The Context
A Hawk or a Dove?
‘Are you a hawk or a dove on India Kasuri Sahib?’ President Pervez Musharraf shot the question at me. Although not entirely taken aback, I wasn’t exactly expecting this question at our very first meeting after my assumption of the office of Foreign Minister of Pakistan in November 2002.
We were sitting across the main table in the banquet hall of the Aiwan-e-Sadr (President’s House), an imposing building on Constitution Avenue in Islamabad. Visiting the Aiwan-e-Sadr for the first time can be a daunting experience. With its liveried Army Jawans in starched turbans and impressive gilded uniforms standing like statues, the atmosphere reminds one of the heydays of both the British Raj and the Mughal Empire. I was, however, not particularly overcome by the surroundings or the circumstances.
This could be because I had already been a Cabinet Minister in the Caretaker Government of Prime Minister Mir Balakh Sher Mazari in 1993, and thus had attended meetings at the Presidency before. Moreover, I belonged to a family of ‘rebels’-with my grandfather, my uncles, my father, and indeed myself-having spent time in prisons for our anti-establishment positions, beginning with my grandfather, Maulana Abdul Qadir Kasuri, a prominent leader of the Independence Movement. The membership of my father, Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri, in Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Cabinet was the first break with the family’s anti-establishment tradition. He nonetheless kept our anti- establishment tradition alive through his eventual and eventful resignation following serious differences with Prime Minister Bhutto on political and constitutional matters.
Coming back to my response to Musharraf’s question as to whether I was a hawk or a dove, I said to him, ‘Mr President, you will find out in due course.’ I was not trying to be reticent or evasive. I did not think it was appropriate for me to explain at length on that occasion that I was actually neither. I have always found myself in a minority in the company of both my liberal friends, some of who think peace simply has to be wished for, and my more traditional ones who think that all of Pakistan’s problems lie at the doors of India and, more recently, the United States. Liberals find me far too conservative and conservatives feel I am too much of a liberal for their comfort.
My father faced a similar situation. As I was growing up, I started to understand his dilemma: he had many socialist and progressive friends who thought that he was too conservative because he was a practising Muslim. They were particularly surprised at how my father, being a practising Muslim, could be supportive of progressive causes, especially in the context of the 1950s and 1960s, when anti-colonialism was at its height all over the developing world, when anti-Americanism was on the rise because of the Vietnam War, and when it had become fashionable among the progressives and socialists to adopt Karl Marx’s view of religion as the opiate of the masses. I was, therefore, familiar with the problem and it never unduly upset me. I had learnt to be tolerant of all views and felt perfectly comfortable holding to my own.
Hence, being me came naturally to me.
Family: Opposing Influences
I grew up in the Lahore of the 1950s and 1960s, which was a most fascinating experience. Lahore is the cultural capital of the country-famous for its educational and literary institutions. It was home to a vibrant literary, artistic, and intellectual community, and a centre of political activity. People from Lahore’s political and
intellectual circles regularly visited our home on the then famous Fane Road, off the historic Mall Road. Thus, one of my earliest memories is growing up in a house where a variety of persons with differing ideas and viewpoints were not only routinely present, but also admired and cherished.
Significantly, I was raised under contrasting influences-with my mother belonging to a ruling princely family of northern India with pro-British leanings, and my father hailing from a family of anti-colonial nationalists as well as religiously disposed pan-Islamist Punjabis. These contradictions inculcated a greater than usual degree of tolerance in me, for I could not have otherwise preserved my sanity amidst the frequent exchange of the choicest epithets and the thoroughly derogatory opinions the two sides of my family held about one another. My family background was also perhaps responsible for, what was regarded at the Foreign Office as my non-conventional views on India.
About the book
Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri is one of Pakistan’s eminent politicians. In this book, he provides the ultimate insider’s account of Pakistan’s foreign policy, especially the peace process with India including the Kashmir framework solution, hailed at the time as the most promising-ever dialogue between Pakistan and India since independence. The book also covers the complex Pakistan-US-Afghanistan-India quadrangular relationship. Kasuri talks frankly but also warmly about his Indian interlocutors, his three counterparts Pranab Mukherjee, Natwar Singh and Yashwant Sinha and the two prime ministers he worked with-Dr Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He also gives us a rare insight into the minds of the Pakistan Army, the contribution of the Foreign Office and his warm but complex relationship with President Musharraf. Blending analysis with choicest of anecdotes, Neither a Hawk nor a Dove gives us a comprehensive and revealing account
of Pakistan’s foreign policy and the political compulsions of those at the helm.
About the author
Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri served as
Pakistan’s foreign minister from 2002 to 2007. He was educated at the University of Punjab, Cambridge and Oxford and was called to the Bar from Gray’s Inn, London.