Dr Humayun Khan had a distinguished career as a civil servant and was foreign secretary in Islamabad till 1989. He had spent his childhood at Bishop Cotton School in Simla among a number of pupils who later became figures of some note in India. His elder brothers including Afzal Khan had been at the Doon School at Dehra Doon and had many friends among the political elite and establishment of India. His connections with his old friends remained intact during his stay at Trinity College at Cambridge, which no doubt shaped his worldview. He was working closely with foreign minister Sahabzada Yaqub Khan in 1984 when General Zia thought that he would be the right person to anoint the wheels of his new policy of detente with India. He was to serve at New Delhi from 1984 to 1988 as the ambassador, because his country was out of the Commonwealth and the title of the High Commissioner wasn’t available..

BEGINNING WITH A CRISIS: Things did not, however, begin nicely for Dr Khan after he landed in New Delhi. Indira Gandhi was in power and was having problems with Punjab where the Sikhs were in a state of ferment, a situation in which she had herself played no small part. Before he had presented his credentials an Indian airliner was hijacked to Lahore. Intensively interacting with Rasgotra, Dr Khan helped in resolving the crisis within 36 hours. Pakistan returned the passengers in a PIA flight but kept the hijackers for a trial. Dr Khan thought that his efforts would be appreciated; but at a dinner with Rajiv Gandhi and other officials, the Indian reaction was icy.

When he met prime minister Indira Gandhi to present his credentials, she was no less icy. She complained that after the hijacked plane landed at Lahore, Pakistan had not allowed Indian officials to meet the hijackers and inspect their luggage. It turned out that while Rasgotra in New Delhi had sent a positive report on the incident, the Indian ambassador in Islamabad had filed a very different version. This was followed by Mrs Gandhi’s big trouble in Punjab, and soon there was another hijacking. This time Pakistan did not want to take any responsibility and forced the plane to leave Lahore. It flew to Karachi from where it went to Dubai. The hijackers were arrested there and returned to India. But something funny happened while the plane was at the Lahore airport, according to the Indian officials. The hijackers flashing knives till then, suddenly had acquired a handgun.

The matter was brought up with Dr Humayun Khan. India’s foremost defence analyst, K Subrahmanyam, was in the hijacked plane and vouched for the fact that a pistol had suddenly appeared in the hand of a hijacker at Lahore. Dr Khan was told to forcefully deny the implicit charge.  General Zia himself spoke to Mrs Gandhi on the phone and tried to convince her that the Indian suspicion was ill-founded. But the Indians did not rest and pursued the pistol back to its manufacturer in Germany and were told that it had been bought by a Pakistani ‘official agency’! Dr Humayun Khan tells us a little more about the ‘derring-do’ of the ‘agency’ in his own mission. Mrs Gandhi was greatly riled over Pakistan’s alleged interference in Punjab. Dr Khan’s defence attaché one day reported to him that he had it on the assurance of an A-One (undeniable) secret source that she was about to break off relations perhaps as a prelude to doing something more serious on the border. The A-One source turned out to be not so reliable after all. The defence attaché was wrong.

TWO CHANNELS OF INDIA POLICY: It appears that General Zia used Dr Humayun Khan’s contacts in India while running his real policies through the ‘cover-posted’ personnel from the agencies and the defence attaché. A parallel policy was being pursued and the ambassador was kept out of its loop. At times his defence personnel took a line different from his and declining to support him even on ceremonial occasions. He makes his position clear too by saying that he did not believe in the orthodox position taken by the military thinkers in Pakistan that India simply did not accept Pakistan’s existence and was determined to destroy or undo its independence.

In the context of this ‘duplex’ policy, this is what happened in Punjab, for instance. Mrs Gandhi went on the rampage. Operation Bluestar killed 3,000 inside the Golden Temple and the commander of the operation Major-General KS Brar claimed that he had found ammunition there with Pakistani markings and some of the rebels killed were Pakistanis. Dr Khan of course denied it. Indian officials started telling the Big Powers that since Pakistan was fishing in troubled waters in Punjab, India was no longer interested in peace talks with it. Dr Khan noted that India was beginning to make its own kind of interference in Sindh. In the event, the Sikhs killed Mrs Gandhi in New Delhi and had to pay for it with thousands more of their community killed in the city by enraged Hindu mobs. In the months to follow the Indian officials began their campaign of hostile ‘signalling’ by roughing up the staff of the Pakistan embassy.

