While Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused Congress leaders of holding “secret meetings” with Pakistani officials over Gujarat elections, there was a time when a senior member of the Indian cabinet actually had ‘secret meetings’ with the Pakistan high commissioner.
Modi said that there was a “meeting between former Pakistan high commissioner, former minister of external affairs of Pakistan, former Vice President Hamid Ansari and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh” which was “held at Mani Shankar Aiyar’s house.”
“The meeting had run for three hours and the next day he called me ‘neech’”, he added. Manmohan Singh has expressed deep hurt at the “ill-advised transgressions” and demanded Modi to apologise to the nation.
While the ‘secrecy’ of the current meeting has been stoutly denied, 17 years ago, secret talks were held between the then Union home minister L.K. Advani and Pakistan’s envoy to India during the NDA-I government.
In 2000, Pakistani high commissioner Ashraf Jehangir Qazi had more than 20 ‘secret’ meetings with Advani. Advani had acknowledged that Thapar had been the go-between in arranging the meetings
