REALIZING full well that the United Nations is engaged in coming up with a definition of terrorism broadly acceptable to 189 member-states, it is assuredly hazardous for an individual to embark upon this quest. With a strong sense of personal insufficiency, I am venturing to spell out the essential elements in the expectation that a right chord will be touched across the splits in the international community:

a) the existence of a well-knit organization centring around charismatic leadership; b) targeting an identifiable enemy as a source of primal evil; c) symbolic sanctity of goals to be achieved; d) premeditated violence to provoke and hurt the enemy; and e) willingness to take the consequences.

This writer has no hesitation in saying that the lethal strikes against innocent human beings by terrorists in September last year caused him deep anguish and revulsion. I have viewed them as an affront to and a crime against civilization and humanity. At the same time, I have some reservations about recourse to a declaration of war which carries with it implications of a no-holds-barred contest and the expectation of a victory against a widely dispersed and elusive threat. We have to persevere in waging a sustained campaign to reduce the admittedly grave threat rather than seek to eliminate it, which is an unattainable goal. We should take preventive measures and exercise maximum precautions in the belief that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Obsession with that menace is to be avoided for the good reason that the ideological baggage gets overloaded and major issues on the international agenda run the risk of being consigned to the back burner. The military component in the long-range campaign has to be proportional to the assaults and should not loom so large on the international horizon that humanitarian concerns and adherence to the Geneva Conventions are seen to recede into the background by world public opinion. The void created in world-view in Washington by the winding up of the cold war in a bipolar world is not to be filled by sole preoccupation with terrorism and the neglect of its roots.

The terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda, aided and abetted by the Taliban, one of the most odious regimes in the world, have defamed Islam in the West. It is incontestable that in the light of nineteen Muslim and Arab perpetrators of hijacking, a widely shared perception has been created in the United States that a jihad or holy war against non-believers in Islam is sanctioned by it.

Karen Armstrong in her insightful book, ‘The Battle for God,’ has stated: “The Quran, the revealed scripture that Prophet Mohammad brought to the Arabs in the early years of the seventh century, insisted that a Muslim’s first duty was to create a just, egalitarian society, where poor and vulnerable people were treated with respect. This demanded jihad (a word that should be translated as “struggle” or “effort” rather than as “holy war”, as westerners often assume) on all fronts: spiritual, social, personal, military and economic”.

The misperception of Islam in western circles is dismissive of the historical reality that the late twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of fundamentalism within every religious tradition, inevitably caught as it is ‘in the conflict between mythos and logos.’ What is really important is that the discernible but erroneous impression concerning the militancy of Islam is dispelled by constructive engagement and honest dialogue between the Muslim and western countries.

Instead of signs of withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli dispute, the United States in post-September 11 circumstances should be actively and visibly involved in resolving it with a sense of urgency. Left to them, the Israelis and Palestinians will sink into endless hostility and drag the region into anarchy and chaos.

The international community, with the United States in the front seat and supported by the European Community and Russia, should build on the consensus that already exists on the key elements of a comprehensive settlement within the framework of Security Council resolutions, Barak’s last September proposals and the Taba talks in January 2001 and virtually impose a solution based on peaceful coexistence between a viable Palestinian state and a secure Israel. The prolongation of the current crisis is not the sole but a principal cause of destabilization in the Middle East. We should not allow the rising generation in that region to be fed upon a diet of hatred and revenge, the primeval roots of cycles of violence in human relations.

Economic stagnation and social frustration in developing countries is hardly a justification for recourse to violence against the non-combatants but it indisputably creates hopelessness and radicalizes the disadvantaged. The reduction of poverty will be a concrete expression of our common humanity. With the benefits of globalization accruing to the affluent and the burdens falling on the low-income nations, the widening gap between the developed and developing countries has become a central issue in our age. Shrinking aid levels and rising military expenditures in western countries are a recipe for a plunge into extremism in the vulnerable countries.

