KASHMIR CONUNDRUM

India, Pakistan, the United States, and the question of "autonomy".

AIJAZ AHMAD

THE problem with the Autonomy Resolution that Farooq Abdullah has master-minded, and the reason why it has been couched in such maximalist and demagogic terms, is that it has come at least three years too late.

There was a phase - during the period 1995 to1997, let us say - when Indian government(s) did seem to be evolving a concrete policy response to the insurgency in Kashmir. P.V. Narasimha Rao had been persuaded to believe that, the military equation notwit hstanding, India also needed to find a political resolution to the problems that were feeding the insurgency. In turn, such a resolution could not come about unless the Indian government had credible interlocutors within Kashmir, and no interlocutor coul d be credible unless he could genuinely claim to command an electoral majority. The insurgency was at that point at a low ebb but the alienation of the Kashmiri people had by then reached such a point that they could not be persuaded to believe yet again in the electoral process unless a hope could be revived that they would substantially achieve their aspirations through this process.

This was the backdrop against which Narasimha Rao announced in 1995 that so far as autonomy for the State of Jammu and Kashmir was concerned, only "the sky was the limit" - implying of course that azaadi was out of the question but much of the aut onomy that was once guaranteed by Article 370 and had been eroded over the past many years could surely be resurrected. The "maximum autonomy" plank of the United Front governments was essentially a continuation of that policy. To that extent - though on ly to that extent - Farooq Abdullah is right: finding no other possibly credible interlocutors, the Indian government had armed him with its promises and he had indeed fought the 1996 elections almost exclusively on the autonomy plank which brought him a n impressive victory.

In Indo-Pakistan relations, meanwhile, a new phase of quiet diplomacy had begun to bear fruit by 1997 when Foreign Secretary-level encounters produced an agenda for discussion in June that year, which had three remarkable features. One, it was a comprehe nsive agenda, touching many areas, with special focus on economic relations, cultural exchanges, confidence-building measures and so on, to be realised over time, instead of seeking dramatic breakthroughs. Second, the Kashmir issue was recognised as some thing that needed to be discussed bilaterally, not as a "core issue" as Musharraf now calls it but not as a non-issue either, as Indian governments usually claim it to be. Third, it was implicitly agreed that - given the political compulsions of the two sides, and given the appetites of the media - the two sides were relatively free to put their own respective interpretations on the terms of the agreement so far as the public face of the discussions was concerned. The understanding was flexible enough, in other words, for diplomacy to proceed more slowly on the controversial issues while relatively rapid progress could be made on the non-controversial ones.

There were of course countervailing factors. Insurgency had not been contained. The economy of Jammu and Kashmir was in a shambles. The people still felt as insecure in the face of the counter-terror of the state as in the face of the terror of the insur gents. Forces that wanted to give the Kashmir problem a wholly communal form were at work. Far from subsiding, infiltration from Pakistan was gradually changing its character, bringing more foreign elements into the Valley. Farooq Abdullah had resumed hi s career of profligacy, corruption and misgovernance. The worst aspect, in a sense, was that having raised hopes on the question of 'autonomy', neither Farooq nor the United Front government seemed really keen to push the process forward. Indrajit Gupta, the Communist Party of India stalwart who was then the Home Minister of India, at one point offered to divide the State along communal lines.

Even so, there was an opportunity: insurgents on the retreat, a popularly elected government in Srinagar, Indo-Pakistan relations restored to the realm of professional diplomacy, a government in New Delhi which was especially sensitive to the issue of th e devolution of power to States generally and committed to Article 370 for Jammu and Kashmir specifically. That moment of opportunity ended when the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its communal agenda and sub-imperialist ambitions, came to power. Thanks to its precarious position at the head of a large, non-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) alliance of regional parties, it could not abrogate Article 370 despite its very basic commitment to that abrogation. And, thanks to a politics of opportunism that was both limitless and egregious, it did embrace Farooq as an ally. But for the insurgency itself it could think of no solution but the militaristic one, since the settled position now was that there were no domestic causes for that insurgency and that it wa s the handiwork exclusively of Pakistan.

