Take the Kashmiris to Agra

Time to change the old script of cat-and-mouse games

Barkha Dutt

Rashtrapati Bhavan is all set to roll out the red carpet for General Musharraf. Newspaper editors are back in business deconstructing each word he utters. TV stations have booked every rooftop in Agra for the perfect moonlit view. In the middle of this blitzkrieg, does anyone remember the Kashmiris? For years India’s foreign policy has been aggressively and stubbornly guided by the mantra of Kashmir being ‘‘our own internal matter’’. Even when we seemed orthodox in our refusal to talk to Islamabad over the last two years, we justified it by saying that we would talk ‘‘directly to our own people’’. So how come they can barely be heard?

Make no mistake. I completely support India’s decision to talk to Pakistan. I have indeed long been arguing that the refusal to talk to Pakistan made us seem rigid. In fact, on a TV show, a well-known magazine editor asked me, ‘‘How can you say talk to Pakistan, Barkha? You experienced Kargil first hand.’’ But what about experiencing the rest of Kashmir first hand? Every visit to Srinagar reinforces the feeling of just how out of sync New Delhi is with the Valley and its people. Why is it that all our policy makers on Kashmir happen to be those who have barely spent time there? Why did it take a funeral to get the prime minister to make his first real visit? Most importantly, when will Delhi stop treating Kashmir as an extended laboratory experiment?

Perhaps the single biggest failure of every government has been its inability — or unwillingness — to steer public opinion on Kashmir. After hosting countless audience-based shows on Kashmir, it’s terrifying to see the levels of communal hatred that sheer ignorance is able to breed. The issue of autonomy is a classic example. India’s middle class views the possibility of greater autonomy for the state as an outrage, an anti-national demand that ‘‘only those bloody terrorists can make’’. It doesn’t seem to matter that this promise has been repeatedly made to the Kashmiris and then forgotten. Narasimha Rao declared that India could consider autonomy ‘‘short of independence’’, Deve Gowda offered ‘‘maximum autonomy’’ and Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference contested the last election on the same promise. Yet, how many people in the rest of India are even aware that very specific conditions were attached to the accession of Kashmir to India?

Unfortunately, the bureaucrats who have scripted the peace moves in Kashmir, have revelled in playing a game of divide and rule. Consider the developments of the past year. First the cobwebs were brushed off the Hurriyat; its leaders released from jail and propped up as the faces of the future. Within months though, came a move that seemed to stab this separatist conglomerate in the back and push it back to the margins. Intelligence officials made direct contact with Abdul Majid Dar, the chief commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, Kashmir’s largest militant group. As the world’s media poured into Srinagar’s Nehru Guest house to watch the spectacle of four masked men talk peace, the miffed Hurriyat Conference was forced to criticise the talks just to keep its own self respect intact.

Of course, the talks with the Hizbul Mujahideen seemed to be based on the same divisive philosophy — to somehow drive a wedge between the militant commanders on this side of the border and their boss-men in Islamabad. Intelligence sources would tell us in a conspiratorial manner, ‘‘Majid Dar is our man’’, indicating that he would soon make a public farewell to arms and join the mainstream. And what if Dar had stuck to the promise? Well, as thrilled as the Centre would have been, it would have done nothing to further genuine peace. For the average Kashmiri, Dar would have simply become another discredited local leader who had sold out to New Delhi.

This is what repeated governments have failed to understand. Weakening the Kashmiri leadership actually weakens the prospect of lasting peace. What Delhi needs to do is to strengthen the doves among the hawks, but in a manner that will not compromise them before their people. Deepening the cracks within a deeply fractured separatist movement may make for wonderful strategy, but it doesn’t offer the Kashmiris a real political option.

Ironically, even Delhi’s man in Srinagar, Farooq Abdullah, has felt the adverse effects of these cat-and-mouse games. The National Conference is acutely aware that many of its political opponents — both within the mainstream and in the azaadi camp — get covert monetary and political support from Delhi. As a senior NC leader remarked, ‘‘This is not new. Right from 1953, Delhi has always tried to create a parallel leadership.’’

As Kashmir gets more and more trapped in this vortex of intrigue and mutual suspicion, what was once a homespun movement has been almost completely hijacked by rank outsiders and their ideology of hate. It is an education to visit one of the many “martyrs’ graveyards” in Srinagar. The tombstones tell their own story. These men and their fidayeen squads have violently subverted the cultural ethos of the Valley so that today even 15-year-olds parrot platitudes on jehad. Never before has it been as important for Delhi to back the handful of azaadiwallahs, who are willing to speak out against the fundamentalists. Old-timers like Abdul Ghani Lone who was on Pakistani soil when he condemned the extremists ‘‘on either side’’; or young men like Srinagar’s progressive Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, who speaks of “a global village” in the same breath as “self determination”.

It is no one’s contention that the motley crew of 23 parties in the Hurriyat Conference are the “real representatives” of the Kashmiri people. But it is equally true that the people of the state must be made to feel that they too are part of the Agra summit. Last year, as both hawks and hacks worried about whether the dialogue with militant groups would be within the framework of the Indian Constitution, the prime minister showed imagination by saying “insaniyat” would be the only parameter. Let’s see the same spirit again. The invitation to Musharraf is a start. But let’s bury the bogey of “tripartite talks”, and not be scared of them. Call it something else if the term makes the MEA break into a rash, but let’s find some way of giving a voice to the people of J&K in what is, after all, their future.

The truth is something neither Delhi nor Islamabad wants to confront. The average Kashmiri wants neither Pakistan nor India. And it’s not only about misgovernance and poor development (as India wants to believe) or the unifying force of Islam (as Pakistan wants to believe). At its root, the Kashmir conflict is a complex assertion of identity. We need to win back not the land, but the people. How about a trip to Srinagar, Mr Vajpayee?

(The writer is with NDTV. The views expressed here are her own)