Tony Blair does not look very British to us Indians. Instead of a stiff upper lip, he has a thrusting jaw. Instead of playing cricket, he plays the guitar. John Major used to be much more British. He had an upper lip so thick you could rest your case on it. And he played cricket. He also didn’t make any fuss. On his last visit to India, John Major said a bit about British industry, enjoyed the winter sun and went home. He refused to try and change the world.
Cherie Blair began her Indian visit on a Mother Teresa note, sharing lunch with some needy children of Bangalore. There was a time during the glory days of the British Raj when Indian Maharajahs had to hide their family jewels each time they invited Lord and Lady Viceroy over for dinner, for if Madam hinted that something was lovely you had to hand it over as "gift". Those days are long over, but having lunch with needy children might be going too far in the other direction. It was much better when Cherie Blair visited a Nandi temple in the afternoon, got a massage in the evening, and picked up a dress from tribals for a bargain of twenty dollars. This is far more the kind of thing we want visitors to do. The priests of the temple she visited were also very grateful, because the place got cleaned up. Twenty municipal employees worked for two days to make the house of the lord good enough for Mrs. Blair’s nostrils. It has never been so clean in its history.
But Blair does have the world on his agenda; he came to the subcontinent to save us all, not just to save a temple. Whether he has been assigned to do so, or whether it is voluntary, or whether it is an implicit statement of Britain’s renewed role in world affairs, the fact is that Blair is doing all the heavy lifting on the subcontinent. There are expectations that President George Bush will come on a grand tour of South Asia before the summer is out. President Bush has every right to a triumph in the only proper nation conquered by the United States since the World War II. If, that is, the victors can find Mulla Omar and Osama Bin Laden by then. Last heard Mulla Omar had escaped from the clutches of a superpower on a motorcycle, possibly of Japanese make, since Japanese vehicles were the preferred means of travel by the Taleban. The Americans have begun distributing leaflets to the Afghan masses showing Osama Bin Laden in a suit and horribly-knotted tie, with the kind of shave and hairstyle that is advertised in small town barbershops all across the subcontinent. The leaflet also calls Osama a coward who has betrayed his followers. Personally speaking, nothing would disguise Osama better than a shave. He could drop in for a cup of tea to my office and I would not have the gumption to phone the CIA and collect my $20 million reward. But Bush will seek peaceful solutions to this knotty region as eagerly as he wanted military ones in Afghanistan.
Did Tony Blair’s hop, skip and jump through Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan succeed? By the time he left the temperature on the subcontinent had dropped to more acceptable levels. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and President Pervez Musharraf even shook hands in Katmandu while Tony Blair was in India. Vajpayee later described this as a courtesy call, but one can hardly overrate the value of courtesy in Indo-Pak relations.
Tony Blair’s strategy on the subcontinent was a neat one. From India he sent a positive signal to Pakistan, by "accidentally" suggesting to the media that Pakistan had a strong case on Kashmir. From Pakistan he sent an even stronger signal to India; that India had a non-negotiable demand on terrorism.
When push comes to shove, Tony Blair and George Bush are likely to stick to both these points. The biggest favor that President Pervez Musharraf can do to himself is to bite the terrorist bullet, as it were.
This column is being written before his much-awaited speech (and this is one speech that will be heard as closely in India as it is in Pakistan), but if he follows up lip service with specific action, the environment in South Asia could change radically. There is sufficient reason to believe that London and Washington have done some thinking about the cancer on the subcontinent, and would like to put into place the opening moves of a settlement on Kashmir. That is an unusual statement to make, but these are unusual times. This is totally dependent on what Pakistan is able to deliver on terrorism. The skeptical view in India is that Pakistan might be ready to hand over those involved in terrorism in Punjab, and take a more negative view of those involved in Kashmir. This will not travel. It is the use of violence in an effort to drive India out of Kashmir that is the substantive issue.
The real problem with this problem is that it has become a gross part of the emotional baggage, a question of ours and theirs, victory and defeat, all or nothing. No one takes a cool look at realistic options, or examines the price that is being paid for this dispute. Perhaps no one in power can afford to. The risk of breaking from the conventional mold is too high; electoral defeat in India and perhaps a worse fate in Pakistan. Leave along the emotional baggage of history, even the immediate past can become a trap. Logic suggests that President Musharraf should tell India, perhaps through his televised speech: "We broke our talks in Agra over disagreement on cross-border terrorism. All right. Pakistan has joined the new international convention on terrorism. We will sign on that clause now. Ask an independent judge to determine how solid the evidence is against the twenty persons Delhi has demanded, and gets its judgment implemented in thirty days. On the thirty-first day let us start talking about all our problems, of which Kashmir is the most difficult of them, and therefore deserves priority." Will this happen? Somehow I think not.
For five decades the favorite game of the subcontinent has been brinkmanship. Occasionally one side or the other has fallen on its face, but a little time, a little dust wiped off, and we go back to our old ways. Pakistan tripped up in 1965, sending raiders once again to do what they had failed to do in 1947; and fell heavily in 1971. India was unnecessarily aggressive with Operation Brasstacks; and got caught sleeping before Kargil before it smartly pulled itself together. But without anyone quite noticing it, the ante has been rising. Terrorist attacks that once stopped in the Valley have reached Delhi, and a military confrontation that was restricted to a part of the border has spread to the whole of it.
Tony Blair had barely left for home, then the war rhetoric resumed. Maybe there should always be a foreign guest wandering somewhere on the subcontinent; it keeps us more courteous. The coming week is probably safe, since the Chinese premier is on Indian soil for a week. On the other hand, Vajpayee could well remember that the Chinese launched a sharp attack on our good friends of the time, Vietnam, when he was on an important visit to Beijing as India’s foreign minister under Morarji Desai. But Colin Powell is treating jet lag in Islamabad and Delhi on his way to Tokyo this month, so that should keep fingers off the trigger till he departs.
Is the rest of the world more worried about war in the subcontinent than we are? Probably, yes. Because the rest of the world sees war for what it really is, without sentiment.
When President Bush does come to India and Pakistan he will want to identify the contours of a new equation in South Asia. Any visit by him will be meaningless without this. President Bill Clinton’s visit to India, and the Vajpayee’s to Washington that preceded it, made one vital and last contribution. It corrected the tilt toward Pakistan that has been a consistent element of American policy from the 1950s. Now that the scales are more even, America is better positioned to offer advice, if not to dictate direction. Neither India nor Pakistan will listen to dictation, but neither will reject advice out of hand either.
Surely the only way out of an increasingly dangerous impasse is to return to the table, and to talk.
President Musharraf enjoys a regular game of tennis. He should know the game well enough to realize that the ball is in his court. He may or may not know this, but Tony Blair plays tennis too. It would not be very courteous, would it, to make Blair return to the subcontinent to pick up that ball.
