Security | Illusion of peace

It may call for a particularly tolerant psychiatrist to understand the tics of split personality that India and Pakistan exhibit towards each other. Contrary emotions coexist. Hate is like a sibling feud—the obverse of the coin exists too, and becomes manifest in the most schizoid fashion. Peace follows war follows peace. After Pokhran-II and its ricochet across the border, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had sallied boldly forth on a bus to de-escalate matters. But Lahore led to Kargil. At that stage, the well-set batsman would wait for the reverse swing. Sure enough, it came. Only the source was surprising.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the very man who had prosecuted war in the summer of 1999, was the one who now came waging peace. He had overthrown Nawaz Sharif in a coup d’tat in 1999, installed himself as president, and was reinventing himself as a latter-day Ataturk. His formula did not lack in innovative audacity. Back when he sent his men in stealth mode to occupy the icy promontories of Kargil, he had already shown a healthy disregard for the Line of Control. Now he was proposing that the two countries dissolve it altogether—in a formal pact—and turn it instead into a passage. Not for gun-toting fidayeen, for there would be no more need for them. Kashmir would be shared, open territory linking the two countries, a cultural and human crossroads.

If anyone could pick him up on that, it was Vajpayee. He had his own ingenious knack for the unconventional, a silvery gift of the gab, and a yen for rewriting history in bold typeface and charmingly cursive words. He once floored the Hurriyat by abandoning the stiffly officious line New Delhi had clung to: that the Kashmir problem would be solved “within the ambit of the Constitution”. Instead, he said, “insaaniyat ke daayre mein”—within the ambit of humanism! Politically, too, everyone felt if peace with Pakistan was to be signed and delivered, only a BJP government could do it without fear.

Spoken too soon, alas. The forbidding hardliner was not outside, but within. L.K. Advani, Vajpayee’s home minister, was never quite convinced. At the summit meet in Agra in July 2001, Musharraf emerged from the state limo, strode onto the red carpet, dispensed his salutes to the cameras, and walked in to a hall where history was waiting to be made with a flourish of the pen. A subcontinent, too, waited with bated breath. But after nine hours of haggling over two days, only bitterness was reaped. Almost as if to seal any chance of peace erupting accidentally, the December 2001 attack on Parliament congealed sentiments on all sides.

Kashmir made a valiant attempt on its own too. Even Hizbul supremo Syed Salahuddin sent out a peace emissary in Abdul Majid Dar, but he was slain in 2003, like Abdul Gani Lone was a year before him—that too at a commemoration for Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq, who was assassinated in 1990. There were obstacles to peace on both sides.