The strongest and most economically advanced country in the world will inevitably attract envy and protest. With the demise of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States is undeniably the sole superpower. Some influential members of the European Community have commented upon trends towards unilateralism in Washington. The recent tragic events have given an impetus to multilateralism and coalition building. American exceptionalism is to be blended with Wilsonian internationalism. The liberal values and generous impulses of the United states require a credible expression in this decade.

Terrorism is rooted in an inner malaise created by fundamentalism which is to be equated with fanaticism. A fundamentalist cast of mind is keyed to a feverish pitch and gets targeted on enemies and villains to be eliminated. The search is not for the underlying causes to be tackled to bring about progressive improvement in human affairs but for a mythic reversion to dignity and entry into a golden age that has vanished. Myth becomes the basis of action and rejects deliberate choice of means to move towards a desired end. Identity crisis and a unique kind of fascination exercised by martyrdom on educated individuals belongs to the realm of alienation. ‘Gaze not too deeply not the abyss, lest the abyss gazes into you.’

Winston Churchill, as a subaltern in the British army assigned to the Afghan border in 1897, made insightful comments about the character and psyche of the Pathans and warned of the perils of peacekeeping in a violence-ravaged country. Reproduced below is an extract from his book, My Early life: “Except at harvest time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress... Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its vendetta, every clan its feud... The numerous tribes and combination of tribes have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.”

In rebuilding a failed state in Afghanistan and for a proper disbursement of aid funds, a large-scale international military presence in that country far exceeding the envisaged level of a couple of thousand troops is required. The involvement of the international peacekeeping forces on a sustained basis is indispensable for a creating a secure environment of confidence for good governance and for providing a shield against a relapse into warlordism. Aid and security are good to be delivered here and now.

The international community has responded positively to President Musharraf’s speech of January 12, rejecting terrorism and theocracy, bringing religious schools into the educational mainstream and banning the preaching of hatred in mosques. Commendable as these measures are in the campaign against extremism, they have to be accompanied with tackling the structural factors linked to good governance and plugging the leaks in the delivery of public good to the socially deprived.

As has been highlighted in reports circulated to participants in a recent Human Development Forum in Islamabad, the reduction of poverty and broadening access to social services for the disadvantaged are seriously handicapped by lapses and failures of governance manifested in deficient accountability, a weak sense of participation, leaks in the delivery system and the capturing the benefits of public works programme by patronage politics.

If the number of poor earning less than a dollar a day is increasing, the high level of illiteracy continues to be a big drag on the productivity of the economy, and joblessness is rising, the country becomes a breeding ground for extremism. The swamp has to be dried for releasing and increasing energies for peaceful and productive pursuits. The restoration of an authentic and functioning democracy will fill the space in our national life that has been occupied by fundamentalist forces and create a climate congenial to an inclusive civil society.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan. e-mail: Karachi@sensei-international.com

BRIGHT orange suits, large black goggles, turquoise surgical masks, bizarre hand gloves, knit caps and earmuffs — these are all part of the attire the Americans have selected for their Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay.

All these accessories are meant to mask the inmates’ senses of sight, touch, smell and hearing. The photographs depicting their plight were released by the US authorities and got extensive coverage in the world media. With shaved heads, manacled arms, and shackled ankles, they were seen kneeling down in open-air cells behind three fences and coils of razor wire.

The hastily built 8x8 cells with chain-link fence walls on a concrete slab topped by a corrugated roof could be called cages. These cages are no different from the ones that are used to keep wild animals. As per other details, although it is winter in the Caribbean, the prisoners have been provided with rubber mats and thin blankets. They use open-air latrines and say their prayers on one of the two towels, which have been provided to each of them.

In order to accommodate more and more prisoners in the base, the American authorities had planned to house two prisoners in a cell. This would have been disastrous for the prisoners since the individual capacity of these cells is hardly sufficient to accommodate even one person. All this is happening in the name of a war of the civilized against the uncivilized.

Transporting prisoners in chains and keeping them in cages have struck people from all parts of the world as a denial of civilized values. It is interesting to note that the criticism of such a behaviour has not come from the Muslim states, but from citizens and politicians in the western countries, including the United States.

