I'M not sure I understand the attitude of the government of India to General Pervez Musharraf. And when I say government, I mean that in a collective and not in a party political sort of way. I have been mystified by the way in which the NDA and the UPA both handled Musharraf. We have always known that General Musharraf was the architect of Kargil – long before he began bragging about it himself. For many months after he ousted Nawaz Sharif in a coup and took charge, the government of India refused to speak to him. This may have been a reasonable position, but then the Vajpayee government suddenly did an about-turn and invited him to Agra for a summit. We sometimes forget the euphoria that preceded the Agra summit or the hero's welcome that Musharraf received when he came to India. I was one of the few sceptics. I argued that the summit would achieve nothing, that we were no nearer an agreement to resolve our basic differences and that, in any case, Musharraf was a deeply untrustworthy character. When Musharraf invited editors to his famous breakfast meeting in Agra, most of the press was in an extremely positive frame of mind. Journalists went out of their way to welcome him at breakfast and many people gave him the benefit of their goodwill. I was one of the few who held back. When it was my turn to ask a question, I asked the General how we would possibly trust him after Kargil. Musharraf was not pleased. “This question should have been asked before I was invited,” he said, perhaps accurately. He then launched into a specious explanation about what had really happened in Kargil while seeking to absolve himself of blame. Inevitably, the summit collapsed. The Indian government believed that Musharraf had betrayed its trust by holding a televised breakfast with editors at which he criticised India. Musharraf took the line that while Vajpayee wanted a settlement, there was somebody ‘sitting above' who wanted no peace between the two countries. At the time, this was believed to be a reference to L.K. Advani. But Musharraf now tells us that he meant Vivek Katju, who was, if I remember correctly, a joint secretary in the Indian foreign ministry at the time. This is so absurd a position that I don't think it deserves any further comment. Later, after the summit had been declared a failure, Benazir Bhutto visited India. I interviewed her on TV and asked about Kargil. She said that when she was Prime Minister, a Pakistani General had presented her with a master-plan for a proposed invasion of Kargil – which she had turned down. That General was Pervez Musharraf. The way in which the Musharraf-Agra-Kargil saga unfolded told me something about the man. Clearly, he was untrustworthy. Clearly, he had a deep-rooted antipathy to India. But he also had chutzpah. He could brazen it out in all circumstances. And when he put on his ‘straight-talking, bluff military man' persona, he could fool people relatively easily. When Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister, he started out wanting to trust Musharraf. Manmohan Singh is a decent man with a genuine desire to settle the Kashmir issue and to bring about a lasting peace between India and Pakistan. Shrewdly, Musharraf conveyed to Singh that he was also a warrior for peace. Almost from the time their encounters began, I wondered whether Musharraf was taking India for a ride again. I remember being part of the Prime Minister's media party at the General Assembly session in New York one year when Singh and Musharraf had a disastrous dinner meeting. Defying the assurances Pakistan had given India, the General went ahead and included references to Kashmir in his speech at the UN. When the Indian side remonstrated at the dinner meeting, Musharraf remained unflappable. “Oh, it was just a para included by some junior officer by mistake,” he remarked breezily. This was an astonishing claim to make to a gathering of senior ministers and officials who know that each word of a speech to the General Assembly is pored over by experts and speech writers before it makes the final draft. When the dinner ended in disaster, I thought India had finally got the measure of General Musharraf. Manmohan Singh had once described him as the sort of man we could do business with. I believed that he had now realised that any business transacted with such a man would have to be crooked. But no, we continued talking to Musharraf. We even came up with a potential solution to the Kashmir problem that the government now says was on the verge of being finalised when Musharraf was overthrown. Personally, I doubt if Musharraf would ever have signed off on any solution, no matter how reassuring he may have been in private. And even if both leaders had agreed to the solution, they would have had difficulty selling it to the people of India and Pakistan. Given this background, I am a little astonished by India's decision to refuse Musharraf a visa. Yes, he is untrustworthy. Yes, he has never sincerely worked to improve relations between our two countries. But I don't see what harm he can do us now. He has been to India after being forced from office and while those who heard him speak found him hostile and aggressive, that is fair enough. We are a free country and we allow our guests to say what they like, within reason. In my view, the General should have been given a visa. We should have listened to him. And if we disagreed with him, we should have argued with him. That is how liberal societies function. Instead, we have gone from one extreme to another. We trusted him when we should have been careful. And now, we are needlessly banning him from our shores. Vir Sanghvi is Editorial Director of Hindustan Times __
