On theSspot
Tavleen Singh
This week despite the Chinese prime minister’s visit I am going to write about Pakistan because I believe that our relations with our friendly neighbourhood Islamic republic are more fraught and more intractable. So I take you back to Lahore and my friend’s study and the attack of nostalgia that gripped us as we watched the election results. This could have been because of the emotions aroused by this particular election. Or it may have been because we had been together in so many other moments of Pakistani history but as we gazed at the enormous television screen we began talking about how much had changed between our two countries in the thirty years we had known each other. This led us to start talking about the possibilities of peace and I said that in my long years as a journalist I had not known an Indian prime minister more committed to bringing peace between India and Pakistan than Atal Behari Vajpayee.
This commitment began when he was External Affairs Minister in the Janata Party government and he never hesitated to make his position clear. I told my friends about the time he was invited as chief guest in 1978 to the Ghalib Academy for a reception in honour of the famous poet, Hafeez Jullundhuri. He had returned to India for the first time since partition and Vajpayee was at his eloquent best. He reduced the poet to tears when he said that the wall that politics had built between the two countries would be hard to destroy but if we shifted some bricks in it then we would at least be able to catch a glimpse of each other. ‘Ek do eenthein khiska di jaayein, tank-jhaank to ho.’ In 1999 almost the first thing he did after becoming prime minister was to get on that bus and drive across the Wagah border. To watch that gilded bus cross the border, with a man bearing a basket of sweets preceding it, was one of the most unforgettable moments in history I have witnessed.
If Vajpayee’s efforts to bring peace failed it was entirely because of General Pervez Musharraf and his Kargil plot. We talked of this in Lahore last week and we talked of Nawaz Sharif’s very brave interview to Karan Thapar in which he said things about peace and terrorism that would certainly have got on the nerves of Pakistan’s generals. So will he succeed in seizing a foreign policy initiative from their clutches? Will he succeed in persuading the Generals that their foreign policy has failed in both India and Afghanistan? I do not know but reiterate what I said in this column last week: I detected something in the Lahore air that I have not felt for a very long time. I sensed a hint of what Lahore was like before military men and mullahs ruined this charming city.
When I first came to Lahore in 1980 it was a city full of fun, food and Punjabi high spirits. By the time I next came in the winter of 1985 to cover Zia-ul-Haq’s sham referendum his Islamist interventions had dampened spirits and changed Pakistan’s direction. I next came back after he was killed and Benazir Bhutto was on the verge of winning her first election. It was a moment in history radiant with hope. In the nineties I came on many visits and saw how a bitter disenchantment had set in with democracy and democratic leaders and how the end of the Cold War had turned Peshawer into a haven for jobless jihadis. I remember meeting Gulbedin Hekmetyar and other jihadi leaders in Peshawar and being saddened by how much the atmosphere of one of Pakistan’s most romantic cities had become infused with menace. Gone completely was the sense this city always had of being the crossroads between south and central Asia, gone was the scent of kebabs and hot tea that used to fill the narrow lanes of the Storytellers Bazaar.
From then on every time I came to Pakistan I noticed that a tangible gloom had spread across the country. Some of it caused by blowback from the dangerous foreign policy that Pakistan’s military men followed and some of it due to terrible, tragic events like the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. This is when I was last in Lahore and whenever I thought of making another visit some new assassination, some new act of terror deterred me but from talking to politicians, academics, journalists and friends on my recent visit I crossed back across the Wagah border convinced that this was a moment that India needs to seize.
It is in our national interest, as much as it is in Pakistan’s interest for peace to be given a real chance. It will not be easy because there are military men and mullahs on that side of the border who have a vested interested in ensuring that hostilities continue for a long, long time. I believe that some of them are crazy enough to even use a nuclear bomb if it furthers their evil cause but there are enough people in Pakistan who are ready to fight them. On our side of the border there is no vested interest in the continuation of hostilities but there are plenty of hawks in South Block who are deeply suspicious of Pakistan and unable to shake off the idea of reciprocity. They know that terrorists do not come to India on valid visas but they continue to make it very, very difficult for ordinary Pakistanis to come here even when they know that it is in India’s interests for them to be allowed to come here and get a full dose of Indian soft power.
As for those BJP leaders who are so belligerent every time there is talk of peace let them remember what Atal Bihari Vajpayee tried to do. Let them remember that if he had still been prime minister he would have definitely seized this moment if only because it is unlikely to come again. By the middle of next year American troops will start pulling out of Afghanistan and if the wrong people prevail in Pakistan there is little doubt that we will go back to those awful days when the Taliban ruled in Kabul and when the situation in the sub-continent was so uncertain and so filled with menace that Bill Clinton described it memorably as the most dangerous place in the world.
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