Kashmir and the artful dodge – Dhaka Tribune

Here’s a story of a twisted present with a twisted past that straddles one of the sub-continent’s prime political and geo-political sweet spots and most contested pieces of real estate: Jammu and Kashmir.

On August 6, the Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir, completed four years since a homogenizing act took away its special status. Article 370 of India’s Constitution had long been seen as the rationale that helped to bind Jammu and Kashmir to India.

On that day in 2019, the BJP-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi rammed through two resolutions and introduced two Bills in Parliament that affirmed both the repealing of Article 370 and a related provision, Article 35A, which guaranteed, among other things, government jobs and land-ownership status to residents. The parliamentary railroading also approved the bifurcation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two entities, or Union Territories, of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, each to now come under the direct administrative control of India’s home ministry — as opposed to what it was, a composite federal unit with its own elected legislature, a special Constitution, even a flag.

From a constitutionally protected entity with its own set of laws — although that never prevented intense meddling by New Delhi and its satraps — Jammu and Kashmir, J and K in Indian parlance, was now open to all Indians, and residency norms made easier. Its natural resources, including prized lithium deposits, were also now open to the most persuasive bidders.

The party line was that it was all legal, and all done with the concurrence of the government of Jammu and Kashmir.

It was an artful dodge. At the time, J and K was under what is called President’s Rule, with the legislature having been dissolved — technically, by the order of India’s president — in late-2018. The concurrence was a set piece. The overall application of their anti-Article 370 rubric, long advertised by the BJP and its ideological mooring, the massively invasive RSS, had only to wait for the incumbent BJP to acquire unassailable majority in the parliamentary elections held over April-May 2019. Once that was achieved, matters quickly escalated from manifesto promise aimed at majoritarian politics, to manifest opportunity which held up Article 370 as a long-ago temporary measure that had outlived its usefulness as a bind-to-India adhesive. 

Indeed, the RSS has for long had the splitting of J and K on its mind. In the run-up to the Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections of 2002, the Jammu State Morcha, a coalition of small parties and independent candidates, was guided by RSS to demand statehood for the Jammu region to politically and administratively detach from J and K. A senior RSS official I met in Jammu at the time claimed it was a logical move.

As I have written earlier, this logic has also existed beyond rightwing silos for some years. Essentially, a trifurcation of J and K: Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley its own entity; Hindu-majority Jammu a state; and largely Buddhist Ladakh a Union Territory directly administered by New Delhi. That trifurcation was by 2019 distilled to a bifurcation. And the ethno-political and strategic Indianization project, as it were, in Kashmir, was revitalized.

The Indian Government and BJP publicity is currently awash with claims of normality, ranging from Muharram processions “returning” to Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir’s administrative and commercial hub, to the reopening of cinemas — albeit with heavy frisking by police and paramilitaries to check for weapons and explosives.

Local media remain in the fetters – literally — that were imposed on them after 2018. Communication remains tightly controlled. J and K remains among the most militarized zones in the region and security is intense, despite the staging of a G20 working group meeting on tourism in Srinagar this past May — notably skipped by China. Militant attacks have persisted since 2018 — and taken place as recently as this past week — and unemployment remains high, puncturing official claims of peace and prosperity. Public and private promises made by India’s current leadership for quickly reverting the status of J and K minus Ladakh to a state, and to hold elections to its legislature, remain unfulfilled.

And the Supreme Court of India is currently engaged in hearing a petition that questions the validity of revoking J and K’s special status.

In the structured madness that is Jammuand Kashmir — and its equally tortured cousin: “Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir” for India, or “Azad Kashmir” for Pakistan– history has for long been a witness to collateral damage of civilian lives. This had cut across religions and intertwined millions in India and Pakistan.

This is not a popular view in India, but Kashmir has never really been an “internal matter” of India or that of Pakistan, not since Pakistan-backed tribesmen, militias and its soldiers invaded Kashmir in 1947. More so since 1949, when an UN-backed ceasefire left much of the erstwhile “princely state” of Kashmir in Pakistan’s control. Pakistan’s political and security establishment have since continually leveraged Indian-controlled Kashmir both for domestic politics as well as geopolitical needling.

The Kashmir umbilical, the cause and effect, is as intense as it is complex.

As far back as August 1951, Zakir Husain, India’s future president, along with a group of prominent Muslim intellectuals, scripted a memorandum to Frank Porter Graham, a former US senator appointed UN’s mediator for the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan.

