FRONTIER POST: Indian cricketer Kapil Dev, presently mired in controversy for calling an end to his country's cricketing ties with Pakistan, has confessed it is wrong for sportsmen to indulge in politics.

``My call'' he says, ``was based on what I saw had happened to Indian soldiers fighting militants in Kargil.'' Fine, but where has his heart been sleeping all these past 10 years when the Indian soldiers have been slaughtering, torturing, maiming and raping the Kashmiris with abandon in the territory? He never has issued a call for mercy on them. Are those beleaguered, tormented Kashmiri women, men and children made of plastic and clay, and not of flesh and bones?

This man, indeed, stinks and stinks unbearably foul. He can't be a sportsman, by his own definition. He could only be a butcher's boy. He can have no place among the exalted gallery of sportsmen. He can have a place only among the Shiv Sena thugs of Bal Thackeray.

Kargil will be flogged inpolls

NAWAI WAQT: The leaders of many non-BJP parties in India have been unrelenting in their criticism of what they regard as Vajpayee government's ``failure to defend India's borders,'' allowing them to be violated by the mujahideen. Pakistan should have no doubt that the Kargil issue will be widely exploited in India's forthcoming elections.

Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi in fact fired one of the first salvos of her party's election campaign while addressing a rally in Lucknow. UP is a stronghold of the BJP but Ms Gandhi repeatedly attacked the Vajpayee government for having sacfificed the lives of hundreds of Indian soldiers by not being able to anticipate the situation in Kargil (in fact a day earlier in another rally, she spoke of thousands of soldiers having been killed but then it was pointed out to her that the Indian Army had not admitted to its casualties being in the order of thousands).

A prominent Indian columnist derisively criticised Sonia Gandhi for ``making political hay evenwhen the sun doesn't shine'' by visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals and in proper Lady Bountiful mode, distributing food and blankets to them.