April 27, 1998

Muhammad Ghauri vs Prithviraj Chauhan in the age of nuclear missiles.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Atal Bihari Vajpayee has passed with flying colours his first foreign affairs test as prime minister. So, let it be conceded in the same breath, has Nawaz Sharif. The two prime ministers have handled with deftness a crisis that their respective followers were itching to blow out of proportion. Shabash.

The problem is their followers will not go away. Sharif, good guy though he may be, cannot escape the heritage of communalism which the Pakistan Muslim League epitomises. And Vajpayee, good guy although he may be, cannot escape the heritage of communalism which the Sangh Parivar epitomises. And since the League and the Parivar are mirror images of each other, it is only by denying what each is heir to that Sharif and Vajpayee can take to a logical conclusion the sensible course of reconciliation which they have reaffirmed -- notwithstanding reports of the Ghauri missile's "test-firing".

For the Pakistani communalist, history begins with Muhammad bin Qasim disembarking in Sindh in ad 712. For the Indian communalist, history ends with the conquest of Bakkar by 17-year-old Qasim a few weeks later. For both, the central purpose of their being in politics is a contemporaneous obsession with events of a distant past. That is the mindset which causes Pakistani Leaguers to offensively name their missile after Muhammad bin Ghauri. And the same mindset which causes Indian Parivarists to riposte that Prithvi is the diminutive for Prithviraj Chauhan. Both are set on replaying the battles of 1192.

Of the two, the Pakistani communalist is marginally the more illiterate. The most hilarious example of this illiteracy was the statement issued from the presidential palace in Islamabad in December 1992 that the Babri Masjid had been destroyed to avenge the defeat of the Hindus at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526. It fell to the then Indian high commissioner, J.N. Dixit, to discreetly inform president Ghulam Ishaq Khan that it was a fellow-Muslim, Ibrahim Lodhi, whom Babar had routed at Panipat.

We were less successful in persuading Lal Krishna Advani to desist from the stupid prank of a rath yatra to rebuild a Ram mandir at Ayodhya which even Tulsidas, writing his celebrated Ramcharitmanas a few years after the alleged sacrilege, and within eye-range of the Ramjanmabhoomi, never said was destroyed by Babar's army.

It is not arcane lessons in history but contemporary truths that Vajpayee and Sharif have to grapple with. What both have to understand is that if we test a missile, the Pakistanis will also test their missile and vice versa. Ergo, if they go nuclear, so will we and vice versa. Each bomb leads to more and better bombs; each missile to more and better missiles. There is no enduring security in matching missile with missile and bomb with bomb.

Therefore, Vajpayee should persuade Sharif to move forward on nuclear-related confidence-building measures. More important, he should aim at India and Pakistan concerting joint efforts to move the Geneva-based Conference On Disarmament towards a global treaty on the elimination of nuclear weapons. We have the blueprint in the action plan which we presented to the United Nations' special session on disarmament in 1988.

Our refusal to participate in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the proposed Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty can't be sustained as bargaining counters in an attempt to access nuclear technology we cut ourselves off from at Pokharan. If it is, our bluff will be called sooner rather than later. It can, and must, be sustained by putting India back in the frontline of the demand for eliminating nuclear weapons globally. That will be most persuasively done if done in concert with Pakistan.

Two decades ago, Vajpayee made an unexpected but excellent foreign minister despite his engaging nonsense then of "genuine non-alignment" having been quite as bogus as his "genuine secularism" now. However, the Gujral example makes one apprehensive of whether good external affairs ministers make good prime ministers. It is, therefore, now up to Vajpayee's minister of state, the very fetching Vasundhara Raje Scindia, to do the preparatory staff work for the coming Vajpayee-Sharif summit at the July meeting of SAARC.

In line with this column's practice of tendering unsolicited advice, especially on matters concerning Pakistan, may I offer her two suggestions and one reminder. Suggestion No. 1: she should inform Gohar Ayub Khan at the first available opportunity that it was none other than her very own Hindu ancestors who were thrammed at the Third Battle of Panipat by a Muslim invader, Ahmed Shah Abdali. She would be well-advised to add that Abdali had really come to loot his fellow-Muslims, the reigning Mughals.

Suggestion No.2: with a view to purposefully structuring the India-Pakistan dialogue, she should read a mere four pages, 79 to 83, of my book Pakistan Papers (UBSPD, Rs 85, thanks for the commercial break). The necessary precondition for the dialogue to lead to a breakthrough is that it must be so structured as to be rendered both uninterrupted and uninterruptable.

The reminder is: I was Vajpayee's consul-general in Karachi 20 years before she became Vajpayee's minister in Delhi.

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