By M D NALAPAT
Voices are calling for India to join China and the United States in the legitimisation of the endemic usurpation of civilian authority by the Pakistan army.
The reflections
of A.S. Dulat on what “could have been” in India-Pakistan relations
reveal a faith in the “untapped” goodwill of the Pakistan military that
is shared by several officials and scholars in the Lutyens Zone. He once
claimed that the 2001 Agra summit between A.B. Vajpayee and Pervez
Musharraf would have been a success but for L.K. Advani. This assertion
is as far from the truth. In a very readable book (Devil’s Advocate)
that has more than a few revelatory paragraphs, television personality
Karan Thapar detailed how L.K. Advani (while Deputy Prime Minister and
Home Minister of India) and then Pakistan High Commissioner to India,
A.J. Qazi met in secret on numerous occasions in a remarkably convivial
manner in order to “improve India-Pakistan relations”, with the Deputy
PM clearly searching for a “give and take” process he could help
implement. Naturally, in a pattern set since 1947, India would do the
giving and Pakistan the taking. Even in 2000, the Pakistan High
Commissioner met Advani at his Pandara Park residence, late at night for
over 90 minutes, with Karan Thapar acting as the taxi driver waiting
patiently by the gate (for Qazi to return from his meeting with the
“Iron Man” of the NDA). Advani showed his willingness in public towards
dealing with Musharraf-ruled Pakistan the very day after the Pakistan
army organised an attack on the Parliament of India on 13 December 2001.
Advani went up to Qazi in the grounds of the Imperial Hotel (where a
banquet that both were attending was being held). At the banquet, the
High Commissioner of Pakistan and the Deputy Prime Minister of India
held hands and gazed into each other’s faces with evident affection, as
related by Thapar. To believe that an individual with such a publicly
demonstrated commitment towards making peace with Musharraf’s Pakistan
would “sabotage” the Agra summit is to indulge in a misreading of the
truth. For the then Home Minister would never have opposed a
Musharraf-Vajpayee summit, given his interaction with Qazi. Agra
legitimised a military dictatorship set up through a coup, and marked
the beginning of the rehabilitation of the “Kargil Jihad Commando”
within the international community. Advani respects Vajpayee to the
degree that he (though the obvious successor) led the clamour for Prime
Minister Vajpayee to not follow through on the then PM’s 2003 offer to
resign. By then, Vajpayee was in extremely poor health, and had Advani
taken his place, the next year it would have been the BJP and not the
Congress Party that got a higher number of seats in the Lok Sabha.
The chance to become Prime Minister
usually comes only once in a lifetime, and while Vajpayee, Manmohan
Singh and Narendra Modi seized theirs in 1996, 2004 and 2014
respectively, Advani let go his best chance to become PM in 2003. The
easiest opportunity for Rahul Gandhi to have become PM was in 2012, by
which time Manmohan Singh had lost practically all the good name he had
earned during his 2004-2009 stint in the job and it made political sense
for the Congress Party to replace him. Rahul Gandhi was electorally
more viable than the other two names doing the rounds at that time, that
of Palaniappan Chidambaram (a byword in North Block for his mastery
over the intricacies of the handling of moneys flowing through banks and
stock exchanges) and Pranab Mukherjee, the Finance Minister who imposed
a 97% income tax rate and subsequently opposed the introduction of
colour television when Indira Gandhi got re-elected in 1980. In a
country hungry for change, had Rahul taken charge by 2012, and put in
place a new and efficient Council of Ministers, the Congress Party may
have reached three figures in the Lok Sabha in 2014, while the BJP may
not, as a consequence, have secured a majority on its own. These days,
although every day some Congress functionary or the other talks of Rahul
Gandhi as the “next PM”, the reality is that for the coming Lok Sabha
polls at least, votes for his party would actually get boosted were
Rahul to declare that he was not in the 2019 race for the job now held
by the former Chief Minister of Gujarat. And any regional leader who
publicly backs the Congress president for the PM’s post in the coming
polls will lose votes for his or her party to the advantage of the BJP,
which has been on overdrive to make the coming contest a choice between
Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi for the Prime Ministership. This is the
reason why the followers of Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee are projecting
them as potential PMs, aware that such a perception would energise their
voting base.
Those far away from the portals of power
in Modi’s India are confused at what exactly is the Pakistan policy of
the present government. Certainly there is more than a whiff of the
Vajpayee era within the post-2014 government. Several of those who in
2001 were active in pushing for the unwise decision to hold the 2001
Agra summit are in high positions in the Modi sarkar. Voices within it
are calling for the Government of India to join China and the United
States in the legitimisation of the endemic usurpation of civilian
authority by the Pakistan army. It would be a mistake were there to be
negotiations between South Block and GHQ Rawalpindi precisely when the
people of Pakistan are themselves shedding their fear of the army and
its instruments of coercion and are protesting the subversion of the
electoral system yet again by the men in khaki, this time to secure a
sponsored success for Imran Khan, a “mukhota” of GHQ for two decades.
Instead, the Modi government should stand by the people of Pakistan and
those few political parties which have mustered the courage to take on
the tyranny of the military. Giving the generals legitimacy through
negotiations with them on the lines of the Musharraf-Vajpayee Agra
summit would mean that India has joined the US and China in choosing a
jihadi and rapacious military over the interests of the people in
Pakistan, a country that can survive only should the army be made to
relinquish control over the civilian apparatus of governance.
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