The Kashmir interlocutors’ panel loses all in its attempt of gaining all
Excelsior Special Correspondent
JAMMU, May 27: Initial reactions from stakeholders as well as independent observers to the report and recommendations of the UPA Government’s 2010-11 interlocutors on Jammu & Kashmir have been invariably disappointing. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s let-me-study-first and the principal opposition PDP’s it-is-partially-significant are two-odd exceptions.
While studying the outcome of this year-long academic exercise, that came in the aftermath of 2010 street violence in Valley, one has to bear it in mind that almost all the reactions have come within hours of the official text appearing on the website of the union Ministry of Home Affairs. A disclaimer even cautions that the document was not “official”. It is easy to surmise that the stakeholders, particularly the political parties holding stated positions on the Kashmir problem, have chosen to go public without fully reading the much awaited document, spread on 176 pages. More considered and comprehensive opinions on the report are likely to pour in after the stakeholders make an exhaustive and objective reading.
In the last 65 years of the Kashmir conflict, every player has proved himself right and all others wrong. The situation has not changed from what it was in the mid-1950s. Then ‘Wazeer-e-Azam’ Bakhshi Ghulam Mohammad solved the riddle with his famous quotable quote that every leader in Kashmir had 40 Lakh followers. The history, in fact, is replete with ironies and contrasts, perhaps unparalleled all over the world.
People in Kashmir were not up in arms against the “occupying forces” and “colonial rule” once for an aberration. Their separatist sentiment grew into a full-fledged political and guerrilla movement in 1990. Hundreds of thousands of them marched for Azadi and thousands picked up the gun for an apparently popular cause. Simultaneously, it were they who invited the Mughal invaders to dethrone their own sovereign rulers in 16th anniversary, even after defeating them in three military aggressions. For many, Manmohan Singh is only a distant successor of Akbar The Great. Their most revered spiritual leadership laid the red carpet to welcome the ‘foreigners’ from Delhi.
Even in 1947, Kashmiris formed militias of men and women and they, alongside the Indian Army, repulsed the Pakistani tribesmen’s invasion with the slogan ‘hamla awar khabardaar, ham Kashmiri hain tayyar’. Indisputably their most popular poet, Shayyar-e-Kashmir Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor, denigrated the Pakistani raiders as “looters” and “marauders”. This brand of his poems is not part of the school curriculum in Kashmir but exists in ‘Kuliyaat-e-Mehjoor’ even today.
It were the residents who got almost all the Pakistani guerrillas arrested and killed in the Indo-Pakistan war in 1965, welcomed Sheikh Abdullah as a hero in 1975 and lived with total comfort—with the exception of two individuals, namely Maqbool Bhat and Sofi Mohammad Akbar—till his death in 1982 when a full million of them participated in the mourning and the funeral procession in Srinagar. Same multitudes of people strengthened J&K’s relationship with New Delhi with their massive participation in nearly a dozen elections from 1996 to 2009 in total defiance of the calls of boycott from Hurriyat and threats from militants.
Those on the other side of the table of the debate are no less rich in their argument. They do conveniently refer to “rigging” in several elections, masse uprising of 1990, huge pro-Azadi processions, first in 1990 to 1994, and later in 2008 and 2010. They can also refer to thousands who died for Azadi and even for other issues like power crisis, Bhutto’s execution and military operation on Golden Temple of Amritsar. The most confusing scenarios developed identically in 2008 and 2010 when the Kashmiris were en masse pitched against India from June to September but sided with India from October to December.
Given this mosaic, the job of the three interlocutors was not easy. The right wing BJP and RSS wanted them to see the ultimate reality in historic events like the hero’s welcome accorded by the Kashmiris to the Indian icons like Morarji Desai (Prime Minister) and Giani Zail Singh (President). Abrogation of Article 370, coupled with “ending the appeasement of pampered politicians”, they insisted, was the only solution.
Congress wanted Padgoankar’s team to strike the balance with the popular sentiment of accession to India in Jammu and Ladakh. With the white wine in the red bottle, NC and PDP wanted them to recognize autonomy and self rule, respectively, as the lasting solution.
Hurriyat and other separatist groups demanded resolution through implementation of the UN resolutions (which would polarize the electorate on the basis of religion and lead to victory of the Islamic Pakistan) or “tripartite” talks between New Delhi, Islamabad and the state’s “real leadership” (read unelected separatist leaders). Since the interlocutors had no mandate to venture into the extra-constitutional domain, none of the separatists granted them a hearing, publicly.
