[Reader-list] No permanent AMAN

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

No permanent aman R Jagannathan

DNA

Link - http://www.dnaindia.com/bangalore/column_no-permanent-aman_1340128

The ground is being meticulously prepared to take us up the garden path on
Kashmir. No good can come of stupidity, but that is where we are being led
by the US, our own government and some media groups that think this is the
way to build Indo-Pak friendship.

We are told that peace will be facilitated by increased people-to-people
interactions. The argument is beguiling. Look, they are simple
ghazal-loving, pan-chewing people like us. Indians are always treated like
royalty when we visit friends in Pakistan. So let’s ignore the warmongers in
our two countries who want us to remain in a permanent state of tension and
talk peace.

The truth is different. The constituency for peace has always been larger in
India than in Pakistan. We just want to forget about Pakistan and get on
with life. This is exactly what Pakistan’s mullahs and powers-that-be are
counting on. And this is why we should be wary of falling into the trap. We
refuse to learn from history.

If Pakistan is talking about the possibility of peace, there is only one
reason: it is under intense international pressure. It needs the breather of
talks to recoup its strength before launching its next covert war against
India. With Obama focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan being armtwisted to
fight its own creation, the Taliban, the country is squirming. It needs time
to rethink its war strategy with India which has Kashmir as the key goal.
The other player in this game — the US — is backing Pakistan on talks for
its own reasons. Obama wants to score some gains in Afghanistan in the
shortest possible time. He has willy-nilly bought the Pakistani argument
that India needs to make concessions on Kashmir if it is to help the US
tackle the Taliban. This is a bogus argument.

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 Pakistan calculates that if we refuse to talk, it need not do much about
the Taliban, because it can claim tension on its eastern border. If we do
talk, Pakistan presumes we will have to give in somewhere. It’s win-win for
Pakistan, lose-lose for us.

Peacemongers in India need to remember one basic thing: Pakistan is 10 times
as motivated on Kashmir than India. This makes it a dangerous peace partner.
We need to ask ourselves why we think Pakistan will ever accept status quo
on Kashmir now when it has not done so for 63 years? Even in 1971-72, when a
defeated Pakistan had every reason to accept peace on our terms, Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto did not give in on Kashmir. The Shimla accord was dead the minute
90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war left Indian soil. Even after Pokharan-2,
when a ground war should have been unthinkable, Pakistan risked one at
Kargil.

We should by now have understood that Pakistan will do anything to gain
Kashmir, and so peace talks are just a ruse. This does not mean we shouldn’t
hold talks — the atmospherics of peace are important to cater to world
opinion — but we should always be prepared for the next round of Pakistani
perfidy. Strategically, our goal should be to keep Pakistan off-balance
permanently to have at least half-peace.

To have a durable peace, our focus must be different. We have to defeat the
idea of Pakistan. The idea of Pakistan is that Muslims cannot live in a
secular society, and that wherever there is a Muslim majority, as in
Kashmir, that state must be Islamic. India is built on the opposite premise.
When ideologies are in conflict, only the better one should win. The problem
of Kashmir is not territorial, but ideological. Kashmiri separatism is one
of a piece with bigoted thinking, which is why the Pandits have been driven
out through a process of ethnic cleansing. The logic is clear: once the
Pandits are out of the way, the cry of azadi will never be challenged, and
the whole battle will be posed as one between Hindu India and Muslim
Kashmir.

To say that false ideologies must be defeated is not the same as a call to
war. Nor is it a call against the people of Pakistan, or even a call to
dismember it. But the war against regressive ideologies must be won
decisively if the world is to become a saner place.

There can be no permanent aman with a state built on wrong ideas. We have to
prosecute a propaganda war the same way the Americans did during the cold
war. They made no bones about the fact that they were against authoritarian
communism even while they did peace deals with the USSR to avoid direct
conflicts.

Friendship with an unreformed Pakistan, or accommodating its views on
Kashmir, means explicit abandonment of secularism. Pakistan will settle for
nothing less than the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley, leaving Buddhist
Ladakh and largely Hindu Jammu to us. If we accept this, we might as well
accept religion as the basis of nationhood. We should have no quarrel with
Hindutva, too. Is this what we want?