The promise of genuine autonomy for Kashmir as well as the improved Indo-Pakistan relations that the diplomats had put in place, went up in smoke at Pokhran. The bragging by the L.K. Advanis and the Madan Lal Khuranas as to how India's new-found status a s a nuclear power had changed the geo-strategic situation pertaining to Kashmir and Pakistan, and how they were now about to go into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), is now part of legend. Pakistan put an end to that talk by proceeding with its own explo sions, which then led to two equally dangerous illusions in Pakistan. First, that in acquiring nuclear capability it had also acquired strategic parity with India despite its great inferiority in the matter of conventional weapons. Second, that this new balance of terror gave it a freer hand in Jammu and Kashmir - precisely the illusion that Advani and friends had come to nurse.

Among the major world powers, a basic consensus developed remarkably quickly and this has remained essentially unchanged. Much of what is happening today, in India, Pakistan as well as specifically in Kashmir, is in large measure being determined by that consensual opinion. So, it is well to recall the reactions not just of the United States, and not only on issues of non-proliferation and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but of others as well. Thus, meeting on June 4, 1998, in the aftermath of Pokhran an d Chaghai, the Foreign Ministers of the P5 countries - the United States, the United Kingdom, the Russian Federation, France and China - declared that they would "actively encourage India and Pakistan to find mutually acceptable solutions, through direct dialogue, that address the root cause of the tension, including Kashmir."

That was a nice, calculated phrase: "actively encourage". Not mediation, as Pakistan has always wanted, but claiming for themselves something of a supervisory role, despite India's wishes to the contrary. The same formula was to re-emerge in the agreemen t Clinton signed with Nawaz Sharif toward the end of the Kargil conflict when he committed himself to taking a "personal interest" in reviving Indo-Pakistan talks on Kashmir. The other noteworthy aspect of the P5 formulation was that Kashmir was recognis ed as a "root cause", not the "core issue" as Musharraf would have it but a key problem for which a "solution" had to be found. Responding to this call, Pakistan offered on June 11 to resume talks on the "basis of the agreement reached on June 23, 1997."

A week after the P5 Foreign Ministers had issued that statement, the G8 Foreign Ministers demanded that "India and Pakistan should undertake to avoid threatening military movements, cross-border violations, including infiltration or hot pursuit, or other provocative acts and statements." The phrasing was remarkable for its even-handedness. If the warning against "cross-border violations" was addressed to both equally, Pakistan was as much warned against "infiltration" as India was against "hot pursuit" . Pakistan is still being punished for defying that warning when it mounted the Kargil operation whereas India is praised for abiding much more closely by these rules, not only in desisting from "hot pursuit" in any significant way but also by opening it self up to a whole range of suggestions for 'dialogue' and 'solutions' emanating from the U.S. and its precincts.

Within India, in any case, the fundamental flaw remained. There was no Kashmir policy. The pursuit of "maximum autonomy" that the U.F. government had promised was simply abandoned. Thanks to the compulsions of alliance and public opinion, Article 370 cou ld not be abrogated. Nor could it be revived and implemented, however, to take the wind out of the terrorists' sails, thanks to the strictures by the RSS. "Hot pursuit" was forbidden by the West but within Jammu and Kashmir there could only be a military solution - and any political solution had to be a communal one, as we shall see.

IN relation to Pakistan, India went straight, within six months, from nuclear explosions and threats of "hot pursuit" as well as recovery of PoK, to the theatrics of 'bus diplomacy' - in order to appease the powers which were "actively encouraging" India and Pakistan to show results. Even at that time, though, the professing of peaceful intentions was not entirely in good faith. For example, the exercises that the Indian Air Force held around Pokhran and not far from the Pakistan border during the first week of March 1999, only a few weeks after the Lahore Declaration, was the largest show of air power in recent years.

On its part, Pakistan acted on two separate tracks with rather more determination. It went along with the 'bus diplomacy' but with much restraint. As Vajpayee was preparing to take the bus, for example, the Pakistan Foreign Minister demanded a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir (district by district, he now suggested). On a more practical plane, however, Pakistan began preparing for Kargil - from as early as October or possibly even September of 1998, well before Lahore.

