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22/07/2018
UNLIKELY ASYLUMS
THE LOYALTIES OF TRUMP AND ThAROOR QUESTIONED

President Donald Trump and Shashi Tharoor share a unique opportunity. Each can be assured asylum by his enemy – in Trump’s case by Russia and in Tharoor’s, by Pakistan.

No specialist of Cold War politics would have expected to see the Leader of the Free World, the Gulliver of democracy kowtow before a former KGB operative. It was not that Trump chose to have a tête-à-tête with his Russian counterpart. Numerous US presidents have done that. Remember Ronald Reagan’s confrontational summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in October 1986. The difference between such previous US–Soviet/Russia face-offs and Helsinki 2018 is that no US president had ever been suspected by his own people of being a Russian mole.

Similarly, if anyone familiar with the venal history of Indo-Pak relations was asked to pull out of a hat the name of a suspected traitor, the most implausible would have been that of the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram, Shashi Tharoor. He is a known a Paki-basher, as virulent as US Senator Joe McCarthy was a Communist chaser in the 1950s.

Ironically, both Trump and Tharoor today stand hostage to salacious rumours of consorting with planted Delilahs.

Tharoor’s mellifluous Goebbels-like oratory and his stream of consciousness volumes on India’s social identity reflect his mercurial intellect. He has stamped his footprint on the quicksand of his country’s politics. Like his Congress colleague Mani Shankar Aiyar who suffered for a mistranslated remark about PM Modi, Dr Tharoor took one misstep, but it was lethal enough to damage his reputation.

He warned (perhaps too accurately) that ‘if the BJP wins in 2019, they will "tear up the Constitution of India and write a new one".’ He continued: ‘That will enshrine the principle of Hindu Rashtra, will remove equality for minorities, that will create a Hindu Pakistan and that isn't what Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, and great heroes of freedom struggle fought for.’ Interestingly, he omitted the name of Dr Ambedkar. Even if he had, it would not have tempered BJP’s vitriolic response. BJP extremists want Tharoor deported to Pakistan. None has proposed so far that he be exchanged for IN Commander Kulbhushan Jadhav.

Across the border, in Pakistan, certain forces have disseminated insidious accusations against the ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He is suspected of being too pro-Indian. Good-neighbourly visits to Sharif when in power by A.B. Vajpayee in 1999 and Narendra Modi in 2015 have been given a sinister, conspiratorial twist. That explains partly why Nawaz Sharif is behind bars.

In a week’s time, there will a new government in Pakistan. If it is Imran Khan’s PTI (stand-alone or in coalition), what will be its policy towards India?  The PTI manifesto 2018 omits any mention of Foreign Policy, burying it instead in a final paragraph headed National Security. Composed in khaki ink, it reads: ‘This will include work on a blueprint towards resolving the Kashmir issue within the parameters of UNSC resolutions. For lasting peace within our own region, especially with our neighbour India, conflict resolution and the security route to cooperation is the most viable.’

And the PML-Nawaz or PML-Shahbaz manifesto?  It promises to ‘hold a dialogue with India to reduce tensions on an equal and strictly reciprocal basis for regional peace’. While the PPP (founded by Z.A. Bhutto who signed the 1972 Shimla Agreement), mumbles a sentence about normalising ‘trade ties with India.’

After 2019, India too will have a freshly elected government – a BJP one, if Tharoor’s fears materialise. Should Pakistan be ready to unseal its borders to admit Congress asylum seekers?

 

©  F.S. AIJAZUDDIN

[THE TRIBUNE CHANDIGARH, 22 JULY 2018] 

 
22 July 2018
 
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