'Spy' arrest gives Pakistan ammo on Balochistan

The arrest of a retired Indian Navy Commander, Kulbhushan Jadhav, allegedly for spying and other activities in Balochistan, is a coup of sorts for Islamabad. 

For years now Pakistan has claimed that India is involved in Baloch separatism, but has not been able to provide a shred of evidence. Now, if we are to believe Islamabad’s version of events in the Jadhav case, they have it in good measure. 

Truth 

But in such cases the truth is usually not what it seems to be. It does seem rather far-fetched to believe that an Indian naval commander would personally be involved in a covert operation in what is certainly be very dangerous territory. We need more details before we can accept the Pakistani charges at face value. 

Several people in India are not aware of the contemporary history of Balochistan

Presumably, he will receive an open trial for his alleged transgressions and we will learn the truth - or maybe we will never really get to know it. 

India has never once publicly espoused the cause of Balochistan. Perhaps, given Islamabad’s covert and overt support to Kashmiri separatism and other acts of terrorism in India, New Delhi does indeed back the Baloch, but more likely through monetary support, rather than any military training or arms supplies. 

In contrast, Pakistan has for decades trained, armed and funded Kashmiri separatists and provided shelter for a generation of Khalistani and other terrorists. 

Many people in India are not aware of the contemporary history of Balochistan and the fact that the accession of its principal unit, the Khanate of Kalat, is even more controversial than Jammu & Kashmir’s accession to the Indian Union. 

If Kashmir has been in turmoil since 1990, separatism and insurgency have been a feature of Baloch history since they became part of Pakistan. 

Sparsely populated Balochistan comprises 44 per cent of the area of Pakistan, but just 5 per cent of its population. Pakistani Balochistan comprises the Khanate of Kalat, its feudatories Kharan, Makran and Las Bela, and the British Chief Commissionership of Balochistan. 

In the run-up to Partition, the Congress and the Muslim League faced off on the status of the Princely States in the country. Pandit Nehru rejected the notion that with the withdrawal of British paramountcy, the Princely States would become sovereign again. Whereas Jinnah, who knew that the bulk of Princely States would fall into what would become India, supported the notion that they could either join India or Pakistan or “assume sovereign and independent status for themselves.” 

Relations 

The Khan of Kalat, Mir Ahmed Yar Khan, was an enthusiastic supporter of Pakistan and Jinnah was a legal adviser of the state. Kalat believed its relations with the British were akin to those of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. 

Advised by Jinnah, the Khan of Kalat gave a memo to the Cabinet Mission in 1946 seeking independent status. 

At a meeting in Delhi on August 4, 1947, attended by the Khan, Jinnah and other officials, it was decided that the state would become independent. 

Three days before Pakistan came into being, on August 11, 1947, a joint statement was signed by Pakistan States Department recognising the independence of Kalat. 

Pakistan has subsequently claimed that this was simply a Standstill Agreement, but American scholar Wayne Wilcox who has examined the matter says it was not. 

Independence 

On August 15, a day after Pakistan became independent, Kalat declared its independence which was endorsed by its elected National Assembly, though the state said it was willing to enter into special relations with Pakistan on the matter of defence, foreign affairs and communications. 

Baloch leaders, including the Khan sought Indian help to establish their claims, but they were rebuffed by Nehru. 

In March 1948, Pakistani troops were massed on its border and the Khan was forced to sign an Instrument of Accession with Pakistan, and on April 1, 1948, the Pakistan Army marched into the state and arrested the Khan. His brother Prince Abdul Karim escaped and declared a revolt, the first of a series of five so far that Pakistan has had to confront to date. 

As in the case of Kashmir, the British played a dubious hand in Balochistan. In 1946, the British felt they could live with an independent Balochistan, but by 1947 they believed this would be dangerous to their interests. The British High Commissioner was asked by London “to do what he can to guide the Pakistan government” to ensure that Kalat would not emerge as an independent entity. 

Pakistan has insistently charged India with helping the Baloch insurgency. No one has taken their charges seriously because their charges have been declarations, rather than the kind of proof India has adduced through the likes of David Coleman Headley or Ajmal Kasab. 

