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As the PM readies for his visit to J&K, Amitabh Mattoo in the Times of India argues that for all Kashmir's apparently complex problems, there are in reality only four principal challenges that need to be addressed:
First is the issue of the three dialogues that are vital to rebuild the culture of mutual respect, tolerance, accommodation and faith in peaceful conflict resolution...
The second challenge is to arrive at a consensus on devolution and decentralisation of power...
An issue that is both controversial and essential to building peace is demilitarisation. Militarisation must not be confused merely with withdrawal of troops...
Finally, of course, is J&K's development, a central part of the prime minister's vision for the state...
Read more at the TOI
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Oct 27, 2009 AT 02:48 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep ON Sep 28, 2009 AT 23:55 IST
Rekha Chowdhary in the Indian Express:
Last week, the federal cabinet of Pakistan approved the Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self Governance Order, 2009. By virtue of this order, the official name of the area has been changed from ‘Northern Area’ to Gilgit-Baltistan, and it has been granted political autonomy. The people of Gilgit Baltistan are supposed to have now the right of representation, the freedom of party politics as well as access to justice. The area will have its own elected assembly, chief minister and a centrally appointed governor...
While it is important to recognise the political rights of people of Gilgit-Baltistan, the step taken by Pakistan has serious implications for the peace process in Jammu and Kashmir. The logic of the ongoing peace process has been a ‘notional unity’ of the state through the concept of irrelevance of borders. The autonomy of Gilgit-Baltistan may start a trend in the reverse direction and may just justify the division of the state.
Read the full piece at the Indian Express
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Sep 08, 2009 AT 22:27 IST
It's been a while since l'affaire Sharm-el-Sheikh, but with the Americans active behind the scenes, and the two foreign offices and various sets of politicians involved in daily skirmishes, there is no getting away from Pakistan.
MJ Akbar points out something your correspondent had noticed as well: "a delicate blur in Pakistan's long-held position that might not be noticed at first glance" when Islamabad foreign office spokesman Abdul Basit clarifyied that there had been no change in Pakistan’s stand and it still wanted an independent Kashmir. [emphasis mine] and wonders: Could a deal come precisely because Islamabad realises that conflict with India has strengthened forces that are now the biggest danger to Pakistan’s civil society, democracy and evolution towards a modern nation?
Shekhar Gupta thinks peace with Pakistan ... "can only happen with the Americans not merely leaning heavily, but even under-writing some Egypt-like arrangement to change the very nature of Pakistani society and establishment"
Vir Sanghvi revisits the various arguments and says: Pakistan has one set of standards for the West and another for India and the language that Islamabad understands best is the language of strength.
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Aug 08, 2009 AT 23:49 IST
Syed Saleem Shahzad reports in the Asia Times:
Intense United States efforts and assurances have put Pakistan and India on track to renew their dialogue process over key contentious issues, such as divided Kashmir.
An important upshot of this is that Islamabad has begun a crackdown on jihadi assets its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) raised in the 1990s for asymmetric warfare against India after losing three battles against its much bigger neighbor.
Asia Times Online has learned that a nascent crackdown on militants in Pakistan's largest province, Punjab, will turn into a major operation and the remnants of all defunct jihadi organizations, no matter how peacefully they operate inside Pakistan, will be dismantled. A showcase of this exercise took place Monday in Anti-Terrorist Court II in Rawalpindi, the garrison city twinned with the capital Islamabad.
...Whatever the backlash that might come from the militants, the point is Pakistan has made a significant shift and taken Washington's desires to heart.
Whether it has or not and whether it is just some more spin is a moot question, but as my friend Omar Ali from Pakistan, who forwarded this link, cautions, even if there is a change of heart, the going is not going to be very smooth:
According to Arif Jamal (author of Shadow war; the untold story of jihad in Kashmir*), the military and its subcontractors have trained about half a million jihadis. IF the army really goes against its former trainees, the battle will be very long and very violent. Let's assume 400,000 will get the message and move on to civilian life and 90,000 will transfer their skills to various "tolerable" forms of armed action (bodyguards for feudal bullies, kidnappers for ransom, armed robber who give the appropriate cut to the police, MQM, SPSF and so on) that still leaves 10,000 ready to fight to the death. Even with 98% attrition, the remaining 2% can do a lot of damage.
