| 06 November 2004 | Saturday | 22 Ramazan 1425 |
A blueprint on Kashmir
Democrats in a divided land
The triumph of Arafat
The emphatic vote given by the American electorate on November 2 in favour of President Bush and his Republican Party has surprised analysts in many countries, including Pakistan. The election results have also evidently disappointed a great many people in the Islamic world, in Europe and beyond.
Actually, most opinion polls taken right up to Election Day, had shown a tiny but continuing lead for Bush. This included polls taken by Reuters, Gallup, CNN, ABC, and Wall Street Journal.
And yet, analysts in the leading world news media (including BBC), as also in Pakistan, kept minimizing or ignoring these opinion trends. It seemed that their dislike for Bush had overcome their sense of reality. Hence, their surprise and disappointment at the outcome of the election.
Bush not only secured the 270 plus majority in the electoral college, but also had a massive 3.5 million lead in the popular vote. Moreover, his party increased its majority in both houses of Congress.
He has clearly improved his performance over the 2000 election when he had just barely squeezed through a tight election where his opponent had actually got more popular votes.
Conventional wisdom took a beating in this election in more than one area. It was thought that a larger turnout in voting helped the Democrats and that the greater number of young voters would secure victory for Kerry.
The turnout was greater than in the past, and yet the result went in favour of Bush. Actually, support for Kerry was confined to the coastal areas and his native New England, whereas the south, mid-America and much of the west voted solidly for Bush.
So, how should one explain these election results? Firstly, the US has been and remains, basically, a conservative country with traditional values. It seems that the majority of American voters still distrust "liberals", and this prejudice seems to have swayed them against Kerry.
In more specific terms, the still widespread opposition to abortion, gay marriages etc. was capitalized by Bush who stood for traditional Christian values. He came across as the average American: a family man, folksy, church-going, talking straight - unlike Kerry who had a patrician, professorial look, a certain dryness and aloofness, apart from being a Catholic with a split marriage. Bush was also helped by the popularity enjoyed by Laura Bush as against Teresa Kerry.
Kerry was supported by the liberal news media - the New York Times has been supporting losers since the days of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 - but rural America is hardly swayed by this media.
The show-biz personalities, the blacks, the Hispanics (with the exception of Cubans in Florida) and the Muslims did support Kerry, but they were outnumbered by the traditional Christians, the majority whites, the Protestants, the Evangelicals, and probably the Zionist lobby as well, who supported Bush.
The second decisive factor in Bush's victory was the security factor. The American voter still carries - or is perhaps even obsessed by - the memories of 9/11 and the fear of terrorism.
Bush was able to convince the greater majority of voters that, as compared to Kerry, he was a more determined warrior against terrorism. No doubt, Kerry had made the fight against terrorism the main plank of his policies but he was dogged by his "flip-flop" image. The fact is that Kerry has changed his stance on key issues over the years.
It needs to be recalled that following the US success against the Taliban, Bush was enjoying a record popularity. He lost much of this popularity because of the Iraq war, particularly in the last one year when American body losses in Iraq started to increase.
But Kerry was unable to fully exploit this to his advantage. The fact is that Kerry had voted in favour of the US invasion of Iraq. Later on, he became highly critical of Bush's conduct of the Iraq war but, during the election campaign, Kerry did not give a time frame for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
After all, Bush also wants the US troops to return from Iraq as soon as there is a stable Iraqi government on the ground. It, therefore, seemed that Kerry did not materially differ from the Bush policy on Iraq.
No doubt, he talked about building a new international understanding on Iraq, but he could not really succeed in this endeavour without coming forward with a clear-cut indication of an early or immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
It is also a little hard to understand as to why many people in Pakistan were rooting for Kerry against Bush. In several pronouncements during the election campaign, Kerry had been critical of Pakistan on the issue of nuclear proliferation, and had implied that Pakistan had not done enough, or might even have connived, to give sanctuary to Al Qaeda and Taliban elements in Pakistan. He had shown a clear preference for India over Pakistan and had criticized the Bush administration for giving a non-Nato major ally status to Pakistan.
He seemed sympathetic to India on the issue of alleged cross-border infiltration in Kashmir. Moreover, over the years, successive Democratic administrations in the US (Kennedy, Carter, Clinton) have been pro-India whereas the Republicans have been relatively favourable to Pakistan.
It is also clear that President Bush has a close equation with President Musharraf, as a result of which Pakistan has secured solid diplomatic and financial advantages, particularly since 9/11.
No doubt, Pakistan's geo strategic importance would have probably obliged Kerry, if elected president, to maintain a good relationship with Pakistan but it is doubtful if Kerry would have had a similar warm and close equation with Musharraf. Clearly, Pakistan's national interests lay more with Bush than with Kerry.
Similarly, one could question the basis of support for Kerry as against Bush in many sections of opinion in the Islamic world, including that by the outspoken ex-prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad who publicly called for the defeat of Bush in the election.
The big grievance of the Muslims against the US has been its blind support for Israel. But Kerry has been even more assertive in his expressions of support for Israel. As against this, Bush is perhaps the first American president to come out unequivocally in favour of an independent Palestinian state. Even on Iraq, as stated above, Kerry did vote in favour of the US invasion of that country.
However, the fact remains that some of Bush's policies have offended Muslims in many parts of the world. He has reinforced the impression that the US has been targeting one Muslim country after another.
It can be argued that this impression is not altogether justified since the US-led invasions of Iraq in 1990 and against the Taliban in 2001 enjoyed overwhelming support of governments of Muslim countries (though not that of Muslim public opinion).
However, his invasion of Iraq was rightly seen as illegal and unjustified. The resistance to US occupation of Iraq has grown and strengthened the hold of Islamic extremists in that country. This is rather ironic since the ostensible motivation for the US attack on Iraq was to curb the terrorists.
If anything, the world and the US itself are less safe now than before the Iraqi adventure. Moreover, the US has lost friends and even allies as a result of its uni latera list policies. It could not be in the US national interest to alienate the Islamic world on a long-term basis.
Hence, there is a strong case for a review of existing policies by President Bush in his second term of office. A bold new initiative in the Middle East could greatly reduce Muslim grievances. The US must take concrete steps to restrain Israel and secure a just solution of the Palestinian issue.
Secondly, the US must make an early exit from Iraq. Its presence there is a daily provocation for Arab and Muslim opinion. It should work overtime to build up a credible Iraqi security force so that the Iraqi interim government should handle the local opposition, which reportedly includes Islamic terrorists like Al-Zarqawi who has declared loyalty Al Qaeda. Lastly, no more unilateralist actions should be undertaken by the United States, whether against Iran or any other country.
A blueprint on Kashmir
Whether we like it or not, President General Pervez Musharraf has been able to retrieve the Kashmir problem from the backburner. Our satisfaction is that the military establishment he heads has realized that no solution is possible through hostilities.
This is a substantial gain because from the days of the Tashkent Agreement in 1966 New Delhi's endeavour has been to convince Islamabad to renounce the use of arms to end all disputes between the two.
Now when the talks look like throwing up a solution, we should not be seen flinching. The international community is watching the progress on Kashmir anxiously. We should not be found wanting. Moreover, this is an opportunity the two countries cannot afford to miss.
Musharraf has set the ball rolling. He first told two Indian journalists that the solution of Kashmir lies in identifying the area, demilitarizing it and giving it a status.
Subsequently, he gave shape to his proposal by specifying seven areas: plains, including Jammu, foothills up to 7,000 feet, Pir Panjal, the valley, the Great Himalayan zone, upper Indus valley and the northern areas, the Karakoram, parts of which are with China.
For the first time, a Pakistan ruler has proposed independence for Kashmir, besides joint control or UN mandate. Musharraf must have done the rethinking after talking to the Indian journalists, including myself.
At that time, when told that the Kashmiris wanted independence, he said that they would "step back" once concrete proposals were on the table. This might still happen. But independence is an option as of now.
New Delhi has not yet reacted to Musharraf's proposals in any significant manner. In the past there have been remarks like "the sky is the limit." Still India has been fiercely supporting and sustaining the status quo. That is the four corners of our policy on Kashmir.
