Agra Summit to the night of the missiles, a tip-off that stopped an attack to end of Art 370: An envoy to Pakistan gives an inside view

Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan

By Ajay Bisaria

Published by Aleph Book Company

Pages: 560

Price: Rs 999

Two days after the Narendra Modi government scrapped Article 370 that granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) on August 5, 2019, the then Indian envoy Ajay Bisaria was expelled from Islamabad. Bisaria served as India’s High Commissioner in Pakistan from 2017 to August 2019, which marked an especially turbulent period in the history of the two neighbours’ fraught ties.

In his book, Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan, which is part memoir and part history, Bisaria takes a deep dive into various aspects of the India-Pakistan relationship since Independence. Here are five takeaways from the book.

Indian envoy’s arrest in Pak in 1971

In November 1971, Bisaria writes, the then High Commissioner, Jai Kumar ‘Makhi’ Atal, thought his first call on General Yahya Khan went off rather well, despite the dire state of bilateral ties. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had asked Atal to get going in his new posting in Islamabad shortly after her world tour, to draw attention to the East Pakistan crisis.

Belonging to a princely family of Jaipur, Atal was also distantly related to the Nehru family. But soon, in December 1971, the war in East Pakistan had broken out in full scale.

On December 3, 1971, “not long after he reached home, a few men in civvies walked into his unguarded residence and asked Atal to step out”, Bisaria states. Atal was taken to a building, where his inquisitor growled: “India has attacked us, we are at war, you are an ordinary prisoner of war. What have you to say?” “Atal guessed his diplomatic immunity meant nothing