In the Fire He is still stricken by the fever he caught at Agra. More anger than fever maybe, but the heat still casts its spell on his face even a week after Agra. Here is the Pakistani official sitting red-faced in his foreign ministry office on Constitution Avenue, as he talks about how Vivek Katju hijacked the Agra talks. Immaculately dressed in cream-coloured sherwani he could barely conceal his Agra angst. His agitation shows as he lights a cigarette and goes on to give his countdown on the Agra breakdown. In the excitement, his tea is getting cold but he doesn't seem to care. 'And the likes of Katju in your MEA talk of violations of the LOC?' He gets up from his seat, walks over to the large map that hangs on a wall alongside his desk and opens a veritable fusillade. 'You have been violating not only Shimla but the 1991 agreement between the two countries - and not only in the Kashmir valley but in the Rann of Kutch as well.' Next moment, he calls an assistant, asking him to fish out a copy of the 1991 agreement on 'advance notice on military exercises, manoeuvres and troop movements'. He promises to give a copy of the final draft at Agra, which, he says, came close to being accepted. A couple of more cigarettes later, he cools down: 'Anyway, the process has started. We'll continue with the peace talks.' No doubt, though, the ghost of Katju, joint secretary (JS) in charge of the Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan desk in the ministry of external affairs, will probably loom large over future talks. Actually Katju, the bureaucrat Pakistan loves to hate, an emotion only intensified by the Agra summit, is on his way to new shores - as the ambassador of Myanmar. A position widely seen as a promotion, a post for which even the present ambassador to Israel was lobbying hard. However, Katju's detractors aren't limited to Pakistan alone. If the rustling grapevine's got it right, the dour JS's departure will leave behind more than a few smiling faces in South Block as well. Described variously as 'extremely hawkish'; 'a quintessential bureaucrat' and 'very patriotic', Katju has built up a reputation of being an extremely tight-lipped hardliner who isn't particularly popular in the foreign service. The hardliner part of him is ascribed to his Kashmiri Pundit background. The grandson of Congressman and lawyer Kailashnath Katju who was a member of the first cabinet of independent India, 'Katju comes from a very prominent family of Allahabad, where the singular motif is honesty,' says a close friend of Katju's for the last 37 years, Dr Amar Pal Bhalla of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). There is something about Katju that seems to excite passions. For a low-profile bureaucrat - in fact, till Islamabad named him as one of the agent provocateurs not too many people in India had heard of him - the sentiments he evokes are suprisingly strong. He is either disliked intensely, or supported stoutly. And with two conflicting and equally strong schools of thought on what makes Katju tick, his ideology remains quite a mystery. Does he, for instance, hate Pakistan with a visceral passion, as some insist? Legend has it that once he even asked an economist how India could destroy Pakistan's economy. And when a friend suggested that India give aid to Islamabad, he laughed and said: 'You liberals! You meet some Pakistani liberals, you think the entire country is like that.' And just when you had begun to think of the man as an inveterate Pakistan basher, a former member of the Prime Minister's Office has this to relate. During the Lahore initiative, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was keen to make a trip to the Minar-e-Pakistan as a symbol of peace. Quite a few in the government advised him against doing this - and Vajpayee said as much when he made a small speech at the historic venue. 'But it was actually Katju who advised the Prime Minister to visit the spot,'' says a former colleague. There are some, like the ex-PMO official, who see him as a 'very professional bureaucrat' who has been unfairly maligned because of his Kashmiri Pundit lineage. A senior IFS officer, known to be particularly spartan in his praise of fellow-officers said: 'Katju is an outstanding officer and it is unfortunate that he is often misrepresented because of his background.' Whatever, under the present government his hardliner image can only be an advantage for Katju. Apparently, the very morning a daily reported that Islamabad held L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Katju as those responsible for the Agra failure, the home minister called Katju up. 'A laughing Advani,' according to a Katju associate, 'told him over the phone: 'Now you have been grouped with me'.' Bhalla, who practically grew up with Katju, feels that too much is read into the bureaucrat's 'tight-lippedness'. 'He does his job very well which is the important thing and keeping things in strict confidence is an essential part of his job, given the sensitivity of the region he handles. After all he isn't supposed to brief the press,' he adds. It was, some would argue, this reticence which is allowing Pakistan to get away with labelling Katju the 'worst hawk at the delegation level talks at Agra.' But the fact is that Katju - more than perhaps even Advani and Swaraj - succeeded in getting the Pakistani hackles up. A senior aide to the Pakistani president said: 'It was Katju all the way. He made your foreign secretary look utterly helpless. What's worse, he seemed to be doing Advani's bidding rather than your foreign minister's. It was really a shame the way he sabotaged the draft-making process at Agra.' And even as Pakistan's foreign ministry officials are still frothing over Katju, close friends of the JS insist that his poker-faced image is just one side of the coin. 'Actually, he is a very different person - fun-loving and quite a prankster.' 'Actually he lives very frugally,' adds another close friend. 'He has been driving the same junked-up Fiat for the last eight years. All he wants to do really is serve his country...he is extremely patriotic.' And if Agra was anything to go by, Katju's patriotism remains unquestioned. Or, some would tell you, his Kashmiri Pandit roots run deep.