Education and academics

Kasuri is an ethnic Mian Arain family, he completed his high school in St Patrick's High School, Karachi, and got accepted at the Government College University but later took a transfer to the Punjab University where he earned a BA with Honors in international relations, in 1961.^[13] Throughout his academic career he had a uniformly excellent record, which culminated earning first position in the B.A E (Hons) examination of the Punjab University in 1961.^[13]

Foreign diplomacy

In 1990, he again joined the foreign ministry and guided Pakistan Muslim League on foreign policies issues.^[14] In 1996, he presided over the party delegation and visited the People's Republic of China (PRC).^[14] This delegation was invited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was received by the top leadership of the CCP.^[14] He has also attended the Inter-Parliamentary Union conferences held in Seoul and in Cairo in 1997 as a chairman of the Pakistan Parliamentary Delegations. In 1998, he publicly endorsed for Prime minister Nawaz Sharif's decision for atomic tests (See: Chagai-I and Chagai-II) and was appointed as Prime Minister's Special Envoy (PMSE) to present his country's point of view, while backing the rationale of country's nuclear response.^[14] He subsequently visited many countries to gather the support for country's nuclear testing program, including Russia, the United States, Canada, China, France, the United Kingdom, and other important countries in the world.^[14]

On 23 January 2012, he openly admitted on his Twitter account, to handing over Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to the US when was a foreign minister of Pakistan under General Musharraf. General Musharraf admits in his book (In the Line of Fire, page 237) that his government captured and handed over 369 people to the US. He also writes that the Pakistani government received ‘millions of dollars’ as prize money from the CIA for capturing those people.

Political activism

Kasuri speaking at the 40th Munich Security Conference.

He briefly left the Foreign Office (FO) in 1981 and joined the Independence Movement to step into national politics. He was quickly elevated as the Secretary-General of the Tehrik-e-Istiqlal (lit. Independence Movement). He was subsequently arrested on innumerable occasions during his long struggle for democracy. After the military government of Zia-ul-Haq went back on its promise to hold general elections in the country, leading political parties got together under the banner of the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) for the purpose of holding general elections, restoration of fundamental rights of the citizens, removal of restrictions placed on the free functioning of the press and the establishment of an independent judiciary. He was arrested on numerous occasions for taking part in a movement launched by the political parties in February 1981 for the achievement of the above objectives.

In 1983, he departed from the country in opposition response to Zia's purge and started his academic career in France. He briefly return in 1988 after the mysterious death of Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash and joined the Foreign service office after being requested by his peers. He took first public participation in 1993 general elections on a Pakistan Muslim League (PML) platform, and was a provisional vice-president of PML, and successfully defended his constituency, NA-106: Kasur (now NA-142) in the 1997 general elections.^[15] He was subsequently appointed as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Media Development (PSCIMD) and was also a senior member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Foreign Relations (PSCFR).

In 1999, after the 1999 military coup d'état, Kasuri had a severe confrontation with Javed Hashmi who was presiding the PML in absence of Sharif, and defected to the dissident group headed by Shuja'at Hussain in 2001. He successfully contested in 2002 general elections from a NA-142: Kasur.^[16]

Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri was one of the few members of the Pakistan Muslim League who always expressed his views on all the national issues frankly and fearlessly regardless of whether the government of the day liked his views or not. In 1997, he publicly called for the issue of the impeachment of the former President Farook Ahmad Leghari, and raised objections on the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment; he expressed very strongly and issued statements on the constitutional changes. He lobbied against the Fifteen Amendment, particularly as originally presented, was strongly objected to by him. It was primarily due to his efforts and his colleagues' lobbying that Sharif's government had to make an amendment in the Fifteenth Amendment, which contained provisions, which were highly detrimental to the federal and democratic structure of the Constitution. Kasuri put immense effort to stop the bill from becoming into the law in its original shape that he threatened Prime Minister Sharif to resign from the party and his constituency unless the bill was amended, and notably resigned from the party, though resignation was torn up by Sharif in a stormy meeting of the Parliamentary party.