[Reader-list] IS KASHMIR AUTONOMY VIABLE?

[Rakesh Iyer]

Bipin

Here is the article, a quite long one. Do take your time in reading it.

Rakesh

The article:

Opinion
Kashmir Now Or Never
It is time to recuperate and refurbish the covenant of the federative
promise and principle, setting a uniquely outstanding example both in terms
of plurality of citizenship and of political partnership in opposition to
totalitarian impulses
Badri Raina<http://outlookindia.com/peoplefnl.aspx?pid=4694&author=Badri+Raina>


*“Kashmir may be conquered by the force of spiritual merit but not by the
force of soldiers.”*

-- Kalhana Pandit

I

So total has been the loss of hegemony of Kashmir’s elected representatives,
in government and in the legislature, over the last two months, and so
desperately brutal the recourse to coercive subjugation of fearless young
anger on the streets of the valley, that if ever there was a time to say
resistance to authority (sic) deserves to be rewarded with what it seeks, it
has been now. If the prospect, that is, of the secession of the valley—since
other parts of the state of Jammu & Kashmir desire, contrarily, not
secession but more complete integration with the Union of India — were not
fraught with incalculable negative consequences not just for India and
Pakistan, but for the inhabitants of the valley itself.

To that I shall return.

Just the other day, the home minister made two significant averments in
Parliament. One that the union recognizes that the accession of the state of
Jammu & Kashmir was a “unique one”; and, two, that, apart of all other
things, the Republic and its successive governments had failed to keep
promises made to the people of Jammu & Kashmir.

Since the time for pussy footing about Kashmir is conclusively at an end, it
would help to flesh out those two averments beyond the minister’s sketchily
en passant mention.

*Uniqueness of the Accession*

It is to be recalled that the two conditions agreed upon as the signposts
for India’s pre-Independence Princely States as determinants of whether they
would accede to India or to Pakistan were the religion of the majority
within the states, and the congruity of the states to either Dominion.

In that context, the three states of Hyderabad, Junagarh, and Jammu &
Kashmir offered interesting paradigms.

Where the first two had Muslim rulers but majority Hindu populations, J&K
had a Dogra-Hindu ruler but a majority Muslim population. Of the three,
clearly, J&K, being also contiguous with Pakistan, had the clearest case for
accession to Pakistan.

Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Kashmir, however, desired accession to
neither of the two new countries, but wished to remain Independent.

Having succeeded in signing what was called a “Standstill” agreement with
Pakistan, it was his hope to do the same with India. Except that the fates
intervened in the shape of a precipitate invasion of the state he ruled by
tribal warriors from the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan with the
latter's active support and involvement in late October of 1947.

With next to no means of his own to meet, let alone defeat the invasion, he
found himself constrained to appeal to India for military help vide his
request for Accession to India, dated October, 26, 1947. He wrote to the
then Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma:

“The mass infiltration of tribesmen drawn from the distant areas of the
North-West Frontier. . .cannot possibly be done without the knowledge of the
Provincial Government of the North West Frontier Province and the Government
of Pakistan. Inspite of repeated requests made by my Government no attempt
has been made to check these raiders or stop them from coming to my State. .
. .I have no option but to ask for help from the Indian Dominion. Naturally
they cannot send the help asked for by me without my State acceding to the
Dominion of India. I have accordingly decided to do so and I attach the
Instrument of Accession for acceptance by your Government.”

That much for a Hindu ruler who had been reluctant to join even a
Hindu-majority India but for the fact that circumstances forced such a
decision upon him. Another matter that even on acceding, the Instrument of
Accession he signed stated that the accession in no way bound him to
“acceptance of any future constitution of India” (Clause 7), and that
“Nothing in this instrument affects the continuance of my sovereignty in and
over this State” (Clause 8). Stipulations that to this day continue to
colour the fraught history of tensions between the Union and the State.

