A question of grace, timing in the run-up to global outreach

A certain lack of grace has characterised the run-up to the multi-party parliamentary delegations that have fanned out across several corners of the globe, in an attempt to explain why India carried out punitive strikes across Pakistan in response to the massacre at Pahalgam.

Shashi Tharoor, Manish Tewari, Salman Khurshid and Amar Singh broke from their own party, the Congress, to respond to PM Modi’s call to join these delegations — their names were not on the Congress list sent to the government. The grand old party had to eat crow. It should have known better.

To think that Rahul Gandhi’s Congress is the same Congress that Indira Gandhi once ruled over. She and her closest aides embarked upon a diplomatic campaign across several months in 1971, on the eve of the war with Pakistan, to showcase the gathering crisis over East Pakistan-Bangladesh to the world.

Fast-forward to 1994, when PV Narasimha Rao was PM and India was being hauled over the coals at the Human Rights Council in Geneva over Kashmir — so Rao called Atal Bihari Vajpayee and asked him if he would lead a multi-party delegation representing India.

That moment in India’s parliamentary history will go down as the stuff of political legend — Salman Khurshid, in 1994 a junior external affairs minister, never fails to tell anyone who will listen about how easy it was to work with Vajpayee.

“We didn’t have to persuade each other. We didn’t have to argue. We were instinctively on one page and he (Vajpayee) was so wonderful…He had that velvet touch that you need if you are a persuasive leader,” Khurshid told The Print website, when Vajpayee passed away in 2018.

Now many would not accuse Modi of “having a velvet touch.” Certainly, the PM has a far blunter way of communicating his message.

Perhaps Modi could have picked up the phone and called Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and said to him, “Bhai, I’m thinking India should tell the world in one voice about what is happening inside Pakistan; how this neighbour to our west is flirting with both fanaticism and terrorism; throw in a few nuclear weapons and look what you get, a dangerous cocktail that makes Kim Jong Un look like he’s off to a kitty party.”

Unfortunately, such a call, demonstrating the ability to dissolve both ego and political differences in the national interest, is simply not in the realm of possibility these days. A lack of grace defines the political arena. It’s clear that neither side respects the other.

Modi believes Rahul is an entitled dynast with little ground-connect, who refuses to learn and even worse, cannot be punished by his own party although he loses election after election; Rahul believes Modi is the destroyer-in-chief of institutions.

Both have left little opportunity to insult each other in the public space. And when they aren’t sparring, their closest aides bring up the rear. The taunts, the jibes, the obvious contempt in which the two top leaders of the country hold each other — it’s not a pleasant sight to behold.

It’s no one’s case that politics is a picnic and turning the other cheek should be its leitmotif. But both Indira Gandhi and PVNR understood that foreign policy is an overarching rainbow which is able to absorb the varying shades of greyness in our lives. Even if the Congress perceived PM Modi’s direct invites to its key MPs as political point-scoring, it could have swallowed its spit and told the PM that the Congress would be part of an Indian — not BJP’s — outreach to the world.

Thing about Rahul is that he picks up some very interesting causes, for example the caste census, in order to drive the point home. The PM was forced to take this demand on board, realising the nature of politics in the Hindi heartland — elections are due in Bihar later this year. Rahul should get full credit for not letting go and forcing Modi to acknowledge the need for such an exercise.

Perhaps Rahul believes he must force the government to come clean over Operation Sindoor as well — how many planes did India lose, anyway; why was “Trump asked to mediate” between India and Pakistan; why has the rest of the world not come out in full support of India? The result, according to Rahul, is that “India’s foreign policy has collapsed.”

But has it? God knows the entire country wants to know the same things as Rahul. But there is a sense of timing all politicians must have and it seems Mr Gandhi is dangerously close to missing his. The mood, at least for the moment, is to overwhelmingly avenge the massacre at Pahalgam. The message that India won’t tolerate the killing of innocents has been convincingly sent — spiking the runway at Rahim Yar Khan airbase and bombing Sargodha and Nur Khan, within spitting distance of Pakistan’s strategic command — is a message that the rest of the world is still coming to terms with.

As for whether Trump “mediated” the India-Pak conflict, and whether India should feel offended because his foreign minister, Marco Rubio, called his Indian and Pakistani counterparts in quick succession in the early hours of May 10 — well, it’s time the Indian political class get a short lesson in basic foreign policy.

Fact is, world leaders call each other all the time. Many were probably worried that India’s strikes would feed an escalatory ladder, which may lead to, god forbid, a “nuclear flashpoint.” It’s probably true that India had not contemplated the strikes on Pakistan’s airbases when the conflict began on May 7 — that happened in response to Pakistan’s drones and missile attack from Baramulla to Bhuj on May 8, including on Adampur. It’s perfectly natural that worried world leaders would be calling the leaders of India and Pakistan at a time like this and ask them to pipe down — wouldn’t you, if you had friends in both places?

But the fact also remains that the Indian Air Force had done its job by the time Trump’s boys fully got into the act. Hours later, the Pakistani DGMO called India’s DGMO, Lt Gen Rajiv Ghai, and sued for peace.

The time for all the questions that Rahul has posed will come. Meanwhile, here’s what his fellow Congress MP, Manish Tewari, tweeted when he said ‘yes’ to the Modi invite, quoting from the 1975 film Aakraman, accepting that he would be part of the post-Op Sindoor global outreach.

“Dekho veer jawaanon apne khoon pe yeh ilzaam na aaye/Maa na kahe ke mere bete waqt pada to kaam na aaye.” Never let it be said that when the country asked what you could do for it, all you said is, what did the country do for me.

Tewari, Tharoor, Singh and Khurshid may or may not be the Amar, Akbar, Anthony of our times, but they’ve certainly shown the rest of the country the way.

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