Ex-envoy Ajay Bisaria: ‘Likelihood of something positive happening greater under this dispensation than any other… onus on Pakistan’

25 years after the Agra summit, Bisaria — who authored the best-selling book — ‘Anger Management: The troubled diplomatic relationship between India and Pakistan’ — spoke to The Indian Express and shared his thoughts on lessons from the failed Agra summit and engaging with Pakistan in the current state of affairs. Edited excerpts:

Twenty-five years after the Agra summit, what do you think are the lessons learnt?

For Vajpayee, Agra was a necessary step towards closure on Kargil… a near war, particularly in a nuclear environment, needs closure of some kind. The hope at Agra was to reach that closure. The summit was also necessary for Vajpayee and his team to understand the Pakistani general and his proclivities, an understanding that eventually led to the real closure of Kargil at the Islamabad SAARC Summit of January 2004.

So the trial by fire of going to Agra, watching it fail, and persisting was critical to Vajpayee reaching that closure in January 2004 — which bought us a few years of peace: certainly the next three years, arguably till 2008. In that sense, the peace he hoped to achieve at Agra did eventually materialise; Agra itself was simply too soon. In hindsight, the error at Agra was clearly insufficient preparation. They should have prepped the summit properly — sent teams back and forth. Instead, the approach was “let’s see what the general does”, and the failure was implicit in that. Had they invested a few months of diplomacy before getting there, they could have secured a better outcome at Agra itself.

Now, 25 years later, do you think a similar move is possible in the current environment?

The Indian political leadership now sees the political cost of a peace initiative as too high. The examples cited are Vajpayee in 1999, repaid with Kargil; Vajpayee again engaging Musharraf at Agra in 2001 and still not succeeding; Manmohan Singh seeing the cost in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack and never risking a Pakistan visit; and Modi paying the price for the 2015 Lahore visit with the Pathankot attack.

So, politically, it appears too risky — the fear of being caught in a ruse yet again. If it happens now, it will happen only with a sufficient guarantee — direct or indirect, overt or covert — that this time it is for real: that Pakistan wants a genuine conversation and no one will sabotage it with an attack. The chances are stronger under a “same-page” government in Pakistan, with the army standing as a guarantee — reassuring India that if a peace deal is done now, the army and the civilians are aligned. That would improve the odds. But the problem is that the army itself seems to have gone rogue in Pakistan, and so the appetite for an Agra-type move is very low.

These moves seem to succeed only when there is a strong government in India and a military leader on the other side. Is there a pattern?

That used to be the understanding, and to some extent it holds. It rests on the same broader global framing that it took Nixon to go to China — a Democrat could not have done it. By the same logic, it took Vajpayee, a BJP leader, to go to Pakistan; it took Modi to go to Pakistan; Manmohan Singh could not go in all his 10 years. Because this is such a strong government — a BJP, right-of-centre government — the likelihood of something positive happening is greater under this dispensation than any other.

But I would say the onus is on Pakistan. If they can persuade the Indian political system that this is a prime minister who has genuinely been trying for two years — that they want to pivot to geoeconomics, get past this problem, and talk — then the chances improve, provided there is some guarantee that it won’t be back to square one.

What do you make of the chatter about the RSS also talking of engaging with Pakistan? Should we read anything into it?

It is not insignificant, but I don’t think it is an orchestrated move — the government signalling through the RSS in close consultation. It reads as a fairly innocent, first-principles instinct: let’s solve this problem. That has been the instinct with the others, too.

In my assessment, the longer we go without spectacular terrorism of the Pulwama–Pahalgam level, the greater the chances of some reconciliation… if we go sufficiently long without a spectacular attack, there is a chance we would attempt again what we have tried at least four times since going nuclear. The current political calculation is that any attempt is too risky, because terrorism could sabotage it. But I would certainly advocate a line of communication with the Pakistan Army — covert or overt — to test whether there is a reasonable guarantee, and a reasonable appetite on the other side, for rapprochement.

What was the defining moment at Agra, and your assessment of how it played out?

My assessment is that Agra failed because of Musharraf’s overreach on Kashmir — not, as is often claimed, because there was a hawk in the room called Advani, without whom Jaswant Singh almost had a deal. I don’t think that is correct. Advani and Jaswant had a bit of a squabble, but they were finally on the same page, and Vajpayee backed them. The problem was the overreach on Kashmir. The earlier Musharraf was not as flexible as the later Musharraf, who was willing to do the four-point formula — essentially giving up the claim on Kashmir by making it irrelevant. Even for Musharraf, Agra was part of a learning curve.

The other thing to note about Agra is that Vajpayee was acutely conscious of the history of Indian leaders being conned by Pakistani ones; he had been a strong critic of Shimla in particular. He knew that at Shimla, on the last day, Bhutto had come to Mrs Indira Gandhi, folded his hands in a one-on-one meeting — “mujhe time de do” — and persuaded her that, given time, he would convert the LoC into the international border. That last meeting saved the 1972 summit from being the failure it would otherwise have been.

Musharraf attempted the same play — whether or not he had read that history — seeking one last, desperate meeting with Vajpayee in the hope of retrieving the summit. Vajpayee just smiled at him and said, “General sahab, ab toh bohot late ho gaya” — it is too late now. Had I been in Musharraf’s shoes, I would have settled for a plain and simple agreement: we came, we met, we had a constructive round of talks, and we will continue the conversation. But he had overreached, and Vajpayee said a clear no. Learning from history, Vajpayee refused to be persuaded at the last moment of a summit that a Pakistani leader was sincere — because he felt Musharraf was not sincere enough, and more work needed to be done. My feeling, in retrospect, is that he was determined not to be conned.