As a result, Article 306 A was adopted in the Draft Constitution, and in
course became the much-talked-about Article 370 in the final Constitution of
India. Most significantly, the “special status” thus accorded to the State
of J&K, backed by the then Home Minister of India, Patel (who said to the
Constituent Assembly “in view of the special problems with which the
government of Jammu & Kashmir is faced, we have made a special provision for
the constitutional relationship of the State with the Union”) was accepted
without demur also by Shyama Prasad Mukerjee, a member of Nehru’s cabinet,
later to become the most vociferous and disruptive voice of the Hindu
right-wing. More of that below.

*But the best part of the “uniqueness” lay elsewhere, namely in the
heroically principled declaration of allegiance to a prospectively secular
and democratic Hindu-majority India by a Muslim Kashmiri leader of a
Muslim-majority state, Sheikh Abdullah.*

Internally, within the Princely State of J&K, a popular movement for the
overthrow of the Maharaja’s rule had been underway for two decades before
1947, precipitating in the events of July 1931, when some 21 popular
resistors were gunned down by the Maharaja’s police force in front of a
court house—a watershed event that led to the formation of the “Muslim
Conference” which came to be led by Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, a
post-graduate from the Aligarh Muslim University who was denied a teaching
post in the state by the Maharaja’s regime at a time when educated Kashmiri
Muslims could be counted on finger-tips.

Within mainland India, although the Muslim League came a cropper in the
elections to the Provincial Assemblies of 1936, following upon the passing
of the Government of India Act of 1935, between that loss and 1946, the
Muslim League under Jinnah made huge strides among Muslims in the states of
Punjab and Bengal.

It was during this time that Jinnah was to make fervent arguments to
Abdullah as to the obvious decision that the Kashmir Muslim Conference must
make for joining forces with Jinnah’s League, and for the Pakistan
resolution which the League had passed in 1940.

Remarkably, however, despite the Kashmir Maharaja regime's concerted
anti-Muslim rule, and despite having forged the “Muslim Conference,”
Abdullah, by then the undisputedly tallest leader of the valley, and indeed
the state, and despite the state having been a Muslim majority one, came to
reject the two-nation communal thesis of the Muslim League, and declare his
preference for the secular-democratic struggle that the Indian National
Congress under Gandhi and Nehru had been waging against colonial rule, as he
converted the “Muslim Conference” into the “National Conference” in 1938.
Clearly, some nine years *before* the partition of India and of the tribal
invasion of Kashmir.

Abdullah in these years spoke repeatedly to his convictions.

Arguing that the matter of accession could not be left to the whims and
fancies of rulers, but must reflect the voice of the people, he gave public
expression to the popular Kashmiri view in a speech on October 4, 1947 at a
historic rally (some three weeks before the tribal invasion):

“We shall not believe in the two-nation theory which has spread so much
poison (cf to the communal killings that had been underway in the Punjab and
in Bengal). Kashmir showed the light at this juncture (Gandhi was famously
to say that the only light out of the darkness of communal killings he saw
was in Kashmir where not a single incident took place). When brother kills
brother in the whole of Hindustan, Kashmir raised its voice of Hindu-Muslim
unity. I can assure the Hindu and Sikh minorities that as long as I am alive
their life and honour will be quite safe.”

Vide the Maharaja’s proclamation of March 5, 1948, Sheikh Abdullah took over
as the Prime Minister of the state, and on the next day, he told a press
conference:

“We have decided to work and die for India. . .We made our decision not in
October last, but in 1944, when we resisted the advances of Mr.Jinnah. Our
refusal was categorical. Ever since the National Conference had attempted to
keep the State clear of the pernicious two-nation theory while fighting the
world’s worst autocracy ( *The Statesman, *7 March, 1948).”

On December 3, at a function of the Gandhi Memorial College at Jammu:

“Kashmiris would rather die following the footsteps of Gandhiji than accept
the two-nation theory. We want to link the destiny of Kashmir with India
because we feel that the ideal before India and Kashmir is one and the
same.”

Those ideals—secularism, democracy, end to feudal landlordship—became the
basis for the adoption of the “provisional accession of the state to India”
by the National Conference in the same month of October.

