Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 17

The opportunity slipped away, and it was admitted publicly for the first time in 2011 by Musharraf's former foreign minister, Khurs.h.i.+d Mahmud Kasuri. When Manmohan Singh gave his last press conference he too admitted that they had come so close. Yet he could not even visit Pakistanunlike Vajpayee, who visited twice. Not once during the decade he was prime minister could he visit the place where he was born.

The BJP aside, he was not helped by the bureaucracy around him. If you leave it to the bureaucrats, nothing will ever happen. It made no difference whether Manmohan Singh's NSA was Narayanan, an intelligence man, or s.h.i.+v Shankar Menon, a foreign service man. When Vajpayee took the bus to Lah.o.r.e, it was not a bureaucratic decision. It was not a whim either, a lot of homework went into that bus ride, but Vajpayee 'drove' that bus to Lah.o.r.e.

As time went on then the opposition or resistance to forward movement on Pakistan came from within the Congress party itself. Less than two months after Dr Singh won the UPA a second term, he went to the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh where he and his Pakistani counterpart, Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani, issued a joint statement. In that, a mention was made of Baluchistan, where the Pakistanis have suspected an Indian hand in their insurgency. All Dr Singh did was say we have no information, we're not involved, but we'll have a look at it.

This mention brought the prime minister under great criticism from the BJP, as expected, but also from his own party. I can tell you that if Vajpayee had said the same thing, no one would have had the gumption to question him.

Manmohan Singh's inability to seize a deal in winter 2006 07 frustrated Musharraf more than anyone else. By March he was embroiled in a power struggle when he suspended the chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. It led to a series of events in which he had to give up being the army chief in November 2007; former Prime Minister Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in December and was a.s.sa.s.sinated (for which Musharraf was arrested in 2013); and his stepping down as president in the face of impeachment happened in August 2008.

Some people believe that Musharraf was so annoyed at missing out on his place in history that he may have had a hand in the 26 November 2008 attack on Mumbai which killed 164 people. It was a big operation and could only have been an ISI operation, planned in advance. This talk of rogue element is all nonsense. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who succeeded Musharraf as the army chief, was the ISI chief under Musharraf and both of them would have been in the know.

Why go from out-of-the-box peace to such a deadly attack that might have led to war? There's a belief that when the generals in Pakistan get irritated they feel that the only thing that Delhi understands is force. Such a thing, like a terror attack, is regarded by the army as a kick in the backside.

Since then the Pakistanis have felt regretful that the attack took place, and in our track two meetings (the unofficial bilateral meetings where retired officials try out suggestions that otherwise would not be brought up in formal meetings) the Pakistanis have wished India would put 26/11 aside and get back to talking peace. I had gone to one such meeting in December 2008 in Bangkok, but despite their genuine wish that the attack had not taken place, I had to inform them that it would take time for India to get over it. For many of us the attack had been like an invasion by sea.

Down the years, whenever Pakistanis have asked me what would happen in the event of another 26/11, I have plainly stated that n.o.body can predict the consequences.

After 26/11, s.h.i.+vraj Patil was replaced as the home minister by P. Chidambaram, till then the finance minister and generally seen to be one of the more efficient ministers in the government. He called me in after a little bit of a fiasco with the Hurriyat.

It was obvious that Chidambaram wanted a quiet, meaningful and sustained dialogue, and that he wanted it badly. But like others in the UPA, he was impatient about it. He wanted things to materialise quickly.

The Hurriyat was brought to Delhi to meet the home minister on 14 November 2009. It was arranged by the IB, as per Chidambaram's wishes, but somehow the story leaked and appeared in the Hindu. The newspaper stated that the Hurriyat were summoned to Delhi and told to a.s.semble at Khan Market, where they were picked up and taken to meet Chidambaram. So the quiet bit went out of the window with this expose of the operation, and the Hurriyat was not amused for it claims that whatever it does, it does openly. This was not very open.

'What is so quiet about this?' the Mirwaiz complained to me. 'Aap quiet ki baat karte hain, akhbaar mein aa jati hain.'

The IB figured that the state government had deliberately sabotaged it, meaning the J&K CID. However, if it was intended to be a hush-hush operation then why did the state CID get a whiff of it? How did the state government come to know the Hurriyat men were a.s.sembling in Khan Market? They were probably being tailed by the state CID.

The DIB called me up after this and said the home minister would like to see you. I said great.

