Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Union Home Minister Amit Shah after voting in the third phase of the Lok Sabha elections. (Express photo by Nirmal Harindran)
To be targeted in the lead editorial by The Indian Express (‘A poor debate‘, May 13) in the midst of a hard-fought election, for a video clip shot months ago in the context of my recent books is, I suppose, a personal honour. Especially as the Congress has been quick to distance itself totally from my remarks. The clip has been dredged up by the BJP to give life to their faltering campaign, with the sole intention of creating an issue where there is none. And so respectable a newspaper as this one has wasted its breath condemning remarks that had nothing to do with the present contest and by an individual in his individual capacity, as the Congress has made unambiguously clear by not naming me as a candidate, by not giving me any position in the party for a full decade past and by keeping me at arms’ length from participating in any election campaign. Indeed, the Congress has refused to let me speak from any Congress platform for the past 20 years. Why do I matter so much as to attract editorial page condemnation?
Only because my consistent advocacy of a structured dialogue with Pakistan is an important national issue. The rationale of my argument cannot be compressed into a clip of a few seconds and then distorted for ulterior purposes. It has been set out at length in numerous articles, my 1994 publication, “Pakistan Papers”, many book reviews and my two recent books, Memoirs of a Maverick, whose very title emphasises that my views are not conventional; and The Rajiv I Knew, where I write of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s breakthrough visits to Pakistan in December 1988 and July 1989 and what he had to say publicly about his vision for good relations between the two countries.
Although my personal views on Pakistan are my own, they accord in close measure with two other distinguished Prime Ministers of India — Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. Indeed, it was Vajpayeeji who posted me as India’s first consul-general to Karachi (1978-82) and did me the courtesy of invariably coming into the House when I spoke on Pakistan. On one occasion, he went so far as to wonder why I was never included by the Congress when Congress teams were sent to meet him on Pakistan. I applauded Vajpayeeji’s persistence in seeking dialogue with Pakistan despite Kargil, despite the attack on Parliament and despite the disappointment of the failed Agra summit.
Manmohan Singh was the first to admit that he was building on Atalji’s initiative. He carried forward the Vajpayee opening by creating a secret back channel on which three years of uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue actually led to an agreement in principle on the way forward in Kashmir and needed no more than the final signature of the two leaders. Our PM was scheduled to visit Pakistan in March 2007 but earlier that month, internal differences between the Chief Justice of Pakistan and the Pakistan president led to the visit being postponed and eventually the president falling from power. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the horrendous Mumbai terrorist attack on 26/11/08, not only did Manmohan Singh attempt a resumption of the dialogue with the new Pakistan PM but also continued to use diplomatic channels to keep in contact.
I had, therefore, welcomed PM Modi’s invitation to Nawaz Sharif and the decision to resume talks at the swearing-in of the new Indian PM in May 2014. That invitation is referred to in the editorial, but it fails to mention that those talks never took place because the new BJP PM objected to his BJP predecessor, Vajpayee ji, having encouraged Pakistani envoys to bring the Hurriyat into the loop, even to the extent of allowing a Hurriyat delegation to visit Pakistan. It was Modi’s sudden decision in the third week of August 2014 to not send the Foreign Secretary for talks in Islamabad because Pakistan’s Ambassador had the Hurriyat round to tea that marked the end of any diplomatic dialogue between India and Pakistan by the new government – a halt that has now lasted a dismal decade.
True, as the editorial says, Modi ji made a dramatic stop in Raiwind on December 25, 2015, but while that might have signalled a thaw, ever since a terrorist attack the following month, our relationship has been in the deep freezer. There are many reasons why the dialogue should be resumed (as urged by all but one of our recent ambassadors to Pakistan) – and, equally, many reasons why it should not. But surely the democratic way forward is first a dialogue in India between the Nay-sayers and the Aye-sayers, and second, the resumption of a dialogue with our neighbour whom we cannot wish away.
That is the context in which I referred in the clip to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. It is a fact. Nuclear deterrence to prevent nuclear war arises out of dialogue between hostile nuclear powers, as shown by the US and Russia ever since the Soviet Union went nuclear. They have not childishly downgraded their diplomatic relations or refused to talk. What I said even in the clip was to point to Pakistan possessing a nuclear arsenal. My remarks have been distorted both by the BJP and The Indian Express to suggest that I was recommending dialogue out of fear. On the contrary, I have always recommended dialogue because we have the strength to be self-confident in such a dialogue and persist with discussion despite differences as the sensible way of finding a via media.
In this election, my own party, the Indian National Congress, had made me a Nobody. Now, Modi/Shah and The Indian Express (and the Congress spokesman) have brought me centre-stage. I do not know whether I should thank them for rescuing me from obscurity or ignore them. I have concluded that I should take the middle course by stating my side of the story.
The writer is a former Union minister