However, we do now have a new government in New Delhi, which may be less forbearing towards Pakistan than its predecessors. Covert operations are not something they will talk about openly. But Pakistan needs to watch out, because if India decides to follow Pakistan’s example in dealing with its neighbour, there could be big trouble ahead. 

Mail Today March 28 2016

Beyond Pakistan’s Claims to Have Caught a ‘RAW Agent’ Lies a Wilderness of Mirrors

Let us dispose of the notion that India does not carry out covert operations against Pakistan. New Delhi has, at least since 1990, refused to use the instrumentality of terrorism to hit back at Pakistan, but you can be sure that – short of terrorist acts – it employs all the weapons available in the covert arsenal for both defence and offence. This is the least you can expect, given Pakistan considers India its primary adversary and is into all kinds of activity ranging from ordinary espionage, to subversion of currency, promoting separatism and supporting terrorism.
India has important strategic interests in Pakistan, including in the Balochistan region. Balochistan is of interest principally because of the stepped up naval activities of the Chinese in Gwadar and the plans for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.


For the past two decades, India has made no secret of its activities in Iranian Balochistan. It has sought to develop the port of Chabahar for alternative routes to Afghanistan and Central Asia. It has used its consulate in Zahedan, which is near the Pakistan border, to keep an eye on Pakistani activity there and support Indian interests. All this is done, of course, under the watchful eyes of the Iranian authorities who, no doubt, have their red-lines on what the Indians can do and what they cannot.
Looking at the case of Commander (retired) Kulbhushan Jadhav, the arrested India man that Pakistan says is a ‘RAW officer’, it is worthwhile recalling the legendary CIA counter-intelligence officer James Jesus Angleton’s description of intelligence craft as “a wilderness of mirrors.” Finding out where the truth lies is next to impossible, and reality is what you want to believe.
At first sight, the facts of the case are fairly straightforward.
On Thursday, local media in Pakistan reported that its security forces had arrested “a serving officer in the Indian navy and deputed to the intelligence agency Research & Analysis Wing (RAW)” in Balochistan. Subsequently, Dawn reported Balochistan home minister Mir Sarfaraz Bugti as saying that “an Indian spy” was arrested in the southern part of the province.
On Friday, the Pakistan foreign office summoned Indian high commissioner Gautam Bambawale to protest what it claimed was the “subversive activities” of a “RAW officer.”
In a statement, the Pakistan foreign office said: “The Indian high commissioner was summoned by the foreign secretary today, and through a démarche (we) conveyed our protest and deep concern on the illegal entry into Pakistan by a RAW officer. And his involvement in subversive activities in Balochistan and Karachi.”
Later on Friday, the official spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs, Vikas Swarup told reporters that the “said individual has no link with the government since his premature retirement from the Indian navy.” Indian diplomats in Pakistan had sought consular access, he said, adding that “India has no interest in interfering in the internal matters of any country and firmly believes that a stable and peaceful Pakistan is in the interest of all in the region.”
Pakistan’s Dunya News channel said that Jadhav had been arrested from the Chaman area of Balochistan, that his address in Mumbai was No 502B Silver Oak, Powai, Hiranandani Gardens and that he had a passport no. L9630722, with a valid Iranian visa made out in the name of Hussein Mubarak Patel. The channel said that Jadhav had joined RAW in 2013 and was initially based in Chabahar, the port in Iran which India is helping to develop.
The Indian Express has confirmed that Jadhav does indeed live where the Pakistani report says he does, is the son of a former police official in Mumbai, and is a businessman who had interests around the world, though it has not figured out what business he does.
This is the point from where the wilderness of mirrors begins.
The first big question is why a commander-level officer would be involved in a cross-border operation. His rank is the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the army, and officers of this rank run operations from a distance, they don’t participate in them. Indeed, persons of this rank are not even forward-based on a border where captains and majors run the operations that are in turn  executed by low-level agents, and non-commissioned officers, at least in the India-Pakistan context. Over the years, India has caught a raft of ISI agents, but all of them were relatively low-level operatives or non-commissioned officers like SSG commando Mohammed Khalid, who was arrested in Kupwara in 1995, or Naik Zulfikar Ahmed – who died in a Delhi hospital and was listed as a “martyr” on a Pakistan army website.
The second big question is why such an officer would carry an Indian passport with him for what was going to be a clandestine operation. Using third country passports for such missions is standard practice for any major intelligence agency, as it provides an immediate layer of deniability in the event of an agent being caught.
If we work with the assumption that Jadhav is indeed an Indian intelligence officer, there are several possibilities here.
First among these is that he was kidnapped from Iran and delivered to Pakistani officials at Chaman. The second, that he was lured by a Pakistani intelligence operation to enter Afghanistan and abducted from there. There is a third possibility – that Jadhav had to involve himself personally because either he had to deliver a large sum of money to Baloch contacts, or had been promised a meeting with someone so important that his contacts said this would require his personal presence.
The last scenario harkens to the Venlo incident in which British and Dutch intelligence officers were lured to the German border and kidnapped from Dutch soil in 1939. They were tempted by the offer of a meeting with a non-existent general who was supposed to be leading the resistance against Hitler. For Pakistan, getting hold of an Indian officer in Balochistan is a major coup. For years it has been shouting from the roof-tops that Indians were involved in Baloch separatist activity, as well as a whole raft of other bad things in Pakistan.

