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Two assassinations & a conspiracy
The former R&AW chief A.K.Verma who died on Friday had worked the back channel with Gen. Zia’s emissary the ISI chief Hamid Gul to forge a deal on Siachen, and the Line of Control that runs through Kashmir, after the Pakistan President reached out to Rajiv Gandhi, many believe during a surprise visit by Zia to Jaipur in 1987. Verma believed their assassinations were connected.
If V.P.Singh had not been persuaded, when he became prime minister in December 1989, into believing, wrongly, that Anand Kumar Verma, the Research & Analysis Wing chief, he inherited from Rajiv Gandhi, was a Pakistan hawk and could not be trusted on Pakistan, the two sub-continental rivals would have laid not one, but two long standing disputes to rest - Siachen and Jammu and Kashmir. In other words, the Kashmir issue that has defied solution for over 67 years, and now, more than ever, threatens to drive Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif apart, would have been laid to rest, 27 years ago. Pakistan, could never repudiate a treaty forged by a military leader. Mr. A.K. Verma, who brokered a secret peace deal with Pakistan's all powerful army chief President Zia ul Haq's emissary, died on Friday, his lasting contribution to sealing both Siachen and the Line of Control, are secrets he would have taken to the grave.
Except, in a remarkably candid interview with this newspaper, the man who could have changed history, but wasn't allowed to, spoke in detail about the secret back channel talks that he held with Pakistan's top spook Hamid Gul in the Jordanian capital and in Geneva, that had the blessings of Zia, the unlikeliest of peacemakers. "Its simple, Gen. Zia, through a secret back channel had agreed to do a backroom deal with Rajiv Gandhi, which would have re-ordered the relationship that the Pakistan government had with India. We would have gone from sworn enemies to uneasy allies. We would have had the demilitarization
of Siachen, and the LoC converted to an International Boundary," Mr. Verma told this newspaper some months ago.
Equally explosive is his claim that the Pakistan president, who arrived - uninvited - to a cricket match in Jaipur in February 1987, and held closed door talks with the Indian prime minister, was assassinated by the Pakistan establishment for
reaching out to Rajiv Gandhi.
If that wasn't a shocker, here's the biggest one of all - Verma insisted that there was a link between the assassinations of the Pakistan President and the Indian
leader, who was blown up by a suicide bomber at an election rally on May 21, 1991, in polls that he was poised to sweep. On Friday September 2, Verma, the last of the four men who were in the loop over the Zia-Rajiv Pact, breathed his last. This is his untold story.
Pakistan’s President Zia ul Haq death in that air crash was an unlikely topic of conversation at an election rally in Tamil Nadu 25 years ago. But in the bullet-proof white Ambassador en route to the election rally in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991, knowing that I had recently interviewed two Pakistani leaders, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and former premier Benazir Bhutto, Rajiv Gandhi would bring up the mystery death of the Pakistani dictator Zia–ul-Haq in the unexplained crash at Bahawalpur in August 1988.
Former R&AW cheif AK Verma
While I proferred my view when asked about what one-time Zia protégé, Nawaz Sharif, was like as a person and as a leader, this is what he said then: “have you noticed how every time any South Asian leader of import rises to a position of power or is about to achieve something for himself or his country, he is cut down, attacked, killed….look at Mrs. Gandhi (his mother Indira), Sheikh Mujib, look at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at Zia ul Haq, Bandaranaike …”. Within minutes of that conversation, Rajiv Gandhi himself would be dead, felled by a suicide bomber.
***
Mr A.K.Verma, former Secretary, of India’s intelligence agency, Research & Analysis Wing, who died in Delhi yesterday believed Zia’s death had a direct link to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination that would take place, three years later.
He believes that the Pakistan Army – or the counter-intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI – engineered the air crash that killed the Pakistan President Zia ul Haq, and says that poison gas being introduced into the air conditioning ducts into the closed off VIP seating area may have been the modus operandi. Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes may not have been far off the mark, after all. “And there’s a very good reason for it,” said the former spook several months ago, from his sun-lit home in Delhi, as India marks the 25th anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi’s death this year.
Verma’s links with his Pakistani counterparts and the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto were whispered about, storied, legendary. He knew Pakistan better than most. His theory on the links between the two assassinations as he connects the dots may seem a stretch, but given the murky, clandestine methods that marked ISI ops, it certainly cannot be dismissed.
