Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, the Vajpayee government has invited Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf to visit India. Given the compulsions and imperatives of both sides, it is likely that this visit will take place around the middle of July.

As perhaps the only person to have been a member of the Indian delegation during both Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's visit to Pakistan in 1989 and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Lahore bus yatra in 1999, I have learnt one cardinal principle that needs to be observed in such visits. This is that we should guard against raising undue expectations about such visits leading to a state of Nirvana in our relations with Pakistan.

There was a tendency during the Rajiv-Benazir summit in 1989, amongst those who are incorrigibly naïve about Pakistan's internal politics, to suggest that as both Rajiv and Benazir belonged to a post-Partition generation, they would somehow produce a magic wand to mend fences. [Rajiv was too realistic to share this euphoria.]

rest of the article is at http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/may/30gp.htm

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