Retrieving the lost years

AS the doves take to the skies once again and India and Pakistan, in voices as yet more cracked than fully tuned, again sing hymns to love and peace, it’s worth remembering that it is not some bold, new frontier both countries are setting out to conquer. They are merely trying to catch up with the past and return to the situation existing in February ‘99 when Mr Vajpayee rode a bus to Lahore.

The climate between the two countries then was far better than it is today. Two right wing leaders — Vajpayee in India and Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan — were inspired by a vision of moving forward and taking the troubled relationship between their countries into a new future.

Vajpayee as the leader of an established democracy — we should have heart enough to admit this — didn’t have to look over his back when he journeyed to Lahore and visited the Pakistan Minar (a monument to the atrocious architecture we seem so partial to in this country). Nawaz Sharif was not so lucky. His military chiefs — especially one General Pervez Musharraf — thought he was being too radical and moving too fast on the road of accommodation.

The Jamaat-i-Islami, the army’s B team in matters ideological, took to the streets in Lahore to protest against the Vajpayee visit. Under orders of the then Punjab chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, the Punjab police went into action and gave a thrashing to the Jamaat-i-Islami still etched in its collective memory. This was one of the soundest decisions Shahbaz Sharif ever took.

The bus ride, however, came to nothing for the hopes it generated were dashed on the heights of Kargil, GHQ’s signal contribution to military science. Everyone knows whose idea Kargil was, the brainchild of the army command. But who authorized it?

Was Nawaz Sharif in the know? If he was, did he comprehend all the implications? Or did the army command pull the wool over his eyes and went ahead with an operation, disastrous in its consequences, with only a cursory nod from the political government? History not being an honoured muse in this country, we still don’t have all the right answers.

Cutting through the fog of mystification, however, this much is clear: the army had bitten off more than it could chew. The Indians were taken by surprise. But they recovered and when they threw everything into the battle, the tide turned and posts captured by us began to be recaptured by them. Far from cutting India’s lifeline to Siachen, the attackers, now short of supplies, became the beleaguered.

The Indian army took heavy casualties but this fact alone could scarcely be of much comfort to the geniuses who planned Kargil when their aim was not simply to inflict casualties but to give heart to the Kashmiri resistance and make India serious about negotiating on Kashmir.

Far from achieving these objectives, they brought the country to the brink of disaster. Curbing their appetite for adventurism was no longer the point. The imperative was to find a way out for Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif didn’t fly to Washington to save his own skin. His skin was not on the line. He went to pull the army’s chestnuts out of the fire. (What thanks he’s received for this is of course another story.)

President Clinton received Nawaz Sharif at short notice. What’s more, thanks to Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, who had set up this meeting, he met him on July 4, when everyone in America is celebrating Independence Day. Clinton spoke to Vajpayee and told him the Pakistanis were ready to withdraw. We tried to save face by saying that henceforth the American president would take a personal interest in Kashmir.

The road to Kargil may not have led to Srinagar as some in the army command fondly believed but it certainly led to October 12, to Nawaz Sharif’s ouster and Gen Musharraf’s coming to power at the head of Pakistan’s fourth military government.

Relations with India, already strained because of Kargil, further dipped. Nor were matters helped by the new ruler’s tough tone on Kashmir. Nawaz Sharif had become an apostle of better relations with India. Having ousted him from power, Musharraf was programmed to oppose whatever he had stood for.

Jihad (with a capital J) now came out of the closet in Pakistan. Hitherto covered in some semblance of disguise, it now turned into Pakistan’s biggest and most visible circus. Jihadi organizations, vowing to liberate Kashmir, openly solicited contributions and followers. Maulana Masood Azhar, sprung from an Indian jail after a plane hijacking, was openly paraded by God knows whom in various cities. Then classified as boldness, this grandstanding would soon come to haunt Pakistan.

Agra was a chance to repair the damage, even to mark a new beginning. It’s nonsense to say Agra failed because of no preparation. The problem with India and Pakistan is not too little but too much homework, with officials working small details to death. In a relationship as fraught as ours the grand gesture counts for more than bureaucratic hairsplitting.

Even the ongoing moves towards normalization owe little to preparatory homework. Even if Vajpayee and Musharraf haven’t met since Agra, the impetus for normalization is coming right from the top. For once megaphone diplomacy, not always an unmitigated blessing, is proving useful. Vajpayee says something in India and Musharraf and Jamali say something here and things are seen to move. The guns falling silent along the LoC and in Siachen, the revival of air links, and the other things being proposed, are all products of megaphone or television diplomacy. (Of course encouraged by discreet nudging from our foreign friends.)

Things could have worked out in Agra too but the two leaders, and the fault has to be shared equally between them, failed to get the measure of the occasion. The BJP hardliners caught fright at the prospect of conceding anything that might be interpreted as a Musharraf triumph while Musharraf remained in thrall to the sound of his own voice. Speaking forcefully of Kashmir, the irony apparently escaped him that what military expertise had failed to win in Kargil could scarcely be recouped by diplomatic flair in Agra. Lack of vision on both sides, not lack of preparation, scuttled that summit.

Then of course came the global freeze heralded by the attack on New York’s Twin Towers. By quickly aligning with the US — after that single telephone call from Powell now inscribed in the annals of historical legend — our military rulers thought they had saved Pakistan and outflanked India. Following the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament they were in for a rude shock. Deploying the logic of terrorism against Pakistan, India massed troops on the border and got the US to put pressure on Pakistan to curb ‘religious extremism’. In such cruel circumstances were they administered the rites of realism.

For India too the experience has been chastening. It thought that a combination of American pressure and Indian bluster would serve to extinguish the fires of jihad in Kashmir. A vain hope as the security situation in Kashmir testifies.

India remains in denial on Kashmir, finding it impossible to admit the evidence of its own bungling. Pakistan has taken advantage of the situation there. It hasn’t manufactured or invented it. UN resolutions or no UN resolutions, the Kashmiris are fed up with India, chafing under Indian rule. Not stopping “infiltration” but winning hearts and minds is India’s real problem in Kashmir, a battle it lost long ago. There is nothing that Pakistan can do about this.

But beyond the discontent of the Kashmiri people, peace with India is in our best interests. The Pakistani mind has become a warped mind, afflicted by an excess of militarism, mullahism and jihadism. Nourishing this holy trinity is a common factor: hostility towards India.

The liberation of the Pakistani mind won’t be achieved as long as we allow our vision of the world to be shaped by this phobia.