Jaswant's progress

He makes assertions on well known episodes that are palpably, demonstrably untrue and makes them with supreme assurance.

Jaswant Singh's factual errors are not of the kind common to politicians: misstatements in argument.

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

- Ralf Waldo Emerson

AT the outset, Jaswant Singh confides that the title of his book is an adaptation of the title of a volume of de Gaulle's memoirs chosen in the confident belief that "there are similarities that help me identify with him". The confidence is hopelessly misplaced. Few memoirs enhance the reputation of their authors. Jaswant Singh's was badly dented by pomposity and arrogance in speech and conduct and a wilful disregard for the truth. His book does not repair the damage; it aggravates it. Remnants of his credibility received a shattering blow even before the book was launched. The Bharatiya Janata Party's bigwigs were conspicuous by their absence at the launch party.

The immediate provocation for their absence - and for the ridicule which the media poured out in abundance - was "the mole issue". As ever, Jaswant Singh prevaricated, kept changing his story in a manner that would have done Sir John Falstaff proud, and performed the act, not with poise, but with pompous rage worked up to evade answers. The book claims that in 1995 he was "given a copy of a letter... to a United States Senator". A "part of its contents" was published (page 126). It referred to "accompanying material" and to "respecting the confidence of a person with direct access to the Prime Minister", P. V. Narasimha Rao. The mole was opposed to "nuclear testing".

In the Rajya Sabha, on August 1, 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh challenged Jaswant Singh: "If he has the decency and courage, he should name the person he is accusing of being a mole... . If you don't, let the country draw its own conclusion." On July 25 Jaswant Singh had said at a press conference that the mole was "in the PMO in a high position". He was not sure "whether he was a civil or uncivil (sic.) servant" but added that "the civil servant" had "retired" and was "out of the country". Stung, he claimed in the Rajya Sabha that the letter was written by a Thomas W. Graham and sent to Harry Barnes - who was no Senator but Ambassador to India (1981-5). No Thomas Graham had served in the U.S. Embassy. The pleas he advanced for suppressing this "sensitive" information for over a decade, even from the police, have been well documented in the press. The BJP's leaders were not amused by his cavalier behaviour on an issue of "national security".

This was no aberration. It was in character. In Defending India Jaswant Singh perpetrated two brazen falsehoods. One (page 45) was that when Gen. Sir Rob Lockhart, the first C-in-C of the Indian Army, presented to Jawaharlal Nehru a plan for the growth of the Army, the Prime Minister retorted, "We don't need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence... Swap the Army. The Police are good enough to meet our security needs." This lie was repeated by Lockhart's Man Friday, A.A. Rudra and retailed by Major Gen. D. K. Palit in his book War in the High Himalayas. Major K. C. Praval records in Indian Army After Independence (page 49) that Lockhart knew of the tribal invasion into Kashmir but failed to inform Nehru and was sacked. Palit's record in the 1962 war is censured in the Henderson Brooks-P.S. Bhagat Report. Jaswant Singh relied on such testimony to spread an inherently implausible tale in order to tarnish Nehru's name. He studiously ignored Nehru's long "Note on Defence Policy and National Development" dated February 3, 1947 - before independence. Nehru wrote "We shall have to build up our defence forces" and laid down his expectations of each of the then three wings. It was published in 1984 in Volume 2 of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (pages 363-8). Defending India was published in 1999 with a research grant from the Sir Dorab Tata Trust and help from two able research assistants.

Worse followed on page 56. The author refers to "the Congress viewpoint" and quotes Nehru on Gandhi's commitment to non-violence. The footnote refers us to his Discovery of India without citing the page. It is rewarding to trace it to page 443 of Nehru's fascinating work; for, it exposes vividly Jaswant Singh's low tactics. After stating Gandhi's stand on non-violence Nehru proceeded to add that "at no time" had the Congress "applied the principle to defence from external aggression or internal disorder".

Both Gandhi's stand and the Congress' are set out on one and the same page, 443. This excludes inadvertent error, leaving malicious intention as the only explanation for the obvious misrepresentation. (See box for both pages.)

Jaswant Singh's factual errors are not of the kind common to politicians: misstatements in argument. Time and again he makes assertions on well known episodes that are palpably, demonstrably untrue and makes them with supreme assurance. Besides falsehood, another common feature is the persistent claim that the predecessors were wrong-headed, if not dishonest. In law and morality, a reckless disregard for the truth is as culpable as a deliberate lie. Here is a brief list of some of his gymnastics with the truth.

