Durrani, Pakistan’s ‘General Shanti’

PEACE-BUILDING has never been for the faint-hearted, especially not when the two sides are India and Pakistan. Major Gen Mahmud Ali Durrani (retd) was a soldier of the Pakistani Army, but he wore his ‘peacenik’ badge with pride, and the accusation of being ‘pro-India’ with equanimity.

For many years after his retirement from the army, Durrani lived with the optimism that he could succeed in convincing military and political leaders, and even the aam janta of his country that there was no alternative to building bridges with the “humsaya dushman”. By the time he died of a heart attack last week at the age of 84, Durrani had come to terms with a statement oft-repeated by generations of people on either side of the border: “Peace won’t come in our lifetime”.

The situation had not seemed so hopeless just over 20 years earlier, around the turn of the century, when Durrani first dived into his role as peacemaker on a ‘track two’ channel, even though relations between the two countries gave no room for such optimism in those years either. The terrorism in Kashmir, the tit-for-tat nuclear tests, Kargil, the hijacking of IC814, the Jaish attack on Parliament, the failed Agra summit, all took place at the time, giving little hope that the two countries could normalise.

Still in service as the head of the Pakistan Ordnance Factories Board, Durrani was roped in to the track-two group called BALUSA, put together by the Indian-born Pakistani-American academic-diplomat Shirin Tahir-Kheli.

It seems astonishing in 2025, when India has staked its relationship with the US on its unwavering denial of President Donald Trump’s claimed role as the broker of the Operation Sindoor ceasefire, that back then, a mid-level State department official could seek and obtain the permission of prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Atal Bihari Vajpayee to explore normalisation of India-Pak ties through informal channels.

On the Indian side, former Air Force Chief, Air Chief Marshal SK Kaul (retd), was the opposite number to Durrani in BALUSA, the name reportedly derived from two villages in Pakistan's Punjab province. As this early track-two effort gained traction in the public space — senior politicians from the BJP and the Congress, high-profile bureaucrats and journalists from both countries were participants — the former soldier, who became a frequent flyer to Delhi, shot to prominence on both sides of the border. Not least because he also had the ear of Gen Pervez Musharraf, who became the military ruler of Pakistan in 1999.

Gen Musharraf would eventually appoint him Ambassador to the US in 2005. That was when a joint British-American effort had begun, aimed at building a working relationship between former Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf so that the Western world could ease its conscience and keep the General in check by forcing him to accept Bhutto as his regime’s democratic face. When Bhutto met Durrani at a dinner hosted by a Pakistani in Washington in 2007 weeks before her departure for Pakistan, she remarked that he should be serving the country’s security in a more substantial role. After she was assassinated later that year in Rawalpindi, and Asif Ali Zardari became President in 2008, he asked Durrani to be NSA, apparently “fulfilling a promise that Benazir had never made”.

It was in this capacity that Durrani came face to face with the reality checks of peacemaking with India. He would have certainly joined the dots between a civilian government taking charge in Pakistan, and the increasing frequency of violations by the Pakistani Army of the 2003 ceasefire. Soon after becoming NSA, he travelled to India to deliver the RK Mishra Memorial lecture at the Observer Research Foundation, where he declared that “my commitment to peace, for the good of the people of our two countries, is total”.

Durrani’s first real shock as ‘General Shanti’, as he was dubbed in India, was the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008 with the ISI’s fingerprints all over it. His visit to Delhi in October that year may have been his first in which the warmth of the past was replaced with steely vibes and some official plain-speaking. But Durrani believed he and his interlocutors in Delhi — India’s NSA MK Narayanan and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon — had managed to turn the tide.

He would tell Richard Boucher, then US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, that he was received in Delhi “as a friend with open arms” and that his meetings had gone “unusually well”. He would have been unprepared for the second shock, just weeks after his Delhi trip. In November 2008, Mumbai was held hostage for around 60 hours by 10 terrorists from Pakistan. Durrani was sacked in January 2009 as NSA for telling CNN-IBN that Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist to be caught alive, was indeed a Pakistani.

Writing in the Dawn newspaper, columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee said Durrani, like the good cavalry man he was, had “shot from the hip” and was being accused of “having ‘tarnished’ the national image, which is already in need of a good scrub and buff”. He also wrote that Zardari had apologised to Durrani for this treatment. For a country in denial about 26/11, that was Durrani’s last brush with officialdom. But it did not stop him from reiterating what he had said then at a seminar at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi in 2017 — perhaps his last public visit to India — though he was also quick to add that he was “110 per cent sure” that the ISI was behind the Mumbai attacks.

For many years, he continued to be involved in efforts to resuscitate the India-Pakistan relationship from the lows to which 26/11 had sunk it. In an interview to Pakistan’s Herald magazine in 2016, he had said: “As a Pakistani and as a realist, I say it is in our interest to have stability in our relations with India because all this tension has kept us behind the West. If we had spent the same money and thoughts we spend on India on development, on improving governance, on improving the justice system and on improving our political system, we may have been better off. That is why I joined this bandwagon of peace.”

As bilateral ties continued to deteriorate steadily over Pak-sponsored terror attacks and India escalated its responses — from Uri to Pulwama to Pahalgam — Durrani continued to keep in touch with a few friends in India, though his voice was heard less publicly. He seemed to know that his goal had receded. Durrani will go down in history as a soldier who tried his best for a peaceful resolution to one of the most difficult conflicts in the world, and was not afraid to do so.

Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist.