Introduction
General Asad Durrani and I have gelled ever since we met at a Track-II dialogue named after Thailand’s Chao Phraya River. It was held in the aftermath of 26/11, in the wake of Western apprehension of what may come to pass. Who knows, if a madman was in control we could all still be blown to kingdom come, in revenge for 1971 or even 1947. General Saheb has been a friend. His straightforwardness is striking. There is no bullshit; for him a spade is always a spade, which is at times disappointing for me. He has never hesitated to speak up or render help. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi was preparing to take the oath of office in 2014, two notables from Srinagar called and suggested that Pakistan’s prime minister, Mian Nawaz Sharif, be invited. They said he was keen to come. Since it was early days, people in high places were prepared to listen, so I passed the message along. There was excitement in government, but the bigwigs wanted an assurance that Mian Saheb would come if invited. To confirm, I first called a senior diplomat in Pakistan. His advice was to not risk it, because Nawaz Sharif might not be allowed to come to India. Somewhat disappointed I called the General. His response was unequivocal; there was no reason for Nawaz Sharif not to come. Generals in Pakistan are generally right, and more so Asad Durrani. Our wives met at one of the Track-II meetings on Kashmir, held in December 2015 at a Dead Sea resort in Jordan. My wife Paran and the Begum are poles apart. Paran enjoys an occasional smoke with the General whereas the Begum approves of neither smoking nor drinking. Yet they got along like a house on fire. Incidentally, at the same meeting, the Pakistanis enquired whether there was any hope of forward movement between India and Pakistan. I stuck my neck out and said something should happen soon. Lo and behold, we were in Abu Dhabi on Christmas Day on our way home when we learnt that Modiji had dropped in at Lahore. Since then, however, the process has gone nowhere. If it’s any consolation, Pakistan is in a bigger mess than we are. The man India put its faith in, Nawaz Sharif, is likely to be kept out of power (along with his family) by the military when the next elections are held, likely in August 2018; the
military’s preferred choice is the current PM, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, whom Mian Saheb had handpicked to replace him. In any India-Pakistan conversation, Kashmir will inevitably come up. In January 2018, during my annual pilgrimage to Goa, I met a Kashmiri in a tailoring shop. He told me that Kashmir wanted independence. ‘Whatever for?’ I enquired. ‘How would you expect me to react if you walked into my shop and slapped me?’ he said. That’s what the security forces do in Kashmir. Anyone can be stopped and beaten, he claimed. The slightest protest or stone-pelting leads to tear gas and pellet guns. Kashmir remains on the boil: the Line of Control (LoC) and border are more volatile than usual and questions are being raised about the government’s muscular policy. A reformed militant who had flirted with the Lashkar-e-Toiba visited me more recently and spoke of the threat of increasing radicalism in the Valley. He said the youth in South Kashmir prepared for martyrdom and had no concern for Pakistan as they believed they were fighting for Allah. As former Pakistan Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan acknowledged, the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack did irreparable damage to the Kashmiri cause and tarnished Islamabad’s image as well. Pakistan had been out of it since then, until we brought them back into the picture in 2016. The militant, who now resembles a professor more than a terrorist, warned that the Jamaat-e-Islami, once with pockets only in Sopore, Shopian, Kulgam and Pulwama, was now omnipresent in radicalising the youth. It had made inroads in the state government and infiltrated the J&K Police as well. The central jail in Srinagar was the hub of radical indoctrination, he said from personal experience. Militancy was a thriving industry, where everyone was someone with a vested interest in the status quo—except that the status quo is never static. The Kashmiris who crave peace live in fear of the next explosion, not knowing where or when it will happen. What a change this is from the time when Srinagar was a city of great style, from the 1960s to the early ’80s. The situation in Kashmir, like our relationship with Pakistan, is going nowhere. It waits for another Vajpayee. Could General Pervez Musharraf and Dr Farooq Abdullah, sharing many similarities, given an opportunity, have found a solution on the LoC? Kashmiris crave peace but there can be no peace or forward movement in Kashmir so long as we keep relating it to elections elsewhere in the country, just as we do in our relationship with Pakistan. We need to talk to Pakistan as much as we need to engage with Kashmir. As Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said in the state
assembly in February 2018, with the risk of being called anti-national, there is no alternative to engagement with Pakistan. Or, as the old Kashmiri communist Mohammed Yousuf Tarigami said, seeking a ‘security solution’ to a fundamentally political problem will not succeed. Finding a way out of any mess requires a willingness to listen. It connects us to Kashmir and to ourselves as well. But we are so caught up in the noise around us that very few have the time to listen. Sentiments at times are more illuminating than facts. Empathy is the key to understanding Kashmir. I have learnt much from Track-II, including the similarities between Kashmir, Afghanistan and Balochistan. Noted Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid once said that if Kashmir were resolved, Afghanistan would be a cakewalk. At one of our meetings, Rustom Shah Mohmand, a Pakistani bureaucrat, diplomat, and a gem of a human being, remarked that Pakistan needed to put its own house in order in Balochistan before finding fault with India in Kashmir. Surprising as it may sound, I was as happy leaving the Prime Minister’s Office in 2004 as I was joining it in 2001, even though these were by far my best years in government. Yes, there was a tinge of sadness at leaving the RAW just when I was beginning to enjoy it; 17 months is not enough for a chief. But there are so many worlds, so much to do. Retirement is the beginning not the end of life. Who could have imagined I could even become an author in the bargain? As someone said, there is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and doing nothing. Having lived more than my life of secrecy, spookiness still clings to me. A Kashmiri friend, not knowing we had shifted residence to Defence Colony in Delhi, dropped in and enquired if this was my ‘new safe house’. Pakistani friends still don’t believe that my only e-mail ID is my wife’s. And my wife tells all her friends that you can never get the whole truth out of this spook. A ‘cover story’ is still useful at times. When the idea of a joint project was first mooted by Peter Jones at one of our Track-II meetings in Istanbul, the General laughed and said nobody would believe us even if we wrote fiction. We have tried to stay as close to the truth as we believe it to be even if some of it is regarded as fiction. The reality is that there are normally more than two sides to most stories. Truth is a kaleidoscope. I know there will be people in the fraternity who will say how did these swines get so chummy: who was working for whom? After all we have each been a part of licensed skulduggery on either side. Not everyone will agree with what we have said, possibly nobody. But the effort here has been to make some sense of the India-Pakistan conundrum in the hope
that sanity will someday prevail. I have often been labelled an optimist. If so, it’s only a way of life and I have no regrets, or as General Saheb says, he doesn’t give a damn. All I can say it’s been a great life. As Mark Twain puts it, good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. And this, I believe, is how the General and I have gone about it, even though he is much more of a realist. Finally, this project could never have taken off without our friend, philosopher and guide, Aditya Sinha. A.S. Dulat .
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