On August 4, 2001 in a discussion with "senior strategic analysts" of the prestigious Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), Jaswant Singh said on mediation: "The 1965 Tashkent talks is a case in point. It was for the first time, when the then ruling party [Congress] accepted a third party mediation" (emphasis added, throughout). The talks held in Tashkent in 1966, not in 1965, were by no means the first under mediatory auspices. On Kashmir, mediation, first British and next the United Nations' was the norm from 1947 to 1954 and again in 1962-63 (the United States and the United Kingdom). The Indus Treaty of 1960 owed everything to the World Bank's mediation. The Colombo Powers mediated between India and China (1962-1963). So did the U.S., between India and Pakistan, in 2001-2002 during Operation Parakram. The BJP's strategy was to press the U.S. to move against Pakistan. It was ready to pay a high price. Geography impelled the U.S. to opt for Pakistan after 9/11. Jaswant Singh was prepared to go farther than others in the BJP to secure U.S. support. It is surely improper to speak to a state-funded think tank in a partisan spirit.

Jaswant Singh also told the IDSA: "India has... taken the lead... while initiating the Composite Dialogue in 1998" (Strategic Analysis, IDSA; October 2001; pages 838-9). This is absolutely untrue. Pakistan suggested a Working Group at the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit at Male, which Prime Minister I.K. Gujral accepted on May 12, 1997. He developed second thoughts when A.B. Vajpayee attacked him. Eventually, a mechanism for the composite dialogue was settled in Islamabad on June 23, 1997 (The Hindu, June 24, 1997, for the text). Gujral reneged on this also and offered, at the Dhaka summit on January 14-15, 1998, that all the subjects be discussed in one go to avoid separate talks on Kashmir. Vajpayee revealed on May 24, 1998, that the Dhaka offer was worked out in consultation with him. The Joint Statement of September 24, 1998, itself cites the 1997 accord and says it "would now be made operational". Two months later the BJP wrecked the talks. This is the game Vajpayee & co. are still playing - obstruct others when they start the peace process and claim credit for their own niggardly moves.

There is one gaping flaw in the memoirs. Strobe Talbott's book Engaging India (2004) reported in detail Jaswant Singh's remarks on a host of important issues which are most unflattering. He owes the public a clear duty to respond to them whether in refutation or confirmation. Silence is not a decent option. If exercised, it is tantamount to confirmation.

This brings us to yet another Jaswant Singh exercise in prevarication. Karan Thapar exposed it thoroughly in Hindustan Times on November 7, 2004, with good reason. At the end of June 1998, Jaswant Singh told him in a TV interview that India was prepared to discuss the conversion of the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir as the international border "if it is raised by somebody". As is the practice, the TV channel revealed this in a press release ahead of the telecast on June 30. Jaswant Singh immediately denied it ("entirely incorrect"). Strobe Talbott's book reveals that on July 9 or 10 at the Frankfurt airport, 11 days after Jaswant Singh's denial, he had proposed precisely that in secret to Talbott. This offer to make the LoC the border was repeated at the State Department in August and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Manila (pages 94 and 124, Talbott's book).

There is no mention of this in Jaswant Singh's memoirs. Why? Nor of his repudiation of the Draft Nuclear Doctrine prepared by the National Security Advisory Board and published on August 17, 1999. He repudiated it in private to the Americans and to the Germans. The Indian public was left in the dark. The memoirs are silent on it. Talbott also reveals how close the BJP was to signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Jaswant Singh was not above deceiving Talbott either. "Jaswant assured me that under the Indian system, signature was tantamount to ratification, which he called `a mere formality'." This was utterly false. To Jaswant Singh's own knowledge, signing and ratification are two entirely different things as he himself admitted to C. Raja Mohan in November (The Hindu, November 29, 1999). They were, he explicitly said, "separate decisions". In the memoirs he writes "If, occasionally during the dialogue, and when discussing the issue of adhering to the CTBT, deflective ambiguity was taken recourse to, that can scarcely be turned as adherence." There is, however, a big difference between ambiguity and explicit falsehood.