Gen. Zia’s strategy of sending Talibs, hundreds of students from Pakistan’s madrassas to fight alongside the disorderly mujahideen, armed with US weaponry, had helped to secure the western flank on the war against the Soviets and boosted his credentials as a Washington favourite. Together with his close friend, the former ISI chief and Pakistan’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, they had carried on where Pakistan’s first military ruler Gen.Ayub Khan had left off, cementing Pakistan and its army, as the pre-eminent power in the country.
On board Pak One, on that fateful afternoon, apart from Gen Akhtar were two other men who worked closely with President Zia – the U.S. Ambassador Arnold L. Raphel and Gen. Herbert Wassom, the head of U.S. Military mission to Pakistan.
Pakistan President Zia-ul-Haq plane crash
The presence of the two high-profile Americans on the flight, who kept the U.S.-Pakistan-Afghanistan policy on track, would dampen speculation that the CIA had a hand in the elimination of the Pakistani leader, although conspiracy theorists would say that Ambassador Raphel had gone over to the Zia camp and was profiting from arms deals, and therefore had to go too.
There are many, both in the Indian army and security experts who insist to this day – as Rajiv Gandhi implied that fateful night - that Zia had been cut down because he had become too powerful and was no longer amenable to Washington’s diktat.
Mr. Verma laughed out of court, the story of US involvement in Zia’s assassination. “The U.S did not have the wherewithal, or the kind of access to the aircraft sitting in a hangar in Bahawalpur airbase that the Pakistani army did. Only the Pakistanis had access to Pak One and would have got near enough to plant the gas in the plane.”
Sources close to Gen. Zia’s family had privately let it be known– once the shock wore off - that they too had concluded that the Pakistani leader’s death had to be an inside job, and that the general who succeeded him, who chose not to fly with him on the same aircraft, may have even been in on the plot to remove Gen. Zia. The President would certainly not have been amenable to stepping down; he was not the kind of man who would go gently into the night.
But why would the Pakistan establishment eliminate their own man, a general, their own chief of staff, and what possible connection could a Zia-ul- Haq have to Rajiv Gandhi and India, I ask. And Mr Verma’s bombshell? “Its simple, Gen. Zia, through a secret back channel had agreed to do a backroom deal with Rajiv Gandhi, which would have re-ordered the relationship that the Pakistan government had with India. We would have gone from sworn enemies to uneasy allies. We would have had the demilitarization of Siachen, and the LoC converted to an International Boundary.”
The agreement that Rajiv and Zia had arrived at on Kashmir and Siachen, where the Indian leader is reported to have said - “we had the maps and everything, ready to sign,” was the trigger. Take away India-Pakistan rivalry on Kashmir, and the Pakistan Army’s sole raison d’etre would be at an end.
And running that back channel was Mr Verma himself, who admits for the first time that it was he – and not the Indian “intelligence chiefs” as he wrote in a tribute to Lt Gen Hamid Gul, when the Pakistani spook died, August 2015 – who had quietly met with the then ISI chief aka the ‘Father of the Taliban.”
No details of that meeting was ever shared with anyone in the public domain until last August. That first, preliminary round was conducted in such secrecy that neither their respective foreign ministries nor the next rung of counter-intelligence knew. The hush-hush exchange in April 1988 in the Jordanian capital Amman, has never been made public. Neither was the meeting that followed in Geneva in Switzerland where the broad agreement was reached on Siachen. When I ask why it was not publicised, Mr Verma had shrugged and said, “because I have never talked about it.”
Rajiv Gandhi assassination
Reports that Princess Sarvath, the Pakistan born wife of the Jordanian Prince Hassan had been involved in initiating the first round of the back channel between India and Pakistan had always been the subject of palace gossip, but Mr Verma makes no mention of her when he recounts this insider’s account of the story. Instead, he says that it was Gen Zia, - surely, the unlikeliest of peacemakers in Pakistan’s history - who went out on a limb and asked Prince Hassan to speak to Rajiv Gandhi directly and initiate a meeting between the two sides.
He recalls that the first meeting was held in one of Jordan’s plush hotels and that Gen. Hamid Gul laid out President Zia’s concerns over the rising defence budget which, at 48% was making Pakistan bleed, leaving it unable to take care of the needs of its poor.
