Dead end

How and why New Delhi's dialogue with the All Parties Hurriyat Conference broke down.

"IT takes all the running you can do," said the Queen in Lewis Carroll's masterpiece, Through the Looking Glass, "to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

Less than six years after then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee initiated what was marketed as a historic engagement with the secessionist All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and Islamist terror groups, the dialogue process in Jammu and Kashmir has reached a dead end. New Delhi has let it be known that it no longer intends to continue separate high-level dialogue with the APHC after the latter refused to participate in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's second round-table conference on Jammu and Kashmir.

How did this breakdown come about? APHC chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has said his organisation did not wish to waste its time in what he characterised as "a seminar" and asserted that it saw no purpose in any bilateral process. Mirwaiz Farooq's assertions are mystifying, given the fact that he has participated in bilateral dialogue with both President Pervez Musharraf and Manmohan Singh in the recent past - not to mention several international seminars on the conflict. His colleagues in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) have even participated in official discussions involving other parties.

Nor are APHC claims that New Delhi has been intransigent plausible. Prior to the second round-table, the secessionist coalition had laid down three conditions. It asked that the process include only major parties; that it be preceded by separate negotiations with the Prime Minister; and that formal invitations be delivered by the government itself rather than emissaries acting on behalf of India's covert services. Each of these demands was met. Notably, just 27 participants were invited to the round-table, down from 75 at the first round held in February.

In March, when General Musharraf acknowledged the diversity of political forces in Jammu and Kashmir by meeting National Conference president Omar Abdullah, the road to the second round-table conference seemed open. At a seminar in Karachi hosted on the fringes of the World Social Forum, the Mirwaiz accepted that "all traditional slogans" had begun to be redundant. Soon afterwards, he proclaimed his willingness to discuss "concepts like self-governance and self-rule". "We need to carry others along," he said, adding that the "state structure has to be kept in mind".

What changed in the days before the second round-table? For one, pressure from Islamist terror groups became intense. Soon after Musharraf's meeting with Abdullah, the apex organisation of Pakistan-based terrorist groups, the United Jehad Council (UJC), staged a protest against what it saw as a betrayal. Both the UJC and its principal ally in Jammu and Kashmir, Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, understood their backs were to the wall. "The sacrifices offered by the Kashmiris," the UJC said, "demand that common people and mujahideen should get united and take the struggle to its logical conclusion."

By mid-May, Hizbul Mujahideen emissaries had made clear to Mirwaiz Farooq that an APHC decision to participate in the second round-table - and thus deny their jehad legitimacy - would make its leaders targets for attack. A statement issued by the Hizbul Mujahideen chief, Mohammad Yusuf Shah, publicly attacked the "pointless moderation" of the secessionist leadership. Mirwaiz Farooq buckled and called for the "political, diplomatic and military fronts" of the "Kashmiri resistance" to work "in unison".

As things stand, the APHC has retreated from the openness seen at Karachi into the realm of clich. At one recent rally, Mirwaiz Farooq characterised its objective as "freedom and freedom alone", not "jobs, subsidies or power". It is not hard to see the contradictions between the cleric's position and the vision he articulated just a few weeks earlier, or to dismiss his recent actions as fear-driven hypocrisy. However, hard-headed political considerations underpin the APHC's decision to go along with the jehadi fiat, which need careful examination.

Principal among these is the realisation that the APHC simply cannot afford to share the table with political competitors. Should the organisation be called on to put its representational claims to the test prior to the resolution of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, there is little doubt that it would be obliterated by better-organised mass parties like the National Conference or the People's Democratic Party. With no real bases of support outside of Srinagar, the APHC would need a miracle of significant dimensions to pick up even half a dozen Assembly seats.

In 2004, the APHC agreed to talks hoping to position itself as the sole arbiter of the state's political future: as a medium between New Delhi, Islamabad and the mujahideen, which would be handed power in a deal of the kind which returned Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah to office in 1973. There was no space for those Mirwaiz Farooq described as "Tom, Dick and Harry". "If," the cleric argued in defence of his decision not to join the round-table, "at some point of time we feel that others should also be involved in the process. We shall devise the mechanism. Let Delhi not bother about that. Leave that to us."

