Finally, Prof. Ghani said, 'Next time we will come prepared with our ideas.'

That was that, and they agreed to meet that June.

The problem was that the Hurriyat was unwilling to bell the cat. Suppose in that meeting, the Mirwaiz had repeated the three points he had mentioned to me over dinner in May 2003, and asked if they could be done. That would have put Advani and the government in an awkward position, for they would have had to deliver. Instead, they kept asking for vague things, like confidence-building measures by releasing twelve persons.

The problem was that the separatist leadership has let down Kashmir time and again. Suppose Farooq were representing the Hurriyat or the separatists, he would have said what he felt he was required to say. Simply because he is not answerable to Pakistan.

After the second meeting I went to Srinagar in May to prepare for the third meeting, and I spent nearly a week with these gentlemen, talking to them. 'Professor Saheb, kucch toh indication de dijiye,' I said. 'Are you going to bring the map, give me some idea.'

'I am preparing it,' Prof. Ghani said.

The truth is that naksha kabhi taiyyar nahin hoga. If you ask me about autonomy, I have dealt with Kashmir for so long, and I have asked at the highest level, is autonomy doable, and I have been told: yes. It is doable. I have never offered anything beyond the Const.i.tution to anybody. I have told different separatists that there are various types of azaadi, but who am I to talk of anything outside the Const.i.tution? And who would have believed me?

And if Delhi has not been sincere about giving Kashmir anything of consequence or substance, then the Kashmiri leadership also does not have the gumption to extract anything. Maybe Delhi was insincere, but then it was up to the Kashmiris to check them out, instead of time and again backing out, whether it was Shabir Shah or Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. The government's game plan would have been to get the Hurriyat engaged, then get Shabir into it, then get Yasin Malik into it. The only person who would have stayed aloof would have been Geelani and that wouldn't have mattered. All that was now required was sincerity and a bit of aggressiveness of purpose, and in another four meetings or so with the Hurriyat, things would well and truly have been on their way.

I returned on 13 May from Srinagar and the next day the results of the Lok Sabha election were to be counted and announced. I had told the Mirwaiz, 'You've got to come to Delhi.'

'Yeah, yeah, we'll come,' he said. 'But what happens if these guys lose?'

I laughed. 'How does it matter?'

'No,' the Mirwaiz said. 'What if Mulayam Singh is the prime minister?'

'Mulayam Singh will be more keen than Advani,' I said.

And to the great misfortune of the Kashmiris, Vajpayee's team lost the elections.

16.

MANMOHAN SINGH'S LOST DECADE

By about 1:30 in the afternoon of 14 May 2004, it became clear that the NDA government headed by Vajpayee was not going to return to power, and that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) would be replacing it. I went to Brajesh Mishra's room, and found him standing by his cupboard, fiddling with things. He looked at me and said, 'Haan, bolo.' 'Sir, ab kya hoga?' I asked.

'Hum sab jayenge,' he said. 'Bistra bandhenge, chalenge.'

And he left the next day. As did everybody else: nicely, neatly, graciously.

I figured it would be appropriate to resign since this government appointed me. I drew up a letter in which I said I would like to be relieved and gave it to Brajesh Mishra. 'You don't have to do this,' he said. 'You're not a political appointee.'

Nonetheless he wrote an instruction on the letter: 'Brief the new prime minister and take further orders.' It thus required me to hang around till the new prime minister came in.

I went back to my room and called my old DIB, M.K. Narayanan, who was in London. Just for that brief moment I may have had second thoughts on quitting. Narayanan gave me the impression that he was not part of the government-formation process, but promised to look me up when he returned to Delhi. Ultimately he joined on 31 May as the advisor (internal security), but in between he did come to Delhi and meet Sonia Gandhi. But he did not meet me.

In the meantime I hung around at the PMO, the last man left, visualising my meeting with the person I thought was going to be the new prime minister: Sonia Gandhi. And I was quite excited about it.