The Pakistani general asked Mr Verma what they could do “together” to bring India-Pakistan relations back on an even keel, and take some of the pressure off Zia ul Haq, and whether they could start with the de-militarisation of Siachen.
“I laid out our views on the Siachen standoff saying that Pakistan should give us their plan on Siachen, which I could take back to the prime minister,” Mr Verma says.
Clearly, there was a lot more than the GDP on Gen Zia’s mind. There were strategic imperatives that were forcing the Pakistani leader’s rethink. It stemmed, from Gen. Zia’s concerns over the domestic fall-out of the Afghan operations. Both Gen. Zia and Gen. Akhter were on the same page on what had been achieved thus far in Afghanistan, but they were swiftly coming to the realization that they could be losing control of the war on their western border.
In the first sign of unrest, an arms and ammunition dump on the outskirts of the capital, Islamabad had been blown up that April, destroying arms stored away for the Afghan war effort. The two generals probably felt that now was as good time as any to free troops from its eastern border by buying peace with India.
There was one other consideration. Despite the huge amount of arms and aid pouring in from the U.S., General K. Sundarji’s Operation Brasstacks, as ill-conceived as it was, had rattled Rawalpindi. A brainchild of the hot-headed, some would say even impractical but brilliant Indian Chief of Army Staff, General K. Sundarji, Operation Brasstacks saw the ‘thinking man’s General mobilize thousands of troops, men and material to India’s border with Pakistan, demonstrating India’s continuing ability to dominate the region.
There are two views on this. One is that, as Islamabad and the world believed, Operation Brasstacks was Rajiv Gandhi’s hubris, (just as Operation Bluestar was Indira Gandhi’s.). The other story was that Gen Sundarji had not consulted Rajiv Gandhi at all, and that the prime minister of India was privy only to an Operation Brasstacks of maps and charts on the wall. He knew nothing of the entire eastern, western and northern and southern command, men and resources being mobilized to move towards the Pakistan border under the supervision of GOC Western Command Gen. Hoon.
It wasn’t until Gen Hoon while striking up a conversation with the prime minister told a horrified Rajiv Gandhi, quite inadvertently and under the mistaken belief that the prime minister was already in the loop, that the mobilization was halted.
By then, India and Pakistan, during the longest stretch of peacetime in their shared, embattled histories, had moved for the first time in 16 years, to the brink of war.
Within weeks, their two intelligence chiefs would be exploring the means of taking the hostility down a couple of notches. Gen. Zia’s appearance, without warning at a cricket match in Jaipur in March 1987 - at the invitation of the BCCI and not the Rajiv Gandhi government - the so called ‘cricket for peace’ trip had the Pakistan newspapers all agog, reporting a day later that Zia had threatened Rajiv when they met face to face as the Pakistani leader was saying goodbye.
The news was based on a conversation that an aide, standing right next to the two leaders, claimed to have overheard. The aide said that Zia’s threats were delivered in his usual fashion, while smiling through his teeth! While presenting Zia as the tough-talking no-nonsense general was part of the Pakistan military’s myth-building, it may have also been to cover up the real reasons behind Zia’s unexpected India foray.
Operation Brasstacks which began in November ‘86 had just concluded that very month, March 1987. Zia was not amused. By coming to see Rajiv Gandhi, uninvited, it wasn’t clear whether he was making a conciliatory gesture while delivering a tough message as reports on the event made it out to be or whether it was quite the reverse.
Mr Verma says that in the meetings that he had with Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, he was told categorically that Gen Zia had arrived at the plan on withdrawing troops from Siachen, independently of the powerful corps commanders under him. Was this what Zia shared with Rajiv? Nobody is quite sure. But Operation Meghdoot in 1984, when India launched a pre-emptive move against a Pakistan takeover of the Siachen Glacier had angered – and embarrassed - the Pakistan army which had been caught napping as Indian troops took position all along the 110-km-long Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL), and occupied the heights on the Saltoro Ridge, west of the Siachen Glacier, beyond the last demarcated Point NJ 9842.
“Lt. Gen Gul told me that Gen Zia would withdraw Pakistan’s troops from Siachen to a point acceptable to India, they would accept the Line of Control as the International Boundary. He brought maps. I wrote the bullet points and gave it to Ronan Sen, the adviser to Rajiv Gandhi, and there, we were, convinced that the Nobel Peace prize for that year, 1988 would be jointly awarded to Rajiv Gandhi and Zia-ul-Haq.”
