India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 06 :: Mar. 13 - 26, 1999

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COVER STORY

TROUBLE AHEAD IN KASHMIR

As India and Pakistan face pressure to discuss the future of Jammu and Kashmir, a partition of the State on communal lines emerges as a talking point. And on the ground, the communal fault lines sharpen.

PRAVEEN SWAMI
in Jammu

JAMMU AND KASHMIR is witnessing a strange political performance in the wake of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's drive across the Wagah border. It is a whirling, sometimes violent drama in which, however, the important actors perform offstage. The meeting between the Prime Ministers has set in play forces whose course is yet unknown. However, it seems increasingly improbable that this play will have a happy ending. "This is the most dangerous period in Jammu and Kashmir's recent history," says the State's former Regional Autonomy Commission (RAC) Chairman and academic, Balraj Puri. "And for the first time, I am almost without hope."

Puri's pessimism is not difficult to comprehend. The fact that India and Pakistan are now engaged in a dialogue on the future of Jammu and Kashmir, however vapid it might be, has forced political forces in the State to consider their options. With a horrible inevitability, the solutions that seem to suggest themselves lie along the communal fault lines: fault lines which the communal situation in the Jammu region may not allow to remain dormant for much longer.

AIJAZ RAHI / AP
Part of a procession taken out in Srinagar on March 4, when some secessionist leaders left on the Haj pilgrimage. Some of the proposals on the future of Jammu and Kashmir have grave implications for the continued existence of the State as a single entity.

Perhaps most important in shaping Jammu and Kashmir's current situation were the forces unleashed by the nuclear tests at Pokhran last summer. The tests themselves, mirrored by Union Home Minister L.K. Advani's ill-advised linkage between India's nuclear capability and the resolution of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, ensured a de facto internationalisation of the issue. This was precisely the outcome that Indian foreign policy had sought to avoid for decades. After Pokhran, Pakistan sought to press home its advantage by escalating tension along the Line of Control (LoC), using the worst exchange of fire since 1971 to draw international attention to the Kashmir conflict.

Intriguing off-stage performances after the Sharif-Vajpayee meeting have come from an influential United States foreign policy institution. The Kashmir Study Group, which advises Washington on its Kashmir policy, suggested that "a portion of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir be reconstituted as a sovereign entity enjoying free access to and from both India and Pakistan." Widely circulated among politicians in the State, the paper titled, "Kashmir: A Way Forward", said that the new entity would have its own legislature, citizenship and internal law and order force, with its defence guaranteed by both India and Pakistan.

NISSAR AHMED
Union Home Minister L.K. Advani and Jammu and Kashmir Governor G.C. Saxena at Srinagar airport in June 1998. The Pokhran nuclear tests of May 1998 and the ill-advised linkage that Advani sought to make between India's nuclear capability and the resolution of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir ensured de facto internationalisation of the issue.

These proposals in effect meant a sundering of Kashmir from Jammu, and dividing the State on communal lines. In 1950, Owen Dixon, the United Nations mediator on Kashmir, had suggested a similar plan. The Dixon Plan called for the international border to run broadly north of the Chenab river, cutting apart predominantly Muslim Doda, Rajouri and Poonch from Jammu, and joining them to the Kashmir Valley. Hindu-dominated Kathua and Jammu would have stayed with India. The proposal was unacceptable to India's secular political establishment. The revival of the U.S. interest in the idea had obvious significance in the context of a meeting between two right-wing Prime Ministers.

However, the most important players in the enterprise were those entrenched in the State's political apparatus. Since at least 1996, influential figures in the National Conference (N.C.) have been pushing hard to transform the character of Jammu, a communally diverse but culturally coherent region, which is the principal barrier to Kashmir-centred secessionist claims. Rajouri MLA and School Education Minister Mohammad Sharief Tariq, Surankote MLA Mushtaq Ahmad Bukhari, Mendhar MLA and Agriculture Minister Nisar Ahmad Khan, and Uri MLA and Finance Minister Mohammad Shafi Uri are among the powerful figures who have argued for a restructuring of the basis of regional identity in the State.

AIJAZ RAHI / AP
In Srinagar on February 26, the police fire teargas shells on demonstrators protesting against the denial of permission for some secessionist leaders to leave the country for the Haj.

All the four N.C. leaders come from the predominantly Muslim areas of Jammu broadly north of the Chenab, slated to be part of Pakistan under the Owen Plan. In 1996, N.C. leaders from the region demanded the creation of a new Pahari (mountain) region, separating the predominantly Muslim Rajouri-Poonch belt from Jammu province, and integrating it with Uri to the north in Kashmir province. Later, during meetings of Puri's RAC, whose report the N.C. Government has for some reason refused to make public, the MLAs again said that they did not want to be governed by Jammu's "kanak mandi lalas" (grain market traders).

