Columns: Fifth Column

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India Today, March 8, 1999
March 8, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
To Peace And in our Time

The Congress should back Vajpayee's Pakistan Policy .

By Tavleen Singh

How typical of the Congress to put its trivial political interests above those of the country. This is one area in which the party has a long and impressive record. So before we have had time to savour or even fully understand the importance of the bus ride to Wagah, the party has dragged us back into the mire of the most squalid domestic politics. Wagah was an achievement not just for Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government but for India.

But perhaps because Congress leaders understood this only too well they decided it was time to start toppling the Government. As long as the Government looked bad they were happy to announce graciously and frequently that they were "not interested in power" and would wait till Vajpayee's tenuous coalition fell apart due to "its own contradictions". But no sooner has it started to look good than we have the first clear attempt to bring down the Government. And for the most hypocritical of reasons.

Rabri Devi's government in Bihar was not just a disgrace but a dangerous joke on the people of that benighted state. Not just because it was frighteningly easy for killers to wander about murdering innocent villagers but also because there has been no development worth its name and not even a semblance of governance. Yet the Congress, despite its shameful record of needlessly dismissing state governments, appears to have suddenly discovered it is wrong for state governments to be dismissed by the Centre. Where was this concern, we should ask, when Indira Gandhi sowed the seeds of our current Kashmir problem by wrongly and unforgivably dismissing Farooq Abdullah's government in 1984?

But for once, instead of discussing the sleazy aspects of domestic politics, I want to write about something good and beautiful. And what happened at Wagah was exactly that.

It was as the prime minister said a "defining moment" in the history of the subcontinent. And lest we forget it in the morass of domestic sleaze we are about to be dragged into, allow me to describe to you what it was like to have been at Wagah on that hot and dusty afternoon of February 20. We, the media, arrived in our buses from Lahore more than an hour before the prime minister's bus was due to cross the border. While we waited and gossiped, as idle hacks are wont to, a measure of cynicism began to set in.

There would be glitches for sure, we said. When had either of us (India or Pakistan) ever been able to conduct a major event without it being touched by confusion, delays and worse? Rumours began to spread that the prime minister was arriving an hour late. It must be the air traffic controllers' strike, we explained to Pakistani colleagues. Or perhaps, knowing the exalted standards of the Delhi Transport Corporation, the wretched bus had broken down between Amritsar and Wagah.

Even when the Pakistani prime minister's helicopter landed exactly at 3.45 p.m. in clouds of dust that swept over us and the elaborate arrangements, our doubts were not dispelled. The first sign that things were not going wrong came at five minutes to 4 p.m. A man crossed over from the Indian side carrying a basket of fruit as a traditional sign of shagun or goodwill. Whoever thought that up deserves a medal.

Minutes later came Punjabi dancers. "Women dancers," a Pakistani friend gasped, "we haven't seen them in our country for years." The dancers came only as far as the closed gates, which were then opened ceremoniously to allow the prime minister's bus to drive into Pakistan on the dot of 4 p.m. All our cynicism dissipated as he stepped onto Pakistani soil and embraced Nawaz Sharif. Even the most cynical among us admitted to a lump in the throat. Pakistani friends in Lahore said many of them wept as they watched the ceremony on television. Especially when they watched the Pakistani guard of honour play the Indian national anthem. It was something, they said, they had not dreamt would ever happen.

In Lahore that evening and the next day-when Vajpayee was at his eloquent best and mesmerised invitees to the governor's reception-I met not a single Pakistani who was not deeply affected by the prime minister's bus ride. It was, they all said, a new beginning and they hoped that something concrete would now come of it.

Something concrete can. But the initiative has to come from Delhi and not Islamabad. Two things that we can do immediately are to unilaterally allow trade across the border and make it easier for Pakistanis to get visas that permit them to travel in India without being restricted to only certain cities and having to regularly report at police stations.

The only reason these things have not already happened is because we have insisted on reciprocity. Which is ridiculous when you consider we are the bigger country. We did not insist on reciprocity when the prime minister took his bus ride and we should forget about it in future decisions as well.

There are those who are suggesting that only certain categories of Pakistanis be given visas freely-like judges, civil servants and journalists. This is nonsense. They get visas anyway. It is ordinary Pakistanis who go through horror and humiliation just to be able to visit relatives on our side of the border. It is their goodwill that we need.

Even so, for the Government to do anything at all it should not be constantly fighting to survive. So we can only hope that for once the Congress will realise there is something bigger than its miserable self-interest. It is called India.

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