The survey reading of Kashmir Conflict
This assignment should be done on two readings attached below
The guidelines for the writing of survey readings ( attached below )of two reading materials are as follow:
The four-page reflection is a critical reading analysis — where you may include key questions and/or critique. ➢ A critical analysis is subjective writing because it expresses the writer’s opinion based on the evaluation of texts. ➢ It will be important to identify the key theme(s) and the purpose of your reading, analyze the importance of the main idea(s). ➢ Have one or two key questions as points of inquiry. Summarize your readings and observations with reason. ➢ Consider the following questions: 1. Why/how did the readings affect you? 2. How is the material organized? 3. What does it clearly address?
In the early eve ning of Friday, June 11, 2010, Tufail Ahmad Mat-too, 17, was walking home in Srinagar, the capital city of the Kashmir Valley. In the fi nal year of secondary school, he had a
busy schedule. He had just fi nished a session at a coaching center for a
medical school entrance examination.
The walk home through Srinagar’s bustling streets that summer eve-
ning would be Tufail’s last. At Rajouri Kadal, a congested locality in the
old city of Srinagar that is known for wildcat demonstrations by groups
of youths who suddenly emerge from lanes and by- lanes to confront pa-
trols of the Jammu & Kashmir police and the Indian Union government’s
Central Reserve Police Force, tasked with keeping order in restive neigh-
borhoods, Tufail was caught up in such a fracas. The detachment of the
J&K state police fi red tear- gas shells to disperse their adversaries. One
shell hit Tufail’s head as it exploded. The impact split the boy’s skull
open, and his brain spilled out. He died instantly.
Tufail’s death ignited a summer of rage in the Kashmir Valley. Over the
next three and a half months, until late September, the Kashmir Valley
was convulsed by stone- pelting protests as tens of thousands of people,
predominantly teenage boys and young men in their twenties, confronted
the state police and the CRPF across the Valley day after day, week after
week. When the extraordinary eruption of public disorder subsided in
the autumn, about 120 protesters were dead, shot by the police and the
CRPF and occasionally by Indian army personnel. About 1,500 stone-
throwers sustained serious injuries, and several hundred police and CRPF
personnel were also injured. The vast majority of the dead and seriously
C H A P T E R F I V E
The Kashmir Question
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2 2 6 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
injured stone- throwers were males aged between 15 and 30— that is,
persons who had been children, infants, or unborn when the Kashmir
Valley had descended into a maelstrom of violence 20 years earlier, in
1990, when an insurgency and uprising against Indian rule marked the
beginning of a brutal confl ict that lasted a de cade and a half before
subsiding.
Tufail Mattoo’s family, middle- class people, with no strong po liti cal
beliefs, wished their son to be buried in a family graveyard plot. But that
was not to be. On June 12, 2010, Tufail’s body was carried in a pro-
cession of thousands chanting slogans for azaadi (freedom) from India
through Srinagar and buried in the “martyrs’ graveyard” in the old city’s
Eidgah neighborhood, where a few thousand slain insurgents and other
po liti cal activists have been laid to rest since 1990. The crowds fought
pitched and running battles with the police and the CRPF before, during,
and after the funeral. The stone- throwers’ uprising sparked by Tufail’s
death spread and intensifi ed over the next three months, and its fury, re-
ported worldwide by international media and daily, often in graphic de-
tail, by Indian tele vi sion channels and newspapers, shocked India’s po liti-
cal establishment and urban middle class, who had come to believe that
a steep decline in insurgency since 2004 meant that “normalcy” had re-
turned to Kashmir. The eruption subsided in the autumn, worn down by
severe restrictions on public assembly and freedom of movement. But it
had shown that a po liti cal problem still existed in the Kashmir Valley
and that a new generation of its youth were as aggrieved with Indian
authority as the generation that had produced thousands of Kalashnikov-
wielding militants during the fi rst half of the 1990s.
Tufail Mattoo’s family, neighbors, friends, and teachers all recalled his
most endearing trait: his gentleness. “What a polite boy he was,” a
woman neighbor said sotto voce. Indeed, photographs of Tufail taken at
the Srinagar schools where he studied— the Little Angels’ School, where
he did elementary schooling, the Radiant Public School, where he did
middle schooling and fi nished tenth grade, and the Government Higher
Secondary School, where he was a twelfth- grader when he died— all show
a slightly built boy with sensitivity writ large on his face. “Tufail was an
extremely gentle boy,” the headmaster of Radiant Public School recalled.
“There were 120 students in that [tenth grade] class in 2008, and Tufail
was the most polite one. All I can say is that his gentleness made him very
different from other students.”
Tufail’s parents were too shattered to engage with the avalanche of
public and media attention, but an uncle who fl ew in from Oman to at-
tend his last rites recalled Tufail’s compassion for the less fortunate.
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 2 7
Three months before his death Tufail bought a jacket, which he wore for
a couple of days, until he happened to walk past a boy of the same age
shivering in the winter cold in Amira Kadal, in the heart of downtown
Srinagar. “He took off the jacket and handed it to the boy,” the uncle re-
membered; “I just watched him.” A schoolmate confi rmed that Tufail had
“some sort of obsession with the needy. Whenever he spotted a person in
need, he would try to help.” Tufail’s interests were “playing cricket, read-
ing books and driving.” His family had ordered a car as his eigh teenth
birthday present. This likeable teenager from a middle- class family might
have made a fi ne doctor, had he passed that entrance examination. In-
stead he will be remembered as Shaheed (Martyr) Tufail Ahmad Mattoo,
a notable name in Kashmir’s pantheon of “martyrs.”1
The Kashmir question is usually viewed through the lens of the interna-
tional dispute over the territory’s own ership between India and Pakistan,
which has existed since 1947. This perspective necessarily foregrounds
the religious dimension and the Hindu- Muslim confl ict that led to the
subcontinent’s partition in 1947. The Indian standpoint is that the
avowedly secular Indian Union needs the Indian state of J&K, the only
one of the Union’s 28 states that has a majority of Muslims in its
population— about two- thirds—to be complete. This standpoint is con-
tested by the Pakistani claim that as a Muslim- majority territory that is
more territorially contiguous to Pakistan than to India, most, if not all, of
the disputed entity ought to belong to Pakistan, an explicitly Muslim
nation- state. These competing ideological claims have produced diamet-
rically opposed positions on the sovereignty dispute. The Indian position
is that the whole of the disputed territory is an “integral part” (atut ang)
of India and emphasizes the legal fact that the last ruler of the princely
state of Jammu and Kashmir acceded his domain to India in October
1947. In this view the parts of the former princely state that have been
under Pakistan’s control since the end of the fi rst India- Pakistan war over
Kashmir in January 1949 rightfully belong to India, although in practice
Indian governments since the mid- 1950s have been content with the ter-
ritorial status quo, as about three- quarters of the population of the dis-
puted entity live on the Indian side of the de facto border, known as the
Ceasefi re Line until 1972 and the Line of Control since then, that divides
the former princely state between the two countries. The typical Paki-
stani view is that the territorial status quo is a grave injustice to Pakistan
as well as to the people living under Indian jurisdiction, who have not
had the opportunity to choose whether to be part of India or Pakistan.
(A United Nations– supervised referendum, or plebiscite, was to settle the
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2 2 8 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
sovereignty dispute in the early 1950s, and India and Pakistan blame
each other for its nonoccurrence.) In Pakistani nationalist rhetoric, the
former princely state is Pakistan’s “jugular vein” (shah rug), most of
which has been usurped by India.
The typical Pakistani view of the Kashmir question as a case of Mus-
lims oppressed in and by Hindu- majority India has a mirror- image coun-
terpart in India: that a perennial problem exists in India’s only Muslim-
majority state because the state’s Muslims, or a large proportion thereof,
have always been and continue to be congenitally disloyal to the ideal of
the secular Indian nation- state and are a fi fth column for Pakistan. Thus,
this story goes, it is no wonder that they are the perpetual malcontents of
Indian democracy and troublemakers who waged an armed revolt from
1990 and have persisted after the decline of the insurgency in sporadi-
cally expressing their disloyalty through other means, such as the mass
rioting of 2010.
This reifi cation of religion and religious difference is grossly misleading.
The violence that engulfed the Indian state of J&K through the 1990s and
well into the fi rst de cade of the new century was not due to the fact that
the majority of the state’s people had a religious faith that was at once dif-
ferent from the majority of other citizens of India and the same as that of
the vast majority of Pakistan’s population. The insurgency against Indian
authority was rooted instead in the gradual radicalization, over a period of
four de cades from the 1950s through the end of the 1980s, of a distinct
regional identity and po liti cal tradition specifi c to the Kashmir Valley. Re-
ligion has been and continues to be an important constitutive element of
this regional identity, not least because the Kashmir Valley is an over-
whelmingly Muslim region, and appeals couched in religious idioms have
fi gured prominently in po liti cal struggles and mobilizations since the be-
ginnings of mass- based politics in the Valley in the early 1930s.
Yet the regional identity of the Kashmir Valley, like all the regional
identities evolved over historical time that together make up the rich and
diverse social mosaic of contemporary India, is not one- dimensional but
complex and multifaceted. It draws on deep wellsprings of a common
culture shaped over centuries, in which a language- based heritage is a
vital constitutive element. Kashmiri, a Dardic variant of the Indo- Aryan
family of languages that retains Sanskritic features from the pre- Islamic
era in Kashmir, is the native tongue of the vast majority of the Valley’s
people. A religious faith rooted in a par tic u lar Kashmiri form of Islam is
another such element.
The regional identity of the Kashmir Valley is not qualitatively differ-
ent from numerous other regional identities that are quite at peace in and
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 2 9
with the Indian Union. That the Kashmir Valley is not at such peace is
because the Valley’s people were continuously, and eventually deeply,
alienated from the Indian Union due to authoritarian control and inter-
vention imposed on them by the Center (New Delhi). As a result, the
Indian state of J&K, and particularly the Kashmir Valley, where the
majority of the state’s population lives, was denied the demo cratic and
quasi- federal development that became the norm, and the fundamental
source of strength, of the Indian Union. This post- 1947 history explains
why the Kashmir Valley is the Achilles’ heel of India’s democracy in the
early twenty- fi rst century: a weak spot that tarnishes an otherwise vibrant
democracy that is today unmistakably evolving as a federation of distinct
and diverse regional polities.
This chapter focuses primarily on the Kashmir Valley, a region of about
7.5 million people. I give less attention to, though I do not ignore, the
other two regions of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir— the Jammu
region of about 5.5 million people, which lies south of the Valley and
whose social composition and po liti cal dynamics are different from the
Valley’s, and the Ladakh region, a sparsely populated mountain desert of
300,000 people that lies northeast of the Valley. Likewise, I refer only
when necessary to the two regions of the former princely state that lie
across the Line of Control, have a total population of under 5 million, and
are referred to as “Pakistan- occupied Kashmir” in India: “Azad” (Free)
J&K, a long sliver of territory comprising mainly western Jammu dis-
tricts whose cultural character is close to contiguous areas of Pakistan’s
Punjab province, and Gilgit and Baltistan to its north and northeast, a
vast and sparsely populated high- altitude wilderness similar to Ladakh
and referred to in Pakistan as the Northern Areas.
A Regional Identity
Walter R. Lawrence was a British offi cial who was deputed to the Kash-
mir Valley as “settlement commissioner” in 1889. His job was to reform
the land revenue system of this region of the princely state of Jammu and
Kashmir, which had been established in 1846 as a vassal principality of
the British colonial power, ruled by a Hindu dynasty originally from the
Jammu region. When the British departed India in 1947, there were
about 562 such principalities, covering 45 percent of the subcontinent’s
land area, governed by an assemblage of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh vassal
rulers. This extraordinary network developed through the nineteenth
century formed the pillar of the British practice of “indirect rule” in India.
Jammu and Kashmir was one of the largest princely states in territory
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2 3 0 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
and population, along with Hyderabad in the south (where, in a mirror
image of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim dynasty and ruling elite pre-
sided over a subject population of which Hindus comprised the large
majority).
Walter Lawrence spent six years in the Kashmir Valley and in 1895
published his book The Valley of Kashmir. He wrote: “if one looks at the
map of the territories of His Highness the Maharaja of Jammu and Kash-
mir, one sees a white footprint set in a mass of black mountains. This is
the valley of Kashmir, known to its inhabitants as Kashir. Perched se-
curely among the Himalayas at an average height of about 6,000 feet
above the sea, it is about 84 miles in length and 20 to 25 miles in breadth.
North, east and west, range after range of mountains guard the valley
from the outer world, while in the south it is cut off from the Panjab by
rocky barriers 50 to 75 miles in width.” The Valley’s population was then
814,241, of whom “52,576 are Hindus, 4,092 are Sikhs, and the rest are
Musalmans, who thus form over 93 percent.”2
The Valley of “Kashir” has an ancient lineage as a cultural and po liti-
cal unit. In the eighth century Lalitaditya, the king of Kashmir, built an
imperial domain centered on the Valley that encompassed a swathe of
the plains of northern India and parts of Tibet, Af ghan i stan, and Central
Asia. An epic chronicle of Kashmir from antiquity to the eleventh century
was composed around 1149 by Kalhana, the son of a minister in the
royal court. Written in Sanskrit, the classical language of pre- Islamic In-
dia, the chronicle is called Rajatarangini (The fl ow of kings) and has
7,826 verses divided into eight books. Rajatarangini was translated into
En glish in 1900 by Marc Aurel Stein, a British explorer and scholar, as
“A Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir.”3
Islam arrived in the Kashmir Valley in the fourteenth century and
spread rapidly. The conversion of all but a tiny fraction of the population
from Hinduism was due to the proselytizing of wandering Sufi mystics.
A crucial fi gure was Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, a Persian Sufi from
Hamedan in western Iran. Hamadani, known in Kashmir as Shah Ham-
dan, made three visits to the Valley during the 1370s and 1380s with
hundreds of disciples, many of whom settled in Kashmir. A mosque com-
memorating him, the Khanqah- e-Maula, was built in Srinagar in the
1390s on the bank of the Jhelum River. It still stands on the original site
in an imposing eighteenth- century version.
Kashmir’s Sufi heritage is, however, identifi ed above all with an indig-
enous saintly fi gure, Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani. This mystic, also known
among Muslims and non- Muslims in the Valley by the Sanskritic (and
Hindu- sounding) name Nund Rishi (Nund the Saint), was born around
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 3 1
1377 in a village south of Srinagar and lived until about 1440. His life
was deeply infl uenced by Lalleshwari (c. 1320– 1392), a woman mystic of
the Hindu Shaivite sect, which was infl uential in Kashmir at the time; its
followers worship the deity Shiva. Lalleshwari, known as Lal Ded in the
Valley and venerated as a saint, expressed her spirituality through poetry
composed as couplets in the Kashmiri language. She can be regarded as
the found er of the Kashmiri literary tradition. Her infl uence on Sheikh
Noorani was so great that he has been referred to as a “Muslim Shaivite”
who “translated Islam into Kashmir’s spiritual and cultural idiom.”4 He
could be called the Kashmir Valley’s patron saint and is referred to as
Alamdar- e-Kashmir (The Standard- Bearer of Kashmir). His mausoleum-
shrine is in Charar- e-Sharief, a small town about 20 miles southwest of
Srinagar. In 1995 the shrine and most of the town were razed by fi re dur-
ing a gun- battle between Indian army troops and insurgents who had
holed up in the holy premises, sparking anguish in the Valley. The shrine
has been reconstructed and continues to be a center of pilgrimage for
Kashmiri Muslims as well as the Valley’s Hindus and Sikhs.
Sheikh Noorani’s syncretistic philosophy set the tone of Islamic belief
and practice in the Kashmir Valley, and the specifi cally regional variant
of Sufi sm he pioneered is the dominant religious tradition at the pop u lar
level in the Valley to this day. One of those infl uenced by his preaching
was Zain- ul- Abidin, the greatest of Kashmir’s indigenous medieval rulers
(sultans), who reigned from about 1423 to 1474. A square in the center
of Srinagar, Badshah Chowk, is named after Zain- ul- Abidin, who is
known as Badshah (Great Ruler). He reversed the intolerant policies of
his father, Sultan Sikandar, who had persecuted Hindus, especially Brah-
mins who would not convert, and vandalized ancient Hindu and Bud-
dhist monuments. The son reinstated religious tolerance, got Hindus who
had fl ed the Valley to return by abolishing the jiziya (a tax on non-
Muslims), restored grants paid to learned Brahmins, and had Kalhana’s
Rajatarangini translated into Persian.