“Pakistan claims Kashmir, first, on the ground of the majority of the state’s people being Muslims and, secondly, on the ground of the state being essential to its economy and defence,” pleaded this most prescient of missives. “To achieve its objective, it has been threatening to launch “Jehad” against Kashmir in India …

“Pakistan’s policy in general and her attitude towards Kashmir in particular thus tend to create conditions in this country which in the long run can only bring to us Muslims widespread suffering and destruction. Its policy prevents us from settling down, from being honourable citizens of a state, free from suspicion of our fellow-countrymen and adapting ourselves to changing conditions to promote the interests and welfare of India. Its sabre-rattling interferes with its own economy and ours … ”

This has remained the cynical blueprint for 75 years, several wars and insurrections, and the play of exporting terrorism to Kashmir as a matter of state policy from 1989, the time Benazir Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan (indeed, Bhutto admitted as much years later, in December 2003 in New Delhi, in a roomful of diplomats, officials, and CEOs at a global conference I blueprinted. She described it as a “joint politico-military decision” to help “focus attention on Kashmir.” It spiralled, leading to the death or displacement of Hindu Kashmiris or “Pandits,” the targeted killing of Kashmiris across religions if they opposed “azadi,” the escalation of terror strikes into northern India, even Delhi—and, reciprocally, more military-driven pushback, triggering a vicious cycle).

If India has erred massively in the Kashmir it controls, with decades-long heavy-handedness ranging from overturning popular mandates and jailing leaders — a practice encouraged by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — to hammering away at civilians using the army and paramilitaries, so has Pakistan in its slice of Kashmir. Tens of thousands of army and paramilitary troopers typically have overseen polls and controlled protests there.

Both countries have for decades sidestepped diplomatic minefields.

Pakistan has circumvented the 1948 UN Security Council Resolution that called for a withdrawal of Pakistani nationals and tribesmen from its 1947 incursion into Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. The resolution announced that “pending a final solution, the territory evacuated by the Pakistani troops will be administered by local authorities under the surveillance of the (UN) Commission.”

Puppet governments have typically run Azad Kashmir. Mirroring moves by India’s Parliament to claim all of Kashmir, a series of resolutions passed by Pakistan’s national assembly ensures Kashmir is cemented to Pakistan’s aspirations.

For its part India too has steadfastly prevented a referendum in Kashmir, “in accordance with the will of the people,” as the UN resolution directed both India and Pakistan. India has also bypassed a time-bomb of a caveat employed by India’s governor-general at the time, Lord Louis Mountbatten, in response to the ruler of Kashmir, Hari Singh’s plea for help from India to keep Pakistan at bay. In his letter of 27 October, 1947, Mountbatten wrote: “ … in the case of any state where the issue of accession has been the subject of dispute, the question of accession should be decided in accordance with the wishes of the people of the state, it is my government’s wish that, as soon as law and order have been restored in Kashmir and its soil cleared of the invader, the question of the state’s accession should be settled by a reference to the people.”

None of it has come to pass.   

It is also noteworthy that, whether on account of its own internal pressures, or tweaking by allies like the United States and China, Pakistan has since 1949 turned down offers of a no-war pact by India. In the early 2000s Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf more than once linked a no-war pact to a solution in Kashmir, beginning with mutual demilitarization. But India, with BJP prime minister at the time, Atal Behari Vajpayee, at the helm, wouldn’t risk another bluff after the Kargil war. Nawaz Sharif was Pakistan’s premier in February 1999 when he signed the Lahore Declaration with Vajpayee. Among other things, the declaration urged India and Pakistan to “intensify their efforts to resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu & Kashmir.” Pakistan’s subsequent military ingress in Kargil, of which Musharraf was a key architect, and the war, between May and July that year, imploded that effort (Nawaz Sharif also visited India at Narendra Modi’s invitation in 2014, a surprising guest at the lavish prime ministerial inauguration that was also the beginning of Modi’s South Asian outreach. Nothing really came off it beyond optics).

On a bad geo-political day for India, the Kashmir mix also includes China — which has its own intense border issues with India, including in the Ladakh theatre. A significant example made this evident in mid-2016, when Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day address on August 15 referenced state-led brutality and human rights violations in Balochistan, where China has a port hub, Gwadar, in its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. To the northern end of that corridor is the Karakoram highway, which runs through Gilgit-Baltistan (which India continues to claim along with Pakistan-controlled Kashmir) over the Khunjerab Pass to Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang province. Modi also referenced human rights violations in Gilgit-Baltistan. In response, China sent signals, via statements issued by proxy think-tanks, for India to back off.

The hard truth is that the people of Jammu and Kashmir — whether under Indian or Pakistani claim and counterclaim and China’s eagle eye — have for long ceased to be anything but pawns in a game in which they have occasional influence but little control.

Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Center for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He has authored several books on history, ethnography, conflict resolution, and Eastern South Asia. His most recent book is ‘The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India’s Far East’ (Simon and Schuster).