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Kashmir at the heart of the
problem
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The leaders and top diplomats of India
and Pakistan begin formal talks in Islamabad on Monday
to follow up on declared intentions to build peaceful
relations made on the sidelines of a South Asian summit
in January by Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
and Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf.
In previous such meetings - the most recent was
the failed Agra summit in India in August 2001 - there
was no serious discussion of the Kashmir dispute. This
time should be different, as Musharraf has said: "We
have reached an agreement that Kashmir has to be
addressed, that there will be a dialogue on all issues
including Kashmir, and that Pakistan is a party to the
dispute."
Musharraf has for some time publicly
promised to put an end to Islamabad's policy of allowing
militants from crossing over the Line of Control (LoC)
into the Indian side of divided Kashmir as a means of
hastening a settlement to the 50-year-old dispute over
the territory.
Septuagenarian Vajpayee for his
part considers that a peace breakthrough with Pakistan
will be his major achievement during his six years in
office, and it figures high in the election campaign of
his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. India is scheduled to
go to the polls in April.
Traditionally, India's
position has essentially been that the LoC that
separates Indian and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir should
be the final border, and what happens on the Indian side
is Delhi's business alone. Pakistan has for long argued
that India must conform to United Nations demands for a
plebiscite, by which Pakistan hoped that the
predominantly Muslim population of Jammu and Kashmir
(J&K) province would vote to join Pakistan.
Musharraf has said that he is now prepared to drop
Pakistan's insistence on a referendum and meet India
"halfway somewhere".
But while Musharraf might
be willing to talk peace, he faces difficulties from
within his own constituency. The hardline Pakistan
position could be personified by Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the
chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Pakistan, a major Islamist
political party. Qazi, a former geography teacher and
now a successful business tycoon from a Pashtun family
of North West Frontier Province, maintains that the
present developments in the relations between India and
Pakistan are aimed at damaging Pakistan's interests in
Kashmir.
So the dilemma for the Pakistani
leaders is how to formulate policies under pressure from
the US - which is actively involved in the peace process
- while at the same time pacifying internal interests.
For instance, the US has put most pressure on Pakistan,
which has as a result significantly curbed cross-border
militancy, while India has been able to go ahead and
build, for example, a massive security fence on the LoC.
"The US's main target in this phase is to create
confusion in the minds of Kashmiris," said former
Pakistani director general of the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), retired Lieutenant-General Hameed
Gul, who was one of the architects of the militant
struggle in Kashmir and under whose guidance as chief of
the ISI the present uprising in Indian Kashmir started
in 1989.
Speaking from Rawalpindi to this
correspondent by telephone, Gul elaborated that last
year in December, while speaking at a seminar in New
Delhi, former US secretary of state Madeline Albright
advocated a referendum for Kashmiris to determine their
own future. At the same time, the US has floated
different formulas and theories from time to time. "This
is all to confuse Kashmiris as they [US] are selling
several options, which all suggest a sort of an
independent status for Kashmir, whether it stand as a
divided entity or in a unified form," Gul said.
"The whole US initiative in this region is in
line with its global designs. The South Asian region is
still the weakest chain of US influence where it still
has to establish its writ," said Gul.
Gul
believes that should Kashmir receive independent status
- either as a unified entity or in the shape of divided
autonomous states - it would fall under a United Nations
mandate for some time, and the US would finally bring in
North Atlantic Organization Treaty (NATO) troops under
its command. "This is the ultimate outcome of the
present US-sponsored moves," said Gul. (This has in fact
already happened in Afghanistan, where NATO troops are
assisting US-led forces. )
Gul sees Musharraf's
foreign policy as a "complete failure". "The feelings of
Musharraf's failed policies, especially on Kashmir, in
the army are the same among the civilian population.
However, fortunately our army is a disciplined force,
and Pakistan is not the banana republic that one can
expect when a there is a serious division within the
armed forces," Gul says.
The latest dialogue
between India and Pakistan will take place without
Kashmiris, who have their own indigenous pro-Pakistan or
pro-India separatist movements. In private
conversations, Kashmiri leaders often express their
concern over such peace talks. They invariably recall
the Shimla agreement of 1971 in which a "ceasefire line"
that was to guarantee Kashmiris their right to
self-determination turned into the LoC, a vague position
which the international community now takes as a virtual
border between the sections of Kashmir administered by
Pakistan and India.
"To us, bilateral talks on
the Kashmir issue mean the status quo," said Professor
Nazir Shawl by telephone to Asia Times Online. Shawl is
a Kashmiri intellectual and member of the executive
council of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC -
Gillani group). "But in principle, this is the first
phase of talk and we are convinced that when the
dialogue reaches a level when some meaningful talks
start, Kashmiris will be inducted. I have been the part
of track II diplomacy efforts in which Kashmiris are
very much a part of the process, and we think that at
the right time we will be given a role."
Shawl
stresses that the Kashmiri struggle is a home-grown and
indigenous one and it will continue until it achieves
its end. "External conditions do affect the movement,
but the genuine struggles survives, whether its
intensity is low or high," says Shawl.
Also
speaking to this correspondent, Saleem Hashmi, a
spokesperson of the Hizbul Mujahideen, a frontline
Kashmiri rebel group, maintained that though his group
does not oppose talks, he believes that India is trying
to grab advantages that are unacceptable. "One bid is
the installation of fences on the Line of Control, which
is tantamount to modifying the present status of the
dividing line into a virtual border."
Similarly,
he maintained that India's courting of Moulvi Abbas
Ansari's faction of the APHC, which only represents four
parties in the multiparty APHC, shows the real Indian
face. He says that the Kashmir struggle is a national
one and it would be wrong to see it in any other color.
And in January India played a controversial card
for the first by time bringing Kashmiri pandits
(indigenous people) formally into the dialogue on
Kashmir. Delhi did this by giving representation to the
pandits, even though they are strongly against the
division of Kashmir and represent only a minority in the
region.
Pakistani analysts see this as
symptomatic that India does not want to follow US lines
in the present dialogue and wants to weaken Pakistan's
hand with such red herrings.
In Pakistan there
is some dismay at the way in which events are
proceeding. Veteran politicians like Sardar Abdul Qayyum
are "astonished" that the LoC is being fenced by the
Indians, and not a single bullet has been fired from the
Pakistan side in response.
Sections of the
Pakistan army are not too amused either. Musharraf's
blue-eyed Lieutenant-General Shahid Aziz, Corps
Commander Lahore, who is tipped to be the next chief of
army staff once Musharraf finally drops this position,
criticized Pakistan's "softer" stand on Kashmir, which
forced Musharraf to give a gentleman's promise that if
India continues with its designs by not responding to
Pakistan's initiatives, Pakistan will support the
Kashmiri struggle with "full heart and soul" from May
when the snow starts melting.
Nothing, clearly,
is simple on the Indian sub-continent, where
centuries-old dynamics still hold sway. New road maps or
blueprints cannot simply be bulldozed through.
Understand this, and some progress might be made over
the coming months.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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