Beijing to Kargil to Agra

Weary travellers and unsuccessful diplomats

NEVER before in half a century of independence has Indian diplomacy faced humiliation comparable to what the country has had to endure this last week. Setbacks we have known; lack of success in carrying conviction we have known; failure we have known. But never before has our national self-respect received the kind of body-blow the Indian prime minister invited upon himself at Agra.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s fatal flaw is that he is not a statesman but a poet, not a diplomatist but a qawwal. He thinks international relations is about a fine turn of phrase. The only reason his forays into foreign policy might be commended is that he was the first to speak in Hindi at the United Nations. Beyond that his is a dismal record of disaster after disaster in diplomacy. One cannot even begin to understand what went wrong at Agra without travelling back in time some two decades to 1977-79 when Vajpayee was external affairs minister in the Morarji Desai cabinet. His overweening desire was to use his portfolio as the launching pad to prove that what the Congress could not do, he, Houdini Vajpayee, was capable of doing. Therefore, since India-China relations had been in deep freeze for two decades, Vajpayee planned his historic breakthrough to the Forbidden Capital.

Nothing much wrong with that. Except that he took no account of what the Chinese were up to elsewhere. That was no closely guarded state secret. The spat between the Chinese and the Vietnamese was at its height. The murderous Pol Pot was rampaging over Cambodia, undertaking the most vicious genocide known to humankind, a mass killing that eventually took the lives of one-third of his own people. Pol Pot’s most ardent supporter was Beijing, a Beijing infuriated because all that stood between Pol Pot and the massacre of every man, woman and child in Cambodia was the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese had entered their neighbouring country to halt Pol Pot in his tracks. The Chinese were not amused. Everyone who knew anything at all about foreign affairs, down to the meanest clerk in South Block, knew that a major armed confrontation was but a matter of time, the world-record worst moment to schedule any breakthrough journey to the People’s Republic. But because Vajpayee knows nothing of world affairs (and everything about securing headlines) he went ahead.

In fairness to him, I should add that he brushed aside contrary advice also because the sands of time were running out: the Morarji government was in its death throes and, therefore, it was Beijing or Bust. He went. Hardly had he touched down that China decided it was the right moment to send troops across the border into Vietnam. A full-scale war broke out while our friend bit his nails on the other side of the border from Hong Kong. Left with no alternative, Vajpayee aborted his mission and took flight to New Delhi. It was, at the time, the most naive exercise in diplomacy ever undertaken by an Indian external affairs minister.

The contrast with Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China a decade later is telling. Almost the minute he took over as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi decided that the restoration of a measure of normalcy in India-China relations was a compelling requirement. I was on the fringes of the PMO team led by Gopi Arora which made the preparations. Gopi’s office was littered with files dating back to the MacMahon Line agreement of 1914 and before. For four solid years, every possible angle was explored. At the prime minister’s level two decisions were taken which only he could take. The first: to push an eyeball-to-eyeball military confrontation with the Chinese army at Sumdorongchu where we had apprehended a Chinese intrusion. It was the Chinese who blinked. Thus 1962 was consigned to history. Then came the February 1987 grant of full statehood to Arunachal Pradesh, notwithstanding the anticipated squawk from Beijing, indeed with every intention of signalling the People’s Republic that every inch of Arunachal was Indian, whatever the Chinese might think.

Thereafter, and only thereafter, were dates discussed for the visit to China. It was no coincidence that visits to both China and Pakistan were scheduled in the same month of December 1988. Everything was prepared down to the last detail before Rajiv Gandhi embarked for Beijing. Everything, therefore, went without a glitch. The one thing not planned for was Deng Xiaoping’s handshake before the cameras of the world in the Great Hall of the People. It went on and on and on. Every television viewer everywhere in the world was informed that the era of confrontation was over, the era of cooperation had begun. A decade later, the reverberations of that handshake are still echoing in the chancelleries of the world. That is what summits between adversaries should be about.

Vajpayee does not understand this. Twice in two years he has scheduled summits with Pakistan with little or no preparation. He is truly an old man in a hurry. He pushed the Lahore Yatra knowing that if he delayed, Jayalalitha would topple his government. He, therefore, made no preparations, not even responding to the 17 different warning signals identified by the K. Subrahmanyam Kargil Review Committee. A week before the visit, I was in Islamabad and Lahore with a parliamentary delegation which included that electronic Barbie doll, the always meretricious Sushma Swaraj, and it was as clear as the sound of the azaan that this was no way to prepare a critical summit. For it was while we were there that the Pakistanis told the Indian high commissioner there would be no Bus to Lahore, only a few yards into Pakistani territory up to the Wagah check-post and then by helicopter to Lahore because there was no other way the Pakistan government could guard the Indian prime minister from the wrath of some Pakistanis. Hence, Kargil.

Now for a second time, his final term as prime minister under sentence of political death, Vajpayee has invited upon himself yet another disastrous summit. The 13 dead pilgrims at Amarnath have to be added to the 500 martyrs of Kargil as the price in blood this country has had to pay for Vajpayee’s hopelessly premature attempts to secure a Nobel prize for peace.