The home ministry has a department on Kashmir which does not believe in having any input from outside. Politicians in power and bureaucrats in the department work out a strategy, not policy, as and when the situation demands. A few former bureaucrats are thrown in as interlocutors every now and then to know the mind of leaders in the valley. The department often gets it wrong.
What Musharraf has proposed is re-division of Jammu and Kashmir. This is something to which none in the government - the opposition or even the experts - has applied the mind, at least not methodically or seriously.
Even if they had, I do not think any government in New Delhi can sell to the country a proposal which suggests division on the basis of religion and throws out the status quo completely. True, a sterile policy is worth jettisoning but when the price demanded is a seven-tier state, the suspicion heightens.
I believe that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh proposed to discuss options when he met Musharraf at New York, putting two riders: one, no territorial adjustment, and two, no division on the basis of religion. Musharraf's proposals eschew the word, religion, but the geographical changes he suggests are primarily on that basis.
An unsteady secular polity like ours cannot accept this. Any division or even a hint of it may revive the horrors of partition. The defeated BJP is only looking for a semblance of chance to revive Hindutva which, at present, does not arouse any response.
Still Musharraf's seven-region proposal should not be rejected outright. It can be made the basis for riveting a setup which may ultimately overcome the objections voiced by India, Pakistan and the Kashmiris. Why not merge the seven regions into two units so that they are viable and, at the same time, can pass muster to be acceptable to the majority.
I have a proposal. Having been associated with leaders and people in the state for more than four decades, I consider myself competent as well as involved enough to suggest a way out.
Once youthful Kashmiri leader Yasin Malik advised me not to make any proposal on Kashmir so that I might one day help the process of negotiations. My profession of writing demanded me to react to the situation prevailing at a particular time. If that rules me out I cannot help.
The crux of the problem is the valley. The Indian parliament has also asked the government to take up "the other Kashmir under Pakistan's occupation." So there are two units: Kashmir and the Azad Kashmir.
They have established their identity in the last 55 years - the first is Kashmiri-speaking and the second Punjabi-speaking. My suggestion is that both Kashmirs should be given autonomy. That is, the governments in these two regions should enjoy all subjects except defence, foreign affairs and communications.
The three subjects were the ones which the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir gave to New Delhi when he signed the Instrument of Accession to integrate his state with India.
The Azad Kashmir is directly under Islamabad and enjoys only the crumbs of power thrown at it. My proposal gives it full autonomy like the one in Kashmir on the Indian side.
The border between the two Kashmirs should be made soft so that the citizens of the two Kashmirs travel freely, without any passport or papers, in both the parts. (I hope terrorism will be over by that time). The status for these areas is that of autonomous units.
The three subjects, foreign affairs, defence and communications, will vest in the government in New Delhi as far as Kashmir is concerned and Islamabad regarding the Azad Kashmir.
Both the Kashmirs should be demilitarized, India withdrawing its forces from the valley and stationing them at the valley's border. Pakistan will do a similar thing regarding the Azad Kashmir.
The UN and major powers should be individually or collectively involved to guarantee the demilitarization of the areas if and when the final settlement is reached. The settlement should be final. There will be no reopening. Both countries should withdraw their complaint from the UN and other international bodies.
All the 72 confidence-building measures - India has increased the number from eight to 72 - should be implemented straightaway so that people-to-people contact increases and trade gets going.
I know Musharraf is allergic to the Line of Control (LoC). But there has to be some line drawn to demarcate the border. The LoC can be straightened as prime minister Indira Gandhi had suggested to the then Pakistan prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at Shimla. Islamabad knows it well that the international community is in favour of the LoC becoming a permanent border, with minimum changes.
Since communications is one of the subjects entrusted to the central government on either side, the autonomous areas will not feel that they are landlocked. Facilities available in both India and Pakistan will be at the disposal of two Kashmirs. With soft borders, they can trade between themselves, have a common currency if they so desire and receive tourists freely from all over the world.
Both Kashmirs can transfer more subjects to central governments, Azad Kashmir to Islamabad and the valley to New Delhi. It is up to their state assemblies to do so once the settlement is signed, sealed and delivered and fresh elections held.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
Democrats in a divided land
"All right," John Dos Passos wrote in a rage over the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, "we are two nations." Oh, are we ever. And 77 years after Dos Passos penned those words, his two nations and ours bear an almost spooky resemblance.
