In Agra, President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee exuded a chemistry that flowed from their linguistic affinity. Vajpayee liked quoting Urdu couplets as he did during the Lahore summit. Remember how he crafted a key speech at the governor’s house there around an emotive poem of peace by Ali Sardar Jaafri. Musharraf was an avid listener in Agra. Barring his difficulty in grasping the frequent reference to “atoot ang” in the context of Kashmir, an awkward expression in Hindi for “integral part”, Musharraf struck a comfortable rapport with Vajpayee.

He also had a largely agreeable relationship with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Musharraf’s difficulty lay in not being on a similar cultural trajectory with Lal Kishan Advani, home minister during the Agra summit and now the opposition’s prime ministerial hopeful for elections due in May next year.

With Monday’s general elections in Pakistan almost certain to produce a government with its base in Sindh, and if Advani’s gambit in India’s parliamentary race in mid-2008 pays off, the two countries could see the fulcrum of their bilateral ties shifting to Sindh. In his condolence message to Asif Zardari in a prompt and emotional reaction to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Advani had even recalled his family ties with member’s of the slain leader’s family. If Advani does become prime minister in the next National Democratic Alliance government, what would it mean for Pakistan apart from a cultural affinity located in Karachi, where he was born? On the face of it he has cultivated an image as a hardliner on terrorism and in ties with Pakistan. Often though Advani’s sharp rhetoric has not matched his actions.

In fact the six-year NDA rule when he was regarded as the most powerful man in Vajpayee’s cabinet, wearing the mantle of home minister and deputy prime minister, Advani did everything possible to disabuse his followers of much of the “hardliner” mythology surrounding him. Three or four examples come to mind of which the Kandahar surrender to the hijackers of an Indian Airlines plane in December 1999 has been the most widely discussed. There was first of all the little known case of Hashim Qureishi, an accomplice of

Kashmiri rebel hero Maqbool Butt in the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Lahore in 1971 and its destruction there. Butt was hanged during Indira Gandhi’s watch on Feb 11, 1984 in Delhi’s Tihar Jail after being kept on the death row for several years. Had JKLF men not killed an India diplomat, Maqbool Butt would perhaps not have been executed as he had turned into a vegetable when I saw him in the jail in 1978. When Hashim Qureishi was suddenly nabbed at the Delhi airport on his way from Holland one day, it was credited to Advani’s proactive leadership as it were. In a few weeks the mask was off. Qureishi was entertaining officially handpicked journalists to Pepsi and samosas in his supposedly high security prison in Srinagar. Soon after that he was projecting himself as a chief ministerial candidate in state elections.

And it was Qureishi who alerted me about the earlier decision by the home ministry under Advani’s watch to free six or seven Sikh hijackers who were repatriated from Dubai where they were forced to surrender thanks to Indira Gandhi’s clout as a respected and feared leader. Advani was asked at a news conference about the little noticed release of the Sikh hijackers when they should have been serving life terms handed by special anti-terror court. It was all the more significant to know because Indian agencies had claimed that the hijackers did not have any arms before some kindly official at the Lahore airport handed them a pistol during a refuelling stopover in Lahore. He said he would look into it, but nothing more was ever said or heard about the case. There were two or three other examples where Advani has shown a forgiving side to his nature.

One such pertains to the contrast between his demands as an opposition leader for the early execution of Kashmiri convict Afzal Guru, whose clemency petition is pending with the president. Guru was convicted along with three others for the attack in December 2001 on the Parliament House. The Supreme Court decided to only keep Guru’s conviction intact and turned down all petition’s to set him free. If Guru does get hanged by the next government which Advani is hoping to form, it would not be of a piece with the iron man’s approach to similar cases of death row convicts during his tenure.

In fact it was under Advani’s stewardship that Tamil Nadu Governor Fathima Beevi showed mercy to Nalini, one of the four condemned convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, and commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment.

There was, however, to be no clemency for the other three, including Nalini’s husband Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan, all sentenced to death in January 1998, nearly seven years after the former prime minister met a gory end in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991. On May 11, 1998, the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence. That story was oddly enough overshadowed by India’s decision to have its nuclear tests in Pokharan that day. A review petition followed. The Supreme Court rejected it on Oct 8. The convicts then approached the Tamil Nadu governor.

The Tamil Nadu Cabinet in light of the fact that she was the mother of a girl, then eight years old, who was born in prison, recommended clemency for Nalini. Congress president Sonia Gandhi, widow of the late Rajiv Gandhi, had also appealed for clemency for Nalini. Advani, had he been the ogre he is often made out to be, could have pushed for the hangings to be carried out. A softer side in him had clearly prevailed again.

I have heard fellow journalist Iftikhar Gilani recounting a story that again shows the strong man, otherwise credited with disastrous events like the demolition of the Babri masjid, to be an agreeable human being. Gilani was picked up on charges of keeping maps and old write-ups on Indian troop movements in Kashmir, documents that were publicly available on the web. However, the terror of the BJP government was such that one night in Tihar Jail when a barber was summoned to give Gilani a rare bath, his fellow inmates, and the barber himself thought that he was being prepared for execution.

The trial had not begun and Gilani was going to be executed. Such was the fear even hardboiled prisoners at Tihar had of the government of that time.

The bath was ordered by prison authorities to make Gilani “presentable” for an inspection of his condition by the ICRC. To Advani’s credit though, he is authoritatively reported to have turned down permission to proceed with the official secrets act case against Gilani 17 times before the home ministry bureaucracy made it impossible for him to say no. Eventually it was his ministry though that bailed Gilani out against the spurious charges.

The Kandahar hijacking of course has been exploited by every one of Advani’s detractors, most of all by the Congress, to show him in poor light. Maulana Masood Azhar returned to Pakistan from Kandahar to a rapturous hero’s welcome. Omar Sheikh has been sentenced to death in Karachi for his involvement in the brutal assassination of American journalist Daniel Pearl. You could not miss the irony here. The tough sentence that should have gone better with Advani’s no nonsense image was in fact handed to a terrorist he had tamely released. To make it more humiliating the sentence was passed under the watch of a man – President Musharraf – who in Advani’s view had encouraged terrorism in India. As for Mushtaq Zargar, the third man released in the embarrassing Kandahar swap promptly got busy in Muzaffarabad staging the war in Jammu and Kashmir.

All this is more or less in keeping with Advani’s misunderstood personality. But that was not the end of it. In a final affront to the forces of Hindutva, he described Mohammed Ali Jinnah as a secular politician. More recently he was seen holding back tears during the special screening for him of a highly acclaimed movie about the life of brilliant children with learning disabilities. Therefore, Mr Zardari, or whoever else from Sindh gets to rule Pakistan after Monday’s polls should prepare themselves for an emotional tryst with an evidently wronged and misunderstood interlocutor from India should he make it to the top next year.

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