Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has rubbished National Security Advisor M K Narayanan's claim that she had not fulfilled her assurances given to Rajiv Gandhi and said on the contrary it was the former Indian prime minister who had gone back on his word.
In an interview to a private TV channel in New Delhi on December 16, Narayanan had said India was skeptical about Bhutto's assurances, as she had not fulfilled her promise given to the then Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
"If she lives up to her promises, most certainly. But it's difficult to believe she will. One has to go by what she did in the 90s, so one is skeptical. Her track record is not necessarily something that would make us believe that she will follow to the letter and the spirit of what she has said," Narayanan had said in the interview.
Bhutto, in an interview to Outlook, said she had in fact kept her word while Gandhi had gone back on his assurance.
"If anyone kept their word, it was me, not Rajiv. He went back to India and then called me on his way to the Commonwealth to say that he could not keep his promise to withdraw from Siachen, and that he would do it only after the elections (1989)".
Bhutto said Narayanan could not have known what transpired between her and Gandhi at the meeting as it was a one-on-one between the two.
"Nobody else knew what Rajiv and I discussed. There was no fly on the wall. How can anyone say that I have not kept my promises to him when the single biggest result of that meeting was the end of Sikh insurgency? I made no promises that could have been broken," she added.
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