'Food For Thought'

Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has successfully engineeredanother media storm over a new set of 'proposals' for the 'resolution' of the'Kashmir issue', which he offers, with a studied air of insouciance, as 'foodfor thought'. The remarks were made at a gathering of editors and seniorjournalists at an iftar dinner hosted for him and Prime Minister ShaukatAziz by Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed and State Minister Anisa ZebTahirkheli on October 25, 2004, at Islamabad.

As was the case with the General's earlier proposals regarding the 'foursteps process' [December 18, 2003], the new proposals are both arbitrary andnonsensical, though this has not prevented a number of informed commentatorsfrom taking them very seriously and beginning a debate on the exigencies oftheir translation into policy.

In sum, Musharraf proposes:

• Pakistan would no longer insist on a plebiscite in Kashmir.
  
  
• Since India would not accept a 'religion-based solution', a solution could be formulated in 'geographical terms'.
  
  
• 'Kashmir' can be divided into seven regions - five with India and two with Pakistan.
  
  
• A three-stage process should be employed to secure a 'solution': First, identify the region at stake. Second, demilitarize it. Third, change its status.
  
  
• As regards the 'status', various options could be examined including "ideas for joint control, UN mandates, condominiums, and so on."

There are several aspects of these proposals that are, at best, disingenuous.In the first instance, Musharraf adroitly transforms the three regions withinIndian controlled Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) into five. At the same time, hecleverly notes that "The beauty of these regions is that they are stillreligion-based even if we consider them geographically."

In other words, what Musharraf offers is, again, the principle of religiousexclusivism--the unfinished agenda of the two-nation theory--which underpins theideology of extremist political Islam and the creation of Pakistan, and which isin irreducible conflict with the pluralist democratic polity of India. Thoughthe proposals are formulated in 'geographical terms', they remain at best, andby Musharraf's own admission, proposals for the communal vivisection of J&K--anoutcome that cannot be acceptable to India.

Further, Musharraf presents the geographical division of J&K as a faitaccompli, making only the modalities of its realisation a matter ofnegotiation with India (India has consistently rejected the possibility of anyterritorial concessions in J&K). In this, he develops on his earlier 'foursteps' thesis, in which 'Step 3' required that all those options for a solutionof J&K that were not acceptable to either side be "eliminated from thedialogue".

This is, in essence, a dog in the manger perversity masquerading as 'highpolicy'. The sheer audacity of what is proposed here is concealed by the'reasonableness' of the language in which the proposition is cast. To take ananalogy, if a usurper and a legitimate claimant, or a thief and his victim, arein conflict, our objective should not be to determine whose claims are supportedby law and considerations of justice, but rather to equally deny the claims ofeither side, and to create an alternative structure of possession that offersconditional access to the goods, properties or rights in dispute to both parties--anoption that quite naturally favours the usurper and the thief.

Such an outcome cannot be consistent with any considerations of morality orlaw, which would require that competing claims be settled on the justice, thelegality and the principles underlying respective claims, and at least in somemeasure, the methods by which these have been pursued.

The fact that one party in the Kashmir 'dispute' has engaged in a murderousterrorist campaign for a decade and a half--a campaign that has already claimednearly 38,000 lives in Indian-controlled J&K, and that still continues, andwhich has found a majority of victims among the very people, the KashmiriMuslims, who it claims to seek to 'liberate'--cannot be irrelevant to suchconsiderations of morality, justice and law.

Nor, indeed, can the fact be irrelevant that the regions of J&K--'AzadKashmir' and the Northern Areas--which have been occupied by Pakistan for overhalf a century, have witnessed a complete denial of human and political rights,as of all vestiges of development. The mere fact that the aggressor in aparticular case is unwilling to relinquish his claim cannot create moral orlegal grounds for the rightful possessor to relinquish or dilute hisentitlement.

This, however, is precisely what Musharraf is proposing, and he is not alone inthis logic. In recent years, terrorists, their various advocates, and theirsponsors in different theatres have repeatedly advanced the thesis that the only'solution' to terrorism is that its victim-societies offer its perpetrators someconcessions - and much of the liberal democratic world has bought into thisargument, with devastating impact on political will in the free world.

