by NYLA ALI KHAN
For India, Kashmir lends credibility to its secular nationalist image. For Pakistan, Kashmir represents the infeasibility of secular nationalism and underscores the need for an Islamic theocracy in the subcontinent. Once the Kashmir issue took an ideological turn, Mahatma Gandhi remarked, “Muslims all over the world are watching the experiment in Kashmir. . . . Kashmir is the real test of secularism in India.” In January 1948, India referred the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations. Subsequent to the declaration of the ceasefire between India and Pakistan on 1 January1949, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was divided into two portions. The part of the state comprising the Punjabi-speaking areas of Poonch, Mirpur and Muzaffarabad, along with Gilgit and Baltistan, was incorporated into Pakistan, whereas the portion of the state comprising the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh and the large Jammu region was politically assimilated into India. Currently, a large part of Jammu and Kashmir is administered by India and a portion by Pakistan. China annexed a section of the land in 1962, through which it has built a road that links Tibet to Xiajiang. The strategic location of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir (J & K) underscores its importance for both India and Pakistan. The state of J & K borders on China and Afghanistan. Out of a total land area of 2,22,236 square kilometres, 78,114 are under Pakistani administration, 5,180 square kilometres were handed over to China by Pakistan, 37,555 square kilometres are under Chinese administration in Leh district, and the remaining area is under Indian administration (Census of India, 1981: 156).
In order to make their borders impregnable, it was essential for both India and Pakistan to control the state politically and militarily. The culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse population of Indian and Pakistani-administered Jammu and Kashmir has been unable to reach a consensus on the future of the land and the heterogeneous peoples of the state. The revolutionary act of demanding the right of self-determination and autonomy for J & K has not been able to nurture unity amongst all socioeconomic classes.
Although Pakistan distinctly expresses its recognition of the status of J & K as disputed territory, it dithers from doing so in areas of the state under Pakistani control. Pakistan arbitrarily maintains its de facto government in Azad Kashmir. Old fiefdoms in the kingdoms of Hunza and Nagar were abolished and the entire area was reconstituted into five administrative districts in 1975 by the government of Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. To date, the Northern Areas remain the disenfranchised fifth zone; administered by executive edict from Islamabad through the federal ministry for Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas (KANA), a politically constituted, non-elected ministry, they do not have a place in Pakistan’s constitution. The Northern Areas legislative council, the region’s elected legislature, is a disempowered body lacking the authority to represent its constituents. The germination of disgruntlement in the Northern Areas caused by the political, economic and social impoverishment of the region has now burst into a blazing rebellion mirroring the separatist movement in J & K. Gilgit and Hunza are strategically important to Pakistan because of the access they provide to China through the Khunjerab pass. Therefore, advocating self-determination for the entire former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir would irreparably damage Pakistan’s political and military interests.
The insurgency in Kashmir, India and Pakistan’s ideological differences, their political intransigence could result in the eruption of a future crisis. In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007, the politically chaotic climate of Pakistan, the belligerence of the military, and the tenacious control of fundamentalist forces basking in the glories of a misplaced religious fervor stoked by a besmirched leadership, can India and Pakistan produce visionary leaders capable of looking beyond the expediency of warfare, conventional or otherwise? Will the leadership in Pakistan seek to douse the conflagration that threatens to annihilate the entire region by flippantly shelving the issue for future generations to resolve?
While preparing to lead the new coalition government in Pakistan in 2008, co-chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, had condemned the distrustful atmosphere created in the Indian subcontinent by the Kashmir imbroglio. While underwriting the importance of fostering amicable relations between India and Pakistan, Zardari had said that the Kashmir conflict could be placed in a state of temporary suspension, for future generations to resolve.
Subsequent to the initiation of the composite peace process by then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, no substantive measure was taken to hold a substantive dialogue and negotiations with Pakistan. Efforts at the “Quiet Diplomacy” heralded by one time Indian Minister for Home Affairs, P. Chidambaram, were intermittent and interspersed with pugnacious responses to regional demands for greater autonomy. A viable resolution to the Kashmir imbroglio requires unprecedented strong political will from leaders, policy makers, and civil society members on both sides of the Line of Control.
Will the besieged populace of the state of Jammu and Kashmir remain beholden to a leadership that doles out valueless crumbs to laypeople while dividing the spoils amongst themselves?
I have emphasized at several fora in Kashmir as well as in the West that insisting on the rigidity of one’s stance which doesn’t allow political accommodation encourages political paralysis and helps the nation-states of India and Pakistan to maintain the status quo, which works in the interests of some of the actors, state as well as nonstate, on both sides of the LOC. It would be foolish to ignore that some civil and military officials––Indian, Pakistani, and Kashmiri––have thrived on the militarization of Kashmir. Also, some militants, armed and unarmed, while cashing in on the precarious political situation in the state have made financial gains, which are unaccounted for. For such individuals and groups self-determination and autonomy work well as efficient means to stir frenetic emotions and whip up public sentiment.
At the public talks that I gave at NYC and the University of Kashmir in 2012 and 2013, I underscored that a dozen or more summit conferences have been held between the government heads of India and Pakistan toward the resolution of the Kashmir problem, from Nehru-Liaquat to Vajpayee-Musharaf meetings, laced in between with Soviet-American interventions, and a series of meetings between foreign ministers Swaran Singh and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but nothing worth reporting was ever achieved, primarily because the people of J & K were never made a part of these parleys. The only silver lining to this huge cloud of failures was the signing of the 1952 Delhi Agreement, signed between two elected prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. As a viable beginning to a lasting resolution, it is high time that Article 370 and the 1952 Delhi Agreement are returned to in letter and spirit. It is interesting to me that a lot of Kashmir observers in the Indian subcontinent as well as in the West reduce the Kashmir conundrum to the dispute between India and Pakistan over sharing the waters of the Indus basin, which originates in the state of Jammu and Kashmir; there are some others who circuitously see the issue in terms of the religious versus secular binary. Interestingly, there is a new breed of writers and columnists in the subcontinent, particularly in Kashmir, who, erroneously, labor under the delusion that pre-and post-1947 Kashmir was a haven for pan-Islamism.
But my take on a feasible resolution to the Kashmir issue recognizes the legitimacy of regional political aspirations across party, religious, cultural, and linguistic lines. I, to the chagrin of some of my colleagues in the state, was vocal about regional political empowerment at a seminar in the Kashmir Valley in the summer of 2013. I reiterate that the political logic of autonomy was necessitated by the need to bring about socioeconomic transformations, and so needs to be retained in its original form. Until then, opening up of trade across the LOC, which still has a lot of loopholes, and enabling limited travel would be cosmetic confidence building measures. I remain steadfast in the belief that until the restoration of autonomy as a beginning, even the people oriented approach adopted by the then Vajpayee-led NDA government and Musharraf’s four-point formula would remain merely notional. Much to the consternation of war hawks, I cannot emphasize enough that a strong and prosperous India is a guarantee to peace in our region, but a stable and prosperous Pakistan would strengthen that guarantee. So gleefully gloating over religious, provincial, and sectarian violence or growing obscurantism in either one of these countries proves detrimental to a peaceful resolution and developmental politics in our neck of the woods. Over the past couple of years, my credo, which is a viable conclusion to my articles, is that the goal should be to find a practical solution to the deadlock that would enable preservation of peace in the Indian subcontinent, while maintaining the honor of everyone concerned.
Nyla Ali Khan is a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network. She is the author of Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Parchment of Kashmir: History, Society, and Polity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com