Chidambaram was very nice. 'I'm told that you know these Hurriyat guys,' he said.

'Sir, we helped getting them to meet Advani,' I said.

'I had contact with them,' he said. 'Can you renew the contact, and give me feedback?'

I went to the Mirwaiz and had a long chat, after which I went back to the home minister and said: 'They're very much on board.'

That was my second meeting with Chidambaram which went well, and later he sent word that we would meet again.

In our third meeting, Chidambaram's frustration came to the fore. He was extremely irritated and said the Hurriyat leaders were not very reliable. I made the mistake of suggesting Shabir Shah.

'You mean Shabir will come?'

'Yes, sir,' I said. 'Of course he'll come. If he's approached he'll talk.'

But Chidambaram was cynical about it because he had negative reports about Shabir. 'Why don't you go and get Shabir?' he said, in a foul temper.

Now Shabir was in jail and I was out of the government. How in the world was I supposed to yank him out of jail? So the home minister got angry with me. And after that, I was not needed.

Chidambaram went to Kashmir in June 2011 and in April 2012, but he did not meet the Hurriyat there. In July 2012, Sus.h.i.+l k.u.mar s.h.i.+nde took over as home minister after Chidambaram was s.h.i.+fted to the finance ministry following the election of Pranab Mukherjee as President of India. s.h.i.+nde made an impression because he was different from his predecessor and more in the mould of a traditional politician. Before he was a politician he was an a.s.sistant sub-inspector of police.

s.h.i.+nde visited in October 2012 and did a couple of smart things: he visited Chrar-e-Sharief and he visited Hazratbal, and he shocked everyone by wandering off into the bazaar at Lal Chowk and asking locals about the price of vegetables. 'Yeh toh theek lagta hai,' Kashmiris said.

Though s.h.i.+nde's instincts were right there was no follow- up, because a few months later, in February 2013, Afzal Guru was hanged for his alleged involvement in the December 2001 attack on Parliament. Immediately he became a martyr in Kashmir not because he was a fugitive freedom fighter like Maqbool b.u.t.t, but because he came to represent the victimisation that Kashmiris felt. In a way, Afzal Guru replaced Maqbool b.u.t.t as the main martyr for the Kashmir movement.

Omar, who was the chief minister, was extremely annoyed and protested, asking what was the haste; there were twelve other convicts who had been waiting longer on death row. Yet what choice did he have; Delhi believed it could ram anything that it liked down the young chief minister's throat. It certainly did the UPA government no good, and Prof. Ghani called me up to ask: 'Whose agenda is the government carrying out?'

I immediately asked for a meeting with Dr Singh, because I was receiving a lot of anguished calls from Kashmir. I finally met the prime minister a month later, but by then there was really nothing much to say. Immediately after the hanging I was challenged during a TV debate by Subramanian Swamy and I told him: 'If Vajpayee had been prime minister, this would not have happened.' I added: 'Even if Advani had been prime minister it would not have happened.'

Needless to say, it set things back even further for the rest of India in Kashmir. If India's intention has been to mainstream Kashmir, then not only was progress at a standstill during the ten years of the UPA, they were set back by irritants like the Afzal Guru hanging.

How could there be progress? After Musharraf no Pakistani picked up his four-point formula in fear that they would lose out in Kashmir. Indeed, having come this close to settling it, Pakistan is not interested in Kashmir. Pakistan will gain nothing at this point of time, so it does not even want to discuss Kashmir. Whenever I have asked Pakistanis at track two meetings as to what happened to the four-point formula, they either laugh or look the other way.

And with the hostility shown by Narendra Modi during his first six months as prime minister, the Pakistanis have gone back to talking about UN resolutionssomething that Musharraf's four-point formula had promised to render obsolete. On the other hand, Kashmiris, who for the longest time were not all that thrilled with Musharraf's formula, were now desperately seeking it as the political solution to their grievances with Delhi.

The solution to the IndiaPakistanKashmir Gordian knot was given to Dr Manmohan Singh on a platter in 2004. When he left office in 2014, he had not accomplished what was within his grasp. No wonder Kashmiris call his tenure their 'lost decade'.

17.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY.

GENTLEMEN.

