March 17, 2008	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 8, 1429

Archives Write to Mr. Jawed Naqvi

On Saturday, the young JKLF chief Yasin Malik was speaking at an international conclave in New Delhi on “the issue of the resolution of the Kashmir dispute and the type of future we want to give the future generations of India, Pakistan and Kashmir”. That the young film heroine Preity Zinta, who shared the dais with him, did not overshadow him is a tribute to Mr Malik’s powerful oratory and personal charm. Scars from years of torture in Indian prisons have not blunted the whiplash of his caustic wit. At about the same time, another young and popular leader from the region, Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was addressing Muslim heads of OIC at their summit in Dakar about more or less the same issues. However, the two young Kashmiri leaders don’t talk to each other.

A few days earlier PPP boss Asif Zardari had set off a minor controversy when he implied that the Kashmir issue could not be allowed to impede other areas of bilateral ties, for example trade, in which India and Pakistan could move at a somewhat faster clip. He was accused by various people of betraying the Kashmir cause for a few crumbs of American patronage. The fact is that it was former prime minister Shaukat Aziz, not quite Mr Zardari’s antithesis in snuggling up to the Americans, who had said the same thing much more clearly in April last year. Mysteriously enough he didn’t seem to attract any flack. Leaning on his skills as a banker, Mr Aziz had in fact stressed unequivocally, during his Saarc visit to Delhi, that the quest for peace between India and Pakistan was “not a business transaction but a commitment between two sides that could lead to a long wait before bearing fruit”. Mr Aziz had likened the required patience to Ireland’s example where decades of pointless bloodbath had ended in a handshake between the two warring leaders in March last year.

Mr Malik and Mr Farooq are not the only Kashmiri leaders who don’t speak to each other. A few months ago, I invited senior leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani and his younger Kashmiri counterpart Bilal Lone to a live TV discussion on the subject close to their hearts though, I must confess, I hadn’t told either of them who the other guests would be.When they did meet in the studios Mr Geelani threw a fit about appearing on the discussion panel with Mr Lone, and eventually the younger leader had to bow out of the frame with due apologies, of course, from the producers and me. “He is like my son, but appearing with him in the same discussion would send the wrong signal to the people in Kashmir,” the octogenarian Mr Geelani explained before finally settling down for the show.

Last week it was the turn of human rights activist Asma Jehangir to court controversy over the highly emotive Kashmir issue. She visited the Valley as a UN rapporteur on religious freedoms and belief, which is a narrower mandate than she is used to for voicing her opinions on the disputed region. Perhaps rightly, in my view, Ms Jehangir expressed her helplessness in airing even her known views on human rights violations during this visit to the strife-torn region. She met people like Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah and apparently had dinner with both or one of them. This brought an angry Mr Geelani, who doesn’t think much Messrs Malik and Shah, back into the frame. “If all that Asma Jehangir ever wanted was a Kashmiri waazwaan, we could have parcelled it to her,” he said tartly in a message conveyed to me through a colleague in Srinagar.

Mercifully the Indians have not been influenced one way or the other by the verbal cross-currents among the myriad spokespersons for Kashmir. And it was thus that New Delhi announced in a routine off the record statement to a news agency that Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon would visit Islamabad soon, possibly in April, to wind up the fourth round of the bilateral Composite Dialogue, and to pave the way for a fifth round, which, fairly high up in its priorities, has included the issue of Kashmir. But on Saturday Mr Malik did not evidently share the impression that the Indian government would keep its end of the bargain and he expressed the fears to his international listeners at the Indian Today Conclave.

“Earlier this month, I was concerned when I heard PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari propose that the issue of resolving the Kashmir dispute could wait and should be left for future generations to deal with,” Mr Malik told the meeting. “I was further distressed to see this notion welcomed in the media and within the public discourse in India.” I asked Mr Malik if he could show me a single instance when the Indian media, he was quoting fearfully, had raised its voice for a quick resolution of the Kashmir dispute. He had no answer. But, he carried on. When two prime ministers, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh, “have given public commitments to resolve this dispute what type of message are you now giving to the youth of Kashmir? I see this as a recipe for disaster. For 60 years, we have already seen this problem passed on to generation after generation and we have seen this conflict become more deadly and more costly.”

Bereft of the common fears that every Kashmiri has a right to nurture, for the region’s tragic saga is replete with incidence of betrayal and political sabotage, Mr Malik’s statement was grounded in solid assertions. What had the so-called passing of the baton to the next generation meant in the context of Kashmir, he asked. “For 60 years, three generations of Kashmiris have suffered this conflict and the injustice that it represents. We have seen our nation divided and disputed between India and Pakistan. Kashmiris are the people from whom everything was taken and still our voice, our aspirations, is yet to be heard and accepted as legitimate and fair. I cannot describe to you what it is like to be born in a conflict-zone in which your future is absolutely uncertain.”

Mr Malik said: “Three generations of Kashmiris have suffered this in different ways. We have seen our society and our social fabric transformed by the forces of heavy military occupation, state manipulation and violent conflict. For 60 years, my people have persisted in an epic of struggle and sacrifice to win our dream of independence and to achieve a peaceful and certain future. We have paid a very heavy cost. We have seen our non-violent struggle crushed by violence and its adherents tortured and locked behind the bars for decades. My own generation finally lost faith in the effectiveness of non-violent struggle and felt compelled to pick up the gun in 1988 for the same convictions our parents held. My entire generation got almost entirely wiped out.”

Unfortunately, neither Mr Malik’s secular pitch nor his traditional quest for equidistance from India and Pakistan, a dream for an independent state of Jammu and Kashmir, is a favoured precept these days. “It is heart-breaking,” he lamented, “that Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit youth have grown up without each other’s friendship. I am deeply worried that our culture of coexistence is under permanent threat if we are unable to end our separation soon. The longer this issue gets delayed the more complicated it will become. Yet, now in 2008 we are hearing that we should pass it on to yet another generation to deal with?” All in all it was a moving speech that won him a loud applause. Someone asked Mr Malik if he was willing to forget and forgive the trauma Kashmir had endured for future reconciliation. He replied in the affirmative, but forgiveness without a resolution to the dispute would not bring peace.

His three demands were: 1) India and Pakistan must institutionalise the peace process, 2) all the key parties in both countries must formally be taken on board, and 3) most importantly, self-representation and inclusion of the people of Jammu & Kashmir must be guaranteed in any good faith negotiation meant to decide the future of his homeland.

To end his speech Mr Malik borrowed a highly moving quote from the celebrated young writer and holocaust victim Anne Frank: “Isn’t it wonderful that no one need wait a single moment, before starting to improve the world?” The sentiment was not too different from that expressed by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq before the OIC delegates in Dakar. The question is, for all their brilliance and empathy with the suffering Kashmiri people, why won’t the Kashmiri leaders stop being sectarian and start talking to each other? Some people may choose to see their mutual aloofness as a case of the proverbial hundred flowers blooming for Kashmir. To others it bears an unmistakable imprint of too many cooks, unknowingly perhaps, but spoiling the broth nevertheless.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com