Can't afford another partition

Where Pakistan goes wrong is in its belief that such a situation can force India to discuss the Kashmir's accession de novo. A few Pakistani leaders took the same route in the past but realised even after hostilities that it was not possible to reopen the whole issue. No government of any party can stay in power if it ever tries to tinker with the accession. Cross-border terrorism is an irritation but it is not something with which India cannot live. It has been doing so for more than 12 years. In any case, after the 9/11 happenings in the US, the whole scenario has changed. Terrorism of any kind at any place has come to be considered an act of violence against humanity. As President Pervez Musharraf has himself admitted that there is a perception that he and his government are supporting extremists and terrorists. Islamabad would realise, if it has not already done so, that the 85-odd camps it has established along the Line of Control (LoC) to train the jehadis are counter-productive. They may be seen as an evidence of the Al-Qaida activity.

What is going to hurt Pakistan the most is the split in the APHC. Its main leaders like Mir Waiz Omar Farooq, Abdul Ghani Bhatt and APHC's new president Abbas Ansari have been looking towards Islamabad for years. They are so much cut up that they did not attend even the Iftar dinner party of the Pakistan High Commissioner to India. Their decision to talk to Delhi is not at the expense of Pakistan. They say so. Policy-makers at Islamabad have turned out to be shortsighted. Fearing the talks at some time, they have cut the ground from under their own feet by playing the Islamic card through Gillani, the Jamiat-e-Islami leader. His stand for Kashmir's merger with the Islamic state of Pakistan is not popular. It has, in fact, alienated the state's two other regions, the Hindu-majority Jammu and the Buddhist-majority Ladakh on the one hand and pushed up the back of communal elements in the rest of India on the other.

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New Delhi too has contributed towards communalising the situation. Some 13 years ago, it appointed Jagmohan, now a Union Minister, the governor of Jammu and Kashmir to fight against militancy. He made deep furrows in the muddy road to parochialism and encouraged the Kashmiri pandits to migrate to Jammu, Delhi or some other places. The day they left the valley -- nearly three lakh of them -- the demand for self-determination or independence assumed communal tone and pro-Pakistan tenor. The APHC, then influenced by Gillani, did not stop the exodus of Kashmiri pandits.

Since then the whole question has got mired in communalism. Jammu and Ladakh have drifted away from the valley, both emotionally and otherwise. They have begun to assert their own identity, regional and religious. The APHC has been forced to admit that its sway is confined to the precincts of the valley. Yasin Malik of JKLF has fired the imagination of Kashmiris by raising the slogan of independence. The situation today is such that the majority of population that was once pro-Pakistan is now pro-Azadi. But it is increasingly realising that independence is a pipedream.

The biggest loss of the APHC has been at the hands of the Pakistan-sponsored jehadis. One, they have damaged the cause of the Kashmiri youth who had raised the standard of revolt against New Delhi. Two, they have given a religious colour to the movement which was purely national in character. The movement became suspect. Thousands who sacrificed their lives did not make the kind of impact they would have made if there had been no outsider.

Gillani sabotaged the movement in another way: he argued that the Kashmiris would join Pakistan after they had "freed" themselves from India. Even the question of pandits' return to the valley, he said, would be decided after Kashmir was settled. Some APHC leaders were unhappy with the approach. But they felt helpless because there were too many Pakistani guns in their midst. Too many foreign diplomats visiting them had spoken in different voices and given them an exaggerated notion of world's support to their cause. When the 9/11 happenings jolted the APHC's thinking, it did not want to be seen linked with terrorism in any way. Their fear was that they might one day be dubbed partners of the Al-Qaida which mentioned Kashmir as one of the territories they would free for Muslims. However, it must be said to the credit of the Kashmiris that not a single person from among them participated in the Taliban's jehad in Afghanistan. There were Muslims from every part of the world but not from India.

Gillani and Pakistan have miscalculated their support. The Kashmiris are not fundamentalists. Nor are they willing to launch another liberation struggle. They are too tired and too sick of violence. They want peace with honour. New Delhi's attitude towards the APHC underwent a change when Abbas, a liberal, came to head the organisation. Gillani's exit and Shabbir Shah's entry had already made the APHC acceptable. The rest is too familiar to be repeated.

The question that arises is whether the talks would be on the lines that Sheikh Abdullah had with the government under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. There was an agreement as well in 1975. Gillani is already pooh-poohing the talks by saying that they would be another Sheikh-type exercise without purpose. New Delhi should be prudent in its approach. The APHC has come to the negotiating table for the first time and it has put no prior conditions. That it has dissociated itself from Gillani's support for accession to Pakistan and Yasin Malik's demand for independence is an indication that the APHC wants to avoid the two extremes. Can some formula be worked out to give the valley an autonomous status?

A map showing the division of Jammu and Kashmir has been attributed to the APHC. Jammu and Ladakh are shown under India and the valley and most of Kashmir presently with Pakistan under the dual control of New Delhi and Islamabad. Some features are similar to the trifurcation, a formula that the RSS had adumbrated. Before discussing anything concrete, it would be better if New Delhi and APHC were to agree on some principles which would govern the settlement. And one of them should be not to entertain any arrangement on the basis of religion. The subcontinent has gone through the traumatic experience of partition. It killed 10 lakh people and uprooted 20 lakh of families. India cannot afford to have another situation like that.

Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.