Copy of the Indian passport Kulbhushan Jadhav was allegedly carrying. Credit: Dunya TV

 

Now, they have a person in their custody and the government of India has acknowledged that he is, indeed, a former Indian navy official. As for New Delhi’s denial of any action prejudicial to Pakistani interests, we can treat that as proforma; after all, the government is not likely to acknowledge such things.
The fourth, and somewhat improbable, possibility is that having abducted Jadhav, the Pakistanis have manufactured evidence in the form of a forged passport. But this can easily be verified through the passport authorities. If indeed, such a passport has been issued to Jadhav, the MEA will end up with a lot of egg on its face.
While India midwifed the creation of Bangladesh, it has never publicly backed the Baloch separatist cause.  This despite the fact that Pakistani “moral and political support” for Kashmiri independence extends to funding, training and arming Kashmiris and Pakistani nationals to fight against Indian forces in the state. Indeed, ISI efforts to promote separatism in India pre-date the Bangladesh war. Simply put, those looking for training camps run by Indians in Afghanistan will not find them. This doesn’t preclude covert moral and monetary support to the Balochis, primarily because of the pain Pakistan has inflicted on India in the last 30 years  – and not with some belief that Balochistan ought to be free. There are few in India who would support the breakup of Pakistan because that would be to open a Pandora’s Box. So, the MEA statement backing a “stable and peaceful” Pakistan should be taken at face value.
What the Jadhav arrest has done is to bring to the public domain the covert war that India is fighting against Pakistan. We know a lot about the Pakistani war against India, but not so much about the Indian effort. It also opens up the possibility that this war, bitter though it may be, can also be fought with some rules – principally, that arrested agents are treated with dignity, not just by those who arrest them, but in their own home country after they return.
Spies who have served the country with great fortitude and suffered torture and long terms of imprisonment are left to rot when and if they manage to return home, usually after long spells of imprisonment. This is in stark contrast to the practices of countries like Russia, Israel, the US or Britain, which sticks by its men, and, in the right circumstances quietly arranges exchanges.

The Wire March 26, 2016

The Chinese Great Leap that is Leaving India Further Behind

The government of India last month showed the world that it cannot maintain control over a minor law and order event just kilometres away from its headquarters on Raisina hill in New Delhi. Just how it proposes to fulfil its bigger plans for overhauling the country’s infrastructure and launching a manufacturing revolution is a bit of a mystery.
All this is more troubling when you look in your neighbourhood and see China purposefully guiding its economy to  a soft landing and laying the foundations for its next advance – to emerge as a rich country by 2050 when it expects its per capita GDP to be of the order of $60,000.
This is no pie in the sky because its building blocks are being placed before our eyes, even though the full fruit of the projects will unfold over the coming decades. The best symbol of this was the arrival of the first “Silk Road” train from Yiwu, in eastern China, to Tehran, through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, taking 14 days less than  it would have taken the same cargo to go from Shanghai to Bandar Abbas. These are early days for the ambitious Silk Road scheme, which has the twin goals of connecting China to the high-end markets of Europe, as well as make it the geopolitical anchor of Eurasia.
A second indicator is the complete overhaul of two hoary programmes that have provided sinew to China’s emergence as a technology and manufacturing power. The new national research & development plan unveiled on February 16 will streamline the many state-funded science and technology programmes that are related to agriculture, energy, environment, health and various facets of industry and innovation. Many have a key national security component as well.   And as of now the plan covers 59 specific areas which have been based on the older Projects 863 and 973.
“863” is the numeric rendition of the year (1986) and the month (March)  of the launch of  the State High-Tech Development Programme. This is when several top weapons scientists wrote to supreme leader Deng Xiaoping calling for special focus on a range of civilian technologies to boost China’s growth. The technologies chosen were  in biotech, space, information, lasers, automation, new materials, super computing, telecom, marine  and, since 2001, clean energy.




