The death of Brajesh Mishra, India’s first national security adviser under former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, brings home the first rule of politics like never before: If you don’t shape your own chances, you might not get a second one.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who sometimes used Mishra’s good offices during his first tenure (2004-2009), especially to make overtures towards Beijing, must be rueing the day he let the opportunity to visit Pakistan slip in March 2007.
For those who came in late to the story, the back-channel between Satinder Lambah and Tariq Aziz, key aide to then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, had resulted in a four-point “settlement” of the Kashmir issue, which basically allowed Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control to take joint management of their resources. The idea was that, in time, as they got to know each other better, the Kashmiris could decide how they wanted to deal with their political future.
It was an incredible idea and it confirmed the distance Pakistan had travelled from its insistence that the UN Resolution of 1949 be the only instrument that could decide Kashmir’s future. As the most powerful man in Pakistan, Musharraf didn’t need anybody else’s permission to deliver. Democracy? What democracy?
For the Indian side, this was the best option ever. There would be no giving up of territory and no loss of political control. If Kashmiris wanted to decide how to run their forests and their streams and their tourist reserves, and if this was the price to pay for the end to the decades-old rebellion inside Jammu & Kashmir, well then, how much better could it get?
Except, Singh kept waiting for that elusive perfect opportunity to go to Pakistan. In the bargain, he missed a shot at creating history. Musharraf was soon bogged down in domestic turmoil which ended with him making a deal with the Americans to allow Benazir Bhutto back into the country in late 2007. She was killed only a few weeks later. When Zardari and his Pakistan People’s Party returned to power in early 2008, they were certainly not going to take up where their sworn enemy, Musharraf, had left off.
Singh lost five precious years in the bargain, but it seems he’s readying to make a final shot. Zardari & Co has to announce elections by December for them to be held around February-March 2013. When External Affairs Minister S M Krishna was in Islamabad in early September, he is believed to have communicated to them the need for action on the Mumbai attacks.
Well it seems now that that is certainly happening. On Saturday in Rawalpindi, home to the headquarters of the powerful Pakistan army, five prosecution witnesses testified before Justice Chaudhry Habib-ur Rehman’s anti-terrorism court.
According to PTI, the witnesses gave the court details of the training camps where the attackers had prepared for the assault on Mumbai. The witnesses included intelligence operatives and officials of the Federal Investigative Agency (FIA). The case has been adjourned till October 13.
Only a day before, during a public hearing organised by the Senate (upper house) standing committee on defence and defence production, former FIA chief Tariq Pervez Khosa said FIA officials had uncovered two Lashkar-e-Toiba training camps in Sindh province — in Thatta and in Karachi, the provincial capital — that were used by the militants for training for the Mumbai attacks.
So what’s going on? Is the Pakistani political class at last taking stock and picking up the nerve to put its hand inside the snakepit? All these decades the Pakistan army was the master puppeteer, pulling the strings of various groups, creating bands of terrorists only to unleash them against India (the “proxy war” inside Kashmir) as well as against the government in Afghanistan, and playing off these groups against each other.
But as clashes between the terrorists and the Pakistan army continue and Zardari’s government continues to push back and assert political control, Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani seems to be postponing the confrontation. Interestingly, things on the trade and economic front began to only move when the Pakistan army dropped its reservations to more open trade with India.
Can Singh still make it to Pakistan before December? If Zardari can pull off some real action on progress in Mumbai, anything is possible. After all, a Manmohan Singh visit will only boost Zardari’s own chances of staying alive in the next polls.
Until then, though, it might be a good thing for the prime minister not to count his chickens. Focussing elsewhere, for example with Bangladesh, might be a good idea. The winter session of Parliament must be prepared for a signature on the Land Boundary Agreement as well as on the Teesta waters.
If the prime minister waits and waits yet again for the perfect time and opportunity to show itself, his thunder might just be stolen by an impending visit by President Pranab Mukherjee to Dhaka. That would leave the PM holding two birds — and no stone to kill even one of them.
