Mistrust brushed under huge, red carpet

‘‘A very warm welcome to you Prime Minister from the bottom of my heart,’’ Shafi began, ‘‘and may you have a great and productive stay in our country. From every account, from your very countenance, you seem to be a good human being, a sagacious man who has seen it all in politics and diplomacy, indeed in life itself.’’

The Prime Minister’s travelling office is believed to be besieged with requests for a meeting with the PM, or simply a photograph. At a reception thrown by Indian High Commissioner Shiv Shanker Menon two days ago, where the Islamabad elite was present—from Maulana Fazlur Rehman to businessmen and society women, some of them reincarnated as members of the Pakistani national assembly—the clamour for photo-ops with the PM was overwhelming.

After Pak PM Mir Zafarullah Jamali’s he-is-a-visionary speech, Jamaiat leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who had organised a rasta roko in Lahore the day Vajpayee visited there in February 1999, quietly watched the proceedings as an honoured guest.

Clearly, the reason Vajpayee is being held in such affection and some awe is because the Pakistanis realise that he’s perhaps the only Indian leader who’s been trying—again and again—over the last 25 years to make peace with the people of Pakistan.

The avalanche of goodwill can be tied to the day the PM gave his interview to Nasim Zehra on PTV on January 3, having postponed it for two days because of a bad throat. The last-minute decision by the PM to go ahead with the television interview was taken, sources said, because he wanted to ‘‘directly communicate with the people of Pakistan.’’

It worked. According to Pak journalists, ‘‘no 10-15 minutes have been more closely watched’’ in recent history. In the beginning at least the PM seemed to play hard to get, not willing to describe Musharraf in reciprocal, wholesome measure. Then he came out with it. Musharraf, he said, was the biggest leader in Pakistan, certainly he believed that the two sides could talk to each other, and he hoped that that would lead the two to ‘‘a conclusion.’’