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Food for Thought
Ajai Sahni
President and General Pervez Musharraf has successfully engineered another media
storm over a new set of 'proposals' for the 'resolution' of the 'Kashmir issue',
which he offers, with a studied air of insouciance, as 'food for thought'. The
remarks were made at a gathering of editors and senior journalists at an
iftar dinner hosted for him and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz by Information
Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed and State Minister Anisa Zeb Tahirkheli on October
25, 2004, at Islamabad. As was the case with the General's earlier proposals
regarding the 'four steps process' [December 18, 2003], the new proposals are
both arbitrary and nonsensical, though this has not prevented a number of
informed commentators from taking them very seriously and beginning a debate on
the exigencies of their translation into policy.
In sum, Musharraf proposes:
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Pakistan would no longer insist on a
plebiscite in Kashmir.
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Since India would not accept a 'religion-based
solution', a solution could be formulated in 'geographical terms'.
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'Kashmir' can be divided into seven regions -
five with India and two with Pakistan.
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A three-stage process should be employed to
secure a 'solution': First, identify the region at stake. Second,
demilitarize it. Third, change its status.
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As regards the 'status', various options could
be examined including "ideas for joint control, UN mandates, condominiums,
and so on."
There are several aspects of
these proposals that are, at best, disingenuous. In the first instance,
Musharraf adroitly transforms the three regions within Indian controlled Jammu &
Kashmir (J&K) into five. At the same time, he cleverly notes that "The beauty of
these regions is that they are still religion-based even if we consider them
geographically." In other words, what Musharraf offers is, again, the principle
of religious exclusivism - the unfinished agenda of the two-nation theory -
which underpins the ideology of extremist political Islam and the creation of
Pakistan, and which is in irreducible conflict with the pluralist democratic
polity of India. Though the proposals are formulated in 'geographical terms',
they remain at best, and by Musharraf's own admission, proposals for the
communal vivisection of J&K - an outcome that cannot be acceptable to
India.
Further, Musharraf presents the geographical division of J&K as a fait
accompli, making only the modalities of its realisation a matter of
negotiation with India (India has consistently rejected the possibility of any
territorial concessions in J&K). In this, he develops on his earlier 'four
steps' thesis, in which 'Step 3' required that all those options for a solution
of J&K that were not acceptable to either side be "eliminated from the
dialogue". This is, in essence, a dog in the manger perversity masquerading as
'high policy'. The sheer audacity of what is proposed here is concealed by the
'reasonableness' of the language in which the proposition is cast. To take an
analogy, if a usurper and a legitimate claimant, or a thief and his victim, are
in conflict, our objective should not be to determine whose claims are supported
by law and considerations of justice, but rather to equally deny the claims of
either side, and to create an alternative structure of possession that offers
conditional access to the goods, properties or rights in dispute to both parties
- an option that quite naturally favours the usurper and the thief. Such an
outcome cannot be consistent with any considerations of morality or law, which
would require that competing claims be settled on the justice, the legality and
the principles underlying respective claims, and at least in some measure, the
methods by which these have been pursued. The fact that one party in the Kashmir
'dispute' has engaged in a murderous terrorist campaign for a decade and a half
- a campaign that has already claimed nearly 38,000 lives in Indian-controlled
J&K, and that still continues, and which has found a majority of victims among
the very people, the Kashmiri Muslims, who it claims to seek to 'liberate' -
cannot be irrelevant to such considerations of morality, justice and law. Nor,
indeed, can the fact be irrelevant that the regions of J&K - 'Azad Kashmir' and
the Northern Areas - which have been occupied by Pakistan for over half a
century, have witnessed a complete denial of human and political rights, as of
all vestiges of development. The mere fact that the aggressor in a particular
case is unwilling to relinquish his claim cannot create moral or legal grounds
for the rightful possessor to relinquish or dilute his entitlement.
This, however, is precisely what Musharraf is proposing, and he is not alone in
this logic. In recent years, terrorists, their various advocates, and their
sponsors in different theatres have repeatedly advanced the thesis that the only
'solution' to terrorism is that its victim-societies offer its perpetrators some
concessions - and much of the liberal democratic world has bought into this
argument, with devastating impact on political will in the free world.
