Historic move

Six years into its failed attempts to engage the secessionists and the terror groups, New Delhi reaches out to the political parties.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Srinagar

"YOU can't shake hands with a clenched fist," Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said in 1982.

Six years into its failed attempts to engage the secessionist All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and Islamist terror groups in Jammu and Kashmir, New Delhi has stretched out its hand to the political parties the State's people have elected to speak for them. Five committees are now to be formed from among the participants in the Srinagar round-table conference to discuss all aspects of the State's future, including its constitutional relationship with India. For the most part, Jammu and Kashmir residents have greeted the development with tired scepticism - but the fact is the process offers real hope for the future.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's round-table process is without dispute historic in its scale. By enabling elected representatives to negotiate collectively the future of the State with the Union of India, the Prime Minister has restored democratic praxis to the centre stage of its political life. Political parties whose position has long derived from the exploitation of religious fundamentalism and dispensation of state patronage - jehad and kebab - will now have to discover a new meaning and purpose and set their minds to imagining what a transfigured Jammu and Kashmir might look like.

Some insight into what lines the committees will proceed along is available from private minutes of the round-table conference obtained by Frontline. Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffar Beig's presentation on Jammu and Kashmir's legal relationship with India, where he emphasised that the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India must remain applicable to the State even while deepening federal autonomy, will be a keystone of the dialogue. So, too, will Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader M.Y. Tarigami's calls for regional and district-level elected bodies to address regional and ethnic concerns.

Significant ideas have also emerged on reaching out across the Line of Control (LoC). During his speech, former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed said that the People's Democratic Party's (PDP) calls for self-rule were directed at Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK). Sayeed's suggestion that his party had no issue with the basic structures of Indian democracy was a significant departure from its recent political polemic, which drew on Islamist motifs. It is, indeed, possible that some committees may even invite suggestions from representatives of restive parts of POK, like Gilgit.

Realising these ideas will, of course, not be easy. Neither the National Conference nor the PDP made significant movement towards district or provincial-level autonomy during their time in office, for example, because State-level legislators were loath to have their authority undermined. Nor, as the acidic exchange seen between PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti and former Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah over her calls for demilitarisation of parts of the State demonstrates, will consensus prove easy to arrive at. Instead, a long and sometimes frustrating process of disputation is inevitable.

How this process proceeds will depend, in no small part, on how much seriousness of purpose New Delhi demonstrates. That no one is certain when the members of the five committees might be appointed, and on whose authority, does not bode well. A committee that was supposed to have been set up in September 2005 to negotiate with the APHC sank without a trace. New Delhi, on that occasion, seemed unable to decide just who it wished to speak on its behalf.

Discussions have not been held, either, on whether the committees will have expert advisers and who will be invited to make presentations.

Not a few signs exist, moreover, that some in the Jammu and Kashmir policy establishment are still uncomfortable with the kinds of plurality the round-table process demands. On the second day of the round-table, Union Minister Saifuddin Soz succeeded in arousing the ire of several participants by suggesting that all that was needed for a resolution of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir was a deal between two "great families" - a reference to Sayeed and Abdullah. Soz's critics saw it as a sign that the Centre was more comfortable with deal-making than inclusive dialogue.

Finally, New Delhi seems to have given no serious thought to how, or even if, it intends to negotiate now with the APHC or terror groups such as the Hizbul Mujahideen. Soz, along with Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah and former Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief A.S. Dulat, had sought to bring the APHC on board in the weeks before the round-table. How the contact can now be maintained without undermining the credibility of the round-table committees and their members is unclear. Yet, New Delhi will at once have to ensure that incentives exist for secessionists to join the dialogue.

But the biggest problem is this: the round-table process calls for an enormous break with the basic structures of New Delhi-Srinagar dialogue. In the two decades after Independence, mass parties in Jammu and Kashmir acquired a curious relationship with ethnic-religious fundamentalism. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad's regime, which came to power in 1953, positioned itself as a protector of the Kashmir Valley's Muslims against Hindu fundamentalism - and of Jammu Hindus against the Islamist tendencies, real or imagined, represented by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah.

Unsurprisingly, Bakshi's regime had good reason to perpetuate the existence of these twin fundamentalisms - and did so with considerable energy. His successor, G.M. Sadiq, used not-dissimilar tactics to maintain the primacy of the Indian National Congress, into which the National Conference subsumed itself in 1964. Sadiq promoted the Jana Sangh in Jammu, describing it as "a lesser evil" than his party's secular opponents, while Buddhist clerics in Ladakh were used to undermine the position of the regional leader Kushak Bakula. Much of the communal friction in the State traces its origins to this time.

