Describing former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as a courageous man, Pakistan has said it was upset when his government fell last year.

"I am today frankly admitting for the first time that we were upset when the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a courageous man, fell," Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri told a visiting Indian delegation in Islamabad on Thursday night.

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He said when the Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance was in power, Islamabad had built a rapport with ministers like Jaswant Singh

and Yashwant Sinha as well as the then national security adviser Brajesh Mishra.

"We were not quite sure how the next government would be," Kasuri said. "But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President (Pervez) Musharraf struck an instant chemistry in New York," he said.

Noting that a sea change had taken place in Indo-Pak relations, the minister said the forthcoming visit to Pakistan by Hurriyat Conference leaders is a big achievement and the Kashmir issue could be resolved peacefully if there is flexibility on the part of governments of both countries.

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