In its own eyes there seem to have been five justifications: it was a response to India's intransigence on Siachen, it could help expand the scope of infiltration in the Valley, it could be sustained because nuclear power had made Pakistan immune to atta cks across the international border, it would help propel the Kashmir issue into the Security Council, and the West would basically, though grudgingly, accept it.

Pakistan has paid dearly for these horrendous miscalculations, and it is still paying. Kargil was in any case the other face of Pokhran.

BUT we would be making a great mistake if we were to imagine that Pakistan's great isolation from its historic American patrons is owed essentially to its introduction of terrorists into the Valley and to its Kargil adventure, or to India's great restrai nt and sagacious diplomacy. The realignments in American policy are owed, rather, to the diametrically opposed positions that the two countries have come to occupy in relation to the global geography of American interests. Barring the former Soviet Union itself, India commands the largest single market that has been opened up for multinational imperial finance so very rapidly and promises to open up the rest of itself so very completely. China, which has a much bigger and healthier economy, and which th erefore is even more attractive for foreign capital, controls the inflow of foreign finance and commodity flows with far greater deliberation.

Second, India's integration into the Western strategic design, including the military design, is now progressing apace, as indicated by its extensive joint exercises with the U.S. and France or the newly forged relationship with Israel. The recent visits of Advani and Jaswant Singh went far beyond mere normalisation of relations and are part of the design for regional strategic cooperation, high technology transfers, and direct cooperation in military and intelligence spheres. Contrast, for example, the U.S. response to Israel's sale of technology to China, where the U.S. forced Israel to abrogate unilaterally an agreement it had signed already.

Similarly, in the ideological and political sphere, BJP-ruled India is fast emerging as America's most 'allied ally'. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is formally charged with intelligence gathering strictly within the U.S., is scheduled to open an office in New Delhi. The U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, a far-Right outfit initially designed to promote "democracy" in the socialist countries, is similarly scheduled to open an Asian Centre that is to be located in New Delhi and fina nced by the Confederation of Indian Industry. There are many such emerging areas of close collaboration in the ideological sphere.

Pakistan's own fall from America's favour is a recent development but it is a development that is steep and dramatic, though it has little to do with Kashmir or Kargil but has much more to do with Pakistan's deep involvement with the Taliban, the corrosi ve effect that the Taliban phenomenon is having on some of the American designs in West and Central Asia. When the Americans tell Pakistan to control the Islamicist militias they are much more concerned with the latter's involvement with Afghanistan and their spread in the Central Asian Republics whose oil the Americans covet.

The U.S. understands as much as anyone else that the Pakistani state is not currently able to control those forces fully. It wants Musharraf to acquire for himself a civilian fig leaf and commit himself to exercise as much authority as he can; for the re st, they can live well enough with a quasi-military regime of the sort that Zia gave them at the height of the Afghan war. So long as the ruling authority in Pakistan is not opposed to its interests - which no ruler in Pakistan ever is - America's own in terest lies not in the erosion but in the re-furbishing of a coherent state authority in Pakistan. This the U.S. can achieve relatively easily, both because the whole Pakistani Establishment is keen to provide a regime that the U.S. would support and bec ause the Pakistani economy is only a step away from collapse. Only American goodwill can save it from a massive default this coming January.

MUSHARRAF has repeatedly announced schemes for de-weaponisation - though with little effect. Infiltration into Jammu and Kashmir has certainly not stopped but there has been an appreciable decrease in the activity this summer. The current Pakistani budge t is said to offer zero growth for defence; even those who claim that figures have been manipulated suggest something like a 3.5 per cent growth in real terms - which too is in sharp contrast to the 28 per cent rise in India's defence budget. Musharraf i s seriously attempting to have "guest militants" of foreign origin evacuated from Pakistan. More recently, he has held a series of meetings with political figures in the country, starting with Ajmal Khattak but including a wide spectrum of people from al l parties, mostly those who are not tainted by obvious cases of corruption.

The choice of Ajmal Khattak as a preferred interlocutor is intriguing. He is an elder statesman of Pakistani - especially Pashtun - politics, once a Communist as well as a Pashtun nationalist who spent much of his life as an exile in Afghanistan and is g enerally credited with having brought together the two Communist factions, Khalq and Parcham, to form a joint party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), on the eve of the revolution. After the revolution he tried to broker an agreement b etween Pakistan and Afghanistan in which, he proposed, Afghanistan would give up its historic territorial claim to the Pashto-speaking areas of Pakistan and Pakistan, in return, would give up its attempts to de-stabilise the PDPA government. Nothing came of it; Pakistan was too deeply committed to American aims. At some point during the crisis of the Communist regime in Afghanistan he returned to Pakistan.

