Mr Frank Wisner, the American ambassador to New Delhi, enjoys President Bill Clinton’s confidence and has powerful connections in the American security establishment. He also fancies himself as a strategic analyst and potential policy-maker. Therefore when Mr Wisner speaks, his words carry more than a ring of authority.
Mr Wisner first came to Pakistan last year. At the time, the Indian government of prime minister Narasimha Rao was seriously toying with the idea of holding elections in Kashmir. How would Pakistan react if Mr Rao went ahead with his plans, wondered Mr Wisner. Would Islamabad sit back and watch? Or would it up the ante by encouraging a violent boycott in Kashmir? Indeed, Mr Wisner’s sense of the ground reality in Kashmir was so acute that he actually admitted (privately) to the possibility of electoral sabotage by powerful vested interests within the Indian establishment itself. In the event, two weeks later, Mr Rao’s election plank lay in a heap of ashes at Charar Sharif, with ringing denouncements of the role played by India’s security forces in instigating the outrage.
During this trip to Pakistan, however, Mr Wisner appeared to be on surer footing. He seemed reasonably confident that there would be a “significant” participation of the war-weary Kashmiris in these elections which, he thought, would go on to acquire a modicum of international “legitimacy”. Once a state assembly was in place, he felt, the process of giving the Kashmiris a voice in their future — the formula is “Article 370 minus independence” — could begin in earnest and pave the way for an eventual Indo-Pak settlement. Mr Wisner therefore urged his Pakistani hosts, as he has done the Kashmiris recently, to grasp the new initiative and fashion an appropriate long-term response to it.
This approach retrospectively validates the Lok Sabha elections in the Valley in May, despite the fact that they were widely thought to have been held under coercion. The 40 percent turnout was rejected by some of India’s own observers on the ground that the Muslim voters were brought to the polling stations by the Indian armed forces at the point of bayonet. But American experts now say that since the rate of ballot mutilation was only 7 percent, the remaining 33% turnout should be accepted as genuine expression of political will in the Valley.
Mr Wisner has indicated a new international consensus on Kashmir led by Washington. Stated bluntly, the new line is that India should hold ‘free and fair’ elections in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and thus bring into existence a state assembly which would, in time to come, negotiate the nature and extent of the state’s “freedom” from New Delhi.
Washington is accordingly pushing for Indo-Pak talks on the issue and the signs are that New Delhi and Islamabad will once again go to the negotiating table. But as Pakistan ‘prepares’ its answer to Indian foreign minister Inder Gujral’s letter for “meaningful talks”, the new situation is jelling pretty rapidly.
Pakistan’s current stance is that the Lok Sabha elections in the Valley were fake and that the coming state elections in September would not be acceptable. India, now seemingly supported by the United States and its allies in Europe, is nonetheless determined to hold these elections. Under these circumstances, the talks, if and when held, are likely to be deadlocked in short order.
In Kashmir, however, the state elections in September will create a new situation. The Hurriyet Conference, which has split in the past, will split once again (according to Asia Watch, a human rights organisation, the Indian secret agencies have created Muslim militias to counter the freedom-fighters) and that part of the population which participates in them will do so under leaders who will try to negotiate ‘meaningful autonomy’ with New Delhi. More significantly, after the formation of a government in Held Kashmir, the nature of war in Kashmir will also change. It will acquire an internecine character.
This new situation will challenge the Kashmir policy-makers in Islamabad. Seven years have passed since we took the position that India was bleeding in Kashmir and would soon succumb to the UN resolutions on a plebiscite. If there was a sophisticated alternative to this formulation, we discarded it by not allowing anyone to talk about the ‘third option’. As for the fig-leaf of Pakistan’s claim that it was not ‘interfering’ in Kashmir, this fell off when a former prime minister publicly confessed to paying Rs 10 crores annually to the Jamaat i Islami and others to keep the war going in the Valley.
If our policy remains unchanged, after September Pakistan will be dragged into escalating its response, the mujahideen fighting for the Kashmiris will come under pressure, and the world will side with India in condemning Pakistan’s ‘interference’. At the level of global diplomacy, which is the main plank in Islamabad’s Kashmir policy, Pakistan has already failed to make headway, both at the UN and at Geneva, where even the friendly Islamic states begged off at the last moment for fear of isolating themselves.
