Story of two Musharrafs India had to deal with

When Pakistan’s former dictator Pervez Musharraf breathed his last in Dubai, he was perhaps unaware of the ‘polycrisis’ that grips his country 15 years after he left power. The dictator’s own contribution to Pakistan’s current misery is monumental; the four (military-overseen) civilian governments since have been unable to reverse the damage inflicted by Musharraf and his uniformed predecessors. A tricky customer For India, Musharraf’s legacy is more ambiguous.Musharraf had the mind of a guerrilla – deception and surprise were his weapons. He had fought against India in 1965 and 1971, never reconciled to the loss of East Pakistan and was pained by the upper hand that India had gained on the Siachen glacier. He sabotaged the most innovative peace initiative in the history of India-Pakistan relations, the Lahore process, when Indian PM Vajpayee took a bus across the border in 1999 to push for sustainable peace.As army chief, he tried a reckless gambit in Kargil, enlisting a cabal of four generals to try to de-freeze and internationalise the Kashmir issue. India’s strong reaction surprised him, just as it had surprised Pakistan’s first dictator Ayub Khan in 1965.Nawaz Sharif’s capitulation to Clinton in Washington in July 1999 and the agreement to withdraw Pakistani forces had humiliated Musharraf. This and the PM’s attempt to remove him, was the army chief’s excuse to seize power in a coup.Within a month of the coup, an Indian aircraft was hijacked from Kathmandu on Musharraf’s watch, with fingerprints of the Pakistani ISI on the operation. The episode ended with the release of four dreaded terrorists who would multiply the mayhem against India. Despite the general’s background, India decided to give him a second shot. The triumvirate of Vajpayee, Advani and Jaswant Singh decided over lunch in May 2001 to ‘read the dictator’s mind’ by inviting him to India. Musharraf promoted himself as president and showed up in Agra in July for a summit where he exploited India’s media and overplayed his hand on Kashmir, leading to the failure of yet another initiative. The endgame of the summit was when Musharraf met Vajpayee for a last attempt to salvage a joint statement. But Vajpayee had read Musharraf well, Agra was not retrievable. General’s new avatar After 9/11, Musharraf was compelled to jettison any allusions to ‘root causes’ of terrorism and join the US war on terror. Pakistan, Musharraf felt, had ‘no choice’ after President Bush told him that the country was “either with us or with the terrorists”. Musharraf, however, played the dual game with dexterity as he covertly engaged Taliban while supporting the US global war on terror. Three months after 9/11, it was India’s turn to be angry when Pakistani terrorists attacked India’s Parliament in December. India reacted with Operation Parakram and a bout of coercive diplomacy that had Musharraf swear in January 2002 that Pakistan’s territory would not be used for terrorism against India. medium97626362 When Vajpayee extended the hand of friendship from Srinagar in April 2003, Musharraf was quick to clasp it. A ceasefire on the border soon followed, cross-border infiltration fell and diplomatic contacts intensified. The decade of Musharraf that had begun with aggression now led to shifts in entrenched positions. The Vajpayee-Musharraf tango that began in Agra in 2001, derailed by terrorism, was revived. It was some quiet diplomacy away from the public glare that finally led to the breakthroughs for an era of relative peace from 2003. When Vajpayee visited Islamabad in January 2004, Musharraf vowed that territories under Pakistan’s control would not be used for terrorism against India. He did not insist on the primacy of Kashmir. The diplomacy had also got smarter: Unlike in Lahore or Agra, a backchannel of trusted aides – Brajesh Mishra and Tariq Aziz – had prepared the grounds for the breakthrough. After 2004, Musharraf continued ‘essays in mutual comprehension’ with Vajpayee’s successor Manmohan Singh, across multiple meetings. Musharraf was even willing to substantively abandon the Kashmir cause with his four-point plan of freezing the status quo and making borders irrelevant.The period 2003-07 was the most diplomatically active, with a robust back channel and a revived comprehensive dialogue that involved breakthroughs in trade and connectivity. But Musharraf’s karma caught up. He faced assassination attempts, apart from a pushback from the judiciary and civilian politicians. He also lost the plot with India from 2006, after train bombings in Mumbai fouled the atmosphere. Musharraf’s dream to reinvent himself as a politician remained unfulfilled. As also his hope to be the peace-making general. His early sins could not be washed away. The writer, aide to PM Vajpayee in the Musharraf years, is former High Commissioner to Pakistan