After serving as a cabinet minister in the Sharif's administrations in the 1990s, Hashmi aligned himself on the realist school of international relations and was a proponent of supporting the civilian control on the federal government and the military. After the military takeover of the government in 1999, Hashmi reportedly exposed the Pakistan Army's misadventure in Kashmir with the Indian Army when he demanded to constitute the Commission to investigate the events implicated front role of the President Pervez Musharraf in 2003. Briefly sentenced to the solitary confinement by the session court in 2004 over the allegations of treason, Hashmi's sentence was overturn by the Supreme Court when it declared his case hearings as mistrial on 4 August 2007. Initially supporting the impeachment movement against Pervez Musharraf with Nawaz Sharif, he drifted apart from the PML(N) to join the Imran Khan's PTI in 2011 but was ousted after disagreeing with the demonstration against the elected government, which he viewed that it had the support from the military to destabilized the elected Sharif administration in 2014.