The legacy of Nund Rishi and Zain- ul- Abidin is writ large six centuries
later in the everyday practice of the dominant faith in the Kashmir Valley.
The towns and villages are full of ziarats, shrines dedicated to Sufi saints,
some of whom are women. These “Muslim saints are worshipped like
Hindu gods and godlings.” Relic worship, which has its roots in Bud-
dhism, was infl uential in pre- Islamic Kashmir although persecuted by
some of the later Hindu monarchs.5 It endures most famously in the
gleaming- white Hazratbal shrine on the outskirts of Srinagar, where a
hair believed to be from the head of the Prophet Mohammad is preserved.
The Kashmiri literary tradition pioneered by Lal Ded has also found
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2 3 2 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
illustrious exponents, from the late sixteenth- century female singer and
poet Habba Khatun, whose compositions are suffused with longing and
loss, to the innovative twentieth- century poet Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor.6
A narrative of victimhood prevalent in the Kashmir Valley stresses a
history of subjugation going back over four centuries to 1586, when the
Valley was annexed by the Mughal Empire, which ruled from Delhi. The
Mughal emperors’ main interest in the Valley was as a summer resort
where they repaired to escape the heat and dust of the plains. During the
fi rst half of the seventeenth century the Mughals laid out beautiful gar-
dens overlooking Srinagar’s Dal Lake that are preserved to this day. By
the middle of the eigh teenth century the Mughal Empire was in advanced
decline. In 1752 marauders from Af ghan i stan led by a warrior- king of
the Pashtun Durrani tribe conquered the Valley. Afghan rule lasted until
1819, when forces loyal to Ranjit Singh (1780– 1839), a Sikh warlord,
captured the Kashmir Valley. In the early nineteenth century Singh estab-
lished an extensive kingdom across northwestern India that mostly cov-
ered large parts of the present- day Punjab and Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa
(North- West Frontier Province) provinces of Pakistan, with its capital in
Lahore, close to Pakistan’s border with India.
The Princely State
The succession of conquerors and occupiers notwithstanding, the period
and overlordship truly relevant to understanding the Kashmir Valley
since 1947 is the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir created in 1846
under British tutelage and suzerainty. The founding ruler of the princely
state was Gulab Singh (1792– 1857), a warrior belonging to a Rajput
(Jamwal) caste of the Dogra ethnic group, who live in large numbers
now, as then, in the southern parts of the Jammu region. Gulab Singh
rose to prominence as a commander in Ranjit Singh’s army. After the
Sikh monarch’s death in 1839, his expansive kingdom began to disinte-
grate due to lack of leadership and internal feuding. Gulab Singh became
an ally of the British— strictly speaking the East India Company, which
moved to assume direct or indirect control over the huge and disparate
areas of Ranjit Singh’s domain. In return for Gulab Singh’s collaboration,
the British gave him the Kashmir Valley, a remote region they were not
interested in directly administering and garrisoning. This was accom-
plished in 1846 under the Treaty of Amritsar. (Amritsar, a city in India’s
Punjab province, is close to the post- 1947 India- Pakistan border, is a
short distance from Lahore, and is famous for Sikhism’s holiest shrine,
the Golden Temple.)
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 3 3
The Treaty of Amritsar was preceded by the Treaty of Lahore, signed
on March 9, 1846, between the British and an effete son of the valiant
Ranjit Singh. A clause of this treaty ceded “perpetual sovereignty” over
“the hill countries” of the Sikh kingdom, “including the provinces of
Cashmere and Hazarah,” to the British. A week later, on March 16, the
Treaty of Amritsar was signed, which stipulated: “The British Govern-
ment transfers and makes over, for ever, in in de pen dent possession, to
Maharaja [Great King] Gulab Singh and the heirs male of his body, all the
hilly or mountainous country . . . being part of the territories ceded to the
British Government by the Lahore state.” This meant above all the agri-
culturally fertile, naturally scenic and populous Valley of Kashmir, as well
as the sparsely populated and rugged region of Gilgit to its northwest
(Gilgit is part of Pakistan’s “Northern Areas”). In return Gulab Singh paid
the Company 75 lakh (7.5 million) rupees— a considerable sum in India
even today but a real bargain for the territory and souls he acquired as
subjects— acknowledged “the supremacy of the British Government,” and
agreed, “in token of such supremacy, to present annually to the British
Government one horse, twelve perfect shawl goats of approved breed (six
male and six female), and three pairs of Kashmir shawls.”7
Gulab Singh already had control of the Jammu region, a mix of plains,
foothills, and mountainous tracts, and had also acquired the vast and
scantily populated high- altitude zones of Ladakh and Baltistan through
military expeditions led by one of his colleagues. Thus the acquisition of
the Kashmir Valley (and Gilgit) completed the territory of the new entity:
the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. C. E. Tyndale Biscoe, a British
missionary who worked as an educator in the Kashmir Valley in the early
twentieth century— one of Srinagar’s best schools is named after him—
noted the polyglot nature of the sprawling entity, a menagerie of diverse
regions and communities, in a book published in 1922: “to write about
the character of the Kashmiris is not easy, as the country of Kashmir, in-
cluding the province of Jammu, is large and contains many races of people.
Then again, these various countries included under the name of Kashmir
are separated . . . by high mountain passes, so that the people of these
various states differ considerably . . . in features, manner, customs, lan-
guage, character and religion.”8
The eternity promised by the British to Gulab Singh and his successors
by the Treaty of Amritsar lasted 101 years, until 1947. After the found er’s
death in 1857, Ranbir Singh ruled until 1885, Pratap Singh until 1925,
and Hari Singh, the last maharaja, held court until events in the autumn
of 1947 literally imploded the princely state. The hundred- year reign of
the tinpot monarchy appointed as subcontractors of the Raj was an
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2 3 4 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
unmitigated disaster for the peasantry of Muslim faith who made up the
overwhelming majority of the Valley’s population.
Walter Lawrence wrote: “when I fi rst came to Kashmir in 1889, I found
the people sullen, desperate and suspicious. They had been taught for
many years that they were serfs without any rights. . . . Pages might be
written by me on facts which have come under my personal observation,
but it will suffi ce to say that the system of administration had degraded
the people and taken all heart out of them.” Lawrence was especially hor-
rifi ed by the practice of begar, forced labor with no compensation, rou-
tinely infl icted on the mass of peasant serfs. He was careful to absolve the
ruler of personal culpability: “the peasants, one and all, attributed their
miseries to the deputies through which the Maharajas ruled, and they
have always recognized that their rulers were sympathetic and anxious to
ensure their prosperity. But the offi cials of Kashmir would never allow
their master to know the real condition of the people.” Who were these
venal offi cials? Lawrence was particularly critical of princely state offi –
cials belonging to the Kashmiri Pandit community, the tiny religious mi-
nority (4– 5 percent) of Brahmin caste indigenous to the Valley:
In a country where education has not yet made much progress it is only
natural that the State should employ the Pandits, who at any rate can read
and write. . . . They are a local agency, and as they have depended on offi ce
as a means of existence for many generations, it is just and expedient to
employ them. Still it is to be regretted that the interests of the State and the
people should have been entrusted to one class of men, and still more to be
regretted that these men, the Pandits, should have systematically combined
to defraud the State and to rob the people. . . . Though this generosity in the
matter of offi cial establishments was an enormous boon to the Pandit class,
it was a curse and misfortune to the Musalmans of Kashmir. . . . I have no
wish to condemn the Pandits. . . . But . . . it is necessary to grasp the fact
that offi cial morality has, generally speaking, been non- existent.9
Walter Lawrence was not the fi rst outsider to be mortifi ed by the ab-
ject circumstances of the vast majority of the Kashmir Valley’s people
under the princely state. In a book titled Cashmere Misgovernment, pub-
lished from Calcutta in 1868, Robert Thorp wrote: “in no portion of the
treaty made with Gulab Singh was the slightest provision made for the
just or humane government of the people of Cashmere and others upon
whom we forced a government which they detested.”10 Indeed, Lawrence
was sent to Kashmir as part of a British attempt to reform governance
after a famine devastated the Valley between 1877 and 1879, but the
Raj’s intervention had to wait until Ranbir Singh died in 1885 and was
replaced by a relatively more pliable successor, Pratap Singh. In 1890
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 3 5
Col o nel R. Parry Nisbet, the “resident” (term for the top British supervi-
sor in princely states) in Jammu and Kashmir, wrote to his superiors that
“Kashmir [should] no longer be governed solely to benefi t the ruling
family and the rapacious horde of Hindu offi cials and Pandits, but also
for its people, the long suffering indigenous Muhammadans.”11
That proved to be a forlorn hope. In his chronicle of Kashmir at the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lawrence trumpeted his
efforts to improve the conditions of the peasantry of the Valley, but
the high- minded reformism of the white man had practically no effect on
the brutal realities of power and penury in the princely state. A similar
effort in the 1930s, after pop u lar re sis tance to the established order
emerged, proved ineffectual with a regime incapable of reform. In 1929
Sir Albion Bannerji, a Bengali (and Christian) civil servant who served as
the princely state’s “foreign and po liti cal minister” in the late 1920s, re-
signed in disgust after two years. He explained to the Associated Press:
“Jammu and Kashmir state is laboring under many disadvantages with
a large Muhammedan population absolutely illiterate, laboring under
poverty . . . in the villages and practically governed like dumb- driven
cattle. There is no touch between the Government and the people, no
suitable opportunity for representing grievances and the administrative
machinery requires overhauling from top to bottom. . . . It has at present
little or no sympathy with the people’s wants and grievances.”12
Tyndale Biscoe, fi red by missionary zeal, was more optimistic. He
wrote in 1922: “if we Britishers had to undergo what the Kashmiris have
suffered, we might also have lost our manhood. But thank God, it has
been otherwise with us and other Western nations, for to us instead has
been given the opportunity of helping some of the weaker peoples of the
world, the Kashmiri among them. May we ever be true to our trust.
Gradually are the Kashmiris rising from slavery to manhood. . . . I trust
they will become once more a brave people, as they were in the days of
old when their own kings led them into battle.”13
Biscoe’s narrative is full of anecdotes of peasant- paupers living in con-
ditions resembling slavery in the countryside of the Kashmir Valley, and
the capital, Srinagar, which is set in a beautiful natural setting of lakes
and mountains, appears as a fetid city inhabited largely by illiterate and
wretched people. Indeed, in a book titled Kashmir Then and Now, pub-
lished in 1924, Gawasha Nath Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit, painted a Dick-
ensian picture of Srinagar: beggars, thieves, and prostitutes abounded
along with disease and fi lth, and “90 percent of Muslim houses [ were]
mortgaged to Hindu sahukars [moneylenders].” The overall situation
was, according to Kaul, “frightful.”14 Until 1924, the Kashmiri historian
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2 3 6 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
Mohammad Ishaq Khan writes, “there was not a single newspaper printed
or published in the State of Jammu and Kashmir.”15 Until 1920 a death
sentence was mandatory for a state subject who killed a cow, an act of
sacrilege in Hindu orthodoxy; in 1920 this was reduced to 10 years in
prison, and later to 7 years.
According to a census conducted in 1941, 77 percent of the princely
state’s inhabitants were Muslims, 20 percent were Hindus, and 3 percent
others, mostly Sikhs. But local Muslims were barred from becoming of-
fi cers in the princely state’s military forces and were almost non ex is tent
in the civil administration. In 1941 Prem Nath Bazaz, one of a handful of
Kashmiri Pandits who joined the pop u lar movement for change that
emerged during the 1930s and swept the Valley in the 1940s, wrote: “the
poverty of the Muslim masses is appalling. Dressed in rags and barefoot,
a Muslim peasant presents the appearance of a starving beggar. . . . Most
are landless laborers, working as serfs for absentee landlords. . . . Rural
indebtedness is staggering.”16
This po liti cal regime and social order revolted Walter Lawrence, Al-
bion Bannerji, and Tyndale Biscoe. But the challenge to it could not come
from well- meaning outsiders. It had to arise from within the society. It
did arise from 1931 onward, and its principal agent was Sheikh Moham-
mad Abdullah.
The Rise and Fall of Sheikh Abdullah
He was born in 1905 into a modestly off family in Soura, then a village
near Srinagar and today a neighborhood of the city. The family were late
converts to Islam; they were Brahmins until the late eigh teenth century,
when they were infl uenced by a saintly Sufi . From the late nineteenth
century, conditions in the princely state led to signifi cant migration of
people from the Kashmir Valley to the neighboring Punjab province of
“British”— as distinct from “princely”— India. In the 1920s an associa-
tion of Kashmiri migrants formed in Lahore started offering scholarships
to enable young Muslim males from the princely state to acquire higher
education in institutions in “British” India. One benefi ciary was Sheikh
Abdullah, who graduated from Lahore’s Islamia College and then earned
a master’s degree in chemistry in 1930 from the Aligarh Muslim Univer-
sity, situated in Aligarh, a town in the western part of postin de pen dence
India’s Uttar Pradesh state. This university was founded in 1875 as the
“Mohammedan Anglo- Oriental College” to provide the subcontinent’s
Muslims with access to modern, particularly Western, education. Abdullah
returned to the Valley to work as a schoolteacher and in 1930 established
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 3 7
the Reading Room Association in Srinagar, where a small number of edu-
cated young Muslim men gathered to discuss social issues. Physically a
very tall man but with a gentle, sensitive face, he is the most important
po liti cal leader the Kashmir Valley has ever produced.
The turning point came on July 13, 1931. The trial of a Muslim
sparked a protest in downtown Srinagar that was fi red on by the maha-
raja’s police. He was charged with making public remarks in a mosque
condemning the princely state’s regime and inciting fellow Muslims to
violence. The fi ring killed 22 demonstrators and triggered unpre ce dented
disorder in the city. Rioters sacked a commercial quarter of Srinagar
populated predominantly by Kashmiri Pandits and Hindu traders from
the Punjab. Until then the absence of pop u lar protest against the condi-
tions prevailing in the Valley was attributed to “the exceptionally docile
nature of the peasantry in the Vale,” consistent with Tyndale Biscoe’s
theory of a people whose “manhood” had been crushed by oppression.17
But in 1931 Albion Bannerji’s “ ‘dumb- driven cattle’ raised the standard
of revolt. The people were never to be cowed again by police action. The
women joined the struggle and to them belongs the honor of facing cav-
alry charges [by the maharaja’s police] in Srinagar’s Maisuma bazaar.”18
Eight de cades after the eruption of 1931, Maisuma, an old neighborhood
in the historic center of Srinagar, has changed remarkably little. It is still
a warren of wooden houses built in traditional Kashmiri style inhabited
by working- class and lower- middle- class people. The tradition of po-
liti cal struggle has also continued. During the fi rst half of the 1990s
Maisuma was a stronghold of gun- wielding proin de pen dence insurgents,
and in recent years its winding streets teem with stone- throwing youths
of the postinsurgency generation who emerge from alleys to confront
J&K police and CRPF personnel.
The British government appointed a commission to inquire into griev-
ances and suggest mea sures for redress. From the early 1930s pop u lar
politics, and re sis tance, grew in the Kashmir Valley, and the princely
state’s regime during its last two de cades in power swam against ever
stronger currents of the tide of history. Abdullah attracted attention as a
fi ery orator. Initially he was one leader among several of the All Jammu
and Kashmir Muslim Conference (hereafter Muslim Conference), a po-
liti cal party formed in October 1932 to provide direction to the nascent
mass movement. His rhetoric was pungent; according to a report by the
regime’s spies on a “seditious speech” by him in a village in 1933, he
urged the crowd to “take revenge” and “turn out Hindus.”19
By the late 1930s Abdullah’s politics had evolved in a more mature,
inclusive direction. In 1938, after internal debate and primarily at the
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2 3 8 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
initiative of Valley activists grouped around him, the Muslim Conference
resolved to “end communalism by ceasing to think in terms of Muslims
and non- Muslims” and invited “all Hindus and Sikhs who believe in the
freedom of their country [Jammu and Kashmir] from the shackles of an
irresponsible rule” to join the pop u lar struggle.20 The reasons for this
mutation may have included the presence of a tiny handful of Pandits
(and Sikhs) in the rising pop u lar movement in the Valley and the growing
infl uence of left- wing thinking among some of Abdullah’s colleagues. A
powerful underlying factor may have been the Valley’s syncretistic Sufi
heritage. In 1939 the Muslim Conference was formally renamed the All
Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) to refl ect the shift.