Following the attacks on Mumbai on 26 November 2008, there was a brief period in which anxiety spread that India's anger could spill over into retaliation on Pakistani soil, and there would be a counter-retaliation, and so on, that the thing might spin out of control, to the extent that nuclear weapons would come into play. Western countries worried the most about it, and when tempers subsided, they were keen that they get a feel of what the thinking was on both sides of the Indo-Pak border. The best way to do that was through track two diplomacy, a term coined by an American diplomat in 1981 to refer to 'non- governmental, informal and unofficial contacts and activities between private citizens or groups of individuals'. Though it contrasts with track one diplomacy, which is governmental, it is not a subst.i.tute for it. India and Pakistan have been hosting a track two diplomatic meeting called the Neemrana Dialogue, named after the first venue, a restored fort in Neemrana, Rajasthan, since 1992. The countries have hosted it alternately, and gather together retired defence services officers, retired diplomats, mediapersons, representatives of NGOs, etc.

What had started off as an IndiaPakistan initiative was gradually expanded to include Afghanistan and when the process accelerated and stabilised, then someone hit on the idea of having an exclusive dialogue for the two militaries, and thus began an IndiaPakistan military dialogue. Retired Lt. Gen. Mohammed Asad Durrani, who was the director-general of the ISI directorate in the years 199092, suggested that if the militaries could talk to one another, then so could the intelligence services.

Peter Jones, a scholar at Ottawa University who was setting up this track two initiative, thought it was a great idea floated by General Durrani and asked for India's response. The R&AW chief who had had successful meetings in 2002 with his ISI counterpart, and who now was retired like me, C.D. Sahay, bounced the idea off me. 'I think it's great,' I said. Hence was born the idea of a meeting of retired intelligence officers from India and Pakistan, sponsored by the University of Ottawa which had been in the business for some time.

One looked forward to these meetings not because we would produce something, but because to the inquisitive mind of an intelligence officer, going to such a meeting would bring you into touch with the other side, you could make a few friends and hear the other viewpoint. It gave you an insight. I must say I learnt a lot.

The other thing is that the question that comes up in Delhi while debating bilateral relations with Pakistan is of who's in control. The Pakistanis acknowledge that ultimately when it comes to foreign policy or national security, the army's approval is required. Within their army, the ISI is an all-powerful inst.i.tutionperhaps the most powerful spy agency in the world, as far as influence on their government is concerned. So if such a track two dialogue helps us make contacts in the establishment within the establishment, that can only help IndiaPakistan relations.

The Pakistanis have been very keen to meet. In these track two meetings we always put down a resolution recommending meetings between the two countries' intelligence chiefs. It makes sense. From the Pakistani point of view, if the intelligence chiefs meet then the army chiefs could meet; and if the army chiefs meet then you could have a summit meeting. One thing follows another. General Durrani and I even wrote a joint paper on it in July 2011. In our thinking, intelligence chiefs can do so much for their governments and their leaders which can remain non- attributable. It can only help the political process.

We've had four rounds of meetings of retired intelligence chiefs. The first two were attended by the future National security advisor, Ajit Doval. The Pakistani side has been better represented than our side, sadly; we find it difficult to muster five people, though we had originally decided that it would be Sahay, Doval, Shyamal Datta, Vikram Sood and myself. Shyamal had second thoughts and backed out, he never attended. Vikram has had better options. So we brought in R.N. Ravi, who used to be with me in the IB's Kashmir Group and who later became the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). After the second meeting, though, both Doval and Ravi backed out as it had gotten closer to the 2014 parliamentary election. Sahay did not go to the third meeting due to knee surgery so we had to rope in two other R&AW officers, Anand Arni and Rajeev k.u.mar, as well as an old IB hand, V. Rajagopal.

The significant thing here is that if five people from each country who have handled important positions can sit together and talk frankly, then why can't the intelligence chiefs meet? An American amba.s.sador who attended the fourth meeting called us a 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', which is also the name of a film.

My own track two experiences started when Amitabh Mattoo, an expert on international relations who was then with the Inst.i.tute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), invited me to partic.i.p.ate in the Chaophraya Dialogue in Bangkok in March 2009. The initiative is named after the main river in Thailand and was organised jointly by the IPCS and the Jinnah Inst.i.tute in Pakistan, but funded by the British. I had also gotten involved, thanks to former foreign secretary Salman Haider, with the Balusa Group meeting, chaired by high-powered Pakistani-American academic s.h.i.+rin Tahir-Kheli and named after two villages in Pakistani Punjab.

