K.N. Pandita
Valley leadership of all hues counsels New Delhi to hold bilateral dialogue with Pakistan for resolving outstanding disputes including Kashmir. Their advocacy is usually coated with victimhood phraseology like “we the poor Kashmiris get killed; we are faultless and we suffer; our economy is in shambles’ a pall of uncertainty looms large over our destiny” etc. Ironically, one time bravado of ethnic cleansing has now turned into cankerous sore of victimhood.
However, Kashmir leadership doesn’t make any such forthright supplication for dialogue to Pakistan. It means that according to them major fault lies with Delhi. Kashmir handlers of terrorists and traitors catch the first flight to New Delhi to talk to a visiting Pakistani VIP but they refused to meet and talk to Indian Parliamentarians who come almost begging at their doorsteps this summer.
We have marked that the counsel of this leadership, while urging New Delhi to initiate bilateral talks with Pakistan, also carries veiled warning like “Kashmir a nuclear flash point; Kashmir a powder keg; Kashmir a seething volcano etc.” The borrowed narrative has become central to their Kashmir tantrum.
The import of a plea like this is that innocent Kashmiris, being non-partisan, are made victims of political strife between two neighbouring countries which are at loggerheads for many decades. By making appeal for peaceful dialogue they want the world community to accord legitimacy to their feigned innocence.
In reality, how much innocent is this leadership? This question has to be answered. Their innocence lies in pushing the valley to four-month long hypocritical siege during which everything is paralyzed through mosque sermons and everything is activated through hypocrisy and guile. In simpler words, the people know the art of lionizing as well as befooling the seditionist leadership by responding to as well as circumventing their call.
For the seditionists, frequent call for bilateral dialogue serves more than one purpose. It equates the two belligerent countries in staking claim to Kashmir; it dilutes Indian Parliament’s 1994 unanimous resolution of retaking the illegally occupied PoK and Gilgit-Baltistan in 1947; it is a subtle step towards breaking status quo on Kashmir; it creates space for foreign powers to stimulate the process of “give and take”, which, in simpler idiom, means India making big concessions, and it kindles Pakistan’s anti-democracy agenda in tandem with China.
If Kashmiri separatists are sincere in playing the card of affinity with Pakistan on religious, cultural, geographical and other counts, they would have by now taken the initiative of crossing LoC and engaging leadership in Muzaffarabad and Islamabad in fruitful talks instead of hoping to make India the cat’s paw. The taste of pudding is in eating.
Sheikh Abdullah tried it in 1964. His son and grandson, both vociferous about bilateral dialogue, should analyze the reasons why the Sheikh had failed in his mission and why he never talked of bilateral talks. . Any fair and dispassionate analysis of that failure will bring them to the conclusion that President Ayub Khan of Pakistan had not recognized the Sheikh as the sole representative of the people of Jammu and Kashmir as Nehru did. Realpolitik and idealism are poles apart.
Therefore, if the Hurriyatis and secessionists— passionate about bilateral talks as they pretend to be — are disposed to make their initiative a success, they will have to carry with them a full team representing not only the three regions and sub-regions of the State but also its ethnic and cultural groups including the communities and groups extirpated from their birth places for dialogue with their Pakistani benefactors.. Peace talks have to be comprehensive and inclusive.
But the seditionists will not lead a delegation to PoK/Pakistan. They are apprehensive that their counterparts in Muzaffarabad and Islamabad will repeat to them what Maulavi Yusuf Shah, the Mirwaiz of Kashmir, banished by Sheikh Abdullah to PoK in 1948, had told a team of Kashmiri Muslim seniors who visited him when he became President of “Azad Kashmir”. Their interlocutors will tell them (of course only in private) to forget Pakistan and be happy with India.
How much innocent is the Kashmiri in this background, and how much sincerity is there in the rhetoric of bilateral dialogue profusely advocated by the valley leadership? It is thought provoking indeed.
Pakistan has three centres of power viz. “elected” government, army and Beijing. Protagonists of bilateral dialogue in the valley should identify which one of the three they want India to talk to.
If pro-dialogue Kashmir Valley leadership believes that dialogue is the solution then the simple logic is that it should first and foremost persuade militants to bid farewell to arms, renounce violence, agree to sit round a table and initiate talks with Srinagar and New Delhi. Immediate result of this initiative will be that security forces deployed to maintain law and order will go back to the barracks and atmosphere of dialogue will prevail.
Pontificating for bilateral dialogue without silencing guns in the hands of wanton killers and allowing atmosphere to remain vitiated cannot lead to any solution. If it is not hypocritical in suggesting bilateral talks, the Valley leadership should put its finger on the real causes of unrest in Kashmir. The accusing needle will point towards their selves only.
Many among pro-dialogue sermonizers say that domestic dialogue is part of bigger interaction and a component of conflict resolution process. Of course, they have some takers in Indian civil society and a select group in Indian media.
Recently, a five-member team of Indian civil society led by former External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha was on two-day visit to the valley. The team met with the Hurriyatis besides a large number of stakeholders. Team leader said that they had come to “understand Kashmir crisis and share the pain of the people”.
Kashmir issue is talked about so profusely for last two decades that we now have an army of Kashmir experts without having read a single book of Kashmir history. In other words, commercialization of Kashmir issue has thrown up innumerable sellers, buyers, stockpilers and black-marketers of Kashmir commodity. This is the result of Pakistan’s wholesale effort of internationalizing Kashmir issue.
In the first place we need to ascertain the credentials of Yashwant Sinha’s so-called civil society team. We agree it was not a government sponsored team. But rank opportunists or people with suspected loyalties and murky antecedents cannot be genuine representatives of civil society to deal with a sensitive issues of immense national interests like Kashmir.
How come the Hurriyatis and seditionists in Kashmir declined to meet with the parliamentary delegation that had come to them almost begging but they readily agreed to meet the team civil society? Hurriyatis are not that naïve not to understand which side of their toast is buttered.
The former External Affairs Minister had come “to understand Kashmir issue”. It means that during his tenure as India’s foreign minister he had not understood that Kashmir seditionists and traitors want secession from India and accession to Pakistan. It is only now that he understands what they want. Therefore either this former foreign minister is telling a lie or he betrays his naiveté. It is difficult to speculate with what argument, a man with so poor a knowledge of Kashmir, will have countered the Hurriyatis.
The team says it came to share the pain of Kashmiris — a noble sentiment indeed. But why did the sentiment spring four months after the unrest began and about a hundred people lost their lives. Why three months after the parliamentary delegation’s failed visit did this group of civil society feel pleased to undertake the visit. Isn’t it that the seditionists as well as their sympathizers in the country have begun to understand that the patent blackmail had begun to boomerang on them and hence they look for face-saving?
About the “pain and sharing it”, did the team civil society ask Hurriyatis who and what is at the root of inflicting pain on Kashmiris? Did they understand that in the course of sharing the pain of Kashmiris, the Kashmiris torched 25th school building south as team civil society went on applying soothing balm on the pain? Whose pain was the team civil society sharing?
Who are the people really in pain in Kashmir? Are those fanatical groups in pain that come out on streets, rush on to attack police posts, throw stones at security forces, damage public and private property, torch school buildings, Panchayat houses, dispensaries etc. or the thousands of policemen who, while protecting public property, have been hit by stones and missiles hurled on them by the maddened crowds. Why the civil society team did not interact with the families of thousands of seriously injured policemen in the valley to share their pain.
Should not have the team shared the pain of the families of the minority community whose wards numbering about 1400 had been given petty jobs under PM’s package and posted to far-flung villages in Kashmir valley but were hounded out by the unruly mobs. They are now languishing in miserable condition in Jammu. Should not have the team shared the pain of thousands of families of internally displaced minority community ethnically cleansed in Kashmir and now living in exile in Jammu and other parts of the country for last twenty-seven years. We did not want the team to share their pain but we expected it to, at least, visit them once and hear their story of pain.
Should not have the team met with Ladakhis who feel not only discriminated against but also made hostages to the diktat of valley leadership for seven decades in the past. They have unanimously demanded Union Territory status for Ladakh. The team should have also met with the representatives of lakhs of refugees of 1947 tribal attacks who have not been given citizenship even after 68 years of migration.
We had never thought that the team civil society was so myopic as to think that J&K meant only the people of the city of Srinagar and nothing more. Had it interacted with various sections of people in the State it would have helped them realize how grave and phenomenal a situation has been created by militarization and radicalization of Kashmir. No patriotic person or leader will support the proposition of bilateral dialogue with Pakistan or with local dissidents in the background of what has been stated above. The real pain of Kashmiris is best explained in this verse of Mirza Ghalib:
Jata hun thori door har ik rahrav ke sath
Pahchanta nahin hun abhi rahbar ko main
(The writer is the former Director of the Centre of Central Asian Studies, Kashmir University).
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