Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

India's secret search for peace and its perils

Praveen Swami

While the separate pieces of the PMO's covert negotiations on Kashmir are becoming evident, it is unclear if this jigsaw puzzle actually has a shape.

LATE LAST year, the 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 jihad against India. "Blood will speak," Saeed prophesied darkly, "and Kashmir will be free."

Political life in Jammu and Kashmir has now been thrown into uproar by the charge that, just three weeks after the Lashkar rally, Malik also secretly met with the man India has entrusted with making sure the jihad fails: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. At his February 1 press conference, the Prime Minister said he had met with Mr. Malik as part of his ongoing dialogue with secessionist leaders in Jammu and Kashmir. When the JKLF leader responded with an irate denial, the PMO issued a clarification that Dr. Singh had in fact been referring to meetings held while he was in the Opposition.

For the most part, newspapers have reported the event as an inconsequential spat over facts. Bar the entertainment drawn from the PMO tying itself up in polemical knots, the Malik-PM meeting has been represented as being of no intrinsic consequence. In reality, the affair illustrates serious problems in the structure of India's engagement with secessionist groups in Jammu and Kashmir. Little noticed, New Delhi's search for peace is being reduced to a series of covert machinations that could end up creating problems more serious than those they were intended to solve.

Hidden behind veils of secrecy, India has for several months been pursuing an energetic secret dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir, involving interlocutors from the state and United States-based members of the ethnic Kashmiri diaspora. On January 25, The Hindu broke the news of these meetings. Mr. Malik, who authoritative sources told The Hindu had been driven to the PMO under Intelligence Bureau escort, was the most high-profile participant so far in a covert peace processes being conducted by National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan, a former IB chief.

Neither the PMO nor Mr. Malik publicly responded to The Hindu 's report, although sources say the JKLF leader registered his protest at the leak to the NSA in no uncertain terms. When Prime Minister Singh was asked by a journalist about the India-Pakistan détente process at the press conference, though, Dr. Singh volunteered the information that Mr. Malik had been among those he had met. According to a Press Trust of India report, Dr. Singh said that "after coming to office he had interacted with a number of separatist Kashmiri leaders such as Yasin Malik and Sajjad Lone [emphasis added]."

Incensed by this assertion, Mr. Malik promptly called a press conference in Srinagar. He accepted that he had met Dr. Singh in 2001 and 2003, but insisted that "talk of our [secret] meeting circulating in the media is nonsense." Asked why then the Prime Minister had said a meeting had taken place, Mr. Malik blamed "New Delhi-based NGOs." "When we don't meet them," he claimed, "they come up with such things." Soon after the JKLF leader's press conference, the PMO affirmed Mr. Malik's assertion that he had only met Dr. Singh prior to his taking office as Prime Minister.

The backchannel

In the absence of a transcript, a final assessment of what the Prime Minister said is impossible. It is, after all, plausible that PTI's reporters and others who filed similar accounts misunderstood what he said. What hasn't been denied, though, is that secret meetings have in fact been taking place. Last month, for example, Mr. Narayanan met with Farooq Kathwari, a U.S. national who is a significant contributor to Islamist organisations, the Asia Society, and mainstream political groups. Prime Minister Singh himself held a meeting with the United States-based Kashmiri Pandit leader, Vijay Sazawal.

Other signs of energetic backchannel movement aren't 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. With the foreknowledge of India's covert services, Mr. Geelani used the cover of the Haj pilgrimage to hold extended discussions with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen's Pakistan-based leader, Mohammad Yusuf Shah, as well as the U.S.-based Islamist leader Ghulam Nabi Fai. Most observers believe the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen hopes to use Mr. Geelani as its representative in future talks with India.

But why, it can be asked, are such secret meetings a problem — particularly if their intended aim is to bring about reconciliation between apparently implacable enemies?