The track two circuit was also a place where I made what for me was a startling discoveryand one that I pa.s.sed on to my old organisation, since I was now long retiredand that was a top Taliban functionary telling me that his organisation was not averse to making contact with the government of India.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was one of the original Talib (students) who was a veteran of the anti-Soviet resistance and who with other Talibs came together under Mullah Mohammed Omar to form the Taliban, which sought to bring an end to decades of strife in Afghanistan by a.s.suming power in 1994. The Taliban government was dislodged by the US invasion of its country in October 2001 in search of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, but the Taliban undertook an insurgency against the US military, which lasted till America began to pull out in 2014.

Mullah Zaeef was in Berlin in July 2011, at the 59th conference of Pugwash. It was a big jamboree filled with interesting people, one of whom was an Irishman named Michael Semple. He pointed Mullah Zaeef to me and I said I was thinking of talking to Mullah Saheb.

'Yes, yes,' he said. 'You must talk.'

'How much is he in on the Taliban?'

'He's not in the inner core,' Semple said. 'But they've parked him in Kabul and he does have access to Mullah Omar. So he meets people, he listens, and then he reports back.'

I asked Mullah Zaeef if we could talk, not knowing whether he preferred to speak in his native Pashto, but he was quite okay with English. We spoke for about 45 minutes, and he made a number of points.

First, that peace was possible but only after the Americans had left, since they were the core of the problem. 'Once they go, the Afghans know how to sort it out,' Mullah Zaeef said. 'And we will sort it out. Whether it requires a coalition we'll see, but accommodation will be the key.'

The Taliban has matured a great deal, he added. The leaders are getting old.

'Is anything happening so far?' I asked.

A bit of movement has been made, he said, with the help of Arab friends (the opening of an office in Qatar, to explore talks with the Americans, was in the works but not yet public). 'We are open to everybody but not Pakistan and not Saudi Arabia,' he said. 'They have vested interests.' He sounded quite confident.

'So you live in Kabul?' I asked. 'You don't meet Indians?'

'I'd be very happy to meet Indians, but Indians don't meet us,' he said.

I don't know why we in India have such a closed mindset, and why we have never tried to reach out to the Taliban. The government can have a policy, but that should not stop my former organisation from reaching out. While I was heading R&AW we didn't try to reach out because we were so hooked onto the Northern Alliance, but then everything changed once the top Alliance military person, Ahmed Shah Masood, was killed.

Masood's death narrowed down our options. And once 9/11 and the subsequent Afghan invasion happened, we should have tried to reach out. The thing is that this game was similar to what we were doing in Kashmir in 1988 and '89, when we were hooked to Farooq Abdullah but had neglected Mufti Saheb and Lone Saheb, which wasn't very smart. You may think you have the best person, but that is not the end of the matter. In fact, even during the Kandahar hijacking, the messages we got from the Taliban's people was that 'we don't know you guys, you don't want to know us', and this is one reason Jaswant Singh, who flew out there to exchange terrorists for the hostages of IC-814, was totally on his own when he landed in Kandahar.

That's one of the lessons of Kashmir: talk to everyone. And when you broadbase your talks, it keeps all partic.i.p.ants from getting too comfortable.

'Do you mind if I take your number and pa.s.s it on?' I said.

'You're most welcome,' he said, handing me his card. 'They're welcome to call me.'

And then he said: 'Let me also clarify that Pakistan has been a friend and we are beholden to them for a lot. But we don't trust them. We have no problem with you, we can do business with you. And we'll be happy to.'

Mullah Zaeef was quite bitter about what the Pakistanis had done to him. Though he was amba.s.sador, when the invasion took place in 2001 the Pakistanis locked him up and then handed him over to the Americans, who put him in Guantanamo Bay. He was there till 2005. I don't know whether or not the Americans turned him around, but he was locked up for four years. Even the UN had taken him off its terrorists' list just the previous year, in 2010.

I was quite excited after interacting with him, and when I returned home, I pa.s.sed it all on to the people concerned at my old organisation. I don't know if anything happened, but Mullah Zaeef did turn up in India two and a half years later, at a conference in Goa in late 2013, where he was in a discussion on the impending American pull-out from Afghanistan with a former CIA officer, Robert Grenier.

In 2013, when I went to a track two meeting in Istanbul I met another Talib, and he was just as keen to interact with India as Mullah Zaeef. He was also based in Kabul, and he gave me his phone number, and again I pa.s.sed it on to the guys at R&AW. Six months later he called up and said, 'Uncle, I'm in Dubai, this is a good place to meet in case your people want to meet.' Again, I pa.s.sed the message on, but I don't know if anything happened.