What this writer learnt from the former Foreign Minister of Pakistan Abdul Sattar, in Islamabad on July 30, 2006, shortly after the publication of the memoirs, was shocking. While working on them, Jaswant Singh availed himself of the services of a senior diplomat in the Indian High Commission in Islamabad to ascertain from Abdul Sattar, who was working on his own book, whether he proposed to publish the documents of the Agra Summit in July 2001. That was sometime in 2005. Abdul Sattar replied that he did not. This writer had published the texts ("The truth about Agra", Frontline, July 29, 2005). One single text of the crucial first paragraph in the handwriting of both Abdul Sattar and Jaswant Singh (printed on page 47) proves Jaswant Singh's version to be false on both counts - the language and the substance. I showed Abdul Sattar Jaswant Singh's claim that he "jocularly mentioned" to Abdul Sattar that "it was best if we wrote English, not `Punjabi' English'". Abdul Sattar told this writer in plain words with calm deliberation: "These words were never uttered by Jaswant Singh." They could not have been, so offensive as they are.

However, fortified with the knowledge of Sattar's forbearance, he proceeded to write a version of the Agra collapse, which has the truth standing on its head. The truth, incidentally, emerged first in an excellent expose immediately thereafter in Frontline by John Cherian. Jaswant Singh would have us believe that not he but Sattar said he would have to consult his leader on the agreed Para One. Sattar returned with a few changes and asked, "Now do we agree?", whereupon Jaswant Singh said he would have to ask the Prime Minister, evidently on the new changes. Sattar's version is that: (1) A draft declaration was agreed. (b) Jaswant Singh asked that Para One on Kashmir be changed. (c) Changed it was, by both Foreign Ministers to accord with India's viewpoint. It was, incidentally, a change for the better, for a good balance. (d) This text was agreed by both, and was written out by both in tandem. (e) Jaswant Singh said he would return in 10 minutes and it can be signed. He did not return to tell the tale. The text, in the handwriting of both, itself belies Jaswant Singh's version and supports Abdul Sattar's. In Parliament, Jaswant Singh did not give the version he belatedly trots out in his book five years later.

In the memoirs, Jaswant Singh harps on President Pervez Musharraf's remarks at breakfast as a cause for the collapse. One participant, Shekhar Gupta, editor, Indian Express, found them constructive (Indian Express, January 31, 2004). L.K. Advani denied that they contributed to the collapse: "No. Not at all" (NDTV, March 12, 2005).

On the hijacking of Indian Airlines' flight IC 814 in 1999, one expected a full account, especially since the author promised to tell us about his interaction with the Taliban at Kandahar in December 1999 (Indian Express, November 11, 2003). Some explanation was due for his certificate on January 1, 2000 after the trip. "We received cooperation from the Taliban throughout the episode" (The Hindu, January 2, 2000).

There is no account of his conduct of diplomacy prior to the plane's landing at Kandahar or why he went there - "Naturally I was inclined to go as it was the MEA's responsibility". He repeatedly said the passengers and crew members were "as comfortable as can be under the circumstances" (December 25, 28 and 29). AFP correspondent A.K. Ahmadzai reported on December 28 "the stench from inside the plane... is overwhelming". At a time when restraint was called for, Jaswant Singh went about attacking all and sundry on December 26. As on other episodes, the narrative is perfunctory and misleading.

The book is a strange piece of work. We are treated to the early years; next, to reflections on Pakistan and Indian nationalism; followed immediately by Pokhran II in 1998 and the years in office. Nothing between 1966 and 1998. He left the Army in 1966 "to join (sic.) politics". The expression gives him away. Jaswant Singh brags about his mastery of the English language. But when he is not consciously using stilted language, unwittingly to hilarious effect, and is off guard, he lapses into English which Somnath Chatterjee sharply told him was "Jodhpuri English". One joins a political party to `enter' politics. One does not "join politics".

The author's world view is altogether different from what some had imagined, as Talbott discovered. He told Talbott in August 1998 that "a nuclear armed India was a natural ally of the United States in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, while a nuclear armed Pakistan was a threat to both countries". One reason he had written the book (Defending India), he said, was "to make Hindutva, as the guiding idea of the BJP, more comprehensible and palatable to Western readers" - an explanation missing in the book itself, significantly.

