RAW gave intelligence information to Pakistan over Pervaiz Musharaf assassination plot: AS Daulat
Shares
NEW DELHI - Former RAW Chief AS Dulat in his book The Spy Chronicles has revealed how RAW helped to save the life of then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
In 2004, RAW passed on actionable intelligence to the ISI about the JeM’s plans to hit Musharraf. He was saved by a whisker. RAW also helped in the identification and arrest of culprits.
Two out of them were later executed following the Peshawar army school bombing. Another startling revelation is Dulat’s assessment that Musharraf was involved in the planning of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Though, Musharraf had abdicated office at the time of attacks, Dulat believes that the planning for them had almost been completed during his tenure.
According to him, Musharraf was getting frustrated that despite abandoning Pakistan’s traditional stand on Kashmir, India was not responding to his peace proposal.
Dulat is seen as the last word on Kashmir in Delhi circles. But in the present dispensation, he seems out of place. He was posted in Kashmir in 1989 almost at the same time when militancy took over the region. But due to differences with then Governor Jagmohan, he then moved to Delhi after a year where he headed the Jammu and Kashmir cell of the IB for the next 10 years.
Dulat’s idea of dealing with Kashmir has been very unconventional. His theory is to use minimum physical force and instead employ money and persuasive powers to buy loyalties. In his previous book “Kashmir:
The Vajpayee Years”, he has mentioned his relations with many Kashmiri separatist leaders such as the late AbdulGhani Lone, Shabir Ahmed Shah, Abdul Ghani Bhat, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and militant commanders like Babar Badar and others. He has mentioned how Shabir Shah was supposed to take over as chief minister in 1996, but backed out just before elections were declared. Again in 2002, he had worked on Abdul Ghani Lone to participate in the elections, but was killed.
Twelve years later, Lone’s son Sajjad Gani Lone successfully contested elections in 2014 and is now a minister in the PDP-BJP government. Unlike PDP, he was perhaps the only politician in the Valley who had a pre-poll electoral alliance with the BJP. Another coup by Dulat was to get the operational commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) Abdul Majeed Dar to announce a ceasefire.
He mentioned the killings of Lone and Dar by Pakistani agencies had rattled New Delhi to the extent that someone had suggested killing Hurriyat hawk Syed Ali Shah Geelani in a tit-for-tat policy.