COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

The S and S duo's shenanigans

Natwar Singh has got company. Legal eagle Kapil Sibal is now furiously engaged in trying to make the mini war in Kargil a great defeat for India. And, oh boy, how the government and the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition are indebted to the S and S duo! That is the best thing that could have happened to the Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance on the eve of a crucial parliamentary poll.

Only half in jest was it said that with Singh firing from all the guns from all the television studios at Vajpayee, the latter would soon cede the slot of the NDA's chief campaigner to the former diplomat. Now it seems that Vajpayee stands in real danger of being pushed back as the number three vote-catcher for the BJP- led coalition even as Singh and Sibal slug it out between themselves for the number one and two positions.

The superannuated diplomat and the lawyer are not simply in sync with the national mood in the wake of the war in Kargil. Their harsh and invariably unsubstantiated charges are meant more to get them closer to the dumb deity of 10 Janpath than to convince the countrymen at large that the prime minister had bungled in Kargil. Singh had reason to be unhappy with the government for accomplishing the main objective of Operation Vijay sooner than he had hoped.

He had allowed himself to be persuaded that the war in Kargil would go on till at least September when the United Nations General Assembly would meet like every year for its annual jamboree. ''Pakistan would rake up the issue in the General Assembly, which, in turn, would lead to the internationalisation of the Kashmir issue,'' the Congress party expert on foreign affairs and putative foreign minister in any future Sonia government had said in several of his on and off-the-record briefings to the media.

Of course, Singh was way off the mark in assessing the time- frame of the armed hostilities as he was in analysing all other facets of the war in Kargil. You need to be clever to be critical; Singh was being critical without being clever. Hence every time he raised his finger at Vajpayee, he lost the sympathy of his viewers\listeners\readers etc. When the entire nation was emotionally engaged in supporting the valiant soldiers fighting to repulse the enemy from the craggy mountains in Kargil, Singh was engaged in campaigning for the coming parliamentary election.

The more the public mood concentrated on the valour and sacrifices of our young officers and jawans, the more shrill Singh sounded as the spokesperson of Sonia's party about the war in Kargil. Everyone outside Sonia's charmed circle of hangers-on was put off by Singh's nit-picking. But none dared call a halt to Singh's ravings and rantings for fear of incurring the wrath of the supreme leader of 10, Janpath. Alas, the Jat revolt against the Congress party in Rajasthan coupled with Singh's felt need to mend fences with his constituents in order for him to realise his immediate dream of getting elected to the Lok Sabha had deprived the BJP-led coalition of the services of the ace campaigner.

But the void has now been filled by Sibal who lost no time in stepping into Singh's shoes. And being far more clever and articulate than Singh, Sibal is determined to bring all his powers of diversionary declamations and lawyerly debates in order to turn the Kargil victory for the nation into a huge defeat for his party. The contempt he affects for ''that prime minister'' on myriad television talk shows detracts nothing from Vajpayee's position of pre-eminence in the nation's polity today. It only shows the lawyer's personal and political pique -- and his lack of civility. For someone who is a senior Supreme Court advocate, Sibal's acerbic mannerism and his seeming ignorance about the terms of political discourse is indeed shocking.

A good lawyer or bad is necessarily supposed to defend the indefensible -- after all, his/her livelihood depends entirely on not being judgmental about law-breakers. But Sibal's preferred choice of a second profession, namely politics, entails some such constraints.

Since the ultimate court of appeal in politics is the people of India one has to at all times try and be in consonance with their moods and their aspirations. On Kargil, despite the tragically high loss of lives of our soldiers, alas, the Congress party's verbal warriors have been shooting their mouths off without endearing themselves a wee bit to the public. They denigrated the Indian successes on Kargil on all three fronts, viz moral, diplomatic and military.

Early on in Operation Vijay, the Congress party rushed to lampoon Vajpayee's Lahore visit when its in-house balloonist made a huge likeness of an over-turned bus with the legend Delhi- Lahore-Kargil emblazoned on it. This was as if the Paki intruders in Kargil had come in the Lahore-Delhi bus. (Lest you forget, the Lahore bus service was never suspended even at the peak of the Kargil hostilities and continues uninterrupted to this day.)

That inverted rubber bus symbolised less Vajpayee's naivete in proffering the hand of friendship to our neighbour than the Congress party's opportunism in seeking to exploit the war in Kargil for partisan ends. After that the Congress bus turned turtle and Singh withdrew to the backwaters of Rajasthan it is now Sibal's turn to rifle through the records of the Indian army for foisting the charge of intelligence failure against ''that prime minister.''

Before we dispose of that unfortunate business of the penalised brigade commander's alleged letter to the chief of the army staff, let me make a general comment in passing. Which is that all acts of aggression anywhere, in any war, must be accompanied by a great element of surprise. It is not possible for the army to be in a state of war-readiness at the border round the year. If your neighbour is bent upon committing aggression against you, he shall have the initial advantages of surprise and the location of the theatre of war of his own choosing. Each time Pakistan committed aggression against India, it took us by surprise, be it 1947, 1965 1971 or 1999. And in 1962 we were completely taken by surprise by the Chinese in Aksai-Chin.

Surely, this repeated failure to anticipate hostile action by our neighbours indicates a flawed approach on the part of our armed forces. Maybe the budget allocation for defence was niggardly as it did not ensure the costly aerial and radar surveillance. Maybe post-Kargil, the finance minister would loosen the purse strings to provide for satellite reconnaissance and remote sensors all along the border.

But the fact that the Indian army used to withdraw well inside our territory during the killer winter months and that this was the routine followed for at least two decades or more cannot be denied by anyone who has tried to appreciate the reality as against the Congress fiction about the war in Kargil.

Now about the quality of evidence produced by Sibal. Contrary to Sibal's claim, Brigadier Surinder Singh, the brigade commander in Kargil at the time Operation Vijay was launched and who had since been sent on a punishment posting to Bihar, wrote no letter to Army Chief General V P Malik in August last year. Even the letter number which Sibal intoned so very loudly at his press conference, for the benefit, no doubt, of television cameras, has been found to be false. So much for his concern for truth.

However, insofar as he sought to lay the blame at the doorstep of General Malik, Sibal was guilty of playing politics with the armed forces. The general's office has lost no time in denying the existence of such a letter. Brigadiers, Sibal ought to know, do not normally address their letters directly to the generals. Will Sibal argue for the truth, at least this once, as an Indian and not as a Congressman?