BOOK REVIEW The Kashmir
conundrum Kashmir. Roots of
Conflict, Paths to Peace, by Sumantra
Bose
Reviewed by Chanakya Sen
Conflict in Kashmir is a conundrum that begs
serious in-depth analysis taking into account every
stream of opinion and identity. Sumantra Bose's
ambitious new venture, Kashmir. Roots of Conflict,
Paths to Peace calls for
according "equal legitimacy" to
the multiple strands of allegiances over
Kashmir and to accommodate them all in a skillful
compromise. Bose's preoccupation is with "reframing the
Kashmir question as a challenge for democratic politics"
and building a polity that makes up the democratic
deficit.
The cultural, social and religious
multiplicity of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has
engendered prismatic and fragmented political
orientations. "J&K as a whole resembles the Russian
matryoshka doll - layers of complexity which
render easy solutions such as plebiscite or partition
impracticable and call for a more sophisticated
approach." (p 12) The "self" in "self-determination" is
differentiated into umpteen political aspirations, all
of which need to be co-opted into an inclusive framework
for peace. Bose proposes a multinational settlement
which recognizes the diverse national and quasi-national
identities prevailing within J&K, while respecting
the core territorial concerns of the Indian and
Pakistani states.
For Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir
valley's most popular politician who aligned with India
due to exigency in 1947, "Kashmir and India were
fraternal but ultimately separate entities." (p 23) His
brand of "regional patriotism" based on the Muslim
heritage of Kashmir did not quite match his National
Conference's avowed secular nature, a contradiction Bose
fails to extrapolate. The author does admit that
Abdullah contributed to the entrenchment and
perpetuation of anti-democratic politics in J&K. His
intolerance of J&K's plural character led to police
crackdowns against minority communities from Jammu and
Ladakh. His 1951 constituent assembly elections "made a
mockery of any pretence of a democratic process". (p 55)
While Abdullah was no democrat, Bose attributes
the root cause of the current conflict to the New
Delhi-sponsored systematic subversion of democratic
rights and institutions in J&K. The heavily
manipulated 1987 assembly election in J&K was "no
aberration, it was entirely consistent with Kashmir's
political fate in India's democracy over the preceding
40 years". (p 50) At this point, Bose does not halt to
consider if dubious elections in J&K were any
different from the violent and coercive elections in
other states of India, say Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, over
the preceding 40 years. His contention that democracy,
by and large, was respected with "imperfections" in
other parts of India lacks empirical substantiation.
Bose maintains that khudmukhtaari
(self-rule/autonomy) lies at the heart of India's
checkered relationship with J&K. Sheikh Abdullah
retained a "subliminal attachment to the idea of a
sovereign Kashmir", though anti-autonomy and
pro-integration voices were raised in Jammu and Ladakh.
In 1953, Abdullah shifted to a confrontational
pro-independence strategy and was dismissed and
incarcerated for 22 years in Indian prisons. His
replacement, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, eroded J&K's
autonomy and allegedly buried Article 370 of the Indian
constitution that granted special status to the state.
Bose writes off Article 370 as "dead in letter and in
spirit" since 1954, but it has never been dead as far as
the crucial prohibition of non-Kashmiris owning property
or setting up businesses in J&K. It is this caveat
that prevented internal colonization and demographic
reengineering in J&K on the lines of Pakistani
Kashmir or Chinese Tibet.
The 1965 dissolution
of the National Conference and its merger into India's
ruling Congress party is depicted as "the end of the
road for Article 370", again a misjudgement because the
article has no bearing on the dalliances of political
parties in J&K. Bose also castigates the appointment
of non-Kashmiris in administrative service of J&K
without cognizance of the basic fact that, to occlude
favoritism and vested interests, India's professional
civil servants are rarely allotted home state postings.
Bose further errs by writing that in the 1965
war over Kashmir, Pakistan's ambitious operation failed
as the "fullest cooperation of local Muslims was not
forthcoming on the expected huge scale". (p 84) Such a
sentence misleads, because far from cooperating, J&K
locals assisted the Indian army in apprehending
infiltrators. The duality of mindsets in the Kashmir
Valley, where on one hand the majority wanted to be
separate from India and on the other hand prevented
Pakistan's forcible takeover, remained intact until
1988.
During the end of the Afghan jihad in the
late 1980s, the Kashmir conflict entered a new phase
characterized by mass estrangement of J&K's
population from India. In 1990, governmental authority
collapsed in the Valley as insurrection took hold. An
"occupier-occupied relationship" emerged between the
Indian state and the Valley's people. Young Kashmiri men
crossed into Pakistan, gained weapons and combat
training and returned to Indian Kashmir to organize a
spate of targeted killings of known or suspected "Indian
agents".
The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front
(JKLF), which dominated the early phase of violent
insurgency, drew inspiration from "the valley's specific
Islamic traditions" though averring that its attitude
towards non-Muslims was non-sectarian. Bose accepts on
face-value JKLF's defense that three-fourths of its
victims were Muslims and only one-fourth were Kashmiri
Pandits, the Valley's Hindu minority. Considering that
Pandits comprised barely 4 percent of the populace in
the Valley, their assassination rate was
disproportionately high. Bose also fallaciously calls
the mass exodus of Pandits in 1990 due to terrorist
threats "propaganda". He supports this perfunctory
argument by attesting that Muslim neighbors protected
the handful of Pandits who stayed in the Valley.
Survivors' families have now documented how far many
more Pandits were actually handed over to assailants by
neighbors. Bose never seemed to have heard of the
rallying cry in 1990 - Kashmir me rehna hain to
Allah-o-Akbar Kehna Hai (If you want to live in Kashmir,
worship Allah).