On 17 May, it was announced that J.N. 'Mani' Dixit would be the new NSA. He came down to the PMO and I went and met him. 'Are you serious about leaving?' he asked.

When I said yes, he said he respected my choice, and then said, 'Keep in touch.' He sent for me once in July and enquired about Kashmir and how best to move forward. But that was it. Soon after he pa.s.sed away.

I b.u.mped into Narayanan at the PMO a day before the swearing-in. Sonia Gandhi was not going to be the prime minister. It would be Dr Manmohan Singh, whom I had first met in the mid-'90s when he was finance minister and I had taken Shabir Shah for a meeting with him at the behest of the prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao.

'I'm joining your set-up,' Narayanan said.

'I'm leaving,' I said.

The new PMO came to their offices on 23 May, which was a Sunday. I figured I didn't need to go in on a Sunday, so I did not. When I went in on Monday, I was told, 'You didn't come to welcome the prime minister.'

'It was Sunday,' I said. 'In any case, I'm leaving, I'll meet the prime minister separately.'

When I went to meet the new prime minister, I took along a note I had prepared on Kashmir because Brajesh Mishra had said, brief him, and I did not know how much time I would have. 'Put it down over there,' he said. 'Now tell me.'

We spent 45 minutes in discussion and finally he said, 'We have to continue this conversation.'

'Sir, I will come whenever you want,' I said. 'But I won't be in the PMO, I've put in my papers.'

Dr Singh dismissively waved his hand at my statement. 'Don't worry about that,' he said.

However, I had already sent my letter to the new princ.i.p.al secretary, T.K.A. 'Kutty' Nair. The new gang must have said, Dulat has put it down in writing, why give him so much importance. It was processed and that was that.

Now that I was officially leaving the PMO it was time to make a call on Vajpayee. On one of my last days I went to see him at Race Course Road. One thing about the man was that he was good with his time and you never had to wait more than five to ten minutes, because he did not meet too many people and he never kept anyone waiting. That day I was summoned in immediately.

The old man looked extremely relaxed. What the h.e.l.l do I say now, I thought. How do I start this conversation. Finally: 'Sir, yeh kya ho gaya?' I asked.

Typical Vajpayee, he laughed heartily. 'Yeh unko bhi nahin maloom ki kya ho gaya,' he said, referring to the Congress party, equally stunned by its win.

We spent a half-hour in relaxed conversation. 'Koi aisi baat nahin,' he said. He was in his light-hearted best element, and there was not an iota of regret.

Then Vajpayee mentioned Gujarat. 'Woh hamare se galti hui,' he said. Perhaps he felt that was the reason he lost power; because he did not stop the 2002 riots.

My last day was 31 May, the day Narayanan joined. We met, and he asked why I was going. 'Sir,' I said. 'This gang brought me here with them so I thought I should go with them. In any case, I never knew you were coming here.'

'Who's going to do this?' he asked, about Kashmir.

'You have two options,' I said. 'Either Ajit Doval or K.M. Singh, these guys are the most contemporary.' In fact, K.M. had just returned from an innings in Srinagar.

'Doval can't be spared,' Narayanan said. 'He's going to be DIB.' That was the first I heard that Doval would become the IB chief.

Eventually no one was put in my job and I don't think they wanted anyone there.

Before I left I also went and met the new minister of state in the PMO, Prithviraj Chavan, who had taken over from Vijay Goel and who would later become the chief minister of Maharashtra. We had two discussions on Kashmir before I left the PMO and he asked me what ought to be the next step. 'There has been a beginning and an opening has been provided,' I said. 'You must take it forward.' I told him he was ideally suited to do so. 'You're the minister here and Kashmiris like to believe that the prime minister or the PMO is dealing with Kashmir.'

'What about the home minister?' he asked.

'Of course you can talk it over with him,' I said. But what mattered to the Kashmiri was that the PMO was involved, which is why Narasimha Rao created a department of J&K affairs directly reporting to him. 'You need to talk this over with the PM on how you want to do it.'

