High commissioner Kewal Singh decided to try his own diplomacy that evening. At the end of a lavish cultural performance by the Bahor ensemble at the Ali Sher Nawai Theatre, attended by both delegations, Singh walked across to his Pakistani counterpart, high commissioner to India, Arshad Hussain, and greeted him warmly. Hussain looked the other way and did not even respond to the greeting. Singh walked out of the hall, surprised and crestfallen at the snub, blaming himself for the indiscretion. But Hussain accosted Singh in the corridor later and told him that he had acted cool since his leaders were “glaring” at him. The two high commissioners agreed to meet discreetly the next day to see if they could find common ground. They pretended to go shopping opposite the Tashkent Hotel, at the state departmental store. Hussain explained to Singh that it would be hard for the Pakistani delegation to go home with a document that did not refer to Kashmir. Singh then helped trigger “an honourable compromise” in a formulation that said that both sides explained their respective positions on J&K.

The more important issue for India was the future of Haji Pir and other strategic heights. Shastri had publicly committed that these vital posts would not be vacated, but the Security Council resolution supported by the Soviet government, and which India had accepted, required that forces of the two countries be withdrawn to pre-5 August positions. The Indian side finally decided to give up these claims and withdrew to the 5 August levels in the larger interest of the joint declaration. After two more days of aggressive mediation by the Soviets, Shastri and Ayub signed the Tashkent Declaration at 4.30 pm on 10 January. The signing ceremony was followed by a reception, after which the two delegations were to depart on the morning of 11 January.

Watching the proceedings, K Shankar Bajpai felt India had given away too much. Bajpai was the designated protocol officer who dropped off the prime minister to his room after the reception. Shastri had looked tired “but no one thought he would succumb to a heart attack the same night”. Bajpai’s shock at Shastri’s passing that midnight was matched by his disappointment with the outcomes in Tashkent. 50 years after India had signed on the dotted line, Bajpai recalled that the agreement would be forever questioned for returning heroically captured J&K areas. We went determined not to return them, unless Pakistan agreed to renounce force and accept the ceasefire line as a frontier. How we could interpret what we signed as achieving those objectives is anyone’s guess. We did face unexpected difficulties: Russia’s skilful diplomacy turned from pro-Indian to even-handed, seeing possibilities of weaning Pakistan away from its then bugbear China. Originally urging the Tashkent meet not for a final settlement but to start a process, Moscow pressed for an agreement there and then, with messages sent through our ambassador warning of a return to the UN Security Council, and without the benefit of a Soviet veto.

While many have held the dilemma of surrendering the heights or abandoning the Tashkent deal to have taken its toll on Shastri, to Kewal Singh, Shastri did not seem unduly concerned about this issue. In their last meeting, the prime minister asked Singh to quickly get back to his duties in Pakistan, since the declaration called for high commissioners to resume their posts quickly and India needed to signal the importance it attached to the Tashkent Agreement.

Bajpai in his later years was willing to concede that India’s national capacity was limited in 1965, but he rued that the lessons had not been learnt even five decades later. “All too often,” he reflected, “there are no solutions. Problems can only be managed until circumstances change.... Pakistan’s 1965 gamble failed, but we only scotched the snake, not killed it... In 1965, we were economically floundering, militarily weak, politically bickering, and still diplomatically inexperienced. The lessons of 1965 — not to be any of those things — are obvious. So too is our refusal to learn.”

The Tashkent Declaration provided for the withdrawal of forces to restore the status quo ante of 5 August 1965 and the return of the high commissioners to their posts. Strong criticism was voiced within both countries, of their leaders squandering at the negotiating table what the armed forces had won on the battlefield. In India, Shastri’s passing somewhat muted the censure. In Pakistan, the agreement flew in the face of the manufactured narrative that Pakistan had won the war by repulsing India’s attempts to capture Lahore. Ayub Khan’s position became increasingly untenable, particularly since the wily Bhutto was slowly distancing himself from the Tashkent outcomes.