On Pakistan, he wasn’t quite Atal

Atal Bihari Vajpayee remained a hopeless romantic on Pakistan.

WrittenBy:Sushant Sareen
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As people, Indians are so beholden to their leaders that they will go to any lengths to even defend the latter’s blunders. Not surprisingly, when analysis gives way to apotheosis, the ability of people and a polity to clinically dissect policy foibles and follies to avoid repeating past mistakes gets seriously compromised. There is such a cult that develops around a leader; bhakts didn’t appear on the Indian political firmament with Narendra Modi, rather, they have been around from the time of Gandhi and Nehru.

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Even today, ostensibly sensible folk go soft in the head the moment the word ‘Nehru’ is mentioned, or even turn violent the moment something disparaging is said about a Kejriwal or a Mayawati, since according to them, the leader is attributed with all the wisdom of the world and is pretty much considered infallible. Something similar has happened in the case of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. His demise has led to a flurry of extremely flowery accounts of his wisdom and his greatness. This is understandable to an extent since, in the cultural context that we exist in, there is a natural proclivity to only speak well of the departed. But when the eulogies start to whitewash—or at least distort history—it is time to call them out.

That Vajpayee was a statesman is not in doubt. That he was a very fine human being and a very large hearted man who was quite in tune with the Indian ethos is well known. Anecdotes about his fondness for food and drink are legendary and add to his likeability quotient. His oratory skills and his ability to build consensus without allowing the bitterness of politics to interfere in the larger objectives before the nation is an established fact. His long years in public life and the experiences he had as a diplomat, not just as Foreign Minister but also as someone representing India in various global forums, informed his worldview and perhaps, even gave him a reality check on how the international system works.

For instance, he received a snub from the Chinese who launched their botched invasion of Vietnam even while Vajpayee was in China at the time, trying to reset the relationship that had turned bitter post-1962. He saw India’s interests best served by building better relations with the West—but without undermining India’s relations with other countries. Above all, he was a nationalist who put India’s interests above defending esoteric lost causes of the world in the name of third-world solidarity. He might have continued to pay lip service to some of these lost causes (not because he was convinced of them but more to maintain some continuity in foreign policy) but never really allowed them to interfere in India’s quest for global relevance.

Like every leader, Vajpayee too, made his share of mistakes—the most glaring of which was his approach towards Pakistan. To put it simply, Vajpayee continued the same old confused, muddled, romanticised and nostalgic approach to Pakistan that had been followed by his predecessors. He was unable to see Pakistan for what it is: an implacably hostile country which looks at India as a civilisational enemy with which co-existence is not possible. However, Vajpayee was unable to get over the Partition hangover of a time when India and Pakistan were one country. He was unable to reconcile to the reality that Pakistan, as it existed, and as it was structured, would never be a normal country living in peace with India.

In a way, Vajpayee had a very Mofussil, or if you will, pedestrian view of Pakistan as a neighbour with which endless enmity was not possible. He never understood that this wasn’t the way the Pakistanis defined the relationship. In the Pakistani worldview, they had to bring down the wall of their neighbour even if it came crashing down on them. With such diametrically opposed worldviews of neighbourly relations, Vajpayee was bound to go wrong with Pakistan.

The problem, however, was that instead of putting in place a solid policy on Pakistan, Vajpayee preferred to keep trying to reach out to Pakistan even after being rudely rebuffed after every initiative. There was an element of naïveté, even chivalry (a watered down version of the Prithiviraj Chauhan syndrome that most Indian leaders suffer from), in how Vajpayee dealt with Pakistan.

Take for instance the bit about his telling some of his aides that India needed to be sensitive and mindful of the compulsions of their interlocutors in Pakistan. This is a standard alibi used by Pakistanis to deceive India, and like all other Indian leaders, Vajpayee too fell for the oldest trick in the Pakistani playbook. In any case, international relations is about the clash of wills of two countries. In a situation where the other side doesn’t give a rat’s ass for India’s concerns and sensitivities, why should Indian leaders care for the predicament of the Pakistanis is something that boggles the mind. Such is the disconnect in the minds of Indian policymakers when it comes to Pakistan that some of the so-called mandarins (never was a term so abused and misused as it is in referring to some Indian diplomats) that even when the Afghans were seeking weapons from India to defend themselves against Pakistani terrorists, Indian policymakers denied these weapons to Afghan friends lest it rubs the Pakistani enemy the wrong way and violates their concerns and sensitivities.

