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Book Review
Despatches from Pakistan
CHITRAPU UDAY BHASKAR
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Reflections on the author’s eventful three-year journalistic stint in Pakistan
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DATELINE ISLAMABAD: Amit Baruah; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 295.
With Islamabad racked by the Lal Masjid violence and global attention focussed on the growing footprints of jihadi terrorism, it is on a perceptive note that Baruah ends his reflections on his stint in Pakistan, as the special correspondent of The Hindu from April 1997 to June 2000. Pondering over the almost Delphic question of whether General Musharraf can reverse the Zia legacy of the Islamisation of Pakistani polity, the author pithily observes: ̶
0;In the final analysis, General Musharraf has failed to put Pakistan on the road to becoming a more tolerant, moderate society. He hasn’t been able to undo the wrongs of Zia’s pernicious legacy. Ending the veto-power of the religious right will need more than the professed personal liberalism of a military general in Pakistan. It will need a political party that can mobilize the people to uphold the rule of law, create jobs and educate the masses.”
Eventful
One could quibble and add that there may be a need for more than one political party to redress Pakistan’s many ills and that a credible opposition wherein all the interlocutors subscribe to normative politico-legal norms and collectively nurture institutional credibility, coupled with the military returning to the barracks and confining itself to its assigned role would be the ideal prescription. But that is a minor digression in what is an extremely readable personal account of one of India’s respected diplomatic correspondents. The title is apt. The seemingly innocuous word “dateline” is pregnant with import for a journalist and for an Indian reporter, the tag Islamabad comes with its own distinctive mix of travails, challenges and opportunities. As one of only two Indian journalists accredited to Pakistan as part of a complex, prickly and archaic reciprocal arrangement, Baruah narrates his own experiences as being the “other” in a state that has exuded perennial hostility to the idea of India. In 12 compact chapters, he writes about his days in Islamabad with no pretensions about this volume being the final word on the deeply complex issue of India-Pakistan relations or an in-depth analysis of what ails the relationship.
“This is a journalistic account of the events I reported from Islamabad…” says the author at the outset and he is faithful to his mandate. Drawing on the many reports and articles he had filed for The Hindu and Frontline, the author leads the reader through the Nawaz Sharif years (1997) through the nuclear tests that altered the strategic profile of the subcontinent (1998) to the false dawn of the Vajpayee Lahore visit (February 1999) and the Kargil perfidy that followed in the summer of 1999, the military coup of Musharraf (October 1999) and the abject humiliation of the Kandahar hijacking episode at the turn of the millennium.
Hijacking episode
The concluding section traces the post-Kargil phase of the prickly bilateral relationship and details the inglorious hijacking episode that finally concluded with Jaswant Singh personally overseeing the release of the stranded Indian passengers in the ill fated IC 814. Baruah, being an Indian journalist, was not allowed the access to travel to Afghanistan that his peers enjoyed and it will be one of his major professional regrets that he was unable to file a story with Kandahar as the dateline. Of the hijacking incident, he ruminates: “At the end of the hijacking and as the new millennium began, I understood that a new and dangerous phase had commenced in India-Pakistan relations. Each time one felt that (the) relations had hit rock-bottom, Islamabad and New Delhi showed that ‘rock-bottom’ was a perpetually shifting level for the two countries. The hijacking was the latest example.” This of course was amply borne out by the enormity of 9/11 and its impact on the regional grid, and the tense India-Pakistan military build-up that followed the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001.
Streak of humanism
Some lesser-known nuggets of new information are tucked away in the book — as for instance the role of Pakistan Army officers in the kidnapping of Rubiya Sayeed, the blatant support to the IC 814 hijackers by the Pakistan establishment, the Colin Powell revelations about the crucial U.S. nudge that encouraged India and Pakistan to resume talks and such like. These are disparate details that will be valuable to the serious scholar and analyst tracking India-Pakistan relations as their tempestuous trajectory move towards the 60th anniversary of Independence.
Dateline Islamabad is not devoid of endearing personal texture and while Baruah’s many Pakistani interlocutors must remain anonymous, the vignette about his regular ‘minder’ (the Pakistan intelligence officials who sh
adowed the author right through his Islamabad stint) offering condolences over a family bereavement is illustrative. There is an abiding streak of humanism on both sides that may yet stabilise the troubled subcontinent. Baruah’s account is a useful addition to Indo-Pakistan literature and highlights the crucial role foreign correspondents play and the hazards they encounter. The publisher is to be commended for producing a neat book that is free of errors — a rarity these days.
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