The Vaj and Shaf Show

It is still too early to tell the story of what went on behind the scenes, the back-channel dealings that made this breakthrough possible. It is too early to tell because this promising new round in the peace process is still in the very early stages of what Americans would describe as a “work in progress” and because the stakes are so high. What is more important right now is to look at what kind of movement it marks in the positions of the two leaders over, say, a five-year time-frame, beginning with Vajpayee’s Lahore bus ride.

There is a clear conceptual and strategic pattern to the way Vajpayee’s mind has evolved. He came to power believing he could solve this problem permanently. Or at least stabilising the situation so the subcontinent could return to the post-Shimla kind of peace. At Lahore, he became India’s first post-1965 prime minister to put Kashmir on the negotiating table. At the same time, he visited the Minar-e-Pakistan in the clearest expression of India’s acceptance of a sovereign, stable Pakistan. Lahore had opened a new window in a relationship entombed in the past.

That the Pakistanis blew it, through a combination of Nawaz Sharif’s immaturity and his army’s duplicity, is a different matter. But Vajpayee’s move was not a one-off. It came from a deep belief that you cannot change your neighbours, that ideally you should not allow your future to be held to ransom by hatreds of the past and that while India had the spine to carry on fighting for ever, even switch to a different strategy where the Pakistanis could be made to bleed as well, statesmanship lay in breaking this vicious cycle. Those who know him well will tell you a story. He once called to commiserate with the Lucknow-based father of an army major killed in Kashmir. The grieving man’s composure was astounding. He even offered his other son in the service of the nation. If anything, this reaffirmed to him the belief that his nation had the stamina to fight on. But it was also a moment when he asked if this must go on for ever. This was just a little before Lahore.

That is why even at the height of the Kargil betrayal he did not succumb to the temptation of expanding the conflict. He maintained contact with Nawaz Sharif, and even allowed an impression to build that he somehow was not in the picture and had been similarly betrayed by his army. It did two things. One, he was able to keep public opinion with him on the larger question of a final peace with Pakistan, diminishing Kargil into one more unhappy episode in our complex history rather than letting it become a decisive turning point, blighting our emotions and binding our options. Second, and this is perhaps a point not fully appreciated on both sides of the border, it gave Nawaz Sharif the space to pull back his forces before more damage was done. It gave Nawaz the luxury described so aptly in that immortal phrase Oliver North used to justify his Iran-Contra shenanigans, giving his president “plausible deniability”.

If Nawaz had continued on when Vajpayee got re-elected in October 1999, his peace momentum would have been much stronger than even at Lahore, forgetting entirely the Kargil distraction. But even after Musharraf changed that script by staging the coup, Vajpayee never gave up that larger vision. It is this that took him to Agra and kept him on the same track despite what he saw as a great deal of diplomatic immaturity on the part of Musharraf and some of his delegates. Further, it is only when the history of these five years is authoritatively written that you will know how close India came to taking the war option at least twice after 13/12. But again, what pulled us back was that same Vajpayee conviction, that even after a war there will have to be peace-making. The successful election in Kashmir then gave him the space to de-escalate and launch yet another initiative at Srinagar in April last year which has now resulted in this breakthrough.

Musharraf entered the scene with Kargil. From what you read in the Pakistani media or understand from the pundits there, he was driven by two considerations. One, that a civilian government could not be trusted with such major policy decisions and that Nawaz Sharif was silly enough to be trapped in a sellout. Second, that the road to real victory traversed Srinagar rather than Lahore and if he could somehow force (through the Kargil incursion) India to negotiate on the “core” issue, it might make for a more realistic engagement than the politicians’ jhappi-phappi (hug-and-kisses) diplomacy. He went so wrong, he was forced to fight for his own survival by staging a coup. He was lucky to get away with it but was now caught in the larger battle. Of legitimacy, acceptability, at home and abroad. The world was no longer kind to new dictators, a fact underlined to him by Clinton in his short, finger-wagging visit to Islamabad that humiliated both, Musharraf and his nation.

Musharraf has come a long way since then. Funny, how evolution from soldiery into politics can change people. Musharraf of Islamabad, January 2004, is a far cry from Musharraf of Agra, July 2000. There was a different swagger to him then, a different attitude. It was so evident that even a pacifist like I.K. Gujral was constrained to remark that he was behaving as if he was visiting a defeated nation. He may have sometimes charmed his hosts by making dismissive references to his fundamentalists but his overall approach, attitude, even that term so cruelly mauled by television experts, body language, were all wrong. So his hosts were beginning to have doubts even before the breakfast meeting with Indian editors where he threw it all away by grandstanding in front of the lone PTV camera. Could they trust him, and trust in terms of both intention and ability? To that extent his outburst at the breakfast came as welcome relief and an excuse for India to pull back.

It’s a tall order, for Musharraf to make the transition from a soldier to a statesman, but those who dealt with him in Islamabad this week say they found a new General. It is not just that Musharraf is chastened by the aftermath of 9/11 and 13/12 and the two attempts on his life. The most charitable description is that he is perhaps like a batsman who has survived the initial barrage from the fast-bowlers and now wants to settle for a long innings. In simpler English, that means stabilising his relationship with India. Nobody is as yet willing to hazard a guess on whether he has made the strategic decision to be friends with India. But it seems he has concluded that his own nation is not going very far forward, at least in the direction where he wants it going rather than his so many enemies and likely assassins, if it continues to be in a state of permanent hostility with India. This by itself is a seriously optimistic understanding of the mind of one of the most interesting men we have seen in our neighbourhood in our times. The bottomline is, Vajpayee has decided to bet on it. At the least, this is consistent with his own beliefs and wishes.

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