Ajit Doval asks Pakistan to stop terror export as prerequisite to dialogue

National security advisor Ajit Doval has conveyed to his Pakistani counterpart Gen (Retd) Nasir Janjua that Islamabad will have to stop exporting terror to India as a precursor to any substantive bilateral dialogue.

Updated on: Oct 11, 2016, 15:11:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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National security advisor Ajit Doval has conveyed to his Pakistani counterpart Gen (Retd) Nasir Janjua that Islamabad will have to stop exporting terror to India as a precursor to any substantive bilateral dialogue. Doval conveyed this to Janjua over telephone on October 1 when he called the Pakistan NSA to inform him of the September 29 cross-LoC surgical strike.

A soldier takes position near the Line of Control in Nowshera sector on Monday. (Nitin Kanotra/HT Photo)

Top government sources told Hindustan Times that Doval did not take Janjua’s calls after the September 18 Uri terrorist strikes left 21 Indian soldiers dead as the Pakistan NSA had been unable to deliver on what he promised after the January 2 Pathankot airbase attack. Doval had called up Janjua late on January 1 to inform him about the location of terrorists near the Pathankot airbase. He had also shared the mobile number of their Sialkot based handler Kashif Jaan, a Jaish-e-Mohammed operative. Janjua failed to deliver on Pathankot despite his word that he would be able to stop the attack even if it meant calling up Jaish chief Masood Azhar.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had decided to institutionalise a dialogue between two NSAs during their January 5, 2016 telephone conversation after the Pathankot attack. The two NSAs have been in touch with each other since, barring the 12-day period after the Uri attack. The first admission of the Doval-Janjua dialogue was made in public by Sharif’s octogenarian foreign policy advisor Sartaj Aziz, who is considered close to Rawalpindi GHQ.

Read: Border outposts in India on alert after Pak red flags hostility

During the October 1 conversation, Doval made it known to Janjua that there is no point of talking through the institutionalised channels if Pakistan chooses to remain in denial about its territory being used by jihadists to target India and if no action is taken against proscribed groups despite evidence being handed over to Islamabad.

Doval apparently reminded Janjua that India had allowed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) access to the Pathankot airbase and shared details of the investigation with Islamabad but there has been no closure from Pakistan side. He also read out the full statement issued by Indian DGMO Lt Gen Ranbir Singh on the surgical strike.

Read: Pakistan a ‘fly-by-night operator’ misusing UN forum, says India

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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