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The Indian parliament was Tuesday adjourned following ruckus from opposition parties, mainly the Congress, over the recent meeting between a senior Indian journalist and the alleged mastermind of Mumbai terror attacks, Hafiz Saeed, in Pakistan.
The Congress alleges that the journalist, Ved Pratap Vaidik, an aide of yoga guru Ramdev, had met India's most wanted terrorist in Lahore as an emissary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Indian government which, however, claims it had no role to play in the meeting.
"The man is an RSS (Rashtriya Swamsewak Sangh, the ideological mentor of BJP) man. That is a known fact. We are curious to know if the Indian embassy facilitated this meeting," Nehru-Gandhi scion and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi told the media outside the parliament.
The Congress party wants the journalist be arrested and sedition charges pressed against him for meeting Saeed, the founder of the banned terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba.
However, Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the government neither facilitated the 69-year-old journalist's meeting with Saeed on July 2 nor has Vaidik any links with the BJP or the RSS.
"The government has not sanctioned permission to anyone for meeting him (Hafiz Saeed)," he told the parliament.
Vaidik insists he met Saeed on his personal capacity and doesn' t regret meeting Saeed who allegedly masterminded the Mumbai massacre in which over 170 people were killed by Pakistani militants in 2008.
"When I went to Pakistan, a meeting with Hafiz Saeed wasn't planned. Journalists there asked me -- you criticize Hafiz Saeed so much, have you ever met him? I have been in journalism 55 years and I have never said no to meeting anyone," he said.
