IN the India-Pakistan context, what is the opposite of a peace activist? It is the bureaucrat. A relic of the colonial administration, they form a powerful institution that comprises administrators, sleuths, police, customs. In Pakistan the army usurped much of this multi-tasking role. I am not aware of the current state of play there. Of course bureaucrats are their own best antidotes. A few years ago a Pakistani visa-seeker was taken off the Indian blacklist after I got a powerful Indian bureaucrat, then national security adviser, to intervene. The Pakistani, an economics professor who loves India more than many Indians do, was put on the Indian government`s blacklist when British CID picked him up as a communist trade unionist in Kanpur in the 1940s. The colonial CID`s adverse report was the current bureaucracy`s reason to deny him visa until 2005.

Bureaucracies can be helpful and so they can pull a rabbit out of the hat. On other occasions they become a stubborn obstacle against a good cause, as many a peace activist on both sides of the border must have experienced.

The Indian bureaucracy wields unbridled clout. Take last week`s presidential address to the parliament. Usually the speech reflects the views of the prime minister`s cabinet and not necessarily that of the head of state. That is why a majority vote in the Lok Sabha against a mandatory motion of thanks to the presidential speech is one of the instruments that can bring down the government. A defeat of the motion would not be seen as a mark against the president but as a lack of confidence in the government`s policies. The cabinet`s draft in turn is a patchwork of paragraphs assembled by bureaucrats in various ministries on a range of issues the president is required to address.

Any single bureaucrat with a personal agenda can thus insert words that are deemed to mirror the will of the people, for that is what words spoken by the president reflect. It is ironical that the head of state`s address is supposed to be an expression of that ultimate identity - the people`s will, when he or she may be merely repeating what was drafted by an unelected official. Remember the popular serial, Yes Minister. Jawaharlal Nehru relied less on his bureaucrats, and preferred to draft his own speeches and vetted those that were to be delivered by the president, particularly when foreign policy was involved. His successors, including Indira Gandhi, brought the bureaucrats into the frame. Of course Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was himself one before being ushered in as finance minister in 1991.

A government that leans too heavily on its bureaucracy, which in the case of South Asia means relic of the old colonial-style shepherding of the people, can be in trouble. It is then that it looks for antidotes. In 1998, the Indian national security adviser was in the eye of a storm over a letter he had drafted, stating that China was the reason for India`s decision to exercise the nuclear option. The letter from then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to then US President Bill Clinton was leaked to The New York Times.

A foreign secretary lost his job in 1990 after ill-considered remarks to the media about the Indo-Pakistan peace process at Islamabad airport during a visit. Indira Gandhi sidelined another foreign secretary after he was indiscreet in talking to the media in Bangkok about India`s nuclear options. Rajiv Gandhi sacked foreign secretary A.P. Venkateswaran on television after the official was suspected of undermining the prime minister`s Pakistan policy, among other things, by planting stories in the media.

Last week saw two important speeches in parliament for India`s relations with Pakistan, both carrying the invisible but palpable imprint of the draftsmen. Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee gave a statement on the follow-up to Mumbai terrorist attack. The speech focussed on specific demands and expectations with Pakistan in the investigations on the attack on Mumbai. The speech was tempered with overtures to people-to-people contact and so forth, a welcome change from the rhetoric of “all options open”, prevalent since December.

Two points in the speech, however, suggested a grudging concession was being somehow made, although the words could just as easily be the minister`s own. Towards the end of the speech, Mr Mukherjee says “I must underline that we have no quarrel with the people of Pakistan. We wish them well and we do not think that they should be held responsible or face the consequences of this situation. We have, therefore, consciously, and after due deliberation, not thought it necessary or fit to curtail people-to-people contacts, trains and road links.”

The world knows that you can`t be seriously encouraging people-to-people contacts even if all the train and road links remained intact if there is an accompanying advisory, repeated at least twice since the Mumbai attacks, counselling Indians not to travel to Pakistan. How on earth can we have people-to-people contacts without people from both sides meeting somewhere? Or was there a suggestion that they could meet anywhere but in Pakistan? The other sore point in the foreign minister`s speech came in the middle of his statement. “Hon. Members are aware of the prevarication, denial, diversionary tactics and misplaced sense of victimhood which characterised Pakistan`s reaction from early days after the Mumbai attack,” the minister said. There`s little doubt that the charge about denial, prevarication and diversionary tactics can be seen as valid. But to accuse Pakistan of having a misplaced sense of victimhood sounds out of line even with the expressed views of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. What was the point being made? Is Pakistan not a victim of terrorism, even if the problem is one of its own making?

The ubiquitous draftsman was again in evidence in the presidential speech to the parliament`s joint session. We know that India is courting Israel as one of its closest confidantes on security matters. Indian leftist groups have, in fact, demanded the cancellations of a 100-billion rupee anti-missile system deal with the Jewish state. We also know that the Indian bureaucracy had falsely blamed bad relations with Israel on the sensitivities of Indian Muslims when the truth was that India`s stance towards Israel was governed by the exigencies of the Cold War. If Indian Muslims were to be credited for the poor ties, why did the Muslims not matter in 1992, when relations with Israel were magically normalised and embassies opened.The draftsmen were busy with their sleight of hand in the presidential address to parliament. “The most tragic loss of lives and acute suffering surrounding the recent incursions into Gaza highlight the urgent need for a comprehensive resolution of the Palestinian issue. We remain steadfast in our support to the Palestinian cause, and in our desire to see peace and stability in West Asia.” Incursions by who? Was it some mysterious angel of death or an equally mysteriously unidentified source of destruction, or a suicidal tendency visiting the Palestinian people? There`s a line in the movie Chicago, in which a woman who had killed her husband mockingly denies her role and says “And then he ran into my knife — he ran into my knife ten times!” The post-Cold War Indian bureaucracy will go to any length to keep Israel in good humour. And so there was not even a mention in the presidential address of Israel, not even as a defence supplier or as the Indian middle class`s most alluring icon in the war on terrorism. True enough, the bureaucracy is the spine of the Indian middle class. They are a powerful people who can raise our hopes or dash them just as easily.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com