Project 973 launched in March 1997 was  the National Basic Research programme aimed at giving China a strategic edge in a number of scientific fields ranging from agriculture to rare earths, population, materials and energy.
863 and 973  based themselves on  the American model followed by the National Institutes of Health and the Pentagon, where expert panels worked out priority areas, called for bids and awarded grants and contracts to researchers, labs and companies. They avoided the old British model into which India remains stuck, where all the activity is done under an allegedly autonomous council for scientific and industrial research which owns the labs and the scientists are life-long government employees.
A third indicator of the new directions China is headed towards comes from steps being taken by the National Development Reform Commission to put up 400 billion renminbi ($61 billion) per quarter this year to finance the next layer of infrastructure development across China. The money will be offered in the form of bonds to local authorities.
The goal of the special bond scheme is obviously to serve as a cushion against the slowdown of the Chinese economy which will continue through 2016 as well. But it is also to further enhance urban and suburban services like broadband, public transportation, telecommunications and promote the use of green technologies.
One important area for investment is also underway – the creation of a grid of charging stations for electric cars being made by Chinese companies. As part of 863, China invested a great deal in electric propulsion for vehicles. As a result, it is a common sight to electric scooters and motor-cycles in the streets of Chinese cities. Now, the stage is being set to have a million electric cars on Chinese roads by 2020. For this, a network of charging stations is being organised in cities and on principal expressways. Having missed the internal combustion engine revolution, China intends to have its companies in lead positions in electric car propulsion.
The fourth area of focus is the internet. Chinese plans to emerge as an internet super-power are being operationalised through its 13^th five year plan. According to Wang Yukai of the China National Academy of Governance, its focus is on providing a high speed and secure broadband network throughout the country.
In 2015, China hosted the second world internet conference which was addressed by President Xi Jinping. That China has created a famously autonomous and huge internet system is well known, but what China is seeking to do now is to insist that the principles it has espoused – sovereign control – becomes a universal value.
Last year, China’s internet plans received key political direction from the fifth plenum of the Communist Party. In February 2014, it was announced that a new leading small group on internet security and information technology would be headed by Xi Jinping himself. These leading small groups are apex decision-making bodies, the equivalent of our erstwhile empowered group of ministers (EGOMS).
India, too has explored many of the ideas that the Chinese are working along. Rajiv Gandhi had established a number of technology missions in the late 1980s. But those programmes imploded along with the Rajiv prime ministership. Newer proposals are floating in the air with little direction. Having abolished the Planning Commission, the Modi government appears unclear as to what the Niti Ayog is supposed to do. In any case, unless it controls the money, as the Chinese NDRC does, its decisions will have little value. The unfortunate aspect of the situation today is that there seems to be a drift without any clear direction. Ministerial function may have improved in some areas, but long-range planning and marshalling of scarce resources is absent. As is social stability, but that is an entirely different issue.
The Wire March 8, 2016

JNU is the best

JNU may not figure in the list of the best universities in the world, but there can be little doubt that it is the best in India. The spread of its academic disciplines, and its influence in Indian academia and public life, cannot be matched by any other institution in the country. 

This is what was intended by the government when it was established as India’s ‘national university.’ 

Investment 

Some of its schools, like those of international studies, life sciences, languages, biotechnology, environmental sciences, and social sciences are leaders in their respective areas in the country. This reflects the purpose with which the university was set up, as well as the investment the country has made.

