Déjà vu

Yet another round of posturing on Kashmir before President Bush's visit to South Asia

David Devadas Delhi

Rewind four years: the armies of India and Pakistan were massed along the border. An orchestrated panic built across the West about an impending nuclear holocaust over Kashmir. UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage engage in hectic shuttle diplomacy.

Fast forward one year: the US-led army rolled into Iraq. On April 9, 2003, a statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad. Almost immediately, Armitage announced his intention to visit South Asia at the end of the month. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then prime minister (PM), decided to go to Srinagar. On April 17, he announced there his readiness to send an official to Islamabad if Pakistan is ready to negotiate a settlement to the Kashmir issue.

Armitage's visit passed without much ado, but it took till the fag end of that year for India and Pakistan to agree to the modalities of talks.

Cut to the recent past: People's Conference President Sajad Lone, arguably by then the most marginal of the recognised faces in the pantheon of Kashmir's secessionist politics, was invited to meet the PM. Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chief, Yasin Malik, who generally has a huge chip on his shoulder, was happy to accept the next invitation to meet the PM in mid-February 2006.

These invitations distressed Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and his colleagues in the All Parties' Hurriyat Conference (APHC). Until then, the APHC had fancied themselves in the role of negotiators on behalf of the Kashmiri people. In a few moves, they had been reduced to just one of the many groups, including mainstream parties, with which the government wanted to discuss the issue at a "roundtable" meet. Miffed, Umer announced last week that his conglomerate would stay away.

Given the pattern of 2003, this roundtable meet, scheduled to occur less than a week before US President Bush's visit, was hardly likely to inspire confidence. It might be a more dramatic prelude to the visit than Vajpayee's offer to talk to Pakistan was before Armitage's visit that year, but less credible.

Despite his immense stature and credibility, however, Vajpayee's offer did not lead anywhere for a while, thanks largely to Pakistan's insistence on a summit, or nisterial talks. Negotiations have taken place through 2004 and 2005 but, at the end of two years, President Musharraf is so frustrated with the pace of negotiations that he made public what has been discussed (Hardnews, Oct. 2005).

In a television interview, he even claimed as his own idea a proposal that was taken to Pakistan by Sheikh Abdullah in 1964 when Jawaharlal Nehru sent him to try and work out a mutually acceptable solution. That idea was repackaged on slick art paper with nifty graphics in the late-1990s as the Kathwari Plan, to which several US lawmakers appended their signatures.

In fact, even Abdullah's idea was a rehashed version of the plan that UN Representative Owen Dixon first presented in 1950. Many in Srinagar have long believed that the plan was formulated in consultation with Abdullah's advisers at a time when Abdullah was in regular touch with Loy Henderson, the then US Ambassador to India.

No wonder, the Indian government is not keen on the proposal. If it had been, it could have responded decades ago. The idea that India and Pakistan could jointly exercise sovereignty over and design foreign and defence policies for an otherwise independent Kashmir boggles the imagination.

Musharraf clearly believes that India is under sufficient pressure from the continuing violence in Kashmir to bend. India is not inclined to accept his argument that violence will come down in Kashmir if India pulls its army out of its major bases in the valley. Given that the Indian government did not bend before the far more disruptive violence of the early 1990s, there is little reason for it to capitulate now.

India wants the borders, including the Line of Control (LoC) between the two countries, to become far more open, and stimulate trade. The only change in sovereignty it could seriously consider is to turn the LoC into the agreed international border. That was first mooted, after all, in 1958 by the then Union Home Minister, GB Pant.

The bottom line, then, is that there is no sign of a meeting point between India and Pakistan with regard to Kashmir. But we're talking, Mr Bush. We're talking.