II

*The Betrayal*

Although Accession vide Article 370 which conferred a “special status” on
Jammu & Kashmir had, as stated above, received approval both from Patel and
Shyama Prasad Mukerjee, a new situation was to develop as the Abdullah
government in the state launched the New Kashmir Manifesto, bedrocked, among
extraordinarily progressive pronouncements—equal status of women in
education and employment being but one— on the promise of giving land to
those who tilled it.

Thus, disregarding Clause 6 of the Instrument of Accession (“Nothing in this
Instrument shall empower the Dominion Legislature to make any law for this
state authorizing the compulsory acquisition of land for any purpose,” and
should land be thus needed, “I will at their request acquire the land”),
Abdullah declared a maximum land ceiling of 22.75 acres, set up a Land
Reforms Commission, and set about distributing surplus land thus acquired to
those who actually were tillers on the soil. Abdullah was to rub home the
point that such land reforms would never have been possible in a feudal
Pakistan.

This was trouble royal.

Most of the land then was in possession of Hindu Dogras, and most of the
tillers were Muslim Kashmiris.

Thus it came to be that the material loss of landholdings was sought to be
converted into a communal question vide an opposition now to Article 370 by
a newly organized forum called the Praja Parishad which came to be led by
the very Mukerjee who had been a willing party to the adoption of the
Article as a member of the Union Cabinet.

Under stipulations of the “special status,” Jammu & Kashmir had been granted
to form its own Constituent Assembly. When elections to the CA took place in
1951, candidates picked by Abdullah’s National Conference won all 75 seats.
The Assembly met on October 31, 1951. On November 5, Abdullah outlined the
major agenda before it:

To frame a Constitution for Kashmir;
To decide on the fate of the royal Dynasty;
To decide whether there should be any compensation paid to those who had
lost their land through the Land Abolition Act;
To “declare its reasoned conclusion regarding accession.”

Abdullah noted:

“The real character of a State is revealed in its Constitution. The Indian
Constitution has set before the country the goal of a secular democracy
based upon justice, freedom and equality for all without distinction. This
is the bedrock of modern democracy. This should meet the argument that the
Muslims of Kashmir cannot have security in India, where the large majority
of the population are Hindus. Any unnatural cleavage between religious
groups is the legacy of imperialism. . . .The Indian Constitution has amply
and finally repudiated the concept of a religious State which is a throwback
to medievalism. . . .The national movement in our State naturally gravitates
towards these principles of secular democracy.”

And, on Pakistan:

“The most powerful argument that can be advanced in her favour is that
Pakistan is a MuslimState, and, a big majority of our people being Muslims
the State must accede to Pakistan. This claim of being a MuslimState is of
course only a camouflage. It is a screen to dupe the common man, so that he
may not see clearly that Pakistan is a feudal State in which a clique is
trying by these methods to maintain itself in power. . . .Right-thinking men
would point out that Pakistan is not an organic unity of all the Muslims in
this subcontinent. It has, on the contrary, caused the dispersion of Indian
Muslims for whom it was claimed to have been created (a perception first
voiced by Maulana Azad in a prescient interview given to the Covert magazine
in 1946, a year before Partition)”

Abdullah considered the third option of Independence (Kashmir as an “Eastern
Switzerland”), and concluded as follows:

“I would like to remind you that from August 15 (the day of Indian
Independence) to October 22, 1947 (when the tribal invasion began) our State
was Independent and the result was that our weakness was exploited by the
neighbour with invasion. What is the guarantee that in future too we may not
be victims of a similar aggression.”

All that notwithstanding, the Hindu right-wing assault began also to gather
force, as it launched the Jana Sangh (precursor of today’s Bharatiya Janata
Party, the BJP) in 1951—the same year as the establishment of the
Constituent Assembly in the State. And its leader became Shyama Prasad
Mukerjee, with the RSS lending two of its leaders for support, namely Atal
Behari Vajpai and L.K.Advani.

