POLITICS-SOUTH ASIA: Kashmir ‘Wound’ Festers for 55th Year

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 15 2002 (IPS) - Fifty five years after Pakistan was carved out of India as a homeland for the sub-continent’s Muslims, the hauntingly beautiful valley of Kashmir remains the raw wound of the traumatic partition that preceded independence from British rule in August 1947.

“For us Jammu and Kashmir (as the original princely state was known) is not just a piece of real estate but a living symbol of our secularism,” Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said Thursday.

He was making the customary Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the mediaeval Red Fort, from where Moghul emperors once ruled a territory that included modern-day Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

Since India’s Independence Day on Aug. 15. 1947 followed Pakistan’s by one day, the anniversaries are an opportunity to publicly respond to any claims that the leaders of the neighbouring country might make over Jammu and Kashmir, which survived as a separate kingdom until October 1947.

There was a lot for Vajpayee to respond to this year. On Wednesday in Islamabad, Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf declared in his Independence Day speech that “the struggle of our Kashmiri brothers is a sacred trust with us which can never be compromised”.

Vajpayee saw in Musharraf’s speech the continuation of a policy by Pakistan to “seize Kashmir through cross-border terrorism, having failed to achieve that aim through open war” and vowed that the territory would remain an integral part of India.

To Musharraf’s charge that provincial elections set in the territory next month was a “farce” and “yet another effort to give a mask of legitimacy to India’s illegal occupation of the state”, Vajpayee responded by suggesting that the military dictator should look at his own record first.

“Those who call the forthcoming elections (in Kashmir) farcical had better look at their record rather than giving us lectures on democracy,” Vajpayee said, drawing confidence from the fact that India has remained a democracy in all these 55 years while Pakistan has been ruled mostly by military dictators.

Vajpayee, ever the elderly statesman, admitted to the hiccups in India’s record of secularism — on which this country’s hold over Kashmir is based — and described as “frightening” an anti-Muslim pogrom in western Gujarat state earlier this year.

The provincial government run by his pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been widely blamed for the pogrom.

“There can be no place for such violence (as happened in Gujarat) in a civilised society. It is necessary that everyone rises above casteism and communalism and leave behind these things that divide us,” Vajpayee said in what has been seen as reproof of his own party members.

Vajpayee also admitted that India had made mistakes in Jammu and Kashmir in the past, but said his government was determined to rectify these and promised to move toward the granting of more autonomy for the state based on discussions with representatives and groups.

Reacting quickly to Vajpayee’s promise, Shabir Ahmad Shah, who leads the moderate Democratic Freedom Party in the state, said: “Vajpayee’s admission is a bold move There should be no further delay in a solution to the Kashmir issue.”

Shah is among those who have entered into dialogue with a group of prominent journalists and lawyers called the “Kashmir Committee”, on ways to find a peaceful solution to the Kashmir crisis

On Wednesday, India’s foreign ministry expressed outrage at Musharraf’s address, calling it “recycled, hackneyed thinking” and proof of “his intention to disrupt the peaceful election in Jammu and Kashmir and to continue his hostile postures toward India”.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao took a swipe at Musharraf’s own doubtful legitimacy. “After a rigged referendum in Pakistan and constitutional and political manipulations that are going on before the October elections there, one would have hoped that Musharraf would have been more restrained in his pronouncements on the elections in Jammu and Kashmir,” she said.

Rao warned that India would take necessary measures to “counter Pakistan’s design to disrupt the peaceful election in Jammu and Kashmir”.

India has accused Pakistan of being behind the assassination of moderate political leader Abdul Ghani Lone at a public meeting in May, shortly after he declared support for the elections in September. The murder exacerbated tensions between the nuclear armed neighbours, which were then on the brink of open war.

In his speech, Vajpayee called on the people in Jammu and Kashmir to “ignore the propaganda from across the border” that urges a boycott of the elections which he described as “an opportunity to heal the wounds of the past and build a prosperous future”.

Vajpayee seemed to rule out immediate talks with Pakistan, saying that urging people to boycott the elections in Kashmir was not quite in line with creating a conducive atmosphere for talks.

India and Pakistan first went to war over Kashmir in October 1947, after the Hindu ruler of the largely Muslim territory acceded to secular India, according to post-independence provisions made for the numerous princely states that owed allegiance to the British crown .

On New Year’s Day in 1949, the two countries agreed to a ceasefire and drew up the Line of Control (LoC) marking the point where the armies of the two countries had fought each other to a standstill.

A second war erupted in August 1965, which ended with a U.N. sponsored ceasefire that redrew the LoC. This left Pakistan with control over a third of the territory and India over two-thirds of it.

Pakistan ceded a part of what it controls to its close ally China, and formally incorporated the Northern Areas into its own territory.

Yet another war fought between the two countries in 1971 resulted in the birth of Bangladesh, which till then was called East Pakistan but preferred to break away in spite of sharing the Islamic religion.

The roots of the Kashmir conflict rests in the “two-nation theory” propounded by Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who held that Muslims and Hindus formed two separate nations and needed to live in separate territories.

Vajpayee has said that India cannot now afford a second partition on the grounds of religion in its Kashmir state, whose Ladakh region is dominated by lamaistic Buddhists while the Jammu region has a Hindu majority.

Already, his partymen are demanding a three-way division of the territory as one solution. This division would be into Buddhist Ladakh, Hindu dominated Jammu and the Muslim-dominated Srinagar valley.