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Dueling pulpits on Independence
Day
By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - India and Pakistan celebrated their 55th year of
independence from British rule this week, sniping at
each other, calling each other names such as
"dictatorial" and "devious", their million-and-a-half
strong armies facing each other eyeball to eyeball
across the Line of Control.
Both countries seem
unable to move forward from the deep religious divisions
that had led to partition and the creation of a
Muslim-majority Pakistan at the time of independence in
1947, and worst of all, they are mired in the still
"unfinished business of partition" of Kashmir. In the
cantankerous style so usual in South Asian "diplomacy",
Islamabad and New Delhi traded charges on the
forthcoming elections in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K),
accusing each other of fomenting violence and raising
tensions in the region.
In his independence day
speech, President General Pervez Musharraf clearly
absolved himself of any responsibility for the peaceful
conduct of elections in Kashmir. India interpreted this
stand as a threat to disrupt the electoral process. The
general raised the issue of "self-determination" of the
Kashmiri people, dismissed the forthcoming J&K
elections as "farcical" and unrepresentative and adopted
a belligerent posture, saying that his country was
prepared not only to defend itself "but to carry the
fight across the border".
Responding in equal
measure, in his traditional Independence day speech from
the ramparts of the Red fort in Delhi on Thursday,
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said
"Pakistan wants to grab Kashmir through terrorism as it
did not succeed in wars", but he warned that nobody
would be allowed to disrupt the coming Assembly polls in
Jammu and Kashmir, saying the elections would usher in a
new era for the people of the state.
The
disinformation campaign launched from across the border
about the J&K elections must be exposed and "nobody
would be allowed to disrupt the polls", Vajpayee said.
Attacking Pakistan for the continuing
"cross-border terrorism", Vajpayee said that while
Islamabad claimed to fight terrorism as part of the
international coalition, it was promoting terrorism from
across the border. "This is double standards," he
remarked.
Taking strong exception to those who
were inciting J&K people to boycott polls, Vajpayee
said that such steps would further complicate the issue
instead of resolving it. "Those terming the polls in
J&K as a fraud should not teach us about democracy,"
he said. "We are committed to defeat the menace of
terrorism being promoted from across the border,"
Vajpayee said, reiterating that J&K was an integral
part of India and would remain so.
India wanted
to live in peace with Pakistan "like a good neighbor"
and it was prepared to take more steps in this
direction, but a congenial atmosphere has to be created
by Pakistan, he said.
Ironically, the one worry
that both countries share in equal measure at this time
is over the increasing US role in South Asia, a
development for which they are both equally responsible.
They are disappointed and indeed exasperated that
despite what has been called their "competitive
servility", neither of them has been able to enlist full
US support for their own versions of history or
geography. This feeling is reciprocated by US officials,
too, who are beginning to feel what they call in their
colorful diplomatese "engagement fatigue".
Guided by its own national interest, the US
wants to keep both India and Pakistan in good humor and
at the same time at some distance from each others'
necks. This formula is not helping Washington make
friends either in Islamabad or in New Delhi. But
denizens of the civil society in both countries,
including those remnants of cold war who have been
habitual snipers at imperialism, colonialism and all
manifestations of neo-colonialism, are happy that it is
not in the US interest now to encourage a war in the
South Asian sub-continent.
But though an
India-Pakistan nuclear war doesn't suit the US and the
West, they see no harm in allowing these two poor,
developing countries to impoverish themselves further in
a bid to outdo each other in spending a great deal of
hard cash for buying weapons. Defense analyst David
Isenberg calls it "one of the little noted paradoxes of
the recent crisis between India and Pakistan that some
of the same countries desperately seeking to avert war
between the two nuclear powers were the same ones avidly
seeking to sell them weapons".
In recent months,
the US, Britain, France and Russia have all sent
high-ranking diplomats to stop New Delhi and Islamabad
from going to war over Kashmir, fearing it might lead to
a nuclear exchange. But at the same time, their
respective military industrial complexes were supplying
India or Pakistan - or both, in some cases - varied
military goods or competing for future arms contracts.