The potential consequences of this policy of appeasement, and of Musharraf's
'options for control' of the various 'demilitarized regions' need to be examined
in some detail, particularly in view of the fact that Musharraf's proposals
build on or echo several 'solutions' that have been doing the rounds over the
past years, including the Kashmir Study Group (KSG) formula, and some loose talk
of an 'Andorra solution', and the fact that these various formulae have been
eagerly embraced by many among the weak-willed and weak-minded among the
regional and global leadership. First, another communal partition of India - and
that is precisely what is being proposed by all these 'alternatives' - simply
cannot be 'sold' in India, politically. Any sundering of territories in Kashmir
will be politically volatile, and will unleash a backlash of violence across the
sub-continent. The 'Andorra formula' had a peculiar and benign history in
Europe, and will find little resonance here. This is South Asia - where passions
run deep and long histories of hatred and mutual slaughter have been compounded
by ideologies of envy, exclusion and communal polarisation that inflame every
sore into a cancerous wound.
Moreover, even if such a 'solution' was hypothetically possible, the area of
'joint control', the 'condominium', or whatever else may be created, would
remain a region in which Indo-Pak squabbling and covert efforts for domination
would be a permanent feature, and would intertwine continuously with the larger
enterprise of Islamist extremist terrorism that currently plagues so much of the
world. Such a 'solution' would, in other words, fail altogether to address the
basic conflict between the two countries - and this conflict, as has been
repeatedly emphasised, is a conflict of irreducible ideologies, the one
committed to exclusionary religious identities and quasi theocratic-domination,
and the other to liberal, secular and democratic values.
Both on grounds of justice and considerations of the future stability in the
region, it is, consequently, a survival imperative for South Asia that no
further part of it be transformed by vivisection into another communal ghetto,
and that those who have long harnessed terrorism to secure this end be
comprehensively defeated, not appeased.
On a diplomatic level, India has refused to respond to Musharraf's new proposals
on the ground that these have not been formally presented, though many a feather
has obviously been ruffled. The proposals have, moreover, been widely rejected
both within Pakistan and in Indian circles. Significantly, this is a time when
Musharraf is alienated from virtually every element of his domestic political
constituency as a result of his engagement with the US in the 'war against
terrorism', of holding on to the uniform, proclaimed madrassah reforms,
reforms for the protection of women and prevention of 'honour killings', the
military campaigns in Baluchistan and the NWFP, etc. However tardy or tentative
his reform initiatives may be, each has won him a different set of enemies in
the country. He has, of course, consolidated his position within the military
hierarchy through the reshuffle on October 3. But, his dilution of Pakistan's
demand for a plebiscite, virtually gospel for the Army and a sheet anchor of the
Pakistani position for over five decades, can only create more enemies in key
institutions.
What, precisely, could Musharraf have hoped to gain by articulating these
proposals at this time and in this manner. Taking the negotiations process with
India forward cannot have been an objective: the hard core of diplomatic
negotiations is never advanced through media posturing, and is often obstructed
by ill conceived proposals aired in public fora at the highest levels of
leadership. The rare occasion on which such announcements serve a positive
purpose are cases where diplomatic relations have broken down or are so strained
as to make meaningful discourse impossible - as was the case with then Prime
Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's 'offer of friendship' to Pakistan at a public
meeting in Srinagar, which eventually translated itself into the present
dialogue process. Such a situation clearly does not prevail at present, and an
institutional process of negotiations has been established and has widely been
proclaimed to be 'moving forward'.
Despite their air of spontaneity, there is evidence that Musharraf's statements
are part of a considered strategy. For one thing, they elaborated on earlier
statements that he made during an interview with an Indian journalist, published
on October 13, 2004. Moreover, past experience suggests that Musharraf's public
declarations are often of the nature of establishing new goalposts, and he can
be relied on to follow his declared ends, albeit with a great deal of tactical
flexibility. Clearly, then, the new 'formulae' are intended to be pursued as
goals of national policy over the foreseeable future. It is evident, now, that
the processes of jehadi attrition, which Pakistan had deployed against
India, cannot be sustained indefinitely at required levels of intensity. As a
result, a process of political and diplomatic attrition would need to be
intensified if even limited Pakistani objectives with regard to J&K are to be
secured. Musharraf's proposal for a resolution of the 'Kashmir issue' in
'geographical terms' remains part of the continued effort to fulfil his
country's communal mandate and agenda 'through other means'.
Courtesy:
South Asia Terrorism Portal |