Worldwide, covert services conduct negotiations where the political principals find it impossible. Israel's long-running secret talks with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, or the Central Intelligence Agency's Cold War dialogue with the Soviet Union's Committee for State Security, the KGB, are often cited as successful examples. India's spymaster A.K. Verma, and the Director-General of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, Hamid Gul, are also known to have held negotiations to restrict urban terrorism in the course of the Khalistan movement in Punjab.

In the course of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, India's covert services have maintained secret contacts with both political secessionists and members of terrorist groups. Indeed, one of the first exercises conducted by Mr. Narayanan after he took office as NSA was to audit expenditure on India's covert contacts and prepare an inventory of what had been achieved — a long overdue stock-taking exercise. In some senses, the ongoing dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir is the fruit of these contacts, although they have sometimes appeared a waste of both hard cash and energy.

What has now happened, though, is a conflation of political and covert processes, both of which are handled by the NSA. While critics of the NSA have claimed Mr. Narayanan's conception of his role is overweening, this critique is misdirected. The real problem lies in the Congress itself. Where Arjun Singh presided over the execution of the policy objectives of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Punjab, or the late Rajesh Pilot vigorously engaged secessionists in Jammu and Kashmir, the United Progressive Alliance has none who seems interested in playing a similar role now. India's spies have thus stepped in where its politicians have failed.

Some consequences

Mr. Malik's case, though, provides excellent illustration of the kinds of consequences this can have. The JKLF leader's decision to share a platform with the Lashkar, a move intended to protect his person from reprisal if the JKLF publicly engages New Delhi, violated the law. In the interests of enabling his secret meeting, however, no action was taken. As a result, the political authority of the state was eroded, and others under credible threat, like the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, were gifted an excellent excuse to appease Pakistan and the terror groups it chooses to patronise.

Consider, too, the decision to engage with Mr. Kathwari, whose organisation, the Kashmir Study Group, has advocated a communal division of Jammu and Kashmir. Until 1999, when the intervention of former RAW chief A.S. Dulat enabled him to meet several key politicians, Mr. Kathwari's Islamist affiliations had led to his being denied permission to visit India. Whatever status and influence the millionaire businessman's wealth lends him, a meeting in the PMO — as opposed to, say, in a discreet hotel room in New York — sends out the appalling signal that his ideas are open for discussion.

Such issues, though, are just manifestations of an underlying malaise: political New Delhi seems to have no real idea of what it actually wants in Jammu and Kashmir. For the most part, discussions with figures like Mr. Kathwari are intended to meet demands from the U.S. that New Delhi help Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf demonstrate that he is making progress in Jammu and Kashmir — put bluntly, payback for the U.S.' pressure on Pakistan to de-escalate violence. As President George Bush's visit to New Delhi draws closer, the pressure on New Delhi will, most likely, intensify.

Is there a way out? Yes — but only in the unlikely event that the hidebound, dissent-allergic intellectual establishment that informs policy on Jammu and Kashmir demonstrates will and vision.

Even as it allows covert processes to proceed, the Union Government could, for example, give N.N. Vohra, its chosen official interlocutor, a mandate and agenda for the consultations he has been holding in Jammu and Kashmir. It could also ask Union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz to begin a result-oriented dialogue on federal autonomy — a dialogue secessionists will have to address or risk being bypassed by history.

For this to happen, though, New Delhi will have to abandon its decades-old conviction that history can be manufactured behind closed doors. Covert processes do have an invaluable and necessary role in policy execution, but they cannot be a substitute for political policy-making.

One of the things the troubled history of Jammu and Kashmir teaches us, after all, is that secret deals are of only so much value outside of the rooms where they are sealed.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

On a higher trajectory
Tackling global warming
India's secret search for peace and its perils
Should the power to punish contempt of court be diluted?
A battle won
Bush has to face it: he is wrong and Chirac is right
Political Prime Minister
Airport privatisation
Rare feat
Hollow claim
New responsibility

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu