The Longest August (46 page)

Within days, Maulana Azhar surfaced in Karachi. Surrounded by bodyguards in camouflage-colored clothes and brandishing automatic rifles, he delivered an incendiary speech to ten thousand supporters assembled in front of a central Karachi mosque. “I have come back and I will not rest in peace until Kashmir is liberated,” he declared.
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The Musharraf government had stated earlier that the hijackers would be arrested if they stepped into Pakistan. But there was no effort to detain Azhar or stop him from addressing a rally.

This hijack drama, the longest in the world to date, pushed Indo-Pakistan relations to their lowest ebb in peace times at the turn of the century.

15: General Musharraf
Buckles Under US Pressure

The strengthening alliance of Musharraf-ruled Pakistan with the Taliban government in Afghanistan caused grave concern in Washington. President Bill Clinton was also well aware of Musharraf's masterminding of the military campaign in the Kargil region of the Indian Kashmir and his reckless preparation for a nuclear attack on India. The general had then capped his dangerously surreptitious actions with toppling the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif.

Though Pakistan's withdrawal to the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir was completed by the end of July 1999, the deaths of India's security personnel caused by the insurgents in Indian Kashmir more than doubled from the previous year's figure, to 425 in 1999. The loss of life among the armed militants, however, was almost three times as much.
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The long, tortuous cease-fire line passing through assorted terrains had proved immune to being sealed thoroughly by India, which was at the receiving end of the violence committed by young Kashmiris who, after crossing the LoC, had received training and arms in Pakistani Kashmir.

It was this state of affairs that led Clinton to call the LoC arguably “the most dangerous place in the world today”
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as he prepared for a weeklong trip to Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan in mid-March 2000.

Five Days in India, Five Hours in Pakistan

After a brief visit to Dhaka, Clinton arrived in Delhi on March 20 and spent five days in the country, touring Agra to see the Taj Mahal, the pink
city of Jaipur, the village of Nayala, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. His time in India equaled the combined total spent earlier by three US presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. Wherever he went, he witnessed Clinton-mania, which pleased not only him but also his daughter, Chelsea, and his mother-in-law, Dorothy Rodham, who accompanied him.

At the end of a series of meetings with top Indian officials and a speech to the joint session of Parliament, he signed agreements on commerce and science and technology while acknowledging India's potential as an information technology superpower. Along with Indian premier Atal Bihari Vajpayee he issued a statement spelling out a new “vision” for Indo-American ties. He spoke of institutionalizing mutual dialogue up to the highest level and continuing talks on the nuclear issue. At the joint press conference, Vajpayee said, “We have a problem of cross-border terrorism, but there is no threat of war.” During his visit to Nayala, ten miles from Jaipur, Clinton got a glimpse of democracy at work at the village level in India when he talked to elected representatives, some of them women in colorful Rajasthani dresses. The overall result of Clinton's extended sojourn in India was to raise the level of Delhi-Washington engagement to a higher level, particularly when compared to Islamabad-Washington ties.
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This became dramatically evident within hours of Clinton's departure for Islamabad. Arriving at the Mumbai airport on the morning of March 25, he walked toward the Presidential Air Force One C-17, giving the impression of planning to board this plane. He paused briefly to bid farewell to Richard Celeste, the US ambassador to India. But then he did not make the expected move. Air Force One left the airport without Clinton, who, unknown to onlookers, had sneaked into the adjoining small, unmarked Gulfstream III, which took off a little while later.

Clinton played this hide-and-seek game at the insistence of his Secret Service. Its chief had warned him that Pakistan's security forces were so thoroughly penetrated by terrorists that extremist groups, possibly Al Qaida, would be privy to his travel route from their sympathizers within the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and would attempt to shoot down the presidential plane.

The Secret Service's ruse did not stop at the safe arrival of the Clinton-bearing Gulfstream III at Islamabad's Chaklala airport. On its way to the
office of Pakistani president Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, Clinton's motorcade stopped near an underpass, where he changed cars.
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To leave nothing to chance, the Pakistani government emptied out the center of its capital on the eve of his arrival. It was in the midst of this fortified ghost town that Clinton addressed Pakistanis on TV, a precondition for his visit, which would last all of five hours.

