| Mr Vajpayee will not visit Pakistan again. He has no further need to, for he has accomplished - so far as Pakistan is concerned - all that he had set out to do in his political career, as a BJP leader, as India’s Foreign Minister and now as its Prime Minister. |
| His first visit to this part of the subcontinent (then undivided) was when he was still a student. He travelled like any young, inquisitive sightseer, stopping in Lahore to stroll through its famous Anarkali bazaar, and then passing through the orderly cantonment town of Rawalpindi, to reach the northern extremity of the Khyber Pass. |
| He came again after 1947 to the same part of the subcontinent but to a different country. He too was the same man but travelling in a different capacity, on these occasions as the official representative of his country, India. It took him almost forty-two years though to make the public admission before an audience at Government House, Lahore, in 1999, that no matter how much he may have regretted the division of the subcontinent, Pakistan in his eyes was and would remain a separate country. Although on that occasion he did not say so in as many words (Mr Vajpayee is a man of few, measured words and even more eloquent silences), by implication he conceded that his party’s slogan ‘Akhand Bharat’ was now as obsolete a political credo in India as the UN resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir were to Pakistan. |
| Having made that significant concession, one can imagine his personal disappointment at finding that Pakistan’s new leadership headed by President General Pervez Musharraf should not have reciprocated, before and after Agra. One can only admire therefore Vajpayee’s courage and tenacity in agreeing to travel to Islamabad – a barren hillside when he saw it as a student. He came in a final attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of previous defeats. [EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 14 Jan. 2004, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
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