In Kashmir, India should focus on handling the people, not Pakistan

The Kashmir issue is no longer the dispute it once was. The Indian policy should centre around handling people rather than Pakistan

Would the Kashmir problem not exist if Jawaharlal Nehru had not taken it to the United Nations? Could the problem have been resolved — in our favour — in Simla? These are two questions that do not seem to go away and so must have something to them. There is a recent angle to them and we’ll come to that in a bit.
 

Jawaharlal Nehru went to the UN after the attack by Pakistani irregulars (usually referred to as tribals), encouraged and armed by the Pakistani State under approval of Jinnah himself. 

The UN Security Council took up the issue and sent down some resolutions, of which the most important elements were: Pakistan should withdraw its troops from those parts of Kashmir which they had encroached on; and following this, India should hold a plebiscite to ascertain the view of the Kashmiri people. The phrase “self-determination” was in great currency in that period, because of the Atlantic Charter that F D Roosevelt had signed with Winston Churchill. America would fight the war in Europe on a set of principles that would ensure that Europe would decolonise. 
 

The charter included this line that the US and Britain “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”

Roosevelt died before the end of the war in 1945 and Churchill lost the election, but the phrase still had currency enough to be used in the UN’s Kashmir resolutions. Subsequently, because the two most important elements were not carried out (India insisting, quite correctly, that Pakistan first withdraw), the UN Security Council more or less lost interest in the matter and in that body the issue was not taken seriously.

Indeed, if the subcontinent did not have the capacity to get itself into trouble through mischief — such as by developing nuclear capability and then overtly weaponising it — the world would not care about Kashmir generally speaking. It would remain one of many dozen parts of the globe where the state abuses the rights of its citizens for various reasons. It is difficult to see what was it that Nehru did wrong (“internationalise” is the word used with anger) and how it ultimately added to the problem.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

The second question, that the matter could have been resolved in Simla, has come to the fore again. This is because of the book that the former minister Jairam Ramesh has written on P N Haksar, the diplomat who served Indira Gandhi. The book speculates about the fact that in Simla, after India had defeated Pakistan in the Bangladesh war, and was holding many thousands of its soldiers as prisoner, India could have forced the Line of Control as the international border.

Instead, the following terms were agreed to: “‘In Jammu and Kashmir, the Line of Control resulting from the cease-fire of December 17, 1971, shall be respected by both sides without prejudice to the recognised position of either side.’

‘Neither side shall seek to alter it unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations.’

‘Both sides further undertake to refrain from the threat or the use of force in violation of this Line.’”

Was this a blunder? Ramesh’s book is worth buying for this reason alone: it sifts through both sides of the argument. Ramesh has quoted the writing of Haksar and his justification for why the deal was the best possible one India could have got (Pakistan’s ratification of it, and the agreement that Kashmir become and remain a bilateral issue, and the sanctity of the LoC are among his reasons).

But if we were to look at the counterfactual, and if India had in fact managed to convert the LoC into the international border, would we then still have the Kashmir problem to deal with? The answer to that lies really in the question: what is the problem in Kashmir? Of course, the replies will vary based on who is being asked that question. The government of India will say that it is terrorism and there is no other problem, the Hurriyat Conference in the Kashmir valley will say something different from the BJP in Jammu and the Congress and the National Conference might say something else altogether.

No matter how we look at it, I think it is unavoidable that those who have observed the trajectory of the violence and the agitations in Kashmir from 1989 will conclude that 'LoC-as-border' is not really a solution. At least it is not a solution to the problem that we are facing. The lack of clarity on the international border is not the reason the latest government there has collapsed and we are back to governor’s rule. This is in keeping with the legacy of political problems we have had in Kashmir going back to the 1950s.

Even if we were to align with the government position and accept that the only issue of concern is stone-pelters, how does that get resolved if the LoC becomes a border? Even if we were to accept that all violence is the product of Pakistani groups, how does renaming the LoC change that?

The situation in Kashmir has become clear over the last few decades. It is not a problem that is still the same as the original dispute. The world has very little interest in the matter, the UN Security Council resolutions are not relevant and never raised. The world is probably bored of the tiresome references both nations make about one another at the international forum, and have been making, for the last six decades non-stop.

The issue has become that of how the Indian polity handles the people of Kashmir. Our attention must be brought there instead of on Pakistan, and this cannot happen without recognising the real contours of the problem. They do not lie along the LoC. Pakistan is actually irrelevant in this process. We err in making it as big a problem in our imagination as we have.