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Who
calls the summit a failure?
THE
implications of the Agra summit open peal by peal like an onion.
Quick, knee-jerk responses are likely to be invalid. Put it down
to my perversity, but I believe that the abrupt scuttling of the
summit has in fact invested it substance, the areas of agreement
with greater durability, longer shelf life.
Remember Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto at Shimla in 1972? After signing the
accord he was to obtain the consent of his cohorts back home. The
consent never came. Nawaz Sharif rushed into the bus diplomacy with
such little preparation that he was not even able to ride the bus
from Wagah to Lahore with Vajpayee.
By
accident, or design, Gen. Pervez Musharraf returned without signing
any agreement. And look at the reception he has received: The PoK
Hurriyat leader Ghulam Mohammad Safi lauded the General for "putting
across his viewpoint before the media". He adds: "we asked
the President ahead of the summit not to sign documents in a hurry
as his predecessors had done in Shimla and Lahore". In this
limited framework, therefore, the unsigned agreements would appear
to be a boon for Musharraf.
If
you feel peeved at boons for Musharraf internally in Pakistan, it
would logically follow that you would probably like his goose to
be cooked. That clearly is not the case because you came pretty
close to signing a document with him which would have been historic
by any yardstick.
In
Islam there is a concept, which Ghalib satirises with aplomb, that
on your shoulders are perched two angels, one furiously noting all
the good that you do and the other committing for the day of judgement
all your sins. It would be unfair to see Vajpayee surrounded by
his top-heavy delegation at Agra in that image.
On
the contrary, Vajpayee’s comprehensive delegation indicated
a democratic culture of consultations at so sensitive a summit.
Musharraf,
on the other hand, had no one readily available for consultations
except his foreign minister Abdul Sattar.
While
Vajpayee had company, the security of his job, it is possible to
speculate that at Agra, Musharraf was short on both these quantities.
After
all, he had left the Presidential gaddi temporarily in the care
of Chief Justice Irshad Hasan Khan. The corps commanders and principal
staff officers Musharraf consulted two days before emplaning for
India, could possibly have had in their midst an aspirant or two!
The
fact that the two leaders came back from the brink (i.e. without
signing documents) has, come to think of it, been a blessing on
this side as well. It gives Vajpayee greater room for manoeuver
in Parliament.
It
takes skilled diplomats to save summits. What an elegant statement
it was by foreign minister Jaswant Singh the morning after followed
by an equally measured and restrained one by Abdul Sattar in Isla-
mabad. All the doubting Thomases must read the Sattar statement
carefully. Terms like ‘integrated’ and ‘composite’
dialogue on ‘Tulbul’, ‘Sir Creek’, we would
be small-minded not to notice our vocabulary being adopted by Sattar
without change of syntax. Unbelievable progress was made at Agra!
This
was the first summit held in the full blaze of TV. The electronic
media has come of age in India. Alas, there is no evidence of a
coherent policy to cope with this burgeoning reality. Gen. Musharraf
clearly walked away with the trophy on media management.
This
was inevitable because of the contrasting styles of the two principals
in this contest. There are 20 years between them. They come from
different cultures, different professions. One, a soldier, receiving
media attention for the first time and rather enjoying the limelight.
Vajpayee, on the other hand, has been a star parliamentarian for
four decades, so much in the national limelight that he has become
blase about it.
It
is one of the great ironies of Indian democracy that leaders of
two of our major formations, Vajpayee and Sonia Gandhi, refuse to
face the electronic media beyond photo ops. In Vajpayee’s case
this is particularly sad because he is a natural communicator. These
days, of course, Firaq’s couplet fits him like a glove: Ab
aksar chup, chup se rahe hain/ Yunhin kabhu lab khole hain/ Pehle
Firaq ko dekha hota/ Ab to bahut kam bole hain. (He broods and is
silent mostly. You should have seen Firaq years ago when he was
the very life of the party).
The
Pakistani media had requested their officials to keep their mobile
phones open particularly towards the last suspenseful lap. A Talkathon
trophy is due to the Indian pundits who gassed nineteen to the dozen
without a clue as to what was going on in the talks. It was in this
dangerous vacuum that Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi planted that mischief
about the ‘invisible hand’. The mischief should have been
nipped in the bud. Instead, I watched an information-starved Indian
anchor slowly brought into focus as the credible propagator of the
‘invisible hand’ story, which, in the noblest traditions
of the profession, he sourced to a ‘Pakistani colleague.’
But
the important question is this: Just because we lost the media war,
should we in our pettiness, blow up a summit so promising?
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