It may also be noted for the record that the subject of his verbal exertions on that particular occasion happened to be Kashmir. Pant wants talks so badly that he is combing the hillsides of the state to find an audience. He has already confabulated with the shikarawallahs and the apricot sellers, engaged the peanut sellers and the pony-wallahs, played interlocutor to carpet weavers and walnut wood carvers and, when last heard, was sizing up the Chinars on the waterfront wondering if they would care to listen to what he had to say. I must say, however, with all the deepest conviction at my command, that my favourite talker is that last Englishman of India. I refer, of course, to one who is presently the union minister of external affairs who also happens to be the union minister of defence, the ever erudite, polysyllabic, polysynthesing, polyglotic, epiglottic Jaswant Singh.
Nothing can be farther from the truth.
The prime minister, being an extremely wise man and no mean talker himself, realised well enough that here was a person with enough verbal ammunition to preside over not just two ministries, but many more if so required. What's more, the prime minister must have also shrewdly calculated that if there was one man who could single-handedly throw the obstreperous Indian media into a blue funk, it was this man. This horizontal ministerial proliferation, as Jaswant Singh would himself have put it, is a most apt, apposite, appropriate, fitting, felicitous, inspired, propitious appointment. This double-minister who talks on the double is India's secret weapon, more deadly than all the Trishuls and Agnis we may have at our command. The Pakistanis, therefore, had better watch out as they walk down the high road to talks.