Foreign minister during 26/11, Qureshi back in Imran''s cabinet : The Tribune India

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Foreign minister during 26/11, Qureshi back in Imran''s cabinet

Shah Mehmood Qureshi. — Photo: @SMQureshiPTI/Twitter

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 18

It was late in the evening of November 26, 2008, as then Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi finished addressing the media after a long day of talks. India-Pakistan bilateral exchanges had become routine in the last four years and the particular press conference hardly had a headline to offer as it concluded. But within hours the state of relations would change and how as news poured in of Mumbai under siege.

Maximum city had been taken hostage by 10 terrorists of Lashkar-e-Toiba who attacked the cultural capital and killed 166 people, including foreign citizens, as bloodshed played out for the next three days.

Read: Imran Khan takes oath as 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan

To the media's surprise, Qureshi and the Pakistani delegation chose to not cut short their visit and the Pakistani foreign minister kept his date for an interaction with women journalists the next afternoon. While at the Indian Women's Press Corps, Qureshi received an angry phone call from Pranab Mukherjee and shifted to an adjoining secluded room for the conversation. Soon after the delegation flew back to Islamabad.

Today Qureshi is back in the limelight again as Foreign Minister of 'Naya Pakistan' under 'Kaptaan' Imran Khan. The former leader of Pakistan People's Party, considered a hawk on Kashmir, also has a legacy of failed talks and disastrous press conference with his counterpart S M Krishna when the Indian foreign minister visited Islamabad in 2010.

Amid speculations that another hawk, Shireen Mazari, could become defence minister, the portfolio has been handed over to Pervez Khattak, former chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Imran Khan's PTI managed a provincial win in 2013 elections. Mazari has been made Human Rights Minister with the possibility of Kashmir rhetoric high on her agenda.

Of Imran's 15 cabinet members and five advisers appointed today, several faces have the stamp of old Pakistan. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, who had served Musharraf as Information Minister and later Railways Minister, is now back with the railways portfolio. As Mosharraf Zaidi, a former adviser to Minstry of Foreign Affairs tweeted, "The Imran Khan cabinet is many things, but "change", it is not. Nine out of 15 ministers, and three out of five advisers were senior officials in the Gen Musharraf era (1999-2007).