L K Advani has a story from his eventful and ultimately disastrous

interactions with Pervez Musharraf during the Agra summit. He says he told Musharraf that if he really wanted to restore confidence between our two countries, all he needed to do was turn over Dawood Ibrahim to India. Musharraf was taken aback both by the directness and “loadedness” of that question, ambushed for a moment by a “mere civilian” thought. Then, recovering, he told Advani that where he came from (the army), this was called “minor tactics”, not worth indulging in when nations talk at that level. It is a different matter that Musharraf’s idea of eschewing minor tactics was to come straight to Kashmir and settle it in one sitting, of course, as per his “most reasonable” formulations. But the fact is that for far too long our bilateral exchanges are a history of petty, minor tactical moves, ambushes, pin-pricks and totally meaningless, purposeless manoeuvres. It follows of course that after each bilateral engagement each side has been able to go back home “having conceded nothing”, and surely never has the draft of any of our declarations or joint statements been described as less than perfect. We are, after all, governments run by joint secretaries, several generations of which species, on both sides of the border, embody the very finest in bureaucratic perfection.

That is why it is fascinating that the most commonly stated discomfort with the Sharm el-Sheikh joint declaration is with its drafting. Let’s concede for a moment that the drafting is bloody awful, a real shame. So what? A joint declaration is not a legally binding contract and is as good as the intentions of the two parties. Over the past six decades both sides have signed and tossed many such joint statements, even declarations. Pakistan’s record here is much more spectacular, having nearly repudiated all three substantive accords of the past four decades, the Shimla Accord, Lahore Declaration and then the Islamabad Declaration, signed in the course of three different decades. It is, therefore, utterly pointless to worry about the imperfections, if any, in the draft of the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement. What matters is the intention behind it, because what might seem like slip-ups in the draft are perhaps intentional. Could it be that the larger intention is to move on from minor tactics now to some bold, if risky, grand strategy? An effort to get our Pakistan policy out of the trenches?

... contd.