India gave last draft on ‘Kashmir agreement’ in 2007, says new report

New Delhi provided Pakistan the last draft on a possible agreement on the Kashmir issue in March 2007 after nearly three years of secret negotiations before these stopped because of a political crisis in Islamabad, according to a new paper from Georgetown University in the US, HT reported.

The paper, by Jawaharlal Nehru University associate professor Happymon Jacob, is based on interviews with Indian and Pakistani officials who were involved in the back channel negotiations on Kashmir and contains some unknown aspects of the efforts to resolve the issue by then Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.

Riaz Mohammad Khan, who was Pakistan’s foreign secretary during 2005-08, said the Indian side gave the last draft in early March 2007, which was “close to what might have become the final document” if negotiations hadn’t come to a halt.

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The Pakistani side didn’t get an opportunity to return the draft with its comment because of the sudden political crisis which sent the Musharraf government into a tailspin.

In January 2004, Musharraf had a “quiet discussion” with Tariq Aziz, who later became Pakistan’s point person for negotiations with India, and India’s then national security adviser Brajesh Mishra that kick-started talks on how to move forward on the Kashmir issue.

In an interview to the Hindu, the author of Neither Hawk Nor Dove, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, who held the foreign affairs portfolio to the end of the Musharraf government in 2008, has said the book contained details of the “truth” even if “it is going to make people angry.”

Kasuri had dismissed suggestions that the Pakistan Army was not on board regarding the Musharraf-Vajpayee-initiated peace process. “I have quoted secret cables to show that all the others in the Pakistan Army were fully on board… It will help understand the role played by the Army in that process.”

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Leaked cables from WikiLeaks showed in 2010 that an agreement on Kashmir was coming sooner than anyone might think, an optimistic Pervez Musharraf had told top US Congressional leaders in 2007. He told them that India and Pakistan were on verge of a deal on the contentious issue.

Despite a change in government in India after the BJP’s defeat in the general election, the “dedicated Kashmir back channel itself effectively began only in late 2004, after the Manmohan Singh government took office in New Delhi in May 2004”, according to the paper.

The new paper says several local and international factors helped facilitate the secret talks, including Vajpayee’s outreach to Kashmiris in 2003 and encouragement from the US government, which was keen to ensure there was no India-Pakistan friction while Washington and its allies were busy with the war on terror in Afghanistan.