WHAT thunderbolt must strike us from the heavens to realize that a Kashmir solution that can satisfy our concerns or preconceptions does not exist. At least not in the realm of possibility.

Of course we can have a Camp David or something like the Oslo Accords on Kashmir. But then let us remember that these agreements brought not the peace of the brave but of the faint-hearted to the Middle East - the pusillanimity all lying on the Arab side. It is wrong also to say that at Camp David Egypt offered peace and got back the Sinai in return. Not only did it offer peace. It also, perforce, had to offer castration. Egyptian castration lies at the heart of the Camp David agreement.

The kind of Kashmir solution that we want can come about only if India returns to the anarchy of the post-Mughal period when there was no central authority and the Mughal empire had broken up into different pieces. Only when such conditions are recreated, only if India follows the Gorbachev path of self-destruction, can we get the Kashmir solution we want. What after all do we want from Kashmir? That India should vacate the Vale and that the Vale, the heaven-on-earth of so much song, should fall to the lot of Pakistan.

This will not happen till the mountains move. (I almost said till Birnam Wood doth come to Dunsinane but then thought better of it because in an age where education has become synonymous with computers the slightest allusion to literature risks charges of obscurity. So the mountains it shall have to be.) Or are we still prey to the illusion that there is an armed solution to the on-going saga of Kashmir?

What about a negotiated solution then? Alas, there is none which can even remotely satisfy us. If we get not the Vale, and if India does not agree to a plebiscite, what, from our point of view, is the point of talking? If India does not budge on these two points it follows (with a logic writ in iron) that any negotiations on Kashmir will ultimately boil down to Pakistan offering unilateral concessions: no support to the Kashmiri freedom struggle, thus giving India a free hand to deal with the Kashmiri freedom struggle on its own terms.

This precisely is the dilemma we face: that neither arms nor talks hold the promise, or even the illusion, of a solution. But a dilemma washed with Kashmiri blood and buttressed with subcontinental foolishness, Kashmir being the third great example of modern subcontinental folly, the other two being (1) the events leading up to the partition of India and (2) the birth of Bangladesh.

Who forced partition? Contrary to the myths surrounding that seminal event, not Jinnah or the Muslim League. If anyone amongst the great Indian leaders had a modern or secular outlook it was Jinnah, leagues ahead in this regard of the confused and half-baked socialist in Nehru. What Jinnah and the Muslims wanted were safeguards so that their interests (material interests) should not be trampled underfoot by the Hindu majority. From 1920 onwards the history of Indian politics attests to the inability or the unwillingness of the Congress under Gandhi's leadership to address these Muslim concerns.

Furthermore, it was Gandhi not Jinnah who couched politics in religious terms. So who was the fundamentalist between them? Certainly not Jinnah who never spoke the language of Muslim revivalism, that not being a problem in his mind. It was Gandhi who after Vivekananda was the great avatar of Hindu revivalism. To his everlasting credit he thereby was able to reach down to the Hindu masses and make a mass party of the Congress. But he refused to see, till it was too late, that there was also a communal problem in India. This, and not the narrow-mindedness which Indian writers ascribe to the Muslim League, was the basis of partition.

Anyone having doubts on this score can do worse than read Azad's 'India Wins Freedom'. Azad indeed, looking at the reaction of Nehru and Patel to the Cabinet Mission Plan (which envisaged a united or confederal India), calls Patel the father of partition.

The second great folly was ours in East Pakistan. Bangladesh was not born because of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the East Pakistan Rifles, the Mukti Bahini or even the Indian army. It was born out of the stupidity and arrogance of West Pakistan.

The third great subcontinental folly is being enacted by India in Kashmir. India had fifty years to win over the Kashmiris. But it failed even to satisfy Shaikh Abdullah whose sympathies lay with India not Pakistan. From 1972 to 1989 Pakistan just forgot about Kashmir. Firstly, because it had the loss of East Pakistan to come to terms with. Secondly, because Zia was embroiled in Afghanistan. Were not 18 years long enough to woo the Kashmiris and bind them to Mother India? They would have been if Indian policy had been driven by statesmanship rather than by a search for petty and short-term advantages.

