India recently allowed some Kashmiri leaders, including Mirwaiz Omer Farooq, to attend the OIC moot in Doha. Then India granted a passport to Mr Abdul Gani Lone, a leader of the APHC in Kashmir, enabling him to travel to Islamabad for his son’s marriage to the daughter of Amanullah Khan, leader of the JKLF based in Pakistan. However, just as people were beginning to wonder whether a “thaw” was in the offing in Kashmir, India acted true to form. It refused to allow several other Kashmiri leaders to accompany Mr Lone to Pakistan. India also forbade its cricket team from playing in Pakistan next month. In this twisting illusion of peace and the reality of war, India has now offered a ceasefire in Kashmir during the month of Ramazan.
On the face of it, of course, any ceasefire is better than no ceasefire at all. In fact, if it can be upheld, we may create some political space for determined back-channel diplomacy on all sides. But there lies the rub. In order to be effectively upheld, the ceasefire must be endorsed by both the other players in the game, namely, the organisations which represent all the Kashmiri freedom fighters and the government of Pakistan. Is such a ringing endorsement on the cards?
This ceasefire could be fated to wither on the vine like the earlier ceasefire offered by the Hizbul Mujahidin last July because everything hinges on the motives of the two key but intransigent players, India and Pakistan. Whatever India may say or Washington may think, the fact is that the Hizbul Mujahidin’s ceasefire was not offered without the tacit approval of the very top echelons of Pakistan’s national security establishment, even if it tactically caught many of its civil and military components by surprise, as in the Kargil operation last year. If New Delhi had understood this fact, it would have realised that attempts to go it alone with the HM were bound to prove futile and a more constructive approach lay in involving Islamabad rather than isolating it in the run-up to the proposed dialogue. But India’s initial insistence on a dialogue within the ambit of the Indian constitution, followed by its dogged refusal to include Pakistan into the peace dialogue at any level or via any public or secret means, effectively derailed the July ceasefire. Why should it be any different this time round?
The evidence suggests that India has been very selective and biased in its “confidence-building” measures. All are specifically designed to endear New Delhi to the APHC and the HM whilst angering Pakistan by further reducing contacts with it. This means that far from hoping to include Islamabad in the dialogue at some stage in the future the Indians are trying to exclude it for all times to come. Therefore Western praise for the Indian offer of a ceasefire followed by pressure on the APHC and HM to react “positively” to the Indian move is as premature as was its earlier belief that the HM ceasefire was contrived without a Pakistani nod and could be exploited without Pakistani approval.
On Pakistan’s side, however, there seems to have been a genuine scaling down of the aggressive posture taken by General Pervez Musharraf last year. The general means it when he says he is ready to meet the Indian prime minister any time and anywhere without preconditions. The general has also indicated to Mirwaiz Omer Farooq that Islamabad is not necessarily stuck on publicly frozen positions. Indeed, in a significant statement, a spokesman of the Foreign Office has said that the Kashmir issue should be tackled within the framework of the UN resolutions and the Simla Agreement — which suggests considerable leeway to all parties in moving towards an enduring resolution away from the status quo.
The problem for the leaders of India and Pakistan is their unwillingness or inability to determine a concrete way forward in the historical context of so many false starts, missed opportunities and downright mutual deceptions and betrayals. Thus India is constrained to isolate Pakistan while simultaneously wooing and wrestling the Kashmiri mujahidin. Pakistan, in turn, is unable to explore any other option and is therefore pushed to extend military support for the insurgency in Kashmir. As a sense of frustration deepens all round, this route is bound to provoke dangerous blowback.
If the leaders of the HM and APHC decide to open negotiations with New Delhi without Islamabad’s approval as some Western powers are urging them to do, we may expect a violent split in the HM followed by an upsurge in intra-Kashmiri warfare, much as happened in Afghanistan. Pakistan will then choose its favourites, arm them to the teeth and unleash them against India. That will surely lead to war. If they don’t, India’s ceasefire will burn out in the next few days and the two countries will continue to slide into hostilities. Therefore India must be willing to negotiate the future of Kashmir with Pakistan rather than with the Kashmiris only. That was possible before 1989. It isn’t anymore. Failure to recognise this truth will lead to a fourth round of war.