The N.C. has made a similar demand to separate the sprawling district of Doda from Jammu province. The claims are in part driven by short-term political considerations. The demand for a Pahari region, for example, was designed to undermine the influence of Gujjar and Bakerwal leaders in the region, communities which have traditionally backed the Congress(I). But the demand also rests on the proposition that these regions have no common culture with Jammu. The Pahari language, for example, is claimed to be distinct enough from that spoken elsewhere in the province to make the creation of new administrative boundaries necessary.

NISSAR AHMED
A.S. Mangat, Inspector-General of the Border Security Force, Baramulla frontier, displays 107-mm mortars and anti-aircraft guns seized in Kupwara in late-February. Most security officials in the State are deeply concerned about the prospects of an escalation in terrorist violence during the coming summer season.

Claims of this kind are specious: through history the Jammu province has been a plural unity, bound together by trade, agriculture and cultural practices. Speaking to Frontline, Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah sought to defend his MLAs' demands for separation from Jammu, claiming that they were driven by the lack of economic development in their areas. This itself is a communally-loaded claim. Predominantly Hindu hill areas south of Chenab, such as Bani in Kathua, have done no better than Rajouri or Poonch. Rather than enable a more responsive government, the N.C. leadership in the Jammu region seems determined to sharpen communal boundaries.

The reasons for this are not too difficult to find. Unlike in the Kashmir Valley, where the N.C. represents a secular face of politics, its position in the Jammu region is very different. Here the party has survived as a representative of Muslim interests, defending the community against supposedly predatory Hindu elites in Jammu. After the March 1998 killings of four Muslims in Karara by a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS-led mob, Doda MLA Khalid Suhrawardy saw no ideological problem in sharing a platform with the local Jamaat-e-Islami chief, Saiyidullah Tantre. In Rajouri, local-level alliances between the N.C. and the Jamaat-e-Islami have long been a feature of the political landscape. Recently some block-level officials of the party offered not-so-overt support to terrorists.

Village Defence Committee member Raghubir Singh, who killed Pakistani national Sher Khan (right), the top Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist who operated in Rajouri district, and was himself killed in the encounter at Sonchal village on February 5.

However, the N.C. is not the only grouping that appears determined to sharpen the frontiers between communities in the State. There are disturbing signs that at least a section of the RSS endorses one version of the same enterprise. At a seminar in February, Jammu University historian Hari Om argued for the consolidation of Jammu province into a new State. Kashmir, in Hari Om's formula, would be declared a demilitarised, autonomous territory for 10 years, after which a plebiscite could determine its future. This plebiscite, the historian expects, could well be won by India. The idea was not novel, but its spokesman was: a Jammu University academic. Hari Om has long been associated with the Hindu right, and with Bharatiya Janata Party-backed agitations.

Similar noises have come from former Union Minister Karan Singh, scion of the Dogra monarchy which once ruled the State. Karan Singh has expressed support for the idea that the provinces of Jammu and Kashmir have too little in common to constitute a single entity. Language, religion and culture, he argued, sunder them too deeply. Local Jammu notables, including Chamber of Commerce chief Ramesh Gupta, brother of Udhampur's BJP MP Chaman Lal Gupta, have also backed the division of the State. In a recent conversation with a senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader, Karan Singh suggested that the existence of Jammu and Kashmir as a single State was a feudal legacy. "I don't suffer from a feudal hangover although I am a feudal," he joked, "but you do although you are a Communist."

These ideas are not new, and it is unlikely that either the N.C. or the RSS fringe calls would find official endorsement.

But the transfigured context today renders such ideas dangerous. Highly placed sources told Frontline that Rajesh Pilot, as Union Minister of State for Home in the P. V. Narasimha Rao Ministry, had invited Vajpayee, Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, and former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, to discuss the United States' proposals for a partition of the State. None of them, predictably, were supportive. But the idea clearly remained in circulation, with Union Home Minister Indrajit Gupta infamously announcing plans in 1997 for the partition of the State. Gupta backtracked with lightning speed, but the fact that he made his comment illustrates the survival of the idea.

Congress(I) politicians in Jammu and Kashmir appear hostile to any such plans. "We've had one partition," says Bijbehara MLA Mehbooba Mufti, the party's most important local figure who has been busy building fences with anti-N.C. forces including the Jamaat-e-Islami. "We don't need another." She said: "People were initially very happy that Vajpayee and Sharif are talking, but the dialogue will be useless unless there are results. More important than such dialogue is opening up unconditional dialogue with our young people who are carrying arms. They want a honourable way out of the situation they are in, but all that successive Governments have wanted to do is impose a military solution. India, and for that matter Pakistan, must decide whether they want Kashmir's people, or their graveyards."

S.THANTHONI
Karan Singh, former Union Minister and scion of the Dogra monarchy that once ruled Jammu and Kashmir. He has expressed support for the idea that the provinces of Jammu and Kashmir have too little in common to constitute a single entity.