The quest for normalising relations with Pakistan was something of a bug in Vajpayee. During his stint as External Affairs Minister during the Janata government, he visited Islamabad to kickstart the normalisation process following the 1971 war. Later as Prime Minister, he started the back-channel with this counterpart Nawaz Sharif, which ultimately culminated in the Lahore bus yatra, the Lahore Declaration and then the Kargil war. Of course, before the back-channel came the nuclear tests, which in a way established the stalemate between India and Pakistan and arguably paved the way for a dialogue. That there was an end of imagination from the Indian side which thought that the nuclear environment ruled out wars for all times, was something that manifested itself when the Pakistanis intruded into Indian territory in the Kargil sector.

To Vajpayee’s credit, once the extent of Pakistani perfidy became known, he didn’t vacillate or back down from throwing the Pakistanis out. He withstood enormous pressure, including from the Americans who wanted a ceasefire and negotiations for a Pakistani withdrawal. Whether Vajpayee was correct in keeping Kargil limited in scope—he issued strict instructions that the sanctity of the Line of Control (LoC) was not to be violated—is a matter of debate. But what is undebatable is the steely nerves he displayed during the conflict. Post Kargil, Vajpayee once again tried his hand at diplomacy with the architect of Kargil, Pervez Musharraf, whom he invited to Agra. The Agra Summit was an ill-thought-out meeting that happened because relations between the two countries had reached a dead-end. At best, it was a throw of dice to see if something came out of the gambit. Quite expectedly, Agra was a dud. Musharraf got the legitimacy he wanted, and the Indian side got egg on its face. A couple of months later, 9/11 changed the course of history. But just a month later came the first attack on the J&K assembly, followed by the terror attack on the Indian Parliament, which in turn, led to a face-off between the armies of the two countries. While the war was avoided by a whisker, the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between the armies remained for over a year.

By 2003, once again activity started behind the scenes. The intelligence chiefs of both countries hobnobbed on the back-channel and worked out a ceasefire along the LoC. Later, using the SAARC summit as an excuse, Vajpayee managed to extract a major concession from Musharraf who held out a public assurance to not allow any territory under Pakistani control for use of terrorism against India. For whatever this commitment is worth, it was Vajpayee’s signal achievement in his dealings with Pakistan. The use of diplomacy to extract such a commitment from the Pakistani dictator was something that Vajpayee deserves all the credit for. But otherwise, his entire policy was the typical wishy-washy, namby-pamby approach that doubles up as India’s Pakistan policy.

In a way, Vajpayee treads the same old beaten path on Pakistan as his predecessors and broke no new ground. He was neither the first Prime Minister to try and normalise relations with Pakistan, nor will he (unfortunately) be the last to take a chance on Pakistan. The trouble, however, is that given his stature, his camp followers feel obliged to keep defending his track record on Pakistan even when they know his policy had nothing to commend itself. Just like the Congressmen who are unable to accept Nehru’s follies in foreign policy and move on, the BJP-types remain so stuck to Vajpayee’s legacy that they cannot summon the moral courage to say that their tallest leader messed up on Pakistan and move on. Just as Nehru’s other qualities and contributions don’t get diminished because of his blunders in the realm of foreign and security policy, Vajpayee’s legacy doesn’t get diminished just because he remained a hopeless romantic on Pakistan.

A great disservice to the memory of people like Vajpayee isn’t done by rejecting, or for that matter, even repudiating their policy on a few issues where it has clearly failed. If anything, it is by continuing to parrot and paying lip-service to their mistakes, that disservice is done to the memory of great leaders.

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