The Rediff Special
Indo-Pak relations: The Turning Point
A dangerous man with a Hindu mindset.' If anyone assumed that
this was a description of L K Advani, Bal Thackeray or Ashok Singhal,
such an assumption cannot be faulted. After all, many Indians
see these men as Hindu revivalists.
But surprise of surprises, it is not with reference to any of
these leaders that the communal epithets above have been used.
It is an oft-repeated description of Prime Minister Inder Kumar
Gujral in Pakistan's official media.
India and Pakistan agreed at a meeting of their foreign secretaries
in June to end all hostile propaganda against each other at the
official level. But even before the then foreign secretary, Salman
Haidar, returned to New Delhi from that meeting, the Pakistan
official media made it clear that this agreement was not worth
the paper on which the two foreign secretaries committed their
governments to end attacks on each other.
Since then, the crescendo of officially-sponsored criticism of
India in Pakistan's official media has risen manifold. And the
most commonly used description of Gujral on Pakistan television is that
he is 'a dangerous man with a Hindu mindset.'
It is a reflection of the vagaries that rule Indo-Pak relations
that the epithets used by Pakistan television to describe Gujral were
to become an important factor in the dialogue between New Delhi
and Islamabad in the run-up to the New York meeting last month
between Gujral and his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharief.
At one of the meetings chaired by Gujral shortly before the third
round of Indo-Pak foreign secretary-level talks in September,
one official brought these epithets to the prime minister's notice.
The official, a hawk on Pakistan who believes that Gujral is bartering
away this country's interests for the sake of a 'doctrine' which
will earn the prime minister a place in history, had calculated
well.
Gujral is obsessed with the media, an obsession which has earned
him the sobriquet of I K (Interview Kumar) Gujral among New Delhi's
chattering classes. Gujral's main constituency, even his friends
acknowledge, is the English-speaking media.
The official in question surmised that details of Pakistan television's
criticism of Gujral will sting him like else. At this meeting,
at the prime minister's Race Course Road residence, he expressed
outrage at what Pakistan's official media has been saying about
Gujral.
Other officials, all of whom have been resentful of the prime minister
for his so-called Gujral doctrine, joined in with elaborate details
of Pakistan's continuing effort to bleed India through a Low Intensity
Conflict all the way from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
Their trump card was evidence gleaned from a video footage of
interrogation of prospective terrorists being trained by Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence and the Taleban militia in camps
in Afghanistan. These terrorists, once their training was complete,
would be sent not just to Kashmir, but across the length and breadth
of India to carry out acts of terror and sabotage.
Their camps had been over-run by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance
led by Commander Ahmed Shah Masoud and the video footage of the
interrogation had been handed over to India by the anti-Taleban
alliance.
A combination of this and other similar evidence and the details
of the personal attacks on Gujral in the Pakistani media proved
to be too much for the prime minister, who in any case, has been
under pressure from his officials to take a harder line on Pakistan.
He threw up his hands and said: "If this is what they (the
Pakistanis) are planning, what can we do?"
This was the turning point in Indo-Pak relations since the Gujral
doctrine created illusions of a bon homie between New Delhi and
Islamabad earlier this year.
This meeting is important because it was there that Gujral finally
decided to go along with the hawks in the Indian establishment
and agreed for the first time since the Indo-Pak bilateral dialogue
was resumed to be tough with Pakistan.
To understand what transpired at the Gujral-Sharief meeting in
New York, it is necessary to outline the background of this meeting
and explain the reluctant conversion of Gujral to a hawk on Pakistan,
a conversion amply reflected in his speeches and statements on
Indo-Pak relations in the last few weeks.
Gujral arrived in New York full of forebodings about Islamabad's
intentions. The meeting of Indo-Pak foreign secretaries in New
Delhi a few days earlier had ended in a stalemate and the air
had already been vitiated by allegations and counter-allegations
about who was responsible for the failure of this third round
of bilateral dialogue.
Then Nawaz Sharief did something which the Indians had not expected.
In his address to the UN General Assembly, he proposed a no-war
pact with India. There was nothing to his proposal: the 1972 Shimla
Accord between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto already incorporates
all the elements of such a pact.
But the propaganda advantage that accrued to Sharief from the proposal
was palpable and Gujral lost the battle to win the attention of
the international community gathered at the UN General Assembly
even before he started his part of the fight.
