‘India, Pakistan must begin secret backchannel talks’: Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri

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About getting both sides back to negotiating table, Kasuri said: “Without announcing to the public, both PMs should appoint people whom they trust entirely as their backchannel representatives. These representatives should not be answerable to anyone. They should be able to pick up the phone and talk to each other at any time.”

Asking both sides to embrace the progress that was made less than a decade ago, Kasuri pointed out that the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency were on board regarding the Kashmir proposal.

He added that the “formula” was the only one likely to find acceptance among “70 per cent” of Kashmiris, Pakistanis and Indians, “leaving out all the hardliners on all sides because nothing will ever be acceptable to them”.

The formula, said Kasuri, “was not done in a jiffy. It was not like going to Agra [in 2001] unprepared. And it was certainly not like going to Ufa”.

Kasuri, Pakistan’s foreign minister during the Musharraf years from 2002 to 2008, said the Kashmir proposals “took three years. It was a lot of hard work. Sentences had to be broken down, full stops had to be taken out, semicolons had to be inserted”.

According to the Pakistani edition of Kasuri’s book, only a handful of people — only five in Pakistan as per Musharraf — knew about the secret talks. As the agreement neared finalisation early in 2007, the process was overtaken by political developments in Pakistan that set off Musharraf’s downfall. Kasuri, now a member of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf, said he had put on record “all the details” so that “at a propitious time, it can be taken up again by governments on both sides… Let them change the order of the paragraphs here and there, but this is the only workable solution,” he said.