by MANI SHANKAR AIYAR
Are we becoming a police state?
BJP spokespersons have been asserting on TV screens and public platforms that I should have taken the government’s permission before hosting an old Pakistani friend of mine to dinner. Why should I seek anyone’s permission to host a dinner party – even if that friend is a Pakistani? Why cannot I invite friends and colleagues to talk about Pakistan with a distinguished Pakistani? Why must I toe Modi’s line on Pakistan? What gives the government a monopoly of national opinion on our neighbour? Does anyone who does not believe that the Prime Minister is the nation’s sole fount of wisdom become liable to the charge of treachery? Do I not have a right to privacy? Do my guests not have such a right?
The BJP responds that this was not just some dinner party, it amounted to sleeping with the enemy. Indeed, the Prime Minister has darkly hinted that I was hiring a contract killer (“supari”) to get him. Invoking a fake Facebook post, he slyly let slip that the dinner was a “secret” conclave to hatch a “conspiracy” with the Pakistanis to make – horror of horrors – a Gujarati Muslim the Chief Minister of Gujarat. Utter rubbish, total balderdash, but a nasty move to establish a salience between Pakistan and Indian Muslims to polarize a crucial election.
Well, I don’t consider Muslims or Pakistanis my enemies, especially a Pakistani Muslim like Khurshid Kasuri who I have known since we were twenty-year-old undergraduates at the same Cambridge college some 56 years ago. It was a friendship that was renewed when the founder-President of the BJP, and then Janata Party Foreign Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, chose me, out of scores of other IFS officers of about my seniority, to be the first-ever Consul-General of India in Karachi (1978-82).
Did he choose me to go to Karachi to spew at the Pakistanis? Atal Behari-ji, as a man truly worthy of the post of Prime Minister, would invariably take his seat in the House whenever I rose to speak on Pakistan. For unlike the present incumbent, he was not paranoid about Pakistan. A true democrat, he was interested in understanding other perspectives on that country.
I flew to Islamabad in December 1978 from the home of our Ambassador in Abu Dhabi, M Hamid Ansari, a brilliant diplomat and an engaging companion with whom I had served a little earlier in Brussels. He was among my closest friends in the Foreign Service and I appointed him chairman of the Oil Diplomacy Committee when I was Petroleum Minister. Destiny had kissed him on the brow to rise for ten long years (2007-2017) to the second-highest constitutional position in our land: Vice-President and Chairman of the Rajya Sabha. Invaluable in his penetrating insights into the Pak psyche, he has guided me over the years through the maze of Pakistan’s domestic politics. He introduced me to his wife’s relatives in Karachi. (Among those I took to their home was a highly distinguished young journalist, in the forefront then of the crusade for a secular India; he is now a minister in Modi’s government. O tempora! O mores!) Hamid Ansari was second only to Doctor-sahib among the distinguished guests at my dinner.
The morning after I reached Islamabad to be briefed by my Ambassador before taking up my new assignment, I heard the Ambassador speaking on the phone to Khurshid Kasuri. I slipped him a note on which I had scribbled that Khurshid was an old friend of mine. He passed on the phone to me, and I could hear the joy in Khurshid’s voice as he welcomed me to Pakistan, insisting that I proceed to Karachi only after first visiting Lahore. That was a tempting invitation as I was born in Lahore. I agreed, subject to Khurshid driving me straight from the airport to my old home at 44, Lakshmi Mansions, located in the triangle formed by Beedon Road, Hall Road and The Mall. Khurshid promptly agreed and my Ambassador indulgently let me take that slightly circuitous route to my new posting.
That Ambassador, Katyayani Shankar Bajpai, was no soft-heart like me. He has always had a hard, tough understanding of Pakistan, untouched by any of the starry-eyed romanticism that tinges my view of that country. He was at the time in almost daily touch with Barrister Khurshid Kasuri, monitoring developments in the then ongoing Lahore High Court trial of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. That is how trustworthy the Ambassador had found Khurshid. Now nearly 90 years old, Ambassador K Shankar Bajpai was another of my valued guests.
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