Scapegoats and bogeys are comforting things because they are alibis for failure. How easy to pin the blame for everything on the ISI. But the unrest in Kashmir was never the ISI's creation. It arose out of the same smallness of spirit, in degree if not in scope, which the Congress leadership displayed in the run-up to 1947. In more ways than one, the subcontinent remains a slave to its past.

But none of this history resolves the Pakistani dilemma over Kashmir: to fight or to talk? Fighting will get us nowhere and talking, given the facts, can only lead to another castration, this time of Pakistan, at American hands. What then to do?

The first necessity is to liberate the Kashmiri resistance from the clutches of fundamentalism. If the Kashmiris in the Valley want to fight for their liberation we have a moral duty to help them, not just with the empty rhetoric of diplomacy but with arms and materiel. Of this duty we are not absolved even by the risk of international censure or lectures read to us by mid-ranking functionaries of the State Department.

But if the Kashmiris want to talk to India that should be their sovereign decision without anyone in Pakistan getting upset by such a development. In short, it is not for us to tell the Kashmiris what to do or how to go about their struggle. That should be for them to decide. We tried directing and remote-controlling the Afghan jihad. Look what a mess we made of it. We have no business replicating the same experience in Kashmir.

But if we are to ensure that the Kashmiri resistance does not go the way of the Afghan 'jehad' - fragmented, increasingly ineffective and prone to internecine warfare - we will have to liberate ourselves from the insidious appeal of holy warriorism. Because of our Afghan involvement there are too many confused souls in our intelligence establishment who believe that an Islamic empire is out there waiting to be created. They forget that while faith was an important factor in Afghanistan, so too were Stinger missiles and Saudi and American dollars. In this context, it is hard to figure out which is the more dangerous or mentally-contricting: the Hamid Gul or the Jamaat-i-Islami schools of thought? Both have to be eradicated if anything like sanity and good sense are to be restored to our higher decision-making.

But an all-important caveat: reining in the demons of fundamentalism should not mean succumbing to the dictates and prejudices of the State Department. It should not mean abandoning our stand on Kashmir or following the American agenda in Afghanistan. For Kashmir's sake we should not imperil our own security. Or put upon ourselves a burden we cannot carry. But neither should we abandon our principled stand. It is important to grasp the distinction between being rash and consistent.

We must do the right thing because that is in our interests and because common sense so dictates. Not simply to appease distant godfathers. In any case, concessions made by the weak are never put down to wisdom. Always to necessity. Let us by all means get off the high horse of messianism in Kashmir and Afghanistan. But let us beware also of thoughtless concessions. We won't get thirty pieces of silver for them.

But above all let us hasten to put our internal house in order. Only when steadiness and a sense of purpose reside there can steadfastness and a measure of wisdom enter our foreign crusades. If not, we will keep being rigid where we should bend. And be weak and compliant where we need to stand tall.

WHAT thunderbolt must strike us from the heavens to realize that a Kashmir solution that can satisfy our concerns or preconceptions does not exist. At least not in the realm of possibility.

Of course we can have a Camp David or something like the Oslo Accords on Kashmir. But then let us remember that these agreements brought not the peace of the brave but of the faint-hearted to the Middle East - the pusillanimity all lying on the Arab side. It is wrong also to say that at Camp David Egypt offered peace and got back the Sinai in return. Not only did it offer peace. It also, perforce, had to offer castration. Egyptian castration lies at the heart of the Camp David agreement.

The kind of Kashmir solution that we want can come about only if India returns to the anarchy of the post-Mughal period when there was no central authority and the Mughal empire had broken up into different pieces. Only when such conditions are recreated, only if India follows the Gorbachev path of self-destruction, can we get the Kashmir solution we want. What after all do we want from Kashmir? That India should vacate the Vale and that the Vale, the heaven-on-earth of so much song, should fall to the lot of Pakistan.

This will not happen till the mountains move. (I almost said till Birnam Wood doth come to Dunsinane but then thought better of it because in an age where education has become synonymous with computers the slightest allusion to literature risks charges of obscurity. So the mountains it shall have to be.) Or are we still prey to the illusion that there is an armed solution to the on-going saga of Kashmir?

