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LATE last year, at a rally, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader Mohammad Yasin Malik stood by the side of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's supreme leader, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, listening impassively as speaker after speaker called for an escalation of the jehad against India.
Just three weeks after that rally, a Frontline investigation has found, he shook hands with a very different man representing a very different agenda: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Malik, who was driven to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) in New Delhi by Intelligence Bureau personnel shortly before he left for the United States on November 28, 2005, for treatment, is just one of the participants in a process of secret diplomacy that is gathering both form and intensity. Many of the key figures in this process seem to be individuals based in the U.S., a fact that suggests that Washington D.C. has at least some role in pushing the pace of dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir. While the pieces of the jigsaw are starting to become apparent, it is far from clear what form the puzzle will finally take.
New Delhi's covert dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir is spearheaded by National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan. Prominent among those Narayanan has met are Farooq Kathwari, a well-connected ethnic-Kashmiri businessman who heads the U.S.-based Kashmir Study Group. The KSG's controversial plans for an ethnic-religious partition of Jammu and Kashmir have informed several of the proposals floated by Pakistan's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf. Kathwari, who was in New Delhi for a fortnight-long visit in early January, also visited the PMO on a second occasion but it is unclear if he secured a meeting with the Prime Minister himself. Officials said that Narayanan told Kathwari that Pakistan's proposals for the demilitarisation of Jammu and Kashmir could only be implemented if Musharraf delivered on his promises to end terrorism.
Manmohan Singh also held a 20-minute meeting with the U.S.-based Kashmiri leader Vijay Sazawal on January 11. Sazawal's concerns, informed sources said, were focussed on the need for the representation of Kashmir Pandits in the ongoing detente process, a demand the community's representatives in India have long been asserting. Like Kathwari, Sazawal is an American national who has been a significant player on issues related to the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir - and an instrument to communicate ideas that governments cannot state in public. Sazawal has participated in several fora where diasporic leaders like the Islamist Ghulam Nabi Fai sought to develop a road map for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. Such informal dialogue has often served as a useful tool to help governments explore new possibilities.
Other signs of energetic back-channel movement are not hard to come by. In December, for example, the Union government reversed years of policy and issued travel documents to the hardline Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, allowing him to participate in the Haj pilgrimage. With the apparent consent of India's covert services, Geelani used the opportunity to hold extended discussions with the Hizbul Mujahideen's Pakistan-based leader, Mohammad Yusuf Shah. He also attended a dinner hosted by former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to discuss President Musharraf's policies on Jammu and Kashmir. Some believe the Hizbul Mujahideen hopes to use Geelani as its representative in future talks, a proposition reinforced by the fact that the terrorist group's web site, www.hizbmedia.com, claims the rejectionist politician as its political leader.
WHILE the meetings illustrate the seriousness with which the Prime Minister treats the dialogue process, the secret negotiations are not without critics. Malik, for example, continues to be under trial in 10 cases of murder, including the killing of four unarmed Indian Air Force personnel at the Awantipora air base. He has also been charged, in the past, with receiving terror-related funds from Pakistan. Not surprisingly, some within India's Kashmir policy establishment are concerned that the Prime Minister's decision to engage personally an individual charged with crimes against the state, rather than assign the job to the official interlocutor, N.N. Vohra, could end in embarrassment - not just to the Union government but to the dialogue process itself.
Malik's recent political conduct, notably his decision to share a platform with Hafiz Saeed during a visit to study earthquake relief in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, has also caused concern. At a November 6, 2005, meeting held at the head office of the Lashkar's parent organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Malik became the first public figure from Jammu and Kashmir to share a platform with the proscribed terrorist group. A host of prominent Islamists used the reception organised by Saeed to call for an escalation of violence against India. Majeed Nizami, the editor of the ultra-Right Urdu newspaper Nawa-i-Waqt, asserted that "every Muslim is duty bound to jehad," and proclaimed that "Kashmir will be liberated only by force." Saeed himself proclaimed that "blood will speak and Kashmir will be free".
