One year ago, the progress of a bus entering Pakistan from India was keenly followed by over a billion people across South Asia and closely monitored the world over. The bus carried Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to Lahore, where he was warmly received by the most powerful prime minister in Pakistan's history. Vajpayee remained in the country's cultural capital for a couple of days and, together with Nawaz Sharif, expressed the desire to end the 50-year animosity between the two countries. The poet in Vajpayee couldn't resist from reciting Hum jang na honay dengay (We won't allow a war anymore) at the Lahore Fort, built at a time when India and Pakistan were one.
The neighbours had never been closer as potential friends. Now, a year on from those fateful few days in February 1999, the two have never been closer to their fourth all-out war — and this time it could be a nuclear one. Within a single year, India and Pakistan played out their entire chequered history of half a century, giving the world both a glimpse of a promising future for a fifth of humankind as well as the threat of a horrendous mass-end.
What did not happen in the course of one year? From signing a peace treaty to domestic political upheavals that saw both Vajpayee and Sharif being unseated; from fighting a near-war in the icy mountains of Kashmir to tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats; and from familiar border clashes to missile testing and the hurling of threats of a nuclear exchange with gay bandon.
Even though Sharif and Vajpayee did not publicly renounce their countries' conventional stands on Kashmir at the unprecedented summit, they seemed ready to move towards a give-and-take settlement. (Sharif even dared to try and replace Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf with a crony, not only to strengthen his hold on power, but basically to have a commander who would not object to a deal with India on Kashmir. As events played out, this was not to be.)