PTI (Pic courtesy CNN IBN)

New Delhi, Jul 21: Did India and Pakistan have an agreed draft statement before the 2001 Agra summit collapsed as has repeatedly been claimed in Pakistan?

Jaswant Singh, who was External Affairs Minister during the summit, throws some light on this abiding argument in his memoirs A Call to Honour which hit the stands on Friday.

Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Abdul Sattar had been told at the summit in July 2001 to attempt a draft and "together we tried our hand at writing something on a piece of paper."

"I attempted something in pencil on a piece of paper, he corrected/amended it, I did likewise and so it went on for sometime, to and fro. Finally, he said he would have to consult his President (Gen Pervez Musharraf) before he could assent or disagree," Singh says.

Sattar reported to Musharraf and returned with a "few changes" and asked Singh whether it was agreeable to him. Singh responded by saying he too had to obtain the clearance of his cabinet colleagues and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Singh recalls Sattar telling him that it was a "perilous" task on which both of them were set as "negotiators of an agreement and messengers of that agreement".

"In such tasks, believe me, quite often, it is the messenger who gets shot," he quotes Sattar as having said.

"This piece of 'paper' (draft) has been variously cited as evidence of discord within the NDA government, of my own personal 'soft approach' against some others, and all those speculative flights of fancy, all so entirely unnecessary," Singh says.

The senior BJP leader says, as during any other diplomatic negotiation, so too, in this, these very preliminary notes would have got refined or explained and would then perhaps have led to some forward movement.