What about a negotiated solution then? Alas, there is none which can even remotely satisfy us. If we get not the Vale, and if India does not agree to a plebiscite, what, from our point of view, is the point of talking? If India does not budge on these two points it follows (with a logic writ in iron) that any negotiations on Kashmir will ultimately boil down to Pakistan offering unilateral concessions: no support to the Kashmiri freedom struggle, thus giving India a free hand to deal with the Kashmiri freedom struggle on its own terms.

This precisely is the dilemma we face: that neither arms nor talks hold the promise, or even the illusion, of a solution. But a dilemma washed with Kashmiri blood and buttressed with subcontinental foolishness, Kashmir being the third great example of modern subcontinental folly, the other two being (1) the events leading up to the partition of India and (2) the birth of Bangladesh.

Who forced partition? Contrary to the myths surrounding that seminal event, not Jinnah or the Muslim League. If anyone amongst the great Indian leaders had a modern or secular outlook it was Jinnah, leagues ahead in this regard of the confused and half-baked socialist in Nehru. What Jinnah and the Muslims wanted were safeguards so that their interests (material interests) should not be trampled underfoot by the Hindu majority. From 1920 onwards the history of Indian politics attests to the inability or the unwillingness of the Congress under Gandhi's leadership to address these Muslim concerns.

Furthermore, it was Gandhi not Jinnah who couched politics in religious terms. So who was the fundamentalist between them? Certainly not Jinnah who never spoke the language of Muslim revivalism, that not being a problem in his mind. It was Gandhi who after Vivekananda was the great avatar of Hindu revivalism. To his everlasting credit he thereby was able to reach down to the Hindu masses and make a mass party of the Congress. But he refused to see, till it was too late, that there was also a communal problem in India. This, and not the narrow-mindedness which Indian writers ascribe to the Muslim League, was the basis of partition.

Anyone having doubts on this score can do worse than read Azad's 'India Wins Freedom'. Azad indeed, looking at the reaction of Nehru and Patel to the Cabinet Mission Plan (which envisaged a united or confederal India), calls Patel the father of partition.

The second great folly was ours in East Pakistan. Bangladesh was not born because of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the East Pakistan Rifles, the Mukti Bahini or even the Indian army. It was born out of the stupidity and arrogance of West Pakistan.

The third great subcontinental folly is being enacted by India in Kashmir. India had fifty years to win over the Kashmiris. But it failed even to satisfy Shaikh Abdullah whose sympathies lay with India not Pakistan. From 1972 to 1989 Pakistan just forgot about Kashmir. Firstly, because it had the loss of East Pakistan to come to terms with. Secondly, because Zia was embroiled in Afghanistan. Were not 18 years long enough to woo the Kashmiris and bind them to Mother India? They would have been if Indian policy had been driven by statesmanship rather than by a search for petty and short-term advantages.

Scapegoats and bogeys are comforting things because they are alibis for failure. How easy to pin the blame for everything on the ISI. But the unrest in Kashmir was never the ISI's creation. It arose out of the same smallness of spirit, in degree if not in scope, which the Congress leadership displayed in the run-up to 1947. In more ways than one, the subcontinent remains a slave to its past.

But none of this history resolves the Pakistani dilemma over Kashmir: to fight or to talk? Fighting will get us nowhere and talking, given the facts, can only lead to another castration, this time of Pakistan, at American hands. What then to do?

The first necessity is to liberate the Kashmiri resistance from the clutches of fundamentalism. If the Kashmiris in the Valley want to fight for their liberation we have a moral duty to help them, not just with the empty rhetoric of diplomacy but with arms and materiel. Of this duty we are not absolved even by the risk of international censure or lectures read to us by mid-ranking functionaries of the State Department.

But if the Kashmiris want to talk to India that should be their sovereign decision without anyone in Pakistan getting upset by such a development. In short, it is not for us to tell the Kashmiris what to do or how to go about their struggle. That should be for them to decide. We tried directing and remote-controlling the Afghan jihad. Look what a mess we made of it. We have no business replicating the same experience in Kashmir.

