February 03, 2007	Saturday	Muharram 14, 1428

LONDON, Feb 2: So long as the threat (of militancy) remains there, one should not expect India to demilitarise the occupied Kashmir, maintained the author of a new book Demystifying Kashmir when asked for her reaction to President Musharraf’s four-step formula for resolving the Kashmir dispute.

Ms Navnita Chadha Behera, an Indian intellectual who made a detailed presentation of her book on Thursday at the IISS, a prestigious think-tank of the UK, said, in principle it was a huge point of departure for somebody at the helm of Pakistan’s Army to talk about demilitarisation, self-governance, joint management and making LoC irrelevant.

“I think it is a huge plus but in practicality there are huge gaps, as to how it would happen. Transferring these ideas is going to be a huge challenge,” she thought.

In her opinion making LoC irrelevant was a brilliant conceptual move ‘because you shift the lens from territory. You allow the people to meet across both sides but how are you going to translate it into reality?”

She agreed with the suggestion that by proposing to make the LoC irrelevant, Gen Musharraf was by implication recognising the LoC as a reality because you could not make something which for you did not exist irrelevant.

“But I don’t think even New Delhi or Islamabad or the people on both sides have worked out how to translate this idea,” she said.

She also agreed with the suggestion that the ‘self government’ requirement could be met at least by India by restoring Article 370 of its constitution in its original form sans all the parliamentary acts passed in the last several decades to dilute the effectiveness of the Article, but asked: “What would that mean to Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir.”

When told Pakistan could also undertake constitutional amendments to offer NA and AJK similar powers as it was proposed to be enjoyed by occupied Kashmir under the original Article 370, she said that would be a new shift in Pakistan’s position and wondered whether Pakistan would agree to such a reciprocal constitutional amendment.

In her opening presentation Ms Behera said in the book she had attempted to redefine the Kashmir conflict by breaking away from conventional assumptions about the basic issue and underlining their many facets.

At one point in her presentation she said infiltration from Pakistan across the LoC has gone down considerably but what she called the infrastructure of militancy remained in tact, to be switched on at will any time in future.

Discussing the options available to India, she sounded a veiled threat to Pakistan as according to her India could go on talking about Kashmir but doing nothing concrete about resolving the conflict and if Pakistan switched back the cross-LoC militancy, New Delhi could also pay back in the same coins in Balochistan, Waziristan and Sindh or it could blackmail Pakistan using the water weapon, “the Kashmir legislative assembly has already demanded re-negotiation of the water accord.”

She said water shortages are catching up with Pakistan fast. The storages are depleting fast. Kalabagh does not seem to be making any headway and Bhasha would open a new Pandora’s Box for Pakistan as it would threaten the Balti population and wipe out all the historical sites there.

But she also saw a hope in the on going peace process which in her opinion was moving forward because both India and Pakistan had given up their long held stated positions on the issue with the former giving up its insistence that there was nothing to talk about Kashmir because it was an integral part of India and the latter giving up its demand for plebiscite and both trying to somehow get the Kashmiris to join the negotiations.