Impact Atal: PM Vajpayee's influence on Kashmir was far greater than his successors', including Narendra Modi
A poet by heart, a politician by mind, and among the wittiest men, former Prime Minister and BJP stalwart Atal Bihari Vajpayee will long be remembered for many things — especially his vision on Kashmir.
As a committed politician, he lived up to two of his iconic phrases centered around the K-issue. One was with regard to Kashmir, where he spoke about a solution through “Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat aur Insaniyat”. The other one was about relations with Pakistan where he said, “Hum mitr badal sakte hain, padosi nahin (We can change friends but not neighbours).”
Both the phrases sound inspirational, exemplary and immortal. Here’s why.
Widely admired as an ambassador of peace, his twin commitments became the benchmark of politics — something which successive regimes and even hardline separatists endorsed from time to time.
But for Vajpayee, all this started with the shock of the Kargil war in 1999.
A war that stretched between May and July that year ended with India’s victory. Pakistani Army infiltrators, who had taken India by surprise, were weeded out under a military action code-named Operation Vijay.
Within two years of the breach of trust by Pakistan, however, a large-hearted Vajpayee was again ready with his hand of friendship outstretched towards the "irreplaceable neighbour".
In 2001, he hosted the Indo-Pak Agra Summit, where a number of issues, including Kashmir, were discussed. But moments before the historic pact was supposed to be signed, visiting Pakistani military-dictator General Parvez Musharaff abandoned the meet and flew back to Islamabad.
Though time faded away, Vajpayee’s commitments didn’t.
Two years later, on April 21, 2003, he sounded more confident.
After concluding a visit to Jammu and Kashmir, the-then PM spelt out his perspective before Parliament on the way to deal with Kashmir and manage relations with Pakistan.
In his speech, Vajpayee said: “I assured the people of Jammu and Kashmir that we wish to resolve all issues — both domestic and external — through talks. I stressed that the gun can solve no problem; brotherhood can. Issues can be resolved if we move forward guided by the three principles of Insaaniyat (humanism), Jamhooriyat (democracy) and Kashmiriyat (Kashmir's age-old legacy of amity).”
“In my speech, I spoke of extending our hand of friendship to Pakistan. At the same time, I also said that this hand of friendship should be extended by both sides. Both countries should resolve that we need to live together in peace,” he added.
The same year, in November, India and Pakistan signed a formal agreement for a ceasefire along the international border, the LoC and the Actual Ground Position Line in J&K.
A year passed peacefully and there were more path-breaking developments.
The moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference held talks with him in New Delhi. It was the first such formal dialogue between the PM and separatists since the eruption of armed insurgency in Kashmir, taking the issue from aggressive counter-insurgency operations to boardroom diplomacies of the highest order.
As all good things come to an end, so did Vajpayee’s tenure.
But his deliverance on Kashmir continued to bear fruit.
In 2015, his successor, Manmohan Singh, flagged off the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service, which was actually Vajpayee’s brainchild, a plan the latter had formally initiated in 2003.
But then, after Vajpayee, his successors couldn’t take any significant steps forward. From his successors, Manmohan Singh to Narendra Modi, none of the two could achieve anything path-breaking that could overshadow Vajpayee’s impact on Kashmir.
For Manmohan Singh, it was two subsequent stints at his disposal. But the fall-outs of his decade of inability on Kashmir were visible.
By 2008, Kashmir was simmering with major street protests against the Amarnath land row that year. Though the agitation subsided with the collapse of the PDP-Congress in the state, within two years, Kashmir erupted with bigger unrest. Over 120 civilians were killed in street protests in 2010.
Within the next two years, the revival of militancy started to haunt the state and armed insurgency continues to fester. Pakistan's breach of the ceasefire agreement, on the other hand, added to the mess.
In 2014, BJP’s victory in the Parliament elections brought a new hope when Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked Vajpayee’s 'Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat aur Insaniyat' as key to address the Kashmir issue. But then, for Modi, Vajpayee’s mantra seemed restricted to a proverbial recitation — Kashmir went from bad to worse with the killing of Hizb commander Burhan Wani in July 2016.
For about the next six months, Kashmir witnessed its longest-ever agitation, with around 100 killed and more than 20,000 wounded in street protests. Despite resumption of normal life, the situation continued to be uneasy.
Interestingly, in 2017, even hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani evoked 'Insaniyat, Jamhooriyat, Kashmiriyat' to resolve the Kashmir dispute – the ideas he had actually derided when Vajpayee propagated them first.
For Vajpayee, the Agra Summit is seen as his only “fiasco”. But time exonerated him of the alleged failure. In 2006, General Pervez Musharraf, in his biography In The Line of Fire, wrote that both he and Vajpayee had been "humiliated" at the 2001 summit "by someone above" the two of them.
Exactly a decade later, former RAW chief AS Dulat in his book, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, apparently claimed that deputy PM LK Advani had “destroyed” the summit.
It was perhaps the only development related to Kashmir, and relations with Pakistan, where Vajpayee had reposed blind faith in his close aid, Advani.
Well, anecdotes aside, we must return to the present-day BJP government. Having emerged victorious with a strong majority, the Modi sarkar was expected to be much more impactful on Kashmir than the comparatively unstable Vajpayee government.
But in reality, Vajpayee’s deliverance on “Insaniyat, Kashmiriyat aur Jamhooriyat” ended up as a mere inspirational phrase, which Modi proverbially recites on big days. He repeated the same while delivering the 72nd Independence Day Speech from the Red Fort yesterday.
Vajpayee’s relationship with Kashmir is not about his life or his passing though. It is about the eternal enigma of his mantra — a trinity on Kashmir, dovetailed in one phrase: Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat aur Insaniyat.