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ALL that Indians and Pakistanis ever wanted from their leaders was that they silence the guns along their needlessly tense borders and to go back to a ceasefire, which their forebears had worked out in a moment of sagacity in 2003. All that was needed was for India and Pakistan to hold irreversible talks at any desperate level, and if nothing came out of them, to continue talking. One reason you and I are alive today may lie in the fact that at the height of their nuclear brinkmanship Kennedy and Khrushchev never shut down the lines of communication with each other.
Prime Minister Modi’s belief in his own Herculean capabilities is at best a happy tiding. If he hammed his role in Lahore (which is a habit) or overstretched a simple script it must not rile his opponents, chiefly the Congress. Where is the harm if he was doing a Manmohan Singh without giving him due credit? We all know it was Singh who dreamt of some day eating breakfast in Kabul, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Delhi. In his turn, Singh was trying to keep alive what Atal Behari Vajpayee had begun. You can trace the links back to Nehru and Ayub Khan.
Modi’s dramatic bear hugs in Lahore were, without doubt, a huge relief for those who wish India and Pakistan well. If his fans insist he is the chosen one and that only he could have delivered the Tweets with near divine prowess, so be it. The Tweets signalled a change from the negative script he was otherwise pursuing towards Pakistan for much of the time since taking power.
Prime Minister Modi’s belief in his own Herculean capabilities is at best a happy tiding.
For mortal earthlings trying to figure out the surprise quotient in Modi’s otherwise pleasant sojourn, it might be useful to seek simpler reasons for the apparent change of heart. To those who study conflict the most logical of all the possible reasons for the Lahore drama ought to be a realisation that war with Pakistan was a terrifyingly forbidding prospect for both. One hopes that was among the key factors that led to the flight to Lahore. Only recently, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj more or less admitted as much in parliament. War is not an option, she said. Even the Congress, which can be utterly churlish when it is out of power, was unable to stifle the appeal of that one sentence by Swaraj. Dialogue was the way forward, she declared.
Several studies have favoured Modi’s new stance. They have suggested that while India was developing limited punitive options for a future terror attack its military advantage over Pakistan remains much less substantial than is commonly believed. In other words, the outcomes over limited military campaigns remain uncertain, with some chance they will not achieve India’s political objectives. Such limited military campaigns are also deemed risky, because if they are unsuccessful with limited force, there could be pressures for combatants to escalate and attempt to achieve more decisive political results. The world watches warily.
It is likely that the Indian leadership factored such a calculation for Swaraj to state that war was not an option with Pakistan. It wasn’t an easy thing to say even if she believed in it. She was the one, after all, who asked for 10 Pakistani heads for the scalp of each Indian soldier beheaded on the LoC. She was also the public face of Vajpayee’s veiled detractors who plotted the demise of the Agra summit. Yet, I have seen her praying for peace at the Katasraj temple, off the Islamabad-Lahore highway, on a private visit. I have seen her join Basant revelries on the terrace in Lahore from where Benazir Bhutto had just left. Peace is the natural state of being for Sushma Swaraj as it is for most Indians and Pakistanis. This truth should not be lost in the din of the Sharif-Modi bonhomie last week.
Allow Modi his drama. We could, meanwhile, explore the factors that spurred Atal Behari Vajpayee to just as dramatically declare at a news conference in Lucknow, out of the blue one day, that he would take a bus ride to Lahore. That was a short-lived tectonic shift too. Apparently, Sharif had chided him for “going to Amritsar via Bhatinda”. So Vajpayee took a bus from Amritsar to Lahore.
Otherwise, recall Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif sitting glumly across from each other in Colombo to produce what Pakistan’s prime minister exasperatedly nicknamed a ‘zero summit’. It will be remembered as the first tense encounter between the two leaders after their untenable tit-for-tat nuclear tests of May 1998. We haven’t been told yet about what might have happened between August 1998, when the Colombo stalemate happened on the margins of a Saarc summit, and the much-applauded Lahore Declaration, a mere six months down the line.
Less discussed factors are common to both Modi and Vajpayee, which may have changed their approach to Pakistan. Remember that within six months of the Pokhran tests, the Bharatiya Janata Party lost all the four state elections to the Congress. Worse, the BJP could never regain Delhi in the aftermath of Pokhran. The defeats deflated Vajpayee’s appeal as a nuclear hero and he rushed to Lahore to salvage his image. Modi’s overture to Pakistan came after he lost Bihar.
There happens to be another compelling similarity between Modi’s and Vajpayee’s rush to Lahore. It came in the form of international opprobrium for the Vajpayee government when his Hindutva supporters lynched an Australian Christian missionary and his two sons in the forests of Orissa. Mohammed Akhlaque’s murder in Dadri earned for Modi equally bad international press. Lahore offered relief to both. Between the threats of aar paar ki ladai, (a decisive war) and bear hugs lies a tougher reality that could be more challenging for both countries than their occasional impulse to self-destruct.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2015
