MUSHARRAF AFTER AGRA: two halos
by B.Raman
Before Gen.Pervez Musharraf, the self-reinstated Chief
of the Army Staff (COAS), the self-styled Chief Executive and the
self-appointed President of Pakistan came to India on July 14 for the
undeserving honours showered on him by the Government of India and for the
summit at Agra with our Prime Minister, Mr. A.B.Vajpayee, he was under
daily attack by the Pakistani political and religious leaders, many
analysts and non-governmental personalities for messing up the economy,
illegally assuming the office of the President after unceremoniously
sacking the duly-elected incumbent, Mr.Mohammed Rafique Tarar, for reasons
and in a manner not provided for in the Constitution and for dissolving
the Senate, the upper House of Parliament, which, under the Constitution,
is a permanent body not subject to dissolution.
After his return from Agra, he is the toast of
Pakistan---at least for the present. All his misdeeds and
non-performance as the Chief Executive have been forgotten and the only
talk in Pakistan today is how he upheld Pakistan's national interest on
the Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) issue in Agra and converted his summit
with Mr.Vajpayee on Indo-Pakistan relations into a summit on the future of
J & K and brought to the attention of the world the so-called voice of
the Kashmiris.
Many Pakistani analysts like to think that he achieved
at Agra against the leaders of the Government of India what he failed to
achieve on the Kargil heights against the Indian army in 1999---
international understanding of the real dimensions of the J & K issue
and of the role of Pakistan as the "spokesman" of the Kashmiris.
By doing so, they think, he has earned back in the eyes
of ordinary Pakistanis, the halo as the saviour of Pakistan which he had
lost a few months after he seized power on October 12,1999, and an
additional halo as the determined upholder of the so-called Kashmiri
cause.
Pakistanis have been dazzled by the felicity with which
he mesmerised the Indian media and almost made them and, through them,
large sections of the Indian public, his admirers and even objective
allies in his espousal of the so-called cause of the Kashmiris.
The unwise action of the Government of India in
selecting Agra as the venue of the summit and the visuals of a leader of
Pakistan against the backdrop of Mughal splendour, an honour accorded to
no other Pakistani leader by any other Government since 1947, evoked in
them nostalgic memories of the days when the Mughals ruled India and made
them long for the restoration of those days again.
Even jihadi organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba
(LeT), which had opposed Musharraf's visit to India, have nothing but
praise for what they regard as his achievement in Agra and feel that he
brought meaning to their dream of one day restoring Mughal rule in India
and hoisting the Mughal flag in the Red Fort.
Next to Musharraf, the toast of Pakistan after Agra are
our Prime Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh, the Foreign Minister, and the
Indian electronic media, particularly the STAR NEWS, but for whom they
believe, Musharraf could not have achieved the projection he did.
Mr.Vajpayee is being hailed as a statesman, as a man of
vision, as a man with the moral courage allegedly to admit that India
cannot solve the J&K issue without Pakistani co-operation, as a man of
accommodation. So is Mr.Jaswant Singh, who is projected as
reasonable, pragmatic, as one who got along well with Abdus Sattar, the
Pakistani Foreign Minister etc.
The Indian electronic media in general and the STAR NEWS
in particular are hailed for providing Musharraf with an opportunity to
appeal to Indian public opinion directly over the head of the Indian
leaders and motivate it to exercise pressure on the Indian leaders for
showing accommodation on the J&K issue.
Even detractors of Musharraf in the past such as Ayaz
Amir, the columnist, have come back from Agra impressed by the performance
of the General and by the ease with which (as seen by them) he established
an empathy with sections of Indian public opinion.
Wrote Ayaz in the "Dawn" of July 20: "The
glumness should lighten. The gods were favourable to us in Agra and
it was Pakistan which basked in the limelight. Never in recent times
was the word Kashmir mentioned as much on television or in newspapers in
India as during the summit. The joint declaration may have foundered
on the need for a mutually acceptable compromise. But for the army
of journalists who had gathered in Agra there was little doubt as to what
the sticking point--call it core issue or whatever-- had been. How
does this not redound to Pakistan's advantage?
"Musharraf himself, let's not deny him the credit, was the star
attraction of the summit. He obviously got on well with Mr Vajpayee, a
circumstance behind the personal chemistry that by all accounts the two
leaders developed. He left no one in any doubt that Kashmir topped
the Pakistani agenda. And in his breakfast meeting with Indian
newspaper editors, by general consent he came across as impressive.
