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HISTORY never forgets a tune; it merely adapts new lyrics to it. Indo-Pak relations have a similarly repetitive refrain. Both countries periodically apply a fresh libretto to match the same old tune.
Had the German composer Richard Wagner been alive, he might have been inspired to convert these diplomatic theatrics into an opera, a sequel to his famous Der Ring des Nibelungen. It took Wagner 26 years to compose that work. It takes 16 hours to perform its four parts, from start to finish. Like Indo-Pak talks, it taxes the performers and exhausts its audience.
For a plot, Wagner could use 68 years of our dramatic histrionics. He could substitute the accursed gold ring stolen from the Rhine-maidens by the purloined princely state of Jammu & Kashmir, and end with a fiery finale — a Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods), in which mortals are destroyed and Valhalla (its hall of honour) incinerated.
Modi is determined no colleague will call him ‘Maulana Modi’.
There are many amongst us who over the decades have hummed the duets of hope between Ayub Khan and Lal Bahadur Shastri (Tashkent, 1966), between Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Mrs Indira Gandhi (Shimla, 1972), between Mian Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee (Lahore, 1999), between Pervez Musharraf and Shri Vajpayee (Agra, 2001), and recently between Nawaz Sharif and Narendra Modi (Ufa, 2015). We are being told now to croon a different tune.
The collapse of the proposed talks by the national security advisers of both countries is a cruel inversion of Cervantes’ observation that “man appoints, and God disappoints”. In the case of Indo-Pak talks, electorates appoint, their governments disappoint.
The fulcrum of any serious negotiations, especially between states, is the ability of each side to understand the viewpoint of the other. Unilateral ultimatums are akin to mules, condemned to sterility. A bray of demands and midnight deadlines on television channels cannot replace conventional, confidential channels of communication between mature governments.
Even while holding her press conference on Aug 22, Smt Sushma Swaraj, India’s external affairs minister, must have recalled the ill-advised press briefing Pervez Musharraf gave in Agra in July 2001 that provided the Indian side with an excuse to scuttle those talks. She must certainly have been reminded by her MEA staff of the remarks her predecessor Jaswant Singh made on July 17, the morning after the failure of the Agra summit.
“It will not be a breach of confidentiality,” he admitted, “to clarify that this was on an account of the difficulty in reconciling our basic approaches to bilateral relations. India is convinced that narrow, segmented or unifocal approaches, will simply not work. Our focus has to remain on the totality of relationship, our endeavour to build trust and confidence, and a mutually beneficial relationship even as we address and move forward on all outstanding issues, including Jammu & Kashmir: building upon the existing compacts of Shimla and Lahore.”
Ironically, 14 years later, another BJP-led government has turned volte face, insisting now upon a unifocal agenda as a precondition for NSA-level talks.
A prime reason for this altered scenario must be India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. No Indian leader since Mahatma Gandhi has aspired to personify the Hindu politico-psyche with as much singular daring as he has — not A.B. Vajpayee, not P.V. Narasimha Rao, not Morarji Desai, neither Indira nor Rajiv Gandhi. Certainly not Jawaharlal Nehru. Stung by Vallabhbhai Patel’s taunt in 1950 calling him ‘Maulana Nehru’ for his conciliatory attitude towards Muslims in India, Nehru retorted sharply, reminding Patel of the suspicion Indian Muslims felt at being regarded by the Hindu majority as “aliens in India, not to be trusted, and to be got rid of as soon and as tactfully as possible”.
Modi is determined no BJP/RSS colleague will ever dare call him ‘Maulana Modi’. Like Gandhi, Modi has become adept at reconciling the duality of his political responsibilities with his religious convictions. He is a consummate self-publicist. He avoids an iftar reception in Rashtrapati Bhavan, yet he is quite prepared to take a selfie of himself with his Arab hosts posing in the Sheikh Zayed mosque in Abu Dhabi. He intends to be remembered as Mahatma Modi, with vaulting saffron-stained ambitions for India. Could aborting the NSA talks be his response to the pressure from the White House, the Kremlin and Beijing to resume a dialogue he disdains? Pakistan’s answer to India’s intransigence has been for Adviser Sartaj Aziz to warble again the aria that Pakistan is a muscular, nuclear power.
Both countries would do better to remember secretary of state George Shultz’s advice after the failed Reagan-Gorbachev talks at Reykjavik in 1986: “I recognised full well that the nuclear age could not be abolished or undone: it was a permanent reality [but] what’s so good about a world where you can be wiped out in 30 minutes?”
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, August 27th, 2015
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