The transition was not unproblematic. In 1941 Muslim religious and
social conservatives, mostly from the Jammu region but including anti-
Abdullah elements in the Valley, broke away and revived the Muslim
Conference. This faction was increasingly drawn to the campaign for
Pakistan led by the All- India Muslim League and its leader Mohammad
Ali Jinnah as the 1940s progressed. The call to Jammu and Kashmir’s
religious minorities to participate alongside Muslims in the pop u lar
struggle also evoked a poor response. In the Valley, the vast majority of
Pandits remained aloof and were often hostile, and the few Pandits who
did join achieved unusual po liti cal prominence precisely because of their
deviant status in their own community.
Just as the movement for Pakistan— founded on a religion- based con-
cept of nationhood and po liti cal self- determination—gained momentum in
the subcontinent, the dominant tendency of the Kashmir Valley’s pop u lar
movement, led by Abdullah, moved in the opposite ideological direction.
In 1940 Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress leader who would go on to be
India’s fi rst prime minister from August 1947 until his death in May 1964,
visited the Valley on Abdullah’s invitation. Nehru had a familial connec-
tion with Kashmir, as his forebears were Kashmiri Pandits who had mi-
grated from the Valley to the plains of northern India. He was also a man
of socialistic and republican convictions whose natural sympathies lay
with the struggle against despotic feudalism in Kashmir. In 1944 Jinnah
visited the Kashmir Valley. While the Muslim Conference and the JKNC
competed to or ga nize a grand welcome for him, he chose to address the
annual gathering of the former party and declared the Muslim Conference
to be representative of “99 percent” of Jammu and Kashmir’s Muslims.21
Later that year, in September 1944, the JKNC leadership met in the
northern Valley town of Sopore and adopted “Naya [New] Kashmir,” a
detailed charter for a post- princely- state social and po liti cal order. In a
diplomatic feint, this manifesto did not abolish the hereditary monarchy
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 3 9
but reduced it to purely ceremonial status. Power would be vested in a
legislature called the National Assembly, to be elected by universal adult
franchise, and executive authority would be exercised by a cabinet re-
sponsible to that assembly. There would be decentralization of adminis-
tration to districts, tehsils (subdivisions of districts), towns, and even the
village level. Recognizing the multilingual character of Jammu and Kash-
mir, the manifesto designated Urdu the lingua franca of the future. (Kash-
miri was the dominant tongue only in the Valley and some hilly areas of
the Jammu region contiguous to the Valley inhabited by Kashmiri-
speaking Muslims, and Dogri- speakers were largely concentrated in the
Jammu plains). Kashmiri, Dogri, Punjabi, Hindi, Balti, and Dardi would
all be “national languages.”
The document’s most signifi cant section had to do with the transforma-
tion of the agrarian economy. The Naya Kashmir charter called for the
abolition of parasitic landlordism without compensation, distribution of
land among tillers, and the establishment of cooperative farms. This con-
fi rmed the leftist turn in the JKNC’s politics and the presence of a sizable
cohort of socialists and even communist (pro- Soviet) fellow travelers in
the or ga ni za tion. (On taking control of Srinagar in late 1947, one of the
party’s fi rst acts was to name the city’s central square Lal Chowk, Red
Square, after the Moscow original.) In 1945, after the end of World War II
and the release of Congress leaders jailed by the British for anticolonial
nationalist activities during the war, the JKNC’s annual convention was
attended by Nehru, as well as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Congress’s
most prominent Muslim fi gure, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–
1988), known as the Frontier Gandhi because of the mass popularity of
his pacifi st (and Congress- aligned) anticolonial movement among the Pa-
thans (Pashtuns) of the North- West Frontier Province.
Despite the secular (and socialist) turn in the JKNC’s line, the move-
ment’s mobilization strategy and its mass appeal among the Kashmir
Valley’s people continued be rooted in a Muslim idiom of politics, de-
rived from and tailored to the Valley’s regional culture, six centuries old,
of Sufi – inspired Islam. The charismatic Abdullah’s style personifi ed this.
His crowd- pulling prowess owed much to his ability to enthrall predomi-
nantly illiterate audiences by reciting beautifully from the holy Koran.
During the 1940s his po liti cal rise was built on the control his followers
managed to acquire over most of the Valley’s mosques, and consequently
their congregations, at the expense of religious preachers of the tradi-
tional variety. Asked toward the end of his life, in 1978, how he managed
to outmaneuver and marginalize the traditional clergy (mullahs) he
chuckled and replied: “By becoming a mullah myself.”22
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2 4 0 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
When Sheikh Abdullah launched a civil disobedience movement
against the princely state’s regime in May 1946, and led the re sis tance to
an invasion of the Kashmir Valley from Pakistan in October– November
1947, his headquarters was in the Hazratbal shrine on the shores of Sri-
nagar’s Nageen Lake, revered by the Valley’s people as the shrine housing
a hair believed to be from the head of the Prophet Mohammad. (In 1990
control of Hazratbal passed to proin de pen dence insurgents fi ghting In-
dian rule, until they were evicted in 1996 by Indian security forces after a
bloody gun battle.) The general secretary of the JKNC party was a cleric,
Maulana Mohammad Sayyid Masoodi, who doubled up as the editor of
Khidmat, the party’s paper. Masoodi, who was infl uential in Valley poli-
tics through the 1960s, was “highly respected by the people for the depth
of his views and the sobriety of his judgment.”23 In December 1990, aged
87, he was shot dead in his home in Ganderbal, a town north of Srinagar,
by gunmen from a pro- Pakistan Kashmiri insurgent group who were
young enough to be his grandchildren.
The other pillar of the JKNC’s strategy and mass appeal was the hope
it held out to the craving for social emancipation among the Valley’s mass
of impoverished peasants, who lived and toiled in conditions of serfdom.
The party’s fl ag, depicting a plow, the peasant’s essential implement, im-
printed in yellow against a red background, signifi ed the peasant base that
constituted its bedrock support.
With World War II over and British withdrawal from India increas-
ingly looking imminent, in April 1946, exactly 100 years after the estab-
lishment of the princely state, the JKNC launched the “Quit Kashmir”
movement, a campaign of mass demonstrations and civil disobedience
against the princely state’s authorities. Abdullah declared: “the time has
come to tear up the Treaty of Amritsar. . . . Sovereignty is not the birth-
right of Maharaja Hari Singh. Quit Kashmir is not a question of revolt. It
is a matter of right.”24 The drive to replace the hereditary kingship and its
autocratic regime with pop u lar sovereignty had overtones of a decisive
offensive of mobilized people’s power, and it was modeled on the Quit
India movement, which Congress launched against India’s British Raj in
August 1942, at a critical stage of World War II. The Quit India movement
is a landmark episode in India’s struggle for freedom. The movement spread
like wildfi re across (nonprincely) India, and (poorly) armed freedom fi ght-
ers in some parts of the country were able to create “liberated zones.” The
movement was put down through mass arrests of Congress leaders, in-
cluding almost the entire apex leadership, and of key organizers in differ-
ent parts of the country, and continuing re sis tance was suppressed
through brutal violence by the Raj’s police and military forces against
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 4 1
rank- and- fi le freedom fi ghters and the civilian populations supporting
them in the strongholds of the movement. Jinnah’s Muslim League, a key
collaborator with the British government during World War II, derided
the uprisings as “not directed for securing the in de pen dence of all con-
stituent elements in the life of the country but to establish Hindu raj
[rule] and [to] deal a death- blow to the Muslim goal of Pakistan.” The
Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference echoed this stance. Abdullah’s
JKNC, however, strongly condemned the repression unleashed by the
colonial power.25
Of the regions of Jammu and Kashmir, the Quit Kashmir movement
had by far the greatest impact in the JKNC’s bastion, the Kashmir Valley.
The princely state’s authorities responded with large- scale arrests of the
party’s top leaders and key organizers across the Valley. Abdullah himself
was promptly arrested and spent 16 months in prison until his release on
29 September 1947, a month and a half after the birth of two in de pen-
dent “Dominions” in the subcontinent, India and Pakistan. Some JKNC
organizers managed to escape detention by going underground. Speaking
in Lahore, the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference’s most promi-
nent leader, Ghulam Abbas, a native of the Jammu region, derided the
Quit Kashmir movement as “an agitation started at the behest of Hindu
leaders.” By June 1946 the movement wilted under intense repression,
and the atrocities of the (overwhelmingly non- Muslim) police and mili-
tary forces of the princely state “in the Valley caused tremendous com-
motion, leaving bitter memories of cruelties fi rmly implanted in the
minds of the normally peaceful Kashmiris.”26 Thereafter a lull fraught
with a sense of simmering crisis ensued in the Valley. This lasted until the
autumn of 1947, when Jammu and Kashmir, and particularly the Kash-
mir Valley, emerged as the prime bone of contention between the newly
in de pen dent states of India and Pakistan.
The hundreds of princely states were naturally an issue in the decoloniza-
tion, amid partition, of the subcontinent. In July 1947 Lord Mountbat-
ten, the last British viceroy of India, urged a gathering of princely rulers
in Delhi to decide without delay, preferably before mid- August, whether
to join India or Pakistan after evaluating two criteria: their territory’s
geographic embedding in or contiguity to India or Pakistan, and the
wishes of their population of subjects.
This was reasonable advice, and on its basis the accession of the large
majority of princely states to India and the rest to Pakistan was the inevi-
table outcome, as most princely states lay within the borders of India and
had non- Muslim majorities. Problems arose with only two princely
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2 4 2 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
states, bounded by India with Muslim rulers and predominantly Hindu
subjects. In Junagadh in western India, a small princely state that was
later incorporated into the state of Gujarat formed in 1960, a Muslim
ruler presiding over a population that was over 80 percent Hindu ac-
ceded his kingdom to Pakistan and then fl ed to Pakistan. In the princely
state of Hyderabad in southern India, most of which would become part
of the state of Andhra Pradesh in 1956, the Muslim ruler stalled for a
year, amid mounting violence by his regime against a population that
was 87 percent Hindu, until the Indian army was sent in and settled the
matter in September 1948.
Mountbatten’s common- sense formula could not resolve the status of
Jammu and Kashmir, however. This princely state was contiguous to
both India and Pakistan, although its contiguity to Pakistan, to its west
and northwest, was more extensive than with India to the south and
southeast. The princely state’s transport, trading, and cultural links were
also more extensive with western Punjab and the Frontier Province,
which became part of Pakistan in 1947 (for example, the Jhelum Road,
so called after the river, connecting Srinagar with Rawalpindi). The
princely state’s religious demographics, 77 percent Muslim, also counted
at least superfi cially in favor of Pakistan. But the wishes of the popula-
tion were not obvious, despite that demographic fact. This was primarily
because the princely state’s largest popularly based po liti cal movement,
led by the JKNC with mass support in the Kashmir Valley and pockets of
infl uence in the Jammu region, had developed a secularist and socialist
orientation and was ideologically much closer to and more compatible
with India’s Congress party than Pakistan’s Muslim League.
Jammu and Kashmir’s last maharaja, Hari Singh, and his coterie of
advisers were concerned above all with the preservation of the dynastic
throne and privileges. On August 15, 1947, a day after Pakistan’s birth,
his regime concluded a “standstill agreement” with the government of
Pakistan, normally a precursor to accession. This was a strange dalliance
between the leaders of the new Muslim sovereign state on the subconti-
nent and a despotic regime that had systematically oppressed its Muslim
majority for a century and whose police and military had committed
atrocities against Muslims in the Kashmir Valley and elsewhere in the
princely state in 1946 and the fi rst half of 1947. But it was explicable.
Hari Singh and his coterie calculated that their interests were more
likely to be entertained by Pakistan’s leaders than India’s, who were
known to hold princely rulers in contempt as British stooges and had
friendly ties with the princely state’s largest po liti cal opposition, the
JKNC. Pakistan’s leaders knew that though geographic contiguity and
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 4 3
religious demographics favored their case, a legally valid accession would
have to be signed by the princely ruler.
The dalliance steadily unraveled, and broke down in the fi rst half of
October 1947. It was derailed by developments on the ground. In spring
1947 a localized revolt against the maharaja’s regime fl ared in the Jammu
region’s Poonch district, which is today bisected by the Line of Control
between J&K and Pakistan’s so- called “Azad” Kashmir. The rebellion
was met with atrocities by the princely state’s overwhelmingly non-
Muslim security forces against the overwhelmingly Muslim population
of Poonch but was not suppressed. Poonch, along with nearby west Pun-
jab and Frontier Province districts, had been a prime recruiting ground
for imperial Britain’s Indian army, and of 71,667 men from the princely
state who served in British forces during World War II, 60,402 were
Poonchis. These demobilized soldiers put up fi erce re sis tance to the
princely state’s forces. After mid- August the rebellion renewed, this time
with a defi nite pro- Pakistan character. By the beginning of October the
rebels gained control of almost all of Poonch, and on October 3, 1947, a
collection of pro- Pakistan sardars (clan chiefs) of western Jammu
districts— Poonch, Mirpur to its south, and Muzaffarabad to its north—
proclaimed a provisional Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir government
in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. On the same day, the maharaja’s government
cabled Pakistan’s foreign ministry in Karachi, accusing the government
of Pakistan of complicity in crossborder attacks being conducted along
several hundred kilometers of the border between Pakistan’s Punjab
province and the Jammu region of the princely state, from Rawalpindi in
the north to Sialkot in the south. On October 18 an even more acrimoni-
ous cable, which alleged that the government of Pakistan had imposed an
economic blockade on Jammu and Kashmir in violation of its obligations
under the “standstill agreement” of mid- August, signaled an irretrievable
breakdown in relations.
The decisive chapter of the struggle for Jammu and Kashmir then un-
folded. On October 21, 1947, a motorized armed force consisting mainly
of Pashtun tribesmen entered Jammu and Kashmir from the Frontier
Province’s Hazara district, located north and northwest of the princely
state. Although many were motivated by the prospect of loot and rape,
they were “led by experienced military leaders familiar with the terrain
and equipped with modern arms, [and] they poured down . . . at
5000- strong initially, with a fl eet of transport vehicles numbering about
300 trucks.”27 After taking the town of Muzaffarabad, later the capital of
Pakistan’s “Azad Kashmir” region, they headed for the Kashmir Valley.
Meeting almost no re sis tance from the princely state’s forces, they seized
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2 4 4 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
Baramulla, the largest town in the northwestern part of the Valley, just
20 miles by road from Srinagar. On October 24 the maharaja’s adminis-
tration sent an urgent message to New Delhi requesting immediate mili-
tary assistance to repel the raiders.
Nehru and his colleague Vallabhbhai Patel (1875– 1950)—a dour, con-
servative Congress leader from Gujarat who as India’s home (interior)
minister supervised the integration of princely states into India— were
willing to oblige but correctly determined that intervention by Indian
army troops without prior accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India
might be regarded internationally as an Indian invasion of a neutral ter-
ritory. Accordingly, on October 26 the last maharaja signed the formal
“instrument of accession” to India, which made the princely state legally
part of the Indian Union and ceded to the government in New Delhi ju-
risdiction over external defense, foreign affairs, and currency and com-
munications. On October 27 Mountbatten, the governor- general of the
Indian “Dominion,” accepted the accession but noted that once the raid-
ers were expelled and order restored, the accession should be ratifi ed by
“a reference to the people” of Jammu and Kashmir.
On the morning of October 27, the fi rst Indian army units arrived in
Srinagar by airlift, to a warm welcome from the leaders of the JKNC.
They deployed immediately and found that units of the raiding force had
penetrated the outskirts of Srinagar. Within a few days they also “discov-
ered that they were dealing with an or ga nized body of men armed with
medium and light machine- guns and mortars,” led by “commanders
thoroughly conversant with modern tactics and use of ground” and sup-
ported by “considerable engineering skill.”28 More than a half century
later, in the summer of 1999, the Indian army would face much the same
situation in the mountainous Kargil district of the Ladakh region, where
they were taken by surprise by Pakistani military units who had crossed
the Line of Control during the winter months in a meticulously planned
operation and occupied ridges and peaks on the Indian side of the Line.
The hostilities of late 1947 turned swiftly in favor of the Indians.
Within a week the Indian units pushed back the raiders from the vicinity
of Srinagar. Then, reinforced by armored cars that had arrived by road
via the Banihal Pass, which connects the Kashmir Valley with the Jammu
region, they went on the offensive. Baramulla was retaken on November
8, and Uri, a smaller town on the western edge of the Valley that has
straddled the border between the Kashmir Valley and “Azad Kashmir”
ever since, was taken on November 14. By the time the harsh Himalayan
winter of 1947– 1948 set in and fi ghting wound down, the raiders had
been driven to the peripheries of the Kashmir Valley.
