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Tuesday March 19, 2024

The Kashmir wish

By Imtiaz Alam
July 28, 2016

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is back in the saddle with an overwhelming mandate from the people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

The Kashmiris did not consider young Bilawal Bhutto’s unkind tirade against Sharif being a “friend of Modi” or Imran Khan’s puritan accusations of the Panama leaks against him. But as soon as Sharif laid his claim on the other side of Kashmir, his nationalist credentials got inverse approval viz the sharp reaction of Indian Information Minister Sushma Swaraj who ridiculed his wish to have Indian-administered Kashmir as part of Pakistan.

The AJK Assembly elections were, otherwise, a case of an indefensible incumbency – which Bilawal tried to cover up with an aggressive anti-India chauvinist rhetoric against the federal challengers to whom mostly Punjabi-Kashmiris haplessly look for largesse and development handouts. It was insulting to the sense of propriety of the electorate that the PPP did not even bother to change at least those representatives who had lost credibility. And Imran Khan lost his credentials by embracing some obvious defectors and crooks.

Despite pulling respectable crowds, the PPP chairman could not cover up for the dent caused by the defections that allowed the PTI under PPP renegade Barrister Sultan to play the role of a spoiler. Had the PPP not split, the result might not have been as devastating; the PPP might have won over 13 seats.

But it was former leftist Pervaiz Rasheed and his junior PML-N team that reaped the benefits of the division in the opposite camp and defeated a highly rhetorical, and short on content, campaign with a substantive development narrative and polite manners – especially with the promise of loads of money for Sharif’s luring model of visible and glittering development schemes.

The AJK Assembly elections have yet again confirmed how aggressive the mainstream parties of Pakistan are in displacing the local parties, and how keen they are on colonising and patronising AJK as an appendage of Islamabad – remotely run by a joint secretary in the AJK Council.

This is a sad reflection on the high-sounding irredentist views of these parties over the Kashmir question. A jubilant prime minister, who has a super combination of Kashmiri-Punjabi-Pakistani credentials, left his ultra-nationalist detractors behind by wishing that Indian-administered Kashmir would become part of Pakistan soon. And so the politicking on the Kashmir question continues unabated – when politicians have no say in national security matters except to dance to martial tunes.

In a compulsive rejoinder, for the same kind of political expediency, Shrimati Sushma Swaraj came down heavily on the Pakistani PM’s wish to be able to claim the other bigger chunk of Kashmir. She ridiculed the “friend of Modi” (Bilawal’s words) for living in a fools’ paradise. No less colonialist was Captain Amrindar Singh of the Congress Party in Indian Punjab when he termed Kashmir as an “occupied” territory and India’s ‘freedom’ to coerce them into subjugation as it wanted.

To most Indian politicians, with some honourable democratic exceptions, the Kashmir question is nothing but an issue of ‘law and order’ being fomented from this side of the Line of Control.

In the complementing hostile nationalist narratives, Kashmir is the ‘atoot ang’ or inseparable part of India; for Pakistan it is its ‘jugular vein’.

And there is no rational or realistic escape from these narratives that feed into the mutually destructive militaristic nationalisms of the two states. The right to self-determination conceded by British colonialists, and exercised by Muslims or Hindus in 1947, was not extended to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. That migh have resulted in the communal division of J&K as witnessed in the bloody partition of Bengal and Punjab which Jinnah had to reluctantly concede on the ground of his Two-nation Theory.

Pakistan drums up its case on the jurisprudence provided by the UN Security Council’s non-binding resolutions for a plebiscite that gave only two options to the Kashmiris – to choose either of the two dominions and to vacate territory liberated by tribal non-state lashkars in 1948 (which now constitutes AJK). It is quite ironic that India, confident of the National Conference of Sheikh Abdullah’s agreement on a special status of Kashmir within India, went to the UN for referendum and Pakistan dragged its feet due to the fear of losing whatever it had got.

Later India went back on its promise, when it alienated Sheikh Abdullah and the Kashmiris, and reneged on its promise for fear of losing the state. Both claimants do not accept the unconditional right to self-determination of the Kashmiris. And this is precisely what the Kashmiris from the valley of Kashmir are demanding. The current democratic agitation against Indian occupation, and for azadi, is nothing but a demonstration of the Kashmiris democratic urge for self-determination.

The two states have, instead, been using the Kashmir dispute to promote their militaristic agendas. Consequently, the Kashmiris have been sandwiched between the extended national security designs of the two states. It would be sensible to adopt a conflict-management approach for a transitional solution by letting Kashmiris have a mutually acceptable arrangement among themselves.

And India and Pakistan could provide a sovereign umbrella in their administered parts of the former Jammu and Kashmir state, without injuring their exalted national egos, and live in peace with each other and keep in permanent check their weapons of mass self-destruction.

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: imtiaz.safma@gmail.com

Twitter: @ImtiazAlamSAFMA