Anger in India over meeting with Pakistani terror suspect

The hour-long meeting between India's Ved Pratap Vaidik and Hafiz Muhammad Saeed - the man accused of masterminding the 2008 Mumbai attacks - has caused a furore in India’s parliament.

File picture of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, head of the Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group, whose meeting in Lahore with Indian journalist Ved Pratap Vaidik kicked up a storm in India’s parliament. Arif Ali / Show more

NEW DELHI // An Indian journalist’s meeting in Lahore with Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the head of the Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group, has ignited a storm of anger and controversy over the Indian government’s role in the visit.

Ved Pratap Vaidik, 69, an occasional columnist and former news editor, met Saeed on July 2, during a 20-day trip to Pakistan that began in mid-June. Lashkar-i-Taiba is a group banned by India, the United States and Europe, and India has accused Saeed of masterminding the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which killed 164 people and wounded 308.

The US placed a $10 million (Dh36.7m) bounty on Saeed, 64, for those attacks, but he has never been captured even though he moves about Pakistan openly.

Vaidik’s hour-long meeting with Saeed caused a furore in India’s parliament on Monday and Tuesday. The opposition Congress party demanded that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government reveal if it had a hand in facilitating the meeting, given that India has been pressing Pakistan to hand over Saeed for trial in India.

“We are curious to find out if the Indian embassy [in Islamabad] facilitated this event,” Rahul Gandhi, the Congress vice president, told reporters on Tuesday. “The man is an RSS man – that is a known fact,” he added, referring to Vaidik’s membership in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the right-wing Hindu group that functions as the BJP’s ideological ally.

Ram Madhav, an RSS leader, denied that Vaidik had any connection with the organisation.

On his official Twitter feed, Saeed said on Monday: “Row in Indian parliament over a journalists meeting with us shows the extremism, narrow mindedness of their politicians. Utterly Shameful.”

Calling Vaidik’s visit a serious national security issue, Shakeel Ahmed, a Congress spokesman, said: “A serious question arises. Did he go to meet Hafiz Saeed at the instruction of the prime minister? The prime minister and the government must come clean on it.”

Sushma Swaraj, India’s minister for external affairs, maintained in parliament on Tuesday: “The government has nothing to do with Ved Pratap Vaidik’s meeting with Hafiz Saeed.”

Vaidik has said that he was “nobody’s envoy but my own”, and that the meeting was arranged by a friend who is a journalist in Pakistan. Vaidik also met Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, during his trip.

Once an editor with the Press Trust of India news agency, Vaidik has largely been a columnist on international affairs, writing for a host of Hindi newspapers such as Saptahik Hindustan and Navbharat Times.

He described his encounter with Saeed in multiple appearances on news channels this week.

Vaidik said the meeting was confirmed at the last minute and that Saeed’s residence was heavily guarded when he visited.

When he brought up the November 2008 terrorist attacks and Saeed’s purported role in organising them, “he denied all the allegations against him”, Vaidik said. “He said he came to know about the … terror attacks only two hours after [they began], on television news.”

Saeed also asked about India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi. Vaidik said his favourable description of Mr Modi made such a strong impression on Saeed that “he said Pakistan would welcome Modi to visit”.

Vaidik has not yet published any articles about his meeting with Saeed, raising questions about its purpose. In a photo that Vaidik tweeted, no notepad or tape recorder is visible on the table between himself and Saeed.

Noting this, Shashi Tharoor, a senior Congress politician, asked: “Was this a journalist’s meeting or an emissary’s?”

Several Indian journalists have tried and failed to secure an interview with Saeed since the Mumbai attacks.

Sankarshan Thakur, a columnist for The Telegraph who knows Vaidik, said he was a "larger-than-life figure" who "considers himself some sort of freelance ambassador for India".

“He’s well connected in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Thakur said. “Still, it’s not that easy to just meet Saeed and the Pakistani prime minister. Something’s amiss here, although I’m not sure what that is.”