Dwarika Prasad Sharma
When Pakistan announced that Salman Bashir would be its ambassador to India, it came as a big surprise to me. Bashir, going by his performance as foreign secretary vis-à-vis India, looked eminently unsuitable to be sent over as ambassador. But the way Pakistan conducts its relations with India, anything is fair game.
Even after-or is it especially after?-what Indian foreign Minister S.M Krishna earlier this month told his Pakistani counterpart Hina Rabbani Khar on terrorism originating from Pakistan, Bashir said that it was “unbelievable” and “incredible” to allege the involvement of State institutions of his country. On the margins of a donors’ meeting on Afghanistan in Tokyo, Krishna had told Khar that “absence” of terrorism was an “essential prerequisite” for normalization of ties between the two countries. In the backdrop of the revelations made by LeT terrorist Abu Jundal to Indian security agencies, which confirmed the hand of Pakistani State agencies, Krishna had told Khar that her country should seriously go about bringing 26/11/2008 culprits to justice and eliminating terrorism.
Ambassador Bashir, who earned the nickname “Literature” Bashir from some Indian commentators after he kept on caustically dismissing as “literature” the dossiers on 26/11 that India handed over to his country when he was foreign secretary, told a TV channel that accusations from India would skew his country’s moves to develop “a new way of conducting its ties with India”. Then came his notorious Bashir-speak: “It takes two to tango.” Can you tango, Bashir, if you are being repeatedly tripped up?
Then in Bashireque sophistry, he essays to establish the “weakness” of India’s allegations by arguing that his country’s State agencies could not be imagined to be involved when these themselves were being targeted by terrorists. He averred: “As I said, if our own Army headquarters are attacked, if ISI offices are attacked, then I think it is really unbelievable, incredible, to allege that Pakistani State institutions have been involved in this (Mumbai attacks). We ought to look at the situation very objectively in our own respective national interests.” Perhaps “Literature” Bashir has not heard of Frankenstein’s Monster!
Cut back to February 2010. On Pakistan’s repeated urgings, even involving the US in the persuasion, India agreed to restart the dialogue broken off after Mumbai. Pakistan had been telling the US that, if its eastern border remained “active”, it would not be able to concentrate on the terror based in the North-West. This was one of many alibis Pakistan has been advancing to soften Washington’s anger at Islamabad’s laxity in “war on terror”. US “encouragement” no doubt played a part in India agreeing to resume the dialogue.
On February 25, 2010, Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao (Now our envoy to the US) and Pakistan’s then foreign secretary Salman Bashir met in New Delhi. “Literature” Bashir’s bluster almost screwed up the process, his arrogance confirming that he, pumped up by the Pakistani media comments in the run-up to the talks, had come with the assumption that the US had “forced” India back to the dialogue. So Pakistan had come to the table with the supposition that it was no favour from India.
That meeting was not expected to yield much, and it didn’t. Indeed, it descended into a merry exchange of barbs.
In a cable to the US State department, Washington’s then ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer, wrote that the meeting had been potentially difficult, but “Indian officials did a commendable job of handling it-and paving the way for future meetings”.
Roemer said that the Indians’ “tactful handling” of the meeting entailed adopting an “unstructured or open agenda, letting Islamabad to raise issues of concern to it, while New Delhi used statements from P. Chidambaram and Nirupama Rao to keep their public messaging focused firmly on terrorism”.
With regard to terrorism, India looks incapable of tightening the screws on Pakistan, but does not miss an opportunity to press action on it at formal meetings. Is it for real and India means business, or is it largely “public messaging” and business as usual? After the July 4-5 meeting of foreign secretaries Ranjan Mathai and Jalil Abbas Jilani, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said about the timing of his expected visit to Pakistan that he needed “suitable outcomes” before travelling. Read with this, Krishna’s stand in Tokyo would suggest that it is not business as usual. That normalization would flower only “without” terrorism, not “with or without”.
But Manmohan is capable of springing surprises. He almost did one on us regarding Siachen. At Sharm-el Sheikh he enunciated the “with or without” paradigm. His gaffe on Balochistan became an extended guffaw among Pakistani officialdom and media, that cited him as “acknowledging” India’s “involvement” in Balochistan.
After Manmohan’s much-quoted “suitable outcomes” remark, our cricket board has invited Pakistani players to some matches in India, which the Pakistani board has hungrily accepted. Veterans like Sunil Gavaskar, who is a Mumbaite, has called the decision hasty in view of Pakistan’s continued intransigence with regard to 26/11 perpetrators.
A day after Bashir’s February 25, 2010, rantings in New Delhi, a terror attack in Kabul killed several Indian officials.
(The writer is a Senior Journalist)
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