Resolving Kashmir with a Musharraf
model By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - The studied casualness with which Pakistan
President General Pervez Musharraf presented his big
idea on Kashmir this week has not been able to hide its
innovative and indeed revolutionary potential in
changing the very nature of discourse on the only
dispute in the present-day world that is considered a
nuclear flashpoint.
Musharraf's already famous
"food for thought" presented at an iftar (ritual
food taken by Muslims to break their fast in the month
of Ramadan) party in Islamabad is worrying India to no
end. Though the government and the media have tried to
dismiss the idea as a trial balloon, it is felt that
India will have to at least appear to seriously consider
the idea and, preferably, come up with one of its own
that is different from its traditional position of
confirming the status quo by turning the present Line of
Control (LoC) into an international border.
The
international community including the United States has
already welcomed the idea. The US said on Tuesday it
would "encourage all interested parties" to take a
"careful" look at any proposal "that could advance peace
in the region". The Western media welcomed it as "an
earnest stab at regional peace".
There is an
awareness in New Delhi that, though most Indian analysts
are dismissing the idea as a reiteration of the Andorra
model floated by US-based Kashmiris earlier with the
blessings of the US State Department, that is not
entirely the case. Musharraf's model seems to go beyond
all that, and Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Mahmood
Kasuri is not quite wrong in praising his boss for the
courage shown in floating the idea, which is neither
exactly a Dixon Plan - a 1950s proposal floated by then
United Nations mediator Owen Dixon - nor just an Andorra
solution.
The Musharraf model has been almost
universally denounced by the secular as well as
fundamentalist opposition in Pakistan, viewed as a
U-turn on Kashmir comparable to Pakistan's U-turn on the
Taliban in Afghanistan following September 11, 2001. It
has, however, received a cautious welcome from those
among the separatist groups in the valley of Kashmir who
favor independence. Some top functionaries of the
Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, a coalition of several
separatist organizations, described it as
"path-breaking" and "positive". They are reported to
have had an inkling of the formula being presented
beforehand, as Pakistan's foreign minister had sought
their opinion on the issue in his meetings with them
during his trips to New Delhi for talks with the Indian
officials in the last months. This also means that the
proposals are well-thought out and well-deliberated in
the Pakistani establishment as well as among the
Kashmiri separatists backed by Pakistan.
What
makes the Musharraf model so revolutionary? Essentially,
the idea that all parts of the original pre-1947 Jammu
and Kashmir state, including those at the moment held by
Pakistan, should be demilitarized and their status
changed in such a way that they do not belong to either
India or Pakistan. Thus Pakistan has finally accepted
the independence option for Kashmir without actually
putting it in those terms.
Pakistan has
traditionally demanded the implementation of the UN
resolutions of 1948 and 1949, which could not be
implemented partly because of Pakistan's unwillingness
to pull out troops and thus demilitarize the occupied
territories. These resolutions envisioned the accession
of Jammu and Kashmir to either India or Pakistan, as per
the wishes of the people to be ascertained in a
plebiscite. Pakistan was never agreeable to the demand
by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front that
independence from both countries be included in the
options at the time of plebiscite. India considers the
UN resolutions obsolete.
The Musharraf model
appears to take away the option of accession to any of
the two warring states altogether and offers different
degrees and forms of autonomy or independence, though he
doesn't quite say that in so many words. He is proposing
to "identify the region, demilitarize the region forever
and change its status. [which can then have]
independence, condominium where there can be a joint
[India-Pakistan] control or there can be a UN mandate."
Obviously this implies that even a region as
dear to the heart of the Pakistan Army as Gilgil and
Baltistan in the Northern Areas of Kashmir will either
have independence or joint India-Pakistan control or a
UN mandate, if the Musharraf model is to be followed.
The option of any country controlling any territory
independently is just not there, unless Musharraf is
employing Orwell-speak, in which independence means the
freedom to be occupied by the country of one's choice.
Mistrust of Musharraf is so high in India's
strategic community that most analysts are not even
prepared to give deep thought to any of his proposals
before rejecting them. But for this, Musharraf might
have been seen to have done precisely what Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh asked him to do - think outside
of the box.
Indian analysts have mostly focused
on the misdemeanor of Musharraf dividing Kashmir state
into seven parts, two on the Pakistani side and five on
Indian side, even though generally Kashmir is understood
to have five regions: the Northern Areas, the so-called
Azad Kashmir, Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Ladakh. For
them, this merely smacks of a narrow-minded regional and
communal approach, though it can also be interpreted as
encouraging ethnic and linguistic minorities in the
state to have their say in the final solution of the
long-festering dispute.
