I could be fooled again, of course

It would be naive to credit the PM with total freedom of action. He has a several Sangh Parivar factions, one more intemperate than the other, pulling him back from moderation.

But there is clearly a streak in him which enables him to negotiate the factions and pick up the moderate thread again.

It is wonderful that he has described Hindutva as synonymous with ‘Bharatiyeta’ or ‘Indianness’. Except for the people of J&K and parts of the Northeast, ‘Indianness’ of any Indian was, I thought, never in any doubt, just as the ‘gaurav’ of any Hindu never needed to be underlined for emphasis. If Hindutva is as simple and universally acceptable as Vajpayee makes it out to be, then what the hullabaloo about?

Left to himself, Vajpayee has always demonstrated a sure touch on Pakistan. His bus journey to Lahore was a continuation of attitudes towards Pakistan shaped decades ago when, as foreign minister of the Janata government, he had made efforts at sorting out Indo-Pak ties.

Later, in July 2001, Vajpayee invited General Musharraf to Agra. While holding the Agra Summit, Vajpayee had not taken his eyes off the electoral fortunes of his party. Elections to four major states — UP, Uttaranchal, Punjab, Manipur and three Assembly seats in Gujarat — were in the offing.

The atmosphere the success of the Agra Summit would have generated would be one of harmony and moderation. Vajpayee was not alone in that evaluation. He had the backing of the RSS in that enterprise — or at least the RSS organ Panchjanya.

Journalists accompanying Musharraf were entertained at the journal’s office in New Delhi. It bears repetition that on that occasion Panchjanya, with the approval of the RSS Chief K. Sudarshan, invited Pakistan’s Jang group to organise a joint competition. Readers of the two publications were to write essays on Indo-Pak relations. The winners would be guests of the publications in their respective countries.

I am possibly extrapolating too much from the RSS publication’s enthusiasm for good relations with Pakistan, but it is my firm conviction that had the Summit not been scuttled, the fresh breath of harmony and tolerance would have stabilised Vajpayee as the unshakable pivot of India’s political middle ground, the only location from where a country so diverse can be governed.

Party hardliners were behind the rout in UP and elsewhere in the February state elections. Gujarat was a panic response but too much shouldn’t be made of the success there. This Vajpayee appears to have grasped. Gujarat is not India. The Gujarat pogrom was a blot on India and any danger of it becoming a recipe for electoral success will invite unspeakable consequences.

In his musings, Vajpyee has touched the heart of the matter: ‘Pakistan cannot fight religious extremism and modernise itself as long as it chooses to be in a position of permanent confrontation with India’.

There is in this formulation a message for the international community as well. There are, after all, 500 million Muslims in the Indian subcontinent — far in excess of all the Muslims spread across the Arab world right up to Morocco.

These South Asian Muslim have grown out of a common civilisational stretch. The poet who wrote the Indian national anthem also wrote the national anthem of Bangladesh.

Pakistan’s national poet, Iqbal, described Lord Ram as the Imam of Hindustan. But, if Pakistani rulers see their security in a perpetual hostility with India, the project entails a wholesale rejection of our civilisational links. Pakistan will then remain a fertile field for the growth of extreme varieties of Islam which will be completely out of sync with the modern world. This double tension of perpetual hostility with India, on the one hand, and with modernism, on the other, will eventually result in the evolution of the world’s most dangerous extremist state.

The exponential growth of this variety of Islam, the intolerance it will generate, will provide grist to the mill of Hindu extremists in India, the variety that shamed ‘Indianness’ in Gujarat.

Vajpayee is all too aware of the fact that unbridled Hindu extremism is essentially a success of Pakistani diplomacy. We have to pull ourselves out of this trap. So he holds out another olive branch to Pakistan, just as much as his right wing will permit: ‘Let our two countries agree to promote mutually beneficial trade and economic ties, strengthen cultural relations, encourage greater people to people contacts.’

I am inclined to endorse this statement all the way except that I am surrounded by sceptics waiting for an occasion when the prime minister will once again make an adjustment with his extremists. And I will be accused by my friends of having been fooled yet again.