Of the tens of thousands who apply, only a handful are admitted, which makes this an elite institution - just as top universities are around the world.

Sadly this is the cause of a great deal of envy and resentment, which is visible in a lot of uninformed, and even absurd, commentary we have heard in relation to the allegedly anti-national slogans being heard on the campus. 

The spread of its student body makes the university unique, because students come from across the country and from all classes of people through a deliberate policy of inclusiveness. 

Far from being a den of anti-nationals, JNU is the place where the project to shape the new Indian identity has been taking shape.

Make no mistake, the real goal of JNU is to promote India’s nationalist project. 

Though we became free in August 1947, Indians today still retain strong local identities – or language, ethnicity, religion, caste, sub-caste and so on. But it is the experience of JNU that many of these get broken down. Not surprisingly, you don’t get reports of North-easterners being bullied or Dalits being made to stay in their own hostels, as is the case with some other universities in the country. 

The products of the university are not one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs like IIT students. JNU has produced generations of teachers, civil society activists, political leaders, journalists, scholars, diplomats, executives, writers and poets. 

The best proof of its nation-building role is that the university has given birth to generations of sensitive and sensitised civil servants who run key departments of Union and state governments today. 

There is perhaps no university in India which produces more civil servants for the country than JNU, and this from a student body that is just about 6,000 today. 

The Modi government’s brightest development star, Amitabh Kant, has a masters from JNU, as do the chief of the CBI, Anil Sinha, the head of NTRO, and the Special Envoy for Counter-Terrorism, Asif Ibrahim. 

And of course, batches of Army officers go out with a JNU degree because the far-sighted military leadership in the 1970s believed that their institutions needed to be linked to a national project like JNU. 

Interaction 

In this process of being the new Indian, it is important to learn about India as well. It is only through interaction with people from the North-east, Jharkhand, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Telangana, Odisha and other states that we really understand their concerns and problems. 

In the India of today, there is regional exploitation, economic backwardness, caste repression, violation of tribal rights - and there is resistance to this, and so this is reflected in the narrative of JNU’s student politics. 

The country also confronts separatism, whether in the North-east, Punjab, or Jammu & Kashmir, and this, too, figures in the JNU story. 

To the best of this writer’s knowledge, however, this discourse has remained verbal and no alumni has actually gone and taken up a gun to overthrow the state.  

Identity 

The persistence of separatism and deep roots of caste and regional prejudice are an indicator that the “new Indian” project remains a work in progress. But instead of using the lathi to shape the new Indian, it is so much smarter to help him/ her emerge through the process of debate, discussion and engagement, a process whose corollary is the acceptance of dissent. 

JNU is the small lab where the new Indian identity is being forged. Attacking it for being “anti-national” is actually aimed at undermining the project and destroying the best university we have on the basis of some dubious pseudo-nationalism. 

There is good nationalism and bad nationalism. Japan rampaging across Asia in the 1930s was the negative; getting an ethnically and linguistically diverse India to fight against British rule was the positive kind. 

Indian nationalism of desh bhakti today cannot be directed against ‘the other’ as Pakistan’s religion based nationalism is. It can have only one goal - the economic transformation of India and the true equality of all its people. 

Our nationalism will become a bad thing if it promotes resentment against people who look different, eat differently, profess a different faith, or have different views. 

Chauvinism and jingoism can only lead to disaster, as in the case of Germany and Japan in 1945, or the case of Pakistan today.

The writer is a JNU alumnus, but also has degrees from DU and Lucknow University

 Mail Today February 29, 2016

On mending fences with Nepal

The recent visit (February 19-24) of the Nepalese Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has not quite restored the glow to India-Nepal ties. When Prime Minister Modi visited Nepal twice in 2014, he raised enormous expectations of a new era in India-Nepal ties which have never been as good as they should be, considering the unique relationship between the two countries. Geography has locked India and Nepal with each other and their historic and cultural ties have been burnished by the open border of a kind that no two countries in the world share.

However, things went downhill in 2015. First there was the devastating earthquake that hit Nepal. India played a major role in providing relief, but that effort was marred by some over-the-top Indian media coverage that seemed to rub Nepal’s nose in the dirt. This was followed by the crisis around the new constitution promulgated in October 2015, which still persists because Madhesis, Tharus (who live in the plains area of Nepal) and the low-caste Janjatis oppose some of its provisions.