Musharraf is rumoured to be contemplating the formation of a government of national consensus consisting of 'clean' politicians, under one rubric or another, headed by Ajmal Khattak. It is also worth adding that in the first group of political figures Mu sharraf has invited for a consultation only Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islami (JUI) who is a religious figure; all the rest represent some shade of secular politics. All this may yet fall flat but this much-delayed initiative does seem to off er hope for the eventual prospects of democracy in Pakistan. The corruption and misgovernance of the previous 'democratically elected' Prime Ministers had been such that restoration of democracy can hardly be identified with a restoration of their rule.

On the other hand, the perpetuation of military rule is equally a recipe for disaster. The typical (and cynical) answer to such a quandary in Pakistan, under Ayub Khan as much as under Zia, has been that the dictator gives up the uniform and acquires a p olitical party of his own, or takes over an existing one, with the same old politicians. Musharraf has already introduced one major innovation in this pattern; he has ruled so far without imposing martial law and with all the civil liberties intact. If h e can now also create a transitional set-up consisting of credible civilian leaders to institute some basic reforms and hold free and fair elections to restore a fully democratic order within the three years allotted to him for the purpose by the Supreme Court, he can earn a decent name for himself in the annals of Pakistani history.

The fact that Pakistan has been preoccupied since the Kargil disaster with sorting out its own internal problems has provided India a welcome reprieve. It is not at all clear, though, that India has used this reprieve wisely. The fact that the BJP-led go vernment has no clear policy on Kashmir except a jingoistic one, combined with the fact that it must produce 'dialogue' and 'solutions' to satisfy the Great Powers (be it the U.S., the E.U., the P5, or the G8) means that the vacuum has been filled with e ither ad hoc moves or with policy perspectives based on American-inspired plans and domestically-designed communal projects.

That communalism and ethnicity would determine policy now seems almost natural. The imperialist powers have long known that playing the ethnic and ethno-religious card is the surest way to break up larger unities of class and nation, so that none is stro ng enough to challenge the existing order. The Americans, especially, mastered this game in relation to their own working class, where the ethnicity of every immigrant community was played against every other. Community, in that sense, has always been th e capitalist answer to class. More recently, this same game has been played to destroy all that was decent and humane in Yugoslavia. It is no wonder that the most vicious communal plans for Jammu and Kashmir have emanated from groups that are based in th e U.S. and are close to the administration in a reputedly 'advisory' capacity.

What is new in this configuration is that it coincides with the emergence of a political order in India where the BJP is supervising a full-fledged communal dispensation at the level of the Indian state. For Jammu and Kashmir, in this context, there is n o thought of restoring the primacy of secular politics in fighting insurgency, preserving the unique multi-religious culture of the State by enlarging the application of Article 370, or creating the conditions in which the Hindu victims of Islamicist ter ror can be restored to their rightful place in the Valley. Instead, we have a policy in which the insurgency is to be defeated purely through military means while the State itself is to be divided along religious lines.

Thus, for example, Karan Singh's influential advocacy of the theory that Jammu and Kashmir have two distinct and irreconcilable cultures which can live peacefully with each other only if they are also partitioned away from each other is an exact replica of the two-nation theory that led to the creation of Pakistan in the first place, and the plan to divide and further divide the State along ethno-religious lines into small units - as advocated by the Kashmir Study Group (KSG) in the U.S. and the Regiona l Autonomy Committee (RAG) within Kashmir - resembles nothing as much as the American formula for Yugoslavia and Madeliene Albright's vision of the world as she expounds on the death of the nation-state and the emergence of culturally-based ethno-religio us units across the imperialised world outside Euro-America.