The other thing that I mentioned was that in the 2004 election, the Congress had nearly a dozen absolutely young, bright members of Parliament from different political families, all of whom appeared to have a future. 'Make use of them in Kashmir,' I said to Chavan. 'Two of three should be allotted Kashmir.'

In particular I mentioned Sachin Pilot and Rahul Gandhi. Sachin was a natural because he was Farooq's son-in-law and so related to Kashmir, while Rahul was descended from Kashmiri Pandits. 'These guys should get involved and visit Kashmir regularly,' I said. 'Whenever Rahul wants to go on vacation he should go to Srinagar.'

Even if Rahul didn't want to be connected he ought to go on holiday and like his great-grandfather say this is my land and I have an emotional bond with it. Pandit Nehru even used to go riding in Kashmir. But neither did these youngsters show any interest, nor were they used productively. It was a great opportunity for the Congress party but it was frittered away.

It was my own fault that I did not continue in Dr Singh's administration. n.o.body asked me to leave and most were surprised; later I was told that some felt I was being arrogant, which is the last thing I was ever accused of in all my years of government service. Maybe I was being impulsive, but I simply thought it was the appropriate thing to do. Brajesh Mishra had brought me in; he was going and I thought I should also go. A good thing has only that much shelf life.

And in the years to pa.s.s, I had no regret on that score. One thing is for sure: Vajpayee's PMO was a very happy PMO. What I saw subsequently was a very tense, stressed-out PMO. I visited a number of times, even on the occasions that Narayanan's successor as NSA, Shiv Shankar Menon, called me over. In the beginning there was a lot of tension between the two guys whose jobs almost overlappedMani Dixit and Narayanan. And though Mani departed, unfortunately, there always seemed to be a lot of wrestling going on within. Whereas in Vajpayee's PMO there was no doubt in anybody's mind that the boss was the princ.i.p.al secretary, Brajesh Mishra. I guess it was a matter of Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra having an exceptional relationship during an exceptional period.

One occasion I went to meet Manmohan Singh was in July. He called me to discuss initiatives on Kashmir, and he asked how the BJP would react. 'The BJP started the process so they shouldn't object,' I said. 'Why don't you just ask them?'

'Whom do I talk to?' he said.

'You can talk to the ex-PM, Vajpayee.'

'He doesn't talk,' Dr Singh said.

'Okay, you can talk to L.K. Advani about it,' I suggested.

'He's very difficult.'

'Okay, you can talk to Brajesh Mishra.'

Brajesh then found a line to the UPA. After we left the government I would go meet the man every five or six weeks and have a drink with him. He was a smart fellow. He supported Dr Singh on the nuclear deal in 2008, much to the unhappiness of his party. When the media asked Brajesh about this he simply said, 'I'm not a party man.' The UPA gave him a Padma Vibhushan.

During the first year of the UPA's government, the prime minister was calling me more often than even Narayanan and so some time in AugustSeptember 2004, Narayanan called me up and asked me to dinner at the India International Centre. 'Have you lost all interest in Kashmir?' he asked.

'Sir, why should I lose interest in Kashmir?'

'Can you take up what you were doing earlier?'

'I could,' I said. 'But in what capacity?'

'In your personal capacity.'

I said okay, even though it did not amount to a formal role in the government. It was no big deal, and I didn't even ask for an air ticket. 'I'll go and tell Ajit Doval,' I said. 'I'd like to keep the DIB informed rather than he hear it from his people, so if you don't mind I'll tell Ajit I'm going.'

I think he did mind, but he said, 'Theek hai.'

The prime minister must have said that no one was able to reach out to the separatists, so why not send Dulat, and that's why I was sent. I met the Hurriyatthe guys who had started the dialogue with the NDA were known in Srinagar as the 'Advani Hurriyat'and had a chat, one by one. I returned and reported my discussions to Narayanan. He took me to the prime minister.

I was surprised to find Kutty Nair in Dr Singh's room. But I suppose everything has some purpose. 'Sir, they're all keen to talk,' I told Manmohan Singh.