Criticism had grown to such an extent that the US authorities have lately suspended transferring of the prisoners to Camp X-ray. The European Union, Amnesty International and International Conference of Red Cross have all demanded that the detainees be given prisoner of war status and then be treated according to the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1864 and updated four times since, provide for humane treatment of war prisoners.

The conventions spell out guidelines for what constitutes a prisoner of war and the rights to which he or she is entitled. The Pentagon has, however, declined to call the detainees prisoners of war, preferring the term ‘Unlawful combatants’ for them. One, however, fails to understand that when the whole episode was called ‘The American War’, ‘War on Terrorism’, and ‘War on Afghanistan’, why those apprehended during the same may not be called ‘Prisoners of War?’

Moreover, it is not up to the Americans to determine whether the detainees are entitled to POW status or not. The Geneva Conventions clearly spell out that the status, if disputed, has to be determined by a ‘competent tribunal’.

There seems to be a lot of thinking involved on the part of the Americans in the selection of a detention site outside the American borders. By keeping the detainees beyond the reach of a legal regime, they have been denied access to the US judicial system. Likewise by keeping them out of sight, the Americans intend to hide them from watchful eyes of the world media.

Now the Americans are free to treat the prisoners in a way they deem most appropriate. They themselves have released the pictures but then there is a point in that too. A clear cut message has been put across the whole world that anyone who acts or intends to act against American interests may have to face the worst possible mental and physical punishment?

The Americans fail to appreciate a subtle point that the extremist groups of al-Qaeda type are born from and thrive on a sense of injustice. The US has not released the names of the detainees, nor has given their nationalities but they are believed to include mainly the nationals of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other Arab countries. By meting out inhuman treatment to them, are the Americans not creating a sense of extreme hatred among the fanatics in the Arab world?

If this is a war about values why should we not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban the principles of fairness and justice applicable in the civilized world? We must realize that the treatment, which is being meted out to the Camp X-ray prisoners is undermining any claim that our so-called civilized world has to moral superiority. It is true that the Americans have suspended further transportation of the prisoners but attention should also be given to those unfortunates, which have already been transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

The prisoners’ issue should be seen in a wider context. It is doing more harm than good to the original cause of defeating terrorism. The war on terrorism is going to be a protracted one and has many facets. In such a war, winning minds is as important as securing victories on the battlefield.

THE Saint of Chakiwara is dead. Muhammad Khalid Akhtar is gone, and with him has gone a light and a presence. He once said he had one ambition in life. He wanted to see the “dawn of the coming Millennium and then call it a day”.

Perhaps he thought it would do the world good to turn its back on a century that brought two world wars and the detonation of the first nuclear bomb. If the first year of the new century is any indication, the 21st could be much worse than the 20th. But MKA, which was how he quite often referred to himself in letters, did live to see the dawn of the new century as he turned eighty.

I met him only once in 1968 when he dropped in to see me at the Pakistan Times because he found my column in the newspaper amusing. Thereafter, I lost contact with him, rediscovering him only in the middle 1980s, thanks to my friend Nadira (Lady Naipaul as of now) who was a close buddy of MKA in her Bahawalpur days. He used to call her the Contessa, the Countess, Senorita or the Princess. Naipaul, he had named ‘The Ogre’. I kept up an on-and-off correspondence with MKA through the years, writing to him variously from Vienna, Washington or Lahore. He would write back on leaves torn out of a desk diary. All the letters I have from him, except one, are written on that strange stationery. He must have liked desk diaries.

MKA was full of humour and he had read extensively. He always remained half-amused about life, people and things. He was a modest man in a country where those with no talent manage to reach exalted positions because of their ability to market themselves. If someone were to look at the long list of those whom the State of Pakistan has honoured for their contribution to literature, you would not find the name of Muhammad Khalid Akhtar there. Had Saadat Hasan Manto been alive, he would have fared the same way. This neglect never bothered MKA in the least, but it bothered his friends and fans who recognized in him the greatest Urdu humourist of his time.

