| 12 June 2004 | Saturday | 23 Rabi-us-Saani 1425 |
Vajpayee goes unwept, unsung
US silence on Israeli war crimes
Well-wishers of Pakistan-India amity have been disconcerted by the rhetoric as well as the substance of the pronouncements of the redoubtable Mr Natwar Singh, the minister for external affairs in the Manmohan Singh coalition government.
It was rather extraordinary that a man of his wisdom, experience and culture should have chosen to begin his tenure by conducting diplomacy through the medium of the press, and that too on a highly sensitive subject like India-Pakistan relations.
His choice as the new manager of India's foreign policy in a Congress-led government at the centre was never in doubt. Insightful observers also knew that, being a loyalist and a confidant of Sonia Gandhi, the diplomat-turned politician, who has long been regarded as a Pakistan expert by his party leaders, would be able to run his ministry almost unhindered.
If there were any doubts, Mr Natwar Singh has been quick to remove them. In a recent interview published in India Today, he observed: "The previous government had taken foreign policy from the ministry of external affairs to the prime minister's office. That will not be done any longer. India is a changed place."
The first thing that India's scholarly foreign minister, who used to review books in his spare time before joining the cabinet, has made clear is that there will be no quick-fix solution to the 57-year old Kashmir dispute. He then went on to add that he was prepared to play the waiting game because "we can sit it out. I don't think Pakistan can sit it out indefinitely."
In the same interview to Outlook (June 7, 2004), Mr. Natwar Singh stated that "there is no doubt the Americans have influenced Pakistan with regard to having a dialogue with India, and persuaded General Musharraf to be more realistic when dealing with India." He, however, criticized the Americans for granting "major non-Nato ally" status to Pakistan "without even consulting India."
The big brotherly attitude came in the open when, in an India-Today interview, Mr Natwar Singh exulted: "When I meet Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri in August, I will ask them when they plan to stop their terrorism programme. Most terrorism in India comes from across the border, though Pakistan's policy of bleeding India has not worked."
But the most contentious observation of the Indian foreign minister related to the Simla Agreement which he described as "the bedrock" on which ties between the two neighbours are to be constructed.
It is interesting to note that Mr Natwar Singh, when asked whether he agreed with the Islamabad Declaration of January 6, did not directly answer a straight-forward question. His line of argument was that it was only the Simla Agreement, signed in 1972, which had ensured peace till 1999.
But four months after the Lahore Declaration came Kargil, and though he did not say it in so many words he implied that a similar fate could await the Lahore Declaration.
There are primarily two reasons why all Congress governments have been laying emphasis on the Simla Agreement rather than other subsequent accords. Firstly they want to remind Pakistan of its humiliating defeat at the hands of India in December 1971 when 909,000 of its defence forces were in India's hands as prisoners.
At Simla, the accord was between the victor and the vanquished. The second reason pertains to the arbitrary and unjustified interpretation being put forward by India that through the Simla accord, Pakistan had agreed to accept the Line of Control as the final border in Jammu and Kashmir.
The insertion of words in the Simla Agreement,, at the sagacious insistence of Mr Bhutto, "without prejudice to the recognized position" belies the Indian claim. This also partly explains why Mr Natwar Singh is so allergic to the Islamabad Declaration because it states that the resolution of all disputes between India and Pakistan, including Jammu and Kashmir, will be " to the satisfaction of both sides."
It is to the credit of Mr Natwar Singh that after Islamabad reacted strongly to his observations, he was quick to control the damage by explanations and clarifications.
His foreign secretary went to great lengths to explain that besides the Simla Agreement, India would abide by all subsequent accords and declarations, including the Islamabad Declaration.
The president of India, in his traditional address to the joint sitting of the Indian parliament on June 6, clarified that peace talks with Pakistan would be held within the framework of the 1972 Simla Agreement and all subsequent pacts agreed to by the Vajpayee government.
In another balancing act, Mr Natwar Singh has announced that his country was willing to consider the gas pipeline proposal from Iran to India via Pakistan if Islamabad provided guarantees of international security.
It is a little intriguing why an experienced diplomat like Mr Singh thought it fit to make an important policy announcement, which constitutes a change in the hitherto Indian position on the gas line proposal from Iran, through the medium of the press when he could have used it as an effective leverage in the forthcoming talks with Pakistan.
It is also not yet clear whether Mr Singh made the gas pipeline offer to Pakistan after getting the approval of the Indian ministry of petroleum which has a decisive say in such matters.
Incidentally, the petroleum ministry is now being headed by Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar, another experienced Indian diplomat-turned politician. It is quite well-known that there has been strong opposition from the Indian bureaucratic and political sectors to the transportation of Iranian gas to India through Pakistani territory which, if implemented, may transform the geopolitics of the entire region.