But if we are to ensure that the Kashmiri resistance does not go the way of the Afghan 'jehad' - fragmented, increasingly ineffective and prone to internecine warfare - we will have to liberate ourselves from the insidious appeal of holy warriorism. Because of our Afghan involvement there are too many confused souls in our intelligence establishment who believe that an Islamic empire is out there waiting to be created. They forget that while faith was an important factor in Afghanistan, so too were Stinger missiles and Saudi and American dollars. In this context, it is hard to figure out which is the more dangerous or mentally-contricting: the Hamid Gul or the Jamaat-i-Islami schools of thought? Both have to be eradicated if anything like sanity and good sense are to be restored to our higher decision-making.

But an all-important caveat: reining in the demons of fundamentalism should not mean succumbing to the dictates and prejudices of the State Department. It should not mean abandoning our stand on Kashmir or following the American agenda in Afghanistan. For Kashmir's sake we should not imperil our own security. Or put upon ourselves a burden we cannot carry. But neither should we abandon our principled stand. It is important to grasp the distinction between being rash and consistent.

We must do the right thing because that is in our interests and because common sense so dictates. Not simply to appease distant godfathers. In any case, concessions made by the weak are never put down to wisdom. Always to necessity. Let us by all means get off the high horse of messianism in Kashmir and Afghanistan. But let us beware also of thoughtless concessions. We won't get thirty pieces of silver for them.

But above all let us hasten to put our internal house in order. Only when steadiness and a sense of purpose reside there can steadfastness and a measure of wisdom enter our foreign crusades. If not, we will keep being rigid where we should bend. And be weak and compliant where we need to stand tall.

WHAT thunderbolt must strike us from the heavens to realize that a Kashmir solution that can satisfy our concerns or preconceptions does not exist. At least not in the realm of possibility.

Of course we can have a Camp David or something like the Oslo Accords on Kashmir. But then let us remember that these agreements brought not the peace of the brave but of the faint-hearted to the Middle East - the pusillanimity all lying on the Arab side. It is wrong also to say that at Camp David Egypt offered peace and got back the Sinai in return. Not only did it offer peace. It also, perforce, had to offer castration. Egyptian castration lies at the heart of the Camp David agreement.

The kind of Kashmir solution that we want can come about only if India returns to the anarchy of the post-Mughal period when there was no central authority and the Mughal empire had broken up into different pieces. Only when such conditions are recreated, only if India follows the Gorbachev path of self-destruction, can we get the Kashmir solution we want. What after all do we want from Kashmir? That India should vacate the Vale and that the Vale, the heaven-on-earth of so much song, should fall to the lot of Pakistan.

This will not happen till the mountains move. (I almost said till Birnam Wood doth come to Dunsinane but then thought better of it because in an age where education has become synonymous with computers the slightest allusion to literature risks charges of obscurity. So the mountains it shall have to be.) Or are we still prey to the illusion that there is an armed solution to the on-going saga of Kashmir?

What about a negotiated solution then? Alas, there is none which can even remotely satisfy us. If we get not the Vale, and if India does not agree to a plebiscite, what, from our point of view, is the point of talking? If India does not budge on these two points it follows (with a logic writ in iron) that any negotiations on Kashmir will ultimately boil down to Pakistan offering unilateral concessions: no support to the Kashmiri freedom struggle, thus giving India a free hand to deal with the Kashmiri freedom struggle on its own terms.

This precisely is the dilemma we face: that neither arms nor talks hold the promise, or even the illusion, of a solution. But a dilemma washed with Kashmiri blood and buttressed with subcontinental foolishness, Kashmir being the third great example of modern subcontinental folly, the other two being (1) the events leading up to the partition of India and (2) the birth of Bangladesh.

Who forced partition? Contrary to the myths surrounding that seminal event, not Jinnah or the Muslim League. If anyone amongst the great Indian leaders had a modern or secular outlook it was Jinnah, leagues ahead in this regard of the confused and half-baked socialist in Nehru. What Jinnah and the Muslims wanted were safeguards so that their interests (material interests) should not be trampled underfoot by the Hindu majority. From 1920 onwards the history of Indian politics attests to the inability or the unwillingness of the Congress under Gandhi's leadership to address these Muslim concerns.

