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J&K - Stumbling out of the
Bind
K.P.S. Gill
There has been an enormous burst of activity and accompanying euphoria since
India's Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, visited Srinagar on April 18 and
made an offer of renewed talks with Pakistan over the vexed Kashmir issue. The
move has been greeted with a crescendo of international approval, and has drawn
enthusiastic responses from the US as well, with Secretary of State Colin Powell
declaring: "All this is very, very promising at a time when we were beginning to
wonder whether or not we were not going back to the potential of conflict."
More significant has been the response within Kashmir and in Pakistan. While
there are dissenting voices in the Valley - there would be reason for suspicion
if there were none - the political response has been largely positive, even
eager. As for Pakistan, the sheer rapidity of the reactions has been remarkable.
There is currently little available intelligence on the background of Prime
Minister Vajpayee's offer, but the consensus in the popular media appears to be
that this was an off-the-cuff gesture, not a well-thought-out and planned policy
shift. Nevertheless, the character and velocity of responses from Pakistan, and
the speed with which a graduated peace process appears to be emerging, suggests
that the probabilities of substantial behind-the-scenes activities preceding
these developments cannot be entirely discounted. This is borne out further by
the timing of the appointment of N.N. Vohra as the Centre's new interlocutor in
Kashmir, and several reports over the past months regarding the creation of the
groundwork for official-level talks between the two countries.
Whatever be the case on this point, the fact is that the present process has a
far greater probability of success than any of the preceding attempts, and the
reasons for this are rooted in the radical transformation of the geo-strategic
context of Asia, the impact of the US coalition campaign in Iraq, and the
progressive 'denial of plausible deniability' by the international community -
and specifically the US - to Pakistan on its role in international and
cross-border terrorism. Among the most significant of these factors has been the
humiliating defeat inflicted on the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. This has sent
a very strong message to the extreme elements of political Islam, and to the
rogue states bound to this ideology and supportive of the terrorist campaigns
inspired by it. It has long been the position of the Institute for Conflict
Management that military defeat is a critical element in the
delegitimisation of the terrorists and their state sponsors, and the defeat in
Iraq has had an inevitable impact on Pakistan and the Musharraf regime, as well
as on at least a segment of those who had thrown in their lot with the Islamist
extremists in the anticipation of a great and proximate victory. For Pakistan,
this impact has been multiplied manifold by a number of secondary inputs,
including repeated and strong statements from the highest echelons of the US
leadership that - while they continued to appreciate the country's assistance in
apprehending
Al
Qaeda elements operating in the
country and 'cooperation on the war against terror' - had also clearly confirmed
Pakistan's role in supporting terrorism in J&K, and had emphasized that the
Musharraf regime had failed to fulfill its promises and had not done enough on
this count. There has also been a strong media buildup in the US - fuelling
urgent speculation and apprehensions in the Pakistani media and policy circles
as well - regarding the possibility of Pakistan becoming the next target of
American 'pre-emptive action', though this has been firmly denied by US
authorities. Subtle signs of a clear shift in the US policy have also emerged
as, for example, in the redrawing of the CIA's map of Kashmir that earlier
showed the entire area - both Pakistan and Indian controlled Jammu & Kashmir -
as a 'disputed territory'. The recently revised maps - which would have gone
through an extended process of review by various Government Departments, and
would certainly reflect the consensus of the present Administration - mark out
the areas east of the Line of Control (LoC) as the "Indian State of Jammu &
Kashmir", while the territories to the west are designated "Pakistan-controlled
areas of Kashmir", correctly reflecting the position of the 1948 UN Resolution
that it was, in fact, only the "Pakistan-controlled" area that was in dispute.
The message to Pakistan cannot have been ignored by the Musharraf regime.
There is, moreover, a growing awareness among Pakistani commentators that the
ongoing terrorist campaign cannot upset the status quo in Kashmir, and a
certain measure of pragmatism is now clearly replacing the delusional strategic
overreach that has dominated Pakistani military thinking over the past decades.
Crucially, it is clear that, after Iraq, the US would like to see peace in the
Palestine-Israel conflict, and the conflict over Kashmir. The shift in strategy
on both these areas is now visible, and the US is reportedly exerting
extraordinary pressures on Syria and Lebanon to stop covert support to
Palestinian terrorist groups. It is clear that parties in the conflict are now
being forced into isolation from the networks of their clandestine supporters in
order to facilitate a clear focus on the actual issues in the conflict, with
terror being pushed out of the negotiating equation. This, precisely, is what
the US would seek to secure on Kashmir. With America's unarguable status as the
world's sole superpower, and the inevitable impact of its policies on the
economic and security future of this region, US interests, perspectives and
responses will certainly weigh in on the decisions of the South Asian
leadership. In any event, Musharraf has tended to go along with America on all
major decisions since 9/11, and though he will be reluctant to be seen as
withdrawing too suddenly from his strident position on Kashmir - "Kashmir is in
our blood", as he put it - it is apparent that, once the US position is stated
clearly, he will fall obediently in line. He may, of course, use the puppet Mir
Zafarullah Khan Jamali government, and Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri,
as a front to make the more distasteful of about-turns, but compliance would
tend to be inevitable.
Lest all this appears to be a matter of course, it is important to strike a note
of extreme caution. The situation remains complex and immensely uncertain, and
there is no surety that the peace process will last. Indeed, if another madcap
military adventurist emerges on the Pakistani political scenario, if a few
fundamentalists run amuck, or if renegade terrorists unwilling to comply with
the shifts in policy of their state sponsors in Pakistan engineer a few dramatic
strikes in J&K, the entire process could well be derailed, yielding another
cycle of escalated violence.
The greater danger in the present peace process, however, is that it fails to
address underlying character of the 'enduring rivalry', the 'intractable
conflict' between the two countries. The conflict over Kashmir is not, as is
widely believed, a quarrel over territory; it is, rather, an irreducible
conflict between two fundamentally incompatible ideologies - a pluralistic
democratic ideology, on India's part; and an
authoritarian-fundamentalist-exclusionary Islamist ideology that asserts that
different belief systems cannot coexist within the same political order. A
permanent peace in South Asia will only result after one or the other of these
ideologies succumbs - and these are crucial to national identity, consciousness,
and even the existence of these two nation states. A permanent peace is,
consequently, contingent on Pakistan abandoning the ideology of hatred and
exclusion that lies at the very foundations of its creation. Failing this, the
only other option, as I have suggested before, is the de-nuclearisation and
de-militarization of Pakistan, or the creation of a tremendous military
imbalance in the region that makes it impossible for Pakistan to engage in the
military adventurism that has characterized much of its independent existence.
[Mr. K.P.S.
Gill is President, Institute for Conflict Management]
Courtesy:
South Asia
Terrorism Portal |