Mr Natwar Singh is likely to visit Pakistan in July after the foreign secretaries' meeting in the last week of June and ahead of Mr Kasuri's meeting with him in August.
This is a bold move on the part of Indian foreign minister to ostensibly allay Pakistani fears and misgivings and should be warmly welcomed by Islamabad. The need of the hour is to repair the damage and to restore a milieu of trust and confidence between the two sides created after Mr Vajpayee's Islamabad visit in January.
It is very important that the present atmosphere of hope and goodwill on both sides of the border is sustained by sincere and determined efforts. If New Delhi and Islamabad fail to do that, Indo-Pakistan relations will soon be back to square one.
There is, however, an increasing realization on both sides of the border that half a century of confrontation has taken too heavy a toll on two generations of their people and that it is time to resolve bilateral disputes and concentrate on building dimensions of peace and cooperation in South Asia.
Happily, despite its long and bitter history, Indo-Pakistan hostility is not visible in personal contacts and relations between Pakistanis and Indians in the same way as it is, for instance, between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
Indo-Pakistan relations have a history of moving from crisis to detente and them back again. The two countries have been so suspicious and mistrustful of each other that even when they reach agreements - that, of course, happens very rarely - the provisions of this are interpreted differently by them to an extent that the agreement itself dies in the process.
For instance, 14 years ago, the defence secretaries of India and Pakistan were able to hammer out an agreement on Siachen, but different interpretations of the agreement strangled it.
There are powerful forces in both the countries who are opposed to the resolution of differences and want to keep the pot simmering, if not boiling. The danger is that, as in the past, when the two sides start negotiations and some progress is under way, one or the other may conclude that the risks of moving ahead are greater than the costs of breaking off discussions. The following steps are suggested to further the peace process:
(a) After the change of government in New Delhi, it is imperative to stay the course, avoid diplomacy through the media and maintain the momentum of goodwill and trust left by the Vajpayee government.
(b) It will help if Kashmir is also regarded by both sides as a human rights issue and not merely as one of territory or international law.
(c) Both sides must understand that no Kashmir solution will be durable unless it is acceptable to the people of the state.
(d) In the forthcoming composite dialogue, it will not be possible to proceed on all issues with the same pace because some issues are less complex than others. But it is important that a sincere effort is made to move on all issues if the dialogue is not to come to a premature halt.
(e) The forthcoming nuclear CBM talks, ahead of the foreign secretaries' meeting, can provide an excellent opportunity to break the ice and move forward.
(f) Both sides must be ready for the long haul, absorb the occasional setbacks and stay the course.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Vajpayee goes unwept, unsung
Strange, there was no effort, no persuasion by the BJP to keep Atal Behari Vajpayee in harness. Here was a person who gave the party a liberal face in the last 30 years and took the tally in the Lok Sabha to 182 from a mere five.
Even the six-year rule of the party would not have been possible if he had not been the meeting point for the 24 parties in National Democratic Alliance. Yet, none in the BJP shed tears when he stepped down in favour of L.K.Advani.
There was no protest from even those who had basked under the glory of Vajpayee for years. The so-called loyalists were conspicuous by their silence. It was a fait accompli over which the BJP MPs went like an exercise.
Every leader offers to step down after a reverse because victory has many claimants, defeat none. Vajpayee's reaction was no different. It was up to his followers whom he led during many battles to say that they would not allow him to forsake the leadership. But they seemed a party to the macabre drama.
They could have torn a leaf out of the Congress book - how they fiercely opposed Sonia Gandhi's decision not to become prime minister. It was a moving scene, the leader declining office and the followers not accepting her 'no' for an answer.
The BJP meeting, in contrast, was too businesslike. No member rose to say that they would not allow Vajpayee to step down. None threatened to stage a dharna to keep him back.
On the other hand, the party even went to the extent of changing the party's constitution to ensure that L.K. Advani would be the opposition leader and Vajpayee a mere glorified chairman. Never before had a leader been so ignobly shunted out as Vajpayee.
He put up a brave face. Still disappointment was written all over. When he was presented a shawl, the BJP leaders applauded loudly as if they supported the diabolical political coup. When L.K. Advani, who has shown "loyalty" to Vajpayee, was seen offering laddu to Vajpayee, I remembered Caesar's words: You too Brutus!
But then this is what happens in such organizations which are monolithic. People are dropped after they have served the purpose. There is no sentimentality about them _ no remorse, no regret. It is a clean, straightforward cut. Vajpayee fell in that category.
Once the BJP's mentor, the RSS, decided that his utility was over, the rest was automatic. Pieces fell into places. In any case, the RSS had for some time been thinking of Advani as Vajpayee's replacement.