Former Pakistan ISI chief Hamid Gul
The agreement envisaged not just the withdrawal of Pakistani forces to the west of the Saltoro Range, giving up claims to territory from NJ9842 to the Karakoram pass, the Line of Control north from NJ9842 till the Chinese border, but Pakistan and India reducing troop strength by two divisions. Gen. Hamid Gul sent a Pakistan GHQ Survey of Pakistan map that showed the new demarcations. Rajiv Gandhi agreed to the Pakistan proposals. But as Mr Verma says, “Overnight, Zia was killed, they had to kill him, he had to be killed.”
For President Zia’s plane to blow up in mid-air on the very day that the defence secretaries were set to meet, and where India would have tabled the Siachen demilitarization proposal that neither side knew had already been agreed to by their political masters, could have been no accident.
Gen. Hamid Gul was almost immediately removed from the post of Director General of ISI. As was the Pakistan High Commissioner Niaz Naik, who died mysteriously therafter.
And at a subsequent meeting when, the Indian side tried to present the Pakistani side with the same Verma-Gul paper, Pakistani officials from their Foreign Office said they had never heard of it, let alone seen or discussed the proposals.
“They just tore it up. There was no proof that we had held talks, there was nothing on paper, no agreement, and they simply pretended – even if they knew – that none of it had even happened,” Verma tells me.
In the year that followed, Rajiv would have befriended the Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, where a discussion on Siachen and other contentious issues would have followed similar lines. Verma is convinced that the Pakistan Army could not have gotten away with another assassination, a repeat of what happened with Zia, but took a more politic route in forcing Benazir’s exit. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg put together a group of parties, the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (IJI) to ensure Benazir lost the election in 1990, barely two years after she had swept the polls, rather than go down the beaten path. There were no exploding mangoes here!
Whether the army and the ISI, which by then had placed their protégés in key posts in Colombo, had begun to reach out to militant groups like the LTTE to eliminate Rajiv Gandhi is a whole new question. The Congress leader’s projected return to power was as much a threat to the Pakistan Army and the ISI as it was to the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government, under Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Indeed, the threat to Rajiv Gandhi’s person could have originated from any one of these quarters. And even further afield.
(Neena Gopal is the author of The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi)
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/op-ed/040916/two-assassinations-a-conspiracy.html
The former R&AW chief A.K.Verma who died on Friday had worked the back channel with Gen. Zia’s emissary the ISI chief Hamid Gul to forge a deal on Siachen, and the Line of Control that runs through Kashmir, after the Pakistan President reached out to Rajiv Gandhi, many believe during a surprise visit by Zia to Jaipur in 1987. Verma believed their assassinations were connected.
If V.P.Singh had not been persuaded, when he became prime minister in December 1989, into believing, wrongly, that Anand Kumar Verma, the Research & Analysis Wing chief, he inherited from Rajiv Gandhi, was a Pakistan hawk and could not be trusted on Pakistan, the two sub-continental rivals would have laid not one, but two long standing disputes to rest - Siachen and Jammu and Kashmir. In other words, the Kashmir issue that has defied solution for over 67 years, and now, more than ever, threatens to drive Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif apart, would have been laid to rest, 27 years ago. Pakistan, could never repudiate a treaty forged by a military leader. Mr. A.K. Verma, who brokered a secret peace deal with Pakistan's all powerful army chief President Zia ul Haq's emissary, died on Friday, his lasting contribution to sealing both Siachen and the Line of Control, are secrets he would have taken to the grave.
Except, in a remarkably candid interview with this newspaper, the man who could have changed history, but wasn't allowed to, spoke in detail about the secret back channel talks that he held with Pakistan's top spook Hamid Gul in the Jordanian capital and in Geneva, that had the blessings of Zia, the unlikeliest of peacemakers. "Its simple, Gen. Zia, through a secret back channel had agreed to do a backroom deal with Rajiv Gandhi, which would have re-ordered the relationship that the Pakistan government had with India. We would have gone from sworn enemies to uneasy allies. We would have had the demilitarization
of Siachen, and the LoC converted to an International Boundary," Mr. Verma told this newspaper some months ago.
Equally explosive is his claim that the Pakistan president, who arrived - uninvited - to a cricket match in Jaipur in February 1987, and held closed door talks with the Indian prime minister, was assassinated by the Pakistan establishment for
reaching out to Rajiv Gandhi.