The potential consequences of this policy of appeasement, and of Musharraf's'options for control' of the various 'demilitarized regions' need to be examinedin some detail, particularly in view of the fact that Musharraf's proposalsbuild on or echo several 'solutions' that have been doing the rounds over thepast years, including the Kashmir Study Group (KSG) formula, and some loose talkof an 'Andorra solution', and the fact that these various formulae have beeneagerly embraced by many among the weak-willed and weak-minded among theregional and global leadership.

First, another communal partition of India--and that is precisely what isbeing proposed by all these 'alternatives'--simply cannot be 'sold' in India,politically. Any sundering of territories in Kashmir will be politicallyvolatile, and will unleash a backlash of violence across the sub-continent. The'Andorra formula' had a peculiar and benign history in Europe, and will findlittle resonance here. This is South Asia - where passions run deep and longhistories of hatred and mutual slaughter have been compounded by ideologies ofenvy, exclusion and communal polarisation that inflame every sore into acancerous wound.

Moreover, even if such a 'solution' was hypothetically possible, the area of'joint control', the 'condominium', or whatever else may be created, wouldremain a region in which Indo-Pak squabbling and covert efforts for dominationwould be a permanent feature, and would intertwine continuously with the largerenterprise of Islamist extremist terrorism that currently plagues so much of theworld.

Such a 'solution' would, in other words, fail altogether to address the basicconflict between the two countries - and this conflict, as has been repeatedlyemphasised, is a conflict of irreducible ideologies, the one committed toexclusionary religious identities and quasi theocratic-domination, and the otherto liberal, secular and democratic values.

Both on grounds of justice and considerations of the future stability in theregion, it is, consequently, a survival imperative for South Asia that nofurther part of it be transformed by vivisection into another communal ghetto,and that those who have long harnessed terrorism to secure this end becomprehensively defeated, not appeased.

On a diplomatic level, India has refused to respond to Musharraf's new proposalson the ground that these have not been formally presented, though many a featherhas obviously been ruffled. The proposals have, moreover, been widely rejectedboth within Pakistan and in Indian circles.

Significantly, this is a time when Musharraf is alienated from virtuallyevery element of his domestic political constituency as a result of hisengagement with the US in the 'war against terrorism', of holding on to theuniform, proclaimed madrassah reforms, reforms for the protection ofwomen and prevention of 'honour killings', the military campaigns in Baluchistanand the NWFP, etc. However tardy or tentative his reform initiatives may be,each has won him a different set of enemies in the country. He has, of course,consolidated his position within the military hierarchy through the reshuffle onOctober 3. But, his dilution of Pakistan's demand for a plebiscite, virtuallygospel for the Army and a sheet anchor of the Pakistani position for over fivedecades, can only create more enemies in key institutions.

What, precisely, could Musharraf have hoped to gain by articulating theseproposals at this time and in this manner? Taking the negotiations process withIndia forward cannot have been an objective: the hard core of diplomaticnegotiations is never advanced through media posturing, and is often obstructedby ill conceived proposals aired in public fora at the highest levels ofleadership.

The rare occasion on which such announcements serve a positive purpose arecases where diplomatic relations have broken down or are so strained as to makemeaningful discourse impossible--as was the case with then Prime Minister AtalBehari Vajpayee's 'offer of friendship' to Pakistan at a public meeting inSrinagar, which eventually translated itself into the present dialogue process.Such a situation clearly does not prevail at present, and an institutionalprocess of negotiations has been established and has widely been proclaimed tobe 'moving forward'.

Despite their air of spontaneity, there is evidence that Musharraf's statementsare part of a considered strategy. For one thing, they elaborated on earlierstatements that he made during an interview with an Indian journalist, publishedon October 13, 2004. Moreover, past experience suggests that Musharraf's publicdeclarations are often of the nature of establishing new goalposts, and he canbe relied on to follow his declared ends, albeit with a great deal of tacticalflexibility.

Clearly, then, the new 'formulae' are intended to be pursued as goals ofnational policy over the foreseeable future. It is evident, now, that theprocesses of jehadi attrition, which Pakistan had deployed against India,cannot be sustained indefinitely at required levels of intensity. As a result, aprocess of political and diplomatic attrition would need to be intensified ifeven limited Pakistani objectives with regard to J&K are to be secured.

Musharraf's proposal for a resolution of the 'Kashmir issue' in 'geographicalterms' remains part of the continued effort to fulfil his country's communalmandate and agenda 'through other means'.

Ajai Sahni is Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for ConflictManagement. Courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of the SouthAsia Terrorism Portal