Sharief also attacked India in his UN address, something Gujral
had not expected. The prime minister's friends, members of the
so-called Lahore Club, all migrants from Pre-Partition Punjab,
had made Gujral believe that Sharief was genuine in his search
for friendship with India, domestic compulsions notwithstanding.
The scathing attack on India in the world assembly shattered this
assumption on which Gujral had predicated many of his moves on
Pakistan.
Therefore, it was a very morose and apprehensive Gujral who walked
into the meeting with Sharief, their second since the two prime
ministers assumed office. There was none of the usual effusiveness,
which Gujral displays whenever he meets foreign leaders. The meeting
began grimly.
But soon enough, Sharief tried to revive the 'Male spirit' with
his remarks on friendship between India and Pakistan. Anyone listening
to the Pakistani prime minister would have thought that the exchange
of fire between Indian and Pakistani soldiers in Kargil was a
figment of someone's imagination.
He talked as if the next stage of the Indo-Pak dialogue was only
awaiting a helpful nudge from the two prime ministers. Gujral
introduced an element of realism into the proceedings when he
bluntly told the Pakistani prime minister that there was a huge
gap between Sharief's words and Islamabad's actions.
Sharief then recalled the meeting of the two prime ministers in
Male. He reminded Gujral that "we had an understanding,"
but he did not spell out what the understanding was. Obviously,
Gujral understood what Sharief was hinting at, for he neither challenged
his Pakistani counterpart's assertions nor commented on them.
It was only when Sharief accused India of going back on that understanding
that Gujral gestured for an explanation. Sharief then turned to
his foreign secretary, Shamshad Ahmad, and asked him to take up
from there.
"Labzon mein mat padiye (Let us not go by words),"
the foreign secretary began and verbalised a long list of grievances
against India. The Indians wanted to explain their version of
what was going on.
Suddenly, the entire gathering was stunned when Ahmad told those
gathered at the summit in almost as many words that successive
foreign secretaries in India were keeping Gujral in the dark about
the nitty-gritty of Indo-Pak relations.
As Sharief vigorously nodded in complete agreement with Ahmad,
Gujral kept quiet and failed to defend his foreign secretary,
who was present.
In the light of what transpired at the Gujral-Sharief summit in
New York, it is possible to reconstruct the sequence of events
that has led to the current deadlock in Indo-Pak relations.
It is clear that when Gujral and Sharief first met in Male, the
Pakistanis drove a hard bargain and got Gujral to agree to a working
group on Kashmir. This was resented by the South Block bureaucracy,
but like good civil servants they agreed to take directions from
political leadership.
When Haidar was leaving for Islamabad for the second round of
foreign secretaries meeting in June, Gujral handed him a brief
which demanded that the talks between the two countries should
go on.
This required all the diplomatic skills that Haidar had acquired
in his career spanning three-and-a-half decades. He balanced the
need to carry out the prime minister's brief with the imperatives
of avoiding a total sell-out to Pakistan.
Haidar agreed at the Islamabad meeting to delink terrorism and
Kashmir, thereby repudiating India's long-standing claim that
the problems in Kashmir were the result of Pakistani-sponsored
terrorism.
He also agreed to a working group on Kashmir, headed by the two
foreign secretaries, thereby conceding the Pakistani claim that
Kashmir is the 'core issue' between Islamabad and New Delhi. Yet,
in wording a joint statement at the end of the second round of
talks, he left enough room for his successor K Raghunath to manoeuvre
at the next meeting of foreign secretaries.
Since his retirement at the end of June, Haidar has told a number
of people in private conversations that the Indo-Pak dialogue
would have broken down in the second round had he not indulged
in this diplomatic tight-rope-walking.
When the two foreign secretaries met in New Delhi last month for
their third round, Raghunath decided to follow the letter of the
joint statement, arguing that the provision for a working group
was coupled with the option of other mechanisms. India, therefore,
declined to go along with the creation of a working group on Kashmir.
The Pakistanis are convinced that neither Haidar nor Raghunath
has made a clean breast of his actions at the two successive foreign
secretaries meetings to their political bosses. When Mushahid
Hussain, Pakistan's information minister, was in India last month,
he told several of his friends and associates here that Gujral
is a good man, but it is the bureaucrats who make it difficult
for the prime minister to deal with Pakistan.
It is a scenario which offers little hope of breaking the current
deadlock in Indo-Pak relations.
K P Nayar/New Delhi
Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine
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