L K Advani has a story from his eventful and ultimately disastrous interactions with Pervez Musharraf during the Agra summit. He says he told Musharraf that if he really wanted to restore confidence between our two countries, all he needed to do was turn over Dawood Ibrahim to India. Musharraf was taken aback both by the directness and “loadedness” of that question, ambushed for a moment by a “mere civilian” thought. Then, recovering, he told Advani that where he came from (the army), this was called “minor tactics”, not worth indulging in when nations talk at that level. It is a different matter that Musharraf’s idea of eschewing minor tactics was to come straight to Kashmir and settle it in one sitting, of course, as per his “most reasonable” formulations. But the fact is that for far too long our bilateral exchanges are a history of petty, minor tactical moves, ambushes, pin-pricks and totally meaningless, purposeless manoeuvres. It follows of course that after each bilateral engagement each side has been able to go back home “having conceded nothing”, and surely never has the draft of any of our declarations or joint statements been described as less than perfect. We are, after all, governments run by joint secretaries, several generations of which species, on both sides of the border, embody the very finest in bureaucratic perfection.
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