The tragedy of Kashmir
November 8, 2016 | Expert Insights
India and Pakistan have fought four wars over it, and remain on tenterhooks with their forces deployed along the borders facing each other in tripwire readiness for the last seven decades. Both nations are nuclear and have vowed to use the arsenal in defence were a need to do so arise. The only other border where such levels of readiness exist is the Korean border, minus the ‘mutual’ nuclear threat. The people that inhabit this region, almost 1.4 billion – twenty-five percent of the world population – are only a nuclear flash away from being consumed, nay annihilated. Such are the stakes. Yet, the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan remains the longest lingering dispute of the world with little effort to solve it, save the initial interventions by the UN or its representatives. A host of UNSC resolutions recognise the nature of the dispute and uphold the universal right of the people of Kashmir to decide their destiny, but the international system has singularly failed to help them realise that promise. They have thus existed in an outright denial of their right to freedom of choice. Scotland and the Brexit adventurers can gets theirs – not the Kashmiris. With such universal rights suspended for the Kashmiris, both India and Pakistan have instead converted the issue into their own battleground. The Kashmiris lie somewhere buried under the increasingly mutating geopolitical determinants that get played between the two principal protagonists. Every now and then the Kashmiris will try and rise above the burden of history, and the two dominating states which sit atop them in divided ownership, but then under relentless perpetuity of the Indian state’s ruthless atrocities or when it all leads to a war between India and Pakistan, they will be pushed down again into oblivion losing their centrality in the dispute. A universal right in the foundational charter is thus denied to the people of Kashmir. This underwrites the tragedy of Kashmir. In 1989, as the region emerged from a decade-long turmoil of foreign occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, and the world’s superpower relented to people pressure offering many nations their independence, the Kashmiris too tried their luck. Their defiance against Indian occupation and a perpetual subjugation of their rights resulted in the longest period of armed struggle by the Kashmiris for their freedom. Six years down they were crushed under the relentless military force of some 750,000 armed Indian men making it the densest military presence per square mile in the world. With 100,000 dead till then, and many more maimed and injured, the Kashmiris have been trying to make their voice heard for a grant. Instead, they only peer into a void. From 1996, when ‘Intifadah-1’ in Kashmir was first put down, India changed tack and initiated a dialogue process with Pakistan, ostensibly to tackle all issues including Kashmir by a composite dialogue process. It was a smart move. It pacified the Kashmiris somewhat by triggering a hope that the two principals might finally settle to a resolution of their core concern, and it forced Pakistan to throttle back in its aggressive regional and international approach to address the issue at all possible forums. This has been the case till now – an almost 20 years of hiatus of Pakistan literally shelving the issue from its centrality hoping one or the other dialogue process might finally realise peace in a tenuous and tentative strategic environment. None of it was to be. Too clever by half, India misread its relative freedom and began playing up its control over the dialogue process – at one time ready to start the process, and at another unilaterally cancelling the possibility on one or the other contrived grounds – losing both time and opportunity to work things through with Kashmiris and Pakistanis. What could have delivered to them an exemplary political victory was lost to them in a display of haughty arrogance. This window of opportunity closed on them with the institution of ‘Intifadah 2’, now in play in Kashmir. India wasted an opportunity of a lifetime to find a durable solution to the most central issue that ails South Asia and holds its 1.4 billion people back. History will note it as the greatest strategic debacle in India’s recent history – the twenty-year bonus wasted at the altar of callous haughtiness. Some things never change. Of these the South Asian sense of entitlement reigns supreme. The brutal killing of the youngest icon in this struggle for Kashmiri freedom, Burhan Muzaffar Wani, a 21-year-old martyr in the cause, has passed the torch to the next generation of Kashmiris. India will now face one more generation of freedom-seeking Kashmiris. And right under the nose of the clever Indians, with apparently the most cued up BJP in power both in the state and at the centre. The pellet pocked faces of the Kashmiris will serve as a daily reminder that there remains work to be done. Kashmir was always a humanitarian issue, of granting a people their fundamental right to decide their future. That’s what a plebiscite is meant to do. That inalienable right remains due to them by virtue of the foundational principle under which the world functions and as enshrined in the various UNSC resolutions that remain un-rescinded. Their brutal killing at the hand of the Indian state’s violence over the decades adds urgency to the whole issue. We cannot let innocent people die under manifested state brutality. Going back to the UNSC resolutions as the legal-moral step forward as a part of Pakistan’s future strategy in its moral, diplomatic and political support to the Kashmiris is the right choice. Past the twenty-year hiatus, it is time to place Kashmir right back in the centre for any future engagement with India, and India’s with the world. All else will fall in place if we can let the Kashmiris have their right to choose their future and their destiny. Which means if they vote for independence we will need to respect that too. In fact we will be true to their cause if we show willingness to include the option for independence in such a plebiscite. This remains South Asia’s moment of reckoning and a challenge to world conscience.