Musharraf’s seesaw relationship with India

K. P. Nayar
Strategic Analyst

SOMEDAY, when India and Pakistan will talk to each other again — instead of talking at one another — Indian diplomats will have to pore over the archives in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to grasp what made the late Pakistani dictator, Gen Pervez Musharraf, tick at a personal level in his dealings with India.

Likewise, on the Pakistani side, they will have to re-educate themselves on the personality of their late Chief of Army Staff — and later President — if they ever wish to move forward in engaging India.

In the polemical discussions, which have overwhelmed India’s public platforms since Musharraf’s death in Dubai on February 5, it has been largely overlooked that the wily Army General was also a thoughtful host. He lost no opportunity to ferret out ways into the hearts of his interlocutors.

When former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Musharraf met in September 2004 for their first summit at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, then owned by Pakistan International Airlines, Singh was swept off his feet by two gifts from the dictator. Singh was born in Gah, a small village in Pakistani Punjab’s Chakwal district. At the end of their one-on-one meeting in New York, which lasted an hour — instead of the pre-planned 15 minutes — Musharraf gave the then Prime Minister two unique gifts. One was a specially commissioned painting of the school in Gah where Singh had his early education. The second gift required deeper ingenuity and effort: Musharraf dug up Singh’s marksheet from that school, framed it and gifted it to the PM. It was probably the most personally gratifying gift that Singh received during his entire decade as the Prime Minister.

Indians have a patchy record in procuring gifts for foreign leaders whom their Prime Ministers engage with in summit meetings. Usually, it is the job of a Deputy Chief of Protocol in the MEA to arrange gifts to be exchanged at summits. These gifts are, therefore, as good or as bad as the limits of imagination of this low-level MEA official. Exceptions are only when the Presidents of great powers come calling, when Indira Gandhi and Vajpayee took personal interest. For the 2004 Singh-Musharraf summit, Indians had no return gifts for the Pakistani General. The Indian establishment had no expectations from the meeting, so protocol officials were told not to bother with finding gifts for the occasion. The thinking in the MEA was that a potentially acrimonious bilateral meeting would have no place for good atmospherics, such as exchange of gifts.

The then Prime Minister was mortified when he learnt that his handlers were no match for Musharraf’s ingenuity in giving gifts. Singh had nothing to give Musharraf. What saved the situation was the resourcefulness of Gursharan Kaur, Manmohan Singh’s wife. She had brought along with her some water colours of Old Delhi’s skyline with no particular recipient in New York in her mind. Some of these water colours included parts of Old Delhi, where Musharraf was born. She got her husband to send these frames to Musharraf later that evening. Musharraf was pleased and the Prime Minister got over the embarrassment caused by the MEA’s bungle.

With the shrewd instinct of the paratrooper that he was early in his military career, Musharraf repeatedly attempted during his time in office to land in India for important cricket matches. He knew that cricket offered an easy passage into the consciousness of India’s masses. More often than not, cricket was an excuse and diplomacy was at the centre of his thinking whenever he expressed a desire to watch cricket in India. After much deliberations, Musharraf handpicked Shahryar Khan to head the Pakistan Cricket Board.

Khan belonged to the former Muslim royal family of Bhopal. He was Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary with one of the longest tenures in that office — from 1990 to 1994. Within months of appointing Khan as Chairman of the Cricket Board, an Indian cricket team visited Pakistan, ending a five-year break in bilateral engagement of any kind following the Kargil war.

For Musharraf, it was a breakthrough with India, which was far more consequential than anything he achieved in statecraft. Many Indians put aside their animosity to the mastermind of the Kargil invasion and Musharraf’s image as a liberal got a boost. He cashed in on this carefully cultivated image as a moderate in Washington, where then US President George W Bush had become Pakistan’s biggest benefactor after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

Then US National Security Adviser, and later Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice was a vocal and vociferous advocate of Musharraf and promoted his image as a fake moderate. As then Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani went to Washington where he had the reputation of a hardliner in case of Pakistan, who had wrecked the peace talks with Musharraf in Agra, even undercutting then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Rice asked him to go easy on Musharraf after the Pakistan-orchestrated terrorist attack on India’s Parliament on December 13, 2001. Rice told Advani that if India squeezed Musharraf too much, he may fall from office and then India will have to bear the consequences of having to deal with his replacement who may be a “bearded mullah with a gun slung on his shoulder like the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

Advani retorted that any such change in Islamabad made no difference to New Delhi. He said Musharraf was bleeding India daily through a low-intensity war. A mullah in Musharraf’s place could do no worse. The clincher was when Advani told Rice that it is the Bush administration which will have to deal with a bearded, Taliban-type terrorist in charge in Pakistan.

“You will pay the price if you do not rein in Musharraf, not us,” he said. After seeing off Advani at her perch in the old Executive Office Building next to the White House, Rice was heard asking her aides if Advani was a lawyer by profession. “He argues like an excellent lawyer,” Rice remarked within earshot of the White House Press Corps.

It is not inconceivable that in future too Pakistan may have another Army Chief as its ruler. Each of its junta leaders has been unique. That is what differentiates Pakistan from the rest of South Asia with the exception of Bangladesh.