BOOK
REVIEW The
Kashmir conundrum Kashmir. Roots of Conflict, Paths to
Peace, by Sumantra Bose
Reviewed by Chanakya Sen
Conflict in Kashmir is a conundrum that begs
serious in-depth analysis taking into account
every stream of opinion and identity. Sumantra
Bose's ambitious new venture, Kashmir.
Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace calls
for according "equal legitimacy" to
the multiple strands of allegiances over
Kashmir and to accommodate them all in a
skillful compromise. Bose's preoccupation is
with "reframing the Kashmir question as a
challenge for democratic politics" and
building a polity that makes up the democratic
deficit.
The cultural, social and religious
multiplicity of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K)
has engendered prismatic and fragmented
political orientations. "J&K as a
whole resembles the Russian matryoshka
doll - layers of complexity which render easy
solutions such as plebiscite or partition
impracticable and call for a more
sophisticated approach." (p 12) The
"self" in
"self-determination" is
differentiated into umpteen political
aspirations, all of which need to be co-opted
into an inclusive framework for peace. Bose
proposes a multinational settlement which
recognizes the diverse national and
quasi-national identities prevailing within
J&K, while respecting the core territorial
concerns of the Indian and Pakistani states.
For Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir valley's most
popular politician who aligned with India due
to exigency in 1947, "Kashmir and India
were fraternal but ultimately separate
entities." (p 23) His brand of
"regional patriotism" based on the
Muslim heritage of Kashmir did not quite match
his National Conference's avowed secular
nature, a contradiction Bose fails to
extrapolate. The author does admit that
Abdullah contributed to the entrenchment and
perpetuation of anti-democratic politics in
J&K. His intolerance of J&K's plural
character led to police crackdowns against
minority communities from Jammu and Ladakh.
His 1951 constituent assembly elections
"made a mockery of any pretence of a
democratic process". (p 55)
While Abdullah was no democrat, Bose
attributes the root cause of the current
conflict to the New Delhi-sponsored systematic
subversion of democratic rights and
institutions in J&K. The heavily
manipulated 1987 assembly election in J&K
was "no aberration, it was entirely
consistent with Kashmir's political fate in
India's democracy over the preceding 40
years". (p 50) At this point, Bose does
not halt to consider if dubious elections in
J&K were any different from the violent
and coercive elections in other states of
India, say Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, over the
preceding 40 years. His contention that
democracy, by and large, was respected with
"imperfections" in other parts of
India lacks empirical substantiation.
Bose maintains that khudmukhtaari
(self-rule/autonomy) lies at the heart of
India's checkered relationship with J&K.
Sheikh Abdullah retained a "subliminal
attachment to the idea of a sovereign
Kashmir", though anti-autonomy and
pro-integration voices were raised in Jammu
and Ladakh. In 1953, Abdullah shifted to a
confrontational pro-independence strategy and
was dismissed and incarcerated for 22 years in
Indian prisons. His replacement, Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammed, eroded J&K's autonomy and
allegedly buried Article 370 of the Indian
constitution that granted special status to
the state. Bose writes off Article 370 as
"dead in letter and in spirit" since
1954, but it has never been dead as far as the
crucial prohibition of non-Kashmiris owning
property or setting up businesses in J&K.
It is this caveat that prevented internal
colonization and demographic reengineering in
J&K on the lines of Pakistani Kashmir or
Chinese Tibet.
The 1965 dissolution of the National
Conference and its merger into India's ruling
Congress party is depicted as "the end of
the road for Article 370", again a
misjudgement because the article has no
bearing on the dalliances of political parties
in J&K. Bose also castigates the
appointment of non-Kashmiris in administrative
service of J&K without cognizance of the
basic fact that, to occlude favoritism and
vested interests, India's professional civil
servants are rarely allotted home state
postings.
