Quest for peace in Kashmir

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Narendra Modi government took a major initiative when it appointed former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma last week as interlocutor for dialogue with all stakeholders to restore peace in Jammu and Kashmir. 

Kashmir had witnessed recurrent violence after security forces killed young Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani last year. Parliament was told that at least 88 civilians joined militancy in the valley in 2016, the highest number in six years.

The year also saw an increase in exchange of fire across the Line of Control. Truce violations are generally linked to attempts at infiltration by Pakistan-based militants and efforts by Indian forces to foil them. 

The first hint of a softening in the government’s approach came in August when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared in his Independence Day address that “neither by bullets nor by abuses but by hugging can we solve the problem of Kashmir.”

In September, even as the National Investigation Agency was tracking flow of funds to separatist groups, Home Minister Rajnath Singh spent four days in the valley to assess the ground situation and affirm the government’s readiness to meet anyone willing to help in finding solutions to the state’s problems.

The interlocutor’s appointment was a source of relief to Chief Minister Mehmooda Mufti whose regional People’s Democratic Party rules the state with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party as a junior partner. She had been watching helplessly as central forces dealt with stone-throwing youths with a heavy hand through most of 2016, one of the bloodiest years for both militants and security personnel.

Official sources put the number of militants killed during the year at 165, the highest in six years, and the number of security personnel killed at 87, the highest in eight years.

The PDP-BJP alliance was dictated by electoral arithmetic. With 28 seats the PDP had emerged as the largest party in the Assembly in the 2014 elections. A near-sweep in the Hindu-majority Jammu region made the BJP a close second with 25 seats. Overlooking ideological differences, the two parties came together to provide the state a stable government. 

Thereafter the BJP stopped talking about abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution which gives Jammu and Kashmir a special status and the PDP stopped demanding withdrawal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which grants impunity to security personnel deployed in the state.

The coalition has an Agenda for Alliance hammered out in talks spread over three months. Mehmooda Mufti has been unhappy over the tardy progress in its implementation.

Developments in Kashmir often have an external dimension too. The current peace effort is taking place as the United States pressures Pakistan to check militants operating from its soil and seeks to draw India into its plans for Afghanistan and the Asia-Pacific region.

Both the PDP and BJP welcomed the appointment of the interlocutor. So did the state’s main opposition party, the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, whose leader Omar Abdullah viewed it as a sign of recognition of the political nature of the Kashmir issue and a resounding defeat of the idea that it could be solved by use of force. 

The Congress party dismissed the Centre’s action as a publicity move. When P Chidambaram, who was Home Minister in the last Congress-led government, suggested greater autonomy for the state might be a solution to its problems, the party quickly distanced itself from the idea, fearing the BJP would use it against it.

Nevertheless Modi interpreted Chidambaram’s words to mean that the Congress is talking the language of Pakistan, lending support to separatists and insulting India’s brave soldiers.

Dineshwar Sharma has a mandate to talk to all stakeholders. Interest, therefore, centres on the response of the Hurriyat Conference, the umbrella under which those who want merger with Pakistan and those who harbour hopes of an independent Kashmir are gathered.

A spokesman of its hardline faction, led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, said the organisation’s executive committee would formulate its position. Moulvi Umar Farooq, who is identified with its moderate faction, and Yasin Malik, leader of the pro-independence J and K Liberation Front, offered no comment.

Sharma is embarking upon a project of a kind the state has gone through before with nothing to show on the ground. As a flag-waving Hindu nationalist, Modi is in a better position than anyone around to push for a settlement of both the internal and external aspects of the Kashmir problem. However, his misinterpretation of Chidambaram’s reference to autonomy raises the question whether he can display the level of statesmanship it calls for. Modi’s mind is on the next election, not on the next generation. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 31, 2017.

Back to square one

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

There is no need to shed tears over the aborted meeting of National Security Advisers of India and Pakistan. It could only have produced more rancour.

Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif was present, along with other South Asian leaders, at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swearing-in in 2014. The goodwill his presence generated evaporated when, barely three months later, the government cancelled a scheduled meeting of Foreign Secretaries of the two countries, to show its disapproval of Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit’s consultations with leaders of the Kashmir’s separatist All Party Hurriyat Conference.

The meeting of officials was part of composite India-Pakistan talks, which have a long history. In 1997, a Foreign Secretary-level meeting outlined eight outstanding issues of concern to the two countries and proposed mechanisms to address them in an integrated manner. Over the years the process yielded some small gains but lack of determined political intervention inhibited progress on major issues.

The 2008 Mumbai terror attack derailed the process. It was put back on track in 2011 with a meeting of Home Secretaries at which terrorism was on the agenda. A few rounds of talks followed but there was little to show.

The cancellation of the Foreign Secretaries’ meeting attracted some criticism at home since India had previously overlooked the Pakistani envoy’s contacts with Kashmiri separatists. But Modi was determined to send across a message that they were not acceptable to him.

Last month, Modi and Nawaz Sharif shook hands at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at Ufa, Russia, and discussed modalities of resuming bilateral talks. A joint statement issued later said they agreed India and Pakistan had a collective responsibility to ensure peace and promote development and that “they are prepared to discuss all outstanding issues”. It spelt out five specific steps, including NSA level talks, and contacts between army officials to improve the situation along the Line of Control which had witnessed continuous exchange of fire.

While the statement conveyed the impression that the composite talks were on again, India’s focus was on the first of the five proposed steps, namely a meeting of NSAs Sartaj Aziz and Ajit Doval in New Delhi to discuss terrorism-related issues.

