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. 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. 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. Foreign minister On 23 November 2004, Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali nominated Kasuri to be country's Minister of Foreign Affairs. His nomination was not objected by the opposition parties, and secured the unanimous votes for his nomination in