The most striking, the most overwhelming fact about the 2004 vote is how closely it resembles the 2000 vote. Think of it: Since November 2000, the twin towers have been obliterated, we've gone to war preemptively and under erroneous pretences in Iraq, George W. Bush has become the first president since Herbert Hoover to have jobs shrink on his watch, our standing in the world has diminished nearly everywhere.
And how did all this affect the electoral map? A shift of 17,000 votes turned New Hampshire (four electoral votes) from red to blue, while a shift of 12,000 votes turned New Mexico (five electoral votes) from blue to red.
The battle lines of the cultural civil war that emerged in the 2000 contest have shown themselves to be all but impermeable to even the most earthshaking events. What did change between 2000 and 2004 was the capacity of the two parties to mobilize the forces behind their own lines. The Democrats did a splendid job of turning out their vote. The Republicans did a stupendous job of turning out theirs.
The exit polling - amended, adjusted, corrected for reality - shows the magnitude of the shift. In 2000 Democrats constituted 39 percent of the electorate and Republicans 35 percent.
This year Democrats and Republicans each constituted 37 percent of the electorate. Four years ago, moderates made up 50 percent of the voting public and conservatives 29 percent. On Tuesday the moderate share of the electorate declined to 45 percent, while conservatives boosted their share to 34 percent.
The Republicans didn't get these figures by winning millions more political conversions than the Democrats: The numbers of 2000 Gore voters crossing over to vote for Bush this time and 2000 Bush voters crossing over to vote for Kerry seem about equal.
Rather, they boosted their totals in small towns and hamlets, among Protestant evangelicals who don't often vote, beyond nearly everyone's expectation but their own. Karl Rove's strategy - that Bush could attain a majority by a super-mobilization of the Christian right - was vindicated and then some on Tuesday.
What Bush won on election night was a narrow "moral majority." The overwhelming support the president won among traditionalist churchgoers of modest means was rooted in an affinity of values. There's no evidence to suggest that Bush's "Medicare reform" - his term for a huge give away to the prescription drug industry - yielded him any votes at all.
Although Bush claims a mandate for his right-wing economics, that's clearly not what won him and other Bush Republicans the support of his evangelical base. - Dawn/Washington Post Service
The triumph of Arafat
I met Yasser Arafat in Tunis in March 1988 in his exile. Two rings of Kalashnikov-toting supporters guarded him, and each visitor was frisked before gaining entry to his temporary headquarters. And there he was sitting in front of an immense photograph of Jerusalem's dome on the rock covering the entire wall behind him.
He was in his habitual chequered head dress and military fatigues. What struck me was the mobility of his face and his energy, seemingly eager to burst out of his frame like a coiled spring.
So much of Palestinian history was behind him. He had met reverses, most recently in Lebanon, but nothing, it seemed, could put him down. He remained what he had always been: the symbol of Palestinian identity and future independence.
That was the time of the first intifada in the Israeli-occupied territories. Boys armed with stones were battling Israeli soldiers in tanks. It was a home grown movement that had projected the Palestinian struggle to the world. Arafat quickly appropriated it, calling the young fighters "my new generation". He told me: "Peace needs courageous men. We are ready".
As Arafat left his battered Ramallah compound last month, where he had been held a prisoner by Israelis for more than two years, to seek medical help in a Paris military hospital, my thoughts went back to that day in Tunis when all seemed lost for Palestinians.
Because, after a tempestuous journey of decades with hopes alternating with despair, Palestinians have again become the orphans of the world. And their hope and symbol of nationhood has embarked on a new, more uncertain journey.
There are many dramatic moments in Arafat's political career, each carved in collective Palestinian consciousness. He bloodied Israel in Jordan in 1968 and was under Israeli siege in Lebanon in 1982. He was first expelled by King Hussein of Jordan and had to leave his Beirut headquarters under Israeli onslaught.