As stated earlier, stung by the redistribution of landholdings, it sought to
make the terms of the Accession the issue, and defying the
democratic-federal principles enshrined both in the Constitution of India
and in their reflection in the trust reposed thereof by Abdullah, it
announced a programme ostensibly aimed to strengthen national unity. At its
first session, it called for:

An education system based on “Bhartya culture” (read Hinduism);
The use of Hindi in schools (in full knowledge that, other than Kashmiri,
Urdu was the language predominantly used by educated Kashmiri Muslims;
indeed, from about the first decade of the twentieth century, the wholly
artificial cleavage between Hindi and Urdu had begun to be deployed by
communalists on either side to press their claims to “true” national
allegiance; )
The denial of any special privileges to minorities;
Full integration of Jammu & Kashmir into the Indian Union.

On the other side, in letters exchanged over a period of time between
Abdullah and Nehru, the shape of an agreement between the State and the
Union was taking shape.

That came to be called the Delhi Agreement (1952). It stated:

Commitment to Article 370

That the State Legislature would be empowered to confer special rights on
“state subjects” (a right that had been won through the anti-Maharaja struggles
of 1927 and 1932—a form of privilege restricted to permanent residents of
the State in property ownership and jobs);

That Kashmir would have its own flag, although subordinate to the Union
Tricolour;

That the Sadar-e-Riyasat (later on Governor of the State) would be elected
by the State Assembly, but would take office with the concurrence of the
President of India;

That the Supreme Court of India would, “for the time being,” have only
appellate
jurisdiction in Jammu & Kashmir;

That an internal Emergency could only be applied with the concurrence of the
State Legislature.

Late in the same year, the riposte to this from the Hindu right-wing came in
the form of the following slogan—one around which the Jana Sangh sought to
mount its attack on the terms of Accession. And the slogan was:

*Ek desh mein do Vidhan,
Ek desh mein do Nishaan,
Ek desh mein do Pradhan,
Nahi challenge, nahi challenge.*

(We will not accept two Constitutions, two flags, and two prime ministers in
one and the same country.)

This communalist right-wing putsch against the principles on which the State
had accepted to accede to India began to find resonance also within a
section of the Congress Party. To Nehru’s great chagrin but helplessness,
his candidate for the first President of India, Rajagopalachari, was
rejected in favour of Rajendra Prasad (who was soon to lock horns with Nehru
on the Hindu Code Bill, and to go to the Somnath Mandir ,once ravaged by
Ghazni, among many other chieftains of old, to effect renovations on State
expense—a move wholly in conflict with the secular foundations of the
Republic).

Other collateral tendencies began also to surface, such as bespoke scant
regard on behalf of the Union of India for the federative principles. In his
despondent letter to Maulana Azad, dated 16 July, 1953, Abdullah complained
about the usurpations underway, in contravention of what terms had been
agreed upon:

“We the people of Kashmir, regard the promises and assurances of the
representatives
of the government of India, such as Lord Mountbatten and Sardar Patel, as
surety for the assistance rendered by us in securing the signatures of
Maharaja of Kashmir on the Instrument of Accession, which made it clear that
the internal autonomy and sovereignty of the Acceding States shall be
maintained except in regard to three subjects which will be under the
Central government (namely, Defence, Communications, and External Affairs).”

And:

“When the Constituent Assembly of India proceeded to frame the Union
Constitution there arose before it the question of the State. Our
Representatives
took part in the last sessions of the Assembly and presented their point of
view in the light of basic principles on which the National Conference had
supported State’s Accession to India. Our view-point drew appreciation and
Article 370 of the Constitution came into being determining our position
under the new Constitution.”

Abdullah pointed out that although it had been agreed that the “Accession
involves no financial obligations on the States” such demands were being
made; and “the changes effected on several occasions in relationship between
India and Kashmir greatly agitated the public opinion.”

And on the other source of perceived menace: “A big party in India (the Jana
Sangh) still forcefully demands merger of the State with India. In the State
itself Praja Parishad is threatening to resort to direct action if the
demand for the State's complete merger with India is not conceded.”