“Now we are in the dawn of a new century, and a new and changing world has come into view,” Clinton began. “Clearly, the absence of democracy makes it harder for people to move ahead. . . . Democracy cannot develop if it is constantly uprooted before it has a chance to firmly take hold. . . . The answer to flawed democracy is not to end democracy, but to improve it.” Clinton then turned to terrorism. “We [Americans and Pakistanis] have both suffered enough to know that no grievance, no cause, no system of beliefs can ever justify the deliberate killing of innocents,” he stated. “Those who bomb bus stations, target embassies or kill those who uphold the law are not heroes. They are our common enemies, for their aim is to exploit painful problems, not to resolve them.” Next he focused on the region. “For India and Pakistan this must be a time of restraint, for respect for the Line of Control, and renewed lines of communication,” he said. “There is no military solution to Kashmir. International sympathy, support and intervention cannot be won by provoking a bigger, bloodier conflict. On the contrary; sympathy and support will be lost. And no matter how great the grievance, it is wrong to support attacks against civilians across the Line of Control.” As for the United States, “We cannot and will not mediate or resolve the dispute in Kashmir. Only you and India can do that, through dialogue.”
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To emphasize his strong disapproval of Musharraf's military role, he ensured that his handshake of the dictator was not recorded by cameras. During his one-on-one meeting with Musharraf he raised the issues of terrorism and a road map for democracy in Pakistan but found him non-committal.

Then, to the surprise of Clinton and many others, the Supreme Court of Pakistan stepped in to dictate its own road map. In mid-May the twelve-member bench unanimously coupled its justification of the coup on the grounds of corruption, maladministration, and the faltering economy with an instruction to Chief Executive Musharraf to hold elections within three years from the date of the coup—that is, October 12, 2002.
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Delhi-Washington Bonding Softens Musharraf

During his state visit to Washington in mid-September Vajpayee warmed up relations between the largest and the most powerful democracies of the globe. He addressed a joint session of Congress. The next day he was received by Clinton with full state honors on the South Lawn of the White House. In his talk with his host he did not veer from his previous stances on terrorism (“India was a victim of cross-frontier terrorism from Pakistan”), reviving the Lahore Declaration process (“It was up to Pakistan to stop aiding Kashmiri insurgents as a precondition for reconciliation”), and the nuclear agenda (“India had no attention of subscribing to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which the US Senate had rejected in 1999”). “I took the bus to Lahore, but the bus went to Kargil,” repeated Vajpayee at every opportunity.
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In his public utterances, Clinton was relentless in his praise of India. He was more eloquent about the virtues of Mohandas Gandhi than Vajpayee was when the latter unveiled a bronze image of the seminaked, striding Mahatma, armed with a long walking stick, on the triangular island along Massachusetts Avenue across the road from the Indian embassy. Mahatma Gandhi thus became the first South Asian personage to be so honored in the American capital.

The convergence between India and the United States went beyond geopolitics. The service India's software companies provided to US corporations to immunize their computer systems from crashing on January 1, 2000, opened a new chapter in the Indo-American commercial-industrial arena. And the 6.5 percent expansion in India's GDP in fiscal 1999 showed the country breaking out of its traditional growth band of 3 to 5 percent. This encouraged US companies to invest in India.

Critics who argued that Vajpayee's visit to Washington at the very end of the Clinton administration was badly timed missed the point that the burgeoning economic links between the two nations were unrelated to the tenure of an American president.

Among those who fretted about the ever-tightening concord between Delhi and Washington was Musharraf. By establishing the National Accountability Bureau, headed by Lieutenant General Syed Mohammad Amjad, Musharraf had cracked down hard on corruption. That won him much popular acclaim and helped him consolidate his power. He was now ready for a meeting with the Indian prime minister. His chance would have come if the biennial meeting of the South Asian Association for
Regional Cooperation (SAARC) had taken place in 2000. Because of Vajpayee's refusal (expressed privately) to share the SAARC platform with dictator Musharraf, the biennial conference was postponed.

