Part 16 (2/2)

The other thing that I mentioned was that in the 2004 election, the Congress had nearly a dozen absolutely young, bright members of Parliament from different political families, all of whom appeared to have a future. 'Make use of them in Kashmir,' I said to Chavan. 'Two of three should be allotted Kashmir.'

In particular I mentioned Sachin Pilot and Rahul Gandhi. Sachin was a natural because he was Farooq's son-in-law and so related to Kashmir, while Rahul was descended from Kashmiri Pandits. 'These guys should get involved and visit Kashmir regularly,' I said. 'Whenever Rahul wants to go on vacation he should go to Srinagar.'

Even if Rahul didn't want to be connected he ought to go on holiday and like his great-grandfather say this is my land and I have an emotional bond with it. Pandit Nehru even used to go riding in Kashmir. But neither did these youngsters show any interest, nor were they used productively. It was a great opportunity for the Congress party but it was frittered away.

It was my own fault that I did not continue in Dr Singh's administration. n.o.body asked me to leave and most were surprised; later I was told that some felt I was being arrogant, which is the last thing I was ever accused of in all my years of government service. Maybe I was being impulsive, but I simply thought it was the appropriate thing to do. Brajesh Mishra had brought me in; he was going and I thought I should also go. A good thing has only that much shelf life.

And in the years to pa.s.s, I had no regret on that score. One thing is for sure: Vajpayee's PMO was a very happy PMO. What I saw subsequently was a very tense, stressed-out PMO. I visited a number of times, even on the occasions that Narayanan's successor as NSA, s.h.i.+v Shankar Menon, called me over. In the beginning there was a lot of tension between the two guys whose jobs almost overlappedMani Dixit and Narayanan. And though Mani departed, unfortunately, there always seemed to be a lot of wrestling going on within. Whereas in Vajpayee's PMO there was no doubt in anybody's mind that the boss was the princ.i.p.al secretary, Brajesh Mishra. I guess it was a matter of Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra having an exceptional relations.h.i.+p during an exceptional period.

One occasion I went to meet Manmohan Singh was in July. He called me to discuss initiatives on Kashmir, and he asked how the BJP would react. 'The BJP started the process so they shouldn't object,' I said. 'Why don't you just ask them?'

'Whom do I talk to?' he said.

'You can talk to the ex-PM, Vajpayee.'

'He doesn't talk,' Dr Singh said.

'Okay, you can talk to L.K. Advani about it,' I suggested.

'He's very difficult.'

'Okay, you can talk to Brajesh Mishra.'

Brajesh then found a line to the UPA. After we left the government I would go meet the man every five or six weeks and have a drink with him. He was a smart fellow. He supported Dr Singh on the nuclear deal in 2008, much to the unhappiness of his party. When the media asked Brajesh about this he simply said, 'I'm not a party man.' The UPA gave him a Padma Vibhushan.

During the first year of the UPA's government, the prime minister was calling me more often than even Narayanan and so some time in AugustSeptember 2004, Narayanan called me up and asked me to dinner at the India International Centre. 'Have you lost all interest in Kashmir?' he asked.

'Sir, why should I lose interest in Kashmir?'

'Can you take up what you were doing earlier?'

'I could,' I said. 'But in what capacity?'

'In your personal capacity.'

I said okay, even though it did not amount to a formal role in the government. It was no big deal, and I didn't even ask for an air ticket. 'I'll go and tell Ajit Doval,' I said. 'I'd like to keep the DIB informed rather than he hear it from his people, so if you don't mind I'll tell Ajit I'm going.'

I think he did mind, but he said, 'Theek hai.'

The prime minister must have said that no one was able to reach out to the separatists, so why not send Dulat, and that's why I was sent. I met the Hurriyatthe guys who had started the dialogue with the NDA were known in Srinagar as the 'Advani Hurriyat'and had a chat, one by one. I returned and reported my discussions to Narayanan. He took me to the prime minister.

I was surprised to find Kutty Nair in Dr Singh's room. But I suppose everything has some purpose. 'Sir, they're all keen to talk,' I told Manmohan Singh.

