To many Pakistanis Sudheendra Kulkarni is simply the man whose face was blackened in Mumbai by the hoodlums of the Shiv Sena. The goons of the Maharashtra-based extremist party did to the politician-turned-social activist in October 2015 what even his supporters couldn’t: they made him a household name in India. Just because Kulkarni had, despite serious threats, decided to go ahead with the launch of former Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri’s book Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove. Not to be cowed down, Kulkarni displayed his smeared face at a hurriedly-arranged press conference and the same evening went ahead with the launch of the publication under the banner of the prestigious think-tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Mumbai, of which he happens to be the chairman.

Kulkarni was in Pakistan this month for the launch of his latest book August Voices at the Karachi Literature Festival in Karachi. It was only natural for me to meet up with him at a common friend’s house. As one who has known him since the early 1980s, and was with him on many an occasion, I found that people were most interested in meeting him when I introduced him as the leading character in the ink-smearing drama.

Born in 1957 in Akkol, a village in Belgaum district of Karnataka, he moved to Bombay in 1975 to study at the Indian Institute of Technology. But on completing his studies, Kulkarni realised he wasn’t cut out to practise the subject he had studied — civil engineering. He moved into journalism and was on the staff of Sunday Observer when I had first met him. He sounded like a hardened leftist then but a few years later he had swerved to another extreme by joining the BJP.

Sudheendra Kulkarni went from being a leftist to joining the BJP to being vilified for promoting amity between India and Pakistan. He explains why.

As we sit for dinner, I watch him enjoying the salads (he is a vegetarian) and decide to ask him to explain the transformation, which was also reflected in the turnaround of the policy of Blitz, the weekly he used to edit.

“In our days, students were idealists and they were susceptible to tilting towards the left,” says Kulkarni. “So, was I. It was only when I went to the USSR that I realised there was no personal freedom in the country I had admired. Secondly, it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which set off a chain of devastating events in our part of the world that disgusted me.”

A sip of fruit juice later, Kulkarni continues: “Americans jumped into the cauldron, the Taliban were created, terrorism raised its ugly head and has now spread all over. Your country has since then been plagued by the Afghan refugees. The list of crises is too long to be repeated.”

So, why then the extreme right, the BJP, I persist.

He smiles. “I knew this comment was in the offing. Look, the BJP that I joined is not the BJP of Mr Modi. It was an off-shoot of the Janata Party. I was most impressed by Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He was a fair-minded politician. He was not a communalist. He genuinely wanted peaceful and good-neighbourly relations with Pakistan. He made me his trusted aide in the Prime Minister’s Office, a post I held for six years, from 1998 to 2004.”

Kulkarni has dedicated his latest book to three people – Mr Vajpayee, Mr Advani and Mr Manmohan Singh. How come Advani, I ask him? He was behind the demolition of Babri Masjid, wasn’t he?

“That’s not correct, he wasn’t,” Kulkarni shoots back. “In fact, when the mosque in Ayodhya was demolished, Advani-ji publicly declared that it was the saddest day of his life.”

I ask him if he put the words that Mr Jinnah was a secular person in Advani’s mouth when he was with him as his speech-writer on his visit to Pakistan in 2005. The words had caused a furore in India.

“I did write the speech, but the viewpoint was his,” comes the reply. “And what I wrote was what I have always believed in firmly. The new custodians of BJP fell out with Advani-ji and I resigned from the party because by then the RSS had acquired a stranglehold on the party. I was never with the RSS. BJP was never with the RSS. BJP stopped its outreach to Indian Muslims, while I believe that Hindu-Muslim unity is absolutely essential for India’s integrity and progress. Hindu-Muslim unity is also necessary for India-Pakistan relations.”

I ask him if the ride on the ‘Dosti Bus’ in 1999, under the stewardship of Mr Vajpayee, was his first trip to Pakistan.

“Yes, but that was not the first time I stepped on to Pakistani soil,” he recalls. “In 1997 to mark 50 years of independence, Advani-ji had undertaken a nationwide yatra [tour] to pay homage to all the martyrs and heroes of the freedom movement. In Punjab, he led the prayers in remembrance of Bhagat Singh, Sukh Dev and Rajguru, who had been hanged in the Lahore Central Jail in 1931 for fighting against the British colonial rule. They were cremated at Hussainiwala, a village now on the Indian side of the line drawn by Cyril Radcliffe. Later we went to the Wagah border, where I took permission from the [Pakistan] Rangers to step on the Pakistani side of the border to kneel down and pray for the soul of freedom fighters from Pakistan.”

BJP stopped its outreach to Indian Muslims, while I believe that Hindu-Muslim unity is absolutely essential for India’s integrity and progress. Hindu-Muslim unity is also necessary for India-Pakistan relations.”

Sudheen, as his friends call him, then tells me he regrets the fact that he cannot read Urdu. His reading is restricted to what is available in the Roman script.

Our green tea had arrived. As we sip it, I ask him about his new book. In it he puts forward the case for a confederation between India and the original two wings of Pakistan. Isn’t that too unrealistic, I inquire.

“It seems unrealistic now, but it wasn’t then. My book recalls the statements, speeches and even the poems dating back to August 14 and 15, 1947. I have shown how Mahatma Gandhi and Mr Jinnah were trying for a confederal relationship between India and Pakistan. None of the top leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League envisioned or wanted the kind of bloody partition that took place. Partition cannot be undone but its negative fallout can, and must, be undone. We can live like peaceful neighbours… It is the duty of the majority community in all countries to ensure the safety of the minorities in their countries. The members of the minority community should feel safe and secure and have equal rights and opportunities.”

But is he including Bangladesh in the scheme of things he proposes?

“Indeed, I include all South Asian countries, big or small,” says Kulkarni as he neatly folds his napkin. “In fact,| my book proposes that CPEC should be extended eastwards and connected with the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar-China corridor.”

The ORF, under the guidance of Sudheendra Kulkarni, is actively promoting Hindu-Muslim harmony. “We collaborate frequently with Anjuman-i-Islam in Mumbai, an educational institution that is older than the Aligarh Muslim University,” he explains. “Under the leadership of Dr Zahir Kazi, its president, the Anjuman has been running scores of colleges and schools. Incidentally, Mr Jinnah also studied in one of the schools run by Anjuman. Our aim is to make the Anjuman a broad-based university mainly but not exclusively for the Muslims.”

Even after the Shiv Sena’s attack on him, Kulkarni has been organising several programmes in Mumbai aimed at promoting India-Pakistan friendship. For example, the ORF had organised a very widely-attended function on its premises in Mumbai to pay homage to Maulana Abdus Sattar Edhi. Speaking on the occasion, he had commented that it was not entirely correct to describe Edhi sahib as Pakistan’s Mother Teresa. “Without taking any credit from her, I must say that the maulana’s service to humanity was greater and more broad-based,” he tells me when I ask him about it. “He served humanity on different fronts, under far more difficult circumstances.”

Earlier in the morning Kulkarni had also visited the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation and had been extremely impressed with the institution, its service, its maintenance and the discipline prevailing there. He tweeted later in the day and called Prof Adeeb Rizvi a saint.

Can there be two opinions on that, I muse as we part.

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 19th, 2017