Furthermore, it was Gandhi not Jinnah who couched politics in religious terms. So who was the fundamentalist between them? Certainly not Jinnah who never spoke the language of Muslim revivalism, that not being a problem in his mind. It was Gandhi who after Vivekananda was the great avatar of Hindu revivalism. To his everlasting credit he thereby was able to reach down to the Hindu masses and make a mass party of the Congress. But he refused to see, till it was too late, that there was also a communal problem in India. This, and not the narrow-mindedness which Indian writers ascribe to the Muslim League, was the basis of partition.

Anyone having doubts on this score can do worse than read Azad's 'India Wins Freedom'. Azad indeed, looking at the reaction of Nehru and Patel to the Cabinet Mission Plan (which envisaged a united or confederal India), calls Patel the father of partition.

The second great folly was ours in East Pakistan. Bangladesh was not born because of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the East Pakistan Rifles, the Mukti Bahini or even the Indian army. It was born out of the stupidity and arrogance of West Pakistan.

The third great subcontinental folly is being enacted by India in Kashmir. India had fifty years to win over the Kashmiris. But it failed even to satisfy Shaikh Abdullah whose sympathies lay with India not Pakistan. From 1972 to 1989 Pakistan just forgot about Kashmir. Firstly, because it had the loss of East Pakistan to come to terms with. Secondly, because Zia was embroiled in Afghanistan. Were not 18 years long enough to woo the Kashmiris and bind them to Mother India? They would have been if Indian policy had been driven by statesmanship rather than by a search for petty and short-term advantages.

Scapegoats and bogeys are comforting things because they are alibis for failure. How easy to pin the blame for everything on the ISI. But the unrest in Kashmir was never the ISI's creation. It arose out of the same smallness of spirit, in degree if not in scope, which the Congress leadership displayed in the run-up to 1947. In more ways than one, the subcontinent remains a slave to its past.

But none of this history resolves the Pakistani dilemma over Kashmir: to fight or to talk? Fighting will get us nowhere and talking, given the facts, can only lead to another castration, this time of Pakistan, at American hands. What then to do?

The first necessity is to liberate the Kashmiri resistance from the clutches of fundamentalism. If the Kashmiris in the Valley want to fight for their liberation we have a moral duty to help them, not just with the empty rhetoric of diplomacy but with arms and materiel. Of this duty we are not absolved even by the risk of international censure or lectures read to us by mid-ranking functionaries of the State Department.

But if the Kashmiris want to talk to India that should be their sovereign decision without anyone in Pakistan getting upset by such a development. In short, it is not for us to tell the Kashmiris what to do or how to go about their struggle. That should be for them to decide. We tried directing and remote-controlling the Afghan jihad. Look what a mess we made of it. We have no business replicating the same experience in Kashmir.

But if we are to ensure that the Kashmiri resistance does not go the way of the Afghan 'jehad' - fragmented, increasingly ineffective and prone to internecine warfare - we will have to liberate ourselves from the insidious appeal of holy warriorism. Because of our Afghan involvement there are too many confused souls in our intelligence establishment who believe that an Islamic empire is out there waiting to be created. They forget that while faith was an important factor in Afghanistan, so too were Stinger missiles and Saudi and American dollars. In this context, it is hard to figure out which is the more dangerous or mentally-contricting: the Hamid Gul or the Jamaat-i-Islami schools of thought? Both have to be eradicated if anything like sanity and good sense are to be restored to our higher decision-making.

But an all-important caveat: reining in the demons of fundamentalism should not mean succumbing to the dictates and prejudices of the State Department. It should not mean abandoning our stand on Kashmir or following the American agenda in Afghanistan. For Kashmir's sake we should not imperil our own security. Or put upon ourselves a burden we cannot carry. But neither should we abandon our principled stand. It is important to grasp the distinction between being rash and consistent.

We must do the right thing because that is in our interests and because common sense so dictates. Not simply to appease distant godfathers. In any case, concessions made by the weak are never put down to wisdom. Always to necessity. Let us by all means get off the high horse of messianism in Kashmir and Afghanistan. But let us beware also of thoughtless concessions. We won't get thirty pieces of silver for them.

But above all let us hasten to put our internal house in order. Only when steadiness and a sense of purpose reside there can steadfastness and a measure of wisdom enter our foreign crusades. If not, we will keep being rigid where we should bend. And be weak and compliant where we need to stand tall.