EVERY time India and Pakistan meet for a round of ‘composite dialogue’ — a process tedious enough to test the patience of a saint — the holy casket containing the ashes of the Kashmir dispute gets lowered another foot into the ground. At this rate, the day is not far off when this casket leaves the diplomatic sphere and enters the realm of archaeology.
The Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers have met again, this time in Islamabad. At the end of their talks a joint statement has been issued, packed with the usual bromides. On Kashmir: “The Ministers reiterated that possible options for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the issue of Jammu and Kashmir should be explored in a sincere, purposeful and forward-looking manner.” If there is any triumph these hollow words celebrate it is that of vagueness.
The whole aim of Indian diplomacy regarding the Kashmir dispute has been to drain the last signs of life from it. Far from challenging India on this score, Pakistan under the baton of military statesmanship has been bending over backwards to assist it. Pandering to Indian concerns about “terrorism” our leaders have been struck by verbal paralysis when it comes to saying anything about Kashmiri self-determination. When was the last time a Pakistani leader — not Shaikh Rashid Ahmed, thank you — brought up the subject?
Signalling readiness to move beyond the UN resolutions on Kashmir was a huge and needless concession Pakistan made to India. When you leapfrog over those resolutions, framed around the right of self-determination, you are left with the husk of the dispute, its spirit exorcised.
Pakistan’s hope, forlorn as it turns out, was to elicit some return flexibility. As the on-off dialogue on Kashmir all too clearly reveals, India is in no mood for flexibility of any kind — verbal, rhetorical, substantive.
We may be the biggest throwaway artists in the world — look at the Jan 6, 2004, joint Indo-Pakistan statement signed in Islamabad which might as well have been drafted in the Indian ministry of external affairs — but Indian diplomats quibble over every comma and full stop. The club of retired Indian ambassadors to Islamabad boasts of some of the hardest-boiled eggs on the planet. I suspect we tend to get carried away more easily, although in defence of self-interest we could do worse than follow India’s example.
The strident objections of the peace-with-India-at-any-cost brigade should not be ignored. Kashmir is an albatross round Pakistan’s neck. Both countries have wasted too much time in empty bellicosity. It’s time to move on and be realistic, code language, in this context, for forgetting about Kashmir. These are weighty objections but then no one is advocating thermo-nuclear war for the sake of Kashmir, merely the proposition that, if a final solution is unattainable, it doesn’t make sense for Pakistan to stop talking about the right of self-determination. By doing so we gain nothing and risk losing what’s left of Kashmiri trust in Pakistan.
Once upon a time Pakistan promoted militants like Ali Shah Geelani in Indian-held Kashmir. Now, in the name of realism, it is promoting the likes of Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, considered little better than quislings by most Kashmiri Muslims. What good is this shift doing us?
It’s one thing not to remind India of its bad faith on Kashmir, quite another to become apologists for Indian intransigence and to insist, as General Musharraf did in New York last month, that India was showing flexibility when in fact it has shown none.
The irony is that we are hearing these apologies from the very people who not long ago upheld the banner of military adventurism. The people of Pakistan didn’t vote for Kargil. Come to think of it, even the then prime minister was a bit confused about what exactly the army was up to on those craggy heights, and what it was hoping to achieve.
Having abandoned confrontation under pressure — the pressure of international circumstances — military thinking has swung to the other extreme: a course suspiciously close to appeasement. It is hard to figure out which is more dangerous: the military at war or the military at peace.
The point has come where there is no shortage of Pakistanis positively fearful of their government’s mania for unilateral concessions. Sure, Pakistan is not ceding territory or sovereignty to India. Even so, it is irritating to see Pakistan performing minor gymnastics to show flexibility and then citing its own athletic performance as proof of progress along the road to peace. This is a recipe for self-deception.
The composite dialogue is settling into a familiar pattern. India doesn’t budge an inch from known positions. To induce movement Pakistan throws a concession. Nothing happens, India still refusing to budge. Pakistan throws another concession. Again nothing happens. Pakistan goes into a sulk and there is talk of the peace process stalling. At which point India, by way of a lollipop, thrusts a ‘confidence-building measure’ (CBM) in Pakistan’s mouth. There is rejoicing in Pakistan and editorials are written about how things are finally on the move.
Never mind progress on serious issues: Siachen, Baglihar Dam, Sir Creek, etc. India has a large jar of lollipops to keep the leading lights of Pakistani diplomacy happy: more bus services, incremental expansion of trade, notification of missile tests, etc. These are useful items of progress and indeed there should be more of them. But for a change we could do with some movement on the larger issues.
Certainly we possess no lever to induce India to relax its iron grip on Kashmir. The people of Kashmir may be sick and tired of Indian rule — if they weren’t, there would be no need to keep so many troops there to keep their heads down — but India is not about to consult, much less honour, their wishes. Even if India has no legitimate title to the state, and it doesn’t, the fact of possession or occupation (nine-tenths of the law, remember) is in its favour. After three and a half failed wars — Kargil being the half-volley — there is nothing we can do about it.
But if this is realistic map-reading, seeing the situation as it really is, how does it follow that a Pakistani leadership should assume the burden of easing India’s conscience by playing down the right of self-determination, which is the essence of the Kashmir dispute? It is in India’s interest to dilute this essence. We should not be playing India’s game.
It is a mistake to encourage the false belief, as this government seems to be doing, that all this one-sided flexibility is deployed for a noble cause, that from it will emerge the outlines of a final Kashmir settlement. An opium-eater is allowed such delusions, not a nation aware of its surroundings.
India is not about to meet Pakistani or Kashmiri aspirations. The only settlement India favours is to freeze the status quo, put the Kashmir dispute on ice and engage Pakistan on other fronts. This is the course it has always advocated and now that the composite dialogue is being conducted very much on these terms, India is not about to abandon it.
How many times in the past one year has Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ruled out any change of frontiers? This is plain enough English. It shouldn’t be so hard for us to understand what this means.
So let’s not kid ourselves. Kashmir is not about to be solved in a hurry and certainly not during the tenure of this government. Musharraf’s uniform may work wonders at home, sadly, it works no miracles abroad. Let there be more bus and train services, easier visa conditions, more bilateral engagement but without false hopes and, preferably, without the tear-jerking sentimentalism at which we Pakistanis seem to be so good.