Kashmir Quotes

“You wonder why, after all this, Hashim stays in India. ‘There’s no country freer than India and people don’t realise it,’ Hashim said. ‘You can pee anywhere you like and nothing will happen to you.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“The Kashmiri has a huge problem,’ Hashim said. ‘He doesn’t want to speak the truth, he doesn’t want to hear the truth.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“whenever a VIP visit to Kashmir was planned, like that of the prime minister, a hundred messages would fly around saying, ‘Usko ura dena, uski baja dena, safed ghar khatam ho jana chahiye.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“Shishon ka koi messiah nahin, kyon aas lagaye baithe ho.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“I don’t think Kashmiriyat is dead, nor is Sufism. If we don’t support the idea of Kashmiriyat or the Sufi tradition, it will fade out eventually, because radicalism is increasing. Sheikh Saheb was said to be a pure Musalman but he kept the Jamaat-e-Islami at bay, telling them they were not going to meddle in political life. After him, Farooq was the same way and in fact more aggressive about it, saying that they should close down all the Jamaat schools and that if Delhi funded the state, it would set up its own schools. But he did not get that much support. This is getting compromised. If you don’t do anything about Kashmir, then more and more Wahhabism will come in, as petro-dollars, etc., with their mosques growing and the lectures from their mosques increasing. A couple of years ago I was leaving Srinagar on a Friday and I was startled. Every road I passed had a loudspeaker blaring for the jumme ka namaaz. This never happened earlier. To my surprise, one of the breeding grounds of the fast-spreading radicalism is the Srinagar jail. A Kashmiri who was detained twice under the Public Security Act told me that the atmosphere of radicalism was so suffocating that you felt that you were in a jail inside a jail. So long as the likes of Masarat Alam and Qasim Fakhtoo are given free rein radicalism will grow. While Pakistan remains a factor in Kashmir, the real danger is that radicalism will end up as the lasting political legacy of Kashmir.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir the Vajpayee Years

“Then Vajpayee mentioned Gujarat. ‘Woh hamare se galti hui,’ he said. Perhaps he felt that was the reason he lost power; because he did not stop the 2002 riots.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir the Vajpayee Years

“In Brajesh’s case it was not a question of him briefing the prime minister because they knew each other so well. It was a question of sitting down and discussing a matter. So at the end of every day Brajesh would leave office at about 6:30 p.m.—he didn’t sit late, like a lot of people do—and he would go to RCR, where he would spend his time depending on how much time Vajpayee had. He probably wound up and reached home at 8:30 to 9:00 p.m. most evenings. You might wonder how the government functioned at all in this easygoing manner, but the truth is, in our country the government functions on its own and in Vajpayee’s time it functioned smoothly despite the fact that there was a coalition government. Vajpayee managed the coalition very well: he was good with people, he was good with words, and above all he had a sense of humour.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir the Vajpayee Years

“Firdous is a man who wanted peace, but it seemed as if no one wanted him.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir the Vajpayee Years

“Therefore internal debates and bickering continue and inevitably flow into the public domain, confounding the existing confusion. Rajiv Gandhi had once said that intelligence organisations could not be treated like the rest of the bureaucracy. It is time the government settled these issues once and for all—who better to do it than Prime Minister Modi.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“As a former militant commander who spent considerable time in Pakistan told me, ‘There are some very fine officers in the ISI, but no one of Doval’s intellect or”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“Irshad Malik, the Kashmiri militant now in London (who Firdous had wanted me to bring back to India when I was at R&AW), once said to me about PoK: ‘Uss taraf kya hai? Pakistan mein kya hai? Aap kyon fiqar karte hain? Inko jaane dijiye, paar dekhne dijiye, udhar kuchh bhi nahin hain.’ He said that Srinagar airport—and he obviously hadn’t been to Srinagar airport in at least twenty-four years—was better than any Pakistani airport. Hotels in Kashmir are as good as any in the world. ‘They have nothing there,’ he said. You should publicise these facts, he said to me: ‘Aapko toh film banani chahiye.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“The magistrate said, double jeopardy: no one can serve twice for the same crime. She had him released.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“Kathwari had headed Ethan Allen in 1985 before buying it out a few years later, and it turned him into a multi-millionaire. He became an influential person in the US, selling furniture to even the White House, and setting up the Kashmir Study Group (KSG), which comprised legislators and academics. According to the KSG website, current members include Teresita Schaffer and her husband Howard, both old South Asia hands; Robert Wirsig; Representative Gary Ackerman; and Dr Ainslie Embree. Kathwari had long taken the pro-independence line on Kashmir. Along the way he had also been sobered by the fact that two of his sons died as jihadis in Afghanistan.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

“This book was written in good faith, with diligence to the truth, and as a matter of public service. Some of what I write may be contested. But the whole purpose of the book is to arouse interest in Kashmir and learn from past mistakes. In any case, mine can’t be the last word on Kashmir, but I hope it will be the nearest to the truth.”
― A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years