LAHORE – The Indian External Affairs Ministry may have inadvertently caused some of the confusion over a hoax call to President Asif Ali Zardari that escalated tensions between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, Indian newspaper The Hindu reported on Wednesday. Pretending to be India’s External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the caller had conveyed threats of an imminent military response to the attacks, said the newspaper. Exactly a year later, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper revealed that the culprit behind the hoax call was none other than Omar Saeed Shaikh – the militant responsible for the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl – who had made the call via cell phone from his prison cell in Karachi, the newspaper reported.
A US Embassy cable from New Delhi, sent on December 4, 2008 (181351: confidential) – which the newspaper said it accessed through WikiLeaks – revealed that External Affairs Ministry Joint Secretary (Americas) Gaitri Kumar had told the Americans on December 1 that Mukherjee had made a phone call to Zardari. Ambassador David Mulford said in the cable that later, on December 1, National Security Adviser MK Narayanan had informed him that no such call was made and he would have known if it had been otherwise, the newspaper reported. In order to clear the confusion, Kumar met the American political counselor again on December 3 and said Mukherjee had never spoken to Zardari on the phone, the newspaper said.
The newspaper said that though Kumar gave the Americans no explanation for the discrepancy between this report and the one she gave on December 1, Ambassador Mulford wrote that he “suspects she incorrectly inferred that a Mukherjee-Zardari call took place from the fact that Mukherjee’s office had, as a precaution, prepared points for him to use if Zardari were to phone Prime Minister Singh when he was unavailable, leaving Mukherjee to receive the call.” The American Ambassador cabled that despite the conflicting versions from the Indian government, he had concluded that Mukherjee “did not in fact” phone Zardari, the newspaper said.
