Kashmir: The Need for nuance
Anxiety and pessimism have corroded the confidence of US and other NATO soldiers posted in Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s cutting remarks about the US administration were a true reflection of this military mood of cynicism and apprehension. And amid the confusion that pervades US Afghan policy is the declaration that it will leave Afghanistan by mid-2011. Military history doesn’t contain too many examples of a force publicly announcing its date of departure from the battlefield to anyone who cares to listen, including the enemy. This is likely to lead to a wait-and-watch policy by the Talibs or a tease-and-run policy to keep the US forces peripherally engaged while shifting the bulk of the jihadi fighters to other theatres of action...It is time we recognised the imminent danger of jihadi escalation in Kashmir if confidence isn’t quickly restored. My suspicion is that an unsustainable status quo will be dragged out, with some good weeks and some bad, rather like a sick patient who shuns diagnosis or medicine thinking things will get better on their own. They won’t. The government of India must intervene now, for if it doesn’t, there might come a time when it will look back on mid-2010 not as a time of trouble, but as the time before the troubles. – NAJEEB JUNG
By Najeeb Jung
Jul 14 2010
Jis khaak ke zamir main ho aatish e chinaar/ Mumkin nahin ke sard ho wo khaak e arjumand.” (The dust that has in its conscience the fire of Chinaar trees/ That dust, celestial dust, will never become cold.)
This couplet of Iqbal was often quoted by Sheikh Abdullah. Having smouldered intermittently for the past 25 years, the chinaar is burning again. Kashmir’s youth is out in the streets of the Valley playing David to India’s Goliath and the televised scenes of young men slinging stones at uniformed men evoke memories of the Palestinian Intifada, a disquieting parallel for any Indian of goodwill.
With the bulk of Kashmir’s ranking hardliners under house arrest, the government doesn’t know who to talk to. This is a mob without a leader: the political opposition, the PDP and the Hurriyat have abdicated that space, leaving the young chief minister to cast about himself for solutions as they sneer at him from every possible forum. In a telling commentary on India’s contemporary political culture, we find rival parties refusing to find common cause even when the foundations of the Republic are threatened.
Omar Abdullah has said that the ground reality isn’t grasped by political pundits in Delhi and Kashmir. While this may be so, it is also fair to say that the present stance of the government, the absence of channels of communication, the lack of an honest broker between the state and the young people on the streets make peace much harder.
Curfews are effective as emergency measures, but they are (or ought to be) a last resort. A curfew is a blunt instrument: to impose one is to punish civil society collectively. Curfews weigh more heavily on the old and the innocent than the troublemakers they are aimed at. Babies are delivered without doctors, patients are denied critical medicines, those on daily wages starve. Curfews buy time but their cost in terms of public alienation is prohibitive. A state that has to use curfews to maintain law and order is a state that has no political capital left.
While it’s true that the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Jamat-ud-Dawa, the Hizbul Mujahideen and stray terrorists with handlers in Pakistan are now active in the Valley, these facts shouldn’t be allowed to become alibis for inaction. The government needs to be as engaged with young political activists through informal channels as the subversives are, to negotiate a truce. All methods must be used to establish indirect links with the young to gain time. A truce will supply the breathing space for the state to construct a planned response.
Abdullah needs to break free of the belief that the early summer was an idyll which represented normalcy and that the troubles that have followed are, therefore, an aberration. The troubles in Kashmir are not an aberration. They are rooted in the belief of the average Kashmiri that the Government of India has not been fair to the people of Kashmir. The people of the Valley are convinced that the elections of 1987 were rigged, that young politicians, legitimately elected, were robbed of their seats. Some of these thwarted politicians, once committed to ballot-box politics, now lead terrorist outfits based across the border. Reintegrating them into republican institutions will be difficult and achievable only through a continuous dialogue conducted by professionals trained to negotiate, who will test the stamina of the other side. We need to commit ourselves to this dialogue now, despite the troubles, because the geopolitics of this region is changing in a way that’s inimical to India’s security environment, for in the near future, action in Afghanistan and Pakistan will have
a direct bearing on the Kashmir Valley. As bad as things are now, in the near and medium term, they are likely to get worse.
It is clear that the US is not succeeding in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai’s willingness to share power with the Taliban is indicative of the sense of foreboding and resignation that permeates the higher echelons of Kabul’s ruling elite. Karzai’s own contrived election, the stories of corruption involving him and his closest aides, the allegations against his half-brother whose writ has run over Kandahar from the day Afghanistan was liberated from the Talibs in early 2002, his dependence on advice from US ambassadors stationed in Kabul, the chronic corruption, the failure of governance, together show that he has not grown in office.
Anxiety and pessimism have corroded the confidence of US and other NATO soldiers posted in Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s cutting remarks about the US administration were a true reflection of this military mood of cynicism and apprehension. And amid the confusion that pervades US Afghan policy is the declaration that it will leave Afghanistan by mid-2011. Military history doesn’t contain too many examples of a force publicly announcing its date of departure from the battlefield to anyone who cares to listen, including the enemy. This is likely to lead to a wait-and-watch policy by the Talibs or a tease-and-run policy to keep the US forces peripherally engaged while shifting the bulk of the jihadi fighters to other theatres of action.
There is the Al-Qaeda led by Arabs, there are Chechens, Afghans, Somalis and other professional subversives that need to be kept engaged. The North-West Frontier of Pakistan is one area, but increasingly this has become exceedingly dangerous. US drones and the Pakistan military have virtually flattened South Waziristan and are now concentrating on the North. The losses to the terrorist outfits have been large in the past few months. An easier hunting ground is Kashmir. Here a disgruntled and dissatisfied young population, local vested interests, the brutal, high-handed behaviour of the police, paramilitary and the armed forces, a political leadership that isn’t clear about its objectives, a breakdown of communication between the two principal actors, that is, the government and the young leaders of the “intifada”, the lack of any apparent guidance from the Central government, together create the most attractive context for all sorts of jihadis, some from within India and some from outside. They will get increasing local support in the current situation making it exceedingly difficult for the local administration to succeed.
It is time we recognised the imminent danger of jihadi escalation in Kashmir if confidence isn’t quickly restored. My suspicion is that an unsustainable status quo will be dragged out, with some good weeks and some bad, rather like a sick patient who shuns diagnosis or medicine thinking things will get better on their own. They won’t. The government of India must intervene now, for if it doesn’t, there might come a time when it will look back on mid-2010 not as a time of trouble, but as the time before the troubles.
The writer, a former civil servant, is the Vice Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi.
Source: The Indian Express, New Delhi
3:33 AM
Sultan Shahin
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