February 15, 2004

Sumantra Bose is a descendant of the legendary Indian leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who joined the Japanese during the Second World War in a romantic but unsuccessful bid to oust the British from India. Sumantra Bose also treads dangerous terrain in a bid to find an acceptable solution of the Kashmir problem. His eminently readable book Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace is a thought-provoking, largely objective, account of this intractable dispute that has bedeviled relations between India and Pakistan for more than half a century and, above all, continues to cause immense sufferings to the Kashmiri people. Its solution could truly usher in a new era in South Asia.

Since January 2004, India and Pakistan have embarked on a fresh bid to improve their bilateral relations, following the agreement reached between President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee at Islamabad. There are some indications of flexibility by both sides and, in this context, the ideas set forth by Sumantra Bose do open some new possibilities and deserve consideration by policymakers of the two countries.

Bose compares the Kashmir issue to the Russian matryoshka doll that has layers of complexity which, in his view, render easy “solutions” such as plebiscite or partition impracticable if not dangerous. He argues in favour of a multinational political settlement in Jammu and Kashmir, a settlement that recognizes the reality of multiple national identities within that territory while respecting the core concerns of the Indian and Pakistani states. He believes this to be “the only viable strategy for converting a stalemated zero-sum game into a positive-sum scenario for all sides”.

Bose largely endorses the Pakistani version of the history of the Kashmir dispute. For more than a century, the Hindu Dogra rulers of Kashmir had oppressed the Muslim majority brutally. Bose, therefore, sympathizes with the Muslim struggle against the Maharaja beginning in the 1930s.

Bose notes that the trouble in Kashmir in 1947 started when an uprising against the Maharaja broke out in Poonch in protest against his taxation policy. By early October 1947, the rebels had gained control of the area. Thus, it was an indigenous revolt and not a case of aggression from outside the state.

Tribal Pathans from Pakistan subsequently joined the rebels. At this stage, the Maharaja pleaded for military assistance from New Delhi. Mountbatten, who had stayed on in India as governor-general, insisted that India must not send troops to Kashmir without first getting the accession of the state to India. Bose contends that the Maharaja did sign such an Instrument of Accession to India where after Indian troops were flown to Kashmir on October 27, 1947. However, British historian Alastair Lamb has already refuted this contention in his book Incomplete Partition (1997) and has established with documentary evidence that no Instrument of Accession had been signed by the Maharaja prior to the dispatch of Indian troops. The Indian action was, therefore, illegal. Bose has not produced any evidence that proves the contrary.

Bose also makes only a passing reference to the genocide of Muslims in Jammu by the Maharaja’s troops in which, according to Lamb, some 200,000 Muslims were killed while several hundred thousands were forced to migrate to Pakistan, thus changing the composition of the population in Jammu. Nor does Bose mention the unfair boundary award of Radcliffe that gave the Muslim majority district of Gurdaspur to India, enabling it to gain access to Kashmir.

Nevertheless, Bose agrees that at the time of India’s independence in 1947, the princely states were expected to choose between India and Pakistan after evaluating two criteria: contiguity to India or Pakistan and the wishes of their subjects. The population of J&K was 77 per cent Muslim and had far more contiguity to Pakistan “reinforcing the case for accession to Pakistan”. He also notes the repeated promises made by India to allow a plebiscite to enable the people of J&K to choose between India and Pakistan, as also the UN Security Council resolutions to this effect. Since 1955, India has reneged on its promises. It has even denied a role for the UN in Kashmir.

Bose is forthright in criticizing India for “the purposeful denial of democratic rights (which) has been the defining theme of democratic India’s policy toward Kashmir consistently since 1947” and the “consistently anti-democratic, authoritarian policies of successive New Delhi governments towards IJK”. In this context, Bose has analyzed in detail the various rigged elections in Indian-held Kashmir. Even the latest elections of 2002 presented a mixed picture. Several districts in Kashmir “witnessed negligible polling verging on a total boycott in some areas”. In any event, he agrees that elections are no alternative to the right of self-determination.

