Manmohan Singh is desperate to befriend Pakistan, believing that this achievement will be his lasting legacy as Prime Minister. His endorsement of Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani as a `man of peace' has outraged the nation because Pakistan remains belligerent and has refused to act against perpetrators of terror targetted at India Is Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani a man of peace? This is the kind of question asked — if at all — in Kaun Banega Crorepati at the very beginning of the programme to help contestants kick-off their five-crore -rupee dream with a bang.
No one will get the answer wrong. The Prime Minister of India, Mr Manmohan Singh should be thankful that he will not be in KBC’ s hot seat, because he would have cut a sorry figure by picking the option that says: ‘Definitely yes’ — and been booted out of the competition.
Following a recent meeting of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation nations, Mr Singh’ s compliment to Mr Gilani must have taken the latter by surprise. It is the sort of praise that the rulers in Islamabad usually most expect from their all-weather friends like China and least from a country like India which they have tormented for decades through proxy wars using terrorism as the medium. The jury is still out on what was wrong with the Indian Prime Minister when he made the remark. He did try to qualify that silly endorsement less than 48 hours later, explaining to a puzzled media that he was prepared to “trust” the Pakistani leadership on the commitments it has been making to bring terror suspects to justice, but would also “verify” those commitments. For good measure he asserted that he was not putting “blind faith” in any Pakistani leader.
Now, there is a problem here. It’s not one of diplomacy but logic. If you trust someone to be a “man of peace” you cannot be also simultaneously verifying the intentions of the person. If you do so there is no trust. We have been holding Islamabad responsible for not walking the talk, not just since 26/11 but also earlier.
That has been the official position, unchanged until now, because the Pakistani leadership — whether it is the democratically elected Government which Mr Gilani heads or his Army which calls the shots or that country’s Inter-Services Intelligence which is allegedly complicit in the various offensives against New Delhi — has been duplicitous in its conduct on India’s concerns regarding cross-border terrorism. What change in Islamabad’s atti
tude did Mr Singh then notice for him to laud the Pakistani Prime Minister? He must share it with us.
A charitable explanation for Mr Singh’s statement can be that he was being funny.
Every head of a Government has the right to be funny. Ronald Reagan, even as President of the United States, was full of fun; President of France Nicolas Sarkozy, as we all know, is a fun-loving person. Closer home, leaders like Mr HD Deve Gowda and Charan Singh were in their quaint ways truly funny as Prime Ministers. But there is some difficulty in associating ‘fun’ with the
bureaucratic Manmohan Singh. Unless, of course, we accept that his idea of fun is to preside over scams crafted and implemented by his Ministers and prominent Congress members in his full knowledge and pretend not to know of them. Or to take digs at senior opposition leader LK Advani and call him the “Prime Minister in waiting for ever” — the latter remark recycled ad nauseam. But Mr Singh would not see much fun in the retort that it is better to be a Prime Minister-in-waiting than be a puppet Prime Minister.
But, on a serious note, the Indian
Prime Minister cannot be casual when dealing with Islamabad. Mr Gilani was the Prime Minister of Pakistan when the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai took place. He has done precious little in the three years gone by to bring to justice those whose complicity in that terror strike has been established through tomes of evidence New Delhi has provided Mr Gilani. The accused are based in Pakistan and are Pakistani nationals.
Some of them are roaming free. Under Mr Gilani’s leadership Islamabad has consistently stonewalled all Indian efforts to sincerely address the issue. Led by Mr Gilani,
Islamabad has been working hard to sabotage India’s role in the future of Afghanistan. Militants continue to cross the Line of Control from the Pakistani side without much resistance into India and create havoc. These and several instances are sufficient to demonstrate Mr Gilani’s lack of intent.
But Mr Manmohan Singh does not see the obvious. Instead, he has the knack of suddenly summoning irrelevant remarks like a magician brings out a rabbit from his cap.
Recall, for example, the flutter he created with his completely uncalled for statement
on Bangladeshi residents. By some quirky calculation he concluded that 25 per cent of Bangladeshi citizens were “anti-India”. By way of explanation he added that this was so because a majority of that country’s population supported Jamaat-e-Islami, which was anti-India. That is excellent reasoning except for the fact that never has the Jamaat-e-Islami secured more than 10 per cent of the total votes polled in elections in Bangladesh. That alone should show the low levels of acceptance the organisation has among voters in Bangladesh.
Amazingly, Mr Singh’s faux pas came at a time when India-Bangladesh relations were looking up after a long time, with a Government in place there that is eager to establish closer and more friendly ties with New Delhi. For reasons which are obvious and need no elaboration here, India should be working overtime to strengthen those relations and not sour them with the sort of statement that Mr Singh made. The fact that it was an ‘off the record’ and ‘off the cuff’ remark — clarifications that his spin doctors desperately offered to undo the damage — has done little to salvage his image.
What can explain the Indian Prime Minister’s obsession to be in Islamabad’s good books? It cannot be a burning desire to see that the two countries end their decades’ long hostility and live as good neighbours, because that will not happen as a result of Mr Singh’s undeserving praise of his Pakistani counterpart. There can be only one explanation: Mr Singh is keen to end his tenure as a ‘man of peace’ himself, a dove that flew into the hawk’s nest to extend an olive branch. However, leaders are remembered less by what they supposedly tried to do and more by what they achieved. On that front the Prime Minister is woefully short of material.
His admirers, of which there are not too many left, would want the country to believe that Mr Singh is taking huge risks for the sake of peace in the sub-continent.
For the moment, let the admirers be and ask the Congress, of which he is an illustrious member, whether it shares his assessment that Mr Gilani is a man of peace. For that matter, is that also the opinion of the UPA Government?
