BJP’s pursuit for ‘Hindu Rashtra’ is perfect for Pakistan, vindication of its own existence  

The three provinces other than Sindh that constitute Pakistan were distinctly divided in their views on the partition of India.

Punjab with a strong UnionistCongress alliance and the North West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) with a sturdy KhudaiKhidmatgarCongress coalition displayed robust movements against the vivisection of the country, while the Khans of Kalat, rulers of Balochistan, wanted independence or a federal link with India.

Therefore, ever since Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer, hurriedly bequeathed a nation to the Muslim League, the rulers of Pakistan have been on an overdrive to convince their people about the justification of a separate homeland.

Fundamental to that narrative, assiduously fed to the masses, was that a united India would have essentially been a Hindu country and is as such even in its truncated state.

The Pakistani establishment uneasily twisted and turned at India settling into a multi-religious society, not to mention the fact that the Muslim population in India was larger than in Pakistan. In short, a secular India was most inconvenient for the controllers of Pakistan and a considerable hurdle in demonisingIndia as a Hindu republic to demonstrate the need for a Muslim nation.

During my tours of Pakistan, I unmistakably sensed government officials there were uncomfortable about Muslims figuring in Indian delegations. It unbundled the two-nation theory. The team opposite him squirmed when in 1997 Salman Haidar as foreign secretary headed Indian negotiators at bilateral talks. They would have been immensely happier had India sent an all-Hindu team.

Uninterrupted Congress governance in the first 30 years of independent India was an irritant for the powers in Pakistan. Then came a windfall with non-Congress parties amalgamating as Janata Party to form a government in 1977, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, hitherto of the Hindu chauvinist Jan Sangh (which in 1980 morphed into Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP) as external affairs minister.

Vajpayee had on the one hand worked as secretary to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, president of Hindu Mahasabha and founder of Jan Sangh, and on the other was a swayamsevak or volunteer of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

The politics of the Hindu Right in India desperately hankered for recognition, which it rarely received. It was also inclined towards populism and theatrics to attract attention. Vajpayee, though, was conscious of the need to practice rajdharma or the duty of rulers and the obligation to act in the interest of the country, rising above the narrow confines of his antecedence. In 1978 Pakistan was under the draconian martial law of General Zia-ul-Haq. Yet Vajpayee undertook a visit there. Pakistan was restless for revenge after Indira Gandhi’s Congress administration in 1971 dismembered East Pakistan from its western wing to pave the way for an independent Bangladesh. Indeed, relations were still comparatively in cold storage.

Vajpayee pursued a package of confidence building measures, such as stationing of journalists in each other’s capitals, liberalisation of visas and improvement in trade. In keeping with the Hindu Right’s tendency to exaggerate, he described his sojourn as a “historic visit”.

At a press conference in Islamabad, he said Kashmir could be discussed after normalisation of ties with a “view to solving the problem”. Vajpayee had described the 1972 Simla Pact after the previous year’s Indo-Pak war a stab in the nation’s back. Now he admitted to laughter from the audience: “I am trying to forget my past and I urge you to do the same.” He dangled hope before Pakistanis as none of the more circumspect Congress EAMs had. They read him as anxious to achieve and was therefore more receptive to their aspirations.

After Congress returned to power in 1980, another 18 years of disappointment ensued for Pakistan, before its claim of India being a Hindu country was rekindled. For Pakistanis a BJP-led government was a dream come true.

Not unexpectedly, Vajpayee as PM promptly ventured to Pakistan – dramatically crossing the border on a coach en route to Lahore – to sign a Declaration with his counterpart Nawaz Sharif. He did not take the precaution of checking if the omnipotent Pakistani armed forces were on board with it.

The army chief General Pervez Musharraf expressed his displeasure by declining to attend a reception for the Indian prime minister. Within weeks his troops infiltrated into Kargil and engaged India in an extended battle. BBC estimates at least 500 Indian soldiers sacrificed their lives to retake the heights.

Vajpayee persevered. He hosted Musharraf, who had ousted Sharif from office, and then revisited Pakistan when the khaki brigade were still in-charge of the country. The first meeting at Agra was infructuous. The second at Islamabad produced a joint statement.

No Congress prime minister has ever set foot on Pakistani soil when that country has had a military leader. Personifying the Hindu Right, Vajpayee was happy to overlook the previous villainy of Musharraf and dine with him.

The contrast between Vajpayee and his immediate Congress successor Manmohan Singh was – as the then foreign minister of Pakistan Khurshid Kasuri elucidated in his book Neither a Hawk nor a Dove – that the latter was presented with a reasonably acceptable deal on Kashmir. After intense Track-2 diplomacy led by the prime minister’s special envoy Satinder Lambah, a variation of a “line of peace” replacing the UN-mandated Line of Control in Kashmir proposed by Bhutto and found encouraging by T N Kaul, then Indian foreign secretary, at Simla, apparently obtained a nod from Vajpayee, according to Kasuri. Eventually after analyses from various angles, the matter was not formalised as Congress couldn’t trust Musharraf to keep his word.

Congress may also have been wary of a two-faced BJP withdrawing from a consensus after a treaty was sealed. While in opposition Jan Sangh and BJP have virulently opposed any accommodation with Pakistan. When in government under Vajpayee they were keen to prove themselves. The world waited with baited breath as the constellation of a military junta and Hindu hardliners – both firm opponents of rapprochement – was enjoined at the same juncture – 1999- 2004. But notwithstanding Vajpayee’s eagerness the twain was not to meet.

The biggest euphoria in Pakistan erupted when Narendra Modi headed a BJP absolute majority. There was celebration that the secular Congress had been defeated and Pakistan had been vindicated that India was a de facto Hindu republic; and an expectation that the parliamentary majority would enable Modi to push through concessions regardless of Congress’s position. Modi reinforced this impression by inviting Sharif for his swearing in and by dropping in at Lahore for a tete a tete during a first family wedding.

The difference between Vajpayee and Modi is that the former, who evolved as a right-wing pragmatist, appreciated what was good for his country; whereas Modi is solely self-centred and otherwise a prisoner of RSS’s misguided vision that Pakistan, a nuclear state, can be clobbered into submission.

By electing and now re-electing a Hindu extremist like Modi, India has fallen into the Pakistani establishment’s hands. Wittingly or unwittingly Indians have shed the cloak of secularism and granted victory to the military-mandarin-mullah combine, who still live in the slight hope that Modi’s singular lack of attainment in six years could compel him to be ultimately conciliatory towards his foe.

This for the time being appears unlikely as this will vitiate ties with his Hindutva vote bank. But the urge to find a place in history could yet be hard to resist.