Like the virtues of motherhood, the desirability of dialogue is nigh-impossible to dispute. New Delhi’s decision to resume dialogue with the Mirwaiz UmarFarooq-led All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) has consequently been greeted with near universal applause. Most observers see the dialogue as being a key element in the complex process of restoring peace to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) – one that will, at least, strip jihadi violence of its political legitimacy. It is worth considering, however, that real-life motherhood, as distinct from the version advertised in infant formula advertisements and afternoon soap-opera, can be both painful and unhappy: and that the dialogue due to begin at Delhithis week, similarly, may not prove cost-free.
On September 5, representatives of the mainstream APHC – as well as some secondary secessionist groups – are scheduled to meet India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. It will be the first formal engagement between this grouping and thegovernment of India since January 2004, when Mirwaiz Farooq had met with Prime Minister Singh’s predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee and India’s then-Deputy Prime Minister,L.K. Advani. That dialogue went nowhere – dissensions within the APHC, the resistance of jihadi groups, and the change of regime in New Delhi, all contributed to the impasse. Following the coming to power of Prime Minister Singh, considerable efforts were made to bring on board formations which rejected dialogue, notably the hardline Islamist leader Syed Ali ShahGeelani. While these efforts to broad-base the dialogue sank without a ripple, they seem to have had the effect of nudging the APHC back to the table.
What are the prospects, now of a successful dialogue process?
New Delhi has demonstrated that a change of regime has done nothing to mitigate the chaotic mechanics of Indian decision-making on Jammu and Kashmir. Sources told SAIR that at least two members of the Indian negotiation team – which if media reports are to believed comprises of New Delhi’s official negotiator,N.N. Vohra, senior bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah, former Research and Analysis Wing chiefA.S. Dulat, Congress politician Saifuddin Soz and National Security Council headM.K. Rasgotra – had not been consulted before their names were made public.
Advertisement
Most members of the team are still uncertain if they would actually be involved in the September 5 meeting, and if, when and with what mandate, they would directly meet with their APHC counterparts. Given that parallel lines of back-channel diplomacy preceded the dialogue –Habibullah, Vohra and Soz all played independent roles, with each only cursorily involved in the others’ work – there is also some risk that the APHC may have been made conflicting promises by these multiple interlocutors.
Chaos is, however, a part of business-as-usual in most of South Asia. A more serious problem, however, must be addressed. While there is no disputing the fact that dialogue is necessary on J&K, the structures of the ongoing process contain within them considerable risks. For one, New Delhi risks undermining many of the gains which have been made since democratic processes were revived in thestate a little under a decade ago. Mirwaiz Farooq has made it clear that the APHC intends to bring a wide spectrum of issues – Indian counter-terrorism legislation, possible prisoner releases, and human rights violations – to the table. All of these are questions the J&Kgovernment has raised with the Union of India. Unless elected representatives of thestate are at the table where these questions are addressed, the dialogue process will undermine the legitimacy of the ruling People’s Democratic Party(PDP)-Congress coalition government, ceding to the APHC the right to speak for J&K.
Second, it remains unclear just what the APHC might gain from a successful dialogue process. Few believe that theAPHC, at least in public, can accept some variant of the status-quo in J&K, even one that concedes significant federal autonomy to thestate. The APHC most certainly has little incentive to do so, for there is little evidence that its constituents would be able to gain power through the democratic exercise which would have to precede such an agreement. Even cursory analysis of the raw election data on the 1987 elections – which those grouped together under the APHC umbrella as well as the Jamaat-e-Islami and elements of what is now the PDP fought in alliance – demonstrates that a secessionist platform would at best be able to gain a majority of seats only in the Kashmir Valley, leaving it well short of the mandate needed to form agovernment in J&K. It is hard to conceive of incentives which could persuade the APHC to abandon its position as de facto representative of J&K’s people for a post-dated and unsigned cheque promising future power.
Finally, and most important, New Delhi appears to have no real sense of the costs of a failed dialogue. Should the APHC walk out of the dialogue process, claiming that New Delhi was being intransigent, it would have very real consequences. India’s position on J&K, for one, would most likely come under considerable pressure. Pakistan would project the ‘core problem’ as India’s unwillingness to make concessions to even its chosen dialogue partners. Even if these pressures did not create serious problems, there would also be consequences within J&K. Hardliners like Geelani and his supporters among terrorist groups would claim their resistance to dialogue had been vindicated. With the APHC discredited, New Delhi would come under pressure to make concessions to the extreme Islamist Right-wing. Of course, as Indian strategists point out, this is excellent reason for the APHC not to walk out of the dialogue – but the fact remains that a prolonged and fruitless dialogue will have much the same impact as one that fails.
Much will depend, of course, on the position Pakistan takes in the coming months and years. It is worth remembering, first, that the current reduction in violence has nothing to with the revival of political processes in J&K. Pakistan began to de-escalate its war-through-proxy in thestate after the near-war of 2001-2002, aware that a failure to calibrate the jihad could lead to existence-threatening crisis. In forcing this realization on Pakistan, and in sustaining it, both India’s threat of war and arm-twisting by the US played a role. None the less, violence continues in J&K; it is only by the exceptionally macabre standards set in thestate in the 1990s and early 2000s that what we see today can be described as a step towards ‘normal life’. It is important to note, moreover, that much of the ongoing terrorist violence has been directed at coercing mainstream political systems: abortive attempts on the lives of high-level PDP and Congress politicians, and successful assassinations of low-level leaders and activists, are an everyday occurrence.
Moreover, while there is little doubt that Pakistan has been incensed by Geelani’s rejection of the détente process, it is also interesting to note that it has not acted against groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba(LeT) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), which have taken much the same position. While Pakistan has been forced to act to reduce cross-border terrorism, there is no sign that the infrastructural capabilities of terrorist groups have been reduced so far. It is at least possible that the public support General Pervez Musharraf has given to the NewDelhi-APHC dialogue is a tactical response to the pressures on him, not part of a strategic re-think. Aware that a crisis like that of 2001-2002 imposes disproportionate costs upon Pakistan, and hard-hit by the punishment his military has been taking in both Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province, General Musharraf may simply be biding his time in the hope that the dialogue process goes nowhere – after which the jihad in J&K would resume.
All these possibilities are, of course, speculative and, possibly, markedly pessimistic. Exhausted by a decade and a half of endless conflict which has succeeded, in the main, only in bleeding ordinary people in J&K, both the APHC and the Pakistani military establishment might well be responding to the manifest and widespread public support for peace. If so, the ongoing détente process – of whichtoday's meeting will be just a small part – could lead to a genuine, broad-based dialogue, yielding progress on the many separate disputes which together constitute what we call the crisis in J&K. Apart from broadening the depth and content of democratic processes and governance in J&K, there are any number of things that could be done to transfigure the situation: cross-border trade, joint watershed management and border de-escalation are just a few obvious examples.
Nevertheless, it is not without reason that pessimistic prognoses have a record of proving right in J&K: a little caution, dialogue enthusiasts might do well to consider, after all, costs nothing.
Advertisement
Praveen Swami is Chief of Bureau in New Delhi and Deputy Editor, Frontline.Courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