Anxious about the prospects of an India-Pakistan war, New Delhi endorsed Sadiq's actions, seeing the dominance of the Congress as necessary to push forward Jammu and Kashmir's integration with India. Sadiq, in turn, delivered the constitutional instruments New Delhi wanted. In April 1965, for example, the State Legislature renamed Jammu and Kashmir's Sadr-i-Riyasat Governor and its Wazir-e-Azam Chief Minister. The term Wazir-e-Azam had been generally translated as Prime Minister - terminology New Delhi had long been uncomfortable with.

New Delhi's pursuit of integration, however, drove Sheikh Abdullah and his one-time enemy, the Srinagar cleric Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq, to join hands. Claiming that New Delhi's policies threatened the existence of the Kashmiri identity, they called on their cadre to boycott marriages, funerals and religious ceremonies hosted by the families of Muslim members of the Indian National Congress. Images of Pakistan's founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah displaced those of freedom movement icons such as Mahatma Gandhi inside Sheikh Abdullah's headquarters in Srinagar's Mujahid Manzil.

Just how far Jammu and Kashmir's most important leader travelled down the chauvinist road is evident from the fact that Abdullah demanded his identity be entered as a `Kashmiri Muslim' in his passport, a wilful conflation of nationhood with religion. As the scholar Navnita Chadha-Behera has perceptively noted, the "clock had turned full circle". "In the 1940s," she has observed, "the Sheikh had joined hands with Indian nationalism in order to challenge Muslim nationalism, and now he joined forces which stood for the Muslim identity in order to challenge the Indian identity."

What is significant is that Sadiq's regime, like that of Bakshi, made little effort to present a coherent political challenge to ethnic-religious chauvinism. Its energies were confined to containing the agents of fundamentalism through coercive means, not the ideological basis of their legitimacy. As long as Sheikh Abdullah or the Mirwaiz's street protests did not pose a serious challenge to the regime, their existence served the purpose of persuading New Delhi that the body of the Chief Minister was all that stood between India and a pro-Pakistan abyss.

In 1977, soon after he was released from jail and made Chief Minister, Sheikh Abdullah found himself facing a challenge from the Jamaat-e-Islami-Janata Party alliance. He chose the same path as his predecessors. National Conference cadre administered oaths to potential ethnic-Kashmiri voters on the Koran and shipped in clerics from Uttar Pradesh to campaign in Muslim-majority areas of Jammu. Sheikh Abdullah was careful to assert that "Kashmir was a part of India and Kashmiris were Indians," but he added that "if we are not assured of a place of honour and dignity in India, we shall not hesitate to secede".

Like Sadiq, Sheikh Abdullah was happy to wage war on fundamentalists - he had, in the run-up to the elections, proscribed some 1,125 Jamaat-e-Islami schools, describing them as sources "of communal poison". At once, though, Abdullah had no desire to engage in a frontal battle with the Islamists who were the most persuasive argument that could be presented to New Delhi for the perpetuation of his rule. His son and successor, Farooq Abdullah, acted alike. As Islamist protests in Kashmir spiralled out of control from 1987, Abdullah saw them as an instrument with which he could leverage concessions.

Underpinning this unhappy political history is the jehad-kebab trope: the idea, shared by Prime Ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru to P.V. Narasimha Rao, that the proper role of elected regimes was to dispense patronage and thus contain dissent rather than to act as agents of the making of history in Jammu and Kashmir. The jehad - the communal mobilisation that challenged Jammu and Kashmir's accession to India, or indeed its variants in Jammu province or Ladakh - was a matter to be dealt with through deals made behind closed doors rather than through democratic processes.

It is interesting to consider just how this trope shaped politics after 1996, when the National Conference took power again in Jammu and Kashmir. The APHC could push ahead with supporting Islamist terrorism secure in the knowledge that mainstream parties and the State's administrative-developmental apparatus would ensure Kashmir did not degenerate into a Kandhahar. As such, it had to take no responsibility for the consequences of its actions - which, in turn, mainstream parties leveraged to extract political and economic concessions from New Delhi.

Perhaps the most important gain of the round-table process will be the shattering of the jehad-kebab trope. For the past 15 years, Indian policy making on the conflict has been driven by professional mediators, academics and unelected bodies such as the APHC - all of them claiming to have knowledge of, and power over, an entity called "the Kashmiri mind", whatever this racist construct might be. Few of them have an interest in embracing a process that allows the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir to exercise their own minds and act upon whatever vision of the future they arrive at.

Can Prime Minister Manmohan Singh realise his own vision? Within his own party, few seem to have the energy or imagination that is now needed. Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil's vapid 13-page round-table speech, which was bereft of a single idea of substance, is a case in point. Failure will inevitably prove a crippling personal blow. Yet, the Prime Minister has a real chance of making history instead of just another deal. It would be tragic if he does not summon the will needed to make those final steps forward - and instead backs away, as others did before him.