Agra Summit to the night of the missiles, a tip-off that stopped an attack to end of Art 370: An envoy to Pakistan gives an inside view

Indian envoy’s arrest in Pak in 1971

In November 1971, Bisaria writes, the then High Commissioner, Jai Kumar ‘Makhi’ Atal, thought his first call on General Yahya Khan went off rather well, despite the dire state of bilateral ties. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had asked Atal to get going in his new posting in Islamabad shortly after her world tour, to draw attention to the East Pakistan crisis.

Belonging to a princely family of Jaipur, Atal was also distantly related to the Nehru family. But soon, in December 1971, the war in East Pakistan had broken out in full scale.

On December 3, 1971, “not long after he reached home, a few men in civvies walked into his unguarded residence and asked Atal to step out”, Bisaria states. Atal was taken to a building, where his inquisitor growled: “India has attacked us, we are at war, you are an ordinary prisoner of war. What have you to say?” “Atal guessed his diplomatic immunity meant nothing to his interrogator or even to his host government at that point. A war would lawfully have required diplomats to be repatriated or exchanged under the Vienna Convention. Taking them prisoner was, of course, illegal. But these niceties did not seem to matter at that moment. Atal remained unfazed: ‘If I am a prisoner of war, I have nothing to say except that don’t beat up or kill my men and don’t insult and burn my flag’,” Bisaria says.

The Indian envoy was then taken back to his residence, where he was effectively a prisoner of war with his diplomatic status seemingly extinguished. “For three days after the war began, Atal remained a prisoner of war, under house arrest till the Red Cross took over,” Bisaria writes. “Atal was asked to sign a declaration saying that all his mission staff were alive and safe. Atal refused to sign off on the paper till he was satisfied that his staff were indeed safe. Atal insisted that his deputy, Ashok Chib, accompany him to all the venues where his colleagues were incarcerated, so that they could do a head count before signing the Red Cross form.”

Unravelling of Agra Summit

Pakistan’s then President Pervez Musharraf’s “overreach” in publicly airing his hawkish views on Kashmir, his lack of intent in containing terrorism and insistence on a formulation linking forward movement in overall bilateral ties to progress on Kashmir led to the collapse of Agra Summit in 2001, and not L K Advani’s hardline approach, says Bisaria.

On the second day of the Summit, Musharraf met editors of major newspapers and TV networks for a breakfast conversation during which he “let loose” his hawkish position on Kashmir and equated terrorists with freedom fighters, Bisaria writes. This public telecast sounded to observers like a mid-Summit report on the talks, where Pakistan’s hard views were being inflicted on India, while New Delhi’s positions were unclear.

The former diplomat says he and Brajesh Mishra, Vajpayee’s principal secretary and National Security Advisor from 1998 to 2004, watched Musharraf’s televised remarks with “dismay” from the makeshift PMO in Agra.

“Mishra turned to me and said that the PM needed to be informed of this development, since he was sitting in conversation with Musharraf, oblivious to everything happening outside the meeting room,” Bisaria writes. “Mishra scribbled a few lines. I had them quickly typed up, adding a couple of sentences of my own. The note basically said that a press conference by Musharraf was being telecast, where he had repeated his hardline positions, harping on the Kashmir issue and had talked of terrorists as freedom fighters.”

It fell upon Bisaria to walk into the room where the two leaders were sitting. “My arrival interrupted the conversation as both leaders looked up. Musharraf had been talking and Vajpayee was listening, apparently with great interest. I handed over the paper to the boss and said that there had been some important developments. After I left the room, Vajpayee looked at the paper and then read out from it to Musharraf, saying edgily that his behaviour was not helping the talks.”

Bisaria, who retired from the Indian Foreign Service in June 2022, says the narrative that emerged from the meetings in view of Pakistani leaks was that while Vajpayee and Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh were “OK” with Pakistan’s “convoluted draft” of the Agra joint statement, Advani “the hawk” had vetoed it since he did not favour any progress with Islamabad. “Advani was quite aware of the slant in the media reporting, making him the villain of the piece… Later Pakistani writings tend to highlight the almost agreed upon draft. The reality was different,” he writes.

Bisaria also details Jaswant Singh’s talks with then Pakistan Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar on the draft statement, noting that another factor that led to the unravelling of the Summit was that both countries attempted to summit a mountain with little planning or even sherpas to help them. “Negotiating a joint statement at the level of the prime minister and foreign minister was not the smartest choice by Pakistan,” he says. “There had been little diplomatic bargaining, no backchannel dialogue, and limited diplomatic attempts to choreograph the Summit’s outcomes to bridge the vast chasm in the two positions on Kashmir and terrorism.”

Bisaria also recounts his conversation with Vajpayee and Mishra months later. “If India had gone with a bland text to declare the Summit a success and then cross-border terrorism had continued, would we not have appeared even more gullible than we did when the Summit was declared a failure?… Mishra agreed that would have been a worse outcome,” he writes. “Still, the invitation to Musharraf served a purpose, Vajpayee did manage to read Pakistan’s loquacious dictator, and this experience would help him evolve his Pakistan policy over the next three years.”