"This event, recorded only by PTV, was not meant for immediate
telecast. But Prannoy Roy of New Delhi Television (the organization
which does news programming for Star News), sensing the opportunity,
persuaded Pakistani officials to lend him the only copy of the
recording. The result was a media coup for Star News and something
which dominated the Agra skyline for the rest of the day."
Pakistani analysts claim that Musharraf would have come
home from Agra with an agreement far superior to the Lahore Declaration of
1999 and the Shimla Accord of 1972 in protecting the interests of Pakistan
and projecting the interests of the Kashmiris but for one Indian
leader--Mr.L.K.Advani, the Indian Home Minister. He is abused as the
"hidden hand", which came in the way of the signing of the Joint
Declaration, as an incorrigible hawk, as the leader of the so-called
hardliners and prisoners of the past in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
as the wrecker of Agra.
Ayaz wrote: "How were the talks scuppered? Quite simply because
Vajpayee himself and his cabinet hard-liners (led of course by Mr Advani)
were operating on different wavelengths. The hard-liners wanted to
give nothing on Kashmir and even though Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh
twice agreed on the Kashmir clauses of the draft joint declaration, on
both occasions he, and his Prime Minister, were vetoed by the hawks.
Which, as it takes little imagination to see, is not the best way of
conducting any kind of negotiations. Where in the world during
high-level negotiations are the principals subject to constant
cross-checking and blocking by more influential figures in the wings? But
that's what happened at Agra.
"This circumstance alone testifies to one of the inherent flaws in
this summit. While Musharraf was master of his show, and in a
position to call the shots, Vajpayee, for all his pre-eminence as a
leader, found his hands tied by his BJP hard-liners. On screen many
Indian presenters kept asking the question: can Musharraf be trusted? In
the end, it was the Indian government, especially its Advani hard-liners,
which could not be trusted to sustain the momentum generated by this
visit.
"When the crunch came Vajpayee's poetic vision was helpless before
the cold-eyed narrowism of his hard-line colleagues. If he had his
eyes on history, Advani probably had his on the provincial elections which
are to come in Uttar Pradesh. That's how Agra crumbled.
"Pakistan need shed no tears at this outcome. For the first
time since Kargil the burden of intransigence and provocation shifts
clearly to Indian shoulders.
"But why despair? Life goes on and while Musharraf has brought no
text back from Agra whose clauses can be cited, he has helped create a
process which both countries have an interest in keeping alive. And
if this process does not touch Kashmir, let the onus of this be on India's
head. If history, the name we give to collective folly, has to play
out its course in that unhappy land, so be it. At least from now on
the blame directed at us should be less shrill," concludes Ayaz.
The halos around Musharraf's head are unlikely to
endure. As the TV-created and fed memories of Agra fade in the minds
of the ordinary Pakistanis and they are back to their daily economic
hardships, their survival in the midst of escalating sectarian violence
etc, the halos will vanish and they, and the rest of the world, will see
him once again as the military dictator, as the wrecker of democracy, as
the godfather of the Taliban, as the benefactor and the beneficiary of
Osama bin Laden and as a commando rich in deception and subterfuge, but
not in wisdom.
Provided, the Indian Government, through ill-considered
actions such as those to invite and lionise him does not again commit the
folly of unwittingly helping him not only to place himself on a pedestal
in the eyes of his own people, but also to project himself to our own
people as a leader of the future, full of sincerity and vision, and a man
of peace as against the prisoners of the past of India.
Past Pakistani military leaders only succeeded in
penetrating Indian territory through razakkars and jihadis.
Musharraf has, in addition, made a bold bid to penetrate the minds of
large sections of Indian society through his mastery of the visual media,
a Psywar technique which he learnt during his secret commando training
with the US Green Berets-- the technique of using the media of the
adversary to reach the public opinion of the adversary directly over the
head of the political leadership and soften their perceptions of him.
Writing jointly in the "Foreign Affairs"
journal of the US (March-April, 1996), Joseph S.Nye, former Chairman of
the US National Intelligence Council and former Assistant Secretary of
Defence for International Affairs in the Clinton Administration, and
Admiral William A.Owens, former Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
in the Clinton Administration, said as follows of the soft power of the TV
to appeal directly to public opinion over the heads of the target
country's political leadership: "Soft power is the ability to achieve
desired outcomes in international affairs through attraction rather than
coercion. Soft power can rest on the appeal of one’s ideas or the
ability to set the agenda in ways that shape the preference of
others."
Our policy-makers watch helplessly as Musharraf wields
this soft power again and again to soften the perceptions of him in the
Indian public mind and to harden their perceptions of the Indian
leadership. He has introduced a sophisticated psywar dimension to
Pakistan's proxy war against India, which needs to be countered
effectively.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: corde@vsnl.com)