Back home, Sharif came under attack for the Ufa statement as Pakistanis saw as one-sided inasmuch as it did not mention Kashmir, which, to them, is the central issue. They refused to buy official explanations that Kashmir had come up in the Modi-Sharif meeting and that the term “outstanding issues” covered Kashmir.

The Modi government has been projecting a hawkish image for some time to impress the Hindutva constituency. After Myanmar-based Naga rebels killed 18 security personnel in an ambush in Manipur, the Indian army conducted a retaliatory raid across the border. Official spokesmen said it was a warning to all terrorists operating from foreign soil.

As the scheduled meeting of NSAs approached, Pakistan was ready with a bait set. When India sent a draft agenda with terrorism as the only item, it sent an alternative one listing topics it wanted to be discussed, including Kashmir. Basit invited Hurriyat leaders to meet Sartaj Aziz over dinner.

To prevent the Hurriyat leaders from leaving Srinagar for Delhi, the Centre ordered that they be put under house arrest. As Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, whose People’s Democratic Party rules the state in coalition with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, remonstrated, the Centre decided instead to arrest the Hurriyat leaders on arrival at Delhi airport.

With the fate of the NSA meet sealed, the two sides played out a long charade in front of television cameras with the singular aim of backing off without having to take the blame. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj demanded that Pakistan convey by midnight its acceptance of India’s advice not to meet Hurriyat leaders and limit the talks to terrorism. That gave Pakistan the opportunity to pull out saying there could be no talks on the basis of conditions.

Material which has come to light in the past week shows that the two governments spent the last month preparing dossiers the NSAs were to exchange. The meeting having fallen through, they publicised the charges against each other through the media.

After a 15-month-long journey through a convoluted path, Narendra Modi is back at the starting point, so far as relations with Pakistan are concerned. If Sharif has to take into account the Inter Service Intelligence, he has to contend with the Hindutva establishment which is watching his steps. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, August 25, 2015

Kashmir: no lesson learnt

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

French statesman Talleyrand said of the Bourbon kings that they learnt nothing and forgot nothing. The same can be said of India’s rulers, judging by their inaction on Kashmir when the time was opportune.

The Kashmir valley, which witnessed several waves of violence during the past two decades, has enjoyed comparative peace for some time. However, the Indian government has failed to take advantage of the situation to promote the political process and ensure lasting peace.

The quiet of the recent past is partly the result of closure of the mountain passes following snowfall, restricting movement across the line of control. But there is reason to suspect that Kashmiri weariness has also contributed to the lull.

The Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella organisation of parties which do not consider the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India as final, has not been very active. One of its leaders, Abdul Ghani Bhatt, recently suggested that the United Nations resolutions on Kashmir have lost their relevance. Its chairman, Mirwaiz Umar Farouq, asserted that they remain the basis for resolution of the dispute. The conflicting statements of the two leaders indicate the group is clueless on the way forward.

The Kashmir issue is linked with India-Pakistan relations inasmuch as it is a remnant of the partition of the subcontinent. The process of normalisation of relations between the two countries remained slow and tortuous during the past year but some hopeful signs have emerged. There is, for instance, growing recognition that both the countries can gain from increased mutual trade and people-to-people contacts.

All this created a favourable atmosphere for the Indian government to take a new initiative to address the grievances of the people of Kashmir which have led to recurrent violence. It had before it the report of a three-member team of interlocutors which contained some ideas it could work on.

The team comprising Dileep Padgaonkar, a noted journalist, Radha Kumar, a well-known academic, and MM Ansari, a former Information Commissioner, was appointed in 2010 as part of a package announced to quell a wave of student protests which had led to brutal police action that left more than 100 teenagers dead and several hundred others wounded.

A 36-member all-party parliamentary delegation which flew into Srinagar on a fact-finding mission was greeted with stony silence. The Hurriyat leaders refused to meet the MPs. However, some MPs sought them out and held discussions with them. They also had talks with J and K Liberation Front leader Yasin Malik.

Unfortunately MPs belonging to the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which tends to view issues through a communal prism, adopted a recalcitrant attitude and blocked the emergence of a political consensus.

Following up on the parliamentary initiative, the government announced an eight-point package to assuage Kashmir’s wounded feelings. The appointment of interlocutors for a dialogue with political parties, groups, students and civil society was the first of the eight points.

The other points included release of all detained students and withdrawal of the cases against them, immediate reopening of educational institutions, an ex-gratia payment of Rs500,000 each to the families of those killed and review of the working of the security law and deployment of security forces, especially in Srinagar.

The government, recognising the need to address the problem of economic backwardness, made a special allotment of Rs1 billion for the state and decided to set up separate task forces to go into the developmental needs of the predominantly Hindu region of Jammu and the predominantly Buddhist region of Ladakh.

The Hurriyat leaders who want Kashmir’s representatives to be included in India-Pakistan talks on the state’s future were cool to the concept of indirect dialogue. However, the interlocutors held discussions with them. They also travelled widely in the state and met more than 700 delegations.

The content of the interlocutors’ report has not been made public so far, but it is widely believed that they have recommended grant of a measure of autonomy to the state and changes in the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which gives the security personnel impunity. The government’s failure to consider its recommendations and formulate an action plan shows it gives a low priority to the political process.

The government’s inaction apparently stems from a lack of moral courage to take on the BJP, which, it fears, will not only condemn any accommodation of Kashmiri sentiment as appeasement but also use it to whip up communal passions with an eye to the 2014 parliamentary elections.--Gulf Today, May 15, 2012.