‘Qatal ki raat’: When Modi declined Imran call

Following India’s Balakot strikes on February 26, 2019, in response to the Pulwama terror attack, in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed, tension had escalated in the ties between India and Pakistan, whose air force launched a retaliation. Indian Air Force Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman shot down a Pakistani jet on February 27, 2019, before his MiG 21 Bison jet was hit in a dogfight. Varthaman was captured by the Pakistani army. On that day, Bisaria writes, the ambassadors of the US, UK, and France were informed during a briefing by the then Pakistan foreign secretary, Tehmina Janjua, about a message she received from her country’s army, which said that nine missiles from India had been pointed towards Pakistan, to be launched any time that day.

“The foreign secretary requested the envoys to report this intelligence to their capitals and ask India not to escalate the situation. The diplomats promptly reported these developments, leading to a flurry of diplomatic activity in Islamabad, P5 capitals, and in New Delhi that night,” Bisaria says, adding that then Pakistan PM Imran Khan wanted to talk to his Indian counterpart PM Modi. “At around midnight, I got a call in Delhi from Pakistani High Commissioner Sohail Mahmood, now in Islamabad, who said that PM Imran Khan was keen to talk to Prime Minister Modi,” he writes. “I checked upstairs and responded that our prime minister was not available at this hour, but in case Imran Khan had any urgent message to convey he could, of course, convey it to me. I got no call back that night.”

He then recounts: “The US and UK envoys in Delhi got back overnight to India’s foreign secretary to claim that Pakistan was now ready to de-escalate the situation, to act on India’s dossier, and to seriously address the issue of terrorism,” adding that “Pakistan’s PM would himself make these announcements” and that Varthaman would be returned to India the next day.

“India’s coercive diplomacy had been effective, India’s expectations of Pakistan and of the world had been clear, backed by a credible resolve to escalate the crisis,” Bisaria writes. “Prime Minister Modi would later say in a campaign speech that, ‘Fortunately, Pakistan announced that the pilot would be sent back to India. Else, it would have been qatal ki raat, a night of bloodshed.’”

ISI tip-off about al-Qaeda plot

Pakistan’s spy agency ISI had tipped off New Delhi about an al-Qaeda plot to carry out an attack in Kashmir in June 2019, which turned out to be genuine, Bisaria’s book reveals.

Shortly after PM Modi returned to power for the second consecutive term in May 2019, Bisaria writes, he got phone call at 2 am. “My caller was a contact close to the ISI and I assumed he was calling me simply because he was up late like most folks in Islamabad, awaiting the sehri meal in the month of Ramzan. The call had a more serious purpose, it was to tip me off with a specific input about al-Qaeda planning an attack in Kashmir. On 23 May, a terrorist, Zakir Musa, had been killed in the town of Tral in Kashmir’s now famous Pulwama district.”

Musa, whose funeral drew over 10,000 mourners, had been an associate of slain terrorist Burhan Wani, but had split from the Kashmir-focused militant group, Hizbul Mujahideen, to declare his allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2017. Al-Qaeda was apparently about to avenge Musa’s killing.

“It turned out that this was a genuine enough tip-off when an attack was indeed attempted close to the predicted time and place. This was an unusual input that Pakistan seemed to be giving to India. One theory about why the high commission was used as a channel was that the ISI was taking no chances and wanted no repeat of Pulwama; it wanted to make it clear at a political level (that) it was not involved with the revenge attack being planned, but was only giving India a friendly tip-off with a piece of intercepted intelligence,” Bisaria states.

“Another surmise was that General Bajwa, the army chief, through the ISI, was trying to improve the atmospherics in the relationship in the run-up to the Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) Summit of 14 June, hoping that Pakistan’s sincerity about trying to better relations would register on the Indian side,” he writes.

State of play before Art 370 abrogation

Barely a month before the scrapping of Article 370, in July 2019, when Bisaria visited New Delhi, he found various arms of the government eager to understand what was happening in Pakistan.

“I got to have substantive conversations on the state of play with our security establishment, diplomatic establishment, and also the political leadership. The highlights of the visit were meetings with the re-elected prime minister, the reappointed NSA, and the freshly minted external affairs minister, S Jaishankar,” he recalls. “I tried to draw a roadmap of the next six months — the possible meeting of Imran Khan with President Donald Trump in the US, the possibility of a meeting between the two prime ministers in September at the UNGA, the possible invitation to the PM to visit Kartarpur for the corridor opening in November…”

Bisaria says his conversation with Jaishankar revealed the latter’s “clear, realistic take on the Pakistan conundrum”. “We agreed that India’s Pakistan policy needed to meet three objectives simultaneously — of managing the bilateral relationship, managing global influences, and managing the domestic narrative,” he writes.

“My advice to the leadership was that India’s Pakistan and Kashmir policy could and should work on separate tracks. We should do what was right for Kashmir and not be overly concerned about Pakistan’s reaction. I had argued that Pakistan was at its weakest and would not risk any military misadventure over Kashmir, even though it might escalate the rhetoric. While I had an inkling of the imminent action on Kashmir, I did not know of the specific time frame,” he adds.