His was not humour based on flippancy, of whose prime practitioner is Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi. It was humour of a different order, easy yet sophisticated. Unlike Yusufi’s, it did not cry for attention. It was effortless and unlaboured. When you read someone like Yusufi, it is apparent that he has spent hours polishing each sentence, as if it was a pair of shoes to be worn at the Queen of England’s investiture ceremony. MKA was a natural. He also wrote faultless English, the language in which we always exchanged letters.

There is a letter I have from MKA dated November 1992. “One writes for one’s friends-in-spirit; theirs is the praise that one craves for and gloats over ... For myself (lone soul that I am and quite an ‘ancient’) reading is the only consolation. It is my water of Lethe for sorrow and disappointment. But I admit there are moments when one hates books and would like to run out of the room into the wilds to catch zebras ...

“All of us have our malaise. What exactly is your malaise? Maybe we can compare notes and do something about it. Lately I have written another Baqi (Chacha Abdul Baqi) story to please myself called ‘Donkey Business’. It has appeared in Aaj, a quarterly magazine published in Karachi. So, au revoir and God bless you and keep you from the Demons.”

In another letter in May 1995, MKA writes, “I have been living ‘on the quiet edge of desperation’ lately. My half a dozen dilation surgeries have absolutely got me down, making me feel like an old man on my way out. At forty, a man is a camel, at fifty, a serpent, at sixty, a dog, at seventy an ape and at eighty, nothing at all. Remember KH, I’m past seventy-six now, getting to be ‘nothing at all’ ... I do not write anything at all these days, there being no water in the well - but it does not matter.

“Yes, our Princess (Nadira that is) is divorced but I have not written to her for ages and do not have her address. There is no one like this Princess of ours. She is writing so beautifully and wonderfully these days (in Friday Dawn) that I feel real proud of her. Envious too, to tell you the truth. You need not have any fears on her count. She is a brave and courageous woman. Very wild too and she will find her own way. No harm can come to her. I’ve always admired her ‘unconquerable soul’.”

When Nadira married V.S. Naipaul, MKA’s ‘The Ogre’, he wrote to me in May 1998. “The Ogre is a snob (that we all are to a greater or lesser degree). He is also a ‘Very Superior’ person. A ‘very cruel, insensitive man,’ as you say. All this is true but I think you are a bit harsh on him. He is a writer and like most writers, a heartless scoundrel (if you read his novels ... you will admit that he is no mean novelist). He is a consummate craftsman.

“A writer is, in fact, many men — multitudes of men — who have all the attributes, good and bad, of humanity. I read ‘Among the Believers’ many years back in the ‘80s perhaps when it first appeared in Penguin’s. I did not consider it a very bad book, in spite of its sneering ‘know-it-all’ tone, Indeed, I enjoyed the book, as I’d enjoyed his ‘An Area of Darkness’ about India. Don’t you think, it does us good to be taken up and smacked occasionally? ... It’s in my opinion necessary that we should be told quite plainly what others think about us.

“We are not at all infallible, above blame or censure (think of the Blasphemy Laws, etc. Do they not disgrace us as a nation ... The PTV Khabarnama or Wazirnama which has not changed its sycophantic tone in the last 30 years. Now this nuclear hysteria and the silly bombast of our leaders.) No, KH, there is something seriously wrong with us as a people. As for the ‘Believers’ in Afghanistan, you know what they have been doing — beating up people for trimming their beards, insulting women in the streets for not hiding themselves completely from human gaze.”

Then he returns to Naipaul. “This is no defence of The Ogre, who, I agree with you, is a very repellent and self-satisfied man (possibly the fault of his pedigree). In this bizarre ‘love affair’, it is not our Ogre who is to be blamed: it was not he who hijacked Naadan Nadira (not so Naadan) to London. I think the man was kidnapped, held prisoner by the Countess who knew what she was doing. She was calculating, remorseless, purposeful in her intent, using all her woman’s wiles and fatal charms.

