This Time It's Personal.(Atal Behari Vajpayee )(Brief Article)

Atal Behari Vajpayee has good reason not to trust Pervez Musharraf. In May 1999, two months after the Indian prime minister had traveled to Lahore for a groundbreaking summit with his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan-based militants launched an invasion across the Line of Control that divides the disputed state of Kashmir. The operation, credited by many to the then Army chief Musharraf, set off the brief but bloody conflict known as the Kargil war. A year later, after Musharraf had overthrown Sharif in a coup, Vajpayee invited him to Agra for another summit--and felt betrayed when the general upstaged him as the talks dissolved without an agreement. "Many members of his party said [Vajpayee] was too naive, that he had been a simpleton for believing Pakistan," Commodore Uday Bhaskar, a military analyst in New Delhi, says of the Kargil debacle.

Vajpayee undoubtedly had no wish to make the same mistake a third time, which may help explain the unusually hard line he has taken in this latest crisis, sparked by the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi. Indeed, as familial as the animosity between India and Pakistan has long seemed, the conflict may have entered an even more intensely personal phase. In Pakistan, Musharraf seems to be singlehandedly shifting his country's course. The dramatic Jan. 12 speech in which he banned the most prominent Kashmiri jihad groups has already had some effect: attacks by Pakistan-based rebels have dropped noticeably, and Indian officials have begun to make mildly conciliatory noises toward their archenemy. With both sides--and the world--sobered perhaps by how close the two nuclear powers came to full-fledged war, the door would seem open to a long-term solution to the Kashmir problem. Whether India and Pakistan walk through that door, though, depends very much on the courage of their leaders--and on whether Vajpayee now trusts the general.

The Indian prime minister has long walked a fine line between nationalist and conciliator. A 77-year-old Brahman and published poet from Madhya Pradesh, he was jailed during the independence struggle and ...