On Nov 13, 1974, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat made a famous speech at the United Nations. “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” he had declared on his way to becoming a revolutionary icon of the Arab world and beyond. “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand,” he had cautioned. Last week in New Delhi, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi also told a dinner audience to heed the olive branch in his hand. In this case though the words sounded inappropriate. Let’s see why.

The failed 1981 Fez summit of the Arab League saw hard-line states like Iraq, Syria and Libya snubbing Morocco’s King Hasan, the host, by not sending their heads to the important meeting. Instead, second or third ranking leaders like Libya’s Abusallam Jalloud and Iraq’s Tariq Aziz were dispatched to stress the point. When Syrian Foreign Minister Abdul Halim Khaddam got up to express his rejection of the Fahd plan, which was proposed by Saudi Arabia in an attempt to end the stalemate with Israel, he was politely told by King Hasan to sit down. “You are too junior to make war or peace,” Khaddam was told with a smile.

Of course there is no fundamental principle about the rank of the interlocutor who may deliver a subtle or brusque warning in international relations, as Mr Khaddam sought to do, albeit unsuccessfully. A fourth ranking American official was able to change the Pakistan government’s worldview by threatening its leaders with dire consequences. And who can deny the clout wielded by Henry Kissinger, for example, who outshone his bosses as a global power centre. The context of the idiom also is important. We normally hear of the olive branch during a raging crisis when one of the sides involved makes a bold bid for peace, often taking a U-turn from a given policy. India and Pakistan are self-evidently well on the way to a fifth round of their Composite Dialogue which, if taken seriously, should be enough to resolve their chronic and acute differences.

Therefore, where was the need to punctuate the prevailing atmosphere with the idiom of the olive branch?

The phrase could apply in our context, if at all, to President Musharraf’s overture in Kathmandu when he reached out to then prime minister Vajpayee in the famous handshake. Or it could be more appropriately used for Mr Vajpayee’s Agra summit invitation to Gen Musharraf even though the Pakistani head of state was still perceived by India as the villain of Kargil. Which brings me to another key political issue implicitly raised by the Pakistan foreign minister’s comments in New Delhi. Mr Qureshi told a press conference, according to the text made available by the Indian foreign ministry, that there was a consensus now, cutting across the domestic political divide in both countries, for a peaceful settlement of India-Pakistan disputes.

He specifically named India’s main opposition BJP and an undisclosed Pakistani opposition party, presumably Gen Musharraf’s Muslim League, as being on board with the peace process.

There’s a problem in this. According to reports last week, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif berated President Musharraf’s policies for messing up the Kashmir issue with India. Was he referring to, or perhaps accepting, Indian allegations that Pakistan under the general’s rule had continued to foment trouble in Kashmir despite promises to the contrary? If that was the case, where is the ground for asserting a domestic consensus? Is the new government continuing the previous establishment’s policies or is there a departure. If so what is the point of departure on issues like Kashmir? Similarly, on the Indian side, by explicitly naming the BJP as being supportive of the peace process, Mr Qureshi has overlooked everything that the party’s prime ministerial candidate, Mr Lal Kishan Advani, has spoken of adversely on the issue in his book.

He has given more than a hint in the book My Country My Life – on where he stands on Kashmir and other issues dogging India-Pakistan ties. For example, the hard-line rightwing politician recounts in some detail his own strategy vis-a-vis Hurriyat leaders and other Kashmiri interlocutors during his tenure as home minister. The strategy was rooted in the BJP’s 1966 resolution in its avatar as the Jana Sangh.

“Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India,” was a familiar quote from the Jana Sangh resolution. “Pakistan has aggressively occupied one-third part of the state since 1947. To get that aggression vacated and secure the liberation of Pak-occupied part of the state is the duty of the government of India.” And in a giveaway, Mr Advani makes an important comment when he says: “As I read these lines, I am amazed at their relevance even today, after forty-two years.”

In remarks quoted by an Indian news agency last week, Mr Asif Ali Zardari, keystone of the ruling edifice in Pakistan, said he was prepared to accept autonomy for Kashmir as part of a lasting solution.

Mr Advani, according to his book, would have none of that. On the contrary, he slammed poor Farooq Abdullah, the nominally pro-India Kashmiri leader of secular credentials, for pressing the Vajpayee government to accept a resolution for Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy passed by the state’s assembly under his tenure as chief minister.

“The nation was shocked on June 26, 2000, during the Vajpayee government’s rule in New Delhi, when Jammu & Kashmir assembly adopted a report of the State Autonomy Committee (SAC) and asked the Centre to immediately implement it. The SAC recommended return of the constitutional situation in J&K to its pre-1953 status, by restoring to the state all subjects for governance except defence, foreign affairs, currency and communication,” Mr Advani wrote.

Obviously, the Vajpayee cabinet rejected the demand and Mr Farooq was told “to decide whether to continue in the NDA at the Centre following the Union Cabinet’s rejection of the state assembly’s autonomy resolution. To his credit, Dr Abdullah allowed the issue to lapse.” The BJP strongman confessed to having differences with Vajpayee’s key security aide Brajesh Mishra and A.S. Dulat, a former chief of RAW who was the Kashmir pointman in the prime minister’s office, over the government’s Kashmir policy.

When he learnt that Mr Dulat had given some Hurriyat leaders the impression that the government was prepared to look at solutions on Kashmir outside the ambit of the India Constitution, Mr Advani was upset. “In my very first meeting with the APHC delegation, I made it clear that there was no question of the government entertaining any proposal outside the Indian Constitution.”

It was now the turn of the Mirwaiz to suffer a politically embarrassing bear hug. In a TV interview, quoted by Mr Advani, “the young Kashmiri separatist leader said that actually it was Advani who started dialogue with Hurriyat two years ago when he was in government. Farooq said that Pakistanis have discovered his soft face recently, but Kashmiris discovered his soft face two years ago.” It’s clear that consensus is hardly the word Mr Qureshi was looking for.

There’s one more matter that the minister appeared not too keen to touch publicly during his Delhi tour. For even as he went about his meetings in the Indian capital, the Kashmir Valley was in ferment over the Amarnath pilgrimage issue. Some Indian officials too said privately that the scene was reminiscent of the massive upsurge of the 1990s. Yet there was not a word — either from the media during the press conference or from Mr Qureshi during his other public appearances, on the raging issue. Was this the “opportunity” and the “environment” the Pakistani guest had in mind for peace to prosper? Or was he being deferential to his host’s sensitivities and, therefore, keeping quiet about it? Let me end by saying that I was on the same flight from Lahore to Delhi in which the Hurriyat leaders returned last week from their Pakistan sojourn. The atmosphere in the cabin was gloomy. It was obvious that the moderate Kashmiri leaders feared becoming irrelevant because of the drift between India and Pakistan over their fate. What could be heard loudly instead over their looming despair were the shrill exhortations of the rightwing Muslim leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani from Kashmiri rooftops.

The rightwing leader seems to have gained everything in Kashmir at the expense of everyone else. And he is not holding any olive branch in his hand. This, and not the relatively easy solutions of Siachen and Sir Creek disputes, will make a more meaningful context for the talks that the two prime ministers are planning to have. Whether they meet in Islamabad first or in Colombo on the margins of the Saarc summit in August is secondary.

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