The reaction came from Kutty Nair. 'The PM is going to Srinagar next week,' he said. 'Can you arrange a meeting for him with the Hurriyat?' It sounded like he needed P.C. Sorcar rather than me.

'No,' I said, point-blank. 'There has to be a method in this. It will take some time. But I promise you, if Delhi wants to talk I will get them here in three months to talk to you.'

In hindsight I wondered why the prime minister was going and what the rush was. There should be an agenda when you visit, something you want to do or say. But if he felt that as PM he should visit Kashmir as early as possible then he need not have bothered about the Hurriyat. The prime minister can't do everything himself; there are other people to get that process going.

In any case, that was the last time I was officially consulted over Kashmir.

The problem is that they wanted instant results. They wanted me to send a message to the Mirwaiz to meet the prime minister on his visit the following week. The Mirwaiz said: 'Hum itne gire hue bhi nahin hain ki aap thanedar bhej denge aur hum aa jayenge.' (We are not so lacking in self-respect that we will respond to every summons from Delhi.) Ironically, the same Mirwaiz had been happy with his meetings with Sonia Gandhi while she was in the opposition. She's reasonable, he would say. But once the UPA came to power, she stopped meeting the Hurriyat.

The UPA instead got bogged down in what was right and what was wrong. Such initiatives have to come from within; that is what is political will. And the UPA had it on a platter. All it had to do was follow up on the process that Vajpayee started. Since Advani had started talking to the Hurriyat, that should have been the starting point. It just needed following up, patience, time and understanding. It would have been impossible for the Hurriyat to wriggle out, or for the BJP to backtrack on.

But these things never happened. If something had to happen it should have happened in the first six months or eight months or maximum one year. Instead there was a brainwave to broadbase the Kashmir meetings and get more people in. The PMO called a roundtable meeting which was a waste of time. It went on for six hoursand Manmohan Singh sat through the whole thing. Imagine, Vajpayee wouldn't spend five minutes on such a meeting and it required a lot of persuasion just to have tea and samosas with the Hurriyat; and the UPA organised three roundtable meetings to which the Hurriyat did not even show up.

There was no meaningful dialogue and after that everything fell into the usual routine of chalta hai. Then people began saying that the separatists were useless and that there was no point in talking to them. But you have to talk to somebody, isn't it?

They wouldn't even talk to Farooq Abdullah, and I had told them that Farooq was deeply annoyed with the NDA for denying him the vice-presidency and then for his loss of power in the state. It was a good time to win him over. But perhaps Sonia was not interested.

During his decade as prime minister, Manmohan Singh went to Kashmir on at least five occasions and most of those visits were a waste. Kashmir is a political matter, but more than that it is emotive and psychological. That is why 'insaniyat ke dairey' has retained its resonance even after so many years.

That nothing happened on Kashmir or Pakistan is Manmohan Singh's great tragedy, because no other prime minister wanted it more, or was more sincere. But he was a lonely man with no support either from the party or the bureaucracy, and as the government weakened, the BJP took more and more advantage of it, called Dr Singh 'a weak man'. If the BJP had criticised him for being weak towards Pakistan then all he had to do was say that he was merely carrying on what Vajpayee started. After all, despite Kargil, Vajpayee invited Musharraf. Advani did say in 2004 that only the BJP could do something with Pakistan because the majority would never think that the BJP had sold out. Then Vajpayee, surprisingly, in 2005 said the Congress was going soft on Kashmir. It was strange, but basically no matter who is in power the other side doesn't want to concede anything on Kashmir.

Linked to the Kashmir paralysis was the missed window of opportunity with Pakistan, when Musharraf was at the height of his power from 2004 to 2007. This is something Dr Singh himself admitted at his last press conference on 3 January 2014: that there was a golden opportunity for a deal with Pakistan, particularly during the 200607 winter, that was missed.