Such rhetoric may sound appealing, but the key problem is that neither terrorist groups nor the All-Party Hurriyat Conference has shown any interest in Mufti's calls. Indeed, the apparent Vajpayee-Sharif rapprochement appears to have left the Hurriyat confused. Hurriyat Conference chairman and Jamaat-e-Islami leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani condemned the meeting, arguing that the people of Jammu and Kashmir had to be parties to any settlement in the State. "Bus and cricket diplomacy," he said at a February 8 press conference, "will do nothing to improve relations between the two countries." However, the organisation's close ties with Pakistan mean that its protests have been more than a little muted. On the other hand, Shabbir Shah, about whose possible entry into mainstream politics there has been considerable speculation, supported the Wagah drive and the dialogue that followed.

CURIOUSLY, this high political drama appears to have little mass support. On February 9, a CPI(M) call for bandhs as part of the nationwide Left protest against price rises led Kashmir residents, for the first time in over a decade to join a mainstream political agitation. Despite the Hurriyat Conference's warnings to residents not to join the CPI(M) agitation, shops, businesses, banks and even government offices through the Kashmir Valley remained closed in response to the call. CPI(M) State Secretary and Kulgam MLA Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami later led a procession of over 3,000 people from Lal Chowk to Maulana Azad Road in Srinagar. Without dispute it was the largest mass gathering in the Kashmir Valley in recent years.

M.LAKSHMANAN
All-Party Hurriyat Conference chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The apparent thaw in India -Pakistan relations in recent weeks appears to have left the Hurriyat confused.

The CPI(M)'s spectacular display makes at least two points clear, other than that the party has managed to consolidate its position since Tarigami was elected. The first, as the broadly pro-Hurriyat Conference newspaper Aftab ruefully pointed out, all local organisations have ignored the real grassroots problems facing the State's people. The bandh, Aftab recorded, was a "miracle". The second is that there is a genuine mass constituency for a democratic politics that focusses on these concerns. Sadly, few other parties appear to have learned the lessons of the CPI(M)-sponsored bandh, instead they depend on political mobilisations that are communal at the core.

Genuine political initiative is certain to be desperately needed in the months to come. For one, Pakistan has made clear that the process of detente will not lead to a scaling back of its involvement in Jammu and Kashmir's armed conflict. On Pakistan's annual Kashmir Freedom Day, February 6, Sharif announced at Kotli that the State's separation from India was "unstoppable". "The sooner India understands this," he said, "the better". Then, the powerful Pakistan military establishment has sent its own signals. While fire across the LoC briefly ceased in the days around the Wagah border crossing, Army officials told Frontline that it has now returned to levels they describe as "normal". And, critically, Sharif has shown little ability to control far-right groups in Pakistan that sponsor terrorism, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Lashkar-e-Taiba's patron body, the Markaz Dawa wal'Irshad.

NISSAR AHMED
Congress(I) activists demonstrate at Badgam on February 25 against the killing of innocent persons by unidentified gunmen, price rise and the grant of visa to Salman Rushdie.

Most security officials in Jammu and Kashmir are deeply concerned about the summer to come. "Let's put it this way", says Director-General of Police Gurbachan Jagat, "I'm afraid it will be very hot." Intelligence officials point to nightmare scenarios, including the possibility of large-scale massacres of Hindus in Jammu leading to communal retaliation, and an escalation of exchanges across the LoC escalating to a point where international intervention becomes inevitable. "I think such scenarios may have an element of exaggeration", says Tarigami, "but they highlight issues which we should be very, very watchful of."

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Bijbehara MLA Mehbooba Mufti. She and other Congress(I) politicians in the State appear hostile to any plans for a partition of the State.

Sadly, few in the ruling establishment appear concerned. High-profile purchases of property in Jammu by several leading Kashmir politicians has signalled, inadvertently or otherwise, that many are bracing themselves for desertion. Massive financial mismanagement and poor governance, in turn, have given room for both Hindu and Muslim communal politics to flourish. Panchayat elections scheduled for this May are likely to achieve little, for the State's 1989 Panchayati Raj Act rests more on nominations than on democratic selection. "What we need is a politics that devolves power to the people in a genuine way in government and development", Tarigami points out, "otherwise communalism will be difficult to resist."

RAJEEV BHATT
CPI(M) State secretary and Kulgam MLA Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami. The success of the CPI(M)-led bandh on February 9, called to protest against the price rise, points to the presence of a genuine mass constituency for democratic politics that focusses on the real problems faced by the people at the grassroots-level.

But most politicians appear to be blithely unconcerned about Jammu and Kashmir's future. Balraj Puri points to how the creation of the Ladakh Autonomous Council in 1989 created bitter Muslim-Buddhist strife in the region. "The Ladakh autonomous council for a variety of reasons only represented Leh", he says, "pushing Kargil Muslims with strong cultural links there to seek refuge in a larger Islamic identity." Now, both BJP and N.C. politicians appear to be working to the same end in the Jammu province. "Jammu is the real battleground now," Tarigami says bitterly. "It is here that it will be decided whether regional identities will survive, or be swamped by communal solidarities. It is here that the future of secularism in Jammu and Kashmir will be decided. But who is there to fight the battle?"