It was only in mid-March 2001 that an opening appeared for Musharraf because of the South Asia visit by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. After meeting Musharraf and his foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, in Islamabad on March 11, Annan explained to journalists that since UN resolutions on Kashmir were not passed under the self-enforcing Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, these needed the cooperation of the concerned parties for their implementation. He urged Pakistan and India to start a fresh dialogue on Kashmir.
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On arriving in Delhi four days later, Annan said, “You and Pakistan have too much in shared heritage by way of history, as well as family and cultural ties, not to resolve your differences. . . . It is time to begin healing the wounds.” Following his meeting with Vajpayee, he stressed the need for Indo-Pakistan dialogue on the dispute over Kashmir.
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Since the Vajpayee-Sharif summit had been held in Pakistan, it was the Indian leader's turn to invite his Pakistani counterpart to India. They agreed on a three-day visit starting July 15.

Flexible Musharraf Meets Inflexible Vajpayee

A few weeks before the summit, Pakistan's president Tarar resigned in favor of Chief Executive Musharraf. That was why President Musharraf arrived at the Delhi airport in civilian dress to be welcomed by his Indian counterpart, K. R. Narayanan. For the fifty-eight-year-old Musharraf, to return to the city of his birth after fifty-four years was an intensely moving experience. When he visited his ancestral home in the Daryaganj neighborhood, called Nehra Wali Haveli, he had a tearful reunion with an old servant who remembered him as a little boy.

Musharraf became the first Pakistani leader to pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi. After laying a wreath at the site containing the Mahatma's ashes, he and his chubby, short-haired wife, Sehba, elegantly dressed in an embroidered purple
salwar kameez
, showered rose petals at the memorial—an honoring ritual common among Pakistanis and North Indians. “Never has the requirement of his ideals been so severely felt than today, especially in the context of India-Pakistan relations,” he wrote in the visitors' book. “May his soul rest in peace.”
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Musharraf did his best to live down his reputation as the mastermind of the failed Kargil campaign in Kashmir. He repeatedly asserted that his government accepted the Shimla and Lahore Declarations. “We must not allow the past to dictate the future” became his refrain in the way “I took the bus to Lahore, but the bus went to Kargil” had become Vajpayee's in Washington.

Pakistan's high commissioner in Delhi, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, invited leaders of the major political parties of India as well as Kashmir, including the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), to a reception at his residence in the evening. Ignoring his hosts' advice, Musharraf held a closed-door meeting with APHC leaders. But, to his credit, in the several statements he made off and on the record, he never mentioned APHC or the UN resolutions on Kashmir. In the hour-long informal tête-à-tête he had with invited Indian journalists, academics, and former diplomats before the reception, he came across as an unpretentious, affable man—and a professional staff officer who spoke clearly, being largely unfamiliar with the diplomatic niceties and obfuscations. “My English is not very good,” he remarked at one point. “So if India has problems with the phrase ‘Kashmir dispute,' let us just call it an ‘issue' or a ‘problem.'” On the contentious subject of whether or not “Kashmir is the core issue,” he said, “Let us find another word, another adjective. What I mean is that this is the [only] issue on which we have fought wars.”
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In short, Musharraf was being flexible, whereas earlier in the day in his meetings with Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh he had been presented with a list of cross-frontier acts of terrorism.

The next day the scene shifted to Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, the gem of the Indo-Islamic architecture and a shining symbol of the apogee of Mughal power in the Indian subcontinent. The two sessions of talks were described by the host's spokesperson as “very constructive.” The following day was spent on finding common ground and preparing a version acceptable to both sides. But after a delay of nine hours, in which several draft proposals were exchanged, the two delegations failed to produce a document that Vajpayee and Musharraf were willing to sign.

The Agra summit ended in smoke. Its failure set it apart from the ones in Shimla (1972) and Lahore (1999), but there was another major difference: the coverage by the media. In 1972 the Indian government mono­polized broadcasting. It was the same with Pakistan in 1999. Two
years later in Agra, thanks to the proliferation of privately owned broadcasting companies in India, there was a massive presence of invasive electronic media with a battery of TV cameras and roving commentators at work throughout the day and well into the night. Given the cutthroat competition in the industry, the newsreaders and field reporters tried frantically to engender exciting headlines for each successive half-hour news bulletin with the endless—and often meaningless—lead of “Breaking News.” In this cornucopia of exposure, Pakistanis got an ample chance to express their viewpoint on Indian TV channels eager to feed their viewers with something unfamiliar. The Pakistanis marshaled competent spokespersons. In the absence of studio editing, they offered coherent arguments—a refreshing change for Indian viewers.