Indian Parliament Member Vows to Block Establishment of El Fatah Office in Country

An Indian Member of Parliament said this weekend that he would do everything in his power to prevent the Indian Government from permitting El Fatah, the Palestinian guerrilla organization, from opening a recruiting and propaganda office in India.

Balraj Madhok, who is executive chairman of the Forum of International Affairs, told newsmen that he was deeply disturbed by reports that permission would be granted to a three-member El Fatah mission that has been touring India. He said he would not rest until such permission was rescinded. Mr. Madhok described El Fatah as a commando organization whose main aim was to infiltrate Israel for acts of sabotage and subversion and it was patently wrong to give any quarters to delegates from such an organization. He demanded that the El Fatah visitors be ousted from India immediately. The MP also denounced India’s attempted participation in the Moslem summit conference at Rabat, Morocco. He said by no stretch of the imagination could India be described as an Islamic State and had no business attending such a conference. The Indians were however excluded from the parley, apparently at the behest of Pakistan, and the New Delhi Government expressed indignation over the rejection.

(The 25-nation — Arab and non-Arab — parley urged the Big Four to intensify efforts to obtain speedy, unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories. The parley, called in the wake of the fire at East Jerusalem’s El Aksa Mosque, third holiest shrine of Islam, asked the Big Four to take into account the Moslem attachment to Jerusalem and to restore the pre-1967 status there. The conference’s closing communique reiterated in slightly stronger language the United Nations Security Council’s Nov. 22, 1967 resolution. The communique, which did not mention the fire, was expected to have a moral impact on the Moslem world but little practical effect.)

(In a post-parley news conference, Morocco’s King Hassan II harshly criticized extremists among the guerrillas as “wild and harebrained” and said that threats to murder Israelis did not aid the Palestinian, Arab or Moslem cause. Last week, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman chided India for seeking to participate in the Moslem conference at a time when new outbreaks of terror against Moslems were occurring in India. He said. “It is strange that India should try to force her way into Islamic conference where she is not wanted, only in order to prove her anti-Israel zeal.)