THE LAST FEW weeks of the last two years of the 1900s were testing times for the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Its May 1998 nuclear tests were being condemned by the world as an act of nuclear irresponsibility by a small power that was yet to develop a robust national security apparatus. And so when the Navy chief, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, defied the orders of the civilian cabinet, though over totally unrelated issues, that was being seen across the world capitals as further proof of the lack of maturity of India’s democratic institutions. The stand-off finally led to the ignominious sack of the chief, a first in independent India, on December 30, 1998.
A year later, on the Christmas eve of 1999, the regime faced blackmail from terrorists who had hijacked an airplane and were asking for the freedom of three of their leaders in return for the lives of the passengers. If the Vajpayee government had showed spine in handling the year-end crisis of 1998, it capitulated before the blackmailers in the 1999 crisis. Not only did the government free the terrorists, it even sent a cabinet minister and its intelligence chief to escort them to safety.
Much had happened in the intervening year that had tested India’s security nerves. The military crisis of 1998-end was followed by a series of attempts by the Vajpayee regime to repair the frayed relations with Pakistan. The attempts culminated in Vajpayee’s much-hailed Lahore peace bus trip, but within weeks Pakistan mounted a military aggression on the Kargil hills.
Adversity, at times, can bring out the best in one. The stab in the back brought out the best in Indian diplomacy. Diplomats who had been fighting what had appeared to be a losing war against the sanctions imposed by the west suddenly found themselves invested with a new brief—gain world support against military aggression from an insidious neighbour. India, which was being condemned as perpetrator of a ‘militarised nuclear evil’, suddenly became the victim of a nasty act of military chicanery perpetrated by its neighbour.
Perhaps the finest hour for Indian diplomacy during the Kargil crisis was when India refused to send its prime minister to Washington for a US-mediated parley with Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Get them out of Kargil, and we will talk, was the line that Vajpayee gave president Bill Clinton. The latter had no option but to ask Sharif to climb down from Kargil unilaterally.
If India spent the summer of 1999 on fighting the intruders in Kargil and winning the world’s hearts and minds, the autumn was spent on another debilitating election campaign. Despite the stellar military victory in Kargil, the Vajpayee government could improve only marginally over its 1998 tally. Thus it was a war-weary and election-exhausted India that faced the winter of 1999. It was then that the hijack further tested the nation’s security resolve. The adversity did not bring out the best in India’s leadership.
But the hijack also helped India to expose the insidiousness of the Taliban regime in Kabul which had been supported by Pakistan, and was doing underhand business with the US (the Taliban’s telecommunication network had been built by US companies.) Throughout the Kargil War, the Indian foreign office had been pointing to the axis of evil that had developed between Islamabad and Kabul, but the US had been turning a deaf ear.
The hijack helped change the western perception. The fact that the aircraft was taken into Afghan territory, that the Taliban regime there had played dishonest brokers in the talks with the hijackers, and that the freed terrorists had a safe passage through Taliban territory gave much heft to India’s case that Pakistan’s ISI were the friends, guides and philosophers of the Taliban regime.
In the weeks that followed, foreign minister Jaswant Singh made much of these in his frequent meetings with his US interlocutor, deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott. The fact that the US had condemned neither the hijack nor Pakistan’s role in it strongly, that it had not moved its little finger in putting pressure on Pakistan and the Taliban, and that the Taliban regime had openly declared that it was being counselled by the US during the hijack drama, all put Washington on the defensive. So much so that Singh’s more hawkish colleagues in the government, defence minister George Fernandes and national security adviser Brajesh Mishra even accused the US of having adopted a “lackadaisical attitude” towards India’s security concerns.
As if to make amends, Talbott, when he met Singh in London in mid-January 2000, agreed to establish a joint working group on counterterrorism. Its first meeting was in Washington in early February. The Clinton visit of March turned out to be a major turning point. Though Clinton took credit for having persuaded Pakistan to climb down from Kargil, he took care not to mention the hijack in any of his public speeches in India. The visit put the relations on an even keel, which enabled the successive regimes in both countries to take them farther into a robust security partnership.