India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

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

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INDIA & PAKISTAN

Unanswered questions

The heady euphoria triggered by the Lahore Declaration appears to have abated, and statements from India and Pakistan since then show up the inherent difficulties in initiating a dialogue on Kashmir.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi

IN acknowledging that they could engage in a dialogue on the status of Jammu and Kashmir, India and Pakistan seemed to break new ground in Lahore on February 21. This has been rendered, in the assessment of some commentators, into a virtual advertisement for the revelatory qualities of the competitive nuclear tests in the subcontinent in May 1998. Having consummated their ideological contestation in the chilling logic of nuclear exterminism, India and Pakistan, the new orthodoxy holds, had no choice but to step back from the precipice and agree to evaluate the entire record of their troubled relations afresh. Much is read into the fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is spearheading the rapprochement with Pakistan today, has always been the most strident in its insistence that to open a dialogue on Kashmir would be akin to pronouncing the death of the Indian nation.

These assertions may seem attractive to those who set much store by the hidden ironies of history. But a plain evaluation of the facts would reveal them to be excessively fanciful. If agreeing to talk about Kashmir is the principal criterion, then the breakthrough in neighbourhood relations came not in Lahore in February, but in Islamabad on June 23, 1997. Seemingly ringing down the curtain on a decade of coercive diplomacy in the region, the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries agreed on that day to inaugurate a phase of dialogue in which the issues of Jammu and Kashmir and peace and security, including confidence-building measures, would be high-priority items.

That was a concession to the principle that dialogue and mutual accommodation are always preferable to bellicosity. But the shared sense of bonhomie proved altogether transient. Two days after appending his signature to the agreement in Islamabad, Indian Foreign Secretary Salman Haidar unburdened himself of the following explanation in Delhi: "We have an established position on this subject of Jammu and Kashmir. There is no dispute on our part of Kashmir in the sense of a disputed area. Our concerns relate to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, infiltration and support to terrorism." In other words, India could only conceive of engaging in a dialogue on the basis of the cessation of the insurgency on its side of the Line of Control and the future status of Kashmiri territory on the other side.

The following day, a Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman dismissed Haidar's remark as mere "propaganda" and insisted that Jammu and Kashmir was a "disputed territory", whose future status was to be "determined through a reference to the people in terms of the United Nations Security Council resolutions."

After the initial flurry, the neighbourhood engagement ran squarely into the obstacles posed by hardened positions on both sides. A lack of concord on the appropriate forum and sundry other modalities of the dialogue compounded this difficulty. Subsequent meetings between the Indian and Pakistani Prime Ministers in New York, Edinburgh and Dhaka were marked by cordiality but little more than the agreement in principle that the talks should go on. It did not help matters that by the time of the last meeting in January 1998, the I.K. Gujral Government was already a lameduck administration, devoid of a clear mandate to negotiate on a vital area of foreign policy. Then came the change of regime in New Delhi and the nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert.

ALTHOUGH in the substantive sense the Lahore Declaration only underlines an agreement dating from June 1997, it is significant in that it reverses a dangerous spiral in mutual antipathy. The manner in which the Prime Ministers of the two countries have conjured up a dramatic shift in the public mood is abiding proof of the power of gestures. Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee's visit to the Minar-e-Pakistan and his observations on that occasion were significant in their declaratory potential. They laid to rest the bogey that India still refused to accept the legacy of Partition.

Whether these perceptions have been a live influence on public opinion in Pakistan is debatable. That they lurk just below the surface and can be brought to the boil by sufficiently motivated quarters is, however, evident from certain recent remarks by General Mirza Aslam Beg, the former Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army. In Gen. Beg's evaluation, tensions between India and Pakistan went beyond territorial disputes, into basic questions of identity. Pakistan is a nation that came into existence as an Islamic homeland in South Asia. As a self-proclaimed secular state that is capable of winning the allegiance of its Muslim population, India poses an ideological challenge to this perception. Kashmir is, in this sense, a denial of the principle of Pakistan. It is eminently a part of the "contiguous Muslim territories" that merited inclusion in the Islamic homeland. And yet it remains a holdout, refusing integration on the basis of religion.

A symbol of identity in Pakistan, a badge of honour in India. Kashmir has suffered the misfortune of being transformed into a battleground of ideas - a nasty conflict with manifestly brutal implications on the ground. In conceding the need for a dialogue on Kashmir, the Indian state has retreated significantly from its insistence that the project of subversion in Kashmir merited nothing other than a coercive response. Yet there is a glaring incongruity in this concession, a serious inconsistency that retrospectively calls in question all of India's claims on Kashmir.

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif at the Darbar Hall of Governor House in Lahore on February 21.

In part because of the insecurities of Partition and the truculence of the Hindu right-wing political element, Kashmir has always suffered a serious "democracy defi-cit". Representative government in Kashmir has been the exception rather than the rule. An experiment with democracy that commenced in 1975 was suspended in 1983, resumed on a provisional basis in 1987, and then decisively terminated in 1989.

To this must be added another distinctive feature of Jammu and Kashmir: alone among Indian States, it stands out as an exception to the principle of linguistic organisation. The Kashmir Valley is a region of great linguistic and cultural homogeneity, but Jammu is home to a multiplicity of linguistic groups and allegiances. In a situation that called for extreme flexibility of modes of political organisation, the Indian Government has never been able to go beyond the idiom of tutored democracy. As a consequence, Jammu and Kashmir as a state has never been able to establish a stable equilibrium of elite solidarity, which is the indispensable prerequisite for a viable political dispensation that is free of all overt forms of coercion.

In many senses, the Lahore Declaration underlines the fact of the democracy deficit. India today stands willing to discuss the status of Kashmir with a neighbouring country, over the heads of the people of the State. It is a comment on the established paradigm of thinking on Kashmir that few commentators have chosen to question what the content of such a dialogue could be. What, above all, would be the implications for the insistence that Kashmir is an integral part of India and the people of that State, Indian citizens with all the rights that this status involves?

Multiple questions remain to be addressed and various areas of ambiguity wait to be ironed out. It may have been the easy part to agree in a sudden access of neighbourly goodwill that contentious issues would all be placed on the negotiating table. The devil, however, lies in the details. And the inherent difficulties in initiating the dialogue have been apparent in statements from both sides since the heady euphoria of Lahore.

First, Nawaz Sharif indicated that India had tacitly accepted that the right of self-determination should be applied in Kashmir, provoking a storm of outrage from Opposition parties in India. Pakistan also made it known concurrently that it would explore "other options" if the talks on Kashmir failed to produce results.

Prime Minister Vajpayee, for his part, chose not to respond directly. He did dredge up primeval anxieties with the assertion that India would not relive the historical miseries of successive invasions from abroad and would not lose any more of its territory. While the Prime Minister delved into history, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh chose to impart a certain sense of urgency to the task of resuming the dialogue. In calling for an end to the process of "map-making" on the subcontinent, he also seemed tacitly to determine pre-emptively the outcome of the dialogue.

The bellicosity deficit was made good by Home Minister L.K. Advani on his return from Wagah. There were great hopes generated from the recent breakthrough in neighbourhood relations, he said, though these would prove ephemeral if Pakistan should seek to sustain its effort to subvert the Indian state from within. A new beginning or a punctuation mark - the jury clearly is still out on the Lahore Declaration. And while it deliberates, Kashmir will continue to be torn by the conflict of ideas and its heavy toll of human life.