Speaking in tongues

Am I the only one who is getting a touch tired bored with Jaswant Singh’s recent epiphany?

Advani was present when the decision to free Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar was taken. Advani master-minded the July 22, 2008 episode where during the crucial vote of confidence in Parliament, a bunch of BJP MPs flashed wads of cash around and accused the Congress of bribery and worse. Advani ordered the BSF into Bangladesh while India was fighting the Kargil war. And so on, in an endless stream of ‘revelations’ that are keeping the more apoplectic of our TV anchors happily occupied.

Advani was being an idiot not thinking clearly when, in My Country, My Life, he succumbed to the Parivar’s penchant for rewriting history and attempted to whitewash his own role in the December 24, 1999 hijacking of IA Flight 814 and the subsequent release of Zargar, Sheikh and Azhar.

He could so easily have explained the decision in this fashion: The Cabinet committee considered the situation and, keeping in mind the potential loss of 160-plus Indian lives, collectively decided to free the three terrorists.

End of story. Sure, the Congress would during the election cycle continue to hammer away at the BJP and at Advani for that incident — but much of it was due to the fact that the BJP unwisely [‘unwisely’ given that its tenure in office saw several major terrorist attacks, none of which were handled with remarkable elan] decided to make the 2009 election about ‘soft on terror versus hard on terror’; in other words, to make political capital out of 26/11.

In a misguided attempt to try and dissociate himself from that collective decision by saying that he was neither in the know of, nor party to, the decision to free the hostages, Advani went way out on a limb. This is the man who was number two in the Vajpayee cabinet; the man who held the Home portfolio. The Kandahar hijack was among other things a clear security threat to India and its interests — so how tenable was it that the man in charge of internal security was completely out of the loop while lesser ministers were intimately involved in the decision-making?

In trying to burnish his tough-on-terror image, all Advani really managed to do was to project the image that he was a bit of a dummy in the Cabinet, excluded from the really tough decision making. Like I said, in choosing  to distance himself from Kandahar, LKA was being an idiot not thinking clearly.

What I don’t get though is, why is Jaswant suddenly the hero? Why is he not getting his fair share of hard questions [Oh I know — if you ask him hard questions, he will get miffed and won’t talk to you and then your stream of ‘revelations’ will die up, and what’s a 24 hour news channel to do when that happens]?

“I tried to cover it. I treated it as part of my continuing sense of commitment and loyalty,” was Jaswant Singh’s comment that also suggested that his sentiments had not been reciprocated by Advani. Jaswant Singh said he did not regret doing so as that was the step he had taken during the election campaign. “How should I put it? I was very conservative with the truth,” he said.

Thus spake Jaswant. ‘Conservative with the truth’?! Only he could have come up with a phrase that — here we get into Humpty Dumpty territory again — means the exact opposite of what he intends to imply. And only we would allow him to get away with it.

In his book Engaging India, his good friend Strobe Talbott has some insight into Jaswant’s modus operandi. A clip, from page 103:

He was a master of public statements that made up in panache what they lacked in content and sometimes even in discernible meaning. Two of my favorites were “The totally moral has become the realistically moral” and “if strategic deterrence is not on the negotiating table, how can you have a missile-development program on the table?”

The journalists duly scribbled down these oracular utterances, never asking for clarification or amplification, and then reported them to their readers as though they provided insight into what was going on in the talks.

Indeed. In recent times, Donald Rumsfeld has been enshrined as the modern master of the use of words to obscure meaning and, in some cases, to substitute for meaning. Remember Rumsfeld’s justly famous riff on the knowns and unknowns?

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Or his equally famous number on evidence?

“There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.”

I would submit — and Talbott clearly believes as I do — that Jaswant belongs in that league. From the archives, here’s one of my all time favorites [When I first read this line some eight years ago, I filed it away with the care you would give to a particularly interesting and exotic puzzle, because I saw considerable medicinal value in Jaswant’s statement. They say mind games help ward off Parkinson’s; on prevention-better-than-cure lines, I’d recommend that once a week you read the clip below, and try to figure out what the man is saying. It won’t become clearer, but hey, maybe it will help with the Parkinson’s thing. Also, keep in mind that this is not extempore — the clip is from a carefully prepared text written by the master himself]:

We wished to talk. But in the process of talking, and it is the impression of anybody that India agreed to talk because it was out of any weakness, India agreed to talk, it was out of any fatigue, we agreed to talk, as has been suggested by somebody, because of the call- to my mind, it is completely an unsustainable call – that the Jihadis have now pressurized on India that we are ready to have a talk.

So much for his obfuscatory utterances. Jaswant’s revelations in recent times can in precis form be rendered as below:

1. He knew Advani was bluffing when as part of his ‘tough on terror’ image-building exercise he said he was completely in the dark on Kandahar. Worse — when then NSA Brajesh Mishra first called Advani’s bluff, Jaswant didn’t just chose to stay silent — he actively defended Advani by being ‘conservative with the truth’.

2. Jaswant, as then Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, stayed silent when proceedings in Parliament were cynically stage-managed by his party leader who, for political reasons, chose to create a tamasha out of a crucial debate.

3. Jaswant, as a man who has held high constitutional office as Defense and Foreign minister chose to ignore, even hide, what he believes is a crucial lapse in national security at the time of the Kargil war.

Today he says:

“I tried to cover it. I treated it as part of my continuing sense of commitment and loyalty”

Commitment and loyalty to whom/to what? All of this happened when Jaswant was a minister; when he had sworn a solemn oath to put the country and its interests first. Now he says he was motivated by a far narrower, more self-serving notion of commitment and loyalty.

So, again, I wonder: Why does Jaswant today get a free pass? Why is he the hero in the passion play currently unfolding? Why is he not being grilled on his own sins of omission and commission?

This is a demonstration of sycophancy. Misuse of the party. It’s sickening.

That’s Jaswant on Advani’s use of the party machinery to promote his book. And his own actions, in being ‘conservative with the truth’ as long as he had a stake in Advani’s, and the party’s, prospects were… what?