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Kashmir issue : Pick up the lost thread |
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Former Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri’s revelation that India and Pakistan were close to a settlement of the Kashmir issue during General Pervez Musharraf’s rule confirms the widely held view that back-channel talks between the two countries had made a lot of progress at the time. It now appears that the secret negotiations, which began in 2004, had by early 2007, produced the outline of an accord that would have allowed a gradual demilitarisation of the entire Jammu and Kashmir.
Investigative journalist Steve Coll, in a recent article in the New Yorker, has brought out that the attempt ultimately failed not because of substantive differences but because Pervez Musharraf’s weakened position left him without the clout to sell the solution at home in Pakistan. The General had become embroiled in a feud with the Supreme Court, which culminated in his resignation and replacement by Asif Ali Zardari.
Media reports say that the settlement worked out at over two dozen meetings in overseas locations provided for resolving the Kashmir conflict through the creation of an autonomous region in which residents could move freely and conduct trade on both sides. It was expected that over time, the border and the Line of Control, LoC, would become irrelevant, and declining violence would allow a gradual withdrawal of lakhs of troops on both sides.
The settlement would have changed the basic nature of the problem and led ultimately to a paradigm shift in Indo-Pakistan relations.
Steve Coll has said that Musharraf’s declining clout forced him to seek a delay in formalisation of the accord.
Events since 2007 have created more obstacles in working out a solution to the Kashmir issue. The November 26 terror attack in Mumbai has brought the composite dialogue between the two countries to a screeching halt. Pakistan’s dilly-dallying on cooperating with India for punishing those responsible for the Mumbai terror strikes, most of them based in Pakistan, has further reduced the prospects of picking up the thread of back-channel parleys from where it got snapped in 2007.
But neither India nor Pakistan can deny that the framework for a Kashmir settlement continues to exist and that it would be in the interest of both countries and the region if the move is revived and carried forward.
Internally, positive developments such as the successful conduct of Assembly elections, universally acknowledged as the most free and fair ever held in the state, have created hopes of resolution of at least the domestic dimensions of the Kashmir issue.
Fortunately, even though the composite dialogue has come to a halt, there has been no going back upon the confidence building measures, CBMs, especially those relating to increasing people-to-people contacts.
It would be in the fitness of things if both India and Pakistan make efforts to resume the back-channel dialogue from where it got disrupted in 2007. This would be especially beneficial for the Zardari-Gilani dispensation in Pakistan, as a Kashmir settlement would help them to ward off attempts from the Army to again encroach into the civilian domain. Of course, it would be a god-sent for the people of Kashmir, especially those living in the Pakistan-occupied part.
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