External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar tweeted on August 2 that he had conveyed “in clear terms” to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that “any discussion on Kashmir, if at all warranted, will only be with Pakistan and only bilaterally.” Kashmir has been bilaterally enshrined as a legitimate topic of discussion between India and Pakistan and to that extent it is certainly warranted. There is nothing iffy about it. Pakistan has worked in many ways to obtain a better grip on Kashmir, including by getting nuclear bombs. Now that India has given Pakistan a fait accompli, will Pakistan roll over and play dead? And how does New Delhi hope to pull it off?
The road ahead
There is a haphazard shape to the beast, sensing its hour coming around, that slouches its way towards Kashmir to be born. The rough contours: The government will later rather than sooner have to pull additional troops out to give the situation in Jammu and Kashmir a gloss of normalcy. There is no saying how many troops are out there in Jammu and Kashmir. It could be surmised that there are about 80,000 deployed in the northern part of Kashmir, along the Line of Control. This is not counting those in counter-insurgency operations in the southern parts of the erstwhile State. This is not counting local police, the BSF and the CRPF. Obviously the additional troops numbering some 40,000 have been brought in to manage the new situation. There could be more.
The trick is how, with little or no bloodshed, this massive deployment, unparalleled in any democracy, will squelch what waits to emerge out of the Pandora’s Box without a lose-lose scenario dominating the national consciousness. It is a tough call.
Moves are afoot to hold an election, probably in March or April. The new political leadership, carefully nurtured, will no doubt be from among the throw-ups in the panchayat elections. It is a good time to wager if former Chief Ministers Omar Abdullah, Farooq Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti can ever contest another election. It is a foregone conclusion that these leaders of regional mainstream political parties, which the government says is a discredited lot, will have to be suitably dis-incentivised from contesting the polls, and this means having them under some form of detention for the foreseeable future. From the new perspective, they have identified themselves too much with separatist impulses. Certainly, third-rung or fourth-rung leaders from these parties may already have been identified and may be being primed to give solidity to the new deal that awaits the Kashmiris. Together they are the new quislings of Kashmir’s perennial uprising.
In order to present that green shoots of industry and economy are going to grow out of Kashmir’s hitherto separatist soil, the CII has already planned a summit in October, and big money is being readied to throw at the region, as has been done before. Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance, Mukesh Ambani, who has signed on to the government’s vision, soon promises to unveil plans for Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. The government may not risk a repeat of bringing heavy industries to Kashmir now but it will certainly press ahead with the smaller initiatives pertaining to local handicrafts and the like. It will try to set an example by proving that removal of Article 35A, which has prevented people from the rest of the country from buying property in Jammu and Kashmir, will have a real impact. Just like the elections, this will be a managed outcome. It is a challenge: Even though people from Jammu could always have bought land in Kashmir, they never dared. In May 2008, land was allocated to the Amarnath shrine to set up temporary shelters for the pilgrims leading to sustained and massive protests and a reversal of the government stance months later.
Yet this could be an extremely optimistic picture. Having removed the separatists of various hues from the equation on the ground and supplanted them with Delhi-controlled ventriloquism, the Centre cannot hold. It will be laying itself directly open to blame on a variety of counts. With the police, paramilitary and administrative machinery totally under New Delhi’s control, the Centre cannot possibly have either the same level of engagement or the same level of deniability of the mess that mishandling of the situation could create, not least the human rights abuses accusations that are bound to pile up once the troops cede the ground to grimmer realities that have lurked for seven decades. At the end of it, diplomat Paul Bremer, whom the Americans sent to Baghdad to clean up after Saddam Hussein, could begin to look like Florence Nightingale.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is hardly likely to launch a charm offensive. Prime Minister Imran Khan has already predicted the possibility of lone-wolf disruptions of the dreaded Pulwama type. The spiral upward that could follow will end more messily than we have hitherto known. So far, Muslims in the rest of the country have not been drawn into the Kashmir quagmire. There have been some instances but not enough to cause serious alarm. Seeds are perhaps being sown for that to change now. Kashmir’s theatre of war is readying to spill outwards. As pressures pile up, communalisation could result. Jammu, after all, is one-third Muslim. Will the presumed positives of abrogation of Article 370 and an old development card that has been repeatedly and tiredly played with less than encouraging results far outweigh the inherent infirmities of the move?
Statecraft then and now
The question finally arises: could statecraft have been handled differently? Painstaking back-channel work had narrowed the outstanding differences between India and Pakistan during the time of Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, and the congruence on critical issues had survived changes in Pakistan involving President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the Mumbai attacks. There had been agreement on, among other things, a freeze on the Line of Control as the border in exchange of end to violence and terrorism, leading to thinning of troops on either side and blossoming of local bilateral trade as critical steps towards normalisation. The presumption was that once the momentum was there the rest would follow. It could have been taken forward. Time alone will tell if that was the less risky, more gentle, more inclusive way forward, or this, which right now appears to be a comedy of terrors.
sudarshan.v@thehindu.co.in
