Abdul basit high commissioner biography examples

The letter listed several reasons why Chaudhry was “not made for the delicate profession of diplomacy”, including the joint statement issued by India and Pakistan after a 2015 meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then premier Nawaz Sharif at Ufa, Russia, that referred to an agreement on the national security advisers of the two sides discussing “all issues connected to terrorism” but contained no reference to the Kashmir issue.

Basit, who opted for early retirement and was replaced in New Delhi by Sohail Mahmood, has been silent on the letter since it began circulating on social media on Monday. The influential Dawn newspaper quoted its sources in the Foreign Office as saying that the letter is genuine.

Basit and Chaudhry share some history – in December 2013, Basit was widely tipped to become the foreign secretary when the government chose Chaudhry for the post at the last minute. At the time, Basit was the envoy to Germany and had even returned to Pakistan in anticipation of being appointed to the post.

In February this year, the government picked Basit’s junior Tehmina Janjua as the country’s first woman foreign secretary even though Basit had again been tipped for the post. At the same time, Chaudhry was named Pakistan’s envoy to the US.

In the letter purportedly written from New Delhi on July 5 this year, Basit was reacting to a farewell letter sent by Chaudhry in March.

“The more I think the more I am convinced that you have been the worst Foreign Secretary ever. My concern is that you would also end up being the worst Pakistan Ambassador in Washington DC,” Basit wrote.

Basit wrote he could “cite many examples” to back up his contention that C

Bengaluru

Pakistan’s high commissioner Abdul Basit was in Bengaluru a couple of weeks ago, for an event of which I was also part.

I knew him from before, and asked him what he planned to do in South India (apparently he was only the first or second Pakistani high commissioner ever to be allowed to visit Bengaluru). He would see the city’s technology parks, he said, and also would go to Mysore, which is a two-hour drive from here. There he would visit Tipu Sultan’s palace in Srirangapatnam, just outside Mysore.

Mr Basit assumed that all Indians would feel proud of Tipu, but of course he was wrong as recent events have shown.Two people have died in Karnataka last week, over the marking of Tipu’s birthday. It has become, as so many things depressingly become in India these days, a Hindu-Muslim issue. In our part of the world, kings are seen as “good” (Ashoka, Akbar etc) and “bad” (Aurangzeb, Tipu Sultan). This is a marked characteristic of a society and a nation that sees history through emotion and not fact or reason. It is also the sign of a mostly illiterate and neo-literate people.

The boasts of Tipu and his generals are held against them to make it out as if he was forever on jihad against Hindus. This is bogus, but there is no point in trying to show that here. It is better to read books about him and be convinced, than to be told.

Here, of course, the problem is that very few books are written in India, unlike in the civilised world. We have no tradition of writing memoirs and keeping diaries. We have no interest in putting out new works on figures from the past.

And so there are no books being written by Indians on Tipu. One must consult 19th century works like Haidar Ali, Tipu Sultan and the Struggle of the Mussulman Powers of the South, by Lewis Bowring (a name familiar to Bangaloreans through the Bowring Club on St Mark’s Road) to learn something about this king.

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A scathing letter allegedly written by Abdul Basit, the former ambassador to India, addressed to Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry dated July 5, 2017 has surfaced online, in which the former lambasted the latter's tenure as foreign secretary apparently over a number of foreign policy gaffes made during Chaudhry's time in the office.

"The more I think the more I am convinced that you have been the worst Foreign Secretary ever," Basit wrote in the letter, a copy of which has been circulating on social media. Sources in the Foreign Office confirmed to DawnNews that the letter is authentic.

The former envoy to India, who was replaced after opting for an early retirement earlier this month by Sohail Mahmood, had written the acerbic letter in response to Chaudhry's farewell letter which he wrote after being appointed the ambassador to United States.

Basit also expressed concern in his letter that Chaudhry would end up being "the worst Pakistan Ambassador in Washington D.C".

The ex-ambassador then went on to list the reasons behind his critique of Chaudhry: while alleging that Chaudhry was not made for the "delicate profession of diplomacy", Basit cited two incidents as example — the joint statement issued after a meeting in the Russian city of Ufa between ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi in 2015, and Pakistan's failure to get re-elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC).

The Ufa joint statement had been criticised at the time for being the first prime minister-level joint statement in which Kashmir was not specifically mentioned. Later in 2015, Pakistan suffered diplomatic humiliation after losing in a bid for re-election to the UN HRC, forcing the Foreign Office to do some introspection and look for the causes.The defeat was shocking because it was the first time that Pakistan had lost a major election at the UN.

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