The changeover confirms my worst fears that if the BJP had formed the government, Vajpayee would have been asked to resign in favour of Advani in due course of time. Hardliner Advani is a trusted man of the RSS.
Although Vajpayee is never tired of saying that he is a swayam sewak, he is not considered as much a votary of Hindutva as Advani. Vajpayee's reputation has always been that of the right person in the wrong party.
The stock of Vajpayee in Pakistan and Bangladesh has to be seen to be believed. His stint as foreign minister in the Janata Party government (1977-79) is still recalled in both the countries as the golden period of relationship with India.
Even after the BJP's defeat in the Lok Sabha election, he retains high esteem. People of Pakistan and Bangladesh feel sorry that he has lost. There is a feeling that he would have done something concrete to improve relations.
By changing him, the RSS has come into the open to project the BJP as a party with the Hindutva face. Nagpur, where the RSS has its headquarters, appears to have come to believe that the BJP should look every bit Hindu.
When Advani said soon after elections that his party would plug the Hindutva line it was clear that the BJP would drop the pretension of being liberal. Vajpayee's image did not fit into that policy.
Whether such an approach pays the BJP dividends or not is yet to be seen. But the party has played false to thousands of Muslims who had begun moving nearer to it. Feeling personally betrayed must be Mohammad Arif Khan, who proved that he could secure Muslim votes on the BJP ticket. But the Hindus did not vote for him. The real problem with the BJP is that it has not yet understood India's ethos.
The cultural nationalism it talks about does not transcend the country's long tradition of pluralism. The Indian culture is not synonymous with Hinduism. The BJP should realize this. The RSS is convinced that polarizing the electorate on Hindu-Muslim lines has given it electoral advantage.
This was surely one of the central lessons it derived from the 1991 parliamentary polls in which the BJP was the beneficiary of the violence it had instigated over the Ram Janambhoomi movement the year before. The BJP was elected to power for the first time in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.
What it tells is that the BJP has contaminated most of the Hindu middle class in India and abroad. The common man still remains largely free of the poison it has injected.
Results of the Lok Sabha election should have made the RSS wiser. The BJP may lose the ground still further and become a rump of a party if it does not realize that India can never be a Hindu rashtra.
A couple of remarks that Vajpayee made to analyze the reasons for the BJP's debacle indicate that the party does not want to face the truth. It was neither "over-confidence nor complacency," the cause attributed by Vajpayee, it was sheer saffronization.
People rejected the party's efforts to "Hinduize" their pluralistic way of living. Vajpayee still tried to save Narendra Modi, who the voters have seen as a symptom of the disease of parochialism. The party cannot ride back to power on the back of Modi.
Vajpayee would have retrieved part of his soiled reputation by not accepting the party's chairmanship. This would have been a protest of sorts, probably his catharsis for not having taken any action against Modi.
People will miss Vajpayee as a clever and resourceful orator. He was an adroit hand for compromises. That he too fell victim to the manoeuvres of fanatics in the BJP is a tragedy. Parliament will miss his diction in Hindi.
Vajpayee may have a grievance that people did not give him the due for all that he did. He should blame his party's stalwarts like Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi who were like a mill stone around his neck.
Whatever he did they undid it because they had a closed mind. One used power to escape his linkage with the Babri Masjid demolition and the other exploited authority to rewrite history. People interpreted Vajpayee's silence as his concurrence for what the two did.
Agreed, he feels hurt over criticism. But Vajpayee is to blame for not taking action against communalist or fanatic elements. He was too weak and vacillating.
Maybe, his hands were bound because of the overall supervision by the RSS. But history is an unbiased reckoner. The verdict on him would have been different if he had only acted on instincts which were healthy and not allowed his diffidence to dictate to him.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
US silence on Israeli war crimes
Ariel sharon and George Bush rose to power almost about the same time. They are soul mates and think nothing of demolishing houses, destroying lives, raining destruction on hapless victims and spreading death in the land. They both seem to agree that their victims are fully deserving of their wrath, particularly when they are Palestinians or Iraqis.
The crimes committed by Sharon-Bush combine may be different from Hitler's but only in degree or method. The deadly effect is the same. Women, children and the elderly killed in Iraq or the occupied territories are as innocent and undeserving of death as were the Jews of Nazi Germany.
Hitler used crematoriums to achieve his goal; the present duo resorts to remote-controlled hi-tech missiles, daisy-cutters, mother of all bombs and so on.
The assault on the Rafah refugee camp by one of the largest Israeli forces in action since the start of the intifada, and the systematic destruction of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the occupied territories have drawn only mild condemnation.
The troops operate under the cover of darkness after surrounding the neighbourhood, and start a house-to-house search for militants. Even if civilians are killed they are dubbed as militants.
