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Tuesday, Aug 12, 2008
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Hopes for compromise fading

Praveen Swami

Delhi braces for protracted war of attrition with protesters

Congress had misgivings over Jaitley formula
Police stretched to the limit

NEW DELHI: Faced with a rising tide of street violence in Jammu and Kashmir, officials of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs are bracing themselves for a meltdown of efforts to negotiate a way out of the Shrine Board crisis — and a bruising war of attrition with protesters in the State’s twin, troubled regions.

Political leaders who met Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil on Monday failed to secure an agreement on the contours of a peace deal acceptable to all major political groups — deflating hopes that a please-all compromise will be arrived at ahead of a scheduled all-party meeting called by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for later this week.

Sources present in the meeting said that the Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Union Law Minister, Arun Jaitley, backed by the Shiromani Akali Dal’s Naresh Gujral, pushed for a formula built around an order delivered by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in 2005. In the judgment, the High Court had mandated that the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board would decide on the length of the yatra, and ordered the State government to permit the use of forest land for pilgrims.

However, the Congress seemed reluctant to back the call, afraid that it could accentuate protests in the Kashmir valley. National Conference leader and the former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, the sources said, remained non-committal. People’s Democratic Party leaders, who had backed protesters who attempted to cross the Line of Control to protest against the disruption of freight links between Srinagar and New Delhi, did not participate.

Few experts in New Delhi seemed surprised at the failure of the high-level talks to make progress. “In most charged ethnic-religious conflicts of this kind,” said the Director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, “there usually isn’t a solution that can make all the parties happy.” In practice, he noted, any concessions to one side were being seen as a loss of face by the other, fuelling a hardening of postures and heightening of violence.

Some analysts even argue that New Delhi’s well-intentioned peacemaking could be accentuating the crisis, rather than helping to resolve it. “The message has gone out in both Srinagar and Jammu,” a senior Ministry of Home Affairs bureaucrat told The Hindu, “that behaving in completely unreasonable ways gets New Delhi’s attention. And with elections around the corner, all parties hope to benefit from a communally-polarised political landscape.”

Worst-case scenarios

Given the lack of progress in the talks, officials in New Delhi have begun discussions on worst-case scenarios, including the early deployment of dozens of police and paramilitary battalions scheduled to have been pumped into the state ahead of the elections. Police in Jammu and Kashmir have been stretched to the limit in recent weeks, and its officers have been warning Governor N.N. Vohra that the ability of their personnel to hold the ground is diminishing.

Less than a company of police and paramilitary personnel were, for example, available to hold off an estimated 50,000 protesters marching to the Line of Control. They were stopped ahead of Sheeri, on the Baramulla-Uri highway. Widespread violence, however, took place across much of the State, with police finding themselves outnumbered in many areas. Two police stations were burned down by mobs in the district of Baramulla.

Indeed, fears that the police would fail to hold back protesters led the Jammu and Kashmir government to discuss crisis measures to stop the march, including the cutting off of bridges along the Jhelum river, which runs parallel to the LoC. Army formations in the Uri sector had also been told to prepare themselves for the use of lethal force against civilians, had the marchers succeeded in reaching the LoC.

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