IT may not quite be a four-point potential solution to the Kashmir dispute that was once mooted under the now retired Gen Pervez Musharraf but Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s proposed four points to stabilise the disputed region are worth considering.

Ahead of the prime minister’s address at the 70th UN General Assembly, the Foreign Office had indicated that Mr Sharif would concentrate on the Kashmir issue, though it had not indicated how it would try and revive global interest to help address the dispute.

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After the Ufa debacle, with the Indian government insisting on talking only about terrorism, the Pakistani government changed tack and had begun to once again focus mostly on Kashmir.

The fear, then, was that Pakistan and India were returning to a period of talking past each other instead of talking to each other. Seemingly aware that Pakistan had to offer concrete proposals to tackle Indian intransigence, Mr Sharif and his team have come up with four interesting points that have something for both sides.

The immediate out-of-hand dismissal of the proposal by the Indian government has only underscored that the problem is really the India government’s apparent rejection of the very idea of talks with Pakistan.

Prime Minister Sharif’s trump card was to call for the formalisation of the 2003 ceasefire agreement that was verbally agreed to and adhered to for the better part of a decade.

Given that the mechanism has already been tried and tested and produced positive results for many years, it is a sound offer.

Furthermore, to make such a call from the podium of the UN General Assembly hall and to request that the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan step up its verifications suggests that Pakistan really does want to put a stop to the year-long violence along the LoC and the Working Boundary.

While the demilitarisation of the disputed region and the withdrawal of troops from Siachen are perhaps longer-term goals that can only be realised once a full-fledged peace process is resumed, they do articulate a vision for what a normalised region could look like.

The challenge for the Pakistani government will be to carry forward these proposals and press them in other forums.

As the immediate and fierce Indian response indicated, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in no mood to go beyond its talking points of terrorism and attempting to link it to Pakistan.

To push for bilateral normalisation when one side — a side courted by the outside world for economic and diplomatic reasons — is determined to talk only on its own terms is a very hard task indeed.

The problem, as ever, is compounded by the sense that the outside world is somewhat sympathetic to the Indian claim that Pakistan continues to tolerate anti-India, pro-Kashmir jihadists on its soil.

A tension-free region must also be a terrorism-free region. A zero-tolerance policy is still awaited here.

Published in Dawn October 2nd, 2015

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