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Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace
Sumantra Bose tells us that the Indian Government’s denial of democratic rights to the Kashmiris is primarily responsible for the present turmoil in the state. Unbiased opinion in India has regularly deplored these lapses and pointed out the failures of the democratic process. What galls the reader is that Bose hardly stops to argue the point but simply repeats it. Agreed that the present insurgency is the result of our failure on the democracy front in Kashmir, but Bose is ignorant of the undercurrents of disaffection in Kashmir dating back to long before India’s Partition. Many Kashmiris who have lived, as I have, through the Partition and its aftermath in Kashmir, would recall the Sher-Bakra confrontations in Srinagar and other places that even Sheikh Abdullah’s popularity could not contain. These confrontations occurred even before the Muslim United Front was cheated out of its gains in 1987. The implications of a non-political event, the 1983 India-West-Indies cricket match in which the spectators jeered at the Indian team, seem to have been lost on the author. This in spite of the fact that successive governments in the state had offered and continue to offer numerous sops to the local population in terms of job opportunities and educational facilities. While every one knows that Kashmir’s rulers have been corrupt and self-serving, we must not overlook the fact that a good many locals did benefit from India’s largesse. Rehearsing the already known positions of the parties on the dispute, Bose suggests no new ‘paths to peace’ in Kashmir. After stating all over again what previous commentators have said about the pros and cons of converting the LoC into the international border or parcelling out the state to various disputants, Bose ends up reiterating the autonomy argument albeit within the enlarged framework of an Indo-Pak dialogue. "A longer-term Kashmir settlement necessitates that the LoC be transformed — from an iron curtain`85to a linen curtain between self-governing Indian and Pakistani regions of the state". Such proposals sound reasonable when made from safe academic perches, but lack substance when weighed against the reality of hardened stances from parties on the dispute. What is forgotten here is that the rulers of the Pakistan-held areas do not see their region as a territory in contention. As Bose himself admits, that region is ethnically and linguistically separate and closer to Pakistan. So what does self-governance really mean here? In spite of his professed ‘objectivity’ in appraising competing claims in the state, Bose is less than fair to the displaced Pandits. At pains to list the grievances of the Muslims in the Valley, he makes no attempt to understand the reasons for the mass exodus of the Hindus in 1990 and without question endorses the thesis that Jagmohan advised the Pandits to leave. Laughable though it is, what is worse is the unproved allegation that the Pandits are the "local standard-bearers for authoritarian central control". Intellectual posturing cannot get any sillier than that. |
ONE of the sidelights of the tragic conflict in
Kashmir is the amount of punditry it has spawned in the last half
century. Journalists, academics and politicians of all hues have from
time to time added their nuggets of wisdom to the inordinately detailed
reportage on this issue. The electronic media in India and Pakistan have
hardly lagged behind in discussing it to the point of distraction. Now
we have a professor from the London School of Economics offering his
views on "the powder keg that is Kashmir". Unfortunately,
these views are unoriginal and add nothing to what we already know.