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 4 5
Two factors were crucial in this outcome. First, the Indian counterof-
fensive benefi ted enormously from the support of an auxiliary force— the
JKNC or ga ni za tion in the Kashmir Valley. Thousands of volunteers en-
rolled in a “National Militia” that the JKNC quickly put together, and
these locals were invaluable to the Indian campaign. Second, some of the
raiders had committed atrocities as they advanced. Baramulla was pil-
laged, and the fi ghters who had come ostensibly to liberate their coreli-
gionists perpetrated brutalities, particularly on women, there and in
other northern Kashmir Valley towns such as Handwara. The terror un-
leashed in the name of liberation deeply unsettled the people in these ar-
eas, and their memories of savage executions and rapes would linger for
several de cades.
The leaders of Pakistan were furious at the turn of events. Kashmir,
meaning above all the Valley, had been an integral part of the idea of
Pakistan since the term “Pakistan” was coined by an Indian Muslim stu-
dent at Cambridge University in 1933. (The K denoted Kashmir, the P
Punjab, the S Sind, and the “tan” Baluchistan.) In late November 1947
Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, denounced the JKNC’s
leader: “Sheikh Abdullah has been a paid agent of Congress for two de-
cades and with the exception of some gangsters he has purchased with
Congress money, he has no following among the Muslim masses [of
Kashmir].”29 In fact, after his release from jail in late September, Abdul-
lah had told a huge gathering on the premises of Srinagar’s Hazratbal
shrine on October 5 that the question of accession to India or Pakistan
was secondary to the imperative of establishing a government legitimate
in the eyes of the people. However, after the force from Pakistan entered
the Valley, overran its northwestern areas, and approached Srinagar, he
traveled to Delhi. He arrived there on the eve ning of October 25, and on
October 26– 27, when the maharaja’s accession to India was sealed, he
was staying at Prime Minister Nehru’s residence. On October 27 he told
the daily Times of India that the attack had to be resisted because failure
would mean the coercive absorption of the Valley into Pakistan.
Abdullah could not have behaved otherwise in late 1947. The Valley
was his home region and power base, and he had every reason to believe
from experience that he would have no place in Jinnah’s scheme of things
if the Valley passed into Pakistan’s control. A veteran po liti cal activist from
the city of Jammu has written that the Valley’s people were “outraged” by
the Pakistani attempt to fi rst secure accession by wooing the hated princely
ruler and when that failed “to decide the issue by force.” He argues that the
deeply rooted regional identity of the Kashmir Valley, evolved over centu-
ries and rekindled through po liti cal struggle in the 1930s and 1940s, “was
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2 4 6 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
obviously a misfi t in the monolithic structure of Pakistan, which did not
recognize any identity other than that based on religion. The federal-
democratic and secular framework of India . . . promised a better guaran-
tee for the defense and growth of Kashmiri identity.”30
While the fi ghting temporarily subsided, the confl ict was international-
ized when in January 1948 the Indian government complained to the
United Nations about Pakistani aggression on a territory that had ac-
ceded to India. In response, the UN Security Council established the
United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan. In April 1948, as
winter snows melted and hostilities resumed, the Security Council ad-
opted a resolution that the Commission was “to proceed at once to the
Indian subcontinent and there place its good offi ces . . . at the disposal of
the Governments of India and Pakistan . . . both with respect to the resto-
ration of peace and order and the holding of a plebiscite” to decide
Jammu and Kashmir’s fi nal status. The reference to a plebiscite was con-
sistent with the Indian stand at the time; on 2 November 1947 Nehru had
announced his “pledge . . . not only to the people of Kashmir but to the
world . . . [to] hold a referendum under international auspices such as the
United Nations” to ascertain whether a majority of the erstwhile princely
state’s population favored India or Pakistan. He repeated this several
times up to 1952. The April 1948 UN Security Council resolution called
on the government of Pakistan to “secure the withdrawal” of the invading
tribesmen and other nonresidents from the regions of the princely state
under Pakistan’s control, and once this was done the government of India
was urged to reduce its forces in Jammu and Kashmir “progressively to
the minimum strength required for the support of civil power.”31
As in many bitter confl icts, events on the ground evolved very differently
from the UN’s high- minded intentions. Over the spring and summer of
1948, the Indian army, by now fi ghting the regular Pakistani army in what
had become a war between the militaries of sovereign states, made further
advances, retaking the strategic town of Rajouri in the Jammu region and
consolidating gains in the Kashmir Valley. The fi nal act of the fi rst India-
Pakistan war occurred in the autumn of 1948, when Pakistani forces made
a thrust toward the Valley from the north, using the mountainous areas of
Gilgit and Skardu as the base. The thrust was repulsed by Indian light
tanks in a battle at the Zojila Pass, which connects the Valley with Ladakh.
The Indians then took the western Ladakh towns of Dras and Kargil in
November and secured the strategic road link between the Valley and the
eastern Ladakh district of Leh, populated mainly by Buddhists of Tibetan
stock. When a cease- fi re came into effect on January 1, 1949, the Indians
were in control of the bulk of the population and territory of the former
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 4 7
princely state, including almost all of the Kashmir Valley— 139,000 out of
223,000 square kilometers, about 63 percent. This is the territorial status
quo that prevails to this day, with very minor changes from subsequent
military confl icts, notably the third India- Pakistan war of December 1971.
The UN- supervised plebiscite never materialized. Pakistanis see this as evi-
dence of Indian duplicity; Indians argue that Pakistan failed to fulfi ll the
fi rst condition set out by the UN for holding the plebiscite, the withdrawal
of Pakistani regular and irregular forces from the territory of the former
princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The British offi cial Walter Lawrence noted in 1895 that “the people of
the valley [of Kashmir] . . . have retained their peculiar nationality unim-
paired” despite three centuries of rule by outside powers: fi rst the Mu-
ghal Empire, then the Durrani Afghans, succeeded by the Sikh monarchy
of Ranjit Singh, and then the princely state of Jammu’s Dogra elite. He
attributed the stubborn resilience of the distinct regional identity and
culture formed in the Valley in the late medieval era to “the isolation of
Kashmir,” its remote location. He did foresee, on the eve of the twentieth
century, that this isolation would not last with the advent of modern
communications. He could not have foreseen that within a half century
the remote, isolated Kashmir Valley would become the crux of conten-
tion between the nationalisms of India and Pakistan. But he presciently
warned that once this remote region and its historically insular people
were no longer cocooned from the wider subcontinent, “the revolution
which will follow the more rapid communication with India is one which
will require wise guidance and most careful watching.”32
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah became the prime minister of the Indian
state of J&K in March 1948 and governed it in the style of an uncrowned
monarch until his fall from power in August 1953. He was at once the
Valley’s fi rst indigenous “sultan” in nearly four centuries and, in retro-
spect, the fi rst truly autonomous regional leader of the polity of postin de-
pen dence India, with a well- knit party and signifi cant mass base. He had
thrown in his lot with India in clear preference to Pakistan, but due to his
stature he did not see the relationship between New Delhi and his regime
in dominant- subordinate terms. He felt that Srinagar could deal with
Delhi on more or less equal terms.
The maharaja’s accession limited New Delhi’s jurisdiction over Jammu
and Kashmir to three subjects: defense, foreign affairs, and communica-
tions. This was normal practice in accession agreements and usually did
not preempt further integration of princely states into India (or Paki-
stan). Jammu and Kashmir was, however, an unusual case because of the
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2 4 8 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
international dispute and UN resolutions calling for a plebiscite and the
presence of a mass- based po liti cal movement within, the JKNC. In Octo-
ber 1949 India’s Constituent Assembly inserted Article 306A into India’s
Constitution, specifying that the Center’s jurisdiction over Jammu and
Kashmir (effectively the 63 percent of its territory on India’s side of the
Ceasefi re Line) would remain limited to the three subjects specifi ed in the
original instrument of accession. After India shed “dominion” status and
became the Republic of India on January 26, 1950, Article 306A became
the basis for Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which enshrined the
same degree of autonomy for J&K in the Indian Union. This gave the
Indian state of J&K a statutory degree of autonomy not enjoyed by any
other unit of the Indian Union, an arrangement known as “asymmetric
autonomy” or “asymmetric federalism” in comparative po liti cal science.
Under Article 370, which remains in India’s Constitution, India’s Parlia-
ment can legislate even regarding the three categories of subjects assigned
to the Center only “in consultation with the Government of Jammu and
Kashmir state,” and regarding other matters of governance on the Union
List with “the fi nal concurrence of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.”
Sheikh Abdullah was adamant that this asymmetric autonomy was the
sine qua non of J&K’s membership of the Indian Union. He articulated
this in an important address he gave on August 11, 1952, to J&K’s Con-
stituent Assembly, which had been constituted in November 1951 to
frame a J&K state constitution, in itself unusual, because other Indian
states do not have their own constitutions and the Republic of India’s
1950 Constitution is supreme across the country. He noted that his prior-
ity was to ensure “maximum autonomy for the local organs of state
power, while discharging obligations as a unit of the [Indian] Union.” He
pointedly added: “I would like to make it clear that any suggestion of
arbitrarily altering this basis of our relationship with India would not
only constitute a breach of the spirit and letter of the [Indian] Constitu-
tion, but might invite serious consequences for the harmonious associa-
tion of our state with India.” This language— especially the use of words
like “relationship” and “association”— was different from a fl owery
speech he had made to the fi rst session of the Assembly, nine months ear-
lier, in November 1951: “the real character of a state is revealed in its
Constitution. The Indian Constitution has set before the country the goal
of secular democracy based on justice, freedom and equality for all with-
out distinction. . . . The national movement in our State naturally gravi-
tates towards these principles. . . . This affi nity in po liti cal principles, as
well as past associations and our common path of suffering in the cause
of freedom, must be weighed properly while deciding the future of the
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 4 9
State.” The last phrase is a reference to the UN- administered plebiscite,
then a live proposition, and can be read as entirely supportive of India’s
position on Kashmir. In the same speech Abdullah criticized Pakistan’s
failure to enact a constitution and ridiculed Pakistan, especially its (then)
western half, as a den of feudal landlords. He also dismissed the idea of
in de pen dence for part or all of the former princely state of Jammu and
Kashmir as utopian.33
In his August 1952 speech in Srinagar, Abdullah was reporting the
outcome of talks on the autonomy issue held in Delhi in June and July
between a J&K delegation led by him and Indian government offi cials
headed by Nehru. During these talks, the J&K team stuck strongly to the
“maximum autonomy” position. They blocked the other side’s proposals
for J&K’s fi nancial and fi scal integration with the Indian Union, rejected
a suggestion to extend the fundamental rights provisions of the Indian
constitution to J&K, and turned down a proposal to make India’s Su-
preme Court the ultimate court of appeal for civil and criminal cases that
came up before J&K courts (as is normal for Indian states). They made a
few concessions, agreeing to fl y India’s national fl ag in the “supremely
distinctive” position alongside the J&K state fl ag in J&K, and they
agreed to the Indian Supreme Court’s arbitration in the event of disputes
between the state and the Center or with another state of the Indian
Union. The talks resulted in an unwritten— and as it turned out within a
year, tenuous— modus vivendi that was separately reported by the lead-
ers to their respective legislatures. Nehru’s comments to India’s Parlia-
ment, elected a few months earlier in the country’s fi rst Lok Sabha elec-
tion, had a tone of weary resignation; he said that he wanted “no forced
unions,” and if J&K were to decide “to part company with us, they can
go their way and we shall go our way.”34
Abdullah’s stance on “maximum autonomy” was not an altruistic de-
fense of the identity of his base— meaning essentially the Valley. He had a
compelling personal motive: keeping maximum power in his own hands.
This drive for absolute power was revealed by the manner in which the
J&K Constituent Assembly was “elected” in late 1951. It was to have 75
members— 43 from the Kashmir Valley, 30 from the Jammu region, and
two from Ladakh. (In a token gesture, a further 25 seats were kept va-
cant for representatives of the regions across the Ceasefi re Line.) Of the
45 seats allotted to the Valley and Ladakh, JKNC candidates were de-
clared elected “unopposed” to 43 seats one week before the election date.
In the two remaining seats, non- JKNC candidates who fi led papers
“withdrew under pressure subsequently,” according to Josef Korbel of
the UN Commission for India and Pakistan. In the Jammu region’s 30
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2 5 0 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
seats, the Praja Parishad (Subjects’ Forum), a Hindu or ga ni za tion led by
former offi cials of the maharaja’s administration and landlords dispos-
sessed by the Abdullah regime’s radical land reforms (described below),
decided to contest 28 seats. Thirteen of its candidates were arbitrarily
disqualifi ed, and the Parishad then withdrew the rest of its candidates in
protest and in anticipation of a completely rigged election that it would
be pointless to enter. The Parishad would have won a few seats in Hindu-
dominated southern and southeastern Jammu districts if allowed to run
for them. Two other non- JKNC candidates standing in the Jammu re-
gion’s remaining two seats also pulled out. In the Jammu region’s
Muslim- majority areas and in the Valley, almost all anti- Abdullah leaders
owing allegiance to the Muslim Conference were in exile across the
Ceasefi re Line, but the JKNC’s 100 percent sweep was still a farce.
The 75- seat Constituent Assembly thus consisted entirely of JKNC
members. In this scheme of things, maximum autonomy for J&K trans-
lated into maximum power for Abdullah and his men. New Delhi turned a
blind eye. Nehru reportedly told a po liti cal activist from Jammu that while
Abdullah’s suppression of all opposition— including dissenting members
of the JKNC— was undemo cratic, because “India’s Kashmir policy re-
volved around Abdullah, nothing should be done to weaken him.”35 Be-
tween 1948 and 1953, only one slogan could be heard in the Kashmir
Valley: “One Leader, One Party, One Program!” (referring to Abdullah, the
JKNC, and their “Naya [New] Kashmir” agenda of 1944, respectively).
Abdullah’s confi dence, even brazenness, was based on one po liti cal fact:
the mass support and indeed adulation he enjoyed in the Kashmir Valley.
He had already achieved near- iconic status among the Valley’s people by
1947 for his leadership of the struggle against feudal autocracy. (His top
lieutenants, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Mirza Afzal Beg, G. M. Sadiq,
Maulana Masoodi, Ghulam Mohiuddin Karra, and Syed Mir Qasim, had
also become house hold names there.) On July 13, 1950, the anniversary
of the bloody protest in Srinagar in 1931, Abdullah’s regime “introduced
the most sweeping land reform in the entire subcontinent.” Up to then,
almost all of J&K’s arable area of 2.2 million acres was owned by 396 big
landlords and 2,347 middling landlords, “who rented to peasants under
medieval conditions of exploitation.”36 In the Valley, Kashmiri Pandits,
under 5 percent of the Valley’s population, owned over 30 percent of the
land. (The Abdullah regime softened the blow for the Pandits by allowing
them to retain their fruit orchards and reserved 10 percent of state gov-
ernment jobs for them, a share several times the Pandit community’s pro-
portion of the J&K population.)37 Between 1950 and 1952, 700,000
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 5 1
landless peasants in J&K became peasant- proprietors, as over a million
acres of expropriated land were transferred to them. The majority of the
benefi ciaries were Muslims in the Valley, but one- third were low- caste
Hindu cultivators in the Jammu region. By the early 1960s there were 2.8
million smallholding peasant house holds in the state.
The transformation of rural J&K had far- reaching consequences. It ele-
vated Abdullah to nearly divine stature among the Kashmir Valley’s peas-
antry, a lay addition to the Valley’s pantheon of Sufi saints. Already literally
lionized by his followers as Sher- e-Kashmir (The Lion of Kashmir), he now
became the Valley’s Baba- e-Qaum (Father of the Nation). In the mid-
1950s Daniel Thorner, a scholar of agrarian affairs, visited the Valley. He
found that despite “defects in implementation, many tillers have become
landowners and some land has even gone to the landless. The peasantry of
the Valley were not long ago fearful and submissive. Nobody who has
spent time with Kashmiri villagers will say the same today.”38
The land reforms catalyzed an intense opposition to the Abdullah re-
gime in the Hindu- dominated southern districts of the Jammu region.