Abdullah’s anguish at what seemed gathering storms on two fronts—the
subversion by the Union of the terms of Accession, and a Hindu communalist
putsch to undo Article 370, found poignant expression in a speech he had
meant to deliver to an Eid gathering on august 21, 1953 (twelve days after
his government was dismissed and Abdullah arrested and incarcerated). In
that he wrote:

“. . .there is the suggestion that the accession should be finalized by vote
of the Constituent Assembly.” “It is the Muslims who have to decide accession
with India and not the non-Muslims. . . .The question is: must I not carry
the support of the majority community with me? If I must, then it becomes
necessary that I should satisfy them to the same extent that a non-Muslim is
satisfied that his future hopes and aspirations are safe in India.
Unfortunately, apart from the disastrous effects which the pro-Merger
agitation in Jammu produced in Kashmir (the valley). . .the Muslim middle
class in Kashmir has been greatly perturbed to see that while the present
relationship of the State with India has opened new opportunities for their
Hindu and Sikh brothers to ameliorate their lot, they have been assigned the
position of a frog in the well. . . . *What the* *Muslim intelligentsia in
Kashmir is trying to look for is a definite and* *concrete stake in
India.”*(emphasis added)

As stated, the dye had been cast, and his great friend Nehru had him
arrested on the suspicion that he had been hobnobbing with the Americans for
support to secede from the Union and declare Independence. Although there
might have been grounds for such a suspicion, to this day no proof is
forthcoming.

But read the lament quoted above, and there is not a jot more or different
that informs the frustrated Kashmiri youth in the valley who are at this
minute agitating in the valley, willing to confront police bullets.

It is another matter that long years after in 1974, Abdullah signed an
Accord with Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India which
stipulated, among other things, that

“Parliament will continue to have power to make laws relating to the prevention
of activities directed towards disclaiming, questioning, or disrupting the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of India or bringing about secession
of a part of the territory of India from the Union. . .” etc.,

When the Indian Home Minister therefore speaks of keeping promises with the
Kashmiris, those promises have a much wider ambit than the question merely
of amending the vile Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows the least
army man to shoot to kill without accountability.

Throughout these turbulent years of conflict, never once has any government
of India sought to formulate schemes whereby talented Kashmiri Muslims,
products of an educational explosion—all thanks to Abdullah’s New Kashmir
programme, could be made to feel not just safe in the heartland but valued
assets in the ongoing story of national “development.” Not to speak of the
communal lens through which Kashmiri Muslims continue to be viewed by Indian
society at large, an old malaise made dangerously trenchant subsequent to
the era of “terrorism.”

And, paradoxically, the more that strong-arm methods and vicious prejudices
fail to deliver desired results, the more the State means to persist with
them. And now that some streaks of recognition seem to dawn on policy
establishments, the present-day incarnation of the old Praja Parishad and
Jana Sangh are back to the same old perfidies, robbing the secular
democratic sections within the Congress chiefly of any will or courage to
disregard Hindu right-wing communalism and do right by Kashmir.

III

*Azadi*

Some 51 teenage Kashmiris screaming for secession have died in the last two
months from police bullets in the valley.

Quite apart from the legalese of the question (the Sheikh/Indira Gandhi
Accord for one), and apart also from the hard reality that such secession
will neither ever be agreed to by any political establishment in India or
any government of the day, or accepted by Indians at large, hypothetically,
what prospects could be envisaged were the other parts of the State who do
not want secession to be persuaded that the valley of Kashmir be bestowed
Independence and Sovereignty?

--following such a declaration, demands for *Azadi* could gain legitimacy in
Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, to name a few, and be hard to deny once a
precedent is set;

--a Hindu communalist backlash could ostensibly engulf India, rendering the
lives of Indian Muslims tenuous, and leading to demands that India be
declared a Hindu State, since the secession of the valley would have proved
the two-nation theory to have been correct after all;

--within Pakistan, first the Baloch, and then the Sindhis might take heart
and set themselves the objective to be freed of Punjabi ethnic dominance
through secession;

--within the valley, a Bangladesh-like situation might well emerge, namely a
struggle among those who will wish to retain a secular democratic state and
those who might argue for an Islamic state; it is well to remember that of
its forty years or so of independent nationhood, brought about under the
leadership of the Awami National Party on secular principles, some thirty
years were to see the communalist Leaguers in power; until now when under
the present regime again the Supreme Court there has struck down Article 5
of the amended constitution, and thereby once again reverted to denying any
religion-based party formations, but after the spilling of much blood.

