Those born after 1971 would have only read about it without ever getting to feel the trauma, but between 1947 and 71 Pakistan had already fought four major wars with India. The 1947 separation from India was the bloodiest and the most traumatic of them all where civility was put to shame through widespread bloodshed seeped in hatred. I repeat it here to record the wretchedness of it. What stayed with the generation that underwent the trauma was the odiousness and thus the distrust of each other.
The 1947-48 war and the two that followed in 1965 and 1971 were in one way or another linked to Kashmir, either in their germination or in how those evolved. One other, while the Seventy-Oners were around, was in 1999, in Kargil. Termed as half-war, it got derided by a larger majority of the people as an amateurish attempt at an uncalled for confrontation between two nuclear neighbours, which forever altered the strategic stability determinants in South Asia. This in turn enthused cavalier dispositions in two states riddled with belabouring disputes.
The Seventy-Oners, without the baggage of history, only saw Pakistan’s India problem as one of form and little substance. No surprise then that the country is divided right down the middle on some of the strategic choices as it grapples with challenges that have gravitated to the point of beckoning our focus for future direction of policy.
Other than the 1999 half-war, the rest were full wars fought by the two states with their fullest might and involved the populations of both countries which underwent the associated pains and apprehensions. Kashmir, thus, is entrenched in the minds of the two people as an issue over which blood had been shed and pain and anguish suffered. Even today, in this day of enlightenment and progression (pun intended) it remains difficult for any entity, political or otherwise, to discount the history of how Kashmir presents itself in popular perception.
Along with four wars there were series of dialogues that too were initiated to somehow breach the logjam, but with every passing day Kashmir has only diluted as an issue of fundamental human rights from the larger international conscience. There are many reasons to it which include smart Indian manipulation of the international environment, and a dissonance in purpose as the state and its governments in Pakistan have each charted varying approaches towards Kashmir as well as India. Such division of labour, if not confounding has surely divided the people over the means to achieving the end.
It is important to underline that while repeated wars and repeated dialogues have failed to offer any amelioration, the oppression of the Kashmiri people continues. India’s ruthless application of force, dismembers and maims the Kashmiris on a daily basis, and continues to violate the UN Charter on Human Rights by denying them the right to choose freedom, or to preserve life against the butchery that the Indian military inflicts on them. The issue thus merits urgent attention.
The two formal Instruments that bind both India and Pakistan to pursue any resolution are the oft quoted UNSC Resolutions of 1949 onwards, and the Simla Agreement of 1972. Both have serious limitations that make them infructuous per the evolved character of the issue. What in 1950 was a clear choice for the Kashmiris to decide between India and Pakistan may be on the verge of questionable relevance, with Kashmiris chanting ‘Azaadi’, and sacrificing around 100,000 lives in that pursuit. The UNSC resolutions only engage the Kashmiris to a plebiscite to decide between one or the other master. They, nurturing their own ambitions, have no say in their future in the current form of those Resolutions.
Is this something that Pakistan may like to deal with? Can or should Pakistan tinker with what is in fact a strong legal basis of its case against India on Kashmir? Perhaps, as an interim, it is preferable to live with the UNSC resolutions as they exist, and following a plebiscite, if indeed it happens and is decided in favour of Pakistan; then she could offer the Kashmiris a choice to either remain or secede from Pakistan as an independent nation.
Merely, taking the case to the world on the basis of atrocities is treating only the surface and not the core of the malaise. Kashmir would still be unresolved even when Indians stop committing the atrocities against the Kashmiris. The self-styled champions of human rights without actually taking the matter to the level of plebiscite shy away from the crux. They deal with the form, but not the substance.
The Simla Agreement essentially hands over the key to all issues to India in the name of bilateralism. India has, since 1972, exercised its arbitrary whim of either engaging Pakistan or not, or simply engaging on her own terms. The Comprehensive Dialogue since 1998, and other such moments of a possible engagement have withered under the whims of Indian unwillingness to engage with Pakistan. The Kashmir dispute, territorial, or the denial of fundamental human rights, continues to remain unresolved and unattended. It is time international conscience jiggled itself alive to the Kashmiri plight, as it did for South Sudan and East Timor.
Today’s Pakistan is sadly seized with internal fissures, chiefly between the civil and the military. As a popular army chief comes close to the end of his tenure the swords are out among the civilian cavaliers to sully his image and re-craft some space for the mostly inept civilian leadership. In it Kashmir too is a victim. The jihadi organisations, the JuD and the JeM, have been paraded as army surrogates who have allegedly not only actively supported the freedom struggle in Kashmir, a negative, but are touted as the main source of disrepute for Pakistan. The liberalist samurai thus have brandished their weapons for badmouthing the army while frothing for civilian domination. As they pursue their sinister agenda it also takes the Kashmiris down.
As we close the gauntlet around the so called Kashmir-focused Jihadi groups, we may be earning some brownie points with Narendra Modi, but are also telling the Kashmiris to mind for themselves because in an effort to resurrect our image we will now restrict ourselves only to the innocuous diplomatic, political and moral support to their cause. That they will have to depend on the blood of Burhani Wani alone as their sustenance.
We also have failed the Kashmiris by being unable to forge an international compact to win them their fundamental human right to freedom even as we begin to fulfil our side of the bargain. The JuDs and the JeMs will close shop because that is for the common good, but we must also offer the Kashmiris the benefit of this common good. To this end no samurai is invested.
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