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Monday, Jul 19, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Peace on the guillotine, again

By Praveen Swami

Dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir cannot succeed unless the central precondition for democracy exists: a commitment by all parties to resolve differences through discourse, not military means.

LAST APRIL, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee laid out his vision of what the dialogue process he was pushing would bring to Jammu and Kashmir. "Spring will return to the beautiful Valley soon," he said, quoting from the Kashmiri poet, Ghulam Ahmed Mehjoor, "the flowers will bloom again and the nightingales will return, chirping."

Just over a year on, the guillotine seems ready to descend on the nightingale's delicate neck. On July 14, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil announced that he hoped to resume talks with the centrist faction of the secessionist All Parties Hurriyat Conference. It seems unlikely, however, that such talks will take place, at least in the short term. It seems even more unlikely, sadly, that any real purpose will be served should some sort of a dialogue be pushed to begin.

What has gone wrong? On July 6, Hurriyat chairman Maulvi Abbas Ansari said he was resigning his post in an effort to bring about the reunification of the secessionist coalition's factions. The organisation's founder-chairman, Srinagar cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was asked to work towards restoring the Hurriyat's original Executive Council, which until last year's split included Islamist hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Although the Hurriyat reiterated its willingness to continue talks with India and Pakistan, Mr. Farooq said the process would commence only after a new chairman was elected by the pre-split Executive Council.

At one level, the Hurriyat's de facto termination of the dialogue with the Government of India can be read as the outcome of intense terrorist pressure on the conglomerate's centrists. On May 29, terrorists had shot at the Mirwaiz's uncle, Maulvi Mushtaq Ahmad, who died nine days later. Mr. Farooq's own house was subsequently attacked, and a close political associate was assassinated. A school and seminary operated by the Mirwaiz was also burned down. Speaking in New Delhi on June 28, Mr. Farooq admitted that "somebody within our rank and file is targeting me and my family."

Discretion, as has happened so often over the past decade and a half, eventually triumphed over valour. One reason for this turn may have been growing suspicion that the new United Progressive Alliance was, unlike the National Democratic Alliance, unwilling to put all its eggs in the centrist basket. On June 9, lawyer-politician Ram Jethmalani held an unscheduled 30-minute meeting with Mr. Geelani, pushing ideas for wider internal autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Jethmalani made his visit on behalf of the non-official Kashmir Committee, set up with quiet Government assent at the start of the NDA's engagement of the Hurriyat.

Most observers had believed the Kashmir Committee to be defunct after the resignation of two of its three members, senior journalists M.J. Akbar and Dilip Padgaonkar. Mr. Jethmalani's mission was thus something of a surprise. The enterprise seems to have been pushed by elements in the Union Ministry of Home Affairs who believed the centrists needed to be prodded into action, and the dialogue `broad-based.' The services of the recently-removed Intelligence Bureau Director, K.P. Singh, were used to set up the meeting, with a New Delhi lawyer of ethnic Kashmiri origin playing honest broker.

In the event, Mr. Jethmalani's foray proved a profound embarrassment. Mr. Geelani kept the veteran lawyer waiting for hours before granting him a brief audience. Later, Mr. Geelani claimed that he rejected Mr. Jethmalani's autonomy proposals out of hand. "I explained to him how the Indian forces had committed massacre after massacre of Kashmiri people in the last 15 years," the Islamist leader recounted, "and he had nothing to say when he withdrew." Off stage, the centrists saw the mission as undermining their claims to be sole spokespersons for secessionist opinion in Jammu and Kashmir. A week later came Mr. Ansari's resignation.

Mr. Geelani, most observers believe, is unlikely to bite at the unity bait just yet. He hopes to first regain command of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the organisation to which he gave much of his life before being marginalised last year. From December 2003 onwards, moderates in the Jamaat had run a successful campaign to remove pro-Geelani figures from positions of power, tacitly backing the Hurriyat moderates. Syed Nazir Ahmad Kashani, the Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, fought off the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin's efforts to garner support for the hardliners.

