No subject

Dawn, 24/12/01



By Khalid Hasan


Alexander Evans, a young English academic who has been working on Kashmir for several years and could well be one of the best-informed men in the West on the subject, wrote after September 11 that militant groups in Kashmir would come under sharp pressure in the coming months to cull their ranks of Osama bin Laden supporters. That seems already to be happening. 

He wondered what direction the uprising that began in 1989 would now take. Noting that it was and had remained "exclusively Muslim", Evans argued that while it was a Muslim revolt against Indian rule, it was not necessarily an "Islamic" revolt when it began. In my view, the "Islamization" of the movement, when it came, was a mistake as it guaranteed that the support available to the long Kashmiri struggle for self-determination in many parts of the world would be lost. 

After some heady successes which saw the Indian military force humbled, the control of the movement increasingly shifted to those who had agendas that went beyond Kashmir. They saw Kashmir as part of a larger crusade against a large assemblage of enemies, among them, the nebulous entity called 'The West' and the "infidel" forces of "disbelief" dedicated to the destruction of Islam. Thus the movement in Kashmir took a course different from the one the peaceful marchers to the UN office in Srinagar who had been fired upon in 1989 had intended. 

India took full advantage of this, arguing that what it was facing in Kashmir was not a popular, indigenous uprising but a fundamentalist, terrorist-inspired insurrection. This plea fell on many sympathetic ears in western capitals. It even received a positive hearing from many Muslim governments who had their own reasons to fear the onset of "jihad". For instance, Osama bin Laden's principal target was his own country's government and the ruling house of Saud. Though he broadened his agenda as time passed, the Saudi monarchy and its policies remained his main motivation for th
Sudan, then Afghanistan. 

Coming back to Kashmir, in Evans's view, a "brutally effective Indian counter-insurgency with scant regard for human rights decimated the first generation of militants" with the "young romantics" making way for a more "professional group of fighters". The arrival of the "guest militants" on the scene modified the nature and objective of the Kashmiri struggle. 

Today, as the war in Afghanistan winds down and the destruction of the Taliban receives its lethal finishing touches, the focus will shift to Kashmir. The commitment of guest militants is ideological, not mercenary. But the ideology that fires them has the whole world arrayed against it now. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have in that sense done the greatest disservice to both Islam and to the causes which sought inspiration from it. Prof. Anwar Syed, whose reaction I sought, said he found Evans's view "optimistic". 

Evans believes that an end to militancy in Kashmir will strengthen Pakistan's hand. "It would also, for once, empower Kashmiris, whose voice could not be dismissed as that of a small gun-ridden minority. India, instead of condemning the proxy war it sees in Kashmir, would have to grapple with the real underlying issue... And without militancy rendering Pakistan's pleas for international action on Kashmir suspect, there could be scope for renewed UN involvement in the Kashmir issue. If Pakistan was to end covert support for militancy, India would face intense US pressure to offer something by way of return." 

A few years ago, the admirable British academic Alistair Lamb who, Yusuf Buch once said, had "put every Kashmiri in his debt", called for a fresh look at Kashmir since the two sides were so bogged down in history and so convinced of the merit of their positions that they could have no meeting point. He argued that the "liberation" of Kashmir "really means doing something about the Vale", as the "bulk of the remaining Muslim-majority bits of the old state has in one way or another already been 'liberate
"unitary plebiscite" as laid down in the UN resolutions which, people tend to forget, are advisory, not mandatory. 

Lamb wrote, "It is unlikely in the extreme ... that any unitary plebiscite can now be implemented in the state ... In this rather restricted sense, the United Nations resolutions of 1948 plus the UNCIP resolution of 1949 are indeed obsolete ... If they cannot be implemented through Indo-Pakistani cooperation, no one else is going to enforce them." 

...According to Lamb, the Cease-fire Line will need to be extended to the Chinese border to end the Siachen conflict which will mean India accepting the 1963 Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement. 

Lamb wrote that if the Valley was to become autonomous with India and Pakistan guaranteeing its autonomy and sharing or dividing responsibility for defence, external relations etc., perhaps a mutually acceptable arrangement could be worked out. He said a settlement was possible if certain conditions were met. First, Indian and Pakistani leaders must genuinely wish to find a settlement. Pakistan, though "lacking the arrogant assertion of absolute right" like India, should realize that the demand for a "unitary plebiscite ... is hardly conducive to compromise", nor is there any "international enthusiasm" for such a course. 

Lamb suggested that Pakistan should drop its claim to the "clearly non-Muslim" areas of the state and India should accept the Pakistani position in the Northern Areas which would "reduce the dispute in territorial terms to Azad Kashmir and the Vale". 

No settlement should involve the direct transfer of sovereign territory from one side to the other, he stressed. That would leave Azad Kashmir and the Vale which might be declared "autonomous regions, each with its internal self-government but with defence and external relations in the hands of Pakistan in the case of Azad Kashmir and India in the case of the Vale" with both sides agreeing as to the degree of their military presence. 

The Indo-Pak agreement, he proposed, could be sup
ented by an agreement between Azad Kashmir and the Vale defining a "special relationship". Local elections could be held to ratify the arrangement. He called it the "Andorra solution", that being the region between France and Spain which rests under the protection of both but is internally autonomous. 

Both India and Pakistan, Lamb wrote, "must be prepared to waive established concepts about the nature of the dispute ... and replace economic polemic with a basis of fact derived from a careful examination of what, as far as can be ascertained, actually happened ... They must be prepared to accept the legitimacy of the interest in the dispute of the other party, or parties, a process which is in practice rather more difficult than it at first might sound ... There must be informed debate. It is not necessary for everyone to agree with everyone else about every single point. It is essential, however, that all aspects of the problem be questioned and re-examined." 

That this advice comes from probably the best friend the Kashmiri people have in the West, we must remain mindful of.