In his analysis of the past 13 years of the insurgency in Kashmir, Bose traces how the pent up fury of the Kashmiri people erupted following the blatantly rigged elections of 1987. The Palestinian intifada-style popular protest also encouraged the Kashmiris. At a later stage, infiltrators from across the LoC joined the struggle. But Bose says “the war in Kashmir, even in its fidayeen phase, is not reducible to simply a problem of “cross-border” terrorism and infiltration fomented from and/or by Pakistan”. He holds that “the policies of the Indian state have been crucial to the eruption, spread, decline, and renewal of insurgency. The onus of any process to develop a peaceful approach to the Kashmir conflict thus falls primarily on India, and secondarily on Pakistan.”

Noting the diversity of the population in J&K and their divergent political views, Bose thinks that, in a hypothetical referendum, the Kashmir Valley would probably return a strong pro-independence majority while a sizeable minority would vote for Pakistan. The Jammu region, with a two-third Hindu population, would vote for India but three out of six districts of Jammu (Doda, Rajouri, Poonch) have Muslim majority and would favour independence or union with Pakistan. Similarly, Ladakh has two districts: the Buddhists in Leh district would favour India but the Muslim district of Kargil would produce a different verdict. Overall, Ladakh has a 52 per cent Muslim majority.

Finally, Bose comes out with a solution to the Kashmir dispute. He rejects a possible plebiscite and also does not favour the Indian preference for making the LoC as the de jure border which, he notes, would not be acceptable to Pakistan. He believes that the settlement in Northern Ireland, the “Good Friday” Agreement of 1998, can be the model for Kashmir. He thinks that ways exist of substantially tackling the dilemma represented by the LoC that do not require any change in existing, de facto territorial jurisdictions of states in Kashmir. He argues that erasing or redrawing the LoC is neither feasible nor desirable. However, it should be “transformed from an iron curtain to a linen curtain” between self-governing Indian and Pakistani regions of Jammu and Kashmir.

Bose also calls for giving maximum autonomy to IJK on lines of the 1952 Delhi Agreement between Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah, from which India had later backed out. He says, “Substantial and real self-rule short of sovereignty is a sine qua non of any Kashmir peace process and any settlement.” This kind of devolution is especially true for IJK but also applies to AJK under Pakistan. There should be respect for human rights and release of political prisoners to establish a degree of normalization and rule of law. Other elements of the Northern Ireland model would involve a close partnership between India and Pakistan. In fact, a friendly relationship between these two countries is the only hope for an eventual settlement of the Kashmir problem.

However, the comparison of Kashmir with Northern Ireland is not quite justified. The UK is quite willing to get out of Northern Ireland whereas the Protestant majority wants it to stay. In the case of Kashmir, India is determined to stay on while the Kashmiri Muslim majority wants India to go.

Bose must be credited for writing a balanced account of a highly charged issue. His description of the situation inside Indian-held Kashmir should be particularly useful for Pakistani analysts who at present lack this knowledge. However, it is unlikely that many circles in Pakistan or even among the Kashmiris would welcome the solution proposed by him. They will argue that Bose basically seeks to legitimize the Indian occupation of Kashmir, which he himself has exposed as being based on force. On the other hand, after 56 years of bloody conflict, the travails of the Kashmiri people must end and India and Pakistan do need to find a way out of the impasse. Compromises have to be made by all sides. Some of the ideas of Bose could present a way forward.

Kashmir — Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace
By Sumantra Bose
Vistaar/Sage Publications, B-42, Panchsheel Enclave, Post Box 4109, New Delhi-110017, India. Tel: 91-11-2649 1290-7. Email: marketing@indiasage.com Website: www.indiasage.com Available in Pakistan with Mr Books, 10-D Super Market, Islamabad
Tel: 051-2278843-5.
Email: mrbooks@isb.comsats.net.pk 
Website: www.mrbooks.com.pk
ISBN 81-7829-328-5
307pp. Rs595

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