Bose further errs by writing that in the 1965
war over Kashmir, Pakistan's ambitious
operation failed as the "fullest
cooperation of local Muslims was not
forthcoming on the expected huge scale".
(p 84) Such a sentence misleads, because far
from cooperating, J&K locals assisted the
Indian army in apprehending infiltrators. The
duality of mindsets in the Kashmir Valley,
where on one hand the majority wanted to be
separate from India and on the other hand
prevented Pakistan's forcible takeover,
remained intact until 1988.
During the end of the Afghan jihad in the late
1980s, the Kashmir conflict entered a new
phase characterized by mass estrangement of
J&K's population from India. In 1990,
governmental authority collapsed in the Valley
as insurrection took hold. An
"occupier-occupied relationship"
emerged between the Indian state and the
Valley's people. Young Kashmiri men crossed
into Pakistan, gained weapons and combat
training and returned to Indian Kashmir to
organize a spate of targeted killings of known
or suspected "Indian agents".
The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF),
which dominated the early phase of violent
insurgency, drew inspiration from "the
valley's specific Islamic traditions"
though averring that its attitude towards
non-Muslims was non-sectarian. Bose accepts on
face-value JKLF's defense that three-fourths
of its victims were Muslims and only
one-fourth were Kashmiri Pandits, the Valley's
Hindu minority. Considering that Pandits
comprised barely 4 percent of the populace in
the Valley, their assassination rate was
disproportionately high. Bose also
fallaciously calls the mass exodus of Pandits
in 1990 due to terrorist threats
"propaganda". He supports this
perfunctory argument by attesting that Muslim
neighbors protected the handful of Pandits who
stayed in the Valley. Survivors' families have
now documented how far many more Pandits were
actually handed over to assailants by
neighbors. Bose never seemed to have heard of
the rallying cry in 1990 - Kashmir me rehna
hain to Allah-o-Akbar Kehna Hai (If you want
to live in Kashmir, worship Allah).
If the JKLF was indeed "secular",
then how is one to explain the playing of the azaadi
(freedom) card into the hands of the Pakistani
state's surrogates like Hizb-ul-Mujahideen by
1994? If the early "intifada" phase
was indeed secular, how could zealot
Pakistan-centered Islamist outfits like
Harkat-ul-Ansar take over the entire momentum
of fighting in J&K so suddenly? Bose, who
has conducted field visits to J&K, states
that pro-Pakistan views constitute a minority
opinion in the state, but fails to explore why
thousands of Kashmiri youth joined ISI
(Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence)
brainchild organizations alongside
"foreign/guest militants".
Since the late 1990s, Pakistan-based terrorist
groups have launched more than 55 deadly
fedayeen attacks (suicide missions) in J&K
and other parts of India. Bose is sanguine to
the reality that suicidal warfare is "not
exclusively a cross-border phenomenon",
but involved Kashmiri-speaking local Muslims.
In Muslim-majority Rajouri and Poonch
districts of Jammu also, "the rhetoric of
jihad has had some effect" on local
youth. (p 157) In guerrilla ranks that were
killed after 1990, the overall
local-to-foreigner ratio stands at 70-30, a
statistic that should have led Bose to examine
the sinuous ascent of religious fundamentalism
in J&K.
Vetting existing solutions, Bose rejects a
plebiscite as an obsolete idea that is
infeasible because India is against it and
Pakistan has no genuine commitment to it.
Independent statehood for Kashmir based on a
plebiscite is a "rigid monolithic
conception" likely to herald a countdown
to all-out civil war owing to its
winner-takes-all dispensation. Bosnia's 1992
sovereignty plebiscite unleashed bloody
partition and ethnic cleansing Europe hasn't
witnessed in half a century. The Good Friday
agreement's plebiscitary clauses in Northern
Ireland are also rife with inflammatory
possibilities, jeopardizing the losers'
future.