The Praja Parishad had been formed in late 1947 at the initiative of for-
mer offi cials in the princely state’s administration based in the city of
Jammu, J&K’s second largest city after Srinagar and the state’s winter
capital. These elements, smarting at their displacement from power by a
new ruling elite of Valley Muslims, began agitating against Abdullah’s
regime in 1949. They were joined by upper- caste Hindu landlords dis-
possessed by the land reforms. (In contrast to the Valley’s Pandits, there
were no sweeteners for Hindu landlords in the Jammu region.) After the
dubious J&K Constituent Assembly election pro cess of late 1951, the
Praja Parishad launched a campaign of protest meetings, marches, and
civil disobedience against the Abdullah regime in the Jammu region’s
southern districts that steadily intensifi ed through 1952 and the fi rst half
of 1953. The campaign demanded “full integration of Jammu & Kash-
mir State with the rest of India like other acceding [princely] States and
safeguarding of the legitimate demo cratic rights of the people of Jammu
from the communist- dominated and anti- Dogra government of Sheikh
Abdullah,” in the words of Balraj Madhok, a leader of the movement
who later became the all- India president of India’s Hindu nationalist
party, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (forerunner of the BJP; founded in 1951
and renamed in 1980).39 Its rallying cry was “Ek Vidhaan, Ek Nishaan,
Ek Pradhaan!” (One Constitution, One Flag, One Premier!) for all of
India— a reference to separate constitution- making by the J&K govern-
ment, the existence of a J&K state fl ag alongside the Indian national tri-
color, and Abdullah’s title of “Prime Minister.”
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2 5 2 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
Abdullah reacted with a combative speech in April 1952 in Ranbirs-
inghpora, a small town named after the second ruler of the princely state
on the Jammu district’s border with Pakistan’s Punjab province. In this
heartland of Jammu Hindus, he described the demand for full integration—
that is, revocation of J&K’s asymmetric autonomy within the Indian
Union— as “unrealistic, childish and savoring of lunacy.”40 He asserted
that the agitation had backing from not just the Hindu nationalist party
but unnamed elements in the Congress party and Union government. The
speech was widely reported in the Indian press and deepened the contro-
versy. The Delhi talks in the summer of 1952 between Abdullah and Ne-
hru were intended by the Indian government to calm things down and to
elicit concessions from the J&K government that might dampen the
clamor for “full integration” while upholding the asymmetric autonomy
framework. That did not happen.
In April 1953 Abdullah appeared to consider compromise with his in-
ternal enemies. The basic principles committee of his handpicked J&K
Constituent Assembly proposed devolution of power to regions within
J&K within the framework of the state’s asymmetric autonomy. In addi-
tion to the state legislature, the Kashmir Valley and Jammu regions would
each have directly elected assemblies with authority to legislate on speci-
fi ed subjects, as well as separate ministerial councils for regional affairs.
Ladakh too would have an elected council to exercise local autonomy. It
was even proposed to change J&K’s name to “Autonomous Federated
Unit of the Republic of India.” The Jammu agitators refused to take the
bait and stuck to their “full integration” stance, supported by the spiritual
and po liti cal leader of eastern Ladakh’s Tibetan Buddhist community,
who disliked the meteoric rise of a Valley- based Sunni Muslim ruling elite
and feared the implications of the land reform policy for the Buddhist
clergy’s im mense landholdings in eastern Ladakh. Areas of the Jammu
region with Kashmiri- speaking Muslim majorities and strong JKNC
support— mostly the current districts of Doda, Kishtwar, and Ramban,
mountainous tracts contiguous to the southeastern Valley— also refused
to be part of an autonomous Hindu- majority Jammu region.
In May 1953 Abdullah switched to confrontation. In that month the
internal situation in J&K worsened when Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, a
leading Hindu nationalist politician from West Bengal and the found er in
1951 of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, entered J&K in solidarity with the “full
integration” agitation and was arrested. He died of apparently natural
causes the following month while detained in the Kashmir Valley. In May
the JKNC’s apex body, its working committee, appointed a subcommit-
tee to examine constitutional options for the future of J&K (and the
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 5 3
disputed territory of the former princely state as a whole). On 9 June
1953 this subcommittee submitted its report, outlining four possible op-
tions, all involving a plebiscite and in de pen dence for part or whole of the
disputed territory. The fi rst and recommended option called for a plebi-
scite across the entire disputed territory but differed from the UN Secu-
rity Council resolutions by suggesting that the population should be
given not two but three options: become part of India, part of Pakistan,
or an in de pen dent state. Abdullah refused to back down during July
1953 in correspondence with Nehru and India’s education minister, Abul
Kalam Azad. Instead, he announced he would convene the JKNC’s work-
ing committee and general council in late August to discuss the recom-
mendations, and planned to hold a public rally on the issue in the Valley
on August 21, coinciding with a Muslim religious celebration.
On August 9, 1953, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was formally dis-
missed as prime minister of J&K— by Karan Singh, the 22- year- old son
of the last maharaja and the ceremonial head of state, a titular position
styled sadr- e-riyasat, acting “in the interest of the people of the state.”
Abdullah had already been taken into custody in a predawn raid by state
police under the Jammu & Kashmir Public Security Act, a draconian law
used until then to persecute his opponents. He would remain incarcer-
ated for the next 22 years, until 1975, barring brief spells in 1958, 1964–
1965, and 1968. On August 9 and 10, 33 JKNC leaders— including Afzal
Beg, a cabinet minister in the deposed J&K government— were also
taken into detention under this Public Security Act. Bakshi Ghulam Mo-
hammed, deputy prime minister and home (interior) minister and one of
Abdullah’s top lieutenants for two de cades, took over as the prime min-
ister of J&K. Of Abdullah’s closest lieutenants, only Afzal Beg and Mau-
lana Masoodi remained loyal. Most others— Bakshi Ghulam Moham-
med, G. M. Sadiq, and Mir Qasim— became the leaders of a new, New
Delhi– sponsored regime in J&K.
On August 10, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed issued his fi rst statement as
prime minister, in which he denounced Abdullah as an oppressive leader
who had become a tool of (unspecifi ed) foreign conspiracies to undermine
J&K’s ties with India. In September 1953 Nehru justifi ed the change of
government in J&K on the fl oor of India’s Parliament on the grounds that
Abdullah had lost the confi dence of the majority of his cabinet, which
consisted— in addition to Abdullah and Afzal Beg— of Bakshi Ghulam Mo-
hammed, the Kashmiri Pandit Shyamlal Saraf, and Giridharilal Dogra from
Jammu, and by his actions caused “distress to the people.” Nehru was never
to offer any reason for Abdullah’s arrest and protracted incarceration. In
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2 5 4 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
October 1953 large majorities of J&K Constituent Assembly members (60
of 75) and JKNC general council members (90 of 110) ratifi ed the new
leadership in specially convened sessions.41
The extraordinary events of August 1953 bore telltale signs of a care-
fully planned putsch, instigated by and executed on behalf of the govern-
ment in New Delhi. To the Nehru government, Abdullah’s behavior had
crossed red lines, and he could no longer be tolerated. The intrigue capital-
ized on rifts in the leadership of the JKNC party and its government. For
the Hindu members of Abdullah’s cabinet, Shyamlal Saraf and Giridharilal
Dogra, allegiance to India was probably the decisive factor. For G. M.
Sadiq, the leading cryptocommunist in the JKNC leadership and speaker
(president) of the J&K Constituent Assembly, the changing position of the
Soviet Union on the international dispute over Kashmir may have been a
factor, as also for D. P. Dhar, the Kashmiri Pandit deputy home (interior)
minister in Abdullah’s government and another communist fellow traveler.
In 1948 the Soviet propaganda organ New Times hailed Abdullah as the
leader of “a progressive and demo cratic mass movement” but condemned
the intervention of “Indian reactionaries” in Kashmir. By 1953, after Sta-
lin’s death and amid growing Soviet interest in India’s emerging foreign
policy posture of “nonalignment” with either superpower bloc, while Paki-
stan gravitated toward the United States, the same paper was calling the
Kashmir question an “internal affair” of India and decrying “imperialist
efforts to turn the Valley into a strategic bridgehead.”42 For Bakshi Gh-
ulam Mohammed, personal ambition was probably the motive— the lure
of stepping out of Abdullah’s shadow and supplanting him.
The problem was that August 1953 also marked the beginning of bitter
feelings of estrangement, arising from regional pride and sentiment, among
the population of the Kashmir Valley toward the Indian Union as embod-
ied by the Center in New Delhi. For most people in the Valley, Sheikh
Abdullah was the hero who led the struggle that had brought them emanci-
pation from the princely state’s yoke and the messiah who gave the peasant
masses land, dignity, and deliverance from generations of serfdom.
Mir Qasim, a prominent JKNC leader in Anantnag, the southern Val-
ley district, joined the putschist group and was immediately made a min-
ister in Bakshi’s cabinet. Qasim, who later served as J&K’s chief minister
from 1971 to 1975, recalled in his memoirs, published in 1992, that the
coup d’état “gave rise to a grim situation and a bitter sense of betrayal in
Kashmir. . . . The news spread like wildfi re, giving rise to widespread agi-
tations and protest marches. In [the town of] Anantnag, where the news
reached a day late, I sat in my [law] chamber for three days, watching
wave after wave of protest marches surge past. Some people were killed
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 5 5
in police fi ring.” On August 12, Qasim and G. M. Sadiq left Anantnag for
Srinagar with a police escort: “on our way to Srinagar we passed through
[the small towns] Kulgam, Shopian and Pulwama and saw the people’s
angry, rebellious mood.” In Kulgam, crowds gathered at a graveyard
were burying people killed in police fi ring. When they saw Qasim with a
police escort, they asked him: “So you are also with them?” “In Shopian
we faced a graver situation,” Qasim wrote, “here a 20,000- strong crowd
menacingly surged towards where we were staying, to attack us.” When
they arrived in the capital, “Srinagar was in chaos. Bakshi Saheb’s own
house, despite the police guard, was under attack. He was ner vous and
wanted to step down as prime minister in favor of Mr Sadiq.”43
Wearing the martyr’s crown, Abdullah would dominate the Valley’s
politics in absentia throughout his 22 years in captivity. He was let out
on three occasions— for brief periods in 1958 and 1968 and a year in
1964– 1965. His short- lived public appearances invariably triggered mass
euphoria in the Valley. Thus on April 18, 1964, according to Indian
newspaper accounts, Abdullah “entered Srinagar and was greeted by a
delirious crowd of 250,000 people. Srinagar was a blaze of color, and
everyone seemed [to be] out on the streets to give Abdullah a hero’s
welcome. . . . Addressing a gathering of 150,000 people on 20 April,
Abdullah said that in 1947 he had challenged Pakistan’s authority to an-
nex Kashmir on grounds of religion, and now he was challenging the In-
dian contention that the question had been settled.” In March 1968, “al-
most the entire population of Srinagar turned out to greet him” as he
arrived in the Valley, the Times of India reported, adding that hundreds
of thousands of people were chanting “Sher- e-Kashmir zindabad [long
live the Lion of Kashmir], our demand plebiscite.” Days later, addressing
100,000 supporters in Anantnag, south of Srinagar, Abdullah warned
that “repression will never suppress the Kashmiri people’s urge to be
free.” Indeed, Mir Qasim wrote in his 1992 memoirs that the Jammu &
Kashmir Plebiscite Front, an or ga ni za tion formed by Abdullah’s support-
ers in 1955, had since its formation “reduced the [offi cial] National Con-
ference to a nonentity in Kashmir’s [the Valley’s] politics.”44
Abdullah overplayed his hand in 1953. But his fall from power, engi-
neered beyond any reasonable doubt by Nehru’s government, was funda-
mentally because he was a mass- based regionalist leader whose stature
among his own people and assertive style were at odds with the vision of
centralized power and top- down authority in the corridors of offi cial
New Delhi.
To put the 1953 (and post- 1953) events in J&K in context, it is impor-
tant to remember that in the early 1950s Nehru wanted to renege on
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2 5 6 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
Congress’s commitment during the struggle for in de pen dence that free
India would be constituted as a decentralized union of linguistic states,
and he instead pushed the idea of a powerful Center presiding over four
“administrative zones” on grounds of “security and stability.” He reluc-
tantly climbed down from this agenda in 1953 in the face of pop u lar
protest, and from the mid- 1950s the Indian Union gradually formed on
the basis of the states’ autonomy, a pro cess largely completed by the late
1960s. But in J&K, the focus of a sovereignty dispute with Pakistan, the
“security and stability” perspective prevailed, and a virtual dictatorship
of the Center was imposed on the state after 1953.
Six de cades on, India’s politics revolves around powerful regional lead-
ers who have a mass base in one state of the Indian Union. But Abdullah
was a regionalist leader ahead of his times. In 1951 his J&K government
announced a “nation- building” program to bring together the diverse
communities of J&K in an offi cial publication released to celebrate its
achievements in its fi rst three years in offi ce, particularly land reform.
This sort of terminology was bound to raise alarm, if not hackles, in
Nehru’s New Delhi.45
Integration
The top- down implementation of J&K’s “integration” with India after
1953 was dictated from New Delhi and executed by client governments
in Srinagar run by stooge Valley politicians with no legitimacy in the eyes
of the Kashmir Valley’s people: Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed from 1953
to 1963, G. M. Sadiq from 1964 to 1971, and Mir Qasim from 1971 to
1975. This pro cess built up a toxic reservoir of anger and discontent in
the Valley. This succession of puppets could not have survived in offi ce if
Abdullah had been at liberty to lead pop u lar re sis tance, hence his banish-
ment from public life for 22 years, of which he spent nearly 20 in prison.
The policy of remote control from New Delhi could only be effected by
turning J&K— and particularly the Kashmir Valley— into a police state
where civil liberties and demo cratic institutions and pro cesses were sys-
tematically subverted and destroyed. Thus as the rest of India evolved as
a plural and competitive democracy with a substantial degree of auton-
omy for its states, the Kashmir Valley became an enclave ruled by crude
authoritarianism and repression.
In February 1954 the J&K Constituent Assembly gave its consent, in
the absence of a small number of dogged Abdullah loyalists, to a slew of
integrative mea sures. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed called it “fulfi lling the
formalities of our unbreakable bonds with India.” Speaking in the national
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 5 7
Parliament, Nehru welcomed the move as “representing the wishes of the
people of Kashmir.”46 In May 1954 a constitutional order was issued in
the name of the president of India (the titular head of state) that brought
J&K within the purview of legislation passed by Parliament on most
subjects on the Union List, placed J&K’s fi nancial and fi scal relationship
with the Center on the same footing as that of other states, and gave In-
dia’s Supreme Court full jurisdiction in J&K. The fundamental rights of
citizens guaranteed by the Indian Constitution were also extended to
J&K, but with an escape clause: these rights could be suspended at any
time by the state government on grounds of “security,” and no judicial
appeals against such decisions would be allowed. The 1954 develop-
ments were the beginning of the end for J&K’s asymmetric autonomy as
enshrined in Article 370 of India’s constitution.
During October– November 1956, the J&K Constituent Assembly was
presented with a draft state constitution, which was rapidly approved by
67 of the 75 members. (Of the rest, four were in jail, and another four
boycotted the proceedings.) The preamble stated that “the state of Jammu
and Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India.”47 The
state constitution came into effect on January 26, 1957, India’s Republic
Day. On January 24, 1957, the UN Security Council passed a resolution
reiterating its 1948– 1951 resolutions calling for the sovereignty dispute
to be resolved “in accordance with the will of the people expressed
through the demo cratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite con-
ducted under the auspices of the United Nations” and stated that any ac-
tion taken by the J&K Constituent Assembly “would not constitute a
disposition of the State in accordance with the above principle.”48 But by
1957 the UN’s role in the Kashmir dispute was fading into irrelevance as
events in Kashmir unfolded differently.
In May 1954 Pakistan formally entered the United States’ orbit, when
an agreement was signed in Karachi providing for American military
hardware to be supplied to Pakistan. In September 1954 Pakistan joined
the South- East Asia Treaty Or ga ni za tion, and in September 1955 it be-
came a member of the Central Treaty Or ga ni za tion, another U.S.-
sponsored regional security alliance. Pakistan’s motivation was to fortify
itself militarily and strategically against India. The United States wel-
comed Pakistan’s cooperation with its overriding strategic priority, “con-
tainment” of the Soviet Union. Around the same time, India formalized
its stance of “nonalignment” with either superpower bloc.
In response to these developments, the Soviet Union moved closer to
neutrality- minded India. In December 1955 the Soviet leaders Nikita
Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin visited India and traveled to Srinagar.
