THE grass is trampled not only when elephants fight. It is also trampled when they make love. Why is it that when Pakistan and India are talking peace, and are on their best behaviour in decades, the people of Kashmir are cautious and wary?
Is history shaping their attitude? Pakistan and India never consulted them when both countries went to war, ostensibly over the future of Kashmir. Are they likely to consult then when talk of peace fills the air?
The joint statement issued in New York after Dr Manmohan Singh and Gen Pervez Musharraf met says that the two leaders “addressed the issue of Jammu and Kashmir and agreed that possible options for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the issue should be explored in a sincere spirit and purposeful manner.”
By pundits on both sides this formulation — regarding the exploration of options — has been hailed as a step forward. The question is, even when India and Pakistan begin this voyage of exploration, at what stage of the odyssey do the Kashmiris come in? Or are they doomed to be spoken about, never spoken to?
Pakistan, champion of the Kashmir cause, once championed the Taliban (a fatal course of action that should never have been pursued) before selling the Taliban down the tube when New York’s Twin Towers were hit and Colin Powell and Richard Armitage piled on the pressure.
No, as the record testifies, even before any real pressure was applied. For the Pakistani leadership accepted all of America’s demands on the spot, without insisting on negotiations or anything else in return, a measure of magnanimity that, let alone Powell and Armitage, took the entire Bush administration by surprise.
(Read Bob Woodward’s “Bush at War” for an insight into the mood in the White House post-Sept 11. The Americans were desperate for Pakistani cooperation. No one in the Bush administration expected the Pakistanis to be quite as obliging as they turned out to be. No wonder Gen Musharraf is such a star hit in Washington.)
What’s to convince the Kashmiris that Pakistan won’t do a Taliban on them?
After all, American prodding, not homegrown wisdom, is the driving force behind the current moves for Indo-Pakistan normalization. If in doubt, consult Colin Powell. After the meeting in New York between the Indo-Pakistan principals, he said: “(It) was our efforts, and the efforts of the partners that we work with... that made that come about.” He has made similar claims in the past. Which makes one wonder whether, left to themselves, the two countries would have emerged from their time warp.
In any event, what are the Americans telling India and Pakistan? With other eggs to fry — Afghanistan, Iraq, etc — the Americans can do without a distraction in the subcontinent, the Pakistan army looking east, guns trained on India, when its services are needed in the west, for the pacification of the Afghan borderlands.
So both countries, especially Pakistan, have been advised to cool it as far as Kashmir is concerned and get on with life in other spheres. Sensible advice but where does it leave the Kashmiris?
Whatever the communiques say, and there is no point in reading too much into vague verbal declarations, the reality on the ground is that if there is a Kashmir settlement tomorrow, it can only mean the freezing of the status quo. No other outcome seems possible in today’s circumstances.
As a plebiscite and international arbitration are out of the question — the passage of time and inconclusive wars having taken care of both those options — what we are left with at best is some territorial adjustment; at worst, the status quo.
As the occupying power, is India amenable to any territorial concessions? If the only realistic answer is no, what Kashmir settlement are we talking about unless it boils down to a Pakistani acceptance of the status quo? There is nothing wrong with that if that’s the only realistic option available but then why give the impression we might be headed for an historic settlement? Raising expectations when the stars are not in conjunction is not sensible policy.
The Kashmiris have always been left out in the cold. India cannot bring itself to allow them a seat at the diplomatic table while Pakistan has lacked the imagination to make their aspirations the centrepiece of its Kashmir policy.
In effect, the Kashmiris are being told that while in theory everyone is willing to die for them, in practice they are not entitled to speak for themselves. Wary of Pakistani intentions and heartily sick of Indian repression, don’t blame the Kashmiris if they feel like saying: a plague on both your houses.
Pakistan betrays a measure of confusion when it says it is willing to go beyond stated positions.
This amounts to diluting if not forsaking the principle of self-determination on which its entire stand on Kashmir rests. In any case, it should be for the Kashmiris, and not Pakistan, to stick to, or go beyond, stated positions. For once Pakistan should follow, not lead.
India’s problem is far graver, its position on Kashmir riddled with contradictions. On the one hand, it grudgingly admits Kashmir’s status as an issue awaiting resolution. On the other, it maintains the fiction that Kashmir is an integral part of the Indian Union. How can the future of an integral part of India become a subject of discussion with Pakistan? If it does, what becomes of the fiction?
India also holds that engaging the people of Kashmir in any meaningful dialogue is an internal matter between the Indian government and the Kashmiris. If this were really so, and if India had a more sensitive touch, Kashmir as a problem would have been consigned to the trashcan of history long ago, leaving Pakistan holding an empty cup.
The father of Kashmiri nationalism, Shaikh Abdullah, was on India’s side, not Pakistan’s.
He became disillusioned when he saw Indian policy for what it was: stonewalling. Later, after spending years in prison, when he made a virtue of expediency and became chief minister of the disputed state, his moral standing plummeted while his successors, lacking his credentials, were denounced as Indian stooges.
India had a priceless opportunity to address the causes of Kashmiri alienation in the period between Pakistan’s military defeat at India’s hands in 1971 and the start of the Kashmir uprising in 1989 — 17 years sacrificed to neglect and complacency.
Kashmiris were faced with a hard choice. They could either live with the status quo, which many found abhorrent, or they could seek new forms of struggle. It was in this climate that the most spirited elements of the population sought salvation through armed struggle. Pakistan exploited this situation. Even if it had wanted to, it could not have manufactured it.
In the very exploitation, however, lay the seeds of a blunder. A freedom movement loses its character when taken over by foreign elements. In a replay of Afghanistan — the ISI playing favourites and exerting control over the Afghan resistance — the Kashmir resistance found itself hijacked by Pakistan-based elements, a nationalist movement thus transformed into an enterprise looking suspiciously as if sponsored by Islamabad.
If that was one extreme, Pakistan’s military leadership now appears to be swinging to the other extreme of “going beyond stated positions” without having any idea where this new-found flexibility may lead or indeed what it is meant to achieve.
Don’t go to war over Kashmir. It makes no sense and indeed never did. Don’t sponsor jihad from Pakistan for that in the end, far from achieving anything, only undercuts Kashmiri aspirations.
Proceed with normalization and indeed strengthen it but don’t sacrifice the people of Kashmir in the bargain.
If there is a real deal India is offering, which it is not, then by all means abandon “stated positions”.
But if nothing of the sort is on the table, or ever is likely to be, if India can’t bring itself to talk to the Kashmiris in any meaningful manner, what sense for Pakistan to lurch in some desperation towards an objective which is no more than a mirage on the horizon?