The reaction came from Kutty Nair. 'The PM is going to Srinagar next week,' he said. 'Can you arrange a meeting for him with the Hurriyat?' It sounded like he needed P.C. Sorcar rather than me.

'No,' I said, point-blank. 'There has to be a method in this. It will take some time. But I promise you, if Delhi wants to talk I will get them here in three months to talk to you.'

In hindsight I wondered why the prime minister was going and what the rush was. There should be an agenda when you visit, something you want to do or say. But if he felt that as PM he should visit Kashmir as early as possible then he need not have bothered about the Hurriyat. The prime minister can't do everything himself; there are other people to get that process going.

In any case, that was the last time I was officially consulted over Kashmir.

The problem is that they wanted instant results. They wanted me to send a message to the Mirwaiz to meet the prime minister on his visit the following week. The Mirwaiz said: 'Hum itne gire hue bhi nahin hain ki aap thanedar bhej denge aur hum aa jayenge.' (We are not so lacking in self-respect that we will respond to every summons from Delhi.) Ironically, the same Mirwaiz had been happy with his meetings with Sonia Gandhi while she was in the opposition. She's reasonable, he would say. But once the UPA came to power, she stopped meeting the Hurriyat.

The UPA instead got bogged down in what was right and what was wrong. Such initiatives have to come from within; that is what is political will. And the UPA had it on a platter. All it had to do was follow up on the process that Vajpayee started. Since Advani had started talking to the Hurriyat, that should have been the starting point. It just needed following up, patience, time and understanding. It would have been impossible for the Hurriyat to wriggle out, or for the BJP to backtrack on.

But these things never happened. If something had to happen it should have happened in the first six months or eight months or maximum one year. Instead there was a brainwave to broadbase the Kashmir meetings and get more people in. The PMO called a roundtable meeting which was a waste of time. It went on for six hoursand Manmohan Singh sat through the whole thing. Imagine, Vajpayee wouldn't spend five minutes on such a meeting and it required a lot of persuasion just to have tea and samosas with the Hurriyat; and the UPA organised three roundtable meetings to which the Hurriyat did not even show up.

There was no meaningful dialogue and after that everything fell into the usual routine of chalta hai. Then people began saying that the separatists were useless and that there was no point in talking to them. But you have to talk to somebody, isn't it?

They wouldn't even talk to Farooq Abdullah, and I had told them that Farooq was deeply annoyed with the NDA for denying him the vice-presidency and then for his loss of power in the state. It was a good time to win him over. But perhaps Sonia was not interested.

During his decade as prime minister, Manmohan Singh went to Kashmir on at least five occasions and most of those visits were a waste. Kashmir is a political matter, but more than that it is emotive and psychological. That is why 'insaniyat ke dairey' has retained its resonance even after so many years.

That nothing happened on Kashmir or Pakistan is Manmohan Singh's great tragedy, because no other prime minister wanted it more, or was more sincere. But he was a lonely man with no support either from the party or the bureaucracy, and as the government weakened, the BJP took more and more advantage of it, called Dr Singh 'a weak man'. If the BJP had criticised him for being weak towards Pakistan then all he had to do was say that he was merely carrying on what Vajpayee started. After all, despite Kargil, Vajpayee invited Musharraf. Advani did say in 2004 that only the BJP could do something with Pakistan because the majority would never think that the BJP had sold out. Then Vajpayee, surprisingly, in 2005 said the Congress was going soft on Kashmir. It was strange, but basically no matter who is in power the other side doesn't want to concede anything on Kashmir.

Linked to the Kashmir paralysis was the missed window of opportunity with Pakistan, when Musharraf was at the height of his power from 2004 to 2007. This is something Dr Singh himself admitted at his last press conference on 3 January 2014: that there was a golden opportunity for a deal with Pakistan, particularly during the 200607 winter, that was missed.