It is a measure of India's frustration with the
West, particularly the US, that New Delhi has simply
stopped bothering about the US demands over how to
tackle the crisis in Kashmir. Vajpayee was not even
prepared to meet US secretary of state Colin Powell in
his last visit a fortnight ago. It was the new External
Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha who persuaded him to do
so.
Sinha felt that if Vajpayee did not meet
Powell it would become difficult for him to seek
audience with President George W Bush on his forthcoming
visit. As Bush has met the previous Minister Jaswant
Singh, a comparison would naturally be made and this
would be interpreted as a personal rebuff for Sinha. But
when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage comes
calling, Sinha will be away in Kathmandu.
None
of the demands Powell made in his last trip has been
met. India has not agreed for international observers
for the forthcoming polls in Kashmir, calling it an
internal matter, though Western diplomats have been told
they can visit Kashmir during election days. But no
international monitoring; India does not need
certificates from its former colonialists.
Similarly, no political prisoners from Kashmir
will be released for the elections. India has even
dropped the pretence of wanting to widen the
participation of various schools of thought in these
elections. Several of even pro-India democratic parties
are having second thoughts about the justification for
participating in the polls that appear meant to simply
validate the rule of a member of the central coalition
National Conference.
The Times of India has
quoted well-placed officials in the US administration to
say that there is a sense of exasperation in Washington
over the situation in the region and with the inflexible
position taken by both sides. As a result, many senior
officials in the administration are leery of getting
their teeth into the problem, at the heart of which is
the very basis, manner and principle on which the two
states were founded.
"It's not a problem from
yesterday or day before. It goes back to 1947," one
official conceded. "And it's hard to get it when you
have 31-year-olds writing memos." One senior diplomat
who recently served in the region said even Powell was
frustrated with the region, notwithstanding the increase
in its priority because of the danger to US interests in
the region. "He doesn't like India or Pakistan. He
doesn't like the region," the diplomat said. Another
official said, "You can hear him grinding his teeth each
time we come to the region."
The situation of
the US administration vis-a-vis India and Pakistan has
reminded observers of an episode in the serial West Wing
that deals with the inner workings of the White House.
The US president has meetings with the Indian and
Pakistani envoys following one of the usual
sub-continental stand-offs. After listening to the
complex arguments from both sides, the president is
flummoxed. "What do you want me to do?" an aide asks him
after the two envoys have left. The resident, played by
Martin Sheen, rolls his eyes and says, "Just shoot me!"
That pretty much describes the real situation just now,
say White House insiders.
But the US has only
itself to blame. If only it had some common sense. Take,
for instance, the US advice that India prepare the
ground for the participation of Kashmiri nationalists
(secessionists for India and freedom fighters for
Pakistan) in the September polls. Anyone who knows
anything about India appreciates the kind of problems
India has had in dealing with the National Conference
(NC) regime in Kashmir that is called a puppet regime by
Pakistan and that was installed in Srinagar following,
as even the prime minister indirectly agrees, a rigged
election in which only a few percent of the people
participated. The alacrity with which the autonomy
resolution passed by a two-thirds majority of the
"puppet" Kashmir Assembly was rejected should have
apprised the US about the state of affairs.
Now,
after two years of wrangling with its puppets - the NC
chief Omar Abdullah is also the Deputy Minister of
External Affairs in the Vajpayee government - a
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) official, not a government
official or minister, has been appointed to discuss what
the government never tires of clarifying "devolution" of
powers, not autonomy, with the NC.
Indians
discussed devolution with the British colonial
government until 1935. Since then, even in colonial
times, the discourse in India has been about the
autonomy of the states in a federal polity, not
devolution. The controversial accession document that
for India legitimizes Kashmir's accession gave India
control of only defense, external affairs and
communication. Kashmir has been designated a special
state in Article 370 of the Indian constitution. It
still has its own flag and its own constitution. It used
to have after accession with India its own prime
minister and president and so on. But since 1952
Kashmiris have been primarily fighting for their right
to elect leaders of their own choice, a right that is
available to all Indians but has not been made available
to Kashmiris, except for once in 1977, by then prime
minister Morarji Desai.
