Thaindian News

New Delhi, Jan 27 (IANS) Ahead of next week’s bilateral talks in Thimphu, India Thursday said Pakistan has to root out terrorism that has turned out to be a Frankenstein monster for Islamabad.”Pakistan has created the Frankenstein. They will have to deal with it,” Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told a group of Afghan journalists..

“Frankenstein (in the novel) creates an artificial human being. But the creature turns out to be dangerous,” Rao said, referring to terror attacks in Pakistan that have almost become a routine in the country of 170 million people.

“The sickness is there. They have to cure it. They have to root out this evil.”

A group of 30 journalists, including 14 women, were in New Delhi to pursue a 15-day media course at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) during which they interacted with officials and journalists to get an insight on how the Indian media functions.

The foreign secretary, at their valedictory function organised in the external affairs ministry’s office, said the epicentre of terror “definitely” lies in Pakistan.

The people there, she said, generally want to live a life free from terror but some groups and “elements in the state of Pakistan” were prone to violence.

“I am sure people of Pakistan want peace. But there are some groups and people who think violence is the way. There are elements in the state of Pakistan who have not done anything (to tackle terror). In fact they have allowed it to grow,” she said.

Rao said the Pakistan government was aware of it.

She said India was not blaming Pakistan for the terror just for the sake of it.

“People shouldn’t think that we are attacking Pakistan. The Mumbai attack is an evidence. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai (in 2008) were from Pakistan. The lone surviving gunman (of the 10 Pakistani terrorists of the 26/11 strike) Kasab is a Pakistani,” she said.

Rao’s comments came ahead of the scheduled Feb 6-8 India-Pakistan talks in Thimphu between foreign secretaries of the two countries on the sidelines of the Standing Committee meeting of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

The talks could set the stage for a meeting between External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi and a subsequent visit by Qureshi to Delhi.