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An explosion on the road to peace

Back in October 2007, when Pervez Musharraf was re-elected President of Pakistan, supporters of the secessionist leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, burst on to the streets of downtown Srinagar, setting off firecrackers in a demonstration of their support for the General. In their imagination, a historic peace — and the enthronement of the Srinagar cleric as Jammu and Kashmir’s ruler — was just round the corner.

Now, the fantasy has exploded. Last month, when Pakistan’s voters chose to blow the former General off the political centre stage, Jammu and Kashmir was far from their minds. But the shock waves set off by the elections have profound consequences for India-Pakistan dialogue on the region which has been the cause of four wars between the neighbours — and a key factor in the fifth.

Most Jammu and Kashmir secessionists — barring gleeful Islamists hostile to Gen. Musharraf — have been silent on the events in Pakistan, too shocked to offer meaningful comment. So, too, has India’s Jammu and Kashmir policy establishment, which betted on status quo in Pakistan. No one is quite certain where the dialogue process on Jammu and Kashmir might go from here but this much is certain: the parties need to move fast if it is to be saved.

Contained in a set of unsigned notes exchanged between two retired diplomats who have been meeting in secret since 2005 is a roadmap for peace. During their meetings, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s envoy, S.K. Lambah, and his Pakistani counterpart, Tariq Aziz, arrived at five points of convergence.

First, insiders involved in the dialogue told The Hindu, the two men agreed that there would be no redrawing of the Line of Control. However, they agreed that minor readjustments were needed to rationalise access to both Indian and Pakistani forward positions.

Secondly, Mr. Aziz and Mr. Lambah exchanged extensive notes on greater autonomy for both sides of Jammu and Kashmir. While they accepted that the process would encompass the entire region, they agreed that local conditions made it difficult to impose symmetrical arrangements on both sides of the LoC. Pakistan, for example, said it needed time to arrive at a consensus on the political future of the Northern Areas. India’s proposals, for their part, closely resembled PDP leader and Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minster’s proposals for devolving power to regional and sub-regional elected bodies. However, they fell well short of the National Conference’s calls for the restoration of the pre-1953 status of Jammu and Kashmir, which would remove it from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and the Election Commission.

Thirdly, a half-way house was arrived at on Gen. Musharraf’s calls for the demilitarisation of Jammu and Kashmir — a position backed by the People’s Democratic Party. India committed itself to reducing troops as the activities of Pakistan-backed jihadist groups scaled down, a process that has been in place since 2005 when India replaced troops in urban areas with police. Despite the Aziz-Lambah dialogue having been placed on hold, forward movements on troop cuts continue. For example, elements of the Rajouri-based 27 Mountain Division are currently being moved to their base station in Kalimpong, along with their organic artillery assets.

Fourthly, Mr. Aziz and Mr. Lambah discussed Gen. Musharraf’s calls for “joint management” of the region at length. India insisted that the phrase suggested a dilution of sovereignty, which it would not countenance. In its place, Mr. Lambah pushed for the cooperative management of mutually-valuable resources such as watersheds, forests and glaciers.

Last, both sides agreed that, in practice, the border between the two sides of Jammu and Kashmir would be open, allowing for free movement of people and goods.

Did these areas of agreement constitute a final settlement? No. On important issues of timing, sequence and nuts-and-bolts implementation — not the least, the transformation of the LoC into a border — considerable work lay ahead. Nor had the principals — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Gen. Musharraf — even begun to sell the five agreed principles to sceptical political allies and the electorate.

But the fact is that agreed principles were in place, a major step forward. Enthusiasts began believing that the rest were just petty matters of detail. “I think the agenda is pretty much set,” Mirwaiz Farooq told an interviewer in April last year, based on his discussions with Mr. Aziz in Dubai. “It is September 2007,” he said, “that India and Pakistan are looking at in terms of announcing something on Kashmir.” As that deadline approached, rumours of an early election — a precursor to putting an Assembly in place to endorse the India-Pakistan deal — proliferated.

