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OPINION

J&K: Settlements and Principled Settlements
AJAI SAHNI

126 persons were killed in Jammu & Kashmir between May 1 and May 26, in the run-up to and during the two-day Round Table Conference chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, despite the fact that the State capital and venue of the Conference, Srinagar, was locked down under a security blanket and curbs on movement that were extraordinary even for this terror ravaged State. The dead included 69 civilians and 11 Security Force (SF) personnel. April had witnessed 91 fatalities (37 civilians and 16 SF), while March accounted for 70 dead (14 civilians and 13 SF).

May has, of course, been a month of consistently high fatalities each year, marking the melting of snows over the State’s high passes. Nevertheless, the focused fury unleashed on Srinagar – where an unstable ‘normalcy’ has been in evidence for some time now, resulting in a flood of summer tourists – was clearly linked to the Conference and the ‘message’ that Pakistan-backed jehadis and their front organizations in Srinagar wished to communicate. This fury peaked in the final few days culminating in the Conference with a spate of incidents that brought exceptional pressure to bear on the harried SFs, and eventually led to the Prime Minister’s decision to cut his visit short. The most significant of these incidents included:

May 25: Four tourists – two children and two teenagers – from Gujarat were killed and six others injured when terrorists hurled a grenade at a tourist bus at Botapora near Hazratbal on the outskirts of Srinagar.

May 24: At least 11 persons, including three Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel, were injured at Qamarwari in Srinagar, when terrorists lobbed a grenade at a CRPF picket. The Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) claimed responsibility for the attack. In a second attack in Srinagar, two civilians and a CRPF soldier were injured in a bomb blast at Sarafkadal. In a third incident, at Zadibal, terrorists targeted a police station, wounding four police personnel and six civilians.

May 23: A few hours ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s arrival in the Kashmir Valley, a suicide bomber blew himself up as a patrol party of the Border Security Force passed Hyderpora colony near the Srinagar Airport, injuring at least 25 BSF personnel. The Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) claimed responsibility for the attack.

May 22: Thirty-four persons, including 23 civilians, were injured in separate grenade attacks in Srinagar. In the first incident, terrorists hurled a grenade on a Police gypsy at Chatipadshahi-Rainawari, injuring 13 civilians and five police personnel. Another grenade attack was carried out on a Police Gypsy at Barbarshah. Six civilians and two police persons were injured in the attack. A separate grenade attack by the terrorists at Fatah-Kadal injured four Central Reserve Police Force personnel and an equal number of civilians. The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) claimed responsibility for these attacks.

May 21: Two terrorists in police uniform attacked a rally of the Youth Congress at Sher-e-Kashmir Park in Srinagar, killing three political activists and two police personnel minutes before the scheduled arrival of Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. Inspector General of Police (Kashmir), K. Rajendra Kumar, was among 25 persons injured in the attack, which was claimed by the LeT and Al-Mansoorian. The two terrorists were subsequently killed in the exchange of fire.

It cannot be unreasonable to inquire whether there are at least some avoidable deficiencies in a ‘peace process’ that so escalates violence, destabilizes established equations, provokes a dramatic hardening of positions, pushes areas of relative peace into sudden carnage, raises political tempers and polarizes political constituencies. Such an inquiry becomes the more significant in view of the fact that the process failed to secure the participation of any of the groups that appeared to have been projected as its principle target – the various factions of the Hurriyat; that created so little that is new in terms of options or avenues of resolution; and that has already irritated at least some of the participants in the Conference into strong dissent. A faction of Panun Kashmir, the organization representing the displaced and long-neglected Kashmiri Pandits, and which participated in the Conference, has already voiced strong objections to the Prime Minister’s creation of a Working Group to look into the issue of greater autonomy for the State. The Prime Minister did not, in fact, use the expression ‘autonomy’, but referred, rather, to “effective devolution of powers among different regions to meet regional, sub-regional and ethnic aspirations”. Panun Kashmir’s General Secretary, Ramesh Manvati, nevertheless, saw fit to declare, “We are strongly opposed to grant of autonomy to J&K. We wonder whether the Prime Minister’s announcement amounts to negating the 1994 Parliament resolution that the entire undivided State belongs to India.” He argued further that the State already enjoyed enough autonomy, and there was need to integrate it with the Union more strongly, so that Indian Constitutional guarantees ‘flowed freely in the State’.

In their rejection of the ‘autonomy’ issue, though for diametrically opposite reasons, Panun Kashmir was one with the ‘moderate’ Hurriyat. The Chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, declared, “We will not be part of the dialogue wherein internal autonomy will be discussed, which is a futile exercise”, and further, “Hurriyat want to clarify that the Kashmir issue is a trilateral problem involving India, Pakistan and people of Jammu and Kashmir.”

Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Chairman of the more radical Tehrik-e-Hurriyat (TeH) faction, rejected the Prime Minister’s efforts to focus on issues of current relief to the people of J&K, similarly echoing the Pakistani position: “First, resolve the core issue, then talk about development. Decide the destination, then everything can follow.”

