Agra to Islamabad....Failures

Why didn’t Pillai speak up when his boss was in Pak?

By Jawed Naqvi

Monday, 19 Jul, 2010


Pakistan’s former foreign minister Gauhar Ayub rightly admitted to an Indian TV channel that his current successor Shah Mehmood Qureshi was out of line in making less than diplomatic comments about India’s Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna in Islamabad last week. Mr Qureshi’s comment to the effect that the visitor did not have the mandate from Delhi to hold serious discussions with him was childish and inappropriate. Moreover, whether Mr Krishna was consulting New Delhi or not on the phone in between his engagements was really not anyone’s business but his own.


Mr Qureshi was of course within his rights to express disapproval of an unnecessary and harmful comment made by Indian Home Secretary G. K. Pillai on the eve of Mr Krishna’s departure for Islamabad. Now I know many Pakistani friends and colleagues, not to speak of Indians, who would agree with Mr Pillai’s contention that the ISI was hand in glove with the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attacks. Be that as it may, it still doesn’t justify the comment on the eve of the foreign minister’s globally-watched crucial visit and let me tell you why.

Mr Pillai had all the details about the case when his boss, India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram visited Islamabad on June 26, a visit which was preceded by Mr Pillai’s own useful trip there. Had he made his ISI-was-involved-in-Mumbai comment then, it could have been seen as a bold and even meaningful observation. But he didn’t. Why did he choose to muddy the water for Mr Krishna? Who had authorised him to make that comment at that particular moment? Could he not have left the details of the controversial issue, since that is what it is, to the Indian foreign minister to handle? Surely Mr Krishna could have dealt with it privately or at the press conference he later addressed with his Pakistani counterpart?

And yet Mr Qureshi was wrong to compare Mr Pillai’s role with that of Hafiz Saeed, the fanatical anti-India rabble-rouser. Saeed goes about spewing hatred of Indians and yet remains unchecked by Pakistan’s law-keepers not unlike certain powerful hate-mongers in Mumbai and Gujarat who remain outside the grasp of the state’s corrective institutions for all the untold harm they cause to peace at home and with the neighbourhood. Mr Pillai’s role in queering the pitch for an India-Pakistan dialogue last week was more akin to the part played by the former Indian information minister Sushma Swaraj whose comments to the press contributed directly to the dismal end to the Musharraf-Vajpayee Agra summit on July 16, 2001.

Before coming to Ms Swaraj’s subversive role in Agra, let me put a question about the approach of Mr Pillai and others who may think like him towards India-Pakistan ties. The question is: Between the Kargil conflict and the Mumbai attack, which of the two was more catastrophic for India? In case some find that an unfair question let’s ask an even more blunt one that takes into account Mr Pillai’s concerns about the ISI; which of the two incidents has a clearer imprint of the ISI – Kargil, which everyone now knows was a botched up operation by the Pakistani army – or Mumbai, in which the ISI’s role still remains in the realm of allegation? Certainly Kargil. It was by far the more destructive for India-Pakistan ties because of the clear involvement of Pakistan’s state institutions.

And yet on March 23, 2001, without any apparent overture or apology from Pakistan, then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee shot off an invitation to President Pervez Musharraf. “For the welfare of our peoples, there is no other recourse but a pursuit of the path of reconciliation, of engaging in productive dialogue and by building trust and confidence…” Vajpayee’s invitation letter ended with a call to “put in place a stable structure of cooperation and address all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir”.

The Agra summit was torpedoed – not by Mumbai-like terrorists, but by Pillai-like officials and Swaraj-like politicians. A. G. Noorani has painstakingly chronicled the timeline of how it was subverted and why. As Noorani said, let us begin with Sushma Swaraj. On July 15, 2001, the day the talks began in earnest at Agra, she briefed the press listing the issues discussed but omitted Kashmir to the dismay of Pakistanis. She gave contradictory explanations even for this. “I didn’t mention Kashmir because it was obvious. That is why Gen Musharraf has come here.” (The Times of India, July 17). On the same day she said “it was not a deliberate omission” (The Telegraph, July 17).

But, on August 6, in the Lok Sabha, then foreign minister Jaswant Singh suggested it was deliberate. “When she told the press what she did, she told the press what she was authorised to tell and she had the authority of the Vajpayee Cabinet to do so.” He was right. A detailed report from Agra in The Telegraph (July 17) revealed: “It can be said now (after the debacle) that some people had an inkling that the Indian side would come out with a deliberate statement to suggest that Kashmir was not being discussed at all and that the summit was going very badly.”

Noorani notes that three causes were cited for the failure – Musharraf’s talk to seniors in the Indian media on the morning of July 16; his insistence that Kashmir was a “core issue”; and his refusal “to address cross-border terrorism”.

Sushma Swaraj told Pakistan daily The News (July 20): “Things were derailed the moment the video recording of General Saheb’s tough talk to a group of senior editors was instantly made available to all TV channels of the world who took no time in airing them.” She knew, of course, that this was simply not true. NDTV’s Prannoy Roy asked for the video, acquired it and telecast it. The so-called substantive bit was equally false. One of the editors who was present, Shekhar Gupta, asked Advani on his Walk the Talk programme on NDTV on March 12, 2005, whether the cause was “the breakfast with us, editors, which was televised”. Advani replied: “I don’t think so. No. Not at all”.
Shekhar recalled in Indian Express on January 31, 2004, that in fact Musharraf made many concessions: “If you go over the tapes of that Agra breakfast, you would underline things Musharraf said that no Pakistani leader had said until then.” Couldn’t Gupta have said the same thing on the day the breakfast was touted as the reason for the inconclusive summit?

If not the breakfast meeting, what was the true cause of the failure at Agra? Jaswant Singh mentioned “three broad areas” at his press conference in Agra on July 17. One was Musharraf’s stand that “unless the issue of Jammu and Kashmir is made central there will be no progress on any other aspect” whereas India’s approach “addresses all issues”. This had been denied by Pakistan’s foreign secretary Inamul Haque at the outset, on July 14. Even so, the Indian foreign minister’s charge was that Pakistan sought discussion of Kashmir exclusively; not settlement of the dispute at Agra, let alone an accord on its own terms.

The second area related to “cross-border terrorism” (CBT). The third was omission of previous accords – Simla and Lahore – the very charge he had publicly made in Delhi on July 14, and which Pakistan’s then foreign secretary Inamul Haque denied instantly (The Hindu of July 15 carried the charge and the denial side by side). In parliament on August 6, Jaswant Singh himself rubbished the Simla and the Tashkent accords but had his remarks deleted from the record (Indian Express, August 9).

No doubt the next venue for the India-Pakistan conundrum is Kabul where both sides will be present at an international conference on Afghanistan. The BJP will be praying that the two sides don’t talk so that it can do all the pretend fence mending and not the Congress or anyone else. Mr Pillai will probably be mining the situation for post-retirement political benefits. Us journalists will grow old reporting these on-again off-again talks.

Meanwhile, young stone-pelters on the streets of Kashmir are facing off against one of the most formidable armies in the world. They are the ones paying a real and terrible price for these diplomatic mind-games.