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2 5 8 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
In Srinagar, Premier Khrushchev said: “the people of Jammu and Kash-
mir want to work for the well- being of their beloved country— the Re-
public of India. The people of Kashmir do not want to become toys of
imperialist powers. This is what some powers are trying to do by sup-
porting Pakistan on the so- called Kashmir question. It made us very sad
when imperialist powers succeeded in bringing about the partition of
India. That Kashmir is one of the States of the Republic of India has al-
ready been decided by the people of Kashmir.” Marshal Bulganin referred
to Kashmir as “this northern part of India” and discerned that its popu-
lation felt “deep joy” in being “part of the Indian people.”49 Fortifi ed by
this support, Nehru told Parliament in March 1956 that the plebiscite
was “beside the point” and emphasized “Pakistani aggression in Kashmir
and the legality of Kashmir’s accession to India.”50 In April he disclosed
that a year earlier, in May 1955, he had offered Pakistan’s prime minister
a permanent, de jure division of the former princely state along the 1949
Ceasefi re Line. That the offer was made, and summarily rejected, reveals
India’s contentment and Pakistan’s grievance with the territorial status
quo. In February 1957 the Soviet Union for the fi rst time vetoed a UN
Security Council resolution on Kashmir, and would do so regularly
thereafter.
Meanwhile, on August 10, 1955, Abdullah’s followers in the Valley,
purged from the JKNC, fl oated an opposition or ga ni za tion, the Jammu &
Kashmir Plebiscite Front. Afzal Beg, in and out of prison, became its fi rst
president, and its other leaders included Maulana Masoodi, who had
been removed as the JKNC’s general secretary in 1953 for opposing
Abdullah’s ouster and incarceration. As the Plebiscite Front began to
mobilize the people, on August 23 the J&K government banned public
meetings, “to prevent clashes between supporters and opponents of the
Government.” Mass detentions of Plebiscite Front activists followed. In-
deed, “between 19 November 1955 and 29 September 1956 four presi-
dents of the Plebiscite Front were arrested” one after another.51
In the Kashmir Valley, Bakshi’s 10- year regime became synonymous
with, and is remembered for, or ga nized thuggery and blatant election
fraud. In 1957 the J&K Constituent Assembly was dissolved and elec-
tions were held to form a state legislature. The offi cial JKNC won 69 of
its 75 seats. Of the Kashmir Valley’s 43 seats, 35 were won by offi cial
candidates without any contest, either because no candidates fi led nomi-
nation papers or because all papers other than those of the offi cial candi-
dates were ruled invalid. Token contests in the other eight seats pitted
offi cial candidates against po liti cally unknown persons. The opposition
in the J&K state legislature constituted in 1957 consisted of fi ve Praja
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 5 9
Parishad members who won from Hindu- majority areas of the Jammu
region. The results in state elections in 1962 were a replica of 1957: the
offi cial JKNC won 68 of the 74 seats. (The Praja Parishad got three, and
three went to in de pen dents, including the chief Buddhist lama of La-
dakh.) Of the Valley’s 43 seats, 32 were decided without any contest, and
Bakshi and his cabinet colleagues G. M. Sadiq, Mir Qasim, and Khwaja
Shamsuddin were all elected unopposed.
The man responsible for deciding whether nomination papers were
valid was Abdul Khaleq Malik, a Bakshi henchman, and those blessed by
him in this way are remembered even today in the Valley’s po liti cal lore
as “Khaleq- made MLAs” (members of the legislative assembly). Nehru
wrote to Bakshi after the 1962 state elections: “it would strengthen your
position if you lost a few seats to bona fi de opponents.” The farcical situ-
ation was of Nehru’s making. When in 1954 an attempt by the Praja So-
cialist Party, a leftist all- India party, to open a branch offi ce in Srinagar
was thwarted by Bakshi’s thugs, Nehru’s reaction was to accuse the Praja
Socialist Party of “joining hands with the enemies of the country.” Ac-
cording to a Jammu- based activist who met Nehru in Delhi to request
that pro- Abdullah elements be allowed some po liti cal space to operate as
an opposition in the Valley, Nehru agreed that Bakshi was an unsavory
character but “argued that India’s case [on Kashmir] now revolved
around him and so . . . Bakshi’s government had to be strengthened.” The
activist recalls Nehru saying that the Valley’s politics “revolved around
personalities” and there was “no material for democracy there.”52
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed outlived his usefulness to his masters in
New Delhi after a de cade as J&K’s “prime minister,” during which time
he came to personify a regime hated in the Valley. In late 1963 an attempt
was made to dilute the embarrassment and the anger, and he was com-
pelled to step down. But he managed to stave off the New Delhi– backed
prime ministerial candidacy of G. M. Sadiq, his rival within the ruling
clique, with whom he had been locked in confl ict since 1957, after failing
to appoint anyone from the Sadiq faction to cabinet posts after the 1957
state elections. Bakshi was replaced as prime minister by one of his more
obscure cabinet colleagues, Khwaja Shamsuddin, who lasted four months
in the offi ce, from October 1963 to February 1964.
Winters tend to be relatively quiet in the Kashmir Valley because of the
biting cold weather and frequent snowbound conditions. But the winter
of 1963– 1964 saw the Valley explode in pop u lar protest.
The unrest was sparked by the mysterious disappearance of the holy
hair of the Prophet Mohammad from Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine in late
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2 6 0 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
December 1963. The vanished relic reappeared just as mysteriously a
week later, but in the meantime the Valley had been convulsed by agita-
tion and protest. It was an eruption of mass fury against the government
of India and its local proxies, who were suspected by the public of malfea-
sance or negligence in the relic affair. The release of pent- up resentment of
over a de cade of repression generated an uprising that surpassed the Quit
Kashmir movement of 1946 and would itself be surpassed for intensity a
quarter century later, in the winter of 1989– 1990, when an uprising- cum-
insurgency against Indian authority would engulf the Valley.
The few leaders of pop u lar standing not in prison, notably Maulana
Masoodi and Ghulam Mohiuddin Karra, who had been the chief of the
Srinagar city or ga ni za tion of the JKNC in the 1940s before falling out
with Sheikh Abdullah, had a diffi cult time controlling and calming the
people. Yet
Masoodi and Karra warned against violence. . . . Both did wonderful work
pacifying excited Muslim crowds during the critical days, when a small mis-
take could have soaked the Valley in blood. But for Masoodi [a se nior
cleric], authentication of the restored relic would have been impossible and
placed the Indian authorities in tremendous diffi culty. Karra’s speeches,
characterized by balance and caution, produced a moderating infl uence. . . .
In a mass meeting at Zadibal [a quarter of Srinagar inhabited by the Valley’s
Shia minority] he advised Kashmiris that while denouncing Hindu commu-
nalism in India they should not overlook the atrocities of Muslim fanatics in
East Pakistan [a reference to early 1964 riots targeting the Hindu minority
of East Pakistan].53
The intelligence reports from the Valley were most alarming, and the
outpouring of rage unnerved at least some in New Delhi’s offi cialdom as
well as destabilizing the proxy regime in the Valley. The inept Shamsud-
din was replaced in late February 1964 as prime minister of J&K by
G. M. Sadiq, and a decision was made by the Sadiq government and its
handlers in New Delhi to take the calculated risk of releasing Sheikh
Abdullah in order to calm down the people. This was the context of
Abdullah’s release and triumphant return to Srinagar in April 1964. In
late April he went to Delhi to meet Nehru, who was ailing and died
weeks later, on May 27, 1964. In May he was allowed to go to Pakistan
to meet with the Pakistani military dictator, Ayub Khan. The steadfast
loyalists Beg and Masoodi accompanied Abdullah to both Delhi and
Pakistan.
The “Srinagar Spring” dissipated within months. The Indian govern-
ment was worried and alarmed by Abdullah’s defi ant rhetoric on “self-
determination” and the mass response this evoked in the Valley. Over a
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 6 1
de cade in prison seemed to have steeled rather than broken his resolve.
The Sadiq government, packed with Sadiq loyalists like Mir Qasim and
D. P. Dhar, came under pressure not just from the Kashmiri street, domi-
nated by Abdullah, but from the deposed Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed,
who tried to or ga nize a no- confi dence motion against Sadiq in the state
legislature with Abdullah’s tacit support. In September 1964 Bakshi was
arrested under the Defense of India Rules— a draconian law inherited from
the British Raj, who used it liberally against Indian freedom fi ghters— and
sent to the same prison in the Jammu region where Abdullah had been
consigned 11 years earlier. (Bakshi was released after a few months on
health grounds.) Then, in the winter of 1964– 1965, the most drastic epi-
sode yet of J&K’s “integration” into India unfolded.
In December 1964 India’s home (interior) minister announced in Par-
liament that the Center had decided to bring J&K under the purview of
Articles 356 and 357 of the Indian Constitution. These articles empower
the Center to dismiss elected state governments if it determines that there
has been a breakdown of governance in the state and to assume the state
government’s legislative mandate (President’s Rule), respectively. They
are the most antifederal features of India’s Constitution and would gain
par tic u lar infamy during the 1980s, when Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s gov-
ernments sought to topple demo cratically elected state governments run
by regionalist opposition parties. In March 1965, the Center’s powers of
control and intervention were consolidated in J&K when the J&K As-
sembly passed an amendment to the state constitution replacing the post
of sadr- e-riyasat, the nominal head of state elected by the state legisla-
ture, with a governor appointed by New Delhi, as in other Indian states.
Another amendment changed the title of J&K’s head of government
from “prime minister” to “chief minister,” as in other Indian states. This
round of “integration” effectively marked the end of the asymmetric au-
tonomy given to J&K under Article 370 of the Constitution.
The most breathtaking “integrative” development occurred in January
1965. On January 3 the working committee of the JKNC, meaning the
ruling Sadiq group, with Mir Qasim the party general secretary, an-
nounced that it would dissolve its identity and become the state branch
of the Congress party. The Congress’s working committee, the party’s
highest body, accepted the decision with alacrity, suggesting a carefully
choreographed plan.
The “people of the Valley reacted with unpre ce dented anger,” and their
“protests were again suppressed with brute force and large- scale arrests.”
In mid- January Abdullah delivered a vitriolic speech to a mammoth rally
at the Hazratbal shrine calling on the people to resist the imposition of
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2 6 2 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
Articles 356 and 357 and reject the absurd and insulting attempt to
eradicate the identity of Kashmir’s historic regionalist po liti cal move-
ment. “Violence and arson took place in some parts of Srinagar,” particu-
larly targeting shops and businesses owned by Pandits and other Hindus,
as soon as crowds dispersed after the meeting. By March, mass arrests of
Plebiscite Front leaders and activists were taking place, and in May 1965
Abdullah himself was arrested under the Defense of India Rules on his
return from a tour abroad.54
The turmoil in the Valley encouraged the Pakistani military to launch
a large- scale cross– Ceasefi re Line infi ltration in August 1965, with the
aim of instigating a general uprising in the Valley. The several thousand
armed men who crossed the Ceasefi re Line into the Valley were a mix of
Pakistani professional soldiers and volunteers from the “non- Kashmiri
speaking AJK [“Azad” Jammu and Kashmir] territories” under Pakistan’s
control since the late 1940s. Such an invasion had been in preparation
ever since October– November 1962, when the Indian army had suffered
a demoralizing military defeat in a border war with China, an emerging
ally of Pakistan. Pakistan had ceded to China a remote and barren moun-
tainous tract of its part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kash-
mir, bordering China’s Xinjiang province, in 1963. The planners of the
1965 operation “had taken for granted the fullest cooperation of the lo-
cal Muslims but this was not forthcoming, at any rate not on the ex-
pected huge scale.” The operation failed due to the paucity of local sup-
port and a hard fi ght- back by the initially surprised Indian army. This
was the fi rst of two Pakistani incursions into the Indian side of the former
princely state. The second came in 1999 when Pakistani military units
crossed the Line of Control (as the Ceasefi re Line had been renamed in
1972), in an operation initially undetected by the Indians, and seized
ridges and peaks in the remote Kargil district of Ladakh. It was a counter-
productive attempt to spark an international crisis that would force India
into negotiations and concessions on Kashmir. As later in 1999, when the
Pakistani move elicited broad international condemnation as reckless and
rife with dangers of escalation between nuclear- armed adversaries, the
1965 operation not only fl opped but boomeranged on Pakistan when the
Indian government decided to broaden the confl ict to the India- Pakistan
international border, triggering a 22- day inconclusive war in September
1965. Pakistan’s chronic revisionism vis-à- vis the Ceasefi re Line/Line of
Control has remained frustrated to this day.
The lesson of 1965 was that the Kashmir Valley’s Muslims, however
aggrieved with India, were not going to take the bait offered by Pakistan.
Though embittered, they were also “reluctant to bring about change
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 6 3
through warfare and bloodshed.”55 That would change a quarter century
later, in the early 1990s, when many thousands from a new generation of
the Valley’s young men took up arms, with Pakistan’s material support,
against Indian authority, and a brutal cycle of violence ensued that in-
fl icted enormous suffering and trauma on the Valley’s people and society
for over a de cade and a half.
In June 1966 Jaya Prakash Narayan, an anticolonial freedom fi ghter and
veteran socialist leader, wrote a confi dential letter to India’s new prime
minister, Indira Gandhi. (A de cade later, in the mid- 1970s, the aged Nara-
yan would play an important role in mobilizing opposition, notably among
youth, to her autocratic policies and especially her infamous 19- month
Emergency.) In the 1966 letter Narayan wrote: “we profess democracy, but
rule by force in Kashmir. . . . We profess secularism, but let Hindu nation-
alism stampede us into trying to establish it by repression. Kashmir has
distorted India’s image in the world as nothing has done. . . . That problem
exists not because Pakistan wants to grab Kashmir, but because there is
deep and widespread po liti cal discontent among the people.”56
But in the Kashmir Valley, it was back to the pathetic “politics as
usual” by then. In elections to the state legislature in 1967, the majority
of seats, 39 of 75, were fi lled without any contest. Congress candidates,
meaning nominees of the ruling Sadiq- Mir Qasim group, which had meta-
morphosed into the Pradesh (State) Congress of J&K, were “elected unop-
posed” in over half, 22, of the Valley’s 42 constituencies. One of these vic-
tors was Shamsuddin, formerly prime minister of J&K for four shambolic
months in 1963– 1964, who was declared elected unopposed from the
town of Anantnag after the papers fi led by fi ve other candidates were re-
jected as invalid. In all, 118 candidates were disqualifi ed from contesting,
nearly half, 55, on the grounds that they had failed to take the compulsory
oath of allegiance to India and the rest with no reason given. The Congress
won a four- fi fths majority in the state legislature— 60 of the 75 seats.
The 1967 national and state elections in India were the country’s most
competitive after in de pen dence: the hegemonic Congress party saw its
parliamentary majority sharply reduced and suffered outright defeats or
serious reverses in state elections across northern, eastern, and southern
India to an assortment of opposition parties, almost all of which were
explicitly or effectively regionalist in character. As noted earlier, these
elections were an important juncture in India’s gradual evolution as a
robust multiparty and semifederal democracy. In J&K, the dreary farce
of rigged elections continued. For the fi rst time, following the integrative
mea sures enacted in 1965, the state elected six members to the Lok
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2 6 4 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
Sabha (three from the Valley, two from the Jammu region, and one from
Ladakh). Congress won fi ve of these six seats, two uncontested: Anant-
nag, in the southern Valley, and Ladakh. In the Jammu region, where
Congress won both constituencies, opposition parties of all- India orienta-
tion, the leftist Praja Socialist Party and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Jan Sangh, “severely criticized electoral irregularities.” The abuses com-
mon to both sets of polls in J&K, state and national, included “large- scale
rejection of nomination papers, arrests of [opposition] polling agents, ad-
vance distribution of ballot papers to Congress workers, absence of op-
position agents at time of counting, and rampant use of offi cial machin-
ery to the advantage of the ruling party.”57
The only opposition candidate to win election to India’s Parliament
in 1967 from J&K was Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, who stood from the
Srinagar constituency. His platform was regional patriotism. In par tic u-
lar, he claimed to be running in order to save the identity of the Valley’s
historic po liti cal movement, the JKNC, now that his rival faction had
forsaken that identity and been absorbed into Congress as a provincial
unit. A commentator on state politics from the city of Jammu remembers
being told in Srinagar by offi cials sent from New Delhi to “supervise”
the elections in J&K— mainly operatives of intelligence agencies— that
their instructions were that “Bakshi had to be defeated in the national
interest.”58 Their efforts failed. It is probable that “Bakshi Ghulam Mo-
hammed would not have won a free election at any point during his ten
years in offi ce.”59 But now the groundswell of support for Bakshi the re-
gional patriot was so strong that he managed to win from Srinagar. Al-
ways the joker in the pack of Valley politicians, Bakshi lived up to his
chameleon and turncoat reputation until his death in 1972. In March
1971 he sought reelection to the Lok Sabha from Srinagar as a Congress
candidate. This was the national election that saw the rise of Indira Gan-
dhi as the dominant fi gure in India’s politics on a left- populist platform.
