Former high commissioner Abdul Basit has asserted that former prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Nawaz Sharif would keep his own envoy out of the loop during his meetings with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Speaking to veteran anchor Karan Thapar in an interview for The Wire, Basit said that Nawaz would pander to Modi’s demands and even refused to raise Kashmir issue during the meetings in Dehli.
Furthermore, he alleged that the former premier would hold secret talks with Modi through an Indian businessman, adding that Nawaz’s senior advisers, Sartaj Aziz and Tariq Fatemi, were party to the unusual approach in conducting ties behind the back of Pakistan’s envoy in New Delhi.
Regarding these meetings, Basit said that Indian businessman Sajjan Jindal was the middle man that connected the two premiers to discuss matters such as Hurriyat leaders and the Kulbhushan Jadhav case.
All of them were “pandering to India unilaterally and unconditionally,” Basit said in the interview, which discussed his book Hostility, a memoir of his three years posting in India from 2014 to 2017.
Basit maintained that the senior advisers were “apologetic” and were more concerned with catering to Modi’s demands and concerns rather than standing up for the interests of Pakistan. He similarly dubbed former foreign secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry as “brazenly apologetic and improvident” and a person who “wanted to deliver (to India) no matter what”.
Basit revealed how he was repeatedly and deliberately excluded from Pakistan-India meetings or communications, specifically at the behest of the former premier whose foreign secretary humiliated him by telling junior officers not to communicate with him without the foreign secretary’s permission.
He added that how over the Jadhav matter he received a letter of reprimand, again from a junior officer, which effectively minimised him and tied his hands. “Right from the word go Pakistan has mishandled the Kulbhushan Jadhav case,” he said and added it’s “gradually losing its credibility in the matter”.