The systematic, unprovoked and sudden demolition of houses, whose inhabitants are given barely enough time to run out of their homes, has gone unchallenged. How can the world bear witness to the atrocities inflicted on such a large scale on unarmed civilians including women and children?
What happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has been happening in Israel for years. Cruelty is fun when the victims are vulnerable and helpless. Israel's highest courts have sanctioned the use of torture on Palestinians prisoners, but not on their own citizens.
The US troops have received their training in Israel. There are also reports that Israeli trainers are working in Iraq training the US troops and mercenaries known as contractors.
When victims of brutal occupation refuse to be intimidated, they are called terrorists and are dealt with as such. People are killed and then posthumously labelled gangsters, Islamic militants, insurgents, extremists, terrorists or just plain killers.
There is no question about the fact that Israel is guilty of war crimes involving the genocide of Palestinians. The latest spate of death and destruction in the bulldozing of their houses in Rafah are nothing less than war crimes which the world, and particularly the US, has tended to ignore.
They are acting in concert. Israel seems to be providing the roadmap of destruction of the whole Middle East and the necessary training in creating urban terror of civilians and humiliation of prisoners.
The world's silence on the atrocities committed day in and day out by the criminal government of Sharon over the last five years amounts to complicity in the crime. One third of the population of Rafah has been rendered homeless and had to be provided with tents to save them from the elements.
The attitude of the United Nations also leaves a lot to be desired as it has accomplished little else other than expressing regret at the massive destruction wreaked on the hapless population of Rafah and Gaza. It is indeed an irony that the victims of the Nazis have turned into perpetrators of the same crimes.
Another criminal act of the Israeli government follows the murder of 13 of its soldiers in the second week of May. An occupied population is being denied its inherent right of fighting the occupier.
No place is safe. No quarter is given. No prisoners taken. Even mosques are not spared. That is the roadmap. Helicopter gunships rain missiles on anything that catches the fancy of the occupier from a safe distance of 30,000 feet. The targeted killing of Palestinian leaders, and the jailing of political leaders are the order of the day.
But what is equally tragic is the silence of the Muslim world. In fact, some Muslim governments have approved of actions against their brethren. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, the Saudi government had strongly urged Bush to attack Iraq.
The sad spectacle of the Muslim nations' ritual gatherings either under the Arab League or the OIC banner does more harm than good to the cause of the Palestinians. Pakistan, which would normally be in the forefront at least in the condemnation of Israeli atrocities, has, for the last four years, chosen to stay largely silent on the issue.
As for the US, it has refused to criticize the Israeli government for any crimes that it commits. It has extended unqualified support to Sharon's extra-judicial assassinations, the controversial Israeli barrier, and harsh military measures adopted in the occupied territories.
Now a completely unquestioned endorsement of Sharon's unilateral plan is costing the US (which lost one of its own citizens, who was trying to protect women and children, to Israeli bulldozers) its credibility, prestige and friends.
The complicity of the US in the crimes committed by the Israelis becomes more enigmatic when one finds total US silence over the wanton destruction of USS Liberty in 1967 by Israeli forces.
Even though 34 American servicemen were killed and 171 wounded and a ship of the US Navy nearly sunk, Congress held no public hearings and President Johnson is said to have said that he did not care that the ship sank and that he would not embarrass his allies.
The effort to bury the incident involving destruction of Liberty continued. A total news blackout was imposed. The surviving crew was threatened with court martial if they ever breathed a word of the incident.
Israelis continued to shoot at the sailors trying to escape on rafts. The crime of Liberty, which was spying on the region in the wake of the 1967 war was that it had witnessed Israeli soldiers turning El Arish, an Egyptian town, into a slaughterhouse systematically butchering prisoners.
They lined up about 60 unarmed Egyptian prisoners hands tied behind their backs in an El Arish mosque and then opened fire with machine guns. In another incident, about 150 Egyptians POWs sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at the back of their necks, were executed.
Israeli troops killed in cold blood as many as 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in Sinai including some 400 in the sand dunes of El Arish. In fact, it was Ariel Sharon who was busy capturing the territory close to the El Arish slaughterhouse.
The extensive war crimes were just one of the secrets Israel intended to conceal by destroying the evidence that USS Liberty had recorded. This information according to Body of Secrets by James Bamford lay buried in the archives of the National Security Agency for 35 years.
It has the admission of Arye Biro, a retired brigadier-general of the US military, that he found Egyptian soldiers prostrate with thirst. According to him, after taunting the prisoners by pouring water from flasks into the sand, the Israelis killed them.
At least half the Israeli army would be on trial for war crimes for these misdeeds. Sharon is reported to have said in 1995 that Israel does not have to bother about war crimes because "no one can teach to us about it - no one."
In the words of Martin Luther King, this madness must cease. We must stop now. We have guided missiles and misguided men. That is a lethal combination.