Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of India, refused to raise, train and arm an Afghan army. Mr Vajpayee was on an invitation visit to Afghanistan, where Mr Tarakki was in power then.
Mr Vajpayee was accompanied by the official entourage and his journalist friends as well. His cronies wanted him to do so, but he refused. The idea was to have a counterbalance to Pakistanis crossing the Indian border in Kashmir.
One of his senior journalist cronies, Mr Ved Pratap Vaidik, tried to convince him that Afghans had been interacting with India since Mahabharat times and many of them had Indian - read Hindu - names, even as they practised Islam.
Mr Vaidik stayed back in Afghanistan to gather more data to convince Prime Minister of his theory, even as the Indian party left for home. Mr Vaidik did gather a lot of material, he told a meeting at Indian Council for International Cooperation (Antar-Rashtriya Sahyog Parishad) in New Delhi recently. But Mr Vajpayee was still unconvinced.
Another hero in Afghanistan at that time was Mr Hikmatyar Khan. Some in his country accused him of being a Russian stooge. Unfortunately, both Mr Tarakki and Mr Khan were executed by Afghans later.
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