Converting the Line of Control (LoC) into a de
jure international border is dismissed by
Bose as "astonishingly naive" as
"no Pakistani regime or leader can or
will accept it". (p 179) Summary
treatment of this scheme reveals Bose's
misreading of history. In 1972, premier
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto did accept the selfsame
legalization of the LoC in a secret protocol
to the Simla Agreement with his counterpart,
Indira Gandhi.
The Hindu nationalist solution of trifurcating
J&K on religious majority basis by carving
out Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh as separate
administrative entities within India is
rightly described as "incendiary and
counter-productive". If such a plan were
to be implemented, the logic of the 1947
partition of the sub-continent would be
replicated with attendant mass displacements
and violence.
Bose's own model for peace calls for a process
that accepts all competing identities and
rejects none - "a strategic compromise
between opposed perspectives". (p 208)
Rival political preferences (pro-independence,
pro-India and pro-Pakistan) must coexist in
mutual recognition and tolerance, ie
"consociation" similar to the
Northern Ireland agreements.
At the Track 1 level, Bose recommends an
institutionalized permanent inter-governmental
India-Pakistan council on Kashmir.
Cross-border terrorism and the changed
geopolitical climate after September 11, 2001
render chances of achieving this rather slim.
Bose, who has authored a separate book on Sri
Lanka's ethnic conflict, could have adduced
the comparative example of vast improvement in
India-Sri Lanka relations once India
disentangled itself in 1991 from the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
India-Pakistan relations can improve
dramatically if the jihad tap is plugged in
Islamabad.
At the Track 2 level, Bose seeks a
representative and accountable political
framework in J&K to ensure minimum quality
of governance. He supports "maximum
devolution of decision-making powers from the
center" to approximate the pre-1953
division of powers between autonomous J&K
and federal India. However, no realistic
safeguard is provided for India to prevent
"maximum autonomy" from degenerating
into Sheikh Abdullah-style majoritarian
autocracy-cum-secessionism that would today be
openly Islamist unlike in the pre-1953 era. A
corollary change Bose tables is narrowing
inter-regional and intra-regional differences
among Kashmir, Ladakh and Jammu.
Simultaneously, Bose calls for an inclusive
and representative order in Pakistani Kashmir
where severe restrictions on freedoms
"need to be minimized". (p 255) This
is another woolly headed proposition, as
Islamabad faces no armed revolt abetted by a
neighboring country in "Azad" (Free)
J&K to concede any liberties.
Still on Track 2, Bose wants "an
acknowledgement by the government of India
that large-scale abuses have occurred, and
that these are regretted". (p 258)
Typically, he sidesteps a corollary apology
from jihadi terrorists who have acted brutally
on civilians of all hues in J&K in the
name of azaadi.
Track 3 in Bose's design requires
transformation of the LoC "from an iron
curtain to a linen curtain", ie
cross-border economic and cultural linkages
between Indian Kashmir and Pakistani Kashmir.
In the current scenario of relentless
infiltration by holy warriors into Indian
Kashmir from the other side, this suggestion
too fails to convince. If "soft
borders" are not preceded by genuine
decommissioning and laying down of arms by
jihad outfits based in "Azad"
J&K, they would augur more violence and
infiltration of illegal human and materiel
cargo.
To sum it up, Bose has invested rational
intellect and humanist thought into this
venture, but at numerous junctures headed off
on unilinear paths motivated by sheer
subjectivity. Total lack of reflection on
radical Islam and its effects on Kashmir
especially disappoint the reader. The book is
still worth reading as a 'liberal' shot at
mapping out the Kashmir maze.
Kashmir. Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace
by Sumantra Bose, Sage Publications India,
2003, Delhi. ISBN: 81-7829-328-5, price: US$6,
307 pages.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact [email protected]
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
the multiple strands of allegiances over
Kashmir and to accommodate them all in a
skillful compromise. Bose's preoccupation is
with "reframing the Kashmir question as a
challenge for democratic politics" and
building a polity that makes up the democratic
deficit.