Her party won a resounding majority in the Lok Sabha and fi ve of the six
constituencies in J&K. The exception was Srinagar, a congested capital
city where outright rigging is more diffi cult than in the Valley’s district
towns and rural areas. Here Bakshi, the regime- sponsored candidate, was
heavily defeated by a journalist known to be a Plebiscite Front sympa-
thizer who stood as an in de pen dent.
In December 1970 the Plebiscite Front announced that it would put
forward candidates in the Lok Sabha election imminent in March 1971
and the state election due in 1972. The decision had been in the offi ng. In
1969 Plebiscite Front candidates had run for local bodies in the Valley,
albeit not under the Plebiscite Front’s name, and swept the polls. Mir
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 6 5
Qasim, who had just taken over as J&K’s Congress chief minister on his
mentor Sadiq’s death, was aghast at the prospect of Plebiscite Front par-
ticipation in the national and state elections. As he wrote in his memoirs,
“if the elections were free and fair, the victory of the Front was a fore-
gone conclusion” in the Valley. Indira Gandhi was also displeased at the
prospect. Speaking in the city of Jammu on December 23, 1970, she was
unequivocal that attempts to enter the Lok Sabha or the J&K legislature
with the intent of “wrecking the Constitution” would not be tolerated.
Asked by journalists how this could be prevented, she replied: “Ways will
be found.”60
On January 8, 1971, “externment orders” were served on the se nior
Plebiscite Front leaders Afzal Beg and Ghulam Mohammad (G. M.) Shah,
Abdullah’s son- in- law, requiring them to leave J&K. During the night of
January 8– 9, “at least 350 offi cials and members of the Front were ar-
rested under the [Jammu & Kashmir] Preventive Detention Act in a series
of police raids.” On January 12 the Center declared the Plebiscite Front
illegal under the India- wide Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, as it had
“on diverse occasions by words, either spoken or written, and signs and
visual repre sen ta tions . . . asserted a claim to determine whether or not
Jammu and Kashmir will remain part of India.”61 In the state elections of
1972, the ruling Congress party got 57 of the 75 seats in the J&K Assem-
bly. For the fi rst time, the Kashmir Valley wing of the Jama’at- i-Islami
(Islamic Rally), a fundamentalist movement that has wings in Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and both sides of the Line of Control in Kashmir, elected fi ve
Assembly members from Valley constituencies, apparently after an under-
standing with Qasim that they would help oppose the Plebiscite Front.
In 1968 Sheikh Abdullah said: “the fact remains that Indian democracy
stops short at Pathankot [the last town in India’s Punjab before the Jammu
region]. Between Pathankot and the Banihal [a mountain pass linking the
Jammu region with the Valley] you may have some mea sure of democracy,
but beyond Banihal there is none. What we have in [the] Kashmir [Valley]
bears some of the worst characteristics of colonial rule.”62 Indeed, the rela-
tionship between the Kashmir Valley and the Indian Union was utterly
poisoned by the policy of force and fraud deployed between 1953 and
1975. The toxic legacy of that period provided the backdrop to the out-
break of a protracted insurgency in the Valley in 1990.
The Return of Sheikh Abdullah
When Sheikh Abdullah fi nally made his peace, in 1975, with those in
power in New Delhi, it was on New Delhi’s terms. In November 1974 his
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2 6 6 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
faithful associate Afzal Beg and a se nior bureaucrat representing the gov-
ernment of India inked a short agreement subsequently known as the
“Delhi accord” and sometimes as the “Indira- Abdullah accord.” It as-
serted that “the State of Jammu and Kashmir which is a constituent unit
of the Union of India shall, in its relation with the Union, continue to be
governed by Article 370 of the Constitution of India.” But there was no
restoration in substantive terms of the asymmetric autonomy enshrined
in Article 370. Instead, the agreement specifi ed that “provisions of the
Constitution of India already applied to the State of Jammu and Kashmir
without adaptation or modifi cation are unalterable.” This meant that al-
most all of the 28 “integrative” constitutional orders issued from New
Delhi and the 262 Union laws made applicable to the state between 1953
and the mid- 1970s would stand. The only concession the Center made
was minor:
With a view to assuring freedom to the State of Jammu and Kashmir to
have its own legislation on matters like welfare mea sures, cultural matters,
social security, personal law and procedural laws, in a manner suited to the
special conditions in the State [a coy reference to its Muslim- majority popu-
lation, unique among India’s states], it is agreed that the State Government
can review laws made by Parliament or extended to the State after 1953 on
any matter relatable to the Concurrent List [subject to the joint jurisdiction
of the Center and the states] and may decide which of them, in its opinion,
needs amendment or repeal. Thereafter appropriate steps may be taken un-
der Article 254 of the Constitution of India. The grant of President’s assent
to any such legislation [passed by the J&K Assembly] would be sympatheti-
cally considered.
A committee was later set up to examine this matter; its recommenda-
tions were never made public.
The Delhi accord was especially careful to protect “the appointment,
powers, functions, duties, immunities and privileges of the Governor” of
J&K, an appointee of New Delhi since 1965. It specifi ed that “no law
made by the Legislature of the State of Jammu and Kashmir seeking to
make any change” in the Governor’s role and prerogatives “shall take
effect” without the assent of the president of India (effectively, the Cen-
ter). Abdullah formally accepted the agreement in February 1975, after
unsuccessfully holding out for the restoration of the “prime minister” ti-
tle to J&K’s head of government, and its contents were then made public
by Indira Gandhi. Abdullah was then reinstated as the state’s chief minis-
ter, after Mir Qasim stepped down. In March both houses of India’s
Parliament approved the Delhi accord; the only opposition came from
Hindu nationalists, then a small presence in Parliament, who demanded
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Figure 8. Sheikh Abdullah addresses a public meeting in Srinagar, Kashmir
Valley (1975). POPPERFOTO / GETTY IMAGES.
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2 6 8 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
the abrogation of Article 370 and objected to “appeasement” of the sepa-
ratist Abdullah. After returning to the Valley, Abdullah dissolved the
Plebiscite Front formed in 1955 and resumed leadership, after 22 years,
of the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference. (The two men who had
usurped the JKNC mantle in 1953, Bakshi and Sadiq, were dead, and
Qasim, a Congress leader since 1965, faded into po liti cal oblivion.)63
This turn of events in 1975 signaled Abdullah’s abandonment of the
“self- determination” platform he had upheld for over two de cades. He
never again spoke using the rhetoric he used in the 1950s and 1960s.
He may have calculated that after India’s historic victory in the Decem-
ber 1971 India- Pakistan war and the breakup of Pakistan with the for-
mation of Bangladesh, the strategic balance in the subcontinent had
shifted so decisively in India’s favor that it made sense to conclude a rap-
prochement with New Delhi. It is also possible that he was worn down
by advancing age— he turned 70 in 1975— and by two de cades of incar-
ceration. (He had a major heart attack in 1977 and died in 1982.) He
was faced with the prospect of dying in jail or in enforced exile from his
homeland, the Kashmir Valley.
Abdullah returned to the Valley amid massive acclaim and celebration.
The ordinary people of the Valley were delighted to have their “Lion”
back, not just free but in charge, as the long era of the jackals fi nally
came to an end. His stature was so commanding that any regime headed
by him was guaranteed to have wide legitimacy in the Valley. When he
died in September 1982, having dominated the Valley’s politics for 50
years, his funeral pro cession was gigantic. It may have been the largest
funeral pro cession ever seen for a po liti cal leader in India and the sub-
continent, although the Valley is not particularly populous nor Srinagar a
very large city by Indian and subcontinental standards.
Under the surface, however, things were not hunky- dory in the Valley
after Abdullah’s return. In 1995 I interviewed Abdul Qayyum Zargar,
who as secretary to Afzal Beg in 1975 had had inside knowledge of the
Delhi accord’s making and aftermath. He was living in his hometown,
Doda, and was now middle- aged. Doda, which is nestled amid rugged
mountains in the northeastern part of the Jammu region, close to the
southeastern part of the Valley, is inhabited predominantly by Kashmiri-
speaking Muslims, who are about 80 percent of its population. (The rest
are Hindu.) The district of Doda was at the time J&K’s largest in
area— 11,500 square kilometers— and had a population consisting of 57
percent Muslims, mostly Kashmiri- speakers like the Valley’s majority
population, and 43 percent Hindus. The district has since been trifur-
cated for administrative con ve nience (into Doda, Kishtwar, and Ramban
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 6 9
districts). At the time of this interview, the undivided Doda district was in
the grip of a brutal cycle of insurgency and counterinsurgency that pitted
armed militants, mainly locals with a sprinkling of Pakistani radicals,
against the Indian army and paramilitary police forces, with the horror
all the more stark in the picturesque setting of nature. And in the Valley,
lacerated by violence since 1990, Sheikh Abdullah’s grave, near Srinagar’s
Hazratbal shrine, was under guard by Indian paramilitary police to pre-
vent its desecration by a young generation of angry militants who had
come to see him as a sellout to “India.”
Zargar recalled that at the time, 20 years earlier, the terms of the 1975
accord had caused consternation and resentment among Plebiscite Front/
National Conference activists across the Valley and other strongholds like
the Jammu region’s Doda- Kishtwar zone. Many activists saw the agree-
ment as not an honorable compromise they could live with but abject ca-
pitulation by their leader, an unconditional surrender rather than a negoti-
ated truce. It took tremendous persuasion, according to Zargar, to convince
the disgruntled rank and fi le not to openly oppose the agreement. The ap-
peal to them was couched in sentimental terms: they should fall in line
because Sheikh Saheb’s (Respected Sheikh’s) personal prestige was at stake,
and he had suffered so much for the awaam (people). While this was
largely effective, not everyone was persuaded. A signifi cant number of po-
liti cally minded younger men who had been born after 1947, grown up
through the oppressive 1950s and 1960s, and come of age in the 1970s,
charted an alternative path to keep the call for “self- determination” alive.
One was Shabir Shah, who cofounded the People’s League, a group based
in the southern half of the Valley (with some infl uence in Doda) and paid
the price by spending 20 years in jail until late 1994. Some of these men,
joined by an even younger generation of men born in the 1960s who were
radicalized during the second half of the 1980s, emerged as leaders of the
Valley’s insurgency in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Sheikh Abdullah of 1975– 1982 was a lion in winter and, in retro-
spect, the 1975 deal was a way station en route to the armed struggle for
azaadi (freedom) that convulsed the Valley in the 1990s. But for some
time— up to 1984— the po liti cal rehabilitation of Abdullah and by exten-
sion of the regional base he represented resulted in a fragile stability in
the Valley.
Once state elections were held in 1977, after the nationwide Emer-
gency imposed by Indira Gandhi in June 1975 ended, the JKNC won a
clear majority in the J&K legislature, 47 of the 76 seats. This majority
was built on their overwhelming victory in the Kashmir Valley, where
their candidates won in 40 of the 42 constituencies. (The other two seats
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2 7 0 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
went to a short- lived J&K branch of the Janata Party that had defeated
Congress in the post- Emergency national election. In the Valley this was
led by Maulana Masoodi, who had become estranged from Abdullah.) In
the Jammu region (32 seats), Congress and the Janata Party won 11 con-
stituencies each, and the JKNC came third, with seven wins. The State
Assembly elected in 1977 was J&K’s fi rst ever legislature that was sub-
stantially representative of its people and diverse communities, and the
government formed by Abdullah was the fi rst in a quarter century with
any legitimacy in the Valley.
In 1981 Sheikh Abdullah anointed his eldest son, Farooq Abdullah, a
doctor and po liti cal novice, as his successor. This was in the already well-
established, if deeply problematic, tradition of hereditary succession and
po liti cal dynasties in the subcontinent. In June 1983 Farooq led the JKNC
to its second consecutive victory in state elections. As in 1977, the JKNC
won 47 of the 76 seats in the J&K Assembly: 38 of 42 constituencies in
the Valley, 8 of 32 in the Jammu region, and one of the two in Ladakh.
Congress emerged as a large opposition, with 26 seats in the new
house— 23 from the Jammu region, two in the Valley, and one in Ladakh.
It seemed that at last a “normal” polity was taking root in J&K, a popu-
larly elected government with a majority mandate facing a strong opposi-
tion. The fact that the party in government was a regional party specifi c to
the state and the main opposition a national party (indeed, the national
party) with a base across India also constituted a healthy balance between
the Kashmir Valley’s autonomist regionalism and the nationally oriented
perspective favored by the majority of the Jammu region’s electorate.
Countdown to Insurgency
The promise was subverted within a year by ruthless intervention from
the Center. Prior to J&K’s June 1983 state elections, Farooq Abdullah
had angered Indira Gandhi by opening channels with opposition parties
in power in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, and
the eastern state of West Bengal. In West Bengal the Left Front, led by the
CPM, had ousted Congress from power in June 1977. In January 1983
Indira had been badly jolted when Congress was routed in state elections
in Andhra Pradesh by the fl edgling regional party the Telugu Desam, led
by N. T. Rama Rao. At the same time Congress had been defeated in
Karnataka, like Andhra a Congress bastion, by the regional incarnation
of the Janata Party whose implosion into factions in 1979 had enabled
Indira Gandhi’s return to power in New Delhi in the midterm national
election three years earlier. After winning the J&K state elections, Farooq
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 7 1
enraged Indira Gandhi further by participating in opposition “conclaves”
with the chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, and Karnataka
that were intended to build a coordinated anti- Congress front in national
elections due in late 1984. As the chief minister of a state government run
by a regional party he led, Farooq Abdullah had much in common with
the opposition chief ministers of these states and their regionalist parties,
above all a tense relationship with the Congress- ruled Center. (The par-
ties in power in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka were explicitly regional-
ist or state specifi c, while in West Bengal the CPM, nominally a national
party, had grown and eventually won power essentially as a state- specifi c
alternative to Congress.)
For J&K’s demo cratic integration with the Indian Union, Farooq’s
initiative to come out of the insular cocoon of the Kashmir Valley and
play a role in all- India politics was a very positive development. But In-
dira Gandhi saw this behavior as hostile provocation. In the national
elections of 1977 and 1980, Congress and JKNC had run candidates as
de facto allies in J&K, sharing out the state’s six Lok Sabha constituen-
cies. This refl ected an implicit element of the 1975 pact that had restored
an emasculated Sheikh Abdullah to offi ce in J&K: an agreement that the
JKNC would not be party to challenges to Congress’s nationwide pri-
macy. Now his son had broken that understanding.
In the J&K state elections of June 1983, Indira Gandhi campaigned
energetically in the Jammu region, appealing to Jammu Hindus’ long-
held resentment of the greater po liti cal importance of the Kashmir Valley.
The campaign yielded rich dividends for Congress in the Jammu region,
and by early 1984 it was becoming clear that she had used the J&K state
elections as a laboratory to test an India- wide strategy she was develop-
ing for the national election due in late 1984. This strategy involved ap-
pealing to Hindu majoritarian sentiment to support her party and gov-
ernment’s defense of “national unity and integrity” against assorted
“separatist” ethnic and ethnoreligious tendencies: in the northeastern
state of Assam, among Sikhs in Punjab, and among Kashmiri Muslims in
J&K— rather implausibly, given Farooq and his father’s commitment to
the Indian Union.
In June 1984, with the national election a few months away, Indira
escalated her anti-“separatist” strategy by sending the Indian army into
Sikhism’s holiest site, the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, to evict a
group of armed radical Sikhs in a bloody battle, sparking a chain of
events that worsened the Punjab crisis and fed a Sikh insurgency there
through the early 1990s. In the same month, Farooq Abdullah’s govern-
ment, barely a year into its six- year term, was dismissed by yet another
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2 7 2 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
intervention from the Center: 12 of the 47 JKNC legislators defected and
formed a new J&K government with the support of the Congress contin-
gent in the state legislature. All 12, mainly back- benchers, became minis-
ters in the new government. Ghulam Mohammad (G. M.) Shah, Sheikh
Abdullah’s son- in- law and a former Plebiscite Front leader, who had
nursed ambitions of inheriting the sheikh’s po liti cal mantle, became the
chief minister.