Further down the extremist spectrum, the United Jehad Council (UJC) – based at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir – rejected the Round Table as a ‘futile exercise’, with its Chairman, Syed Salahuddin of the Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen, declaring that the ‘struggle’ would continue ‘until the entire region secedes from India’: ““No other solution is acceptable to us… Militants will continue their struggle until they get freedom from India.”

The occasional dissident voice, however, cannot be the only measure of the success or failure of the Conference. But even its strongest advocates would need to be modest regarding the achievements of the Srinagar Round Table, which, in sum, amount to the participation of the Prime Minister and a small group (eventually, according to reports, just 30 of the 41 invitees), and the determination to set up five ‘working groups’ to look into a number of issues that have already been looked into several times before, and that, in substantial measure, tend to pre-decide several issues (such as, for instance, ‘autonomy’) that need far greater consultation and consensus before they can be accorded any priority in the processes of resolution.

The chief cause of problems, it has been remarked in another context, is solutions; this applies substantially to the current peace process, and to the circumstances and content of the Second Round Table at Srinagar. For one thing, by announcing its dates well in advance, and without any consensus on participation, the Round Table created the context of enormous political posturing and stridency, particularly among the extremist overground leadership. The arbitrary inclusion and exclusion of particular groups and participants, and the last minute hustling to force some sort of credible quorum for a meeting headed by the Prime Minister can only qualify as cause for embarrassment, and the location in Srinagar points to another organizational miscalculation, presenting the terrorists and their Pakistani handlers with a readymade and widely publicized platform for their ‘propaganda of the deed’.

It is not possible, here, to itemize each of the many deficiencies in the current process, but some of the more glaring anomalies are reflected in elements of the Prime Minister’s own speeches. To take an example, he referred to “two dimensions to the problems of Jammu & Kashmir – one being the relationship between Delhi and Srinagar and the other being the relationship between Delhi and Islamabad.” In this, the Prime Minister gives credence to a distortion that Pakistan has consistently promoted (it is useful to notice how closely this echoes the statement of the APHC Chairman, and the sentiments of the TeH Chairman), and that militates against some of his own earlier observations. On June 11, 2005, at Leh, the Prime Minister had noted that “Baltistan is under the occupation of foreign troops”. The people of the Gilgit-Baltistan region are denied all political rights and a constitutional status, and have been subjected to systematic state-backed pogroms and experiments in demographic re-engineering. The Pakistan Administered ‘Azad Jammu & Kashmir’ region, which has, at best, a nominally ‘democratic’ system with no devolution of power, and qualified political ‘rights’ that are essentially a contemptuous hand-out from Islamabad than any real measure of freedom or autonomy. These are certainly another ‘two dimensions’ that continue to be neglected among the ‘problems of Jammu & Kashmir’, and no solution that ignores these long disregarded and oppressed constituencies can have any current legitimacy or lasting merit. The grievances of the people of Jammu and of the Ladakh region have also been pushed out of view by the exclusive focus on the Valley. By declaring his intention of “building a new Kashmir in Jammu & Kashmir” the Prime Minister can only have rubbed salt into the wounds of the people of these diverse regions.

The problem is that specifics have been allowed to dominate the peace process long before the general principles of resolution have been settled. Unfortunately, unless specific proposals are articulated within the context of consensual general principles, what we have is not elements of a solution, but rather the roots of new complexities, the beginnings of new problems.

This point was driven home by delegates drawn from every major region of the wider pre-1947 Jammu & Kashmir State – including Gilgit-Baltistan, ‘Azad’ Jammu & Kashmir, and the Leh-Ladakh region – in another, relatively low-profile Conference held at Manesar near Delhi on May 18 and 19, under the aegis of the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), just days before the Srinagar Round Table. The unanimously passed Resolutions of the ICM Conference rejected a wide range of elements that are currently embedded in the discourse on the ‘Kashmir issue’, including the role of violence and terrorism, isolationism, communal, ethnic or regional exclusionism and ghettoisation as elements of, or pressures towards, a ‘solution’; they rejected, equally, any resolution based on “a mere political redistribution of power between regional or factional elites”. This Conference sought, instead, a just, non-discriminatory and integrative solution based on democratic norms, clear representation of all constituencies in the region, and the protection of all civil and political rights within the framework of a Constitutional Democracy.

Regrettably, the high-profile Round Table at Srinagar has given credence, authority and legitimacy to elements of an agenda and perspective that has long been dictated by terrorist groups and their front organizations at the behest of their Pakistani handlers, reinforcing a ‘Valley-centric’ approach that has been an essential part of the problem, rather than any part of a potential solution. The sooner the peace discourse on J&K can break through this conceptual logjam, the closer will it come to a constructive approach that can yield a credible and lasting solution.

The writer is the Executive Director of Institute for Conflict Management, Delhi, India.

Courtesy : South Asia Terrorism Portal

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