Talking with India
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville , CA
After a two-year hiatus, India and Pakistan are talking again. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai halted the Composite Dialogue which was initiated during the Musharraf era.
That dialogue had put an end to the day-to-day sniping that had characterized the conversation between Islamabad and New Delhi ever since the Pakistani attack on Indian outposts in Kargil in 1999.
The Composite Dialogue became essential after Kashmiri militants attacked the Indian Parliament in 2001, leading to the deployment of a million troops along the international border between the two countries. The dialogue muffled talk in India of carrying out a limited war with Pakistan.
After Mumbai, the hotheads in New Delhi renewed their belligerent rhetoric of hot pursuits. The Cold Start doctrine was strutted publicly. More recently, they were crowing about fighting a war on two fronts.
In the wake of such histrionics, it is not surprising that no agenda was announced for the conversations between the foreign secretaries of the two countries that took place in New Delhi last Thursday. Nirupama Rao said simply that the talks would focus on the core issue of terrorism. Salman Bashir almost certainly would have wanted to focus on the core issue of Kashmir.
Of course, the two issues are but two sides of the same coin. One hopes that Rao and Bashir were able to build upon the rapport they developed when both served as their respective country’s ambassador to China.
Kashmir has to be discussed and resolved. Violations of human rights in Jammu and Kashmir continue to be the norm as the Indian security forces. In January, a seventh grader, Wamik Farooq Wani, was killed by Indian police in Rainawari. This prompted week-long protests in Srinagar and beyond. The situation was aggravated when another teenager, Zahid Farooq, was killed by security personnel. A moderate Kashmiri leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was put under house arrest for simply wishing to lead a march to the UN offices in Srinagar.
India ’s long history of using discipline and death to enforce its authority in Jammu and Kashmir has exacted a severe toll on the local population. A new report published by the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir called Buried Evidence ( http://www.kashmirprocess.org/reports/graves/BuriedEvidenceKashmir.pdf) has documented 2,700 unmarked graves some of which contain multiple remains. The report also indicates that since 1989, Indian security forces have killed more than 70,000 people and that more than 8,000 have disappeared. On the 23 rd of February, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School organized a panel session to discuss the deteriorating situation on both sides of the Line of Control (a video is posted at the center’s website). While there are violations of human rights on the Pakistani side, they pale in comparison to the suffering experienced by the people of Jammu and Kashmir . Robert Nickelsberg whose work often appears in TIME magazine presented a searing photographic essay of the killings by Indian security forces. Parvez Imroz, a Kashmiri attorney who was invited to serve on the panel, was not allowed to leave India by the authorities. He sent in an audio tape from Srinagar .
The political leaders of India and Pakistan would be well advised to think of the back channel that was created between the two countries during the second half of the Musharraf era. While the Pakistani foreign minister has recently said that there is no record of the proposals made by Musharraf, the Pakistani diplomatic core can refresh their memories by reading Steve Coll’s article in The New Yorker of March 2, 2009.
Coll says that the back channel began in 2004. It envisioned that Kashmir would become an autonomous region whose residents would move freely across the Line of Control and conduct trade with each other. Over time, Kashmir would be gradually demilitarized.
This represented a sea change in Pakistan’s strategic culture which had long revolved around the premise that the entire princely state of Jammu and Kashmir wished to accede to Pakistan in 1947 but Indian ambitions got in the way. It also represented a shift in Pakistan’s long-stated position that the UN should hold a plebiscite in Kashmir to decide on its accession and to involve third parties as mediators in negotiations with India.
Coll says that Musharraf, who was then also the army chief, gathered his formation commanders at GHQ in Rawalpindi and told them Pakistan’s raison d’être was not permanent enmity with India but its own security.
He said that security meant not only the safety of Pakistan’s borders but also its economic development. Musharraf said that war was no longer an option for either side since both had nuclear weapons. He asked the commanders to put their hands on their hearts and tell him if they believed Kashmiris could gain freedom without Pakistan negotiating a settlement with India.
Musharraf argued that peace with India would produce economic benefits that would strengthen Pakistan and allow the military to carry out its 15-year development plan. Coll says that Musharraf was able to bring about a change in the thinking of the commanders by getting them to change their attitude from one based on entitlement to one where they would ask whether the people would support the army.
Of course, peace cannot occur without India also sensing a need to negotiate in earnest with Pakistan. India had seen how its mobilization in the spring of 2002 had caused multinationals to panic and withdraw their employees from India in large numbers. India’s journey to greatness was inevitable barring a catastrophic war with Pakistan.
Coll quotes Jaswant Singh, then India’s foreign minister, as saying, “We were convinced these two countries must learn to live in accord.” On January 8, 2007, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remarked in public, “I dream of a day, while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul.”
Alas, the back channel was doomed since Musharraf over-reached domestically and went into a political death spiral. While Musharraf is gone from the political scene, Singh is still the prime minister of India and an elected administration is in power in Islamabad.
One hopes that the conversations in New Delhi represent a new beginning. There is no longer any need to negotiate in secret. The leaders need to begin preparing their citizens for thinking anew about Kashmir.
ahmadfaruqui@gmail.com
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