Former RAW Chief for inviting Pakistan Army Chief to India tour
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NEW DELHI – Former chief of India’s top spy agency, A.S. Dulat has urged his government to invite Pakistan’s chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa to re-start the process.
Talking to an Indian news channel, NDTV, together with former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, the two spymasters from rival countries who co-authored a book, the former head of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) said that radical changes were being witnessed in diplomatic and strategic fields around the globe.
Both former heads appeared on the TV ahead of the release of their joint book — The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace – a writing piece having a plethora of sensational disclosures about the security discourse of South-Asia and other issues of prominence.
Citing recent unexpected change in the attitude of the US towards North Korea, Dulat, who served RAW from 1999-2000, during said: “Who could have thought a few days ago that President Donald Trump would be talking to the North Korean leader? We should also think out of the box, as Dr Manmohan Singh used to say. Roll out the red carpet and invite Gen Bajwa, and see what happens.”
Emphasising on people-to-people contact, both dignitaries called for easing visa process and resumption of cricket between two countries.
Gen Durrani, expressing his view on bilateral relations, said that former prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gilani’s meeting in Sharm el Sheikh had produced a ground-breaking agreement, but it was tarnished by bureaucracies of both countries. “The agreement to have a joint anti-terror mechanism would have been a great achievement for both. Alas, that was not to be.”
The book is set to be launched in Delhi this week, but Durrani will not be able to attend the ceremony as he has not been given a visa by New Delhi so far, the Indian Express reported.
The book, which will be available in Pakistan soon, also sheds light on the so-called surgical strike of the Indian Army in Azad Kashmir, the arrest of Kalbhushan Jadev, Nawaz Sharif, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Kashmir, Muzaffar Burhan Wani Shaheed and Akhand Bharat plan of India.
Besides narrating the spine-chilling incidents, Dulat has reminded the Indian leadership to address the Kashmir issue first of all. Despite dim hopes, the book has also indicated the possibility of resumption of talks between Pakistan and India in the wake of forthcoming elections in the Muslim-majority nation.
The book is hitting the shelves days after Pakistan and India renewed the Track II diplomacy with an Indian delegation holding talks with a Pakistani team on April 28-30.
Although India claims that the recent efforts for detente did not signify any watering down of New Delhi’s position that terror and talks can’t go together, a senior bureaucrat privately admitted that such a dialogue would surely be at the behest of the government.
The Track II diplomacy is generally called Neemrana Dialogue, named after the fort in Rajasthan where it was first held in 1991, but it is brushed aside by New Delhi, with Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar saying that “…functional exchanges between the two sides have continued and is actually a part of normal process between the two countries. So there is nothing new which we see in this dialogue”.