“It was the Ogre’s misfortune that fateful evening to be at the reception (was it where the Countess, out for a hunt, found her ugly dwarfish quarry in a corner of the hall, utterly bored, miserable and lonely?) The Femme Fatale took pity on the ‘wretched being’ (so she claims) and after confirming from him that he was the distinguished novelist V.S., planted a kiss on his lips. After that La Belle Dame Sans Merci had the man in her thrall and there was no escape for the captive. The Countess is a wild, untamed creature as you know. Quite out of this world. She is an adventurer (adventuress) in a class all by herself, but like all women, she is down-to-earth, practical, very cool-minded. It was a calculated move. She wanted to grab the “Great Novelist’ and she did. Zany or Naadan, she never was.”

The last Chacha Abdul Baqi story to which MKA’s letter refers, takes place in Karachi where uncle and nephew Bakhtiar Khilji, the perennial innocent, overhear two Gujarati traders talking about the US planning to import 40,000 donkeys for research and the introduction of a new delicacy : donkey steak. They hijack the deal but get cheated by two characters called Zaheer Shark and Farid Sharper.

The scheme comes to naught as had the one about publishing a journal to be called Owl. Why Owl? Here is Chacha Abdul Baqi’s answer, “No, it is not an unsuitable name for a literary journal. Its great virtue is its apparent unsuitability as a name. After all, there are magazines named after animals, say Maulvi Gharib Ahmed’s Shaheen or Hakim Altaf Hussain’s Taoos. So why this unreasonable prejudice against the poor owl? What has this bird done to earn such hostility?

THE case of the Hidden Valley Gas and Energy Co. filled the courtroom to capacity. They were mostly executives, embezzlers and their high-priced lawyers. The jury was made up of people who had relatives still working for Hidden Valley.

The reason Hidden Valley had such top flight legal talent is that, having committed so many crimes, the company said they would spare no expense to hire the best legal talent money could buy.

The lawyers took the case because they believed in justice for all, and would get $750 an hour, not including copying expenses.

The lead lawyer for Hidden Valley was Robert Fat Fingers, whose specialty was proving that if anyone was at fault, it was the stockholders, who did not warn the company that they were in jeopardy. He told the press, after Hidden Valley admitted to burning all its documents, “Let’s not rush to judgment.”

Fat Fingers revealed that after seeing all the things Hidden Valley had done, he would plead insanity for his clients.

He said he found a psychiatrist who would testify that his clients had to be crazy to do what they had done.

All the Hidden Valley defendants, to show they were honest, appeared in Brioni and Calvin Klein suits. When they broke for lunch, they went over to the Petroleum Club to play poker.

There was another trial going on in the next courtroom. It was empty except for the jury, the prosecutor and a young attorney representing the defence. The man being tried was named Jean Valjean. He had stolen a loaf of bread from Kmart.

Prosecutor Javert was merciless. “This man stole a loaf of bread today. Tomorrow it will be a bottle of milk and then a jar of peanut butter. Justice must be served.”

The young lawyer, named Victor Hugo, told the judge he was representing the accused pro bono while waiting for a client who could afford to pay him.

Hugo addressed the jury. “Let’s not rush to judgment. Yes, he did steal a loaf of bread from a Kmart store, but was it fresh bread or stale bread? Ladies and gentlemen, he had been laid off from Hidden Valley Gas and Energy and was hungry. When he got a job, he was going to pay Kmart back. Kmart will never make up for their loss if Jean Valjean goes to prison.”

Meanwhile, back in the Hidden Valley courtroom, Fat Fingers was calling witnesses. “I’d like to call Arthur Anglethorpe, the head of Hidden Valley’s accounting firm.”

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“If you mean the truth of my accounting work, I swear it. If you are going to ask me about my consulting work, I’ll take the Fifth.”

“Mr. Anglethorpe, did you ever see anything strange when doing the Hidden Valley books?”

“Once they asked me to use disappearing ink on the ledgers.”