If the JKLF was indeed
"secular", then how is one to explain the playing of the
azaadi (freedom) card into the hands of the
Pakistani state's surrogates like Hizb-ul-Mujahideen by
1994? If the early "intifada" phase was indeed secular,
how could zealot Pakistan-centered Islamist outfits like
Harkat-ul-Ansar take over the entire momentum of
fighting in J&K so suddenly? Bose, who has conducted
field visits to J&K, states that pro-Pakistan views
constitute a minority opinion in the state, but fails to
explore why thousands of Kashmiri youth joined ISI
(Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence) brainchild
organizations alongside "foreign/guest militants".
Since the late 1990s, Pakistan-based terrorist
groups have launched more than 55 deadly fedayeen
attacks (suicide missions) in J&K and other parts of
India. Bose is sanguine to the reality that suicidal
warfare is "not exclusively a cross-border phenomenon",
but involved Kashmiri-speaking local Muslims. In
Muslim-majority Rajouri and Poonch districts of Jammu
also, "the rhetoric of jihad has had some effect" on
local youth. (p 157) In guerrilla ranks that were killed
after 1990, the overall local-to-foreigner ratio stands
at 70-30, a statistic that should have led Bose to
examine the sinuous ascent of religious fundamentalism
in J&K.
Vetting existing solutions, Bose
rejects a plebiscite as an obsolete idea that is
infeasible because India is against it and Pakistan has
no genuine commitment to it. Independent statehood for
Kashmir based on a plebiscite is a "rigid monolithic
conception" likely to herald a countdown to all-out
civil war owing to its winner-takes-all dispensation.
Bosnia's 1992 sovereignty plebiscite unleashed bloody
partition and ethnic cleansing Europe hasn't witnessed
in half a century. The Good Friday agreement's
plebiscitary clauses in Northern Ireland are also rife
with inflammatory possibilities, jeopardizing the
losers' future.
Converting the Line of Control
(LoC) into a de jure international border is
dismissed by Bose as "astonishingly naive" as "no
Pakistani regime or leader can or will accept it". (p
179) Summary treatment of this scheme reveals Bose's
misreading of history. In 1972, premier Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto did accept the selfsame legalization of the LoC
in a secret protocol to the Simla Agreement with his
counterpart, Indira Gandhi.
The Hindu
nationalist solution of trifurcating J&K on
religious majority basis by carving out Kashmir, Jammu
and Ladakh as separate administrative entities within
India is rightly described as "incendiary and
counter-productive". If such a plan were to be
implemented, the logic of the 1947 partition of the
sub-continent would be replicated with attendant mass
displacements and violence.
Bose's own model for
peace calls for a process that accepts all competing
identities and rejects none - "a strategic compromise
between opposed perspectives". (p 208) Rival political
preferences (pro-independence, pro-India and
pro-Pakistan) must coexist in mutual recognition and
tolerance, ie "consociation" similar to the Northern
Ireland agreements.
At the Track 1 level, Bose
recommends an institutionalized permanent
inter-governmental India-Pakistan council on Kashmir.
Cross-border terrorism and the changed geopolitical
climate after September 11, 2001 render chances of
achieving this rather slim. Bose, who has authored a
separate book on Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, could have
adduced the comparative example of vast improvement in
India-Sri Lanka relations once India disentangled itself
in 1991 from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
India-Pakistan relations can improve dramatically if the
jihad tap is plugged in Islamabad.
At the Track
2 level, Bose seeks a representative and accountable
political framework in J&K to ensure minimum quality
of governance. He supports "maximum devolution of
decision-making powers from the center" to approximate
the pre-1953 division of powers between autonomous
J&K and federal India. However, no realistic
safeguard is provided for India to prevent "maximum
autonomy" from degenerating into Sheikh Abdullah-style
majoritarian autocracy-cum-secessionism that would today
be openly Islamist unlike in the pre-1953 era. A
corollary change Bose tables is narrowing inter-regional
and intra-regional differences among Kashmir, Ladakh and
Jammu. Simultaneously, Bose calls for an inclusive and
representative order in Pakistani Kashmir where severe
restrictions on freedoms "need to be minimized". (p 255)
This is another woolly headed proposition, as Islamabad
faces no armed revolt abetted by a neighboring country
in "Azad" (Free) J&K to concede any liberties.
Still on Track 2, Bose wants "an acknowledgement
by the government of India that large-scale abuses have
occurred, and that these are regretted". (p 258)
Typically, he sidesteps a corollary apology from jihadi
terrorists who have acted brutally on civilians of all
hues in J&K in the name of azaadi.
Track 3 in Bose's design requires transformation
of the LoC "from an iron curtain to a linen curtain", ie
cross-border economic and cultural linkages between
Indian Kashmir and Pakistani Kashmir. In the current
scenario of relentless infiltration by holy warriors
into Indian Kashmir from the other side, this suggestion
too fails to convince. If "soft borders" are not
preceded by genuine decommissioning and laying down of
arms by jihad outfits based in "Azad" J&K, they
would augur more violence and infiltration of illegal
human and materiel cargo.
To sum it up, Bose has
invested rational intellect and humanist thought into
this venture, but at numerous junctures headed off on
unilinear paths motivated by sheer subjectivity. Total
lack of reflection on radical Islam and its effects on
Kashmir especially disappoint the reader. The book is
still worth reading as a 'liberal' shot at mapping out
the Kashmir maze.
Kashmir. Roots of Conflict,
Paths to Peace by Sumantra Bose, Sage Publications
India, 2003, Delhi. ISBN: 81-7829-328-5, price: US$6,
307 pages.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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policies.)
the multiple strands of allegiances over
Kashmir and to accommodate them all in a skillful
compromise. Bose's preoccupation is with "reframing the
Kashmir question as a challenge for democratic politics"
and building a polity that makes up the democratic
deficit. 
