Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: India Today
Date: August 21, 2000
The Centre is swinging
from one extreme to another in Kashmir. What's going on?
What is going on in Kashmir?
Does anyone know? Little of what has happened in the past few weeks
makes any sense. There is, they tell us, a peace process but add
that they will not involve Pakistan in it because Kashmir is a domestic
problem. Fine, but why then are we speaking to a group of terrorists
who were put into business by Pakistan with the specific objective of furthering
that country's cause in the Valley? Has everyone in the Home Ministry
forgotten that the Hizbul Mujahideen burst mysteriously on the scene in
the early '90s only when the JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front)
refused to play for Pakistan?
Since then Pakistan's
intelligence agencies have shown considerable creativity not just in the
manner in which new terrorist groups appear and disappear like genies out
of some magic lamp but also in the nomenclature these outfits use.
Lashkar-e-Toiba, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Al Faran, Jaish-e-Mohammed.
To those unfamiliar with the situation in Kashmir it might seem as if we
were fighting all of Allah's armies. In fact, these are only different
names for Pakistan's pawn soldiers.
So, how do we know that
the Hizbul-Mujahideen is not talking to the Union home secretary in Srinagar
only on orders from Islamabad? How do we know the talks were not
a ploy to distract attention while one of its murderous brother organisations
massacred pilgrims on the Amarnath yatra? Frankly, why are we talking
to those strange men if we refuse to talk to their commander-in-chief,
General Pervez Musharraf?
The General in Islamabad
is not an attractive man. His efforts to woo the Indian press have
partly succeeded since most of the hacks he invited to Islamabad for a
guided tour of Pakistani democracy came back with favourable impressions.
Despite this to most Indians he is the man who caused the Kargil war and
who is also a dictator. Usually, not the sort of Pakistani we like
talking to, but if we are going to have a peace process in place let us
talk to him since he is the boss.
A peace process involving
Pakistan is necessary and inevitable. But the bureaucracy refuses
to accept this. And since we have a political leadership that is
guided totally by babus they are being led into the usual traps.
Start a peace process not because we think it will work but because it
will look good. Refuse foreign mediation because we want to continue
pretending there are no international dimensions to the Kashmir problem.
Insist on bilateral discussions because even if the Simla Agreement failed
it was our idea and we should stick to it. The end result of the
current peace process, as any perceptive observer should see, is likely
to be zero.
There are other puzzling
things about the prime minister's Kashmir policy. When Farooq Abdullah
passed his autonomy bill there was general hysteria in Delhi. Farooq
became, instantly, in everyone's eyes a traitor, an enemy of India and
someone not worth speaking to anymore. He was only asking for autonomy
within the Union of India, not secession. Yet, we now have a situation
in which the Indian Government is talking peace to a group whose only objective
is secession and they are doing it with the support of the media and almost
everyone else.
There is something surreal
about this. Something sick about it when you consider that more than
a hundred Hindu pilgrims were being butchered while the talks were taking
place. Which brings us to another disturbing aspect of what is happening
in Kashmir. Why could the yatris not have been protected? Most
estimates say we are dealing with no more than around 3,000 terrorists
in Kashmir. What are our five lakh troops in the state doing?
If the army cannot rid us of four small terrorist groups we should disband
it and hire Israeli commandos instead.
We should also disband
our intelligence services for they are unable to provide us even the minimum
intelligence on Kashmir. It is time the Government examined what
has been going on inside Kashmir and why all our measures to control a
small group of terrorists have failed so shamefully. Part of the
answer is everyone connected with the state in Kashmir -- the administration,
the army, the police -- all work from inside security cocoons so solid
that they could be made of concrete. This reduces their contact with
ordinary people to zero and this could, perhaps, explain why we seem to
have no consistent policy on Kashmir.
So, one minute autonomy
is the worst thing in the world. The next minute we are ready to
talk about azadi. One minute we cannot talk to the legally elected
chief minister of Kashmir as he demands autonomy and the next minute we
talk to terrorists who demand a merger with Pakistan. One minute
we cannot talk to Pakistan and the very next minute we are ready to talk
to the pawns in its proxy war in the Valley. Seriously, what is going
on in Kashmir? Does anyone know?