“What did you do?”

“We had to do it. We were their accountants.”

“And is this the shredder your people used to cut up vital evidence?”

“Yes, but we only did it when we couldn’t understand the documents.”

“Now, Mr. Anglethorpe, knowing what they did, wouldn’t you say they were crazy?”

“It looked like that to me, but a lot of our major clients are crazy.”

A week later, the trial was finished. The jury ruled that the defendants were not guilty of anything except jaywalking. Since it was everybody’s first offence, they were allowed to go home after a stern lecture from the judge, who formerly worked for Hidden Valley.

In the next courtroom, Prosecutor Javert and Victor Hugo made a deal for Jean Valjean. He got 10 years at hard labour and a $100,000 fine — if he promised not to appeal. —Dawn/Tribune Media Services

IS L.K. Advani really the ‘villain of the piece’ who does not let his own prime minister hold out an olive branch to Pakistan? A good many opinion leaders in Pakistan think so and blame Advani for subverting Vajpayee’s initiatives for peace and reconciliation in the region, including the Agra summit.

The invisible hand to which the ISPR chief referred as the wrecker of a process close to a landmark accord was none other than the all-powerful Indian home minister who is said to have overridden two drafts of a joint declaration agreed to by the two delegations and dragged his feet on the third version until the summit was called off. Advani’s reputation as a hardliner stems from his ideological posture.

Given his pronouncements since he took charge of the BJP in the aftermath of its 1984 election disaster (the BJP won only two Lok Sabha seats and Vajpayee was among the losers). Advani has since emerged as the high priest of Hindutva, the agenda that over the years paid rich dividends in terms of political clout and electoral gains. Advani makes no bones about his communal disposition. The religious minorities, he used to say, were pampered under Congress rule and therefore he argued for cutting them down to size in terms of their nuisance value.

Following the BJP’s impressive comeback in the 1989 elections (from an all-time low score of two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984 to a respectable tally of 88 seats in 1989) Advani saw himself as the redeemer of ‘Hindu samaj’. In 1990 he launched his famous rath yatra to campaign for the building of Ram mandir in Ayodhya, and was not far from the scene of action when the frenzied saffron crowd went on the rampage to dismantle the Babri Masjid two years later. The Ram mandir campaign was an exclusive Advani show; Vajpayee had conveniently kept a low profile throughout the agitation.

Whether it was meant to be a compliment, or a subtle snub, US President George Bush was reported to have told Advani, ‘you are more like me’. However, the comparison could be misleading. Advani is certainly not a loud mouth, even though he relishes talking a little more than is expected of him and is often guilty of making undiplomatic pronouncements. Some critics say he is a calculating person and there is always a method to his madness.

Since he derives his political authority from the BJP and not from popular rating, his primary concern has been to see that the party does not lose its way in coalition politics. It was therefore not without reason that ex-party ideologue Govindachari said, prior to the 1999 polls, that Vajpayee was only the mask while Advani was the ‘real face’ of the BJP. Apart from his dogmatism, what makes Advani more conceited is his hold on the BJP’s organizational apparatus.

Vajpayee was made party leader for a number of reasons. His public image, parliamentary experience, his oratorical skills, and last but not the least his being a high-caste Brahmin were some assets that made him the preferred candidate. However the crucial variable was the BJP’s urge to enlarge its vote bank beyond the Hindu constituency which eventually led to a policy shift in its election strategy as the BJP entered the phase of coalition politics. Vajpayee was chosen to lead the BJP in preference to Advani because he was more acceptable to the coalition partners and therefore capable of performing the delicate balancing act required to preside over a motley crowd.

On the face of it, Advani had stepped aside to let Vajpayee occupy the top slot, but his ambition to run the show in the BJP-led government was undisguised. On the eve of the formation of the first BJP-led government in 1998, Advani was reported to have demanded that he be named deputy prime minister besides being given the home portfolio.