Someday, we will also have to investigate whose brilliant idea it was to train so many armed men and turn them loose...
*Haven't read the book, but been meaning to, since I read a review here a few weeks back.
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jul 30, 2009 AT 05:17 IST
The current angst about India conceding ground by agreeing to incorporate a reference to Balochistan in the recent joint statement out of Egypt is misplaced. If India is in fact aiding and abetting rebels in Balochistan, then it is not automatically the moral equivalent of Pakistan's involvement in Jammu & Kashmir. Without getting into lengthy legalistic tangles about how the two might or might not be equivalent, the issue is as simple as right versus wrong.
Not all liberation movements are the same in a moral sense, and it follows that not all interference in a foreign liberation struggle is morally equivalent. The fight in Balochistan is about unfair exploitation of Balochi resources by Pakistan's dominant Punjabis, and about the disrespecting of Balochi language and culture. The fight in Kashmir is about the adoption, by a segment of the Muslim population there, of Pakistan's underlying supremacist ideology, usually known as the "two nation theory"...
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In continuation of the discussion here, Praveen Swami writes in the Hindu:
Ever since May, when the bodies of two women washed up near Shopian, journalists have chronicled the multiple failures of administration and policing that allowed the tragic deaths to spark off some of the worst street violence ever seen in Jammu and Kashmir.
Following the release of the findings of the Justice Muzaffar Jan Commission of Enquiry on Friday, the Jammu and Kashmir government has announced that it intends to prosecute four police officials for some of those failures.
But both journalists and the Jammu and Kashmir government have maintained a stoic silence on one institution blamed by Justice Jan for spreading falsehood and inciting violence: the media itself.
His report highlights the following in the Justice Muzaffar Jan Commission of Enquiry report:
- Journalists share responsibility for fanning south Kashmir violence
- For the most part, media misrepresented forensic evidence
- Blood on a victim’s forehead was “shamefully distorted and projected as a mark of sindoor”
Read the full story
Also read: Despite judicial probe, truth on Shopian deaths elusive
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jul 12, 2009 AT 16:21 IST
Sevanti Ninan in the Hoot on the recent turmoil in Kashmir on June 15:
Shopian, still in turmoil after an alleged double murder and rape, is becoming a classic example of the truth being shaped by the way it is narrated. After almost two weeks of agitation by local people and politicians, the reporting of events has come under scrutiny. It is not difficult to make out from a story where the writer's sympathies lie. There are local and national versions of anything that happens there, and then there are different versions in the national media which are reported by Kashmiri correspondents.
When two young women disappeared on May 29th after setting out for their familiy's apple orchard and were then found dead the next morning, there was a suspicious that they might have been raped and murdered. An FIR saying as much, demanded by relatives, was not registered. While there was a post mortem and an autopsy the results were controversial, and have triggered continuing unrest. Three newspapers published from Delhi and one TV channel make a telling case study of how those who report project different versions of what is happening on the ground....
More here
While Praveen Swami is one of those whose version of events is put under scrutiny, he himself, a couple of days later, examines the versions from J&K in the Hindu on June 17:
...Pro-Islamist media have been helping to ensure that the venom spreads as far as possible. In a June 16 article, Riyaz Masoor, editor, Rising Kashmir, suggested that the victims "represented the nation Kashmir and the rapists represented the state of India; it was the Hindu India raping the Muslim Kashmir." Mr. Masroor accused the Indian Army, which until now has not been alleged to have played any role in the Shopian deaths, of going "on a raping spree." "Let them carry a poison pill with them," he advised the State's women: "if, God forbid, they are caught, let them swallow the poison and embrace death and defeat the evil military man of the world's largest democracy."
The lies seem to be working. Even the United States-based MacArthur Foundation's Asia Security Initiative last week claimed that the judicial commission investigating the Shopian deaths was questioning Indian troops -- a claim whose credibility must be read alongside the bizarre assertions in the report that the Shopian victims were sisters who grew up in an apple orchard.
More here
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jun 19, 2009 AT 01:37 IST
Are the MEA's worst nightmares about Obama coming true? So it would seem, judging by the recent visit of US under secretary of state for political affairs William Burns and his remarks on Kashmir ("Any resolution of Kashmir has to take into account the wishes of the Kashmiri people") and Pakistan that have predictably raised hackles in New Delhi.
