Oh, what a lovely war!

Is this diplomacy? Is this defence? How has the country been brought to this pass? Everyone welcomed Vajpayee’s decision to get on the bus. What none of us wanted was that he be taken for a ride. Yet, that is what has happened. For even as the Lahore Fort was being decked out to receive the Indian Prime Minister in a manner worthy of the Mughal Emperor who built it, well-laid plans to alter the Line of Control, infiltrate an army of mercenary terrorists, occupy several hundred square kilometres of Indian territory and bolster the occupation with anti-aircraft artillery were unfolding with meticulous care. For years the Pakistanis have heralded the opening of the Srinagar-Leh highway by bombarding Kargil from the heights across the LoC. An alert government, and an alertRaksha Mantri, would have put themselves in the shoes of the Pakistani hawks and asked themselves what an enemy denied the western access would do. And come up with the answer that softening the entry points from the north was the obvious alternative option.

But for at least three years, the concerns of defence ministers have been with defence deals, less with the defence of the nation. And the 13 months of George Fernandes have been taken up with internecine warfare in South Block rather than with the enemy without. At the other end of South Block, the PMO has been desperately engaged in ensuring that Vajpayee’s brief tryst with destiny somehow moves above the footnotes of history into at least a chapter heading. The opening came with Nawaz Sharif’s throw-away line that the Indian Prime Minister was welcome to himself inaugurate the Bus to Pakistan. The poet in the Indian Prime Minister could not help but respond to this opportunity to obliterate the memory of the Train to Pakistan of half a century ago.And External Affairs were too craven to point out that grand gestures like this signal the commencement of a process or its conclusion, not its drab continuance. It was difficult to imagine an emptier gesture than a head of government journeying to Lahore to promise his counterpart to complete what their subalterns had begun, with no substantive indication of how the empty phrases of their foreign secretaries would be translated into binding commitments by their governments.

All that has been achieved in the one hundred days since Lahore is that the two foreign ministers have met (at Nuwara Eliya) and agreed that their foreign secretaries will meet. Normally, foreign secretaries meet to prepare for their ministers to get together; Lahore has reduced the political chiefs of the two Foreign Offices into under-secretaries to themselves.

Yet, Lahore is all that the Vajpayee government had going for it as it swivelled towards an election. Lahore was a public relations triumph because it responded to theyearning of the two peoples to live in peace and friendship. The LoC, alas, is not manned by the silly, sentimental people of India and Pakistan. It is guarded by battle-hardened veterans. Had the Prime Minister been more a statesman and less a poet, he would have known that every step he took towards peace would be matched by a step towards war by those who have a vested interest in enmity. And prepared himself, his government and the country against that eventuality. So mesmerised, however, were the Prime Minister and his government by their yatra to Wagah that they prepared, instead, to go to any lengths to appease the Pakistan Government to salvage the tattered remains of their date with destiny. What has happened this merry, merry month of May is paralleled in history only by Chamberlain returning from Munich blabbering about peace in our time.

The chosen oracle for this appeasement of aggression is the much-discredited Raksha Mantri. He has pressed the armed forces to his private political agenda. AsAdmiral Bhagwat has revealed, all three chiefs of staff have had to jointly petition him to desist from interfering in operational matters. He has converted the posting and promotion of senior armed forces personnel into his personal fiefdom. The official media have been vandalised to air the Raksha Mantri’s personal grievances. His eccentricities of character have combined with his arbitrariness of manner and the authoritarianism of his ways to confound the armed forces and confuse the policies of government at a moment of national crisis when clarity of goals, consistency of functioning, stability of purpose and inspirational leadership are essential to rid us of infiltrators and give a befitting reply to our enemies.

It is not possible to demand that the government resign. It has already resigned. But it is possible to demand accountability. Someone has to take the responsibility for the breach of our frontiers, the delay in taking the country into confidence, the unconscionable time it has taken toshape a national response, the failure of our diplomacy and the pathetic excuses being trotted out by the Government of India to exculpate the Pakistan government, excuses that the Pakistan government itself finds an insult to its national honour. The Prime Minister has shown himself to be inept, naive and immature, quite lacking in what it takes to guide a great nation through turbulent times. Yet, the government cannot go because it has already gone. The least one can hope for is that George Fernandes will leave the armed forces to defend the nation — and join Jaya Jaitley in handicrafts and handlooms.