Srinagar. Graveyard of elected governments. As an all too familiar requiem for the dead is played out on the streets of Kashmir’s grim capital where yet another generation of the hot-headed and gullible are being sucked into a vortex of violence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is banking on the political instincts of the eminence grise of the Congress party — the union home minister P.Chidambaram and the finance minister Pranab Mukherjee — to pull India out of the raging fire.
Despite their well-earned reputation for trouble-shooting, no-one gives this flawed initiative much of a chance.
Not when the stone throwing teen has used the David versus the Indian Goliath imagery to his advantage and the world is watching.
Not when the visit of US President Barack Obama will give a boost to the Kashmir story (Remember President Bill Clinton’s visit and the massacre of 2000), a foot in the door that neither Pakistan nor the militants/separatists/Islamists, cashing in on the huge wave of anti-Indian feeling, will ignore.
Not when the opposition BJP will chant the former poet-prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s insaniyat mantra for talks; the enduring benchmark by which separatists will judge any government or initiative that comes after.
The Vajpayee peace package saw the Congress trying to walk a fine line, seeking to forge its own peace intitiative with Pakistan, willing to walk away from the stale formulas of the past to explore the soft borders option, while staying true to the Indian constitution.
It was a formula that peaceniks embraced, and left Pakistan’s ISI frothing. But the peace plan slipped through Delhi’s fingers, even though the moment to tie up the loose ends presented itself like no other. Pakistan, distracted by its own inner demons, allowed its gaze to shift and let peace descend over the Valley. Delhi, complacent over landmark elections that saw an unprecedented voter turnout, saw no more reason to make any concessions, believing that its own democratic plurality would be the salve for the Kashmiri soul.
This delegation from Delhi could be equally blind to the Kashmiri subtext. The over-riding images these last three months are of armed soldiers and/or policemen taking aim at pre-pubescent stone-pelters. The anger, so long suppressed at towns and villages turning into armed camps, at areas being closed off after dark, flamed, with the right spark, into the Palestinian intifada redux. But it’s taken three months for Delhi to voice even a modicum of discomfort.
The wall on Facebook sites like ‘I protest against the atrocities on Kashmir’ is plastered with messages by the angry and the very young, laced with hatred towards the ‘hukumat’. For politicians and Kashmir-watchers alike, the Facebook and Youtube images are a disturbing eye-opener. Gnawing away is the unwelcome thought — could the views and resentment that one associates with embittered Hurriyat leaders have percolated so far down the ladder to the ordinary Kashmiri?
Sifting between a volatile mix of fact and fiction, embellished many times over, has always been difficult in this Kafkaesque state where the midnight knock on the door could be the terrorist from across the border looking for food and shelter or, as easily, the army in hot pursuit. The martyrs’ graveyards that pepper Kashmir’s interiors are a bone-chilling reminder of the many lives needlessly lost, generations scarred and twisted in this battle for the mind of the Kashmiri.
But surely, that was yesterday. Not 2010, a bare two years after the Kashmiri sought to reverse the discourse, shut his door on the terrorist and his Pakistani handler, and send out the subtle message that he may just want to be a part of the Indian success story? Clearly, the game’s changed again.
The ISI, under increased scrutiny from a Washington intent on safeguarding its men in Afghanistan, may have taken its foot off the Kashmir pedal. But with Afghanistan up for grabs after a US drawdown in 2011, that phase may be now over. Just as there is a newfound urgency in GHQ, Rawalpindi, to see that their proxy Taliban secure Afghanistan’s southern provinces, so too the move to not look the Kashmiri gift horse in the mouth. For the first time in three months, Kashmiris living across the border in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir held a protest on Saturday. And Pakistan’s foreign minister and ISI mouthpiece Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s glee was all too obvious on Friday, as India’s Kashmir policy collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
For Delhi to claw its way back into the Kashmiri mindspace will require a judicious mix of heart and hammer. Withdrawing AFSPA and the tokenism that it entails may or may not be a starting point. But it could be a beginning. All it does, say the young on Facebook, is to give the Omar Abdullah government a face-saver.
Pakistan, of course, must be told, thus far and no further. Equally, the delegation must examine whether it should give a listen to youth on Facebook, who are driving this protest. So far, this is not a protest run by the militants. “Who are they going to meet, who will talk to them if they drive straight to Raj Bhawan,” asks a young man on Facebook.
It may be heartening to Delhi that Hurriyat leaders are trying to own the protests as their own, losing no time in cashing in, running up what looked like a Pakistani flag in Lal Chowk after last week’s Friday prayers. But the fact is, that while the stone-pelters may make separatists like Syed Ali Geelani irrelevant by doing exactly the opposite of what he asks, India’s top priority — and that of the delegation — is to return
the valley to a semblance of
normalcy.
It cannot allow children to be shot at, for a people to endure night after night of curfew, and the fiat of the militant who shuts cities down during the day and reintroduces the unrelenting overlay of a foreign idiom over its unique identity, its Kashmiriyat.
Kashmir may never return to the age of innocence, but equally it cannot only hear a requiem for its dead.