India should give Imran Khan a chance

India should give Imran Khan a chance

FPJ BureauUpdated: Wednesday, May 29, 2019, 06:46 AM IST
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AFP PHOTO / FAROOQ NAEEM |

An elected new government is installed in Pakistan. There is so much speculation about what difference Imran Khan — the Prime Minister — could make to improving the Indo-Pak relation.  Narendra Modi, in his congratulatory letter of August 18 to him, spoke of a “meaningful and constructive engagement” with Pakistan. This may be constructed his willingness to have a dialogue with his counterpart in Pakistan. Imran Khan has reciprocated, expressing a desire to-restart the stalled India-Pakistan peace process. He says: “The best way to alleviate poverty and uplift the people of the subcontinent is to resolve our differences, including Kashmir, through dialogue.”

On one hand, Modi is trying to reach out to Imran Khan, and on the other, his party spokesman Sambit Patra, in a press conference on August 21, has carried a blistering attack on Navjot Singh Sindhu for attending the swearing ceremony of Imran Khan. There was so much venom and violence in his press briefing, calling Sidhu anti-national, despite the fact that he was permitted by the union government to attend the ceremony. He is crticised for sitting next to PoK President Masood Khan and hugging the Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa at the ceremony. This is petty politics — creating an issue out of a non-issue.

Could Sidhu have decided the sitting arrangement and walked out of the ceremony, created a scene by refusing to reciprocate the hug from the Army Chief? Could he have dishonoured the commitment to attend the oath-taking ceremony of a friend long standing? In fact, Sidhu, though attended the ceremony in his personal capacity, has created lot of goodwill among the people of Pakistan. He says that the Pakistan Army chief talked of peace and offered to open the corridor from Dera Baba Nanak to Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan to facilitate pilgrims from India — a long pending thorny issue. If Modi’s invitation to Nawaz Shariff to his own swearing-in ceremony in 2014 and his unscheduled visit to Pakistan in December 2015 to attend the wedding ceremony of latter’s granddaughter were not unpatriotic, how could Sidhu’s scheduled visit be called ‘anti-national’?  This politics of calumny and double standards must stop in the larger interest of the nation.

Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar were also invited by Imran Khan’s swearing-in ceremony. But they chose to skip it off on some lame excuse. Perhaps they wanted to be politically correct. The Test matches in England wouldn’t have halted if Gavaskar had taken a day or two off from his commentary and attended his friend’s ceremony. Both Kapil Dev and Gavaksar could have generated immense goodwill across the border, contributing to people-to-people contact. They have lost an historical opportunity. By not responding to a friend’s invitation, they have lowered their self esteem. Friendship cannot be calculative and conditional. What is more important is being true to oneself upholding ethical values. The moral compass is something that one should never compromise.

Imran Khan is right in saying that “those in India targeting Sidhu are doing a great disservice to peace in the sub-continent” and that he was a peace ambassador. The Indian government should give Imran a chance. Let a fresh chapter on Indo-Pak relation begin with the new government in Pakistan. It is unfair to pre-judge Imran Khan as a ‘puppet’ in the hands of the Army and the clerics. Making his speech on his victory he said that he seeks the hand of peace with India, and if India takes one step forward, he would take two steps. This could be taken on its face value to restart a dialogue with him. Modi government’s public posture of not having any engagement at all with Pakistan negates the fact that the national secure advisors and military officials from both the countries are talking to each other, though never made public. There must be a dialogue, even to talk on terror.

If anything, what the ruling party can learn from Vajpayee is rising above partisan electoral politics, tolerating alternate viewpoints and treating the opponents with grace and dignity. It must open dialogue with Pakistan. Vajpayee had invited General Pervez Musharraf to the Agra Summit and took the Lahore Bus, in spite of the Kargil war and the attack on Indian Parliament, to make peace with the neighbour. As he said, “we can choose friends, but not neighbours”. Imran Khan is likely to reach out to Modi in the next few days to make him drop India’s opposition to the SAARC summit which Pakistan is keen in hosting this year. When Sushma Swaraj and her counterpart in Pakistan, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York next month, they have an opportunity to break the deadlock.

G Ramachandram is a professor of Political Science and retired Principal who published his magnum opus The Trial by Fire: Memoirs of a College Principal.

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