If that wasn't a shocker, here's the biggest one of all - Verma insisted that there was a link between the assassinations of the Pakistan President and the Indian
leader, who was blown up by a suicide bomber at an election rally on May 21, 1991, in polls that he was poised to sweep. On Friday September 2, Verma, the last of the four men who were in the loop over the Zia-Rajiv Pact, breathed his last. This is his untold story.
Pakistan’s President Zia ul Haq death in that air crash was an unlikely topic of conversation at an election rally in Tamil Nadu 25 years ago. But in the bullet-proof white Ambassador en route to the election rally in Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991, knowing that I had recently interviewed two Pakistani leaders, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and former premier Benazir Bhutto, Rajiv Gandhi would bring up the mystery death of the Pakistani dictator Zia–ul-Haq in the unexplained crash at Bahawalpur in August 1988.
While I proferred my view when asked about what one-time Zia protégé, Nawaz Sharif, was like as a person and as a leader, this is what he said then: “have you noticed how every time any South Asian leader of import rises to a position of power or is about to achieve something for himself or his country, he is cut down, attacked, killed….look at Mrs. Gandhi (his mother Indira), Sheikh Mujib, look at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at Zia ul Haq, Bandaranaike …”. Within minutes of that conversation, Rajiv Gandhi himself would be dead, felled by a suicide bomber.
***
Mr A.K.Verma, former Secretary, of India’s intelligence agency, Research & Analysis Wing, who died in Delhi yesterday believed Zia’s death had a direct link to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination that would take place, three years later.
He believes that the Pakistan Army – or the counter-intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI – engineered the air crash that killed the Pakistan President Zia ul Haq, and says that poison gas being introduced into the air conditioning ducts into the closed off VIP seating area may have been the modus operandi. Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes may not have been far off the mark, after all. “And there’s a very good reason for it,” said the former spook several months ago, from his sun-lit home in Delhi, as India marks the 25th anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi’s death this year.
Verma’s links with his Pakistani counterparts and the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto were whispered about, storied, legendary. He knew Pakistan better than most. His theory on the links between the two assassinations as he connects the dots may seem a stretch, but given the murky, clandestine methods that marked ISI ops, it certainly cannot be dismissed.
Gen. Zia’s strategy of sending Talibs, hundreds of students from Pakistan’s madrassas to fight alongside the disorderly mujahideen, armed with US weaponry, had helped to secure the western flank on the war against the Soviets and boosted his credentials as a Washington favourite. Together with his close friend, the former ISI chief and Pakistan’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, they had carried on where Pakistan’s first military ruler Gen.Ayub Khan had left off, cementing Pakistan and its army, as the pre-eminent power in the country.
On board Pak One, on that fateful afternoon, apart from Gen Akhtar were two other men who worked closely with President Zia – the U.S. Ambassador Arnold L. Raphel and Gen. Herbert Wassom, the head of U.S. Military mission to Pakistan.
The presence of the two high-profile Americans on the flight, who kept the U.S.-Pakistan-Afghanistan policy on track, would dampen speculation that the CIA had a hand in the elimination of the Pakistani leader, although conspiracy theorists would say that Ambassador Raphel had gone over to the Zia camp and was profiting from arms deals, and therefore had to go too.
There are many, both in the Indian army and security experts who insist to this day – as Rajiv Gandhi implied that fateful night - that Zia had been cut down because he had become too powerful and was no longer amenable to Washington’s diktat.
Mr. Verma laughed out of court, the story of US involvement in Zia’s assassination. “The U.S did not have the wherewithal, or the kind of access to the aircraft sitting in a hangar in Bahawalpur airbase that the Pakistani army did. Only the Pakistanis had access to Pak One and would have got near enough to plant the gas in the plane.”
Sources close to Gen. Zia’s family had privately let it be known– once the shock wore off - that they too had concluded that the Pakistani leader’s death had to be an inside job, and that the general who succeeded him, who chose not to fly with him on the same aircraft, may have even been in on the plot to remove Gen. Zia. The President would certainly not have been amenable to stepping down; he was not the kind of man who would go gently into the night.