Abu Amar, as he was called by his people, always showed courage and an indomitable belief in a future independent Palestine state. The central contradiction of the Arabs' lip-sympathy for the Palestinian cause was that though they supported Arafat financially, their governments were too constrained or unwilling to give him substantial political help.
Arafat had reinvented himself and his movement when his goal seemed within reach through peaceful means after he had backed Saddam Hussein in the Second Gulf War, the first being the Iran-Iraq war.
The US-led victory yielded the Madrid conference and that, in the fullness of time, yielded the Norwegian-mediated Oslo accords. Arafat returned to the Gaza Strip in triumph in 1994.
The Palestinian Authority came into being and for a time there was the promise of a happier future and a Palestinian state. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin helped. Hope was symbolized by that handshake between the two on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
There are many reasons why the Oslo experiment failed. Conventional western wisdom blames Arafat and the second Intifada, in itself a disastrous development for the Palestinian cause.
The truth is kinder to the Palestinians and harsher to the Israelis. Israelis were split down the middle, with at least half of then never having accepted the basic assumption of Oslo: land for peace.
In 1990, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a junior foreign minister, explained to me at great length in his office in Jerusalem why his country should keep all the gains of the 1967 war: "Otherwise, if you were to run across the country from one end to the other, you would reach it in a few hours".
Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli and, after an interregnum, Netanyahu assumed the office of prime minister. American mediation continued; Netanyahu's attempt was to string President Bill Clinton along.
And even as political fortunes in Israel changed, with Labour's Ehud Barak occupying the prime minister's chair, Clinton sought to write his name in history books by achieving a resolution of the central West Asian problem.
The United States, as the traditional protector and mentor of Israel, had severe domestic constraints in pressuring Israelis. Significantly, Clinton waited till the near-end of his second and final term of office to summon the courage to try to cut the Gordian knot.
Western political folklore then takes over. It was Arafat who spurned a once-in-lifetime opportunity to achieve a substantial portion of his goals. Truth is less flattering to president Clinton. The timing of the new Camp David parleys was determined by Barak, who had a penchant for springing surprises and revealed his strategy and tactic to few.
He was then head of a minority government and it was far from certain that he could carry the day in Israel, had Arafat accepted the deal. And Arafat, who was feeling hemmed in, was required to sign on the dotted line - giving up the emotive Palestinian right of return to their original homes - up front.
The nature of Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem on offer was fudged.Palestinian frustrations eventually spilled over into a second Intifada. Arafat was blamed for his inability or unwillingness to stem the violence, which often took the form of suicide bombings. Ariel Sharon assumed power in Israel.
Indeed, his stars were in the ascendant because President George W. Bush was occupying the White House, adopting a laissez-faire attitude long enough to give Israel a virtual carte blanche.
Sharon had been on record as saying that he wanted to break the will of the Palestinians to force them to make peace with Israel on his terms. He systematically set about destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, funded mostly by Europeans, grounded Arafat's planes and helicopters and battered his Ramallah headquarters, leaving him a few rooms in which to live and work. Eliminating Arafat, his ministers publicly speculated, was one option.
President Bush reacted as he was expected to. He launched a so-called road map leading to nowhere while proclaiming the principle of a Palestinian state, stringing along a Quartet, including the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, that has helplessly watched the Palestinians being deprived of a state or dignity.
Sharon had declared Arafat a non-person in the old Soviet manner, quickly to be followed by President Bush. Single-mindedly, Sharon ploughed his furrow, building a wall by expropriating more occupied land, contemptuously disregarding its illegality, and then unveiled his master stroke: a unilateral plan to withdraw settlers and troops from Gaza and a few odd settlements on the West Bank.
The Israeli prime minister's logic was that since Arafat was "irrelevant", he had no Palestinian leader to talk to. Sharon's plan for a version of Greater Israel was quickly blessed by the United States and, with reservations, by the Europeans.
Arafat's fateful journey to Paris, therefore, comes as an unwelcome distraction for Sharon. He and many others might proclaim that the Arafat era is over, but Arafat, despite his many failings as an administrator, has triumphed because he has given his people an identity that cannot be erased and has checkmated Sharon in achieving his central aim: breaking the will of the Palestinian people.
The writer is a former editor of The Statesman, New Delhi.