This isolation will come to haunt Pakistan becase it will not in a position to set a cut-off date to the Kashmir war. The claim that India is bleeding has been laughed off by economists who saw India’s GDP growing at the unprecedented rate of 7 percent in 1995-96. On the other hand, Pakistan’s growth rate has slipped from the traditional 6 percent, and it is importing wheat, sugar, potatoes and onions from India. India’s internal situation inspires confidence in foreign investors while the internal situation in Pakistan is increasingly scary for its own investors and political unrest is at its highest point of intensity.
An alternative strategy involving more complex responses should therefore be considered. In order to put this into practise and break the stalemate, India, Pakistan and the leaders of the Kashmiri revolt will have to come to terms with some harsh facts. (1) Despite Pakistan’s best efforts, the international community shows no sympathy for the “either-or” plebiscite solution advocated by Islamabad. (2) Despite India’s best efforts, the cry for “freedom” in Kashmir has not been silenced. (3) Despite their best efforts, the Kashmiri militants cannot compel India to allow secession. Pakistan, in particular, has to seriously questions some assumptions. Are the Kashmiri people war-weary? Do they desperately crave some breathing space? Are significant sections of the Hurriet Conference inclined to split over the question of boycotting the elections?
If our intelligence reports suggest “yes” to all three questions, we might be advised to consider entering into a specific dialogue with the Indian government. This dialogue should be aimed at ensuring that the element of force is removed from the electoral exercise by all sides to the conflict. This would entail, at the very least, an insistence that New Delhi should release all political prisoners in Kashmir, affect a part withdrawal of its repressive security forces and allow credible international observers to monitor the polls. On Pakistan’s part, we would retain our historic position, including the right to propagate a boycott of the elections, but we would have to keep our fingers out of the pie and refrain from actively enforcing the boycott. The position of Kashmiri freedom fighters in favour of the boycott would remain much the same as it is today, except that they too would refrain from trying to enforce the boycott. What could this strategy possibly yield?
Those Kashmiris who participate in the elections would do so of their own free will. If the turnout is low, international observers will refuse to grant any legitimacy to the exercise, the state assembly which follows will have no locus standi, the Indian case will suffer an immediate and serious setback and Pakistan’s bonafides will be vindicated. If the turnout is significant, we would still come out winners in the end. The state assembly is likely to press Kashmir’s case even more vociferously than in the past. Since voters and representatives will know that they risk incriminating themselves in the eyes of their compatriots, their sense of collective guilt will compel them to fiercely resist any sell-off to New Delhi. In due course, such an assembly is bound to become a legitimate source of resistance to Indian designs in the valley and supplement the efforts of the militants to struggle for “azadi”. The stalemate will have been broken and a new and more powerful dialectic will compel the Indians and the international community to rethink a solution to Kashmir.
There are therefore two basic ways in which Pakistan can react to Mr Wisner’s views. We can continue to denounce him for trying to thrust a hopeless Indian agenda on us; we can continue to claim that the battle in Kashmir is over the question of plebiscite rather than ‘freedom’ or the right to ‘maximum autonomy’; we can continue to argue that the Kashmiris are bound to unite and boycott the September state elections, thereby divesting them of any legitimacy in much the same way as they did in the recent Union elections. Indeed, we can go further. We can infiltrate more men and materials into held-Kashmir, whip up resistance and try to enforce a boycott of the forthcoming elections.
But this is the easy way — we can keep on ploughing the old furrow and end up missing the bus on Kashmir and isolating ourselves further.
The other way is to bring sophistication to a flagging policy and get the international community to put conditions on the coming state elections. Let the West involve the UN, ensure that international observers, including those from the SAARC, see the polls held fair and square, and pressurise India to reduce its occupation army in the Valley. After that, let a fairly elected state assembly in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and the Kashmiri militants join hands to demand more autonomy or plebiscite or the ‘third option’ as it pleases them.
We are at a crossroads. The situation demands a sophisticated re-assessment of Kashmir policy. If we don’t do this, we may be severely punished for not thinking hard enough about a policy which has failed to yield the desired result.