Michael Semple was also a fascinating fellow. He had spent twenty-five years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, could speak Dari and Hindustani fluently, was married to a Pakistani woman, and had a golden beard. He was like Lawrence of Arabia. He was one of the best-informed and knowledgeable people in the West about Afghanistan. He was deputy to the European Union special representative on Afghanistan, though he was later thrown out of the country for what they call 'unauthorised activities'. Basically what I had heard was that he was an MI6 agent, and the Afghans had asked him to go.

I asked him about Mullah Zaeef. 'Look, he's not one of the top guys but he's a useful guy,' Semple said. 'The fact they've parked him in Kabul is significant. It provides a way for other people. He should not be written off.'

In fact, the following summer Semple wrote a piece in the Guardian about the Taliban being ready to talk, and lo and behold: it was almost verbatim everything that Mullah Zaeef had said to me in Berlin.

Perhaps our guys are too sceptical of the Taliban. For them, the Taliban is a 'no go', because the Americans are not going to talk to the Taliban. But what happens if the Americans start talking to the Talibanwe'll be left out of that loop as well. That cannot but happen because there is no solution in Afghanistan without the Talibaneven if the Pakistanis are happy to keep their former proteges out. This is what I have been hearing from Pakistanis lately, that there can be no deal with the Taliban. The Taliban have just become too hot for the Pakistanis to handle.

And there will be people in Pakistan who say nothing can be done without the Taliban; like the former amba.s.sador, Rustam Shah Mohmand, who was even on a committee set up by Nawaz Sharif to deal with the tribals in their border areas. In track two meetings, Mohmand openly criticises the Pakistan government. It would thus be wise for us to be talking to the Taliban.

On a personal note, the track two dialogues enabled me to visit Pakistan four times, and I have had the good fortune of making many friends, prominent among them being General Asad Durrani and former Pakistan foreign secretary Mian Shaharyar Khan, who along with his wife has been very kind to Paran and I. Mian and I have a common interest in cricket.

The first time I met Asad Durrani was at the Chaophraya Dialogue in Bangkok and there was a session on terrorism that he and I were co-chairing. It was pre-Mumbai because the mood was different. Everybody spoke their piece and then the two of us were to give our views. I was new at this and I said, 'Sir, after you.'

'No, Dulat Saheb,' he said. 'Pehle aap boliye.'

So I waffled around a bit, saying the usual meaningless stuff: we've borne the brunt of it, etc.

Then it was Durrani's turn. 'People here have been talking of proxies but I would be very disappointed if my friend here didn't use proxies,' he said. 'This is part of your intelligence. I have no hesitation in saying yes, we use proxies, we are using proxies and I presume you're doing that in Baluchistan.'

He was candid about the whole thing, so at the coffee break I went up to him and said, 'General Saheb, what were you saying?'

'Kyon, maine kucch jhoot bola?' he said.

'Nahin, sir, aap yeh keh rahe hain, proxies.'

Don't you use proxies, was his counter. 'Woh Mukti Bahini kya tha, Bangladesh mein kya hua tha? Proxy nahin thi?'

'General Saheb, main samajh gaya aapki baat,' I said.

After that we got along well. He is an incredible guy.

Once at a dialogue held in Istanbul, Turkey, Durrani and I were sitting side by sidewhich did not normally happenand this got Malini Parthasarathy of the Hindu very excited. She was sitting just beyond Durrani and she took photos of us. 'I've got the two spooks together,' she said.

During a coffee break at the same meeting, a young woman from the Jinnah Inst.i.tute came up to me and said, 'Dulat Saheb, I marvel at two things. One, you don't look or behave like a spook at all.'

'How do spooks behave?' I said.

She looked at Asad Durrani. 'You're too decent,' she said.

'You mean to say your guys are indecent?' I said, gesturing at Durrani.

'The other is, how do you two get along so well?' she said.

'General Saheb is the boss,' I said. 'I look up to him, he's senior to me.'

Besides the paper we jointly wrote on intelligence cooperation, we prepared a paper called 'Kashmir: Confrontation to Cooperation' for the October 2013 Ottawa Dialogue. I told Durrani, 'General Saheb, you write it whatever way you like, I'll go along with it.'