But why would the Pakistan establishment eliminate their own man, a general, their own chief of staff, and what possible connection could a Zia-ul- Haq have to Rajiv Gandhi and India, I ask. And Mr Verma’s bombshell? “Its simple, Gen. Zia, through a secret back channel had agreed to do a backroom deal with Rajiv Gandhi, which would have re-ordered the relationship that the Pakistan government had with India. We would have gone from sworn enemies to uneasy allies. We would have had the demilitarization of Siachen, and the LoC converted to an International Boundary.”
The agreement that Rajiv and Zia had arrived at on Kashmir and Siachen, where the Indian leader is reported to have said - “we had the maps and everything, ready to sign,” was the trigger. Take away India-Pakistan rivalry on Kashmir, and the Pakistan Army’s sole raison d’etre would be at an end.
And running that back channel was Mr Verma himself, who admits for the first time that it was he – and not the Indian “intelligence chiefs” as he wrote in a tribute to Lt Gen Hamid Gul, when the Pakistani spook died, August 2015 – who had quietly met with the then ISI chief aka the ‘Father of the Taliban.”
No details of that meeting was ever shared with anyone in the public domain until last August. That first, preliminary round was conducted in such secrecy that neither their respective foreign ministries nor the next rung of counter-intelligence knew. The hush-hush exchange in April 1988 in the Jordanian capital Amman, has never been made public. Neither was the meeting that followed in Geneva in Switzerland where the broad agreement was reached on Siachen. When I ask why it was not publicised, Mr Verma had shrugged and said, “because I have never talked about it.”
Reports that Princess Sarvath, the Pakistan born wife of the Jordanian Prince Hassan had been involved in initiating the first round of the back channel between India and Pakistan had always been the subject of palace gossip, but Mr Verma makes no mention of her when he recounts this insider’s account of the story. Instead, he says that it was Gen Zia, - surely, the unlikeliest of peacemakers in Pakistan’s history - who went out on a limb and asked Prince Hassan to speak to Rajiv Gandhi directly and initiate a meeting between the two sides.
He recalls that the first meeting was held in one of Jordan’s plush hotels and that Gen. Hamid Gul laid out President Zia’s concerns over the rising defence budget which, at 48% was making Pakistan bleed, leaving it unable to take care of the needs of its poor.
The Pakistani general asked Mr Verma what they could do “together” to bring India-Pakistan relations back on an even keel, and take some of the pressure off Zia ul Haq, and whether they could start with the de-militarisation of Siachen.
“I laid out our views on the Siachen standoff saying that Pakistan should give us their plan on Siachen, which I could take back to the prime minister,” Mr Verma says.
Clearly, there was a lot more than the GDP on Gen Zia’s mind. There were strategic imperatives that were forcing the Pakistani leader’s rethink. It stemmed, from Gen. Zia’s concerns over the domestic fall-out of the Afghan operations. Both Gen. Zia and Gen. Akhter were on the same page on what had been achieved thus far in Afghanistan, but they were swiftly coming to the realization that they could be losing control of the war on their western border.
In the first sign of unrest, an arms and ammunition dump on the outskirts of the capital, Islamabad had been blown up that April, destroying arms stored away for the Afghan war effort. The two generals probably felt that now was as good time as any to free troops from its eastern border by buying peace with India.
There was one other consideration. Despite the huge amount of arms and aid pouring in from the U.S., General K. Sundarji’s Operation Brasstacks, as ill-conceived as it was, had rattled Rawalpindi. A brainchild of the hot-headed, some would say even impractical but brilliant Indian Chief of Army Staff, General K. Sundarji, Operation Brasstacks saw the ‘thinking man’s General mobilize thousands of troops, men and material to India’s border with Pakistan, demonstrating India’s continuing ability to dominate the region.
There are two views on this. One is that, as Islamabad and the world believed, Operation Brasstacks was Rajiv Gandhi’s hubris, (just as Operation Bluestar was Indira Gandhi’s.). The other story was that Gen Sundarji had not consulted Rajiv Gandhi at all, and that the prime minister of India was privy only to an Operation Brasstacks of maps and charts on the wall. He knew nothing of the entire eastern, western and northern and southern command, men and resources being mobilized to move towards the Pakistan border under the supervision of GOC Western Command Gen. Hoon.
It wasn’t until Gen Hoon while striking up a conversation with the prime minister told a horrified Rajiv Gandhi, quite inadvertently and under the mistaken belief that the prime minister was already in the loop, that the mobilization was halted.
By then, India and Pakistan, during the longest stretch of peacetime in their shared, embattled histories, had moved for the first time in 16 years, to the brink of war.
