Kinesics at the Agra Summit

Gestures, they say, speak louder than words. SHIV K. KUMAR speculates on how the body language of Mr. Vajpayee and General Musharraf in Agra may have played a role in the Summit's outcome.

IT may be surmised that what partially salvaged the Agra Summit from a total failure, was the body language used by the two key players in the three-day drama, an army chief and a poet- statesman - even though neither of them was known for any public display of emotion. But howsoever muted was the body language used by President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee, it must have helped them overcome their initial inbuilt reservations about each other. If Kenneth Burke, in his seminal book, Language as Gesture, expounds his concept of words, spoken or written, as forms of gesture, one may also recognise the potency of gesture as a visible mode of communication with its own morse key, as it were. Often, when rhetoric lapses into the grey areas of ambiguity and prevarication, a sparkle in the eye, a gentle vibration in the voice, a warm hug or handshake, may reveal the inner posture of the mind. For instance, the telecast of the ceremonial welcome at Rashtrapati Bhavan, showed Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee lending himself, rather niggardly, to a handshake with President Musharraf who looked cold and stern. At that moment, the Prime Minister may have recalled the fervent hug he received from the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Nawaz Sharif, at the Wagah border, which later blossomed into the Lahore Declaration. But when the General was shown, at his ancestral home in Neharwali haveli, hugging Anaro Devi (who recalled him as a four-year-old mischievous boy), with a benign smile, he revealed a different facet of his personality - a sensitive, warm-hearted human being, susceptible to emotion.

The next day, as the two leaders went into a retreat at the Jaypee Palace hotel at Agra, to engage themselves in political parleys, they must have let their body language come into free play, presumably influenced by the white marble "magnificence" (to quote Gen. Musharraf himself) of the Taj, that unique testament to love and commitment. If the General had somehow made it to the shrine at Nizamuddin and the Dargah at Ajmer, his body language, after these spiritual pilgrimages, would have helped him empathise with Prime Minister Vajpayee's anguish over cross- border terrorism that speaks the language of violence and hatred. But once denied the blessings of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia and Khwaja Mohiuddin Chishti, his body language stiffened into an aggressive posture on Kashmir, his "core" issue. (Interestingly, one may surmise that the word "core", repeated ad nauseam, must have phonetically helped him placate his prime constituency at home, the "corps" commanders - and the jehadis. It is possible to imagine how, during the course of his last round with Mr. Vajpayee, he'd have spoken with a tight upper lip, and his hands clasped in his lap. No wonder, the summit floundered on these basic differences, leading to a wrangle over the drafting of what might have emerged as the Agra Declaration.

While these political parleys had their ebb and flow at Agra, the poets from both countries were engaged in building cultural bridges. At the mushaira held in Delhi on July 15, Ahmed Faraz, the renowned Urdu poet from Pakistan, recited, with his hands raised in a prayerful posture and his voice charged with emotion, his famous ghazal: "Ranjish hi sahi, dil ki dukhane ke liye aa" ("Come, my love, even if only to complain, or bruise my heart"). Wasn't Faraz poetically articulating the sentiments of Mr. Vajpayee who fervently invited Musharraf to come to India even when he knew that the hiatus between the two nations was almost unbridgeable?

To this meeting of the hearts, pleaded by Faraz, Mr. V. P. Singh, another poet-statesman, contributed his poem at the mushaira: "Ab koi kabar na bane, ab koi chita na jale" ("Hereafter, let there be no grave, and no pyre go up in flames"). It is obvious that poetry too, has its own body language that uses images and metaphors to transmit emotions. But what can such a language achieve in a world of political confrontation? So the three-day "love-affair" at Agra failed to reach consummation in a lasting "marriage".

But, maybe, in this end will be a new beginning of a journey that must go on.

To quote a couplet by Sardar Jaffri (often quoted by Mr. I. K. Gujral, another former Prime Minister with a poetic vision): "Guftgoo jari rahe', baat se baat chale" - "Let the conversation never end, one thing leading to another."

The writer is a poet, novelist and educationist who was awarded the Padma Bhushan for literature this year.

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