The atmospherics in the two nuclear-armed and war-going states appear radically altered. Even the Indian politicians are ostensibly keen to “smoke the peace pipe” with Pakistan. BJP’s leader L.K. Advani, the hawk of Agra days and the lead man of the 1992 Babri Mosque demolition, has recently visited Pakistan. He now says that a Kashmir solution can be found during Musharraf-Manmohan tenure. The Indian leadership, following the Musharraf line talks of “irreversibility” of the peace process.
The political logjam on the Kashmir dispute has been broken. No guarantees as yet for solutions but now there can be possibilities of the bilateral dialogue working to the advantage of the Kashmiris living under Indian occupation.
Multiple “home truths” have finally got Pakistani-Indian leadership engaged on Kashmir. India would not have come to the negotiating table if it could have used state terrorism, Siachin occupation or Washington’s pressure on Pakistan to resolve the dispute. Similarly if armed struggle or Kargil alone would have resolved Kashmir in accordance with the Kashmiri or Pakistani wishes India would have had no Pakistan to negotiate with.
Few positive developments on Kashmir, in addition to normalization of ties, have included the visit of the APHC, the resumption of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service without passports, opening up of new bus routes between Azad Kashmir and Jammu districts and greater Kashmiri interaction.
All this may have brought some interim relief in the civic zones of Kashmiri life under Indian occupation. Yet key problems remain; continued presence and the killings by the Indian occupation forces, the brutal laws curbing civil and political liberties, the torture of political “suspects”, the imprisonment, the long incarceration of political prisoners without trials, the prolonged pain of mothers whose sons have disappeared. All this requires rapid response from New Delhi. Manmohan Singh’s promises that “the sky is the limit in terms of what can be done to resolve Kashmir” must translate into early action.
Pakistani and Kashmiri critics of Pakistan’s present Kashmir policy maintain that the twin Indian goal behind engaging on Kashmir are; one extracting a commitment of zero cross-LOC infiltration in IHK and two while continuing the “peace talks” use all the Indian might to crush the Kashmiri freedom movement by destroying the armed struggle and administratively crushing the political struggle.
India’s largely unchanged policy on the ground lends some credence to this criticism.
Mindful of the causes of the Kashmiri freedom movement, Delhi cannot premise the beginning of the rollback of its Kashmir policy on the spurious argument that first there should be a complete end to militancy in the Valley.
Indeed to seize the current opportunity for concretely and irreversibly moving toward resolving the Kashmir dispute there are four issues that Pakistan and India must both agree on as they continue to explore possibilities on solutions. One, that in addition to the APHC there are other political players in IHK, the Peoples’ Democratic Party and the Kashmir National Conference Party. Yet the APHC remains the torchbearers of the Kashmiri determination to decide their political future. Similarly the Kashmiris of the Valley and surrounding Jammu districts who have been involved in the armed struggle will also be legitimate voices in determining the political future of Kashmir.
Two that when Advani maintains as he did in Islamabad that “Jammu and Kashmir is very diverse and any eventual solution to the issue will have to be acceptable to all the diverse communities in the state and all sections of opinion within Kashmir,” he is correct. Any attempt to impose a uniform solution on the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is neither feasible nor desired by the people of the undivided state. The entire undivided state falls in different geographical zones and ethnic divisions ranging including the northern areas, Leh, Kargil, Jammu and the valley. For example the population in three of the Jammu region’s Doda, Rajouri and Poonch districts on the right of the Chenab are located in a distinct geographic entity. To some extent culturally, they are an extension of the Kashmir valley, separated only by the Banihal mountain range.
Three that while India’s refrain of no redrawing of borders, of not changing geography can be understood as a starting point, Delhi must realize that the proposition of “borders becoming irrelevant” in the case of Kashmir must finally lead to a solution that assures a Kashmiri government of the Kashmiris, away from Delhi's control, in the areas where the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination continues. Such an arrangement will have to go beyond article 370 of the Indian Constitution which gives J & K special status. Azad Jammu and Kashmir too have a “status pending” clause in the constitution of Pakistan. Ultimately some arrangement between India and Pakistan will have to be worked out to jointly watch over the defense and foreign policy of Kashmir. The remaining areas of the original Jammu and Kashmir state will have to constitutionally become parts of India and Pakistan, as they have operationally been for decades now.
Overlooking of these issues by India or Pakistan will essentially fritter away the promise that this current peace process holds. Also issues like Siachin and Sir Creek should be the steppingstones for resolving Kashmir, the “mother of all disputes.” Unresolved Siachin could mean that the Indian leadership which backed off from the nearly worked out 1992 Siachin agreement is still in no mood to “play by the rules” where it believes it can handle the costs of unresolved bilateral disputes. That it wants to resolve Kashmir, a dispute with a high internal and external cost, to its own advantage. Hence the current engagement on Kashmir.
India needs to dispel such an outlook, through moving resolving the relatively simpler bilateral conflicts. Peace is a win-win for both India and Pakistan.
