My time is up but I cannot leave without getting his comments on Indo- Pak relations. “Please ask whatever you wish, though I have no hope of Dawn ever publishing this interview,” says Jaswant Singh for the fourth time. He must know that the press in Pakistan is free, so why is he so cynical? The answer is quite obvious: as India’s foreign and finance minister, he knows too well that his inimical stance towards Pakistan didn’t exactly win him friends in the Pakistani media.

But that was in the past, when he was the architect of India’s post-nuke foreign policy. Today, Jaswant Singh is in the opposition and attacks the Congress party and its partners in the government with the same virulence as he once displayed towards Islamabad. “The Congress Party has become an Italian, famil-run party (Sonia Gandhi). How can I treat it with respect?” Loath to give a “dishonest or a misleading” answer when asked about the present air of optimism between India and Pakistan, he says: “The quest for amity and peace is so great that to mislead or misdirect would be a sin. The mechanics of resolution of issues carry two essential requirements: first, they must be supported by peoples of both the countries; second, they have to be taken into confidence. For too long, too many leaders have misled the people.”

Before I can ask him if he counts the BJP in the list, Mr Singh preempts my question by breaking into pure Urdu and describing how he accompanied “Atal ji” on the bus to Lahore where he addressed the Pakistani nation saying that there should be no more bloodshed between the two nations.

How will Jaswant Singh judge Mohammad Ali Jinnah is the only question unarticulated. Let us wait for his book.