It all centred on what Musharraf himself in 2006 called his 'four-point formula' for Kashmir. It was something that began taking shape when he met Vajpayee during the SAARC summit in Islamabad and gradually evolved during the first few years of the Manmohan Singh era. The formula was: making borders irrelevant by allowing free movement of Kashmiris across the LoC; self-governance which meant autonomy but not independence; demilitarisation; and a mechanism for joint management.

It had big implications for Pakistan's stand on Kashmir: it meant that the LoC was being accepted; that the long-held demand for plebiscite would be set aside; that self-governance would replace the demand for self-determination; that Kashmiris would talk to New Delhi; and that Kashmir was no longer the unfinished business of Part.i.tion.

Why did Musharraf do it? From the moment that Musharraf became president he had been speaking about out-of-the-box solutions, about leaving the past behind, and about moving forward. He wanted a deal.

And to that end, he started paying more attention to the political mainstream in Kashmir. Perhaps after the 2002 J&K a.s.sembly election he realised the mainstream would have an important role in the futureremember, Abdul Ghani Lone used to say separatism was just a phaseand he reached out to everybody. Mehb.o.o.ba Mufti was his preferred mainstream politician during the time her father was the chief minister; when Mufti stepped down Musharraf's preference switched over to Omar Abdullah.

In March 2006, Omar visited Islamabad at the invitation of Musharraf, the first mainstream Kashmiri politician to do so, and when he returned I met him for lunch. He was full of Pakistan and full of Musharraf. His thesis was that Musharraf was being much more reasonable than we were. 'Have you met the prime minister and told him?' I asked, which he said that he had.

Musharraf was also very impressed with Omar. From his point of view Omar was a smart, upfront Kashmiri who spoke well and appeared honest, quite the opposite of the wishy- washy Hurriyat guys who said one thing, did another and meant something totally different. Musharraf may have wondered why so much weightage be given to the Hurriyat, if the mainstream guys can do the job for Pakistan.

It was as a fallout of this that he took the Hurriyat to task, telling them to start taking part in elections (advice that, as mentioned earlier, made the Mirwaiz's throat run dry). He reportedly told Geelani that he was an old man who should get out of the way of peace; Geelani was sidelined for the years that Musharraf was in power, not doing much else but criticise Musharraf. Because of Musharraf, Geelani's son Nayeem, a doctor in Pakistan, had to return to Kashmir (which Omar, when he became chief minister in 2008, facilitated). Geelani only regained influence as a separatist once Musharraf lost power.

To ill.u.s.trate how Musharraf's thinking changed everybody there are two visits to India by Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan, the former prime minister of PoK and the head of the Muslim Conference, the party to which Hurriyat leader Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat belonged. In September 2005, Sardar Qayyum attended a seminar at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) where I also partic.i.p.ated in the discussion. When his turn came to speak, he did the usual waffling: that Kashmir was a complex matter, that we need not look at solutions immediately, that confidence building was more important.

When my turn to speak came, I said: 'Sardar Saheb, I've heard so much about you and what you're saying would be extremely disappointing to the Kashmiris sitting here because what you're implying is that there is no solution to Kashmir.'

Sardar Qayyum returned in May 2007, by which time the four-point formula was very much in the air and Musharraf was saying repeatedly that whatever was acceptable to Kashmiris was acceptable to Pakistan. He had built bridges with Musharraf, and his son, Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, had become prime minister of PoK. Sardar Qayyum said exactly what Musharraf was saying: that whatever can save Kashmir and Kashmiris should be acceptable to both sides. I had a long chat with him and found that all that he said was in parallel to whatever Musharraf was saying. It wasn't Prof. Ghani alone whose tune had changed.

In fact, the greatest proponent of Musharraf's four-point formula was the Mirwaiz. It suited all the separatists.

As far back as I can remember, if we look at the history of Kashmir and if we look at the Pakistani leadership, no other Pakistani has been as reasonable on Kashmir as Musharraf was. Yet Manmohan Singh could not grasp the opportunity. Musharraf is supposed to have sent a message to Dr Singh in early 2007: you're a Pakistani Sikh and I'm an Indian Muslim. Let us get together and unite our people and end this madness of confrontation forever.