Blah for blah

There is, after all, only so much that you can write about the menu at Bush8217;s lunch for Vajpayee or groupism within the NRI community or two Indian ambassadors indulging in taxpayer-funded one-upmanship if not actually working at cross-purposes. It would be worse if you were a Pakistani journalist. Your president would find so much more time for the American media than you which, in turn, would take him apart on almost all his claims and promises. So how else would you justify the junket to New York if your president did not even give you the chance for massaging his ego for such marvellous India-bashing? The only problem is that, on both sides, even this name-calling is beginning to get a bit stale. If you open up the files of your newspapers for the same UNGA week for the last several years you will find that even the headlines would read the same. Since I am writing this sitting in Kolkata I am looking at The Telegraph of September 14, last year. And its main headline reads 8216;Atal matches Pervez blast for blast8217;. On the same day, The Indian Express had said, without mincing words, 8216;PM gives it to the General8217;. See the headlines in the same papers this week, or in your favourite newspaper, and check last year8217;s files.

The point here is not whether Vajpayee should have responded to Musharraf8217;s usual rantings or not. The point is also not whether Kanwal Sibal should have grabbed the centrestage for an extension by raining so much and such wonderfully unguided ammunition at Musharraf, even before the two leaders had had the chance of entering the big bullring. Maybe it was some kind of a foreign service euphemism for a formal application for extension in service, though you might have been left a bit confused by his prescription of fasting as a cure for Pakistan8217;s annual Kashmir itch. You8217;d wonder what itch he was talking about. Or maybe the presiding deity of the holy foreign service knows better. All this doesn8217;t matter and will be forgotten over the weekend of shopping and sight-seeing. What matters is how well, and how clinically, Vajpayee and his real policy-makers are now able to separate this Annual Manhattan Madness from the real substance of a policy they had launched at Srinagar in April.

The one point that matters, however, is, what does Vajpayee actually have in his mind. Only a mind as rich and nuanced as Vajpayee8217;s could have conjured up such a poem for all seasons. For India watchers now, which lines he recites when should be akin to China-watchers interpreting Chairman Mao8217;s smiles in the good old days. He also has his happy and sad versions as is the tradition with Hindi cinema theme songs. He can reel out happy lines when things are going well main geet wahi gaata hoon. Or, when he is upset, angry, and wants you to know 8212; main geet nahin gaata hoon.

So did we hear what he sang at New York? Did we read his lips? He talked about betrayal and disappointment and concluded on a most pregnant note: Main geet naya gaata hoon. So if you take the poet in Vajpayee seriously you know what he is trying to say. That I had set out to do something. Yes, there have been setbacks and disappointments. But I am not about to give up. That is why anticipating that abuse will be exchanged between rival contingents in New York, the government had already thrown in a little reminder that the Srinagar initiative was still alive by offering to increase the sizes of our respective missions in New Delhi and Islamabad. Don8217;t overlook also the fact that it was in the course of the New York tamasha that Yashwant Sinha also announced that the prime minister will be going for the SAARC summit at Islamabad in January. It is a different matter that now it was lost in the din of the subsequent sabre-rattling. A little while earlier, this was supposedly the key story with everybody, from the defence minister to sundry ministers of state in the MEA having their own take on it.

The good news is that, like the usual September bellyache of previous years, this will also be forgotten once the contingents return home. Sanity will return as well 8212; to the extent it can in India-Pakistan relations 8212; and some movement will begin in other areas, though very slowly. Probably a couple more buses now that the wait-list for tickets is three months, the train and, who knows, if the Pakistanis can get over their self-defeating cussedness, even air-links and overflights. It is an incredible situation where the prime minister of India has announced a major peace initiative hailed internationally as a great act of statesmanship, Musharraf has been demanding talks and normalisation and yet both leaders are allowing their respective establishments to continue with the same old game of competitive cussedness.

The equation at the UNGA is well known. It is a forum where leaders of the world 8212; currently only George Bush, unfortunately 8212; speak to the rest of the world. The leaders of the third world, meanwhile, speak to their own people back home. For Vajpayee, however, it is a funny paradox. When he spoke at Srinagar in April, he actually addressed an audience in Washington and Islamabad. When he spoke at New York, he was addressing audiences in Lucknow, Bhopal and Jaipur, showing his people he can match the general blast-for-blast. When he returns now he has to separate the rhetoric of one from the substance of another.

This is never easy, but not impossible. Not for a leader of his skill and credibility. But even he has to realise that interludes of irrationality like this, though forced on you by your opponents, tend to eat into valuable time. They also confuse your backers, embolden those not convinced by your logic in the first place and, in the end, also give self-seeking third parties greater space. You can see that happening a bit in this case: The Bush administration8217;s oft-repeated patronising lines of praise for Vajpayee8217;s peace initiative even while it loses its way on the ground.

This prime minister is anything but naive on foreign policy issues. When he made his big move at Srinagar he would not have presumed that Musharraf will play ball immediately, that cross-border terrorism will stop and that Kashmir will be solved even before we go into election mode. Yet, he has a domestic constituency and cannot keep silent if Musharraf continues with his favourite old whine at New York even while his speech-writers8217; syntax gets more complicated. To that extent, the prime minister has done very well, blast for blast. But once he returns home he, and those he trusts with policy-making, should lose no time in putting his own initiative back on the rails. Probably, literally, by making a move on resuming the Delhi-Lahore rail connection.

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