Columns: The Usual Suspects

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India Today, July 12, 1999
July 12, 1999

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Sonia's 1962

Before spouting history, politicians should read it.

By Swapan Dasgupta

For some of India's politicians, the Kargil conflict has become the occasion to be overwhelmed by indigestions of history. The BJP's publicity wing led the way with an ill-conceived advertisement describing Shyama Prasad Mookerji as the first martyr for Kashmir. Apart from obliterating the contributions of those soldiers who died in the 1947-48 Kashmir operations, the advertisement -- preceded by a roll call of the martyrs of Kargil -- was a particularly cretinous example of a political party trying to derive cheap mileage from a national crisis.

Yet, the amateurish over-zealousness of the caretaker party pales into insignificance compared to Sonia Gandhi's crash course in the history of the 1962 Sino-Indian war. For the Congress president, the significant feature of that conflict was not that India had to undergo the abject humiliation of losing Aksai Chin; not that Indian forces were left to fight a war in snowy terrain with World War II guns while the ordnance factories produced coffee percolators; and not that the then prime minister abandoned an entire state to the mercy of the invading forces after gratuitously announcing that his heart went out to the people of Assam. What the average Indian remembers about Jawaharlal Nehru's Himalayan blunder is markedly different from what Sonia's tutors (one of whom spent the war distributing pro-Chinese leaflets to Cambridge students) have told her to remember: that 1962 is important because Parliament was convened during the war! "If we did it in 1962, why can't they do it now?" she asked last week. "I see it as a very well-planned way to make others shut up."

The problem is not a government that is unmindful of its democratic obligations. The problem is Sonia herself. She conveniently absented herself from both all-party meetings convened by the prime minister because her priorities were different and because she couldn't countenance a situation where she wasn't the centre of attraction. By her own admission, "People have many questions in mind. They ask why the Congress is not asking questions." Yet, she couldn't risk exposure in a meeting where there is no place for a prepared text and where the political class rubs shoulders on equal terms. War or no war, Sonia believes that politics is about one-upmanship and photo opportunities. National solidarity hasn't entered Sonia's political vocabulary, just as it didn't feature in the consciousness of her CPI(M) ally in either 1962 or even 1971. "Indira, Yahya ek hai," Jyoti Basu's comrades had scrawled across the walls of Calcutta during the Bangladesh war. Sonia would have concurred with the positioning. For her, the main enemy isn't Pakistan but the BJP.

It's a frightening scenario. Pakistan, we now know, had planned the Kargil adventurism even as Atal Bihari Vajpayee was embracing Nawaz Sharif at the Wagah border. Lahore or not, the invaders were hell-bent on taking the peaks and adding another dimension to the low-intensity conflict in Kashmir. They didn't change their mind even when Vajpayee's government fell by a single vote in April and they wouldn't have altered their plan if Sonia's I-have-272-MPs boast had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With Prime Minister Sonia, would India have had the emotional resolve to fight over territory where Nehru didn't witness a single blade of grass grow? For a lady who takes heart from what the grandfather-in-law did in 1962, the answer doesn't have to be spelt out.

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