Leaving aside the ironies of Malik's decision to share a platform with the Lashkar - he has repeatedly claimed to have been inspired by the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and Vinobha Bhave - his secret meeting with Manmohan Singh appears to erode a cardinal principal of the dialogue process: that it be conducted with organisations that reject violence. While Malik did not advocate violence at the Lashkar gathering, his decision to share a platform with a proscribed terrorist group constitutes a criminal offence. Section 10 of the Unlawful Activities Act of 1967, as amended in 2004, holds out the prospect of a two-year prison term for individuals who participate in meetings of proscribed associations. New Delhi's earlier interlocutors in Jammu and Kashmir - the centrist faction of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and Sajjad Lone - have maintained a distance from the terrorist group.
Kathwari's credentials as an interlocutor are also problematic. Among the richest Muslims in the U.S., Kathwari owns the upmarket furniture giant Ethan Allen. Kathwari's financial clout gives him considerable leverage both among Islamist organisations and among mainstream political groups in that country. Kathwari's commitment to finding a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir began after the death, in 1992, of his son Irfan, who left his studies at the Harvard Medical School to fight in the anti-Sovet jehad in Afghanistan. Concerns about Farooq Kathwari's political affiliations led successive Indian governments to deny him a visa until 1999, when the National Democratic Alliance government arranged for a covert Research and Analysis Wing-assisted visit where the businessman met with senior politicians in both Srinagar and New Delhi.
Underpinning much of the secret negotiation is an unhappy theme: confusion over just what the objectives of the dialogue process in Jammu and Kashmir in fact are. While meetings with figures like Kathwari or Malik might just serve useful covert tasks - keeping channels open with those hostile to the dialogue process, for example - they are of little use in building real political momentum for change within Jammu and Kashmir itself. Malik commands little political influence beyond the municipal terrain of old-city Srinagar; figures like Kathwari or Sazawal, for their part, are entirely unknown at the level of mass politics in Jammu and Kashmir.
From the outset, the dialogue process was intended to shift authority from terrorists to politicians - and on that front, sadly, there has been relatively little progress.
In his meetings with senior politicians, Manmohan Singh has made no secret of his personal vision for Jammu and Kashmir: a deal that would involve giving the state wide-ranging autonomy within the Union of India, similar arrangements in those parts of Jammu and Kashmir that Pakistan administers, and the conversion of the Line of Control into an international border. Strategists in New Delhi know that the realisation of this involves two elements: pushing Pakistan to accept this arrangement, and building a credible consensus around it within Jammu and Kashmir. Securing the first part of the deal was premised on the assumption that pressure from the U.S. would push Musharraf to accept something resembling the status quo. Dialogue with the APHC centrists, led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was designed to realise the second objective.
Pressure from the U.S. has not worked out quite as planned, though. Despite repeated assurances, Musharraf has not actually brought about the dismantling of the infrastructure of Pakistan-based terrorist groups, and while cross-border terrorism has significantly declined, it is nowhere near an end. Worryingly, from New Delhi's point of view, the decision of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government to open the door for a U.S. role in Jammu and Kashmir has also created problems. New Delhi has been under not a little pressure from the U.S. to make concessions to President Musharraf so as to help him deflect pressure from his critics in Pakistan. New Delhi has responded to this pushing by opening channels to figures like Malik and Kathwari - but it is not clear if the Government of India has anything resembling an end-game in mind.
What options might lie ahead? Jammu and Kashmir Congress leader Saifuddin Soz's induction into the Union Cabinet might lead, for one, to more political muscle being thrown behind the dialogue process. While both Narayanan and Vohra have been successful in engaging a wide spectrum of opinion in Jammu and Kashmir, neither is in a position to conduct a political dialogue on behalf of New Delhi. Soz could, in months to come, lead the dialogue process outside its covert-bureaucratic cul de sac and towards a more serious form of engagement involving the Union government and political formations in Jammu and Kashmir. For that, however, New Delhi will first have to get serious about talking to politicians who represent people, not U.S.-based emissaries with no real mandate; it should also understand that Jammu and Kashmir's political future will have to be finally forged by its institutions, not in closed-door meetings.
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