Author: Vir Sanghvi
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: June 22, 2003
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/2003/Jun/22/printedition/220603/detFEA01.shtml
The only time I ever met General
Musharraf was in Agra during the failed summit. I had been - almost from
the start - a critic of that summit. When A.B. Vajpayee invited Musharraf
to India, I wrote, on this page, that the summit was doomed. Our approach
was: let's be friends, and once we've built up an atmosphere of trust,
we'll discuss Kashmir. His approach was: let's settle Kashmir, and only
then can we be friends.
How, I asked, in this column, could
these two approaches ever be reconciled? How could any summit succeed when
there was no meeting ground?
Given my pessimism about the summit,
I was reluctant to drive to Agra to join the media contingent. But there
was a problem to be resolved. The Pakistanis had invited me to breakfast
with the General at Amar Vilas. I had no desire to attend and asked if
the invitation could be transferred to one of the HT journos who was covering
the summit. Why not invite Vinod Sharma, our Associate Editor, in charge
of the Political Bureau, for instance? Not only was he going to be in Agra;
he has also served in Islamabad as the HT's correspondent and is a veteran
peacenik (By the way, he thinks I am a war-monger).
No, said the Pakistanis. Invitations
were not transferable. The General would eat his poached eggs with editors
and editors alone. Mere Associate Editors were not good enough to butter
their croissants in the same room as the great man.
And so, kicking and screaming all
the way, I travelled to Agra and presented myself at some ungodly hour
at Amar Vilas to break brioche with the General.
The first thing that struck me about
the gathering was how out of tune I was with my peers. In that room sat
some of India's best-known and most experienced journalists. Some had met
Musharraf before, many had made several trips to Pakistan, and nearly all
desperately wanted the summit to succeed. I felt like the pooper at some
happy party.
After the General had finished his
now infamous spiel about how important Kashmir was and how no progress
was possible unless we first solved that, I sat back and wondered if I
was the only one who had smelt the coffee.
Surely, it's absolutely obvious
now, I thought. The summit has no chance of success if this guy is going
to go on and on about Kashmir and the 'wishes of the Kashmiri people' quite
unmindful of the irony that he's just seized power in Pakistan through
a military coup, not bothering at all about the wishes of the Pakistani
people.
But such was the mood in the room
that a contribution of hope and Indian hospitality (you must be nice to
a guest even if he spits in your coffee) ensured that the questions were
uniformly friendly, and in some cases, nauseatingly sycophantic.
The nicer everyone was to him, the
tougher Musharraf got. With each question, his position hardened. Finally,
he spelt it out: when you say you want to build an atmosphere of trust
first, we think you are cheating us. You just want an excuse not to talk
about Kashmir.
Then, it was my turn to ask a question.
Feeling rather like an ill-mannered guest who had dared to belch at a banquet
or fart at a funeral, I decided that I'd had enough of Musharraf's smugness.
I don't remember the exact words
I used, but what I said went something like this: you talk about our intentions
but what we want to know is, why should we trust you? Our Prime Minister
made the effort to go to Lahore but what we got in return was Kargil. And
we all know that as Chief of Army Staff you were the architect of Kargil.
Almost as soon as the words were
out, I recognized that the atmosphere had changed. Certainly, the look
the General gave me was incredulous. How dare I poop at his party?
Trust? He said, seemingly outraged
that we should even dare to raise the subject of his credibility, never
mind his many suggestions that we were all Indian con- men, eager to pull
the wool over the eyes of the kind and well-meaning Pakistani army.
"Trust? This issue should have been
raised before you invited me. Not now!"
On Kargil, he was circumspect. Well,
he said, as Army Chief, he couldn't shirk responsibility. But there were
other factors, such as, for instance, the mujahideen factor. And so on
for four or five minutes of waffling.
Fortunately, Prannoy Roy, who was
sitting to my left, had also decided to break protocol and to refuse to
ask his questions in the kneeling position.
First of all, said Prannoy, never
mind the will of the Kashmiri people. What about the will of the Pakistani
people? Who are you to lecture us on democracy? And secondly, you called
Kashmir a freedom struggle. What kind of freedom struggle is it when people
target women and children?
By now, the General recognized that
the tone had changed. So he skipped the how-dare-you-insult-my-honour approach.
Instead he waffled again. Well, he said, the Pakistani people hated Nawaz
Sharif and loved him. Prannoy could come to Pakistan and see for himself.
And as for victims of terror, well, what can one say? These things happen
in any struggle.
And that was that. Not one word
of condemnation of terrorism. Not one word of sympathy for the innocent
civilian victims of terror.
I left the breakfast convinced that
the summit was over. If this was Musharraf's position, then there was no
hope of any kind of agreement.
Sadly, I was right.
But last week, Prannoy took the
General up on his offer and actually turned up in Pakistan. In the interim,
three things had happened. One: we had held an election where we'd genuinely
ascertained the will of the Kashmiri people. Two: Musharraf had held a
joke referendum to legitimize his position as President-For-Life-Or-As-
Long-As-I-Want-It. And three: Pakistan had joined the 'global coalition
against terror.'
It's interesting to see how the
General's new responses differ from the things he said in Agra. One: he's
now against terror. When Prannoy asked him the same question about civilian
deaths, he all but took out an onion and held it near his eye. "Terrible",
he said mournfully. "That's not freedom fighting." (He'd changed his mind,
Prannoy reminded him. "I don't remember" said Musharraf carefully.)
Two: he was shifty about his own
stab at democracy ("Self regret has been that in these three years we have
not been able to evolve a democracy which is functional ...") but clearly
unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of the Kashmir election ('ridiculous').
And three: he was more forthcoming
on Kargil than he had been in response to my question in Agra. Kargil had
been a good thing for Kashmir, he now suggested, because "before Kargil,
whatever happened there, Kashmir, I think, was a dead issue."
So there you have it: violence is
okay. War is wonderful if it helps focus attention on issues. If Kargil
made Kashmir come alive as an issue then that was just great!
Reading the transcript of Prannoy's
interview in The Indian Express (regrettably I missed the telecast) I was
staggered by the magnitude of this admission. Forget about peace. Forget
even about freedom struggles. If war draws attention to an issue - then
go for it!
In the aftermath of Prannoy's interview,
the Pakistanis have gone to great lengths to tell us that the NDTV press
release was misleading. Musharraf didn't actually say that Kargil could
happen again. He said that nobody could say that it could happen again.
The Indian Foreign Office is composed of idiots who only read the press
release and misread the peace-loving General's intentions. And so on.
I'm going to take the Pakistanis
at their word (even though the Foreign Office saw the tape before responding
and as for who's misleading whom, here's a simple test, who would you trust:
Pervez Musharraf or Prannoy Roy?) and accept that the General was misquoted.
But does the confusion over that
one sentence matter? The General still comes across, in the rest of the
interview, as a man who continues to insists on the centrality of Kashmir,
approves of Kargil, and refuses to recognize the legitimacy of our democracy.
So, no matter how much you want
to love the General - and we are not short of people in India who want
to cuddle up to him - the question still remains: has this man really changed
since Agra? Does he genuinely want peace?
Or are Indo-Pak relations still
trapped in the atmosphere of the breakfast hall at Amar Vilas?
I rather fear they are.
