Musharraf a changed man?

Daily Times, January 7, 2005
Musharraf a lively person now: Thapar
Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: President Pervez Musharraf is no more unsophisticated and aggressive in handling media interviews as he was in 2000, when I first interviewed him, said Indian anchorperson and journalist Karan Thapar about the Pakistani president whom he interviewed for CNN-IBM on Friday.

During a brief chat with Daily Times, Thapar recalled his first meeting with Musharraf and found him a completely different man five years on. “He is much more sophisticated and smiles a lot with an occasional hard edge to his voice,” Thapar said, adding that he found Musharraf an “extremely changed” man.

Starting his career as the London Times’ correspondent in Nigeria in 1981, Thapar, who was expelled by the Nigerian government for what it called his objectionable writings, returned to England and joined London Weekend TV and worked for it for 11 years till he returned to India after his wife died in 1991.

Talking about the media in India, he said, “It is an exciting time with a huge growth in media, particularly electronic media. We have 70 channels.” Thapar, who himself ran a production house, however, believed that despite the huge growth in the electronic media there was no diminishment in the authority of newspapers, which still remained the first choice.

He said the media was completely free in India. “Though the government can threaten the media by using the tool of advertisements, government influence has shrunk. Media people don’t care about government advertisements, as the private sector has grown tremendously and newspapers and TV channels largely rely on private sector advertisements.”

Impressed by the freedom being enjoyed by the media in Pakistan, Thapar quoted Pakistani newspapers and columnists and said it was amazing to see a free press in Pakistan with a president in uniform. “This richness of contradiction is amazing.” He mentioned The Friday Times (TFT) as a magazine with satirical-humour (in the Such Gup), which, he said, was non-existent in India.

He believed that the electronic media could help overcome the uneducated beliefs in India and Pakistan about each other. “We speak a common language, our cuisine is common and we also have common swear words. We are divided by a common history and we are prisoners of the past,” he said, adding that discussions on TV channels could help bring both peoples closer by encouraging debates.
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Picture from www.time.com
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Dawn, January 7, 2006
Conversation with Manmohan Singh By Kuldip Nayar

PRIME MINISTER Manmohan Singh has been always effusive and warm whenever I have discussed India-Pakistan relations with him. This time I found him a bit distressed and disappointed. He is not as optimistic as before because he says he does not know what is in the mind of Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf.

The prime minister says he was impressed by President Musharraf at their meeting in New York and that he may go to Pakistan to meet him. “After all, I have an invitation for a visit,” he adds. But he regrets that despite President Musharraf’s promise, cross-border terrorism has not stopped and the machinery to sustain it has not yet been dismantled.

Maybe, General Musharraf is under pressure from within his own country, the prime minister feels. He is full of praise for President Musharraf for trying to modernize his country. He may well turn out to be another Kamal Ataturk. “I wish him well,” says the prime minister. “But he must appreciate my difficulties. I have told him that I could not change the borders, nor divide the state on the basis of religion. I have no such mandate from the nation.”

The bomb blasts in Delhi a few months ago are uppermost in the prime minister’s mind. He says that relations between India and Pakistan were improving at a good pace. People were shedding their mistrust. “Then the bomb blasts at Delhi take place,” says the prime minister. “We reacted to the situation calmly and responsibly.” But where do we go from here? Pakistan has to make sure that there is no cross-border terrorism. America too has “assured us on this point.”