This writer has often been accused of exaggerating the sufi-secular
orientation of Kashmiri Muslims, and of sentimentally misreading acts of
personal and individual camaraderie and brotherhood displayed by Kashmir
Muslims towards visiting Pandits as representative of the totality. I have
also been kindly once commented upon as a “Jehadi lapdog” (just use Google).
But all that notwithstanding, it remains a fact that at the time of the
exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in 1990, a campaign was in
evidence as loud-speakers from mosques blared how the “Nizam-e-Mustafa”
(Islamic Statehood) was at hand, how the Pandits must hasten their exodus,
taking care to leave their women behind, though. You will also hear the
speculation that one reason why elements within the valley do not, at
bottom, wish the Pandits to return home en mass is that they do not wish an
Indian “fifth column” to be reinstated therein, since with them gone, the
desire for an Islamic State acquires greater facilitation. Much as the Jews
in Israel, for example, fear the return of Palestinian refugees into what
was once their homeland.

I must also confess to another sort of experience on some recent visits to
the valley, namely the chagrin with which any mention of “Kashmiriyat”
(denoting the good old syncretic ways of Kashmiris) now tends to be received
there. Indeed, I recall being at a seminar in the university in Srinagar
where a senior academic read a one or two page “paper” titled “Kashmiriyat”
only, in fact, to rubbish the concept, without much substance albeit.

“Kashmiriyat” is now seen as something of a trick to deny the fact that
Kashmir in essence is Islamic, something that finds increasing expression in
text books on history and culture, as the pre-Islamic period (roughly up to
the fourteenth century, A.D.) is sought to be relegated.

Then the incident that happened not so long ago at Pulwama, where a Sikh
Kashmiri was surrounded, and asked to speak the Islamic Qalima, failing
which some of his hair was shorn off. Let it also be said that the incident,
uncharacteristic in the extreme, drew condemnation from all sections of
Kashmiri leadership.

Although, therefore, some residual Kashmiri Pandits who never left the
valley continue to be protected by their Muslim neighbours, and their
weddings and funerals organized with customary syncretic brotherhood, and
although their periodic visits from camps outside the valley to age-old
Hindu shrines in the valley are greeted with warmth, it would be wrong to
deny that after the near-total evacuation of the Pandits, the impulse to
forge a Sovereign and Independent valley into a theocratic state might not
be altogether a baseless surmise.

Be that as it may, what might be the security logistics of the new state,
bordering as it does Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and in that
situation, India as well? To return to what Sheikh Abdullah had said with
regard to this option (“Eastern Switzerland”), how might the new state meet
those vulnerabilities?

And how might it be said that Imperialism from you-know-where, already
stationed in countries nearby, might not feel that at long last the valley
was his for the taking, with all the Afghanistan-like consequences that
could follow, both in terms of turmoil and cultural defilement?

Not to speak of the kind souls from Pakistan’s wild-western provinces, many
in fact now resident in the main city centres of Pakistan? How might
Kashmiris resist their call to a Jehadist embrace, in disregard of
time-honoured ethnic Kashmiri prizing of exclusivity and identity? And if
they became insistent despite a polite “no”, who might come to the aid of
the Kashmiris?

Kashmiris are insistent everyday as the current imbroglio proceeds that
jobs, development, opportunities—these are not the issues. Yet, these might
indeed in time become issues of central magnitude for a prospectively
landlocked valley to deal with, in the absence of both monetary and
infrastructural resources.

Those resources then may have to come from other places with all the
attendant implications, be it the Saudis, or the Americans, or the Chinese.
Altogether, a pickle-in-the-making.

IV

If those be not unfounded considerations, what is to be done?

