A senior party leader said that Mukherjee is their best bet to put a closure on an issue which has proved to be deeply embarrassing for the Congress. Sources say that while the leadership fully realizes that the issue may damage the image of a cohesive party-government bonhomie, but at the same time the leadership is unwilling to overlook the matter as it raises long term implications for the country.
Sources also state that with the party unwilling to accept the deviation in the wording of the statement, the Prime Minister may be left with no option but to backtrack on the statement and put matters in perspective "as just a piece of diplomatic paper and not a legal document." The PM would speak in the Lok Sabha on July 29 and possibly in the Rajya Sabha on July 30 on the issue.
It is learnt that within the government there is already an admission that a 'mistake' has been made, but what are now being worked out are the details of how best and how gracefully to get out of the situation with the least damage to the government.
Interestingly, senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha on Thursday attacked the joint statement but kept his attack focused on the foreign secretary, asking for the resignation of Shiv Shanker Menon rather than Menon's 'political bosses.'
A senior bureaucrat expressing surprise said that it is probably for the first time that a bureaucrat has been attacked and not the minister or the PM, and that too by an opposition leader. He wondered whether there was an attempt to make Shiv Shanker Menon the scapegoat in the entire episode. Menon is set to retire on July 31 as the foreign secretary.
While the government is keen to keep the Union external affairs minister S M Krishna out of the picture, unsure of where and how he can blunder, the two ministers of state in the ministry were fielded to prepare the ground for the Prime Minister when they minimize the significance of the joint statement.
The more experienced and articulate of the two, Shashi Tharoor, said the India-Pakistan joint statement issued in Egypt was a "diplomatic paper" not a legal document, reiterating that what mattered was "not the perception of words on paper" but the conduct of Islamabad in preventing future acts of terror.
"It is a diplomatic paper that is released to the press -- different from legal papers. Ultimately what matters is not the perception of words on paper, it is the conduct of government," Tharoor said in a statement released after a meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani at Sharm-el-Sheikh, on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Egypt.
He said Manmohan Singh had made his stance on talks in the joint statement 'very clear.' "We have said that India cannot go for a composite dialogue with Pakistan, until and unless we have absolute assurances and seen credible action from Pakistan," Tharoor added.
The minister further said, "It is not the language of the statement alone
that writes policy. It's all very well for the people to say that somehow India's interest was compromised by few words on a piece of paper that is not a legal document."