IT is not at all clear as to when Farooq Abdullah began to buy into the communal dispensation. It has to do, probably, with his alliance with the BJP - but certainly not in the way that may be easily supposed. His failure is of a different kind. He was e lected to give Jammu and Kashmir good governance so as to restore the confidence of the people there in electoral politics - which he never did. He was elected, specifically, to win back for Jammu and Kashmir the real autonomy which is the only possible alternative to terrorist devastation, military repression and hallucinatory slogans of azaadi, whatever that means. That too he never fought for. As the promise to fight for autonomy receded, and as the corruptions of his governance proceeded, he began to lose the goodwill he had so recently won back. Then came the BJP's turn to rule, and Farooq made what was widely perceived in Kashmir as a fatal choice: he joined them.

He had a choice. He could have said: these are the people who stand for the abrogation of Article 370, which is that sacrosanct part of the Constitution which gives to the Instrument of Accession its meaning and validity, and I cannot join them unless th ey explicitly retract their position. Instead, he said that the State was so much in need of financial help from the Centre that he was going to cooperate with whoever was in power in Delhi. He did not say that both the Article 370 and fina ncial assistance from the federal government were the right of a people who had chosen to join the Indian Union and who were under siege, unable to meet their own expenses because of the destruction - to property, trade, infrastructu re, social services - caused by the terrorist. He did not say it because his own accounts were not presentable. Dignity in relation to Delhi has been a major issue for the average Kashmiri. He did not fight for that dignity, and his popularity plummeted.

In the arithmetic of insurgency and counter-insurgency, a government typically negotiates when the insurgents are militarily cornered but not defeated in the political sphere. That point had arrived in Kashmir some months after Kargil. When, pressed from Washington, Delhi began looking for interlocutors from among the insurgents themselves, the more willing leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), with a very much narrower base than Farooq's, could fill the bill - but Farooq could not beca use he could not represent the terrorists. He had let pass that moment of glory in 1996-97 when he had represented 'autonomy'. Now New Delhi needed not him but those who represented azaadi - rather, both were needed, to be played off against each other. Farooq chose to play the spoiler.

He has armed himself with two reports, submitted by committees he himself had appointed, which cater to two different constituencies. There is the State Autonomy Committee (SAC) report which offers the maximalist version of the secular demand for autonom y for Jammu and Kashmir as a whole, as mentioned above, and then there is the Regional Autonomy Committee (RAC) report advocating the re-organisation of the State into eight new 'provinces' whose boundaries are defined on ethno-religious lines. Desperate to be recognised as the principal interlocutor, above and beyond the APHC, Farooq wants to play the secular card (maximum autonomy of the State as a unit) as well as the communal card (division of the State into diverse religiously defined units) all at once. This corresponds, then, to the new political face of the National Conference which acts as a guardian of the secular legacy in its operations in the Valley but as a party of Muslims in Jammu and Ladakh, having developed far too limited ties of rep resentation with non-Muslims there.

THREE years ago, when Farooq had not yet lost so much of his credibility and when a secular government in Delhi was still committed to Article 370, the State Autonomy report would have got a friendly hearing but not the Regional Autonomy report with its communal agenda. Now, with the BJP in power and Farooq himself contaminated by alliance with it, the situation is exactly the reverse. The communal division of the State is likely to be welcomed, but "maximum autonomy" for the State as a whole on the sec ular principle is likely to be rejected as posing a dire threat to the unity of the Republic. The political chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Kashmir, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who doubles as the chief of the APHC, would be considered the more important negot iating partner, not because he commands much of a popular base, but because New Delhi would prefer to speak to those who speak for the insurgency, and because Jamaat is the organisation that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knows best from its pre-T aliban days in Afghanistan. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the head of the parent organisation of the Jamaat in Pakistan, was in Washington, meeting top administration officials and think tank specialists even as the Vajpayee government was opening its unofficial c hannels to the APHC to prepare for a formal dialogue.

The BJP itself seems to be simply playing for time. Under U.S. pressure, it must be seen as talking to all and sundry; Farooq is a beneficiary of this circumstance and is being pitched against the APHC in a competition to represent the Kashmiris 'truly'. Its roots in the RSS make it impossible for the BJP, however, to talk seriously of 'autonomy', let alone azaadi. The internal fragmentation of Kashmir along communal lines, which may bring its own kinds of bitterness and violence, seems more like ly - which then is likely to give the insurgency yet another lease on life.