The coup of October 1999 remains undone. Pervez ‘Kargil’ Musharraf is still the military ruler of Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif remains in exile. So does Benazir Bhutto. Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali and Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri are on a life-support system provided by the Pakistani armed forces. Pakistan remains the “stalwart ally” of the United States. Indeed, the CIA assessment put out on the web is that the Pakistanis, with a little help from their Chinese and American friends, now have the edge over India in any imminent military confrontation. That, of course, immensely impresses the neocon Neanderthals who have the dominant voice in Washington. Day after day, the militants in Jammu & Kashmir show they are very much in business. It is, of course, a convenient NDA cliche that all acts of terrorism in the state are acts of cross-border terrorism. And Pakistan, quite unfazed by our world-wide propaganda blitz to nail its lie, continues to both deny its sponsorship of such cross-border terrorism and gets on with supporting it.Indeed, Pakistan’s position on this today is, without the change of a comma, the same as it was at Agra, indeed, the same as it was at Lahore, namely, that while, as in the Lahore Declaration, they are more than happy to join us in condemning “terrorism in all its forms and manifestations”, they will not now, as they did not at either Lahore or Agra, accept the two-and-a-half words “cross-border terrorism”, the absence of which resulted in the “landmark” Lahore Declaration (Jaswant Singh’s adjective, not mine) and the insistence on which wrecked the Agra Summit: “woh khaali haath aur moonh latkate hue Pakistan laute” (empty-handed and downcast, he returned to Pakistan) — poet/PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Meanwhile, the might of our armed forces has spent ten months on the border — only to return to cantonments with exactly as much militarily achieved on the ground as the Duke of York in the children’s ditty, who marched “up the hill his ten thousand men/ And marched them down again”! The “military mindset”, of which our majors-turned-diplomats make so much, remains exactly as it was. And the much talked-of mullah-military relationship flourishes as before. So, what has changed for us to applaud? Nothing.Yet, the enthusiasts of the Vajpayee-Advani-Jaswant line (Yashwant ‘pre-emptive strike’ Sinha is not a player; just a loudmouth filling in for Madan Lal Khurana) want us to believe that the prime minister’s latest offer of talks with Pakistan is a strategic move from a position of strength, taking advantage of a world that has changed since the Agra summit. Nonsense! Not all our huffing and puffing has changed the Pakistani position an iota. Ever since the very first day of Musharraf’s coup, they have consistently sought a resumption of the dialogue — but with no preconditions attached. Not all our massing of our military on their borders; not all our cancelling trains, planes and buses; not all our meretricious lowering of the Indian diplomatic presence in Pakistan; not all our reciprocal expulsion of high commission staff; not all our thundering threats and puffed-chest strutting, ever deflected Musharraf and his people from consistently insisting on unconditional talks. It was Vajpayee & Co. who laid the pre-conditions. Not one of these has been met. Indeed, Vajpayee’s statement in Parliament on April 23 is a tired reiteration of the same pre-conditions: “stopping cross-border infiltration and destruction of infrastructure”. The Pakistanis have responded with the suicide attack on AIR/Doordrashan, Srinagar. Khurshid Kasuri, for his part, and notwithstanding all his praise of Vajpayee’s “statesmanship”, refuses to hold out any assurance of stopping “cross-border infiltration” or “destruction of infrastructure”. He merely reminds us sweetly through his interview to BBCHindi.com that while he is happy to “give full assurance” that “infiltration won’t happen this year” (questioner’s phrase), this is entirely because, says Kasuri, Pakistan never has and does not now “encourage infiltration”! Followed by the splendid parting shot: “But if India really fears (nice touch that ‘really’) in what it calls (note: what India calls, not what Pakistan calls) cross-border terrorism, it is all the more reason for talks to begin at the earliest”.Instead of kidding ourselves setting conditions we cannot enforce, the sensible thing to do would be to get on with talks about talks. This, as Kasuri has reminded us (and what a shame we have to be reminded of it by a Pakistani foreign minister!) is a “bilateral issue”. The Pakistanis are our inescapable neighbours, even as we are their inescapable kinsfolk; this is a family quarrel whose external ramifications have the most serious implications for the preservation of our secular nationhood; a bilateral settlement with Pakistan is our foremost foreign policy national interest; international brokering is not.Therefore, Richard Armitage, when he comes, should be politely shown the door. He has not delivered on a single promise made in the past. He cannot. He will not. For Pakistan, more so a Pakistan whose per capita income has for the first time ever slipped below India’s, matters too much strategically to the Americans, and is too abjectly dependent for its daily chapati on the Americans to deny them their least request. Why should the Americans abandon such a pliant regime? We do not matter to the US. (Thank God for that). We do matter a great deal to Pakistan, as it must matter to us. Hence the imperative of bilateralism. The Shimla agreement, as Khurshid Kasuri reminded us in his interview, opened a bilateral route. But, said he, “When we want to talk to India, it does not want to talk to us. Bilateral does not mean that India won’t talk to us.” Most important of all: “If India agrees on serious talk tomorrow, I promise that we won’t seek any mediation. If India is serious about talks, we won’t bring any third party in.”Remember, this is Pervez Musharraf talking through Khurshid Kasuri. Why should we not seize the opportunity? Why insist on pre-conditions we cannot enforce? I have known Khurshid since, at age twenty, we joined the same Cambridge college the same year, forty-two years ago. He is a man of honour. He is a man of his word. Let us, for God’s sake, give peace a chance, not the Americans a chance.
