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Journalism of Courage
The bureaucratic language that marked Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the UPA government’s handling of the Indo-Pak peace process appears out of character with the man. It was the former PM, after all, who had displayed the courage to break the mould on Indo-Pak engagement. For him to now indulge in nit-picking in order to score political points betrays a lack of confidence in the process that he had once initiated.
No one knows better than Vajpayee how difficult it is to steer this course. The progress achieved by his Ramzan ceasefire call, which had led to the Agra summit, came up against the intransigent postures of senior colleagues like his home minister, L.K. Advani. The irony could not be more marked today. While Advani acknowledges in Pakistan that the Indo-Pak peace process is on track, Vajpayee reverts to time-worn babuspeak on the issue. Very possibly there are influential voices within the BJP who would like nothing more than to go back to the old days of playing the Pakistan card. Vajpayee should be careful not to fall in with their stratagems. If he, as the progenitor of this process, doesn’t own up to it, then who can?
The objections Vajpayee raised are in themselves slight. There is nothing that the Manmohan Singh government has done which amounts to a serious deviation from the line laid down in the Indo-Pak joint statement of January 6, 2004, and the prime minister did well to clarify this in his response to Vajpayee’s letter. Quite possibly if the NDA government was in power it too would have taken these very same decisions. For instance, the Vajpayee government had pursued a liberal line vis-a-vis the Hurriyat. Not only did it engage in a dialogue with the Hurriyat, it allowed the organisation to meet Pervez Musharraf and other leaders when they were in New Delhi and had even considered allowing moderate Hurriyat leaders to visit Pakistan after the Kargil war. As the main opposition party, the BJP must critique government policy but it should also make the distinction between issues worthy of its attention and those that amount to mere diversions.