Indian analysts do not
even appreciate that the Musharraf model seems to
finally bury the argument that Jammu and Kashmir should
be a part of the Islamic state of Pakistan by virtue of
its overwhelming Muslim majority. It also for the first
time opens up the possibility of the status of the
Northern Areas - Gilgit, Skardu and Baltistan - to be
determined afresh.
Musharraf divides the state
into seven regions: Buddhist-dominated Leh;
Shi'ite-dominated Kargil; the Kashmir Valley;
Hindu-dominated Jammu, Kathua and parts of Udhampur
districts; Muslim-dominated Rajouri, Poonch and Doda
districts; Pakistan-occupied "Azad" Kashmir and the
Northern Areas of Gilgit and Baltistan.
These
divisions, however, are not so neat on the ground.
People living in Rajouri and Poonch, for instance, have
linguistic and ethnic links with the people across the
LoC. Similarly, the people of Karnah in north Kashmir's
Kupwara district share similar bonds with the people
living across the Neelum Valley. Some villages, even
houses lie divided across the LoC, causing untold misery
to a number of people.
The LoC is essentially a
ceasefire line and at the very least needs to be
urgently rationalized. Visiting remote areas one comes
across horrendous stories of official neglect and
apathy. Some villagers on the Indian side of the border,
for instance, did not even know until the Kargil
mini-war of 1999 that their village lay on the Indian
side and that they were not citizens of Pakistan like
the rest of their relatives. It was only the intrusion
of television cameras from Delhi to cover the war that
finally gave them this information.
It is not
yet clear if Indian leadership too was consulted or at
least their likely response taken into consideration
before Musharraf made the proposal. There have been
reports in the Indian media that the so-called Andorra
plan, to which the Musharraf plan is being likened, was
among the possible solutions to the Kashmir problem
studied by the former Prime Minister's Office under Atal
Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee's principal secretary and
national security advisor Brajesh Mishra had reportedly
collected details of the possible solutions from various
agencies and was studying them in detail when the
coalition government was defeated in the general
elections. It has also been reported that current
National Security Advisor JN Dixit is continuing with
behind-the-scenes consultations that Mishra had been
holding with Pakistani top brass on Kashmir and other
contentious issues.
The international response
to Musharraf's proposals has, however, been so positive
that New Delhi is finding it difficult to ignore what
has been universally described in the Indian media as
Musharraf's trial balloon, or kite-flying. According to
the Indian Express, Musharraf has demonstrated the
characteristics of a consummate politician. For The
Times of India, Pakistan has in any case been always
ahead of India in scoring diplomatic points. Musharraf
is also being recognized as managing to have scored
something of a diplomatic coup, forcing India's
somnolent bureaucracy to look for some bright ideas of
its own.
Pakistan favoring independence or even
genuine autonomy for the people of Jammu and Kashmir
will certainly raise its moral stature in the
international community, particularly when it is known
that while Hindus, Buddhists and many Muslims have no
problem with their state's accession to secular
democratic India, very few Kashmiris on either side of
the LoC would like the fate of their state being linked
to a fundamentalist, mostly dictatorial Pakistan.
Thousands of Muslim Kashmiris from the valley belonging
to the former ruling National Conference (NC) or the
present ruling People's Democratic Party have sacrificed
their lives willingly in the cause of their state's
accession to India. They keep being systematically
targeted and killed by Pakistan-backed militants. Only
this week former chief minister Farooq Abdullah and the
head of the NC and former minister of state for external
affairs in the Vajpayee government Omar Abdullah
survived assassination attempts for the umpteenth time.
But their ardor for pro-India politics has not dimmed.
In the authoritative Mori poll taken a few years ago,
only 6% of Kashmiris interviewed had opted for accession
with Pakistan.
Floating proposals for the
"independence" of Kashmir may thus earn some brownie
points for Musharraf in the international community,
particularly among those who are not aware of the
complex ground realities of the state and the region.
But merely floating seemingly reasonable proposals will
not do. He would gain real stature and credibility, and
be able to put India in the dock, only if he grants
independence or even genuine autonomy to the people of
Kashmir under Pakistani occupation. If Musharraf lets
Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas be really
azad (free), he would indeed have mounted a
diplomatic coup against India, forcing it to match the
offer. But as long as Azad Kashmir remains under the
thumb of Pakistan's army generals and petty politicians
from areas as far flung as Balochistan or North West
Frontier province, that Musharraf is shedding crocodile
tears at the plight of Indian Kashmiris will not carry
much credibility.
Sultan Shahin is a
New Delhi-based writer.
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