The constitution appeared to be a deal between the three ‘pahari’ or mountain-dominated parties — the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist, UML), the Nepali Congress(NC) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists). The three are traditional rivals, but they got together to foist a constitution which was deliberately weighted against the plains’ groups who now form anywhere between 30-50 per cent of the country’s population and have the capacity to play a “swing” role in Nepali politics. The resulting Madhesi agitation and blockade was supported by India, because New Delhi has long chafed at the attitude of the mountain parties who are all too ready to use anti-Indian rhetoric to score political points and, worse, use China to offset the Indian influence in Nepal.

Oli’s reaction to the Madhesi agitation was to take a hard-line position and accuse India of fomenting it. He sent several delegations to China to develop an alternate energy corridor. But China has always been cautious in taking on India in Nepal. It makes symbolic gestures, but when push comes to shove, it backs off for the simple reason that it is simply not worthwhile economically or politically to supplant India in Nepal.

Finally, on December 20, 2015, the Nepal Cabinet held an emergency meeting and agreed to make a deal with the Madhesi agitators on the issue of provincial boundaries and pass a constitutional amendment to provide for proportional inclusive participation of the Nepali people in the various state organs and the delimitation of the electoral constituencies on the basis of population.

Even then, India did not relent. It was only after the Nepalese Parliament endorsed the Constitution Amendment Bill that things began to move. Within hours of the end of the blockade on February 5, Nepal announced the visit of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to New Delhi. Oli said he was coming to India to remove the “misunderstanding” that had developed between the two countries. Later, he announced on February 19 that a high-level political committee would be set up to review provincial boundaries in a three-month time frame.

No joint statement issued following Oli’s six-day visit and officials say differences between the constitutional process to effect the changes that Nepal has promised remains. During the talks, the Nepali government gave assurances that the constitutional changes, the issue of boundaries and citizenship would be addressed in the coming months.

The Indian side welcomed the constitution, but noted that its success would depend on “consensus and dialogue” and the ability of the government to deal with the issues related to building the consensus. The Indian side also sought to learn a little bit more about the terms of reference of the mechanism that the Oli government had promised on December 20, 2015.

Both India and Oli have gained through the visit. Oli has signalled that he is acceptable to a key neighbour and hence, strengthened his own position within the Nepali politics. India, on the other hand, has managed to show that it can do business with Oli, and that China has not gained ground in Nepal at the cost of India.

The Modi government has also achieved its goal of convincing the Government of Nepal that India remains its primary interlocutor. India had pledged $1 billion in reconstruction aid, of which 40 per cent is in grants and the rest soft loans. During Modi’s visit in 2014 another $1 billion was promised over the next five years. India’s red line for dealing with Nepal relates to security. Given Nepal’s location, and the fact that the 1,800-km India-Nepal border is not militarily defended, means that India cannot afford to have a government in Nepal which is anti-Indian or, to be more precise, is not friendly to New Delhi.

Mid Day March 1, 2016

Dangerous drift in Kashmir: Why New Delhi cannot avoid its responsibility anymore

