HVK Archives: Labour landslide - Kashmir and the history books
Labour landslide - Kashmir and the history books - The Times of India
Rashmee Z Ahmed
()
7 May 1997
Title : Labour landslide - Kashmir and the history books
Author : Rashmee Z Ahmed
Publication : The Times of India
Date : May 7, 1997
The Labour Party's last ,historic landslide election victory in 1945 created real
history - history for the schoolbooks - because it played around with geography.
Prime Minister Clement Atlee's government granted independence to India and with
that began the dismantling of the gargantuan edifice of the British empire. Fifty
years on, an even more historic Labour landslide has swept Prime Minister Tony
Blair into office and it may be historic coincidence that just four days before
the election, he talked of Britain's "responsibility" vis-a-vis the Kashmir
problem.
This time round there is not all that much geography to be recast - just
demography and careful choreography of the Labour Party's position on Kashmir.
This has long been visibly pro-active, compared with the benevolent somnolence of
the previous Conservative governments. Britain under the Conservatives had been
content to differ with the United States in refusing to regard Kashmir as disputed
territory, a stand greatly appreciated by India. Not so Labour, which offered a
sympathetic shoulder to Kashmiri separatist groups in Britain and led from the
front in the last Parliament's All Party British Parliamentary Kashmir group, the
majority of whose members were Labour MPs.
Just seven months ago, Mr Robin Cook, Labour's shadow foreign secretary, went on a
reconnaissance visit to India and Pakistan, during which he took in Srinagar and
Muzzafarabad in Pakistan- Occupied-Kashmir. Mr Cook was not just getting to know
the lie of the highlands in the shadow of the chinars, he was there to get Labour
policy right. What and how much to say on Kashmir without losing the roughly four
million British Pakistani vote and the one million British Indian vote? How also
to ensure that the overlapping three million British Kashmiri vote went to Labour,
particularly in the 40 or so constituencies in which it actually mattered? These
range right across Nottingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Sheffield, Luton, Watford,
Wolverhampton and Walsall.
Dogged Desire
Interestingly, this was one of few issues on which Labour's promises were not
oxymoronic. On almost everything else, it had laid out its stall by juxtaposing
rank opposites - change with continuity; politics of the radical centre; better
public services without higher taxes, commerce bereft of competition. On Kashmir,
it was manifestly less schizophrenic, staying with a dogged desire to "mediate",
to own a sense of "responsibility" because of "our history", to reclaim the issue
from the sidelines to which the Tories had pushed it.
The Labour Party has long had a bad conscience about the Indian subcontinent -
pulling out the stops when it did in 1947 and leaving India and mint-new Pakistan
to sort things out in any way they could. On Kashmir, therefore, Labour arrived
at the perfect policy pitch, which wove substance into soundbite and married
electoral compulsion with ideological certainty. Nothing else can explain the
otherwise tightly-controlled Party's looking away when 78 of its aspiring MPs
signed a questionnaire put to them last month by the All Party Kashmir
Coordination Committee (APKCC). Among the more searching questions put to the MPs
by the 15-party APKCC (which includes the JKLF) was the plea for reassurance that
there would be a high-profile and sympathetic take-up of the Kashmir issue in the
House of Commons.
Impassioned Appeal
Of course, looking away and looking forward to action are not quite the same
thing. Quite apart from everything else, to do both at the same time would
probably give Mr Blair and his foreign secretary a crick in the neck. In terms of
action - even the symbolic gestures customary during the political wilderness of
being in opposition - they didn't push the boat out beyond the pale of
shuttle-cock diplomacy. Two years ago, the Labour Party's annual conference in
Brighton debated an impassioned appeal by delegates to back self-determination for
Kashmir. Labour's former foreign spokesman, Mr Gerald Kaufman, had then declared,
"We don't just want to go on making speeches and saying how sad it was. We want a
Labour foreign secretary to be committed to pursuing this issue, which is one of
the longest- running unresolved issues.....which affects not only the people of
Jammu and Kashmir, the people of India and Pakistan... but the people of the whole
world, because this is a situation which could provoke a nuclear conflict ... I
said it in Pakistan and I said it in Azad Kashmir, there can be no solution
without the agreement of India..."
Labour managed to persuade its frenzied delegates to withdraw the motion, with Mr
Robin Cook blandly accepting Britain's "obligation" to pursue peace without
prescribing any one solution. But it was not in any sense, the dawn of the era of
the oxymoronic promise on Kashmir. For Labour, unlike the Tories, Kashmir was an
issue, a disputed territory, though Mr Cook had wobbled a bit two months before
the October Party conference, when he told some Indian councillors in Britain that
Kashmir was a part of India. He set Labour's record straight at the conference and
a fortnight later, Mr Blair was meeting Ms Benazir Bhutto, the then Pakistan prime
minister, who specially stopped off in London on her way to New York, to thank the
Labour Party for recognising Kashmir's 'ambivalent' status.
Landslide Majority
So much for party political history. History for the school books may be quite a
different matter. With a landslide majority of 179 MPs (and 419 MPs in all), the
British Prime Minister is well- placed to stay "on message", which was Labour's
campaign-speak for iron control and professional politicking. Or indeed he could
go 'off-message' entirely, push the issue back to the quiescent sidelines of
Conservative policy and junk the roughly three million Kashmiri vote as just so
much flotsam and jetsam of the many aspirational vote banks that spoke
resoundingly for Labour. While it may be difficult to see a situation in which
that would happen, Mr Blair could, of course, simply do nothing by appearing to
have too much else to do.
It is a cliche that the demands of government prompt responses quite different
froth those of being in opposition. At the very least, Labour MPs elected by
constituencies where every Kashmiri vote counts, look set to ensure Kashmir
figures in the House of Commons with tub-thumping regularity. A symbolic portent:
In December, Max Madden, the Labour MP for Bradford West, had submitted a
40,000-signature petition to the then prime minister, Mr John Major, calling for
self-determination for the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Now the momentum may grow
with obvious impact on India, which looks to Britain as its second largest
investor, a point which Indian Prime Minister I K Gujral mentioned in his
congratulatory letter to Mr Blair. The APKCC is already pointing with some
satisfaction to the unique "frequency match" between the American and British
governments and the recent attention Mr Clinton has given to the issue. Barely a
week into Mr Blair's new government, The New Yorker has already applauded the fact
that Mr Bill Clinton "at last has a little brother" on ideological issues. A
fraternal approach to geopolitics may not sound particularly epochal, but the
Labour Party's history may decree otherwise.
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