Not a healthy concoction

The Pakistanis have convinced themselves that Vajpayee alone can normalise relations with India. Their argument rests on two counts: first, he is the one who has persistently tried to bury the hatchet with Pakistan and, two, he heads the BJP which will never accept a solution from any other quarter in India. There is a lot of truth in both the points. Not that any political party is opposed to good equation with Pakistan but the fact remains that the BJP's concurrence is necessary since it has come to represent what is known as the Hindu viewpoint. It may sound like resurrecting the two-nation theory. But the BJP's stamp is necessary.

However, Pakistan is mistaken if it believes that the two-nation theory can be extended to Jammu and Kashmir. India, even if the BJP is willing to trifurcate the state, will never agree to the state's division on the basis of religion. Such a solution can deliver a fatal blow to its pluralistic society. This is what I said at Brussels where a discourse on Kashmir was held under the aegis of European Parliament. Sardar Abdul Qayyam Khan from the 'Azad' Kashmir and Gohar Ayub Khan, former Pakistan foreign minister, were present. They raised no objection when I said that India would never accept any solution of Kashmir which was founded on religion. "We can't go back to partition when one million people were killed and 20 million uprooted from their homes," I said. I could not understand why the representatives of European Parliament were insistent on associating themselves with the talks between India and Pakistan. They wanted a resolution to be adopted for that purpose. Europe is part of the West which has lost its credibility after what has happened to Iraq at the hands of America.

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What swung the opinion at the Brussels Discourse against European Parliament's intervention was the intense hatred that the fate of Iraq had evoked in the Islamic world. The Kashmir expatriates and the Pakistanis present at the discourse were conscious of what would happen to Kashmir if Europe were to be involved. It was satisfying to see that the offer of "good offices" by European Parliament was rejected. But that does not solve the Kashmir problem. We, in India, may honestly believe that Kashmir is the symptom and not the disease and that the disease is the mistrust between India and Pakistan. Still that mistrust will need to be removed. Isn't the lack of solution on Kashmir sustaining that mistrust? It is possible that while tackling Kashmir we may stumble upon some ways to have confidence in each other. Beating the same old path or debating the discussed and re-discussed solutions may not do. This is not the job that can be left to the foreign offices or the bureaucracies in the two countries. They carry too much baggage of the past. The Pakistan Foreign Office repeated the other day "the right of self-determination." But President General Pervez Musharraf has realistically stated that the demand for implementing the UN resolutions on Kashmir was outmoded.

Some "innovative" solutions, as Vajpayee had suggested, should be found. This would require a non-official effort like the one on the lines of people-to-people contact. Such individuals from India and Pakistan who have no political, religious or other agenda of their own or of their governments, should meet and re-meet to discuss Kashmir. They may be able to draw the contours of a proposal which has the consensus behind it. Leaders from Kashmir should be associated at some stage so that what is worked out is acceptable to all the three. No time limit can be fixed. The beginning of the process is important, not the deadline.

The Indians, however, must accept the blame for messing up Kashmir. We have held no fair elections, except the one in 1977. The Election Commission has asserted itself in the last two polls, as it is doing now. The polls have been fairly honest despite violence and the pressure of boycott. The story has not been any different this time. Still, 40 per cent of voters in the state exercised their franchise. This is not a bad scenario.

But New Delhi should realise that Kashmir is a political problem, not something that the security forces can sort out. Many army chiefs have gone on record as saying that Kashmir cannot be solved militarily. What we have to do is to devise ways to stop human rights violations. The security forces, although curbed, continue to indulge in excesses. Despite strict instructions to the armed forces, instances of brutality have been quite a few. Interrogation centers have lessened in number but they are still there. It is a pity that the gun culture has got ingrained in the psyche of the Kashmiris and those who are helping or fighting them. Too much time has been wasted and too many people have been alienated. Why didn't the government hold talks with the Hurriyat leaders in the 1990s when human rights activists repeatedly told it to do so? I wonder if posterity would ever forgive the successive governments at Delhi for all the harm they have done to Kashmir. Terrorists have, no doubt, disfigured what was once an honest movement for autonomy. But New Delhi's hands have not been clean. It is time for retrospection. On the other hand, Islamabad has not allowed the state to settle down from day one. It has been driven partly by its own ambition and partly by its policy to keep the problem alive for home consumption. Pakistan has looked at Kashmir from the religious point of view, not from the Kashmiris' point view. In the process, it has lost the pull it once had.

The lesson both India and Pakistan have to learn -- if the rulers can ever learn -- is to keep religion separate from the state. New Delhi has been making efforts off and on without much success. Islamabad has had no compunction in mixing religion with the state, although it has realised belatedly, the dangers of the nexus.

Take the attempt to reform education in Pakistan. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute, an independent body, has said in a report that books used in schools contribute to the growth of bias based on religious belief and encourage "discrimination against minorities." The government has shelved the report because it could not even put the Quranic verse from one section to another of the "sacred curriculum."

As far as India is concerned, education minister Murli Manohar Joshi is in the midst of changing books and re-writing history. If the BJP-led coalition returns to power, he will be like a bull in the China shop. Religion will be introduced with a vengeance in the name of culture or tradition.

After elections, I hope, India will go back to its ethos of secularism and Pakistan to its founder's exhortation of not mixing religion with the state. Unless the two countries rise above parochialism, they have little future.

Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.