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In the line of fire: Musharraf’s memoirs set for best-seller list in India

NEW DELHI: President Pervez Musharraf’s memoirs appear set to become a best-seller in rival India, where opinion-makers have charged that the book, “In the Line of Fire”, in part rewrites history.

The book is due to hit Indian shelves later this week following its release in New York on Monday.

But the knives are already out for the memoirs’ most contentious claim in Indian eyes: that the Indian army’s desire to capture territory led to the 1999 Kargil conflict, which almost sparked a fourth war between the nuclear-armed neighbours. “He’s rewriting history with an eye on the 2007 elections in Pakistan — he wants to project himself and the army as entities to be counted on,” veteran Indian security analyst Uday Bhaskar told AFP. “He has got ‘chutzpah’, real nerve,” he said.

“All that he is saying is a pack of lies, he attacked us and then lost — thatt’s the reality,” former Indian National Security Advisory Brajesh Mishra told the CNN-IBN television network. He dismissed Musharraf’s description of the Kargil conflict as a “landmark in the history of the Pakistani army.”

“India did not cross the Line of Control (dividing Kashmir),” Mishra said. “The Pakistan Army did and it was defeated.”

India has always maintained Musharraf was responsible for dispatching troops across the ceasefire line above the town of Kargil and that it repelled the invaders.

Musharraf, however, insists no Pakistani soldiers crossed into Indian territory and that New Delhi stepped up the conflict after its forces ran into Kashmiri militants who had moved ahead of Pakistani troops.

The row over the book’s contents comes as the two countries have decided to resume peace talks stalled in the wake of the July terrorist train attacks in Mumbai, which killed 186 people.

New Delhi said the attacks were carried out with “help from across the border” — a charge that Islamabad has denied. The book also carries Musharraf’s call for an “out-of-the-box solution” to the dispute over the mountainous, Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, which lies at the heart of nearly six decades of hostility between the two countries.

India says it is waiting for Islamabad to live up to its pledge to halt cross-border terrorism before taking any steps on the Kashmir dispute.

All the controversy is making the book’s publisher and vendors say they scent a winner.

“We’ve no doubt it’s going to be a best-seller” in India, said Simon and Schuster’s regional distribution manager Rahul Srivastava.

“We expect this could to be as big as Bill Clinton’s autobiography, ‘My Life’,” said Srivastava, adding the former US president’s hardcover memoirs sold some 20,000 copies in India, a sizeable sum in the country.

The publisher initially earmarked for India 8,000 English hardcover copies of “In the Line of Fire”, which has the same name as a Clint Eastwood Hollywood movie. That number is around the same as the first order for Clinton’s book.

But due to demand it has also ordered another 2,000, Srivastava said. Normally the company brings around 2,000 copies in total of a new hardcover book into India, he said.

The publisher is also producing a Hindi print run of 5,000 copies for the first time ever, Srivastava said.

“People have been asking for his book,” said Anuj Bahri, the manager of the leading New Delhi book seller, Bhari and Sons.

“He’s Musharraf, he’s controversial, he’s well known — what more do you need to sell a book?” Bahri said. AFP

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