Tavleen Singh asks in the Indian Express:
Why did nobody ask Under Secretary William Burns if his country would be persuaded to have a ‘dialogue’ with Pakistan if Osama bin Laden were similarly arrested and released?
...As someone who thought Barack Obama really was ‘the one’, I find myself increasingly disillusioned by his South Asia policy. Is he so naïve that he believes Islamist terrorism can be fought selectively? How is it possible to fight the Taliban in Swat and Waziristan while continuing to support the Lashkar brand of jihad in Lahore and Karachi?
MJ Akbar continues with the same thread in the TOI:
If America wants a DMZ (De-Militarized Zone) in India they will first have to ensure a DTZ (De-Terrorised Zone) in Pakistan....
... There is great danger in this "soft border" thesis. How can you have a "soft border" unless both sides recognize it as a border? Moreover, what does the phrase "mutual overwatch" mean? Both would dilute symbols of Indian sovereignty in Kashmir.
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jun 14, 2009 AT 05:18 IST
May 27 was Nehru's 45th death anniversary. Inder Malhotra remembers the day in 1964 in the Indian Express:
Hafeez Jullundari — the nearest thing Pakistan had to the poet laureate as well as a sort of minister-in-waiting during the Sheikh’s stay — stalked up to our table and sat down. Wagging his finger, he told me: “Inder Malhotra, you people have had a long ride feeling superior to us because you were lucky to have Nehru. Our misfortune was that after the early deaths of Jinnah and Liaquat, all our leaders were useless. Now Nehru is about to go. You will be down to our level, and then we will see”....
...[Nehru] died at the precise moment when the Sheikh [Abdullah] set foot in Muzaffarabad. The thought uppermost in my mind was that the capital of Pakistan-held Kashmir was not the best place to to be in at the time of Nehru’s passing. But what followed stunned me.
The huge crowd that had assembled to welcome Sheikh Abdullah instantly turned into a mourning mass. Every man, woman and child, hands raised skywards, was praying for Nehru. Some of them were crying. No one touched the elaborate wazwan laid out. Suddenly, there was commotion at a short distance. A tall man was shouting my name, beating his head with both his hands and cursing his “black tongue”. It was Hafeez Jullundari. As he apologised to me profusely, Sheikh Sahib arrived to calm him. Instead, the two embraced each other and sobbed.
Read the full piece at the Indian Express
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON May 29, 2009 AT 01:25 IST
Praveen Swami on whether Kashmir's major political parties can rebuild a relationship with their secessionist adversaries in the Hindu:
Back in the summer of 1986, the Lions and the Goats met at Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid, and vowed to work together to secure Kashmir’s future.
National Conference president Farooq Abdullah was the heir to the legacy of Shér-i-Kashmir [‘the Lion of Kashmir’], his father Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. His new-found ally, the powerful Srinagar cleric Maulvi Mohamm ad Farooq, led the Bakras, or goats, derisively nicknamed so for their long beards. Much of modern Kashmir’s history was shaped by the often-violent clashes between the Shér and the Bakra: between the radical party of the peasants and workers and the cleric-led pious, often pro-Pakistan urban petit bourgeoisie.
More here
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON May 23, 2009 AT 06:04 IST
Muzamil Jaleel in the Indian Express:
The rise and fall of the Tigers, in fact, is a lesson for insurgent groups across the world... But the Tigers failed to understand that war alone is never enough. And at the height of their military success when they forced Colombo to enter into a peace process, Prabhakaran and his group didn’t understand the necessity of the transition from terror tactics to pure politics...
...Like the Tigers, the Kashmir insurgency also had several opportunities to understand the world’s changing political realities, halt violence and take a moral high ground on a negotiating table. But each time, the opportunity provided by a military success was lost with a complete underestimation of the power of the state.