Within weeks, their two intelligence chiefs would be exploring the means of taking the hostility down a couple of notches. Gen. Zia’s appearance, without warning at a cricket match in Jaipur in March 1987 - at the invitation of the BCCI and not the Rajiv Gandhi government - the so called ‘cricket for peace’ trip had the Pakistan newspapers all agog, reporting a day later that Zia had threatened Rajiv when they met face to face as the Pakistani leader was saying goodbye.
The news was based on a conversation that an aide, standing right next to the two leaders, claimed to have overheard. The aide said that Zia’s threats were delivered in his usual fashion, while smiling through his teeth! While presenting Zia as the tough-talking no-nonsense general was part of the Pakistan military’s myth-building, it may have also been to cover up the real reasons behind Zia’s unexpected India foray.
Operation Brasstacks which began in November ‘86 had just concluded that very month, March 1987. Zia was not amused. By coming to see Rajiv Gandhi, uninvited, it wasn’t clear whether he was making a conciliatory gesture while delivering a tough message as reports on the event made it out to be or whether it was quite the reverse.
Mr Verma says that in the meetings that he had with Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, he was told categorically that Gen Zia had arrived at the plan on withdrawing troops from Siachen, independently of the powerful corps commanders under him. Was this what Zia shared with Rajiv? Nobody is quite sure. But Operation Meghdoot in 1984, when India launched a pre-emptive move against a Pakistan takeover of the Siachen Glacier had angered – and embarrassed - the Pakistan army which had been caught napping as Indian troops took position all along the 110-km-long Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL), and occupied the heights on the Saltoro Ridge, west of the Siachen Glacier, beyond the last demarcated Point NJ 9842.
“Lt. Gen Gul told me that Gen Zia would withdraw Pakistan’s troops from Siachen to a point acceptable to India, they would accept the Line of Control as the International Boundary. He brought maps. I wrote the bullet points and gave it to Ronan Sen, the adviser to Rajiv Gandhi, and there, we were, convinced that the Nobel Peace prize for that year, 1988 would be jointly awarded to Rajiv Gandhi and Zia-ul-Haq.”
The agreement envisaged not just the withdrawal of Pakistani forces to the west of the Saltoro Range, giving up claims to territory from NJ9842 to the Karakoram pass, the Line of Control north from NJ9842 till the Chinese border, but Pakistan and India reducing troop strength by two divisions. Gen. Hamid Gul sent a Pakistan GHQ Survey of Pakistan map that showed the new demarcations. Rajiv Gandhi agreed to the Pakistan proposals. But as Mr Verma says, “Overnight, Zia was killed, they had to kill him, he had to be killed.”
For President Zia’s plane to blow up in mid-air on the very day that the defence secretaries were set to meet, and where India would have tabled the Siachen demilitarization proposal that neither side knew had already been agreed to by their political masters, could have been no accident.
Gen. Hamid Gul was almost immediately removed from the post of Director General of ISI. As was the Pakistan High Commissioner Niaz Naik, who died mysteriously therafter.
And at a subsequent meeting when, the Indian side tried to present the Pakistani side with the same Verma-Gul paper, Pakistani officials from their Foreign Office said they had never heard of it, let alone seen or discussed the proposals.
“They just tore it up. There was no proof that we had held talks, there was nothing on paper, no agreement, and they simply pretended – even if they knew – that none of it had even happened,” Verma tells me.
In the year that followed, Rajiv would have befriended the Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, where a discussion on Siachen and other contentious issues would have followed similar lines. Verma is convinced that the Pakistan Army could not have gotten away with another assassination, a repeat of what happened with Zia, but took a more politic route in forcing Benazir’s exit. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg put together a group of parties, the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (IJI) to ensure Benazir lost the election in 1990, barely two years after she had swept the polls, rather than go down the beaten path. There were no exploding mangoes here!
Whether the army and the ISI, which by then had placed their protégés in key posts in Colombo, had begun to reach out to militant groups like the LTTE to eliminate Rajiv Gandhi is a whole new question. The Congress leader’s projected return to power was as much a threat to the Pakistan Army and the ISI as it was to the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government, under Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Indeed, the threat to Rajiv Gandhi’s person could have originated from any one of these quarters. And even further afield.
(Neena Gopal is the author of The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi)
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/op-ed/040916/two-assassinations-a-conspiracy.html