Prime Minister Vajpayee's regime might have been comfortable with this kind of arrangement - witness its refusal to discuss state autonomy with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and the elected Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. Others were not. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan came to believe that the key to peace lies in Islamabad, not Srinagar. N.N. Vohra, the government's official interlocutor on Jammu and Kashmir, for his part, argued for a broad-based dialogue rather than one over which the APHC commanded a veto.

New Delhi's hardening position was driven in no small part by the APHC's inability to deliver on its claims that it could influence terrorist groups to scale back the jehad. Instead, the secessionist formation even failed to condemn the perpetrators of violence as the dialogue proceeded ahead. Mirwaiz Farooq, notably, condemned the recent killing of four tourists only on the grounds that it would hurt the State's economy; the murder of three Congress activists in an earlier terrorist attack in Srinagar failed to move his conscience enough even to merit a mention in his speeches.

As Omar Abdullah recently pointed out, this silence is of a piece with the Mirwaiz's past practice: "Ask him," he told journalists, "to name the people who killed his father or [the APHC leader] Abdul Gani Lone." Answers to who the Mirwaiz believes were responsible for these are evident in the fact that the APHC chairman, as well as other major secessionist leaders, are protected by Jammu and Kashmir Police guards and travels in a government-provided bullet-proof vehicle. Now, it is clear, the APHC will have to choose once and for all which team it wishes to play for.

How might things proceed from here? This much is certain: movement will not be rapid. Once the five committees Manmohan Singh hopes will take the round-table process forward are founded, discussions will begin on several complex ideas. These include the National Conference's calls for greater constitutional autonomy, the PDP's demand for an elected Governor, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader's proposals for the creation of district- and province-level elected bodies intended to address the State's complex web of ethnic and regional aspirations.

To make this political dialogue credible, though, New Delhi will have to find means to compel Pakistan to deliver on its promises to end cross-border support for terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. It will no longer be able to wait in the hope that the APHC will strip violence of legitimacy. Despite General Musharraf's public support for the round-table, the fact is that he has so far shown no sign of acting against the terrorist groups seeking to sabotage it. Indeed, terrorism serves him well: continued violence in Jammu and Kashmir, after all, is the sole leverage Pakistan has at the negotiating table.

New Delhi might, in these circumstances, do well to direct its attention inwards. Introspection is, in particular, needed on the United Progressive Alliance government's failure to arrive at a coherent vision of what it would like Jammu and Kashmir's political future to look like.

The Prime Minister has reached out to an extraordinary range of scholars, retired administrators, activists and even the odd eccentric in his search for new ideas. So far, though, the consultative process has yet to vest Indian policy on Jammu and Kashmir with a clear voice.

As a consequence, India's search for peace remains mired in indecision, with no focussed objective other than meeting United States and European pressures for forward movement. Part of the reason is that Manmohan Singh, unlike his predecessors, is without the services of leaders such as former Union Ministers Rajesh Pilot or Arjun Singh, who had the authority needed to execute hard decisions on internal security issues. Congress president Sonia Gandhi, for her part, has also relied on proxies, notably the PDP, often to the detriment of her own party's interests in Jammu and Kashmir.

Both the Prime Minister and the Congress president, therefore, remain directly vulnerable to the political costs that peacemaking entails. Is there an easy way out? Imagining solutions for the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir is not difficult. Dozens of plans, drawing on everything from territorial disputes in Europe to the ideas underpinning the partition of India, have proliferated in recent years. What the second round-table has made clear, though, is that Jammu and Kashmir is not just a problem: it is, instead, a place inhabited by people; people with conflicting concerns for which there is no tidy solution.

"I don't want to belong," said Alice in Through the Looking Glass, "to someone else's dream." Somehow, those concerned with Jammu and Kashmir's future are going to have to work out a vision for tomorrow all of them can wake up to.