More here
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON May 20, 2009 AT 02:15 IST
Steve Coll's much talked about piece, “The Back Channel”, in the current New Yorker (March 2, 2009, p. 38) which is available on the newyorker.com only to its registered users is available in full at The New America Foundation. While much of what it says has been talked about in Delhi's journo circles, this is perhaps the first detailed published account in public domain of the Back Channel and how close India-Pakistan came to reach an agreement on Jammu & Kashmir:
By early 2007, the back-channel talks on Kashmir had become “so advanced that we’d come to semicolons,” Kasuri recalled. A senior Indian official who was involved agreed. “It was huge--I think it would have changed the basic nature of the problem,” he told me. “You would have then had the freedom to remake Indo-Pakistani relations.” Aziz and Lambah were negotiating the details for a visit to Pakistan by the Indian Prime Minister during which, they hoped, the principles underlying the Kashmir agreement would be announced and talks aimed at implementation would be inaugurated. One quarrel, over a waterway known as Sir Creek, would be formally settled.
Neither government, however, had done much to prepare its public for a breakthrough. In the spring of 2007, a military aide in Musharraf ’s office contacted a senior civilian official to ask how politicians, the media, and the public might react. “We think we’re close to a deal,” Musharraf ’s aide said, as this official recalled it. “Do you think we can sell it?”
Regrettably, the time did not look ripe, this official recalled answering. In early March, Musharraf had invoked his near-dictatorial powers to fire the chief justice of the country’s highest court. That decision set off rock-tossing protests by lawyers and political activists. The General’s popularity seemed to be eroding by the day; he had seized power in a coup in 1999, and had enjoyed public support for several years, but now he was approaching “the point where he couldn’t sell himself,” the official remembers saying, never mind a surprise peace agreement with India.
Kasuri was among the Musharraf advisers who felt that the Pakistanis should postpone the summit--that they “should not waste” the negotiated draft agreements by revealing them when Musharraf might not be able to forge a national consensus. Even if it became necessary to hold off for months or years, Kasuri believed, “We had done so much work that it will not be lost.”
Pakistan’s government sent a message to India: Manmohan Singh’s visit should be delayed so that Musharraf could regain his political balance. India, too, was facing domestic complications, in the form of regional elections. In New Delhi, the word in national-security circles had been that “any day we’re going to have an agreement on Kashmir,” Gurmeet Kanwal, a retired Indian brigadier, recalled. “But Musharraf lost his constituencies.”
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Feb 25, 2009 AT 02:14 IST
Farooq Abdullah had done his usual flip-flop and blown hot and cold before he finally
got down to nominating son Omar Abdullah for the chief ministership of Jammu
& Kashmir. But come the swearing-in day of the youngest chief minister ever
of any state in the country, and Abdullah Senior was in his characteristic good
spirits, bursting into song:
paapaa kahte hain
baRaa naam karegaa
achhe kaam karegaaa
achhe kaam karegaa He was responding to how he felt after his son took over the reins of the state...
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jan 06, 2009 AT 15:26 IST
Shazia Ilmi provides a much needed intervention in the uncritical reactions of fanfare in the Indian Express:
Carpe diem — that Latin phrase means ‘seize the day’. Omar, like a sharp politician did just that. He seized his last national opportunity to reach out to his political constituency at the time when elections loom large and when the hangover of clashes over Amarnath ceases to abate. The short speech managed to press the right hot buttons -- Muslim identity, Gujarat riots and Amarnath shrine land transfer debacle. Bingo — the speech was sharp and smart just like the much-focussed politics of Omar Abdullah and National Conference (NC). Nothing noble or lofty about it, as some would have us believe.
Here are some déjà vu moments that one must recall:
August 27, 2006; The Times of India: “My biggest regret is that I did not resign when V P Singh was the PM and he sent that team’ In a stinging attack on Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L. K. Advani over the 1999 Kandahar hijack episode, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah accused the then Prime Minister and Home Minister of compelling him to release Jaish-e-Mohammad founder Maulana Masood Azhar for which the “world will pay the price”. Abdullah, whose son Omar Abdullah was a minister during the NDA coalition’s rule: “I told Advani I am going to the Governor. And I went to Raj Bhavan with my resignation,” the then Chief Minister said. He, however, did not resign.
Wanting to resign and not quite being able to do is an art the National Conference has mastered. On the Gujarat riots, Omar insisted he should have resigned and he almost did, but not quite. Be it the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed , the Kandahar crisis, autonomy resolution for the state or the Gujarat riots, both Omar and his father have always managed to stop short of resigning! The pricking of their conscience in each case is almost always a tad late.
Read the full piece: Demagoguery apart
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jul 31, 2008 AT 09:28 IST
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