As things stand, Mr. Geelani's supporters are planning to use the hardline majority among the 1,250-plus delegates in the Jamaat's General Council to secure changes in the organisation's leadership, and to amend its constitution to allow for overt support of the Islamist jihad against India. On January 1 this year, the Jamaat's Markazi Majlis-e-Shoora, or central consultative council, went public with a commitment to "democratic and constitutional struggle," an indication of willingness to operate within the Indian political system. If the hardline manoeuvre succeeds, it will bypass the moderates in the Jamaat, who make up the majority of both its rank and file and top leadership.

Perhaps the most important determinant of future events will be how much influence terrorist groups are able to exercise. The signs, on the face of it, are not good. Although violence has been in steady decline since 2001 — the year India threatened to go to war unless Pakistan de-escalated its covert war in Jammu and Kashmir — official figures for this summer do not make for happy reading. Killings of civilians from April to June this year were higher than in 2003, particularly in the Kashmir division. So, too, were the numbers of Indian security forces personnel killed, while the numbers of terrorists killed in retaliation declined. The NDA's strategists had shown little concern for this worrying pattern, but it seems unlikely that the UPA can allow the drift to continue.

Infiltration, as the Chief of the Army Staff, Nirmal Vij, recently made public, has resumed, reaching high levels in the first two weeks of June. What Gen. Vij did not make public was the fact that the almost-complete border fencing is not as effective as some had hoped. Three terrorists shot dead near the Line of Control in the Mandi-Loran area on June 9, for example, were carrying plastic pipes, designed to penetrate the fencing. Indian infantry troops who have carried out tests on the fencing have taken just 10 to 15 minutes to clear the barrier — suggesting that while it is indeed a deterrent, the fence is hardly impregnable.

Worst of all, the political ground on which the peace process is premised threatens to turn into quicksand. With terrorist groups increasingly dominating southern Kashmir, particularly at night, large crowds of villagers have started appearing at the last rites of slain terrorists, a phenomenon not seen since the early 1990s. Gatherings of up to 2,000 villagers have been recorded during the burials of terrorists of Pakistani origin, something unheard of until early this year. In one recent incident in Kulgam, villagers were shipped in by bus to protest an Army siege of a local mosque, in an effort to rescue two terrorists trapped inside.

Major political parties have been unable to respond, for reasons not dissimilar to those of the Hurriyat centrists. The People's Democratic Party, which until recently had a none-too-covert alliance with elements of the south Kashmir Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin, has been haemorrhaging cadre — the wages of the terrorist group's ire at the PDP's inability to deliver on its pre-poll promise to scale back military operations. At least five PDP workers have been killed and eight injured since June. In one gruesome incident on June 15, four PDP activists who had campaigned for Anantnag MP Mehbooba Mufti were taken to a jungle hideout near Aishmuqam, beaten and then shot through the legs.

Crippled by a bitter internal feud, dealing with the crisis before it seems to be the last thing on the mind of the ruling PDP-Congress alliance Government. Last month, Congress politicians, their eyes firmly focussed on the Hindu vote in Jammu, launched a protracted offensive against the State Government's efforts to restrict the ongoing Amarnath Yatra to just one month. The State Cabinet, as a consequence of the growing feud, has not met for five months. Both the mainstream parties and secessionists seem bereft of leadership: a fact which suggests that guns, not words, will shape the discourse in months to come.

None of this ought to surprise anyone, for Jammu and Kashmir has been through this unhappy crisis many times before. Efforts to secure peace through dialogue, despite media proclamations of their historic character, have had little success in the past. People's League leader Shabir Shah's release from jail; the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front's decision to renounce violence; the negotiations with one-time terrorists that preceded the 1996 Lok Sabha elections: all these failed to secure their stated objective. The truth is that dialogue cannot succeed unless the central precondition for democracy exists: a commitment by all parties to resolve differences through discourse, not military means.

Of this, there is so far no sign. The United States' Richard Armitage admitted in New Delhi that Pakistan had yet to dismantle the infrastructure of jihadi terror there; within Jammu and Kashmir, groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba rule at night, not the Indian state. Peacemaking cannot be pursued in a vacuum. Its success will now depend on the Union Government's ability to manage the security environment.

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