That Advani fancies himself as the ‘strongman’ of the cabinet is an open secret. Sardar Vallabhai Patel who was number two in the Nehru cabinet (1947-50) and as home minister accomplished the gigantic task of integrating more than 500 princely states into the Indian Union has been Advani’s role model. However, critics have said Advnai is neither as ruthless nor as competent as Patel was when he crossed swords with Jawaharlal Nehru over several policy matters, in particular the communal issue. Those who project Advani as a hardliner and a dogmatist often tend to overlook his personal ambition factor.

Advani is as power hungry as any other politician in India, and ideology was not necessarily the bone of contention when he was seen to have picked up a row with Vajpayee. His urge to call the shots in the government was marred by the so-called ‘Vajpayee wave’— a well-orchestrated campaign to build a larger-than-life image for Vajpayee as an imperative of the BJP’s election strategy — and gave Advani little room to manoeuvre in the face of Vajpayee’s greatly enhanced political stature.

Advani was quite prepared to accept Vajpayee as the first among the equals but was not willing to let him run the government without his consultation. He is said to have set up a parallel chain of command in the cabinet: while Vajpayee relied on the bureaucrats, Advani acted in unison with the RSS cadres. Ironically, the infighting in the Vajpayee government had little to do with friction between the BJP and other coalition partners; it was more a product of contention between rival power centres within the BJP. Some critics have asserted that Advani’s demolition act at Agra was not prompted by his aversion to doing business with Pakistan but by the desire to deny Vajpayee the credit for a breakthrough.

Vajpayee’s failing health has thrown open the question of succession. Advani is said to have set his eyes on the prime minister’s office, even though it is rather late in the day for him to aspire for it. He, nevertheless, has been undertaking missions such as his recent trip to the US, which betray his impulse to be recognised at home and abroad as the man who actually calls the shorts in New Delhi.

The BJP has gone a long way in pursuit of coalition politics. Some critics call it the process of the BJP’s ‘congressization’ Underscoring the need for a pragmatic approach, Vajpayee said in May 1999 ‘Ideology is not of much use to running a government’. He has lived up to his promise, notwithstanding the Sangh Parivar’s off and on manoeuvres to hold the government in check. Much has been said about the on-going contention between the hardliners and the moderates in the BJP, and the ideological content of the infighting. Nevertheless, some critics refuse to acknowledge the differentiation as real, calling it a ‘fixed’ encounter. According to them, there has been a division of work by mutual arrangement, as Vajpayee and Advani are basically two faces of the same coin. And although the two have been assigned different roles to suit the BJP’s game plan, the distinction between the ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ is cosmetic.

In spite of the divergence in their styles of functioning, both Vajpayee and Advani are of the same ideological stock, and their association with the RSS is more or less of the same duration. Vajpayee’s commitment to Hindutva is as deep-rooted as Advani’s. Some recent expressions of his mindset were: his endorsement of the Hindu Vishwa Parishad’s stance on conversions by Christian missionaries, and his pronouncement on Ram mandir campaign as a manifestation of India’s national ethos.

Vajpayee is subtle, while Advani is blunt but both have the same end in view. The bitter truth is that the so-called moderates in Indian politics are one with hard-core communalists on an issue like Kashmir. They may appear to be taking different positions on peace and reconciliation with Pakistan, the doves favouring a dialogue while the hawks opting for confrontation, but there is no fundamental disagreement between them on the terms of a final settlement with Pakistan.

Let there be no illusions in Pakistan about Vajpayee’s so-called ‘honourable intentions’. He is as much a part and parcel of the ‘saffron brigade’ as Advani is and is at the helm, courtesy RSS. Tactical differences apart, there is a strategic consensus between the ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’ in the Sangh Parivar.

Perhaps it may be more practical to do business with hardliners, a la Advani, than to be misled into believing that the moderates are willing to settle for an honest give and take with Pakistan but are being held back by the hawks who now hold sway in New Delhi. When it comes to war-mongering as has been the case since the massing of troops on the Pakistan border, Atal Behari Vajpayee can conveniently change gear to outdo L.K. Advani.