Bastion of Free Speech

An oft-quoted maxim says that the best way to preserve the peace is to keep ready for war. While the efficacy of this prescription is open to debate, there can be no disputing another maxim - one not limited to foreign policy alone - that threats issued and not carried out will only evoke derision.

But then India swears by Bofors, not Maxims. No particular truth seems to animate the Vajpayee government (unless it be the goal of making India the 51st state of the USA).

After the government was caught on the wrong foot over Kargil, India threw out the infiltrators, an arduous military achievement admirably executed. But this made not the slightest difference to the basic situation in Kashmir, where murder and disruption have proceeded without cease since 1989. After sacrificing thousands of young lives and spending billions of rupees, India had essentially managed to restore the status quo.

On the Pakistani side, meanwhile, the status quo had changed, with Musharraf assuming power. The Vajpayee government responded with an air of injured innocence. No negotiations until cross-border terrorism ceases, it intoned. A curious stance. The scourge had, after all, continued unabated all through Mr. Vajpayee's overtures to Nawaz Sharif, and when he scampered up the Minar-i-Pakistan with such alacrity. Hindus and Sikhs were being driven out of Kashmir even as Mr. Vajpayee was putting his signature to the Lahore Declaration. Now he was changing his stance, but the new doctrine had at least an aura of Principle to it.

The Principle was to be put to test soon enough. In late December, 1999, an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked from Kathmandu. The pilot prodigiously contrived to land it in India. The Vajpayee-Jaswant-Advani combine dithered, squandering the 'home court advantage' and allowing the plane to go to Dubai. All talk of the spectacular success of Indian diplomacy in the Post-Kargil era must be tempered with the memory of how the Dubai government ignored India's pleas and allowed the plane to proceed to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The Vajpayee government could rightly maintain it had stuck to its stated principle. There was no negotiation! The hijackers' demands were met, including the release of criminals secured by the sacrifices of countless brave men and women. And the criminals were accompanied to their freedom by no less than His Excellency Jaswant Singh, the Foreign Minister of India.

Despite its abject jettisoning of its avowed position within three months of its enunciation, the Vajpayee government continued to prattle ineffectually about cross-border infiltration, almost unaware of the inherent self-mockery involved. Then suddenly one day, in the Spring of 2001, Mr. Vajpayee dismounted his high horse to invite Musharraf to 'walk the high road' with him. No explanations to the Indian people for the change in tack.

The slide from disdain to coquettishness was breathtaking. India was the first to recognize Musharraf's illegal assumption of the Presidency. Even before Musharraf made the formal announcement, Vajpayee called him up so as to be the first to address him as 'Mr. President'. This after having railed for months against the usurpation of power and the uprooting of democracy by Musharraf. In the event, the summit meeting ended in deadlock. Its chief victim was Vajpayee's credibility, and its lone beneficiary, Musharraf, whom it enhanced from a loathed tinpot dictator to an accepted head of state.

September 11 arrived two months after the Agra Summit. With the US utterly dependent on Pakistan to move against the Taliban, Musharraf drove a hard bargain to gain both political lionization and financial rescue, as Vajpayee stood on the side lines wringing his hands. India's genuine cry, that she had been a victim of the worst terrorism for a whole decade before 9-11, fell on deaf ears - in no small measure due to Vajpayee's volte-face in meeting with Musharraf. After all, you can't be very convincing about the evils of Pakistani terrorism when you yourself parley with its progenitors and take them on special tours of the Taj.

In December 2001, (a month after Pakistani regulars were airlifted from Kunduz, Afghanistan, revealing just how closely Pakistan was to the Taliban), the Indian Parliament was attacked. The Indian public was outraged by the audacity of the mission, and angered by the incompetence of its government. The intelligence agencies, which had omitted to notice Kargil and were caught with their pants down in the Kathmandu hijack, had failed again. Only a stroke of pure good fortune and a vigilant local crew had averted a monumental disaster. Vajpayee responded by massing Indian troops along the border and placing them on war alert. Under world pressure, Musharraf promised to crack down on extremist elements within Pakistan, doing so only to release most of those he imprisoned within a few weeks.

And then in May 2002 came two consecutive days of gruesome terrorist attacks inside Kashmir - one spraying women and children with bullets at an Army camp. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee paid a long-delayed visit to Kashmir. And during his own visit, even as he waxed in his poetic best about his government's iron resolve, a Kashmiri politician known for his independence and boldness, and his outspoken opposition to Kashmiri terrorism, was gunned down in broad daylight.

The Vajpayee response? Two more months to Pakistan to stop cross-border terrorism! Why? Because Musharraf has given (another) assurance that terrorism would be stopped. And this time he may even have added a 'really' or two.

Life has gone on since then, and eventually, the government withdrew some of the forces from the border, without any particular success in having curbed infiltration. The Kashmir militancy seems to have suffered no great decline in aid from Pakistan. Periodically, each side has attempted to out-growl the other threats nuclear annihilation, making the world shake question the maturity of the leadership on both sides.

There's another axiom of defense strategy, namely that between nuclear adversaries, conventional superiority is meaningless. From this point of view, analyst and reporter Gwynne Dyer recently called Vajpayee's decision to go nuclear three years ago 'imbecilic'.

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