President General Pervez Musharraf has come along way in mending fences with India and taking a fresh look at how to resolve the Kashmir dispute. He should be supported in his endeavours by all peace loving people in India, Pakistan and Kashmir.
In 1999 General Musharraf actively sabotaged Nawaz Sharif’s peace initiative with India at Kargil. Indeed, even after the coup he was still talking tough about how he wouldn’t even sit with India until it was ready to put the “core issue of Kashmir” squarely on the table and resolve it to Pakistan’s satisfaction. In fact, he walked out of Agra in a huff in June 2001 when India countered his demand for core issue Kashmir discussions by putting its own core issue of “cross-border infiltration” on the agenda. Then, following jihadi attacks on the Indian parliament in December 2001, India moved its army to the border and threatened hot pursuit, preemptive strikes and war.
In 2003 General Musharraf finally about-turned, promised to stop the export of jihad to Kashmir and India, and persuaded the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to reopen a dialogue. The even more remarkable thing is that he has managed to keep that initiative on the tracks for over three years despite a change of guard in India and continuing provocations from vested interests in both countries which want to derail it. While credit must be given to two Indian prime ministers for risking a change in the status quo, the fact remains that it is General Musharraf whose bold “out-of-the-box” thinking on Kashmir has fired the imagination of people everywhere – at home, next door in India and in capitals aboard.
There are two types of oppositionists to General Musharraf in India and Pakistan. There are those in India who ask why they should “trust” the “mastermind of Kargil” to smoke the peace pipe. The correct response to these Doubting Thomases is simple. Of course, India shouldn’t “trust” Musharraf’s Pakistan. But equally, why should Pakistan “trust” Congress’ India? The list of each other’s grievances against the other is unending. What’s more, what has “trust” got to do with relations between states? It is conventional wisdom that mundane, hard-nosed interests rather than friendship or some such sentiments govern relations between states. And as far as trust is concerned, isn’t it India’s long held view that a degree of confidence has to be established between the two by resolving “other” non-core issues before Kashmir can be tackled? Isn’t that exactly what General Musharraf is now doing when he exhorts India to put Siachin, Sir Creek and Baghliar behind as quickly as possible?
Others in India are irked by the fact that General Musharraf has gone public with his proposals. But this is misplaced concreteness. These options have been aired ad-nauseam via back-channels for four years now, without a satisfactory response from India. So, in a fit of desperation, General Musharraf has gone public, with wonderful results. There is a growing corpus of informed opinion in both countries that these proposals merit serious consideration. Indeed, for the first time in history, public opinion in India is nudging the Indian establishment to respond positively.
In Pakistan, the opposition comes from die-hard old-timers who refuse to bury the hatchet with India for “strategic” reasons or from those “tacticians” who argue that General Musharraf should not have publicly abandoned old positions (like the UN resolution for a plebiscite) unilaterally. But the “strategists” should be discarded because their strategy has brought only misery to Pakistan and Kashmir without significantly hurting or thwarting India. Equally, the “tacticians” should be ignored because General Musharraf’s strategy has in fact won over public opinion in India and across the world and objectively nudged the Kashmir issue closer to resolution than at any time since the Partition.
The newest move in this direction follows an ongoing visit to Pakistan by the moderate leaders of the All Parties Hurriyet Conference in Indian-held Kashmir. The APHC has wisely endorsed General Musharraf approach without necessarily concurring with its details. But more significantly, in an unprecedented statement, Mir Waiz Umar Farooq, the leader, has called for an abandonment of jihad and violence in Kashmir as a weapon of struggle for the rights of Kashmiris. This has provoked both condemnation and sympathy in Srinagar. The hardliners are outraged by this “unilateralism”, especially since they believe that the gun had a role to play in bringing India round to talking about Kashmir. But this critique, too, is passé. The APHC’s new stance bolsters the peace agenda and puts greater public pressure on the Indian establishment to get out of its old groove and respond positively. It also lays the basis of a larger consensus with the other Kashmiri parties ruling in Srinager who have distanced themselves from New Delhi by agitating for maximum autonomy and self-governance.
The ball is in India’s court. It should build confidence by quickly resolving Siachin, which is most do-able, followed by Baghliar and Sir Creek. It should also encourage all the moderate Kashmiri groups to forge unity and tie them into the India-Pakistan dialogue, thereby isolating and diminishing extremists and cynics on both sides.