Kashmir: In Search Of A Peace Process?

ON 13 OCTOBER 2010, the Government of India named a panel of three interlocutors to start a fresh peace dialogue in Kashmir. The chosen ones were Radha Kumar, an academic and peace practitioner who teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia and has been involved with the think tank Delhi Policy Group; M Ansari, a senior bureaucrat who has worked as the Information Commissioner; and the former editor of the Times of India, Dilip Padgaonkar, who also flirted with public policy by running a short-lived foreign policy magazine.

Each one has been a successful professional in his or her chosen field, but when we place them against the canvas of the seemingly intractable and highly sensitive Kashmir conflict, they are featherweights. Expectedly, their appointments were met with angry reactions from both pro-independence and pro-India parties in Kashmir.

Defiant Hurriyat leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani described the Union government’s pronouncement as a dilly-dallying tactic. Geelani further asserted that unless the Government of India accepted his already spelt-out key demands—recognising Kashmir as a dispute, demilitarisation of Kashmir and the release of prisoners—his faction of Hurriyat would not engage in any talks. Moderate Kashmiri separatists such as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq described the appointment of these interlocutors as a “mere waste of time” and called on the Indian government to accept his proposals, which more or less mirror Geelani’s preconditions for peace talks with India. Even the pro-India People’s Democratic Party’s Mehbooba Mufti criticised the choice of interlocuters as reflective of the central government’s failure to understand the magnitude of the problems in Kashmir. Mufti had hoped to see some political faces on the panel.

The criticism that the appointment of the Kashmir interlocutors has evoked isn’t based only on the unimaginative and weak nature of the current initiative, but also stems from a history of peace initiatives botched by Delhi’s ever-changing interlocutors. Almost a decade has passed since April 2001, when the central government appointed former Union Minister for Defence and Planning Commission member KC Pant as its interlocutor for peace talks with Kashmiri separatists. Pant’s mission was grounded even before it could take off. Though one of the reasons for Pant’s failure was the Hurriyat Conference’s refusal to engage with the Indian government without the involvement of Pakistan, he failed largely because his mandate was limited to mere interaction with people from various political shades and then submitting a report.

in July 2003, two years after Pant’s foray into peacemaking had become a vague memory, the BJP government appointed the lawyer turned senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley to engage with the Kashmir Government and various political parties in Kashmir. Jaitley’s brief was to discuss the question of possible autonomy to Kashmir or to what the BJP-led government referred to as the ‘devolution of powers’ in the context of a larger, pan-Indian debate on federalism. The BJP’s espousal of federalism as a possible solution to the Kashmir conflict remained limited to a rhetorical exercise.

Implicit in the BJP’s advocacy of a ‘uniform federalism’ was the idea that Kashmir had to be treated at par with all Indian states and could not to be ‘pampered’ by restoring its lost special status. The application of the principle of asymmetrical federalism vis a vis Kashmir, or restoration of Kashmir’s status as an ‘associated state’ which existed from its limited accession with India in 1947 until the Delhi Agreement of 1952, was not to be entertained. It was anathema to the BJP, a party which has had difficulties in negotiating the principles of multiculturalism, and along with the ruling Congress party, who promoted a centralised Indian state of Kashmir.

In February 2003, the Indian government appointed former Home Secretary and current Jammu & Kashmir Governor NN Vohra as its pointman on Kashmir, who often preferred to speak to the Kashmiri separatists through the press rather than engage them directly. Vohra seemed to be interested in bloating the list of stakeholders when he engaged with groups in Kashmir which were at best fringe separatist groups, parties existent on paper only, or Kashmiri parties who already conformed to India’s stated position on the Kashmir conflict.

The Vohra initiative culminated in a dialogue between the ‘like-minded.’ Lacking a clear and strong mandate on the contentious issue of Kashmir, the Vohra peace parleys did not gather any moss. However, Vohra’s efforts did manage to initiate talks between the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference and the then Indian Deputy Prime Minister, LK Advani. The talks did not bear any fruit as the BJP-led government was not willing to give any concessions to the moderate Hurriyat, which only undermined the group’s credibility in Kashmir.

Similarly, the use of Indian civil society actors in back-channel and official—but not publically declared—interlocutors such as former RAW Chief AS Dulat, then PMO man and India’s National Security Advisor RK Mishra, and veteran lawyer and BJP Member of Parliament Ram Jethmalani, could not cut much ice on the not so frozen conflict of Kashmir.

A common thread that runs through these failed peace endeavours is the absence of any serious mandate given to negotiators and the lack of continuity. The present peace moves are bound to fail again unless the Indian government addresses some key roadblocks.

Firstly, the Government of India needs to talk simultaneously to both Pakistan and the separatist groups in Kashmir, or run parallel and sustained peace negotiations with the two parties.

Secondly, the team of negotiators should mainly involve political heavyweights from major Indian political parties; parties that enjoy widespread acceptability and respect not only in the Indian parliament but a fair degree of acceptability in Kashmir as well. The negotiators could be assisted by noted experts on the Kashmir conflict.

Thirdly, the negotiators should be given a clear and strong mandate to speak on behalf of the Indian parliament and deal with the multiple layers of the Kashmir conflict.

Last but not least, the ‘musical chairs’ policy of changing interlocutors needs to be done away with and the dialogue process needs to be institutionalised by appointing a robust parliamentary peace panel for a period of at least ten years, which could be representative of major shades of Indian political opinion on Kashmir and usher in a substantive peace process. Only then can the peoples of Kashmir, India and Pakistan hope for peace on the subcontinent.