And it is time that the question is addressed with some candid concern.

A good beginning is made, I think, if all parties to the contention
recognize that Kashmir is not a problem that may ever be resolved to the
satisfaction of all parties. And it would be wrong to think that what is
said therein is merely a pre-emptive ploy. I doubt me much that time will
prove me wrong.

Let me say at once that the two options which seem closest to the heart of
contending parties—the union and the agitators—I see as non-starters, namely
the wish on behalf of the Indian state, on the one hand, that things may
drag on as before till exhaustion seals a fait accompli, and, on the other,
the desire, however fervent, of the young agitators for a country of their
own in the valley.

The first is bad not only because such a fait accompli will not happen, but
because it speaks poorly to the founding pretensions of the Republic of
India—chiefly its claim to “unity in diversity.” And it reinforces a
sentiment felt more widely than just in the valley that the Indian state
has, since the 1990 beginning of the neo-liberal era especially, become
increasingly impatient of both secularism and democracy, and wholly inimical
to the rights of a majority of Indians who to this day, in Abdullah’s words,
feel no “definite and concrete stake in India.” This applies as a thought to
the lives of India’s tribal populations, to Dalits, and to minorities of
various description on a differentiated scale of neglect.

In that context, the Indian state can only be fooling itself to think that
sooner than later the Kashmiris will tire and turn around.

And the second is a bad option because, as suggested above, the consequences
of the secession of the valley are potentially fraught only with negatives
for all parties to the dispute, and to the subcontinent as a whole.

Those recognitions return us willy nilly to salutary reflections on the
possibility of recuperating and refurbishing the covenant of the federative
promise and principle—something on which the accession of the state to the
union had been based in the first place, setting a uniquely outstanding
example both in terms of plurality of citizenship and of political
partnership in opposition to totalitarian impulses in both areas.

This Kashmiri still thinks that the Delhi Agreement (above) of 1952 still
offers the most workable and fair point of engagement. With the caveat that
with the advantage of hindsight any cool Kashmiri would recognize that
extending the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of India and of the Election
Commission of India to the state, far from impinging on the State’s
Autonomy, would in fact be credible guarantees of protection from excesses
and denials.

As to the majoritarian nationalists, they are as much a menace to the rest
of India as to any attempt to arrive at a fair solution in Kashmir. That
being so, the Indian state and civil society must needs muster the strength
and the will to defy and defeat their shenanigans, if the nation is to be
saved not so much from the Kashmiris as, first of all, from them.

It is good, late than never, that the Prime Minister has made some noises to
the sort of effect suggested here. Let his government and society at large
understand fully that it is now or never in Kashmir, and therefore avoid
going into another decade-long siesta after the current violence inevitably
lulls.

As to Pakistan, I am simply tempted to nod assent to what Sheikh Abdullah
had told the United Nations when he went there to plead India’s case: “I
refuse to accept Pakistan as a party in the affairs of Jammu and Kashmir
state; I refuse this point blank.”

After what it has done to its own people over the decades, that refusal
seems most in order. What the occupied part of Kashmir in Pakistan may do
with their fate is best left to them as well. Significantly, the most recent
Chatham House conducted poll showed some 58% of Kashmiris willing to
formalize the Line of Control between the two parts of Kashmir as the
International border between India and Pakistan. That is as it should be.
And once that happens, human and other commerce between the two Kashmirs can
be put on a sound international footing, all ambiguities and hassles
removed.

If initiatives along above lines are not undertaken soon, it may be
pointless to write any further on the subject of the Kashmir problem. Not
reason, analysis, or conjoint effort may then sort it out, but a
conflagration that may lead who knows where.
------------------------------

*Note:*
 * * *Literature on Kashmir is mind-boglingly numerous, and I have sought to
look into as much as time and tide allow. But, for purposes of this piece, I
wish to record my indebtedness to three authors on Kashmir chiefly—Prem Nath
Bazaz, Balraj Puri, and M.J. Akbar on whose work I have drawn with abandon.
The interpretations thereof being entirely my responsibility*