The French call it a menage a trois, a household of three, which is what India, Pakistan and the United States are slipping into. Even as he protests that he is not here to interfere in India-Pakistan relations, that is all Richard Armitage is doing. And even as he protests that he is doing nothing under outside pressure, the fact is external developments are pushing Vajpayee and his government into wriggling out of the bind into which they quite unnecessarily pushed India-Pakistan relations after the fiasco of the Lahore bus ride. Vajpayee admitted as much when he told the Lok Sabha that although Iraq had nothing to do with Kashmir, it was the American invasion of Iraq which made him see the need for movement on Kashmir.Those in government are being compelled to unravel their weaved-up follies about the Musharraf regime. They said they would not talk to Musharraf because he was the cause of Kargil. Of course, he was. Of course, he still is. Then why the climbdown? Government spokesmen and their media propagandists have insisted that the “military mindset” would not allow Pakistan to make peace with India. If so, has the Pakistani military mindset undergone a lobotomy? Or is it that the Armitages of this world are twisting the BJP-NDA mindset into greater sense and sensibility? The Vajpayee government has portrayed every terrorist outrage in India, from Jammu and Kashmir to Akshardam, indeed even Godhra, as the handiwork of the ISI. On what basis then do Vajpayee and Advani now believe that the conditions they have repeated ad nauseam have been or will be fulfilled?As brought to the attention of the Lok Sabha by Rashid Alavi of the BSP, the annual report of the Ministry of External Affairs claims that 13/12 brought us on par with 9/11 in the global war on terrorism! Armies of parliamentarians, including myself, were despatched around the world to tell all and sundry that Pakistan was behind the storming of the citadel of the world’s greatest democracy. Neither the US Congress nor the European Parliament have been impressed with the argument. They have condemned the attack, certainly, but not pointed a finger at Pakistan. Indeed, in a recent testimony before the US Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director George Tenet has categorically put the blame for 13/12 on “Kashmiri militants”, not Pakistan. In the debate on Pakistan, I brought this evidence from the CIA website to the attention of the prime minister. Neither he nor the US authorities (nor the ever-ardent Indian Express) have refuted it.As for the European Parliament, I was a member of the delegation sent there. When we asked why they, who were so concerned over 9/11, had not said a word about 13/12, the lame excuse trotted out was that they were preoccupied with parliamentary group elections. When we asked, well more than a month has passed, what do you propose to do about it, they said they were drafting a resolution urging India and Pakistan to settle Kashmir. It was only our insistence that any linking of the J&K issue with condemnation of the attack on Parliament would sabotage Indo-European parliamentary relations that eventually led to their condemning the attack without bringing in Kashmir — but at no time have the Europeans endorsed our repeated claim that Pakistan masterminded and engineered that outrage.When the Vajpayee lot found that their bluster was not impressing anyone, they mobilised the bulk of our armed forces, at enormous cost to the nation and enormous damage to morale, to go man the outer perimeter of our borders on full alert for ten long months in a meaningless eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, which quite failed to cow down the Pakistanis but thoroughly alarmed the world at this display of brinkmanship by two neo-nuclear powers.That is when the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads since 6 June 1998 was unsheathed: UN Security Council resolution 1172, which revived for the first time since the 1965 war the dreaded K-word, Kashmir. As punishment for Pokhran II, the axis of evil — the five permanent members of the Security Council, all of whom are nuclear weapon powers — threatened India and Pakistan, settle Kashmir or our wrath will descend on you. That is how Vajpayee at Srinagar made the connection between Iraq and Kashmir. The Iraq resolutions were twice as old as resolution 1172 — but kept in storage till Bush decided he needed another war on yet another defenceless enemy to win his 2004 elections. Sorting out India and Pakistan would go down extraordinarily well with the American voter.Vajpayee has made the connection only now. Jaswant Singh made it much earlier. Hence his chasing Strobe Talbott the world over, ten times round, begging redemption for Pokhran II by abject surrender to the United States. The US, of course, won the day. The Vajpayee government first credited the US president, not the Indian armed forces, with ending the Pakistani incursion in Kargil; then they let Bill Clinton get away with describing Kashmir as a “dispute” in the sacred precincts of Central Hall; then rushed in after 9/11 with an offer of territory which the Americans feared to tread; then bit their tongue as neither America nor the world bought our story about 13/12; and have now abjectly dismantled the entire response to 13 It is a grovelling confession of wasted years.It has taken not good sense of their own but third party intervention to force this retreat on the BJP-NDA. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to John F. Kennedy on 24 April 1963 that in Indo-Pak matters, third persons could be “helpful” if they were “quiet, unobstrusive and objective”. The US is none of these. Powell on March 31, the Tenet testimony, Jay Garner’s deadline of December 2004 (denied for the record but of a piece with US neocon thinking); Armitage’s speech at the National Defence University; counter-terrorism chief, Ambassador Black’s testimony cited by me in Parliament; and Brajesh Mishra’s shameful advocacy of a joint US-Israel-India operation on the Arab nation in the name of fighting global terrorism — all these show that in our menage a trois, India is the sauten.
