Over the last one week I went through a couple of books, cover to cover. Both are superbly written. One is on Pakistan as a country, trundling on and on despite all its dysfunctionalities, and the other is by an ex-Pakistani diplomat who was posted in New Delhi from April 2014 till August 2017 as the Pakistan High Commissioner to India.
As for the former book, I will write a separate review of it in a day or two. In the present one, I will write about ‘Hostility: A diplomatic diary of India-Pakistan relations’, written by Abdul Basit, former High Commissioner of Pakistan to India. The book was released in April 2021. Khushwant Singh’s phrase, “with malice towards one and all”, encapsulates the book aptly. He has spared none in the book. But that doesn’t mean the book is a degenerate commentary by some bitter ex-diplomat of the Pakistan foreign services. Basit is intelligent, articulate, erudite, and is a hell-has-no-mercy critic of things in both India and Pakistan power corridors.
The book is 307 pages of fast-paced writing, which starts from the time he was posted as Pakistan’s ambassador in Berlin, to his being shortchanged from becoming the foreign secretary of Pakistan by some of his colleagues in the Foreign Office, to finally serving his full-term in New Delhi, to voluntarily retiring from the service. I had always been impressed by the glib, tongue-in-cheek, guarded and measured responses in the interviews that he used to give to TV anchors in India. Watch his interview with Rajdeep Sardesai in March 2017 about Kulbhushan Jadhav, and one gets to understand how much dissimulation he utilises in articulating himself. Years ago, one of my friends commenting on Basit’s question-answer interaction ‘Off the Cuff’ with Shekhar Gupta for NDTV-The Print, told me, “This is absolute fielding. He is a kalaheer (brainy person).” Abdul Basit is indeed a ‘kalaheer’ in the art of some serious diplomacy.
Basit uses razor-sharp wit to prise open the recalcitrant Pakistani bureaucracy and how individual interests have led to the ruin of any objective diplomacy on the part of Pakistan from being carried out. He is especially vitriolic at ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mian Nawaz Sharif, who he has flayed in such pointed terms that one gets a feel that the ex-PM was hell-bent on sabotaging the Kashmir issue in favour of his own personal rapport with PM Modi and his business interests. Basit has pulled no punches in describing his seniors in the Foreign Office like Aizaz Chaudhary, Tariq Fatemi, Salman Bashir, etc, and their fossilised inertia towards keeping things going for Pakistan as they are. Essentially, status quoism!
As far as his stay in Delhi is concerned, Basit is true to his principle of diplomatic unflappability. He describes how he was unfazed by the criticism of Indian media and their description of him being a hawk. In India, he did not live in a comfort cocoon inside the walls of the Pakistan embassy in Delhi. He writes about his continual interactions with the media, his visits to Kolkata, Lucknow, Nagpur, etc. He is livid when criticising both Pakistan and India for resorting to slap-dashism, rather than following a continuous, unstinting structured bilateral dialogue. The author gived details of how difficult it had been to weather the storms of tumultuous years of the BJP government in Delhi.
Dr K Natwar Singh, former External Affairs Minister of India (2004-06) in his autobiography, One Life isn’t Enough, writes, “Pakistani diplomats are as good as India’s, if not better.” It is amply clear from the book’s range and turn of phrase that Abdul Basit is a top-quality diplomat. His resistance to replying in the face of severe provocations by the media is marvellous. His tryst with ‘patient diplomacy’ comes through in his constructive criticism of how the bilateral relations needed and need to be conducted. His point of argument throughout the book is that Kashmir remains central to India and Pakistan. All the talk on terrorism, trade, sports, etc, may result in what the author calls ‘artificial congeniality’ between the two countries but lacks the potential to bring permanent peace to the subcontinent. He makes trenchant remarks about how Pakistan has let down Kashmiris time and again by being just hollow and bloviating in its efforts. He calls the symbolism of observing various days like July 13, February 5, October 26, etc, to be exercises in futility and a waste of time. The author terms Imran Khan’s speech in the United Nations of September, 2019, thorough balderdash and a game of zero-sum equivalence.
The book is a very well-written one. It may not count as a unique book on the subject of India and Pakistan, but there is a lot of constructive criticism of the two nuclear powers. At many an instance, he would have liked Pakistan to shed its pusillanimity, but that wasn’t meant to be. Here he aptly justifies the tag of being a ‘hawk’.
There is much to be learnt from the book. Terms like sub-rosa diplomacy, candyfloss diplomacy, patient diplomacy, pleonastic argumentation, shakers and movers (signifier for nepotism), au courant (keeping aware of, in the context of how Pakistan Foreign Office in Islamabad tried to make him irrelevant), monkey wrenching, Deus ex Machina, Lapsus linguae (a slip of tongue), cockamamie idea, cloud-cuckoo land, baroque abstractions of diplomacy, possum playing, faute de mieux (for want of a better alternative), ambassador-at-large, blue funk, hortatory comments, philippics (a bitter attack), bailiwick, sterile verbosity, crust of unacceptable complacency, erga omnes (to describe the fact that everyone has rights, including Kashmiris) etc, besides clauses of Vienna Convention on consular access, the various UNSC resolutions etc, are fitted brilliantly. I had considerable difficulty in understanding them. All in all, the book is a should-read for everybody who wants to know how the present intractability has been arrived at betwixt India and Pakistan, and how Kashmir has been abandoned, more so by Pakistan than by India.
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Uzair Qadri