Diplomats don’t talk straight. If two leaders had fought like cat and dog at a summit, we’d be told that they had a “free and frank exchange with both leaders conveying their concerns to each other”. If they had a friendly meeting, we would be told that the two underlined (lately it has become ‘underscored’) the historic ties between the two countries and highlighted the progress made by both countries in deepening their special relationship…. As if presidents and prime ministers go to summits carrying marker pens and highlighters!
Jaswant Singh, as foreign minister, made obfuscation an art. When the 2001 Agra summit collapsed and a fuming Pervez Musharraf took a fast plane to Islamabad, Jaswant got the spokesperson to tell the scribes waiting past midnight: “We embarked on a voyage, but we didn’t reach the destination.” Period.
Funnier still was an earlier one. When Bill Clinton departed for Islamabad after concluding a much-feted visit to India, Jaswant got the foreign office to say, “The president departed in a westerly direction.” Having just fought the Kargil war, India and Pakistan were not on talking terms those days, and Jaswant didn’t want his diplomats to even mention the P-word.
India hasn’t been talking to Pakistan again now, since Uri, Pathankot, Pulwama and Balakot. But thank God, S. Jaishankar talks straight. When asked last week if he would go to Islamabad for the Shanghai gang’s summit mid-October, he said: “I will be there for a multilateral event…. I am not going there to discuss India-Pakistan relations.”
Simple! There won’t be any bilateral with Pakistan. In case anyone still didn’t get it, he added: “I am going there to be a good member of the SCO. Since I am a courteous and civil person, I will behave myself accordingly." Meaning, he will attend the SCO summit, make his speech there, talk about the weather during tea breaks, and come home before nightfall like a good boy.
Other SCO members should be happy. The summit would get all the limelight, unlike the SAARC meetings of yore where India-Pak pull-aside talks overshadowed all the pompous speeches made by presidents and prime ministers at the main summit. So much so, Sri Lanka’s Chandrika Kumaratunga once openly said that India-Pakistan issues were hijacking SAARC. It is another matter that no soul elsewhere in the world would have bothered about SAARC but for all the India-Pakistan tiffs and talks.
We still don’t know this time. Nothing prevents Jaishankar’s counterpart Muhammad Ishaq Dar from just pulling him aside by the elbow during a tea-break and discussing the weather over Murree, the pollution over Delhi or the polls in Jammu and Kashmir.
Being the good guest, Jaishankar might even oblige. He can wear a confident smile, and tell the curious neighbour (all neighbours are curious) that we had a bit of a difficulty in one of our northern territories but are sorting it out. We have just held an election there, people have voted overwhelmingly, and reposed their faith in the Indian constitutional system.
And talks with Pakistan? India has maintained that terror and talks can’t go together. But since the scale of terror seems to have come down for whatever reason, can’t we take another chance? A.B. Vajpayee did it in 2004. He, too, had steadfastly hung to no-talks-till-terror-stops, but when he got an assurance that Pak-controlled lands wouldn’t be used for launching terror, he started talking.
No harm in giving talks another chance. We have nothing to lose but a few words. Moreover, we claim to be much stronger now than we were in 2004.
prasannan@theweek.in