In an interview to mark the forthcoming publication of his book, The Chief Minister and The Spy, his personal account of his decades old friendship with Farooq Abdullah, Amarjit Singh Dulat, former head of R&AW, has confirmed under persistent questioning that Farooq Abdullah told him in 2020, months after the reading down of Article 370, that he would have been willing to help read down the Article if the government had taken him into confidence.

“‘We would have helped,’ he told me when I met him in 2020. ‘Why were we not taken into confidence?’,” Dulat has written in his book. However, Dulat argues that this needs to be seen in the context of Abdullah’s feelings of heartbreak when, after decades of service to the country, he was put under house arrest.

In a 45-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Dulat also said that he would be willing to apologise to Abdullah if he has upset him by making public what was originally a private conversation between the two of them.