THE SHAME AT SHARM-EL-SHEIKH

“Foreign policy,” they say in strategic parlance, “is the art of fighting a war without the firing of bullets.” If this be the case, then India has finally succumbed in the face of Pakistani aggression by the rather pathetic surrender of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the NAM summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt. Pakistan for all practical purposes has been given the green signal to continue with its policy “of thousand cuts.”

Hardly had the embers from the Mumbai 26/11 attack died down, when the P.M. in his meeting with Pak P.M Gilani agreed that “Action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and these should not be bracketed.” As if this was not enough, the P.M went a step further and agreed to the notion “that Pakistan has some information on threats in Baluchistan and other areas.”

Therefore my dear friends, in other words, the victim now becomes the accused. Thanks to the ingenuity of the P.M and his team, the biggest casualty of terrorism in the world, stands accused of fomenting unrest in a country which for all practical purposes, is the cradle of terrorism world wide.

The spin doctors of the P.M, who by now must be really tired up of covering up for his gaffes are making their best efforts once again for this misdemeanour. Shiv Shankar Menon, the outgoing Foreign Secretary, has called it a case of ‘poor drafting’.

Come again!!!!

Poor drafting, you say, Mr.Menon! A nation and everything it stands up for is sold off by poor drafters, you say!

Kindly notice the deceit in the fact that news reports now suggest that these two issues were included in the agreement at the insistence of the P.M himself.

Poor drafting, indeed!

Even by the low standards of bureaucrats in India, this is a new low. To think of it, we have still not reached the abyss. It is only in India, where people hardly give a damn for the nation can the P.M and his team of nincompoops get away with an act which ranks at par with treachery.

Treachery!! Harsh word, but justified in the context of things. The P.M seems to be suffering from a chronic case of deciding foreign policy on his own whims and fancies, rather than arriving at a consensus amongst his colleagues in the cabinet atleast, if not in the Parliament. Last month in Russia, he decided impromptu to meet the Pak President Zardari and spoke about the ‘limited mandate’.

The query the nation had for the P.M as to who authorised the limited mandate had still not been answered, when the nation received this shocking news of ‘delinking of terrorism with the dialogue process’.

In effect, the P.M of a nation which has been ravaged by Islamic terrorism for the past 20 years, which has lost thousands of brave soldiers in the face of this brutal form of state policy, a nation which has seen thousands of children orphaned, brother distrusting brother, goes to the country which is progenitor of this policy of ‘thousand cuts’, and says ‘that you are free to spread this cancer even further, kill, rape and maim people, but we will continue the dialogue process irrespective of the facts.’

BRAVO!!!!

Dialogue about what?

Will it be a dialogue to bring back the Kashmiri Brahmins who have been uprooted from their home and hearth, who live the life of a refugee in their own country? Will it be a dialogue to bring back the dead from the frozen heights of Kargil or the moist corridors of the Taj in Mumbai? Will it be a dialogue to hand over Dawood and his cohorts or the great Hafeez Saeed or Maulana Massod Azhar?

Or on the other hand will it be a dialogue to exchange cultural troupes, permit Pakistani artistes to perform in India (not vice versa), open the route between Srinagar and Muzaffrabad, permit Pervez Musharaf to speak vituperatively about India while standing on Indian soil or grant of the Most Favoured Nation status to Pakistan????

Your guess is as good as mine!

Perhaps somebody should have told late Sandeep Unnikrishnan about this dialogue process when he entered the Taj on that fateful night, or the late Vikram Batra when he inched closer to the enemy before he got hit in Kargil. The train commuters in Mumbai who have stopped taking the locals or are maimed permanently post the bomb blasts should also be invited for this ‘dialogue process.’

That the dialogues since 1947 have not led us anywhere seems to be a trivial to the whole story.

The statements emanating from Egypt are a continuation of a pattern which was set by the P.M a couple of years back, when he proclaimed ‘Pakistan to be a victim of terrorism as much as India.’ The fact that nearly all the terrorists were home-bred in Pakistan was conveniently ignored in the statement. Then came the ‘limited mandate’ stuff in Russia, without as much indicating the authority sanctioning this ‘limited mandate’.

Mumbai 26/11 was an extension of Kargil 1999, with same level of deceit, ruthlessness and same intent to demoralise a nation. General Musharaf, in a recent interview has owned up to Kargil and claimed it to be a victory since it exposed ‘Indian weakness’, and furthermore claims that ‘Kargil forced India to discuss Kashmir’, thereby implying that perhaps Mumbai forced India to accede to its ‘guilt’ in Baluchistan.

Perhaps somebody should have reminded the P.M that since the ascension of I.K.Gujral as P.M in the mid 1990’s, who was similar in his soft approach to Pakistan, RAW was forced to wind up its operations in Pakistan. So much so that in an act of ‘goodwill’ even the identities of the local operatives were leaked out to the ISI. That most of the operatives were either bumped off by the Pak authorities or are languishing in jails without any charges, remains an unfortunate part of the story. History of intelligence agencies is replete with double crosses to protect and propagate one’s interests, but this mass betrayal of one’s interests in order to propagate some woolly eyed principles remains a stand out case. Therefore, even if they wished to, (as they should indeed have) Indians could not foment any trouble in Pakistan, given their lack of local operatives. But given the propensity of the Indian bureaucrat to feather one’s own nest at the cost of the nation, it is not surprising that they perhaps have not read up on their own history.

Whatever the contention of the spin doctors (including most of the newspaper editorials) about the shrewdness and sagacity of the P.M, the fact remains that he has scored an own goal, if one can borrow from sporting parlance. The unfortunate part is that unlike in the sporting field, the repercussions of this ‘own goal’ are catastrophic.

The statement about Baluchistan has ensured that India from being a victim of terrorism has been converted into a propagator of terrorism.

India has let a glorious opportunity to corner an errant neighbour slip out off its hand. Rather than questioning the Pak authorities on the farcical let off of Hafeez Saeed in the Pak courts (apparently the state government of Punjab in Pakistan is fighting the case and not the federal govt), pressurising the government to hand over the fugitives, we have let them off the hook.

At a time when the country is witnessing the tenth year of the bitter victory in Kargil, and on an occasion when the government is apathetic towards its brave sons, the least the nation deserved was a reaffirmation that the sacrifices will not go in vain. The least the leaders could have done was to assure the country that India will not revive any contact with Pakistan till the terror camps are closed down and the wanted fugitives handed over to face justice in this country.

What we received was a self defeating approach towards national matters with no clarity and with different heads looking in different direction, which is worsened by the attempts to defend a mistake of monstrous magnitude whose damage only history will reveal.

The nation deserves an explanation