Talbott adds: "I had heard others associated with the BJP revile Gandhi as a charlatan, an ambitious and angry man who fooled the world into thinking he was a paragon of serenity and love. Jaswant was far more subtle, but during our dinner in Rome and on other occasions, he did not disguise his impatience with the idea of Gandhi as the Mahatma. ... I also found troublesome the way Islam fit into Jaswant's world view - or more, to the point, the way it seemed to be inherently at odds with his concept of Hindu civilisation. By implication, while Parsees, Christians and others qualified as welcome additions to the Indian melting pot, Muslims did not" (pages 133-134). A year later, Jaswant told Talbott, his patient interlocutor: "No one has had as much experience with Islam [read Muslims] as India [read Hindus of the Hindutva brigade]. You must work with us more in waging our common struggle against those forces." An Indo-U.S. alliance against Pakistan was the sub-text.

However, this book contains none of this exposition. On page 387 "Mahatma Gandhi" is absolved of blame for preaching non-violence. At page 89 we are given a version of Hindutva at variance with that of its author V.D. Savarkar and Jaswant Singh's party, the BJP - yet close enough to it. A footnote (page 106) extols the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and adds that it "gained prominence and political influence, giving rise to the creation of Bharatiya Janata Party, formerly Bharatiya Jana Sangh". An exquisite way to describe the BJP's parent. In private Talbott was given one version of Islam and Muslims. On October 17, 2001, a Sapru House audience was given another: "Islam is the voice of God, of Allah, the all compassionate, the all merciful". Which is the real Jaswant Singh?

Significantly, Jaswant Singh disdains the concept of India's composite culture. "There is only one culture in India. It is Indian, thus Hindu or Bharatiya - chose what name you will" (page 89).

As Minister for External Affairs, "I far preferred collecting my own thoughts than going over lengthy briefing notes of variable content, questionable (sic.) language and repetitive bureaucratic syntax" (page 138). In this he is like the BJP ally Bal Thackeray. Asked by Warren Unna of The Washington Post if he read books, he replied, "I don't mix my thoughts with those of others." Jaswant Singh dwells in the cloudy realm of his own thoughts. Facts confuse him.

While in office he wraps himself up in delusions of grandeur, fancying himself as now a de Gaulle, now a Curzon. Yet, he readily submitted to insult by Madeleine Albright when she accused India of lying to the U.S. It was not an encounter between friends as he claims. It was a meeting between Foreign Ministers of sovereign states. He would not have submitted to this had it come from an Asian or African diplomat. Why he accepted that insult from a notorious vulgarian like Albright is not difficult to understand.

Jaswant Singh's utterances show him to be ignorant of the basic facts of the diplomatic record, especially of China. "The Sino-Indian border conflict of October 1962 was the consequence of many factors, a culmination of several accumulated errors, some inherited and others added on. Principally, there was continuing ambiguity about where actually the McMahon Line ran, plus whether it had indeed ever been formally accepted by all, for this fact itself was disputed by China. Worse, independent India did not even move into the territory that it had announced as its own, relying instead on established imperial practice and assumed `good intentions' on the part of a `bhai-bhai' neighbour. Soon enough criminally faulty intelligence inputs, timid military and Foreign Service advice or worse, an absence of it altogether, or, worst still, criminal cowardice and sycophancy, replaced dispassionate and objective considerations." Mark the utter lack of restraint and dignity. This from a man who subverted discipline in the MEA, played favourites and appointed an "adviser (security)", Arun Singh, who ran amuck in the MEA and the Defence Ministry. As Minister for External Affairs, Jaswant Singh went about the MEA as a grump in a china shop.

As a matter of fact, on February 12, 1951, Major R. (Bob) Kating, a Tangkhal Naga and principal aide to the legendary Nari Rustomji, occupied Tawang, evicted the Tibetans, and perfected India's occupation of the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh.

On November 23, 2006, Jaswant Singh said that it was for the first time that China had claimed Arunachal Pradesh, when Ambassador San Yuxi made his remarks 10 days earlier, though it had disputed the border in the East. Advani agreed. In truth, this claim was known to New Delhi at least as far back as in 1936. The book suggests that Jaswant Singh had long laboured under his delusion.

