Jammu & Kashmir - Articles

India’s insistence on the cessation of cross-border terrorism and moving its troops to the Indo-Pak border to prevent this has only sharpened the focus on Kashmir. A shadow play of words continues on the significance of Kashmir for normalizing Indo-Pak relations. India urges that Kashmir is only an issue in contention between the two countries, whereas Pakistan has anointed Kashmir as the core question for prior resolution before the relationship could proceed forward. Meanwhile the bloodletting continues in Kashmir since the two contestants have set their minds in concrete.   There is no dearth of solutions for resolving the impasse. They have been voiced, discussed and rejected at different times over the half century since the Kashmir issue (Indian phraseology) and dispute (Pakistani terminology) arose. They include modalities “ranging from maintaining the status quo in Kashmir to independence to merger to greater autonomy to trifurcation to de-population to re-population”; but they are unlikely to defuse the problem unless they are agreeable to India and are acceptable to the Kashmiris. Other innovative solutions have been voiced in the wilderness like the “fourth option”, envisaging a condominium being established by the two antagonists over Kashmir, simultaneously with permitting the free movement of population across the line of control.   Here lies the rub. Which Kashmiris are we privileging? Negotiating and evolving a solution acceptable to the Valley Muslims would ignore the aspirations and fears afflicting the ethnic minorities in Jammu and Kashmir, which must prominently include the Pandits displaced from the Valley and living with great fortitude in the Jammu camps and elsewhere in India, or forming a Diaspora scattered over several parts of the world. Neither can the anxieties of the Buddhists in Leh be ignored or the fears of the largely Hindu population in Jammu of their submergence in a majority Muslim population within an independent entity comprising the present state of Jammu and Kashmir.   Maintaining the status quo by converting the line of control into an international border, with some minor adjustments perhaps to make it more rational and defensible, would get over several of the prickly difficulties surrounding the current impasse on Kashmir. There still remains, however, the unresolved internal problem of evolving a modus that would address the aspirations of the local population. It should be noted that only three options are conceivable to resolve this internal political quandary: merger of the state with Pakistan or India or granting it independence. The last option of granting independence to the state is wholly unacceptable to Pakistan or to India, raising the apparition of map drawing being undertaken in blood. But there is a basic issue of equity also involved here, viz. the issue of granting independence to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (Azad Kashmir) along with the territories of Jammu and Kashmir (Indian Held Kashmir); together they had formed part of the erstwhile princely state of Kashmir before 1947 and the birth of India and Pakistan. A minor glitch here would, of course, be the need for Pakistan to also grant independence to the area of some 2000 sq. miles ceded by Pakistan to China in 1963. Continuing this reductio at absurdum line of argumentation further is it likely that Pakistan would countenance the merger of its part of the old Kashmir state into India, or would India benevolently agree to the merger of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan? The two countries have expended far too much blood and treasure over their last fifty years’ history for either to swallow this bitter pill. It would also be unrealistic to imagine that the two governments are impervious to the critical internal political dimensions of the Kashmir problem for their domestic polities; no government in India or Pakistan could hope to survive if it tolerated their part of Kashmir gaining independence or, even worse, merging with the “Other”.   Realism, therefore, underpins the argument in favour of the existing status quo; this could have been utilized by India to bind the state more firmly into the Indian polity, not by the insidious extension of its laws into the state and rigging the elections in favour of the party in power in New Delhi, but by evolving a political solution to meet the aspirations of the local population. Apropos, there has been a wholly disappointing effort to grant additional autonomy to the state, although this was promised by successive Central governments over the years. Even a dialogue with the Kashmiris, especially with the disgruntled Valley population, has only been proceeded with episodically and fitfully by New Delhi. The wholly depressing conclusion is therefore unavoidable that the present situation in that unhappy state would continue, implying that militancy – cross-border and indigenous – would continue, and Indo-Pak tensions and instabilities over their dispute over this state would also continue. Meanwhile, their armed forces would continue to confront each other across the international border and the volatile line of control, despite the dangerous conflict and escalatory potential of this deployment. And the local population, caught in the crossfire between the Kashmiri and foreign militants and the Indian armed forces, would be slaughtered on a daily basis.   In this milieu, India’s insistence on bilateralism whilst refusing to resume its dialogue with Pakistan until cross-border terrorism ceases to its satisfaction will seem more and more obtuse to the international community. It would not be unreasonable to expect, therefore, to visualize that pressures upon India to either resume the dialogue with Pakistan or accept mediation by third parties, read the United States, could increase with the passage of time. Should either of these modalities occur, the Kashmir dispute would necessarily head the agenda. India still has the opportunity to invigorate its internal dialogue with the alienated Kashmiris in its own territory.