Pak feared India would go to war post-26/11: Rice

“That isn’t what they’re (India) telling me,” she told the aide. “In my many conversations with the Indians over two days,they’d emphasised their desire to defuse the situation and their need for Pakistan to do something to show they accepted responsibility for tracking down the terrorists,” Rice wrote in her book No High Honors,scheduled to hit stores next week.

In an insider account of what transpired after 26/11,Rice discloses that the origin of panic in Pakistan was the “stern words” expressed by then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee to his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in a phone call.

Rice asked the operations centre to get Mukherjee on the phone,but they couldn’t reach him. Consequently she started getting nervous and thought Mukherjee was trying to avoid her as New Delhi was preparing for war.

“I called back again. No response. By now international phone lines were buzzing with the news. The Pakistanis were calling everyone — the Saudis,the Emiratis,the Chinese. Finally Mukherjee called back. I told him what I’d heard,” Rice wrote in her 766-page book.

“‘What?’ he said. ‘I’m in my constituency. Would I be outside New Delhi if we were about to launch a war?’ Mukherjee asked.”

Rice said Mukherjee explained that Qureshi had taken his stern words the wrong way. “‘I said they were leaving us no choice but to go to war’,he said,” Rice said,adding,“This is getting dangerous,I thought.”

As a result of the rumour,the then US President George Bush asked her to travel to Islamabad and New Delhi to defuse the situation,Rice said. On her emergency visit to New Delhi after the Mumbai attacks,Rice said PM Manmohan Singh and the Foreign Minister both categorically told her that they were against war,despite increasing public pressure,but wanted Pakistan to do something.