The Prime Minister’s assurance on a party forum that future talks with Pakistan would be held on the basis of a structured agenda is his first indirect admission that the Agra summit failed due to inadequate preparations at various levels. While the decision to henceforth be accountable to the nation and party is welcome, Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee should understand that Agra also publicly exposed differences on critical national issues among sections of the Indian elite. If the world is not to exploit this discord, all political parties much acknowledge that a consensus on Jammu & Kashmir and other national issues needs to be forged afresh.
At the surreptitiously broadcast breakfast Gen. Musharraf hosted for senior Indian media persons, it appeared that some journalists shared the dictator’s views on Kashmir, breaching the national consensus that it is an integral part of India. It is immaterial that these men may not have revealed themselves so openly had they been aware they were on camera; what is germane is the knowledge that they are inimical to deep-seated national convictions and would be influencing public opinion on this sensitive issue.
Hence, Mr. Vajpayee should immediately invite proprietors and editors of major newspapers and magazines to define their views on Jammu & Kashmir, Pak-sponsored terrorism in the country, the mushroom growth of ISI-funded madrasas and misuse of mosques. He should request them to define their policy in respect to these issues, so that their dissent (if any) is public, and does not appear as an unexpected act of subversion at a critical moment. He would do well to recall that Mrs. Indira Gandhi could not effect the proposed merger of Bhutan (after Sikkim) on account of the irrational hostility of sections of the media, and that the nation has borne the cost of this failure.
Since Agra is widely perceived as an occasion when the leadership did not adequately espouse national concerns, Mr. Vajpayee needs to involve the coalition and opposition parties more meaningfully in the process of consensus formation. The formality of a meeting on the eve of the summit served little purpose; there was no agenda to debate, and the parties could not publicly refuse to support the Government in its dialogue with Pakistan. However, in the wake of information that has trickled out since Gen. Musharraf returned home, some points are in order.
To begin with, we need to know if the Government is still committed to fencing the borders to contain infiltration by terrorists and ISI-sponsored civilians (who provide information and safe havens to Pakistani operatives, as during the Red Fort attack). This is important because notwithstanding Gen. Musharraf’s obstinate refusal to discuss Pak-sponsored terrorism, his labeling foreign mercenaries in the Valley as freedom fighters, and the subsequent atrocities in Doda and Amarnath, the Vajpayee Government remains inexplicably committed to a soft border with a hostile country. It defies reason that even after the collapse of the summit and the known opposition of the top brass of the armed forces, the Government is pushing ahead with visa relaxations and other unilateral confidence building measures.
Even more disturbing are the definitional concessions made at Agra. The Government has said the summit collapsed because Gen. Musharraf refused to place cross-border terrorism at par with Kashmir as the ‘core’ issue between the two countries. But a number of core issues are tied up in this seemingly innocuous statement, and these need to be thrashed out thoroughly if we are to survive as a nation and as a people.
For instance, India has de facto conceded the Pakistani demand that Jammu & Kashmir is the core issue which needs to be addressed for lasting peace between the two neighbours. As is well known, the Pakistani claim to the state rests on the fact that it has a Muslim majority. But what is not stated is that Pakistan rejects Maharaja Hari Singh’s legal Accession to India because he was the Hindu ruler of a Muslim-majority state. This brings us back to the pre-Partition stalemate when a section of the Muslim elite could not countenance living in a Hindu-majority country, and resorted to Direct Action in its quest for Dar ul Islam.
Obviously India cannot allow a challenge to the legitimacy of the Accession; Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh rightly rejected the denominational basis of nationhood in the run up to the summit. Nevertheless, in the wake of the General’s breakfast blitzkrieg, the Prime Minister lost a valuable opportunity to explain the basis of Indian nationhood when he chastised his guest for sabotaging the meet.
Though India is formally a secular country, it has an ancient living civilization that gives it a national character that is not easily subverted by modern ideological constructs. The world has seen Mother Russia triumphing against a soulless Communist Fatherland; Mother India, too, is releasing herself from the shackles of a culturally-neutral nationhood. Her struggle with a violent Islam, determinedly intolerant of non-monotheistic faiths, may prove a blessing in disguise.
In this backdrop, the Prime Minister should have told the General that since he insists on viewing India as a Hindu country, he should know that the Hindu character has undergone a sea change from the days of Partition. Mr. Vajpayee should have told his guest that Hindus are determined to give their civilizational ethos a pre-eminent place in public life; that the campaign to reclaim Lord Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya was part of this endeavour; and that a movement to recover Sharada Peeth in Occupied Kashmir will follow in due course.
He should have explained that religious denominations (Shaiva-Vaishnav-Shakti) do not divide India the way Shia-Sunni conflict racks Pakistan because our nationhood rests on a shared spirituality encapsulated in the concept of dharma. Dharma stands variously for the eternal tradition, righteousness, justice, law; it is both a religion and a way of life. That is why it is broad enough to provide honourable space to non-Indic religions such as Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, because dharma provides as many paths to salvation as there are souls who seek it. Strife is not inherent in the Hindu/Indic way, as in the case of revealed religions, and these are the reasons why India rejects the denominational basis of nationhood.
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister did no such thing. Instead, his Government allowed a dilution of the concept of “Pak-sponsored terrorism” to a mere “cross-border terrorism,” which is not the same thing. Pakistani depredations are not confined to the Indo-Pak border on the lines of the recent tragedy on the Bangladesh border in which sixteen BSF jawans were gruesomely murdered. The ISI has been responsible for violence in Chennai, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Mumbai, Delhi, and elsewhere, and the story is by no means over. It has infiltrated Bangladesh and Nepal and created a menacing situation on both borders, and the CPM Chief Minister of West Bengal appears more alive to this threat than New Delhi. In Assam, the demographic profile has been altered so drastically that there is little doubt that this state ranks high on the list of ‘core issues’ to be taken up subsequently by Pakistan.
The Government has willy-nilly opened all fundamental issues concerning India’s nationhood and its sovereignty and integrity to challenge and debate. The situation can only be retrieved through serious debate to forge a fresh consensus on these issues. Truly, the time has come for all good men to come to the aid of the nation.
The Pioneer, 31 July 2001