M D Nalapat
Besides the current
Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, India has had three PMs who were very
much in favour of reaching out to Pakistan. The first was Morarji Desai,
the austere Gandhian from Gujarat who became the first non-Congress PM
of India in 1977. Morarji began the day drinking a cup of his own urine
(and, perhaps for unrelated reasons, remained spry and fit throughout
his 99 years). He was a pacifist who, as Finance Minister under
Jawaharlal Nehru, reduced budgets for India’s military during 1959-62, a
factor which experts believe helped cause the defeat of the Indian army
at the hands of the Chinese. As Prime Minister, he refused to intervene
in the matter of the imprisonment and subsequent execution of Z A
Bhutto by General Zia, publicly saying that this was an internal matter
of Pakistan’s. He refused Israel permission to use Indian facilities for
a pre-emptive strike on Pakistani nuclear installations, and withdrew
all Indian intelligence networks from Pakistan, a factor that probably
contributed to his getting the Nishaan-i-Pakistan. Indeed, during his
brief period in office, the Indian external intelligence agency Research
& Analysis Wing (R&AW) was sharply reduced in size and scope.
The next PM who was very friendly to Pakistan was I K Gujral, the pipe-smoking Jhelum-born Punjabi intellectual who took over in 1997. He enunciated the Gujral Doctrine, which held that as South Asia’s largest country, India should make the most sacrifices for peace. As PM, Gujral ordered a halt to all offensive covert activities in Pakistan, a decision that even today impacts India’s capabilities in its western neighbour. It was during his time that visa procedures for citizens of Pakistan were first relaxed, and some people-to-people interaction took place after fifty years of freeze. After him, the BJP’s A B Vajpayee belied the rhetoric of his party by becoming very friendly to Pakistan, especially to Mian Nawaz Sharif, for whom he had a strong bond of affection. Vajpayee saw Sharif as a man of peace, and came to Lahore in a bus in 1999,creating the hope that peace was at hand. However, the absence of the then Army Chief Pervez Musharraf from the Vajpayee-Sharif Lahore Summit was an ominous sign, that was followed by the Kargil operation and the coup against Sharif. After Kargil, Vajpayee no longer felt confident enough to continue with the peace process, although he did go ahead with two unilateral cease-fires in Kashmir, that were used by the Jehadis to consolidate their position.
