Being reasonable

There are three things that Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf must not do if the process of normalization of ties with India is to proceed apace.

He should not invite Indian or Pakistani editors for breakfast and have a heart to heart chat with them (under no circumstances should he get the event filmed); he should not try and answer every question that is asked of him on the relationship with India; and, he should not compete with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani by countering every statement that they make.

The General does not have to win an election in India. There is no need for him to convert the domestic compulsions of the demagogues of the Bharatiya Janata Party into his own constraints.

General Musharraf has been brave in saying that Pakistan is willing to even set aside the United Nations resolutions to address the Kashmir question. The late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had done the same thing when he signed the Shimla Agreement and agreed to a bilateral negotiation to resolve the issue. Nawaz Sharif had also quietly set them aside when the Lahore process was set into motion.

What is different about General Pervez Musharraf’s statement that came at a time when neither the UN nor anyone else in the world was asking for a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir? And why did he make it without preparing the public opinion in his country to accept it?

This was not a concession that India sought at this time. And Madeleine Albright’s view that plebiscite is a solution is neither here nor there because she represents no one but herself on the lucrative celebrity lecture circuit.

What General Pervez Musharraf seems to be suggesting by his statements is a willingness to be flexible in starting negotiations on the cancer that has eaten the innards of the two countries for more than half a century. He has been arguing for quite some time now that both India and Pakistan need to go beyond stated positions on Jammu and Kashmir. Saying that Pakistan was willing to go beyond the UN resolutions is his way of showing flexibility.

General Musharraf may want India to reciprocate by playing down the orthodox position that the whole of Kashmir is an “integral” part of India and that the only agenda is the return of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. India has to now make a determination about whether it is also willing to show some flexibility on the Kashmir issue and what that flexibility might mean.

India cannot keep avoiding the mention of Kashmir in its relations with Pakistan or keep pussyfooting about calling it a “dispute”. Let us recognize it for what it is, then go on to address the issue. History will not forgive the leadership of the two countries if they were to bequeath this cancer to even their future generations.

The 12 proposals for building confidence put forward by India have received a generous response from Pakistan. It is time to move on from there. There is no doubt that General Musharraf is serious about resolving the issue. India should also be clear about whether it wants to get into a serious negotiating mode on Kashmir at the moment or not. If there is a willingness to resolve the Kashmir question, then New Delhi must acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with the General’s suggestion that negotiating positions need to be flexible. The existing frameworks and the known positions of both sides are not going to lead to a solution.

Both sides will have to reject the existing frameworks, which have failed in this respect — that is the historical, legal and the military framework. In all these frameworks the differences between India and Pakistan are irreconcilable.

In the historical framework, India says that the sovereignty lay with Maharaja Hari Singh and not with the people of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. So, when he signed the Instrument of Accession, what his subjects may have wanted was immaterial. The two-nation theory favoured by Pakistan says that the people of Kashmir should have opted for one or the other emergent nation-state on the basis of religion. The two-nation principle was an instrument of governance developed by the colonial state for British India. Once British paramountcy ended, there was no question of using that principle by the post-colonial secular state in India. In any case, India can claim to be the second largest Muslim country in the world, so there is no question, as far as New Delhi is concerned, of allowing Muslims in Kashmir to opt for the Islamic state of Pakistan.

In the legal framework, there are two options — of adjudication and of arbitration. Neither is acceptable to India. As for the military framework, it has not helped resolve anything. The three wars fought, the Kargil conflict and the eyeball-to-eyeball face off in 2002 are a testimony to this. Now that both the countries have gone nuclear, the possibility of resolving the Kashmir issue militarily has become even more remote.

Therefore, the two adversaries have to agree to go beyond these existing frameworks if they want to solve the Kashmir issue. This is what General Musharraf seems to be suggesting. Once there is agreement on this, then a search for new framework can begin.

If it is not possible to resolve the Kashmir issue immediately, even then a certain kind of relationship with Pakistan is possible which would not be entirely adversarial. Between 1972 and 1988, India and Pakistan did not have an adversarial relationship, and the relationship was not Kashmir-centric. Because of a variety of factors since then the relationship has become hostage to the Kashmir issue.

Often solutions are not possible when a situation is not malleable. The attempt then can be to first make it malleable by bringing the temperature down.

To do this, India and Pakistan can initiate a series of Kashmir-related confidence-building measures. Besides the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road link, perhaps other roads can be opened up — say Uri-Chakauti and Jammu-Sialkot. There can be experiments with Friday markets along the border and the line of control. Kashmiri students from the other side can be allowed to come and study in educational institutions on the Indian-side of Jammu and Kashmir. India can pull out a brigade or more of its armed forces from the valley to generate goodwill.

There can be many imaginative measures, which if properly graduated and spread over a couple of years, can bring the temperature on Kashmir down. The important thing is to stretch the process of confidence-building. This would also allow the Pakistan establishment to rehabilitate the jihadis who cannot go on polishing their guns for years to come — they can be trained to become carpenters, plumbers, farmers or other self-employable professionals. Pakistan can also use the time to choke the funding of the jihadis, stop their training, dismantle their launching pads and re-assign, transfer or give golden handshakes and retire their handlers in the Inter-Services Intelligence.

In effect, the two countries would have then created conditions which might allow the next generation in India and Pakistan to deal with the Kashmir issue in a more reasonable way — say 10 to 15 years hence.