One knows Atal Bihari Vajpayee has a horror of the number thirteen, not because Hindutva has suddenly taken to Christian superstitions but because his first term as prime minister lasted thirteen days and his second thirteen months. Does that explain why his latest package to Pakistan contains 12, not 13 steps? In themselves, none of the 12 is to be faulted. They are all good, and some — such as the proposed Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus, the Karachi-Mumbai ferry, and the Munabao-Khokrapar link — are innovative, imaginative. But several others, such as again playing cricket and other sport, the restoration of air links, and the resumption of the Samjhauta Express, are merely an attempt at reviving what we had so foolishly cancelled ourselves. Does, then, the offer add up to a bold new direction — or is it as bogus as Vajpayee’s “hand of friendship” speech at Srinagar on April 18? For make no mistake about it, the Srinagar speech was not a peace offering so much as a political Alzheimer’s. Vajpayee just forgot to mention the two preconditions he had till then insisted on as the indispensable precursor to dialogue — stopping cross-border terrorism and dismantling the infrastructure of terror. While Pakistan and the world exulted, Vajpayee’s advisers got him to repeat pre-condition No.1 in his press conference next day (April 19) even before he left Srinagar, and by the time we in the Lok Sabha got him to lay an official statement on the table of the House, he had restored his second pre-condition as well. So, in the end, his Srinagar speech was no more than a tired repetition of what Vajpayee — and his lesser colleagues — have been bleating about for ages, of a piece with the confusion and contradictions which have marked six years of the NDA’s failed attempts at constructively engaging the Kashmir dissidents on the internal track of dialogue as much as of their botching every attempt at constructively engaging Pakistan on the external track. On the internal track, after the prime minister’s meaningless offer three years ago of talks with our domestic Kashmiri discontents “insaniyat ke dayire mein” — “within the framework of humanity” (what did he mean? That there is no humanity within the framework of our Constitution?) — there has been no progress whatsoever in moving towards a solution on the path of dialogue. Instead, the central government has changed its interlocutors more often than a nanny changing the baby’s nappies. At the root of our continuing problems in the Vale lies the total failure of the internal dialogue — it is the absence of any political initiative to overcome our domestic problems that creates the fertile field in which cross-border terrorism thrives. The NDA, in Kashmir, like the Americans in the world at large, look upon terrorism as aberrant violence to be snuffed out by state violence. They do not understand, as their chums the Americans do not understand, that terrorism is not gratuitous violence; it has causes. Whether justified or not is not the question, there are always underlying causes to terrorism and these have to be addressed if the sparks which light the fire of terrorism are to be doused. As for the external front, the NDA’s inability to comprehend the connection between the persistence of cross-border terrorism and the failure to get the India-Pakistan dialogue going is once again underlined by Vajpayee’s failure to announce the Thirteenth Step — which must be dialogue. Shockingly, the Lahore Declaration contains no reference to “cross-border terrorism”, thus giving the Pakistanis the ready argument that if in February 1999 “terrorism” included “cross-border terrorism”, then what is the current fuss, in the context of structuring the dialogue, over the semantics of Terrorism vs Cross-Border Terrorism? Vajpayee nonsensically stated once that cross-border terrorism is a post-Kargil phenomenon. No, sir, cross-border terorism began when the so-called “raiders” from Pakistan swept across the J&K frontier in October 1947. And ever since the V.P. Singh government bungled the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping case in December 1989, we have lived with aggravated Pak-sponsored cross-border terrorism. Wisdom will dawn when we squarely recognise that Jaswant Singh’s failure to include “cross-border terrorism” in the draft Lahore Declaration is what so lowers our credibility when we insist on cross-border terrorism ending before we begin talking substance with Pakistan. In any case, the point now at issue is less whether we are prepared to open the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway than whether there is any prospect of structuring the India-Pakistan dialogue. The NDA has rendered the dialogue hostage to Pakistan ending cross-border terrorism and dismantling the terrorist network. Pakistan will do no such thing of its own volition. We tried last year to hector them into submission — and ended with egg on our face, our jawans being recalled from field stations after ten long months with not a shot fired. Our diplomatic moves too — such as recalling our high commissioner, cutting high commission staff, cancelling overflights — have come back to haunt us, leaving the Pakistanis quite unfazed. The moves were so ill-thought out that it is we who suffered much more than Pakistan. For Pakistan is more than happy to live without people-to-people contacts. It is our diplomacy that is based on people-to-people contact being a desirable thing in itself besides, perhaps (a big perhaps) bringing the Pakistani people around to persuading their government to seek an accommodation with us. That leaves us with the Americans to pull India’s Pakistani chestnuts out of the fire. Apart from such pious hopes constituting a flagrant transgression of the bilateral provisions of the Shimla Agreement, the NDA’s naivete in jumping on to the 9/11 bandwagon in the expectation that in American eyes this would make us the “good boys” and the Pakis the “bad guys” has simply not worked. It is Musharraf who has become Busharraf; not Vajpayee who is hailed as Bushpayee. Hence, the need for the Thirteenth Step — dialogue. Unless we address the eight broad issues agreed upon at Murree, Vajpayee’s 12 steps will be no more than a transitory propaganda coup. The billion and a quarter people of India and Pakistan deserve more than media spin.
