Could
there be a breakthrough
over Kashmir?
By
Jonathan
Power
November 12, 2002
London - Elections do have a way of clearing the
air, sometimes as with Turkey's earlier this week,
bringing in an entire new weather pattern. So it was too
with last month's election in Kashmir. The Indian prime
minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, presiding over a
government of Hindu nationalists, gave his opposition
rival, the Congress party of Sonia Gandhi, tacit
encouragement to form a coalition government with a local
moderate Muslim party, the People's Democratic Party.
Despite being scorned by the Congress secularists for too
often playing the Hindu chauvinist card and despite being
continuously brow beaten by the ultra nationalists, in
particular the Bombay-based politician Bal Thackeray, who
regularly threatens to bring down the prime minister,
Vajpayee not only masterminded the first free election in
Kashmir for as long as any one can remember, he has in
effect handed over a large part of India's Kashmir policy
to those who don't have much sympathy for his government.
For sure, policy vis a vis Pakistan and decisions on
military deployments in Kashmir or up against the
Pakistani border rest in New Delhi, but the local
government in Kashmir, while no means autonomous, does
have a say on such important questions as whether to
apply India's draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act . It
is also likely to release prisoners held on less serious
charges and will be tough on atrocities carried out by
Indian security forces, a long standing legitimate
grievance of local people.
In 1948 newly independent Pakistan and India went to
war over Kashmir. The UN was called into mediate and a
"line of control" was drawn between the one third of
Kashmir (overwhelmingly Muslim) under Pakistani control
and the two thirds under Indian control. The Indian
controlled part, called Jammu and Kashmir, has a Hindu
majority in Jammu, a Buddhist and Shia Muslim majority in
Ladakh district and, in the most populous part, the
central valley, a Muslim majority. It is in this latter
district that most of the tension against Indian rule
spills over. In the last twelve years, as India has
become more Hindu nationalist and as the Pakistan
military has encouraged and licensed militants demobbed
from the fight against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan to undermine Indian rule in its disputed
province, the bloodletting has been ratcheted up and with
it the military stakes. Now, to cut a tortuous story
short, India and Pakistan face each other with nuclear
weapons, with some powerful voices arguing in the regular
crises of confrontation to use them if the other side
doesn't back down. The American intelligence services
have said repeatedly that humanity's first nuclear war is
most likely to be fought over Kashmir.
American academics and strategic thinkers have all
sorts of good ideas for defusing the tensions that
regularly blow up between India and Pakistan. It is
suggested, for example, that the U.S. should use its
capabilities with high tech monitoring to keep a close
watch on the line of control so that violations are aired
for all to see. Even going further, that the UN Security
Council should recognize the line of control as an
international border. Some argue that the U.S. should
beef up the much depleted Pakistani military so that
there is a better, and therefore safer, balance of power.
And that both sides should be offered America's
sophisticated technologies to control the misuse of
nuclear weapons by rogue commanders or political
factions.
All these have their use and the experts should go on
debating them. But in truth the only thing that really
works is elections and democracy. It is democracy that
has finally broken the log jam on the Indian side. And if
real democracy were allowed to return to Pakistan, even
if it meant the old corrupt parties of Benazir Bhutto or
Nawaz Sharif winning power, it would introduce a
flexibility on the Pakistani side that is just not there
under military rule, a military that since General Zia
ul-Haq's time has funded and encouraged the Taliban on
the one side and the Kashmiri Muslim militants on the
other, all to make India's life more difficult.
This is not to exonerate India's responsibility. India
has failed long ago to honour the promise made by its
first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to allow the
Kashmiris a free vote on what country they wanted to
belong to. (Probably if held today they would say a
plague on both your houses and opt for independence if
that were the third choice)
An Indian government, even a Congress government,
might find it difficult, even impossible, to wind the
clock back that far in the immediate future. But it could
implement the thinking of one of Pakistan's finest
thinkers, the late ex finance minister Mahbub ul Haq. He
proposed that the UN be invited to establish a
trusteeship involving both Pakistani-run and Indian-run
Kashmir for fifteen years. The UN, having secured the
withdrawal of all troops, would open all the borders,
especially across the line of control, encourage trade
and the free passage of peoples. This would give time for
passions to cool inside Kashmir and for local city and
village government to find its feet. It would remove the
threat of war that constantly hovers like a sword of
Damocles. At the end it would have given India the
breathing space to accept that a referendum is inevitable
and Pakistan the time to understand that the Muslim
central valley might vote to be independent.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
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