It's deja vu time in New Delhi again. Ten years since the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition—when leaders and potentates from Burkina Faso to Washington, questioned India about its intentions on ‘‘Kashmir’’—the BJP-led government has managed to bring back all the irritation and suspicion associated with this hold-all term, that has since lain dormant in world capitals. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that, at the height of the Iraq war, when the western world was supposedly too distracted to worry about India-Pakistan, the hyphenation of the subcontinental twins was back. India-Pakistan, Pakistan-India. The world has returned to speaking of the democracy and the dictatorship in the same breath. It doesn’t matter that the SouthAsiawallahs in Whitehall or the State Department, experts who pore over the fine print, believe that a nuclear holocaust over Kashmir may yet be averted because of the selective statesmanship of leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad. The big picture that the world receives out of the subcontinent— admittedly, an incomplete and ignorant one—is of two juvenile neighbours seeking to outbid the other in jingoist recalcitrance. One simply refused to talk to the other, even if it was about terrorism. The other used terrorism as a weapon to start the talks. Clearly, though, Prime Minister Vajpayee’s olive branch to Pakistan, in Srinagar and in Parliament recently, seems to have been made with an eye to arresting New Delhi’s loss of credibility in these world capitals. The prime minister may be touching 80, walks slowly because of surgery in both his knees and like most men his age may not be brimming over with a conspicuous energy and exuberance. Only he, though, understood the symbolism of making that most innocuous offer of talks to Pakistan from the two places it mattered most—from the ‘‘disputed’’ state of ‘‘held Kashmir’’ as Islamabad loves to call it, and from Parliament, the sanctum sanctorum of India’s Constitution. In one gentle stroke, Vajpayee had ticked off his articulate colleagues for indulging in their ‘‘preemptive strikes’’ stream of consciousness against Pakistan, phrases which really belonged to the twilight zone than the public domain. External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha, who promised to bring a whiff of economic diplomacy to MEA’s jaded corridors, abandoned the bureaucratic caution of a lifetime and decided to get in touch with his political instinct. Point is, how indebted is Sinha to BJP hardliners that he still can’t stamp India’s foreign policy with an independent vision? Actually, the penny dropped five summers ago after the Pokharan tests. Justifying India’s need to go nuclear, Home Minister L.K. Advani then defended New Delhi’s right to ‘‘hot pursuit’’ across the Line of Control, if Pakistan did not end cross-border terrorism. That one phrase, ‘‘hot pursuit’’, was enough excuse for Islamabad, if excuse was needed, to conduct its own tests in the end of May. Belatedly, though, Sinha seems to have made amends for his ‘‘preemptive strike’’ statement in Parliament, possibly because even he realised that it had too much of an Advani ring to it. Fact is, it will take little for Vajpayee’s warm oratory behind that bullet-proof glass in Srinagar as well as in Parliament last week, to grow cold with cynicism. Already, some quarters are echoing the view that ‘‘there’s nothing new’’ in what Vajpayee said, that New Delhi’s year-and-a-half-long policy of ‘‘no dialogue until terrorism ends’’ has really paid off. General Musharraf, according to this school of thought, quivers with apprehension and/ or self-doubt each time George Bush or Tony Blair open their mouths. Notice their Camp David statement on Kashmir last month, or even Blair’s interview to the Pakistan newspaper, Daily Times. Didn’t it squarely lay the blame for terrorism in J&K at Islamabad’s door? Fact is, one already very hot summer after it mobilised its large army on the border with Pakistan, India continues to be in grave danger of losing the propaganda battle about Kashmir-Pakistan abroad. We’re not talking governments here. People in London and Washington and Moscow and Paris who read the fine print possibly understand the nuances between North Block and South Block. But what about public opinion in the streets, on TV and radio and in the newspapers of these nations? Any straw poll will show up an India tentative about making its case—and therefore hesitant to talk. Tragedy is, India has in the last five years won not a few major real battles at home and abroad, enabling its removal from the India-Pakistan hyphen. But the gains from Kargil, Lahore, Agra, as well as at home in Kashmir, seem to be in grave danger of dispersal, with New Delhi’s earlier refusal to broaden the canvas of contacts with Pakistan. Apart from the fact that a lack of communication significantly reduces New Delhi’s ability to gather intelligence in the enemy country, the decision to break off all human contact, such as air links, road links and train links, was both absurd and damaging. In the West, at least, it smacked too much of what the Soviet Union did to its own citizens (travel beyond the Iron Curtain was permitted only to the chosen few), a comparison hardly flattering to a nation that prides itself on its fundamentally liberal agenda. Clearly, maun vrat can hardly be a substitute for foreign policy. New Delhi’s argument thus far that it has no need to break bread with a country that constantly undermines its sovereignty, only makes limited sense. By having refused to talk, New Delhi was cutting the ground from beneath its own feet. Instead of a babel of tongues that at various levels explained the nation’s refusal to compromise with terrorism, a deafening silence eloquently fed public misperceptions abroad. What an inversion of the truth! In single-minded pursuit of the high, moral ground, New Delhi seemed to have lost touch with the chaotic conditions in which mere mortals survive. Back on earth, human beings are prone to duck, feint, swagger and bluster, all in the name of national interest. Hopefully, with Vajpayee’s recent remarks, the change in the monotone will be permanent. Otherwise, the diplomatic gains of the last five years are in grave danger of being diminished. New Delhi is still pretty much teetering on the brink of losing the battle for the mind of the world.
