950823

Aseff's remarks

on Ganga

episode flayed

SHAHID MALIK

LAHORE: Mohammad Ashraf Qureshi, one of the central characters of the Indian plane hijack before the 1971 war, has taken exception to the remarks of Foreign Minister Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali in which he reportedly compared the abduction of the western tourists in the held valley of Kashmir to the so-called Ganga episode, leading to closure of air link with what was then the eastern wing of the country.

Ashraf Qureshi, himself a Kashmiri who lost two of his younger brothers in 1992, in Srinagar, as a result of Indian security forces action, told Business Recorder that the reported statement by the Foreign Minister before the diplomatic press corps in Islamabad last week, had evoked an angry response from "the freedom-loving Kashmiris across the globe", who, he said, felt dejected and demoralized in view of the fact that all the five accused in the Ganga case had been eventually acquitted by the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

In his statement, Sardar Aseff, while referring to the Indian track record of "orchestrating events to achieve foreign policy objectives", had tried to corroborate his claim by citing the Ganga episode of the hijacking of an Indian passenger aircraft which landed in Lahore and was later blown up, resulting in a blanket ban on air travel between East and West Pakistan.

Sardar Assf Ahmad Ali had claimed that "later events proved that the whole thing had been played out by the Indian authorities to paint Pakistan as a terrorist state and to provide a ruse for its waging a war on Pakistan."

Decrying the Foreign Minister's statement, Ashraf Qureshi, now a Lecturer in Kashmiriyat at the Punjab University, recounted that his fellow hijacker Hashim Qureshi had been senteneced to 10 years imprisonment not as an Indian agent but on the charge that "he purchased weapons and arranged their supplies to the Indian-held part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir." But even he was exonerated, along with four others, by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Ashraf Qureshi said.

He referred to a press statement by a former Chief Justice of Pakistan Ch. Yqoob Ali Khan, in February 1992, in which he confirmed that the Special Court trying the accused in the Ganga case had held that "Ashraf Qureshi, Hashim Qureshi and Maqbool Butt were not Indian agents."

It was an irony of fate, he said, that Maqbool Butt, who became the victim of "a judicial murder" on charges of terrorism in the Tehar Prison in the Indian capital in 1983, should be dubbed as "a traitor", along with his colleagues, on both sides of the line of control.

"In order to keep the record straight, I challenge the Foreign Minister to have an open debate with me on whether the Ganga episode was an Indian-sponsored drama," he said, adding that in the proposed debate, he could give the details of who trained Hashim Qureshi in the handling of Fokker aeroplanes, and where. When closely questioned on the subject, Ashraf Qureshi said that it was not in Pakistan's interest to reveal everything. But if the minister insists on the validity of his story, "then I have more information on the background to the case," he concluded.