Even after meetings with the Indian establishment in the past, separatists have failed to gain anything. Hizbul Mujahideen’s ceasefire and dialogue process with Home Secretary Kamal Pandey, that happened under limelight in Srinagar, ended into a fiasco in August 2000. Nobody heard of the mediator K K Mishra thereafter. Ram Jethmalani-led Kashmir Committee could not move beyond photo sessions with the separatists, first in 2001 and later in 2011. Mirwaiz-led Hurriyat’s two meetings with Prime Minister and Home Minister met no different fate.
BJP-led NDA threw the autonomy report and resolution, passed in J&K Legislature, into a dustbin even as NC was part of then ruling coalition and Omar Abdullah a Minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. Manmohan Singh’s UPA-I constituted five committees on J&K, including the most sensitive Justice Sagir committee on state-centre relations. Its report did never see light of the day. Contrary to the four committee reports submitted to the Centre, fifth one was handed over to J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah one fine morning in Jammu. Ghulam Nabi Azad-led state government in 2006 set up State Finance Commission (SFC), headed by former bureaucrat, Mehmood-ur-Rehman. Though its report had the distinction of being tabled in J&K Legislature, none of its recommendations has been implemented in the last over one year.
Meanwhile, Rangarajan Committee too submitted its report and the union Home Ministry formed two separate task forces for the non-conflict regions of Jammu and Ladakh. None of these has addressed the political and administrative problem in Kashmir. “How would Padgoankar’s be a different one?” everybody in the Valley’s separatist camp asked since it was launched in October 2010. Who then would expect wonders from Padgoankar, Radha Kumar and M M Ansari?
Time is the best healer, they say. Not the ultimate one, however. Even if, there would have been no Padgoankar panel, the situation in Kashmir would have been the same today—huge tourist inflow, little attention to Geelani’s shutdown calls and more people talking about jobs and rising prices than AFSPA and NCTC. The ordinary Kashmiri seems to have realized that nobody in this country would have the guts or requisite strength to undo the Parliamentary resolution of 1994-95 that unequivocally declared whole of J&K as an integral part of India and called for retrieving 55% of the area from Pakistan’s and China’s illegal occupation. He knows that his only supporter, Pakistan, stands isolated in the world on account of terrorism, post 9/11, and those dreaming about Kashmir’s separation from India had lost the battle.
Given the fact that Valley’s separatist leadership is nothing but Islamabad’s casual labourer, or simply the local postal address of an externally funded political and guerrilla movement, one wonders how the Padgoankar panel expects “prominent separatists like Shabir Shah, Asiya Andrabi and Mian Qayoom” to independently negotiate things with the Indian establishment. One-odd separatist, Maulvi Abbas Ansari, found himself in the eye of a storm simply over entertaining Padgoankar and his colleagues with a cup of tea. He was excommunicated by none other than the leader on whose comforts and conveniences India is believed to have spent Crores of Rupees.
And the only separatist (Maulauna Showkat Shah of Jamiat-e-Ahl-e-Hadith), who walked on to meet the Padgoankar panel secretly in December 2010 [See serial No: 82 of Annexure “E” of the report], was assassinated by militants in broad daylight in Srinagar in April 2011.
It stands abundantly clear that the roadmap to the resolution has only two tracks: addressing the internal problem with development, employment, accountability of politicians and public servants, better delivery of justice, good governance, making the institutions credible and empowerment of the much depressed silent majority of nationalists and patriots; or addressing the external problem while directly involving Pakistan in a far greater resolution process without relying much on her contract cronies in Srinagar. This needs to be unambiguously clear to the much confused interlocutors who seem to believe, mercifully, that Urdu nomenclature of Chief Minister as Wazeer-e-Azam and Governor as Sadar-e-Riyasat [that in fact was for Prime Minister and President during Sheikh Abdullah’s and Bakhshi’s rule] would make the Kashmiris feel that they have achieved freedom after laying one hundred thousand sacrifices.
While the suggestions of releasing militants, engineering their surrenders, granting permission to peaceful protests are equally absurd, only the interlocutors could explain how the Presidential orders they propose [to stop Presidential orders and Parliamentary legislation on J&K in future] would be ratified, first by 2/3rd majority by the Parliament, and later with similar strength by J&K Legislature. It is again Mr Padgoankar and his team that must explain how the so-called “Regional Councils” they have proposed for both parts of the state, could be implemented in POK and Gilgit without Pakistan’s involvement which they seem to have taken for granted.
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