It is this scenario in
which the US asks New Delhi to ensure an election that
may result in an Assembly dominated by the All Party
Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference (APHC) and its splinter
groups. Washington was also seen egging Hurriyat leaders
to participate in the polls. No wonder India quickly
dropped even the pretence of allowing wider
participation and announced poll dates quickly, while
also making sure that these elections are supervised by
an administration that would be the biggest loser if
Hurriyat were to participate and possibly win.
Can anyone accuse US officials of possessing
even a modicum of common sense in such a situation? How
could they have possibly thought that a government that
cannot discuss autonomy with its "puppets" will be able
to discuss "freedom" or "accession to Pakistan" with
secessionists?
The US could have got the scent
of the ground situation from other recent events, even
if its officials were not aware of the history of a
half-century of strife. A recent poll conducted by
London's prestigious survey firm MORI said that 61
percent of Kashmiris would prefer to be with India
rather than Pakistan. This was a true reflection of the
ground situation. Indeed, if MORI had erred, it erred on
the side of caution. Other straws in the wind, too, have
pointed in the same direction. India should have been
celebrating; instead, it was embarrassed and the US
should have wondered why.
As for Pakistan, it
has always known that Kashmiris do not want to join it,
not even the cadres of the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leader
Syed Ali Shah Gilani shouts from rooftops the favorite
Pakistani slogan: "Kashmir banega Pakistan!" (Kashmir
will join Pakistan!). Jamaat's top leaders told this
correspondent at the height of militancy in 1991 when
Kashmir was all but lost to India, "Our cadres do not
like the idea of joining Pakistan. We just want
Independence."
"Why do you advocate the case of
Pakistan, then?" I asked. The answer was simply,
"Because Pakistan is helping us, and India is not
interested in giving us even a face-saving agreement of
some kind so that we can go to our people and claim our
sacrifices have not been entirely in vain."
They
have been saying this in private to every Indian
interlocutor, journalist, academic or politician trying
his hand at track II diplomacy, and this has been
reported to the highest levels of Indian government from
then prime minister Narasimha Rao to Vajpayee.
Pakistan knows that even the Kashmiris living in
Pakistan-occupied Kashmir want independence. It has been
merely firing from their shoulders to hurt India as a
revenge for its own dismemberment at India's hands in
1971 (the creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan).
Both Kashmiris and Pakistanis know there is no
love lost between them. Many Pakistani Kashmiris have
told this correspondent over the years that in their
estimation Pakistan has treated them worse than the way
India treated Kashmiris under its "occupation" until the
militancy started in 1989. It is only since 1989 that
India has let loose a reign of terror in Kashmir, they
claim.
Many former Indian Kashmiri militants,
too, complain that Pakistan duped them into picking up
the gun; they were given the impression that just as
India had moved its troops to free Bangladeshis from
Pakistan in 1971, so Pakistan would attack India and
free Kashmir.
India's Kashmir policy is entirely
geared towards fighting secession. It just doesn't know
what to do once secessionism ends. The following example
would probably help us understand the situation better.
Vajpayee has been shouting from rooftops for
more than a year that the forthcoming elections in
Kashmir, scheduled for September, would be free and
fair, obviously unlike the previous elections. He
repeated this even during his sojourn to Kashmir a
couple of months back and of course he has repeated this
again in his Red Fort independence day speech.
Credible elections can only take place if
leaders from the secessionist Hurriyat Conference
participate and do not issue a call for a boycott of the
elections. So efforts were being made both by the
government and concerned citizens to convince Hurriyat
officials to take the prime minister seriously, even
though there was no reason they should as the government
has not announced that it would allow international
observers, or human rights organizations like the
Amnesty International, etc, which do not have access to
the state at the moment.
Yet, propelled perhaps
by Kashmiri public opinion, one of the major Kashmiri
leaders, Abdul Ghani Lone, started moving in the
direction of accepting the proposition. He started by
calling for Pakistan-sponsored terrorists to stop
coming. But the moment he started showing signs of being
prepared for a rapprochement with the government of
India, alarm bells started ringing, perhaps not so
loudly in Islamabad as in New Delhi and Srinagar.
Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah claims that he
knew that Lone's life was in danger. His response:
Lone's security was reduced by two-thirds. Workers of
the Shiv Sena, an ally of the ruling BJP and a part of
the central coalition, thrashed the 72-year-old Kashmiri
leader in front of TV cameras following his press
conference, while his Indian security officers kept
laughing. Finally, he was killed, allegedly by
Pakistan-sponsored terrorists.
Other Kashmiri
leaders like Shabbir Shah, popularly called the Nelson
Mandela of Kashmir for the length of his stay in Indian
prisons, and Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, former chairman of
Hurriyat, who were contemplating participating in the
elections, have now come to their senses and backed out.
What was Lone's mistake that cost him his life?
His inability to see that the person who had been kept
in charge of facilitating the process of holding free
and fair elections was the one who will be the biggest
loser in the event that free and fair elections are held
- Farooq Abdullah, the Chief Minister. Abdullah has been
ruling the roost in Kashmir, with his son Omar, the
junior foreign minister in Vajpayee government, and will
continue to do so only as long as secessionism lasts.
There are other vested interests in the Indian
establishment. Of course, there are also people,
well-meaning people, some of them even in the
government, who want peace to return to the state. But
on present reckoning they are not strong enough to make
a difference, though realizing the importance of the
present moment and the value of getting Kashmiris to
elect their genuine representatives for once, they are
straining every nerve to make a difference.
The
peacemakers led by former law minister in the Vajpayee
cabinet, Ram Jethmalani, have not succeeded so far. They
were not able to convince the premier to say in his
speech that the government would talk on the issue of
Kashmir with whosoever won the polls. This has been
billed as the formula that would bring the Hurriyat to
participate. But it has not happened. Indeed how could
it? It is preposterous for anyone to hope that it would
happen in the present dispensation.
The ruling
BJP has had for half-a-century as one of its main
election agenda the demand to abrogate Article 370
itself on which the entire question of Kashmir's
autonomy is based. It has suspended this item of its
agenda as a price for joining the present coalition.
But to expect that it will now turn around and
discuss the question of giving Kashmir autonomy over and
above the present powers that it has, though only on
paper, is really a rather outlandish idea. People who
pursue such ideas may be only helping the government
pursue its main and permanent agenda - procrastination.
Something new has to be done or said to pass some more
time; so we find newer sets of people every few months
coming up with newer sets of ideas. In the ultimate
analysis, they are all helping the government do just
one thing - pass time.
Two things must happen if
the Kashmir impasse is to come to an end. One, Pakistan
should realize the futility of its pursuit. It should
see that India has an almost infinite capacity to take
losses in Kashmir. In a country where scores of people
die every few months in their attempt to reach the table
where recruitment for the army is taking place, it
doesn't really matter how many people are killed
fighting the various insurgencies. India is not America
or Israel, where every life counts.
In any case
it has shed enough blood to avenge its humiliation of
Bangladesh. With Musharraf expressing regret for the
conduct of Pakistan army, which killed almost 3 million
Muslims, at the time Pakistan's own citizens, and raped
thousands of women, Pakistan must realize that
Bangladesh was not India's doing, despite its help. If
100,000 Pakistani soldiers were willing to surrender,
how could the Indian army avoid making them prisoners of
war? And if they suffered some humiliation in the
process, they should know better than to complain; this
is part of the game. They should not forget how they
themselves treat some of those Indian soldiers who are
still languishing in Pakistani prisons.
Also,
Kashmiris must realize that they cannot defeat India
with the force of the gun. If they want the right to
choose their own leaders or anything else, the right
course is to align with the suffering humanity of India
and jointly struggle for the rights of all the people.
The poor, the backward, the untouchables, the women, the
children, the peasants, the landless laborers, the
bonded laborers, the religious minorities, the
linguistic minorities - all sorts of disadvantaged
people are fighting for their rights. Kashmiris should
join them and make their struggle a part of the larger
struggle of the Indian people to live with dignity.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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