PAKISTAN’S INTERFERENCE IN EAST PUNJAB: British scholar Joyce JM Pettigrew in her book Sikhs of the Punjab: unheard voices of state and guerrilla violence (Zed Books, London) drew her conclusions from her interviews with the militant Sikhs involved in the uprising that culminated in 1984 with the death of Mrs Gandhi. Babbar Khalsa, the most popular of the militant groups was penetrated by RAW and from 1983 started undermining the Khalistan Movement. It is possible that some of the murder and mayhem was encouraged by RAW to undermine the movement by making it unpopular. Pakistan was the place to regroup, criticise and discuss strategy for the guerrillas. Crossing the border was a routine affair for which secret services on both sides and Border Security Force and the Rangers were heavily bribed. One militant interviewee told the author that the ISI officers took bribes for the support they offered to them. Once the ISI became involved in the racket, the Indian spies were able to penetrate its network through their Sikh plants. It led to the ridiculous situation of RAW actually paying to the ISI through the fake guerrillas in return for crucial information. The Sikh cause was reduced to a farce. The ISI was more interested in creating chaos than in promoting separatism. Pakistan’s participation in the struggle was marred by corruption, which allowed the Punjab pointman KPS Gill to penetrate the ISI and take the battle into Pakistani Punjab.

Dr Humayun Khan felt the hubris of Mrs Gandhi not only in the actions she took in Punjab but also in Kashmir. The crisis in Kashmir was partly brought on by her insistence that the elected government of Farooq Abdullah be dismissed. When her cousin BK Nehru who was governor in Srinagar resisted, she got rid of him and sent in Jagmohan who was in fact nothing more than a hatchet man. He replaced Farooq with GM Shah, which completely destabilised the state. Dr Khan doesn’t agree with the ‘Kashmir-first’ policy pursued over the years by Pakistan, but points out that it had actually begun with Mrs Gandhi in 1972, who wanted to solve the Kashmir problem ‘once and for all’; and that it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who wanted ‘progress on other fronts first’.

LoC as PERMANENT BORDER? When Dr Khan arrived in New Delhi the hardliners in Mrs Gandhi’s political entourage were wringing their hands over the missed opportunity at Simla. They thought that she should not have relented in her determination to convert the Ceasefire Line into a permanent border. It was PN Haksar, the statesman in the Indian establishment, who thought that by extracting tough concessions from Pakistan in return for 5,000 square miles of territory and 93,000 POWs would make Pakistan into a permanent enemy. His reference to the Treaty of Versailles perhaps ignored the adage that complete defeats bring big decisions to the negotiating table and that better lessons are learnt from defeats than victories. Dr Khan thinks that Mrs Gandhi also bowed to joint pressure put on her for mutually acceptable settlement by the United States and the Soviet Union.

He was also told by eyewitnesses that Bhutto had assured Mrs Gandhi of Pak acceptance of the Line of Control as a permanent border with the passage of time. He had used the words ‘mujh par bharosa karain’ to win her confidence. Dr Khan thinks that just as Bhutto betrayed many leaders who cooperated with him on the project of the 1973 Constitution, he betrayed Mrs Gandhi too. His verbal promises to her were reflected in the Simla Agreement clause saying that a ‘final’ solution would be reached at a later meeting between Heads of Governments. He believes that normalisation of relations is crucial ‘before’ tackling the big Kashmir issue: ‘My own view is that even the most intractable issues can be resolved more easily in an overall atmosphere of cooperation and that even the easiest issues are unlikely to be resolved in an atmosphere of confrontation’. He wants all the issues on the table with a sharper focus on Kashmir when cooperation rather than confrontation is the mode of state behaviour.

Dr Humayun Khan’s mission was undermined in India by the two channels Islamabad was using. The defence attaché ran his own policy to which Dr Khan’s diplomacy was added just as a frill. A military officer, on a cover posting, was later caught in a sting operation in New Delhi, thrashed by the Indian goons and sent packing home. He was Major-General Zaheerul Islam Abbasi, who avenged the failure of his personal jihad in New Delhi by staging an unsuccessful military coup in Rawalpindi 1995 ‘for the sake of Kashmir’. The account ends with Dr Humayun Khan saying he found it difficult to understand the reaction of India to the December 2001 alleged attack by Pakistani terrorists on Indian parliament after Pakistan had roundly condemned it. He must have changed his mind on 10 March 2004 when ex-ISI chief, Senator Lt General (Retd.) Javed Ashraf Qazi, admitted that the banned outfit Jaish-e-Muhammad had been involved in the attack on the Indian parliament. He said—“We must not be afraid of admitting that Jaish was involved in the deaths of thousands of innocent Kashmiris, bombing the Indian Parliament, Daniel Pearl’s murder and attempts on President Musharraf’s life”.

And this Jaish-I-Muhammad was the creation of the ISI!