It is a measure of Jaswant Singh's incompetence that rather than settle the border issue he embarked on delineation of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and did so in gross ignorance. In June 2001, he said it would be over by the end of the year. He told a closed-door meeting of journalists and former senior officials in December 2001 that before he became Minister for External Affairs, India "lacked a clear strategic vision in key foreign policy areas". He cast doubts on the ability of the China and Pakistan desks to handle complex issues. "They lack specialisation." Also, "it is only now that we have a clear strategic vision on Central Asia". Before he came along there was never a clear policy on Tibet, he claimed (Saurabh Shukla, Hindustan Times, December 6, 2001). He drew a sharp refutation from one participant in virtual rebuke.

The proposal to delineate the LAC, misconceived as it was, was fouled up by the Minister himself, raking at the Sino-Pakistan boundary accord on the eve of Agra. Each side's map was supposed to depict the line of actual control. China had made it plain in 1960 that it would not discuss with India the boundary to the west of the Karakoram Pass. Yet, on April 17, 2002, the map India gave to China covered that area. On March 29, 2002, Jaswant Singh told C. Raja Mohan in Beijing that clarification of the LAC was "something India has not been able to achieve in the last 50 years". Maps on the western sector would be exchanged by the end of the year and on the east shortly thereafter. The talks are stalled to this day.

All the myths about the boundary dispute are trotted out, including Vallabhbhai Patel's famous letter of 1950 which was silent on Aksai Chin. His lament that no "official study" on the diplomatic or political aspect is yet available betrays the dilettante. No government would provide such a record - Jaswant Singh could have commissioned one from the advisers he acquired; better still, he could have studied the record himself. But that lies in the MEA's files and in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, which he did not read. All he loves is quotes from books by friends and sweeping comments dressed up in florid prose. The book answers Samuel Johnson's definition of a rant - "high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought".

The rake's progress was abruptly halted. In Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, he caught a Tartar. In an interview to USA Today, Powell said what everyone knew to be the case, namely, that the U.S. exerted itself to defuse the tension between India and Pakistan created by the BJP's reckless Operation Parakram. He said that the U.S. had set up a historic telephonic call between the Prime Ministers of both countries. On October 26, 2004, Jaswant Singh, now out of power, said with equal recklessness that "there is no truth... . Powell has never spoken on the telephone ever. The way he has gone about claiming credit is a total concoction and a matter of imagination the way it [the U.S.] conjured up biological weapons in Iraq." Never mind the fact that when in power the BJP was inclined to send Indian troops to Iraq but was prevented from doing so by public opinion and that Jaswant Singh personally never denounced the U.S. His denial did not reckon with the fact that the Americans keep a record of all telephonic conversations. Two days later, on October 28, the State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher revealed that Powell had "several times described the efforts that he made to support the Indian and Pakistani governments as they made efforts to work together. This has been a matter that we have long supported with our policy." Powell indeed had given details of talks preceding the telephonic call between Vajpayee and Zafarullah Khan Jamali. It is hard indeed to accept any statement of fact by Jaswant Singh unless it is corroborated independently, or treat any expression of opinion by him with any degree of seriousness.

Right now he is undergoing a third transformation. The first was in 1966 when the soldier decided to "join" politics. The second is known only to those who knew him. Jaswant Singh projected in the 1980s an image totally different from the one he did from 1989 onwards. He never made the communal statements he now began to make, so much so that a secular-minded columnist urged him in this writer's presence to leave the BJP and join any of the secular parties. The BJP's performance in the 1989 polls went to his head. He decided to become an "idol-breaker", smashing Nehru's idols. His legacy "should be rejected in toto" (The Times of India, July 31, 1990). The manner and style changed. He became arrogant and rude, and assumed false airs - pomposity without dignity, pretensions to learning without undertaking the pains of scholarship and claims to rectitude while showing repeatedly a proneness to falsehood and a reckless disregard for the truth; altogether a false persona.

Now a third transformation is under way - the politician who can cite Ibn Khaldun and emerge as an academic at work on books more than one. His progress would be interesting to watch. Past record reminds one strikingly of the famous two-century-old couplet. The first line was composed by the blind poet Juraat, who asked his friend Inshah to suggest the next line, little reckoning with his proneness to mischief. The couplet fits Jaswant Singh to perfection. Us zulf pay bhapti shab-e-dejuur ki soojhi/andhe ko andherey mein bari duur ki soojhi (on those locks burnish thoughts of the pitched dark of the night/a blind one has in this darkness visions of afar).