It’s poetry, not diplomacy

In answers to questions in Parliament, the external affairs minister is more circumspect. Unsurprisingly. Since it is not he who drafts the replies but his more experienced mandarins. Yes, certainly talks with Pakistan, we are told in the House, but only after they cease their “hostile propaganda” and “end cross-border terrorism”. Are these then “conditions”? No, not at all, not conditions as in pre-conditions but necessary atmospherics for the resumption of dialogue. That might satisfy a professor of semantics. It is hardly the language of sincerity.

Let us take the official explanation first. Did Vajpayee wait for the cessation of hostile propaganda before he took off for Lahore? I was in Pakistan the week before he went, with an all-party team of Indian parliamentarians. There were sections of the media who welcomed the visit.

And others who did not. Neither Nawa-i-Waqt nor Jasarat moderated their tone. The lead in hostile propaganda was undertaken by none less than Pak Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz who tried to sabotage our Tr-ack-II by inviting us to lunch and there unleashing on us, his guests, a vicious propaganda barrage. Did any of this stop Vajpayee from crossing the border?

As for cross-border terrorism, the Pakistanis crossed the border (in the reverse direction to Vajpayee) just as he was readying to board his bus at Amritsar and ruthlessly, deliberately, in chilling cold-blood massacred mo-re innocents than were killed in the Anantnag incident on the occasion of Clinto-n’s visit. Was Vajpayee fazed? Not at all. On the contrary, he clai-med that it was precisely to end such cross-border terrorism that he was crossing the Attari-Wagah border. The photo op was too precious to mess up with a precipitate turning back at Amritsar.

Now we are told the Prime Minister’s remarks on the vacation of aggression in PoK are only a reiteration of Parliament’s unanimous resolution of 1994. Oh, really? Then, did February 1999 come before 1994 or after? If we cannot talk to Pakistan without Pakistan first quitting PoK, then what was the Prime Minister himself doing hugging the squatter and guzzling his kababs?

The fact is that Nawaz Sharif’s invitation to Vajpayee to take the first bus to Lahore was an off-the-cuff gimmick. Vajpayee’s surprise acceptance was equally a public relations stunt. Sharif knew that he, his government and his armed forces were readying for the kill in Kargil. The preparations were so overt, he must have assumed that Vajpayee had be-en informed by his intelligence.

If Vajpayee nevertheless wished to play the Pakistani game of war and peace at the same time, Sharif was not the man to object. What Sharif could not possibly have known was the colossal intelligence failure on the part of a neo-nuclear power faced with another neo-nuclear power.

The least Pakistan expected was that before Vapayee bought his bus ticket, he would have checked on how things were at the LoC; wh-ether in view of the virtual sealing of the infiltration points on the western salient of the LoC (an empty NDA boast at the time) alternative infiltration rou-tes through the northern salient would not be sought; whether the dispute over Siachen had been so far resolved as to anticipate an end to the interdiction of supplies through the Srinagar-Kargil-Leh route. What Nawaz Sh-arif and the Pakistan governme-ent/army could not have known was that Vajpayee was so excited over his media coup that responsible governance had been jettisoned.

Thus was the end of the Lahore process written into its beginning. Lahore was not diplomacy; it was poetry. Vajpayee is a poet, not a diplomat. Hence his repeated blunderings in foreign policy, his consistent inconsistency.

Today, he makes great play of not talking to a military dictator. When he was external affairs minister, 1977-79, he prided himself on being the first external affairs minister ever to visit Pakistan (Nehru had gone as Prime Minister, not EAM).

Then, it so little mattered to Atalji that Zia-ul-Haq had come to power through a wholly unconstitutional military coup, betraying the elected leader who had called the military to the aid of the civil authority, that not only Vajpayee but Advani too visited Pakistan, that it was during Vajpa-yee’s honeymoon with Zia that Pakistan was re-admitted to the Commonwealth and made much of in NAM. And when his host, the genial Zia strung up poor Zulfie and ha-nged him till he swung dead in the gallows, the only government in the world to not express its horror was Vajpayee’s, crowning Vajpayee’s singular achievement of being the only foreign minister in the comity of nations to have not pleaded for Bh-utto’s life. And this is the Vajpayee now fastidiously proclaiming his av-ersion to military dictators.

Another Vajpayee diplomatic disaster was his notorious voyage to China. As with Lahore, so with Beijing, Vajpayee as external affairs minister embarked on a poetic mission to China, without any proper preparation and primarily to prove that anything the predecessor Congress government had not done he could do better.

Thus, no assessment made of the chances of China invading Vietnam. Not that the Vietnamese did not know. They did. And gave the Chinese a bloody nose. But not before Vajpayee had landed in China, squandering the goodwill in Vietnam built over decades, and annoying the Chinese too.

India’s foreign policy is now reduced to currying American favour. We have forgotten Kissinger’s nostrum, uttered on Indian soil during the Kargil war: “Those who seek American approbation end with American intervention.”

Aiyar is a Congress MP but these views are his own