'Right now, we have no relationship with Pakistan. And the relationship with China is not great.'
'Courtly' comes to mind when describing A S Dulat, 85, as we negotiate the venue for lunch. We agree on Delhi's Claridges hotel and opt for Chinese cuisine -- not for any geopolitical reasons, simply because it is lighter on the tummy.
He gallantly turns vegetarian for the afternoon in deference to me. The menu, when it arrives, is fiendishly complicated, locked in some sort of tablet that asks for many personal details before it can be opened.
We toss it aside, ask for hot and sour soup and a selection of dim sum.
Then we go straight to the four or five lines on page 208 of his book The Chief Minister and The Spy, which the former chief of India's foreign secret service, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), fears may have caused an irreparable breach between him and his friend of three decades, former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah.
He tries to hide it but you can see Dulat is hurting and miserable.
"He won't take my calls. In the past, when that happened, I would get my wife to call him. He's not taking her calls either," he says quietly into his soup.
"It is not just any other book. It's special. I've known Farooq Saab for 37 years, almost as long as I've known Kashmir."
He describes their relationship: "It was 2002. The National Conference, led by Farooq Saab, had lost the elections. There was talk that I'd played a role in the defeat. It disturbed me. So, I went to see him: 'Sir, everybody is saying you blame me.' Farooq asked me who was saying this. 'It's not a question of who is saying it. The question is: Do you believe this?' I said. Farooq looked at me. 'Not at all,' he said simply. 'You're like my younger brother'."
Dulat is looking into the middle distance as he says this. His book records that the families were so close, he even knew the name of the Abdullahs' khansamah (cook).
The book is affectionate, even tender, about Farooq Abdullah -- how he navigated the personal and the political through the complexities of Kashmir's relationship with India, specifically Delhi, on the one hand, and Pakistan-inspired and funded terrorists, on the other.
It is not a book written by an objective spymaster. Rather, it attempts to understand the moves of a man whom New Delhi thought 'unmanageable'.
In that context, when Article 370 was revoked, Abdullah told Dulat in 2020 that he had not been unwilling to work with New Delhi.
'Maybe the NC could even have had the proposal passed in the J&K assembly. We would have helped. Why were we not taken into confidence?' Abdullah said to him, Dulat writes in the book.
Understandably, this has set off a storm in J&K politics, with rival Mehbooba Mufti exclaiming with satisfaction that Kashmiris now know who was really responsible for their humiliation, and Farooq Abdullah's son, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, saying with disdain that Dulat was trying to sell lies to sell his book.
Dulat says the manuscript of the book was written with Farooq Abdullah's express consent and was sent to him three months before publication.
A few lines in a 200-plus page volume need not have escalated into such a huge row, but there are people around Farooq Abdullah, he says, who want to create a distance between the two. He refuses to name them.
"Maybe it's a phase. It will pass," I say. He says nothing. It is time to move on.
We pause to taste the food. Carrot and cream cheese dimsum? Hmmm... interesting, though it is doubtful if they eat that in China.
Did he, as chief of R&AW, ever order any assassinations? I ask innocently.
And did those tasked with the assassination ever approach people for help, unaware that they were negotiating to pay undercover informants of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
He laughs. "I know what you're referring to," he says.
Would he say that was India's finest hour in spookdom? "I can tell you that nothing of the kind ever happened in Atal Bihari Vajpayee's time," he says, "or in Manmohan Singh's time."
I hold my breath. A State secret is about to be revealed.
"I remember there was a discussion once. The Pakistanis were having whoever fell out of line on Kashmir bumped off," he says.
"One of the top leaders of the Hurriyat was becoming a nuisance for us. 'Why don't we get rid of him?' a colleague said.
I said: 'What do we gain?' I also remember asking Mufti Saab (Mufti Mohammad Sayeed) when he was chief minister: 'He's talking a lot of nonsense. Why don't you lock him up?', and Mufti refused, saying, 'I'll only make a martyr out of him'."
We speak a bit about his tenure as R&AW chief. He was an outsider. Since he joined the Indian Police Service in 1965, he had always been in the Intelligence Bureau from 1969 until his batchmate Shyamal Dutta was named chief of IB.
The top job at R&AW was offered to him in lieu. Vajpayee was prime minister and the go-to man was his principal secretary and national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra, with whom Dulat got on well.
Dutta was generous enough to accept and accommodate Dulat's interest in Kashmir, though it was foreign intelligence that was now his domain.
A few months into Dulat's tenure as R&AW chief, IC-814 was hijacked.
"It was a difficult time, that week," he says. In his assessment, the main goof-up happened in Amritsar, where the flight was on the ground for a long time. The fault, he says, lay squarely with New Delhi.
"Everyone in New Delhi knew what was happening: From the prime minister to the home minister, from the NSA to the IB director, from the Cabinet secretary to the chief of R&AW. So yes, it was a time of great weakness on Delhi's part because once the plane took off again and departed Indian airspace (for Kandahar, Afghanistan), we lost control of the situation."
What is the next set of dangers to India looming on the horizon?
"Our biggest worry at this point of time should be Pakistan," he replies.
"We have two sets of neighbours on the east and west. We should have a relationship (with them). Right now, we have no relationship with Pakistan. And the relationship with China is not great."
Dulat and I are meeting just a day before the dastardly terror attack on civilians in Pahalgam. Kashmir had, on the face of it, been on the path to normalcy. He doesn't buy the normalcy argument.
Terror, he says, hasn't ended in Kashmir, and it will not end easily.
He offers substantiation of this claim: Every time India claims normalcy is returning to Kashmir, there is an attack.
The very next day, Kashmir is hit and 26 innocents are killed in cold blood in picturesque Baisaran.
"In the last few months, the Pakistan army chief has made repeated provocative statements. The same old story. It does not augur well," he says.
Just about a week before the Pahalgam attack, Pakistan army chief General Asim Munir had said that Kashmir was Islamabad's 'jugular vein' and that 'we will not forget it. We will not leave our Kashmiri brothers in their heroic struggle'.
Dulat says that Kashmiri leaders, both Farooq and Mehbooba, have repeatedly said that engagement with Pakistan is very important.
He also says militancy cannot be fought on the ground if the Kashmir police is not with you.
I suggest that Prime Minister Narendra Modi did try to engage Pakistan by his unscheduled visit to Nawaz Sharif's granddaughter's wedding in 2015.
"If Atalji felt let down by Pakistan, so must Modiji be," I say. "But Atalji never gave up," he retorts.
Though Pakistan insists it had nothing to do with the Pahalgam terror attack, New Delhi isn't convinced.
If there was even a remote chance of peaceful engagement, this attack has pushed it beyond the horizon.
For the first time in history, India has suspended the Indus Water Treaty -- a water-sharing agreement between the two countries, which had remained unscathed during past wars and in all these years of terrorism.
Dulat also feels that Bangladesh needs to be watched, and recalls a Kashmiri leader telling him that in creating Bangladesh, India helped create another Muslim nation, and that one day, Bangladesh and Pakistan would unite.
We return to the book and the exasperation India and Pakistan alike feel in their dealings with Farooq Abdullah.
It is Dulat's case that Abdullah is the most misunderstood man in both New Delhi and Islamabad. The blues are descending on Dulat again.
We quickly order some coconut and jaggery ice-cream to end the meal.
The restaurant is full, the hotel is full, and everyone seems to be having fun as I bid goodbye to the man who has lived 'a life in the shadows, as the title of his engaging autobiography goes.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
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