The report that a crowd of Kashmiri civilians cheered on the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants holed out in Pampore on the weekend – even as the Indian Army was carrying out an operation to deal with them – should set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi. But perhaps the Union home ministry is too busy bashing the sloganeers in Jawaharlal Nehru University to bother about it.
It is incidents like this and the crowds that participate in the funerals of militants that tell you the true state of Jammu and Kashmir, rather than election turnouts and the tourist arrivals.
By now, it should have been clear to all but the most obtuse intelligence, that the Kashmir problem consists of three parts.
First, the need to defeat armed militants, Pakistanis who come from across the border, as well as the Kashmiris who get arms and training in Pakistan.
The second is to win over the Valley Kashmiri Muslims, significant chunks of whom remain estranged from India. It is they who provide the environment in which these militants are embedded for long periods of time.
And the third is to neutralise Pakistan’s malign role which takes advantage of our inability to give adequate redress to the political aspects of the Kashmir issue.
Three prime ministers
A three-tier strategy dealing with these issues has been followed by all the prime ministers who have dealt with the issue.
Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao famously noted that the “sky was the limit” when it came to discussing the subject of autonomy.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee made repeated attempts to engage the Kashmiris, including the Hurriyat leaders like Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Maulana Abbas Ansari. Vajpayee had in April 2003, during a public rally in Srinagar, said that India would wish to resolve all issues confronting Kashmir on three principles of “Insaaniyat” (humanism), “Jamhooriyat” (democracy) and “Kashmiriyat” (Kashmir’s multiculturalism). Vajpayee also famously arrived at a modus vivendi with Pakistan and initiated a process that nearly resulted in a Kashmir settlement by 2007. And all this was being done even while the security forces steadily wore down the militant challenge.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came up with the creative idea of convening a roundtable in 2006 which would bring together leaders of all parties to discuss the Kashmir issue. Three roundtables were held, and several working groups sought to offer recommendations on dealing with specific issues, including one on Centre-State relations which took up the issue of autonomy.
Missing political gesture
What is the reality today? Militancy has been largely defeated. From a high of 638, 590, 469, security force personnel killed in 2000, 2001, and 2002 the deaths are down to 51, 61 and 41, in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
What is missing today is that political gesture that characterised the past efforts to resolve the problem. In his July 2014 visit to the Valley, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about the importance of development and said that he would take the Vajpayee initiatives forward. Subsequently, in the election campaign, he emphasised development as the key issue.
In his November 2015 visit, Modi did invoke Vajpayee’s “Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat and Insaniyat” mantra, but he chose to focus on an economic agenda, promising the state a Rs 80,000 crore development package, adding egregiously that he needed no advice from anyone in the world, when it came to Kashmir.
But, the problem in Kashmir is not development, but politics.
Realpolitik and Idealpolitik
From the outset, New Delhi has sought to deal with this through a mix of realpolitik and idealpolitik. On one hand, it has maintained an iron hand in ensuring its control over the state. On the other, it has offered Kashmiris a range of policies within which they can feel that there are no constraints to their freedom. These policies have sought to address both the real issues relating to autonomy, as well as the sentimental ones relating to the sense of Kashmiriyat. Having ensured that J&K is an integral part of the Indian Union, Pandit Nehru, wisely conceded the state a constitution of its own (the only state of the Union to have one), a flag of its own, as well as the nomenclature of “Prime Minister” for its chief minister and “Sadr-e-Riyasat” for its governor. (The contestation over nomenclature, which was changed in 1965, continues to this day.)
Events, not in the least Sheikh Abdullah’s flirtation with the idea of an independent Kashmir in cahoots with the United States of America, changed things. And Pakistan only compounded them. Today, both New Delhi and the separatists need to work out the 21st century version of autonomy. Kashmiris must ask themselves whether they would be better off with a supreme judiciary and election commission based in New Delhi, or in Srinagar. Or, whether they could really trust Pakistan, which has repeatedly taken recourse to arms to capture the state and is not committed to maintaining its ethnic and religious profile.
No movement
The Modi government has done little or nothing by way of revealing a Kashmir policy. They seem to believe that their work was done the moment they agreed to go into a coalition with the People’s Democratic Party. Now, that coalition remains unstuck, and signals from the ground suggest that the situation is drifting dangerously.
But, as indicated above, development is just one part of the Kashmir problem. The other part is the sentiment among the people of the Valley that they lack something in political terms. It is often expressed by the term “azadi”, and in other circumstances by the support given to militants fighting against India. There is little hope that we can have lasting peace in J&K, unless we understand this.
As for Pakistan, government policy is careening in all kinds of directions and we are yet to see some coherence there. But today, more than ever before, the tone and tenor of Pakistani voices on Kashmir have changed and there is no reason why we cannot move forward from the achievements of the 2004-2007 period.
Kashmir is a dance involving three parties – the Kashmiris, the Pakistanis and Indians. To restore peace and tranquility there requires careful choreography which needs the synchronised movement of all the three parties. Because of its size, and the legitimacy of its claim, New Delhi needs to be the lead dancer, it’s a responsibility it cannot avoid.
Scroll.in February 25, 2016