No agreement, insiders say, was announced because events overtook the dialogue. Under siege in Pakistan, Gen. Musharraf simply could not push major concessions past his political adversaries, Islamist or otherwise. Mr. Aziz asked Mr. Lambah for more time, during which both sides hoped the crisis in Pakistan would pass.

Will last year’s peace-deal-that-wasn’t be just one more in a long series of failed dialogues on Jammu and Kashmir? Eminent columnist Prem Shankar Jha suggested as much in December 2007, when he argued that had “the two governments announced the pact in March or April, the history of the subcontinent might well have taken a bright turn.” Mr. Jha’s prognosis seems well founded. While both former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan People’s Party chief Asif Zardari are known to favour peace with India, it is unclear if they will have the authority needed to push through a potentially divisive peace deal on Jammu and Kashmir.

Another obstacle could lie in the post-Musharraf Pakistan military establishment. Unlike Gen. Musharraf, Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Kayani sees himself as a military professional — not a visionary leader whose manifest destiny it is to transform Pakistan. During his tenure as chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Gen. Kayani had overall command over offensive covert operations against India. As Chief of Army Staff, he has done nothing to buck the ISI-led consensus that jihad must not be abandoned as a policy tool.

Nor does the politics of Mirwaiz Farooq’s APHC give reason for optimism. Despite its stated commitment to dialogue, elements within the secessionist coalition seem determined to reach out to anti-negotiation Islamists. Last month, for example, one-time secessionist heavyweight Shabbir Shah chose to deliver an address to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa — an organisation widely recognised as the parent body of the internationally-proscribed Lashkar-e-Taiba. Shah later said he was “obliged to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa for giving me this opportunity.”

While the Jamaat-ud-Dawa claims it has no links to the Lashkar, its leaders make no secret of their politics. Last year, at a February 5 function in Lahore, Lashkar chief Hafiz Muhammed Saeed declared that the “jihad in Kashmir will end when all the Hindus will be destroyed in India.” And soon after Shah delivered his talk to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar commander Nasr Javed told the audience that the “jihad will spread from Kashmir to other parts of India [and] Muslims will be ruling India again.”

Signs also exist that Pakistan’s position is shifting. On February 20, Islamabad’s ambassador to the United States, Mahmood Ali Durrani, asserted that “various initiatives and multiple rounds of dialogue since 1947 have not brought us any closer to the resolution of the dispute”— initiatives which presumably include the Aziz-Lambah dialogue. General Durrani proceeded to call for a “paradigm shift,” a dialogue in which unspecified Kashmiri leaders “become equal participants in a triangular dialogue.”

New Delhi appears to be bracing itself for a worst-case outcome. In January, Union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz was made Jammu and Kashmir Congress party chief, in part because of his long-standing commitment to dialogue with the APHC. Mr. Soz’s appointment signals that New Delhi is willing to take to leaders like Mirwaiz Farooq — a dialogue disrupted after he backtracked on promises to participate in the Prime Minister’s round-table conferences on Jammu and Kashmir.

What is less clear is whether secessionists are still willing to talk to New Delhi, now that Gen. Musharraf is no longer in a position to influence their decision-making. At a recent conference in New York, the influential Islamist leader, Ghulam Nabi Fai, threw his weight for a renewed struggle for independence — a prospect Gen. Musharraf had made clear was off the table. Fai said: “today we are celebrating the birth of a new nation, Kosovo, which became a reality through the support, understanding and engagement of the United States. The emergence of Kosovo as the 193rd independent country has contradicted the misperception that after September 11, the international community does not support freedom struggles.”

It is for this renewed political legitimacy for war that Islamist terror groups have long been waiting. “Jihad,” proclaimed Saeed last year, “has been ordained by Allah. It is not an order of a general that can be started one day and stopped the next day.”

Both New Delhi and Islamabad must now drive fast to ensure that the agents of death do not overtake the dialogue process — but bear in mind that the road to peace is still pitted with mines.

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