Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Try as you might, you cannot keep Kashmir away from the limelight, and in recent years, mostly for wrong reasons. An Asif Ali Zardari, a cornered Pakistani President, might pick on Kashmir to upbraid the United Nations at its General Assembly session for its own inability to deliver on the resolutions passed by the world organisation to solve the Kashmir dispute. The UN, he whined, at this year’s UNGA session, giving a highly distorted vision of the resolutions, had failed the Kashmiris.
The Pakistani President suffered a memory loss it appears, when he chose not to mention one of the prime conditions the resolution set for holding a plebiscite in the former princely state, namely Pakistan must end its aggression by removing all its troops from the State and the areas occupied by it. Only then, with the legal aspect of the State’s accession to India settled, would the UN put in place a plebiscite administration to determine whether the Kashmiris wanted to accede to Pakistan or India. There would be no third option. .
While Pakistan has virtually ceded the Gilgit region of the state to itself and gifted parts of other areas to China to enable it to build the Karakoram highway, it has kept silent on the UN exhortation that it ends its military operation of parts of the State as a perquisite .
Kashmir has no doubt soured the relations between the two neighbouring countries and its is a fact that a succession of governments in Pakistan – both civilian and military – have accepted a peaceful resolution of the dispute over Kashmir, through dialogue. Even the bilious Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto , his daughter Benazir, and military dictators including General Pervez Musharaf accepted bilateral talks as the only way out.
Another Prime Minister of the country , Nawaz Sharif too, fell in line after blowing hot and cold during Narasimha Rao’s tenure as the Indian Prime Minister. He was even more positive when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee took that bus to Lahore.
General Musharraf went beyond the realm of “possibilities” when he suggested his five point formula on Kashmir , which , he said, would render national boundaries pointless. His formula broadly suggested self- governing regions of the disputed state with a co-ordinating body in place to oversee their functioning etc. It found a large measure of agreement particularly in the valley , though many thought it would not work.
For Zardari to have chosen to pull out the Kashmiri rag from his crumbling political cupboard is understandable, considering the poor chap is thoroughly shaken by his failure to get the military on his side, and worse still, the nagging role of the judiciary headed by Justice Iftikhar Choudhary , which has already seen one Prime Minister out of office for failure to revive the corruption charges against Zardari in the Swiss courts. The poor Prime Minister’s plea that he could not obey the Court orders because Zardari , along with several thousand others , had been granted immunity against such charges by the former President General Musharraf, which enabled Asif Ali Zardari to contest the last election.
The court had taken a dim view of it and the Prime Minister’s successor is hearing the same music which saw his predecessor forced out of office. Zardari, for his part is not quite sure what fate awaits him after the courts determination to make him accountable for the numerous corruption charges faced by him. And fresh elections to the National Assembly are due in a year’s time.
Zardari’s PPP , still a force to reckon with, may find itself headless unless Zardari chooses to induct his and Benazir’s son Bilawal into the electoral grind even as he barely qualifies to be a political major ( 25 years) . Bilawal incidentally was made Chairman of the People’s Party after Benazir’s brutal assassination in Rawalpindi with the father retaining control of the party apparatus. Bilawal is a personable young man just out of Oxford, and has travelled with Zardari on some of his foreign tours . He accompanied the President on his trip to India and was present at his meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Zardari may have raked up the Kashmir issue at the UN General Assembly , imagining it was a ritualistic reference which Pakistani leaders habitually make at international fora , but the truth is that it puts new heart into the failing spirits of the separatist groups in the valley.
And those opposed to the separatists , the mainstream parties like the National Conference, the People’s Democratic Party and the Congress among others, are rarely seen projecting the pro-India view. All these parties swear by the Constitution of India and the State’s own constitution but they do little else to assuage the people’s grievances.
Lack of funds or ideas, mind you, are not a constraint.
Take the panchayat elections which were tom-tommed as a great victory for democratic aspirations of the people. The Kashmiri people defied terrorist threats , the exhortations of the terrorists and turned up , several million strong, to elect Panches and Sarpanches , the very men who have these past two months been running for cover, unable to address the problems faced by the people at the grassroot level. To make a grim situation grimmer, several sarpanches have been murdered by militants and scores have publicly offered their resignation. The basic problem with the revival of Panchayati Raj has been their inability to deliver.
The National Conference -Congress led State Government has been singularly reluctant to arm the panchayats with real power. This has caused grave disenchantment against the system amongst the people , thus exposing the State Government to its wrath. The State Government is not known to have taken any concrete steps to make the experiment , a laudable one, to click.
Yet another ongoing effort was last week’s visit to Kashmir by some captains of Indian industry along with Rahul Gandhi to interact with Kashmiri youth. A laudable effort on the face of it, but nothing new.
The only difference this time was that men like Rattan Tata and Kumaramangalam Birla did not promise opening up industries in the state but made realistic offers of offering internships and training to educated Kashmiri youth in their numerous offices and factories in the rest of the country. A senior banker and Bajaj Motors owners made similar offers which should be welcome for the simple reason that it did not promise the moon. The problem is , should these promises remain unfulfilled, it will only alienate the youth further. The other problem I see is why must a Rahul Gandhi be needed to escort these industrialists ? Why didn’t the State Government or the Kashmir University take the initiative itself ?
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