Finally, the Government of India has constituted seven delegations consisting of 59 members, including 45 Members of Parliament, senior politicians and diplomats. These seven delegations will visit different countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. However, the list of members was not finalised without the characteristic bitterness that has become so common in the modern era of India politics, particularly between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress.
The Congress did finally agree to the government’s suggestion, but not before it went hammer and tongs against the government. So much so, Congress general secretary-communications Jairam Ramesh went to the extent of suggesting that sending all-party delegations to different countries to put forth India’s point of view was a “damage control” operation, after the government’s narrative had failed.
Being the head of the communications department of the Congress, Ramesh’s view is taken to be the view of the Congress. He probably forgot or did not realise that this time he was not talking about any slugfest between the government and the opposition, but the hostilities between India and its perennial enemy Pakistan. This was not exclusively the “government’s narrative” but that of the entire nation.
After the Government of India decided to send all-party delegations, mainly MPs, to different countries, it reportedly proposed four names to the Congress leadership. They included Shashi Tharoor, Manish Tewari, Amar Singh and Salman Khurshid. All of them are known to hold strong positions on policy matters. The Congress, for reasons best known to it and certainly not unknown to most others, instead recommended four different names - those of Anand Sharma, Gaurav Gagoi, Naseer Hussain and Raja Warring.
Eventually, the Congress did agree to the four names proposed by the government, besides Anand Sharma, but not before muddying the political waters. Ramesh even accused the government of “dishonesty” towards Congress by proposing names of its own, before discussing them with the party leadership.
The Congress cannot be exclusively blamed for this “bitter taste” that this development left. For quite some time now, the ruling party and the opposition have behaved like enemies with each other and not just political opponents. Leaders from both sides are responsible for this kind of hostility, which is unprecedented in the country's 77-year-old history since the independence.
It was not always so. It reminds one of the Narsimha Rao-Vajpayee era of the 1990s. Those were the tumultuous days for Indian diplomacy. The United States had emerged as a single superpower in a unipolar world after the collapse of the USSR and the ‘Warsaw Pact’. The US had used Pakistan quite successfully in Afghanistan against the Russians. Pakistan was trying to reap the dividends. Besides, democracy was trying to find roots in Pakistan, with Oxford-educated Benazir Bhutto as the Prime Minister, while the military had been kept at bay.
The then US President Bill Clinton, for some unexplained reason, had started referring to Kashmir as a dispute between India and Pakistan. He made a reference to Kashmir as a disputed territory in his address to the UN General Assembly. The then US Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphael, during her visit to India and Pakistan, also made some controversial statements about Kashmir. Those days India and Pakistan remained hyphenated and no US dignitary would visit one country without visiting the other.
This prompted the Government of India to assert its position on Kashmir. PV Narsimha Rao was not a leader who could be cowed down. It was during his prime ministership that the Parliament of India passed a unanimous resolution reaffirming that Kashmir was and is an integral part of India. The resolution asserted that the only thing to be settled was the return of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir to India. The resolution was passed on February 22, 1994.
Within five days of the passage of the unanimous resolution in the Parliament of India, on February 27, 1994, Pakistan moved a resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) through the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) to condemn India for the alleged atrocities in Kashmir. It was the deft handling by Rao, in close coordination with the then Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, that turned the tables against Pakistan and eventually it had to withdraw its resolution as it feared a defeat if it was put to voting.
Also read: Operation Sindoor and geopolitics: Who are India’s real friends?
That famed delegation, which is often recalled and referred to as an ultimate example of consensus and unanimity of purpose and action between the ruling party and the opposition, was led Vajpayee. Its other members included Dr Manmohan Singh who, as then the finance minister, had achieved worldwide fame for successfully introducing economic reforms in the country; Salman Khurshid, who was minister of state for external affairs; Dr Farooq Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir; and Hamid Ansari, who later served as vice president of India for two terms.
Vajpayee had bailed out Rao earlier as well on economic reforms, which faced strong resistance from the non-BJP opposition, particularly the left parties, who were very strong and powerful back then, with a substantial number of MPs in both the Houses of Parliament. Rao took Vajpayee into confidence who made the BJP abstain at the time of voting.
And then there is the famous exchange on nuclear programme when Rao demitted office, he sounded Vajpayee in Hindi, “samagri tayaar hai” (it was a coded message in Hindi that everything is ready for testing nuclear weapons and he, Vajpayee, can go ahead).
Compare those days to the present times when the ruling and opposition parties only see “enemies” in each other. India needs a return of that era now more than ever. The country is headed for a long haul of hostilities with Pakistan.
Pakistan has been mistakenly emboldened by open Chinese military support. There is no guarantee that Pakistan may not resort to any misadventure once again to entangle India into a conflict. More so when Pakistan’s army chief General Asim Munir takes his orders, not from Islamabad, but Beijing.
Under such circumstances, the country's political parties need to ensure unity of purpose and action without any ugly bitterness as is being seen on a day-to-day basis. Onus lies on both, the ruling party as well as the opposition, particularly the Congress. First move, however, has to be from the government, the same way Narsimha Rao would do and same way, the Congress needs to take notes from Vajpayee’s book.
Follow us
