Indian Hawks Blast
Vajpayee Over his Kashmir Policy
By
Analyst
IN
THE 1972 crime classic Godfather, there is a scene with Virgil
“The Turk” Solozzo that sets the tone for the rest
of the story. Everyone will remember that Solozzo comes with a
fabulous drug deal to the Corleone family. The “old-fashioned”
Don Corleone is queasy about drugs and says no. But his eldest
son, Sonny, shows interest.
Things
happen fast after that. Seeing a family split, Solozzo orders
to kill the Don who survives. Sonny goes after Solozzo and the
New York mafia families behind him. Sonny is gunned down. The
Don is forced from his bed rest to take charge again.
Nations
play the Solozzo game all the time. Two years ago in Agra, General
Pervez Musharraf exploited the differences between AB Vajpayee
and LK Advani on Kashmir. The prime minister sent Advani and then
foreign minister Jaswant Singh to J & K to check if the ceasefire
of 2000 was working. They said it was. But to their surprise,
he terminated it, and called Musharraf to a summit which ended
in a fiasco.
Last
week, Vajpayee was pulling out rabbits again. On his first day
in J & K, he invited Pakistan for a dialogue on all issues,
including Kashmir. According to one reporter’s account,
he repeated the word “dialogue” a dozen times in a
twelve-minute public speech. He never mentioned Pakistani cross-border
terrorism – which the government says must end before talks
begin.
It
was left to BJP president Venkaiah Naidu to make the point in
Delhi. The reaction of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad was angrier.
By the time Vajpayee was returning to the capital, he was backtracking.
There would be no dialogue, he insisted, unless cross-border terrorism
ceased. He spelt out the reason for his mind-change. "I will,"
he said, “have to answer in Delhi tomorrow about the initiative
I have taken…Explanations are going to be asked from me.”
That
is an exaggeration. No one calls an explanation from this prime
minister. And on Jammu and Kashmir, his words are law. The BJP,
for example, has to tolerate Mufti Mohammed Sayeed “healing-touch”
policy because Vajpayee sets great store by it. But differences
are there. The differences simmer at the level of the sub-conscious,
and burst out whenever BJP senior leaders are shocked into responding
to a Vajpayee initiative heard for the first time.
Despite
being the prime minister of a coalition government, Vajpayee holds
his own counsel in certain areas, including the economy, foreign
policy, and Jammu and Kashmir. He does not always operate at the
level of politics in these areas, and is moved by emotionalism
and mood-swings. His dogged support for disinvestment and Arun
Shourie are of a piece with this behaviour. He is emotional about
both and privatisation has become a personal crusade.
On
foreign policy, too, Vajpayee follows his personal instincts.
He trusted Malaysia, but felt let down when it permitted Musharraf
a provocative Kashmir speech during the NAM summit, and this reflected
in Indian overreaction to the maltreatment of Indian IT professionals
in that country.
Also,
Vajpayee could take only so much of the Iraq War, and his poetic
sensibilities were outraged by the death and destruction, which
explains the latish parliamentary resolution “deploring”
the hostilities, and Yashwant Sinha’s taunts about Anglo-American
aims in the invaded country. If Vajpayee had been steadfastly
“pragmatic”, the middle path would have been scrupulously
followed. And it’s emotionalism which is taking him to China,
ignoring the dangers of trusting the Chinese (See debate, “Scaling
the wall,” ).
Vajpayee
has a personal map of Kashmir too. From the outside, it is hard
to say what it is, but don’t be surprised if he is rocked
by his past memories of the place, as we all are from time to
time. But Kashmir is not the soft place of twenty years ago, nor
the idyll of the movie, Kashmir Ki Kali.
Leaving
a minority of politicians and militants, insurgency has not hardened
Kashmiris, as many Afghans and Sri Lankan Tamils were turned to
stone by years of fighting. But Kashmiris are negligible in the
terrorist engagements now, which are largely carried out by Pakistani
groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed. LeT
chief Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed has said in Friday prayers that Hindus
and Muslims cannot co-exist, and that the murder of Hindus is
religiously sanctioned. What weight will Vajpayee’s soft
talk carry with terrorist leaders like Hafiz Sayeed?
Bursts
of statesmanship would be misconstrued as softness as this century
is inaugurated by American “hard power”. It is arguable
if statesmanship has any role as strategic/ economic competition
hots up around the world. Statesmanship is usually accompanied
by magnanimity, but how can we be magnanimous to Pakistan staking
our claim on Kashmir simultaneously? It’s best, therefore,
to be sensible, pursue the terrorists and win over the population,
and bring Pakistan to a dialogue on our own terms. But Vajpayee
is taking the treacherous road of emotions.
Which
brings us to the Solozzo example. The Solozzos of the world don’t
give a quarter. Never, never must a government let show its internal
differences, much less advertise it. It is all right for General
Musharraf to say if he agreed to the Indian terms in Agra, he
would have to settle in his ancestral house in Darya Ganj in Central
Delhi. A dictator is excused certain indiscretions – although
a counter-coup can preempt further ones. But Vajpayee overdid
the differences with “Delhi”. He broke his own policy
link between dialogue and an end to cross-border terrorism, and
when the BJP protested, made the wrong excuses. Vajpayee is a
liberal among hawks, but what is the point of telling Pakistan?
The
writer is an Indian Hawk. This article was printed by Newsinsight,
a web magazine.
