NEW DELHI: Former RAW chief AS Dulat on Friday said India must engage with Pakistan, adding that the initial seven to eight months in 1989, when militancy had begun in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), was a crucial period and the government should have engaged with the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) then.
At the same time, he said it was Pakistan which had engineered militancy in J&K. India has not officially engaged with Pakistan since January 2016 in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Pathankot. Just days before the Pathankot attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Lahore, when he landed there on December 25, 2015 during an unscheduled stopover.
In an interaction with journalist Vir Sanghvi on the occasion of the official launch of his book, ‘The Chief Minister, and the Spy’ in the national capital, Dulat, who was then posted in the troubled state (in 1989) during the time when militancy erupted there, said he had spoken to JKLF leader Yasin Malik, who was driven by the idea of seeking “Azadi” from India.
“Those six to eight months were crucial when we should have engaged with JKLF. They too were keen to talk as they knew that later it (talks) would not be possible,” he said.
The former spy went on to add that even Pakistan was surprised by the support which the militants had received in Kashmir during the early days of militancy.
“That’s why they (Pakistan) created Hurriyat, which was a political outfit,” Dulat added. The former RAW chief then added that “I insist we must (now) engage with Pakistan.
To a question by Sanghvi on whether he believed that Pakistan had engineered militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, Dulat said: “Yes, Pakistan engineered militancy in J&K. No doubt about that… General Zia-ul-Haq was the president (during period preceding the years when militancy erupted in the erstwhile state). He had not really forgotten 1971 (India-Pakistan war).”
Days after controversy broke out over his new book, where the former RAW chief AS Dulat wrote that former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah “privately backed” the abrogation of Article 370, the former spy on Friday chose to play it down by saying that people took out just one paragraph and quoted it out of context, whereas the book is about the tallest leader of Kashmir, who is a legend.
“I don’t know how this controversy started. People took just one paragraph without reading what has been written before and after it…. The book is not just about that one paragraph. It is about Farooq Abdullah, the tallest leader of Kashmir, a legend,” Dulat said during the launch function of the book.