It all centred on what Musharraf himself in 2006 called his 'four-point formula' for Kashmir. It was something that began taking shape when he met Vajpayee during the SAARC summit in Islamabad and gradually evolved during the first few years of the Manmohan Singh era. The formula was: making borders irrelevant by allowing free movement of Kashmiris across the LoC; self-governance which meant autonomy but not independence; demilitarisation; and a mechanism for joint management.

It had big implications for Pakistan's stand on Kashmir: it meant that the LoC was being accepted; that the long-held demand for plebiscite would be set aside; that self-governance would replace the demand for self-determination; that Kashmiris would talk to New Delhi; and that Kashmir was no longer the unfinished business of Part.i.tion.

Why did Musharraf do it? From the moment that Musharraf became president he had been speaking about out-of-the-box solutions, about leaving the past behind, and about moving forward. He wanted a deal.

And to that end, he started paying more attention to the political mainstream in Kashmir. Perhaps after the 2002 J&K a.s.sembly election he realised the mainstream would have an important role in the futureremember, Abdul Ghani Lone used to say separatism was just a phaseand he reached out to everybody. Mehb.o.o.ba Mufti was his preferred mainstream politician during the time her father was the chief minister; when Mufti stepped down Musharraf's preference switched over to Omar Abdullah.

In March 2006, Omar visited Islamabad at the invitation of Musharraf, the first mainstream Kashmiri politician to do so, and when he returned I met him for lunch. He was full of Pakistan and full of Musharraf. His thesis was that Musharraf was being much more reasonable than we were. 'Have you met the prime minister and told him?' I asked, which he said that he had.

Musharraf was also very impressed with Omar. From his point of view Omar was a smart, upfront Kashmiri who spoke well and appeared honest, quite the opposite of the wishy- washy Hurriyat guys who said one thing, did another and meant something totally different. Musharraf may have wondered why so much weightage be given to the Hurriyat, if the mainstream guys can do the job for Pakistan.

It was as a fallout of this that he took the Hurriyat to task, telling them to start taking part in elections (advice that, as mentioned earlier, made the Mirwaiz's throat run dry). He reportedly told Geelani that he was an old man who should get out of the way of peace; Geelani was sidelined for the years that Musharraf was in power, not doing much else but criticise Musharraf. Because of Musharraf, Geelani's son Nayeem, a doctor in Pakistan, had to return to Kashmir (which Omar, when he became chief minister in 2008, facilitated). Geelani only regained influence as a separatist once Musharraf lost power.

To ill.u.s.trate how Musharraf's thinking changed everybody there are two visits to India by Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan, the former prime minister of PoK and the head of the Muslim Conference, the party to which Hurriyat leader Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat belonged. In September 2005, Sardar Qayyum attended a seminar at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) where I also partic.i.p.ated in the discussion. When his turn came to speak, he did the usual waffling: that Kashmir was a complex matter, that we need not look at solutions immediately, that confidence building was more important.

When my turn to speak came, I said: 'Sardar Saheb, I've heard so much about you and what you're saying would be extremely disappointing to the Kashmiris sitting here because what you're implying is that there is no solution to Kashmir.'

Sardar Qayyum returned in May 2007, by which time the four-point formula was very much in the air and Musharraf was saying repeatedly that whatever was acceptable to Kashmiris was acceptable to Pakistan. He had built bridges with Musharraf, and his son, Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, had become prime minister of PoK. Sardar Qayyum said exactly what Musharraf was saying: that whatever can save Kashmir and Kashmiris should be acceptable to both sides. I had a long chat with him and found that all that he said was in parallel to whatever Musharraf was saying. It wasn't Prof. Ghani alone whose tune had changed.

In fact, the greatest proponent of Musharraf's four-point formula was the Mirwaiz. It suited all the separatists.

As far back as I can remember, if we look at the history of Kashmir and if we look at the Pakistani leaders.h.i.+p, no other Pakistani has been as reasonable on Kashmir as Musharraf was. Yet Manmohan Singh could not grasp the opportunity. Musharraf is supposed to have sent a message to Dr Singh in early 2007: you're a Pakistani Sikh and I'm an Indian Muslim. Let us get together and unite our people and end this madness of confrontation forever.

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