The next steps to peace

A walkway along the Dal Lake. Building institutions and shared assets is perhaps the way to go for durable peace. - PRAVEEN SWAMI

The dialogue process is reaching an impasse. Should India now resort to a grand gesture, or take gradated steps to sustain it?

LITTLE pamphlets fluttered down into the small Pakistani towns of Wana and Miranshah in March, exhorting local residents to support the armed forces in their struggle against a resurgent Taliban. "This war is against foreign terrorists and their harbourers who are fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Jews and Hindus against the state of Pakistan," the air-dropped leaflets read.

What do leaflets in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the India-Pakistan dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir have to do with each other? A good deal. In recent weeks, it has become clear that the dialogue process is starting to reach that place so familiar to its participants - impasse. Confidence-building measures like the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service seem to be running out of steam. In March, the first bus service in a month attracted just four passengers from Jammu and Kashmir. On the political front, Islamist terror groups are yet to join the dialogue. And while both India and Pakistan support out-of-the-box solutions, neither side can seem to agree on exactly what these innovations might be.

All of this has made General Pervez Musharraf's calls for the demilitarisation of parts of Jammu and Kashmir hugely attractive. A grand Indian gesture, demilitarisation advocates argue, would breathe life into the dialogue, compel terrorist groups to declare a reciprocal ceasefire, and enable the Pakistani President to shoo away the Islamist hawks who are circling the skies, waiting to prey on the remains of the peace process. Should India fail to do so, some experts have warned, the uniform-wearing Islamists who prepared the pamphlets could seize power, and bring a summary end to detente with India.

Is demilitarisation, then, the sensible next step ahead on the road to peace?

An answer to the question rests on two central questions: the desire of jehadi groups to come to the negotiation table, and Pakistan's willingness to abandon its decades-long use of this army as an instrument of its policy. What evidence is available is not optimism-inducing. Contrary to political claims, surrenders of Pakistan-trained terrorists operating in Jammu and Kashmir have been declining, not increasing. While 151 terrorists surrendered in 2003, that number fell to 118 in 2004 and just 53 last year, despite the existence of a generous rehabilitation package. In the Kashmir Valley, the decline was even more precipitate, from 91 in 2003 to just 19 last year.

Statistics on surrenders can be misleading. Many terrorists seeking to leave their organisations, or tanzeems, ask to be arrested, to protect their families from reprisal or charges of treachery. Here again, though, there is no evidence to show that large numbers of terrorists are seeking to desert their tanzeems. In 2003, 233 Pakistan-trained terrorists were arrested by Indian forces, a figure that fell to 194 in 2004. Last year, the number fell even further, to 189. Interestingly, most arrests of Pakistan-trained terrorists last year took place along the Line of Control (LoC), a departure from the past. Ninety-one terrorists were detained on the LoC, the highest figure since 1995. In 2003, by way of contrast, only three Pakistan-trained terrorists were arrested on the LoC, while just eight were apprehended in 2004. Given that troops on the LoC are quick to open fire on infiltrators, it is likely at least some of these arrests were in fact surrenders in disguise.

Official data also casts interesting insight into terrorist transgressions of the LoC. For the first time since 1990, not a single terrorist was shot dead while attempting to cross the LoC into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), a clear sign that fewer numbers of new recruits are being despatched for training. However, an upsurge in infiltration was evident. Where 90 terrorists, in 43 discreet groups, were killed while attempting to cross the LoC in 2004, these figures rose to 165 and 72 last year. Figures like these suggest that at least some of the ethnic Kashmiri cadre who have spent years in camps in PoK are indeed interested in returning home.

However, the data at once makes clear that there is no large-scale desire to surrender arms among those operating within the State, possibly a consequence of the large-scale earnings from extortion within Kashmir. Nor do the infiltration figures support claims that the terrorist leadership is signalling a desire to end the jehad in Jammu and Kashmir.

In a recent interview, the Hizbul Mujahideen's supreme commander, Mohammad Yusuf Shah, asserted that "in Afghanistan, Vietnam and other conflict areas war and dialogue have run side by side. We have long decided that we shall be active on political as well as diplomatic fronts while keeping the militant front alive so as to protect our precious sacrifices against any sell-out."

Leaving aside the question of whether Vietnam or Afghanistan constitute useful models for the negotiated settlement of conflicts, one thing is clear: the soldiers of the jehad in Jammu and Kashmir will not come to the table stripped of their instruments of leverage. Is it still worth taking the risk of demilitarising some parts of the State?

History is not comforting. Between December 2000, and April 2001, Indian forces terminated offensive operations against terrorist groups in the hope of bringing the Hizbul Mujahideen to the dialogue table. The consequences? A record 289 civilians were killed by terrorists during these months, up from 241 during 1999-2000. Security force fatalities fell - but the losses suffered by jehadi groups dropped even more sharply, making them the principal beneficiaries.

In political terms, the ceasefire demonstrated that pro-peace elements in the Hizbul Mujahideen could not control levels of violence in Jammu and Kashmir.

Organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which then as now had no interest in joining in a dialogue from which they would gain nothing, demonstrated that in alliance with powerful ground-level commanders of the Hizbul Mujahideen, they could undo moves towards peace. Pro-dialogue secessionist politicians proved unable to contain the jehadi assault.

Is demilitarisation, then, an unworkable goal? Not quite.

Unnoticed, the bright green billboards that had blossomed across Srinagar, proclaiming that Muzaffarabad was just a few dozen kilometres down the road, withered away during the winter. New shoots, though, are starting to break out, the consequence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's round-table dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir.

Seen from the outside, the State's political responses to the detente process seem for the most part to have been confined to the National Conference's (N.C.) calls for rapid progress on federal autonomy, and the People's Democratic Party's (PDP) endorsement of Musharraf's calls for "self-rule." But the real political news in Jammu and Kashmir still lies under the surface. Driving political growth is the growing realisation amongst representatives of the State's marginal regions that the dialogue process holds out the prospect of seizing power from established elites in Srinagar and Jammu.

Take the case of Ladakh. "Jammu ruled us for a hundred years," says Pinto Norbu, an MLA and former Minister from Ladakh, "and then Srinagar for the last half-century. History is not fair enough to give everyone a turn, but there is now a real opportunity to have our grievances addressed." Ladakh's representatives hope to use the dialogue both to address specific regional issues and to free the future of their region from events in Kashmir and Jammu. Politicians in both Leh and Kargil hope the opening of trans-LoC routes to Gilgit and Skardu will help diminish the region's economic dependence on Srinagar. Across the LoC, politicians both from the Northern Areas and the PoK share the same vision - with their ire directed at Punjab.

Likewise, Jammu and Kashmir's Gujjar and Bakkarwal communities, long consigned to the margins of both politics and development because of their pastoral lifestyle, also sense opportunity. With between 200,000 and 250,000 scattered across almost every tehsil of the State, Gujjar representatives know that they will play a key role in the fortunes of political parties in Kashmir and Jammu. Gujjar and Bakkarwal leaders hope to leverage the round-table process to just this end. "We can make and unmake governments," says N.C. leader Mian Altaf of his community, "any party which fails to recognise this fact will pay the price." Dozens of other forces - ranging from the Panthers Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to regional formations in Doda or Poonch, are starting to think along similar lines. What shape might this fractious chorus of ethnic and regional voices take? Chauvinist disintegration is, of course, one possibility - a real danger since major parties have not even begun a serious debate on the issues. If the N.C. has a credible map for deepening federal autonomy, one that does not involve doing away with the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution or the protection of the democratic system by the Election Commission of India, the party is yet to make it public. Neither has the PDP, mirroring President Musharraf's own silence on the issue, let it be known just what its understanding of "self-rule" in fact is. Yet the mutinies blossoming across Jammu and Kashmir also offer real hope for the future.

M. Aslam, an authority on the panchayat raj system in Jammu and Kashmir, is among the growing ranks of people who believe strengthening local institutions holds the key. Local institutions, he argues, alone can meet the complex needs of Jammu and Kashmir's civil society. India-Pakistan detente, then, is transforming not just the relationship between the two States, but transfiguring the political life of Jammu and Kashmir itself. A long and complex series of negotiations between established elites and the new voices on the political stage lie ahead. "We need to work out what our grievances are with each other," Aslam says, "and what vision we have for our shared future."

What could, then, be the next steps ahead? Peace-building, some believe, needs to take a different direction. "We recently had the opportunity to visit relatives from whom we had been separated for 35 years," says Siddiq Wahid the Vice-Chancellor of the Islamic University of Science and Technology. "We hugged and wept with joy - and an hour later found we had nothing to talk about. What we need are institutions, not just nostalgia; institutions that will give people the foundations they need for a dialogue about the future." What these institutions could be needs no great imagination. India and Pakistan could collaborate on water and power projects on both sides of Jammu and Kashmir, and allow their citizens to initiate trade relationships across the LoC. Universities could be encouraged to admit students from either side of the LoC, or indeed the agreed borders of India and Pakistan.

Ideas like these are not glamorous, but could constitute bite-sized measures towards building an abiding peace. At a recent conference in Karachi, the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq observed that "all traditional slogans" had lost their relevance in Jammu and Kashmir. Nothing but an "all-inclusive dispensation," in which the religious and cultural rights of each of the State's regions was respected along with those of the peoples of India and Pakistan, would prove workable. He was right. It is quite obvious, though, that a consensus that meets these criteria is more than one step away. Building credible democratic institutions and shared assets will prepare the ground for new political ideas to evolve - and perhaps help mitigate the effects the multiple assaults on the Pakistani state from both Islamists and ethnic-nationalists is certain to have. "Where there is doubt," the Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani recently told participants at a conference in Srinagar, "there cannot be action." In fact, doubt is the sole certainty about the peace process. All those who have chosen to walk towards peace would do well to tread carefully, searching carefully for the booby-traps that litter the road ahead.