The chief executor of this putsch was J&K’s New Delhi- appointed
governor, Jagmohan. He had earned Indira Gandhi’s trust— and public
notoriety— a de cade earlier when he had served as a controversial admin-
istrator in Delhi during the Emergency of 1975– 1977. He was dispatched
as governor to J&K three months before the putsch, after the previous
governor apparently refused to connive in Congress’s unconstitutional
and antidemo cratic conspiracies. Once installed, Jagmohan dismissed
Farooq Abdullah, denied him the opportunity to try and prove his ma-
jority on the fl oor of the legislature, and rejected his appeal for fresh
elections.
It was a surreal replay of 1953, with Indira Gandhi, Farooq Abdullah,
Jagmohan, and G. M. Shah playing the roles of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sheikh
Abdullah, Karan Singh, and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, respectively. As
in 1953, furious protests erupted in Srinagar and across the Valley. These
were suppressed by detachments of the CRPF, whose personnel were air-
lifted into Srinagar the night before the coup. (Nearly three de cades later,
the CRPF still discharges the thankless task, along with the J&K police,
of maintaining order in Srinagar and other Valley towns.) In August
1984 exactly the same modus operandi was used in the failed coup to
topple N. T. Rama Rao’s recently elected Telugu Desam Party govern-
ment in Andhra Pradesh. In 1985 Farooq Abdullah wrote that the plot to
depose his government was “hatched in 1 Safdarjang Road, New Delhi,”
the prime minister’s residence, and “directed by Mrs Gandhi.”64
The developments of 1984 marked the beginning of the end of the
fragile stability that had prevailed in the Valley for nearly a de cade. The
outrageous removal of a government with pop u lar legitimacy and its re-
placement by a motley collection of opportunist stooges, along with the
use of repression to put down protests, touched an all- too- familiar chord
with the Valley population’s experience of New Delhi’s shenanigans and
rekindled their simmering rebellious streak, particularly among students
and youth. There was already anger in the Valley, especially among the
young, at the Union government’s hanging, on 11 February 1984, of the
pro– Kashmir in de pen dence militant Maqbool Butt (1938– 1984). Origi-
nally from a village in the Valley’s northern Kupwara district close to the
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 7 3
Line of Control, he was executed in Delhi’s Tihar prison for having alleg-
edly killed a policeman during a bank robbery in 1976.
In the national sympathy wave after Indira Gandhi was assassinated,
when Congress won its highest ever proportion of the Lok Sabha, its
landslide victory stopped at the Banihal Pass. All three parliamentary
constituencies in the Valley elected pro- Farooq candidates with huge ma-
jorities. (As recounted earlier, Congress’s landslide was also defi ed in
Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, and Assam.)
G. M. Shah’s tenure as chief minister was a farcical episode even by
J&K’s standards. He earned the sobriquet “curfew chief minister” be-
cause of the high frequency of curfews imposed in the Valley to prevent
protest demonstrations during his 20 months in offi ce. Indeed, the Valley
was under curfew orders for 72 of his fi rst 90 days as chief minister. His
lame- duck reign came to a pathetic end in March 1986 when localized
violence against members of the minority Pandit community occurred
around a town south of Srinagar and his government was dismissed by
the Center under Article 356 of the Indian Constitution, citing a break-
down of law and order in the state. J&K was then brought under direct
central rule, which meant that Governor Jagmohan became the state’s de
facto ruler.
Farooq Abdullah, a po liti cal greenhorn known for his impulsive temper-
ament, committed po liti cal hara- kiri in November 1986 when he reached
an understanding with the government in New Delhi. In a fresh twist to
the po liti cal circus going on since 1984, he was reinstated as J&K’s chief
minister pending new state elections, which were fi xed for March 1987.
In return, he agreed to run in those elections in alliance with the Con-
gress party, led by Rajiv Gandhi, which at the time looked unassailable in
India’s politics. Under the deal’s terms, the JKNC would fi eld candidates
in only 45 of J&K’s 76 constituencies, mostly in the Valley, while Con-
gress would contest the other 31 seats, mostly in the Jammu region.
Farooq justifi ed his volte- face as a hard po liti cal reality he had “come
to accept”: “if I want to implement programs to fi ght poverty and run a
government, I will have to stay on the right side of the Center.”65 This
logic was seen in the Valley as abject surrender to New Delhi’s bullying
and evoked nearly universal scorn. By deciding to capitulate to Rajiv
Gandhi’s party and government in return for his restoration to offi ce,
Farooq abandoned the platform of regional pride and patriotism that
was the lifeblood of the JKNC’s mass appeal in the Valley. He simply did
not have the stature and authority that had enabled his father to paper
over a similar capitulation to Indira Gandhi in 1975. When Farooq
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2 7 4 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
turned this page on his defi ance of New Delhi, he lost own ership of the
Valley’s deeply rooted and overwhelmingly pop u lar po liti cal tradition of
standing up for regional identity and rights. That fi eld was now open to
others to fi ll. There was also a related problem. The JKNC and Congress
had won 73 of the 76 seats in the J&K Assembly in the mid- 1983 state
elections (47 and 26, respectively.) With the former governing and op-
position parties now in the same camp, a yawning void opened up in the
opposition space. Jammu & Kashmir’s demo cratic development had
been crippled since the early 1950s by the (forced) absence of a legal and
institutionalized opposition, with the partial exception of the 1977– 1984
interlude, and the Rajiv- Farooq accord threatened to bring about the re-
vival of this fundamentally antidemo cratic feature of the state’s politics.
The winter of 1986– 1987 saw an extraordinary demo cratic mobiliza-
tion in the Kashmir Valley, as a broad and heterogeneous spectrum of
individuals and groups came together to build a regionalist opposition
force to contest the March 1987 state elections. This co ali tion came to be
popularly known as the Muslim United Front. As a mainstream Indian
news magazine published from Delhi observed during the campaign, the
Muslim United Front was an improvised “ad hoc bloc” of various reli-
gious, civil society, and po liti cal groups “with no real unifying ideology.”
One element was the fundamentalist Jama’at- i-Islami, which had a small
pop u lar base but good or ga ni za tion; another was the J&K People’s Con-
ference, a regional party with a base in the Valley’s northern Kupwara
district, formed in 1978 by Abdul Ghani Lone, a very nonfundamentalist
politician who had begun his career in the Congress party. (Lone, a “self-
determination” advocate from 1990, was badly beaten by Indian para-
military police during a demonstration in the early 1990s and repeatedly
jailed, and was shot dead at a public meeting in Srinagar in 2002 by pro-
Pakistan gunmen who viewed him as too moderate.) Another infl uential
Muslim United Front fi gure was Qazi Nissar, the charismatic mirwaiz
(high priest) of the southern half of the Valley. He was arrested by the
Indian government after insurgency engulfed the Valley and jailed from
1990 to 1992. In 1994 he was shot dead in his home near the town of
Anantnag by gunmen from a pro- Pakistan armed group, Hizb- ul Muja-
hideen (Party of Holy Warriors), a close affi liate of Jama’at- i-Islami, after
he publicly criticized them for a spate of murders they had committed of
pro– Kashmir in de pen dence activists.
The Delhi- based magazine noted that the Muslim United Front’s base
was as diverse as its leaders, comprising “educated youth, illiterate
working- class people, and farmers who express anger with the Abdullahs’
family rule, government corruption, and lack of economic development.”
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 7 5
It observed that “the Valley is sharply divided between the party machine
that brings out the traditional vote for the JKNC and hundreds of thou-
sands who have entered politics as participants for the fi rst time under
the umbrella provided by the MUF.” One of the 12 JKNC legislators who
defected in 1984, a Pandit woman who in late 1991 was kidnapped by a
group of insurgents and held captive for 45 days, says in her memoirs
that in early 1987 there was a “wave” in favor of the Muslim United
Front in the Valley. The movement’s grassroots campaign was exception-
ally energetic because it attracted an army of youthful volunteers, young
men born during the 1960s.66
On March 23, 1987, the Valley went to the polls. The same Indian
magazine reported “rigging and strong- arm tactics all over the Valley,”
“massive booth- capturing [forcible takeover of polling stations] by
gangs,” and “entire ballot boxes pre- stamped in favor of JKNC,” while
numerous citizens were “simply not allowed to vote.” The bureaucracy
administering the polls “worked blatantly in favor of the JKNC- Congress
alliance,” and “the police refused to listen to any complaint.” Once count-
ing began, a pattern emerged of supervising offi cials “stopping the count-
ing as soon as they saw opposition candidates taking a lead.”67 It was
another episode of J&K’s hallowed history since 1951 of farcical elec-
tions. The JKNC- Congress alliance took an overwhelming majority in
the state legislature: 66 of the 76 seats. (The JKNC won 40 of the 45
constituencies it contested and Congress 26 of 31.) Muslim United Front
candidates won in just four constituencies, including the towns of Anant-
nag and Sopore, although according to the offi cial results the opposition
alliance got one- third of the statewide vote (which meant that its offi cial
vote in the Valley was much higher than one- third). The Muslim United
Front won no constituencies in Srinagar. One of its defeated candidates
was Mohammad Yusuf Shah, a Jam’aat- i-Islami member who stood from
Amira Kadal, the downtown Srinagar constituency covering the Lal
Chowk and Maisuma areas. (This was Shah’s third foray into electoral
politics; he had also contested state polls in 1977 and 1983.) One of his
chief campaigners was Mohammad Yasin Malik, a previously apo liti cal
young man in his twenties from a typical working- class family in the
Maisuma neighborhood.
A familiar cycle of repression and punishment followed the elections.
Shah and Malik were among the hundreds and possibly thousands of op-
position activists picked up in mass arrests across the Valley as the elec-
tion concluded. Most of those arrested were kept in prison until late 1987
or early 1988, and many were tortured in custody. In May 1989 Malik,
by then a leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which
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2 7 6 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
would launch an insurgency for an in de pen dent state in the second half of
1989, spoke to the same Indian magazine in a Srinagar location. He said
he had recently returned from across the Line of Control, with weapons
and training, along with Ashfaq Majid Wani, another Muslim United
Front volunteer who had been arrested and tortured in 1987. Wani (born
1967), the son of an upper- middle- class Srinagar family, was killed in late
March 1990 during a Srinagar encounter with Indian forces when a gre-
nade he was priming to throw exploded in his hand. His funeral attracted
500,000 mourners who defi ed curfew orders.
Malik (born 1966), who was captured in August 1990, survived the un-
derground life, years of incarceration over the next two de cades, and assas-
sination attempts by the pro- Pakistan Hizb- ul Mujahideen. In mid- 1989
he recalled his imprisonment in 1987: “they called me a Pakistani bastard.
I told them I wanted my rights, my vote was stolen. I am not pro- Pakistan
but have lost faith in India.” Yusuf Shah spoke to another Indian magazine
in the autumn of 1992. By then he was the commander of Hizb- ul Mujahi-
deen, operating under the nom de guerre Syed Salahuddin. He said he had
taken up the gun because experience had convinced him that “slaves have
no vote in the so- called demo cratic set- up of India.”68
The most likely scenario had there been a free and fair election in 1987
was that the Muslim United Front would have won most of the constitu-
encies in the Kashmir Valley and a few in the Jammu region and emerged
as a large opposition in the J&K legislature, holding at least 30 of the 76
seats. The Muslim United Front’s unity might not have lasted, given its
ad hoc character and heterogeneous composition. Instead the second Fa-
rooq Abdullah government, with no legitimacy in the eyes of the bulk of
the Valley’s people, took offi ce, and the Valley sank into a morass of frus-
tration and radicalization. In June 1988 protests against a hike in the elec-
tricity tariff were fi red on by police in Srinagar, and people were killed. In
late July 1988 the fi rst Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front bomb at-
tacks occurred in the city. General strikes and “black days” were observed
across the Valley in 1988 and 1989 on India’s In de pen dence Day (August
15), Republic Day (January 26), the anniversaries of the 1931 Srinagar
protests and the 1947 arrival of Indian troops in the Valley (July 13 and
October 27), and the anniversary of the 1984 execution of the Jammu
and Kashmir Liberation Front leader Maqbool Butt (February 11).
In August 1989 the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front’s small band
of underground militants began a campaign of targeted killings of mem-
bers of the po liti cal establishment and men working as employees and
agents of the extensive surveillance and intelligence- gathering apparatus
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 7 7
in the Valley. The fi rst victim was Mohammad Yusuf Halwai, a JKNC
offi cial in Srinagar who had been prominent in rigging the 1987 election
in the city. He was shot dead by masked gunmen on a downtown street.
On the same day, “many shops in Srinagar were closed in protest against
the opening of a session of the State Assembly and police clashed in some
districts with rock- throwing crowds.”69 Over the next six months, these
targeted killings claimed the lives of about 100 men, approximately
three- fourths of whom were Muslims and the rest Kashmiri Pandits.
In late November 1989 India’s ninth national election after in de pen-
dence was held. This was the watershed election in India’s evolution as a
democracy that marked the end of over four de cades of single- party
dominance and ushered in the regionalization of India’s polity of the next
two de cades. In the Kashmir Valley, the election was a decisive point in
the people’s estrangement from the Indian Union. Almost nobody voted.
In Srinagar the JKNC candidate was “elected unopposed,” as no other
candidates fi led nomination papers. In the other two parliamentary con-
stituencies, Baramulla and Anantnag, the JKNC candidates won with 94
percent and 98 percent of the votes polled. The turnout in both constitu-
encies was 5 percent of the electorate, partly achieved through stuffi ng of
ballot boxes at selected polling stations. (Turnout was also abnormally
low, at 39 percent, in one of the Jammu region’s two Lok Sabha constitu-
encies, the result of a negligible turnout among the Kashmiri- speaking
Muslims of the Doda- Kishtwar zone.) The Kashmir Times, a respected
daily newspaper in the state published from the city of Jammu, editorial-
ized: “let the image of Indian democracy not be tarnished further in
Kashmir.”70
In the second half of January 1990, mass demonstrations demanding
azaadi (freedom) from India broke out across the Kashmir Valley. Hun-
dreds of thousands took to the streets in Srinagar, and tens of thousands
marched in other towns like Baramulla, Sopore, and Anantnag. Farooq
Abdullah’s government was then dismissed from the Center under Article
356 of the Indian Constitution, citing a breakdown of law and order in
the state.
War
I have recounted elsewhere the brutal and complicated saga of the war in
J&K as it has evolved over the two de cades since 1990.71 In recent years,
the story has also been told by writers who are from the Kashmir Valley,
notably Basharat Peer, as a mix of autobiographical reminiscence and
reportage, and Mirza Waheed, in the form of documentary fi ction.72
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2 7 8 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
According to offi cial statistics, 43,460 people were killed in violence in
J&K between January 1990 and April 2011. The large majority of these
deaths occurred in the Kashmir Valley. Nearly half the victims, 21,323,
are classifi ed as “militants” (i.e. insurgents). Another 5,369 were mem-
bers of the security forces: the Indian army, the CRPF and the Border
Security Force, and the J&K police. The rest, 16,868, are classifi ed as
“civilians,” of whom 13,226 are said to have been killed by militants and
3,642 by security forces.
Groups in the Kashmir Valley advocating “self- determination” com-
monly cite a death toll of civilians and insurgents combined of 80,000–
100,000 over the same period. This may be implausibly high, but the
offi cial fi gures and their categorized breakdown of deaths also deserve
scrutiny and skepticism. They do not include, for example, the “disap-
peared”: persons taken away during the confl ict, mostly by security forces,
and never seen again. This number is somewhere between the low and
high four digits. It is also unlikely that all of the 21,000- plus dead classi-
fi ed as “militants” were in fact insurgents. Anecdotal and circumstantial
evidence suggests that a portion of these are civilians passed off as mili-
tants. And the breakdown of civilian fatalities is suspect; the number
killed by militants is probably substantially infl ated and the number
killed by security forces substantially defl ated. Yet even if the offi cial fi g-
ures are taken at face value, it is clear that at a minimum, apart from “the
4,000 or so jawans [soldiers] of the Army, BSF [Border Security Force]
and CRPF and 5,000- odd mehmaan mujahideen [guest fi ghters] from
Pakistan, 34,000 Kashmiri men and women” met violent deaths between
1990 and 2011.73 The count of 34,000 is almost certainly an underesti-
mate, and the probable actual fi gure is somewhere between 40,000 and
50,000, the vast majority in the Kashmir Valley.
Some elements of the offi cial statistics are very revealing of the trajec-
tory of the armed confl ict. Thus the security forces killed 539 civilians in
1990, the year insurgency took off in the Kashmir Valley. Most of these
civilians were agitated but unarmed people who marched in the huge
azaadi demonstrations that year in Srinagar and other Valley towns and
were gunned down in the hundreds by CRPF and Border Security Force
personnel, all men from outside the state, who were as unnerved as they
were enraged by an entire society in the throes of uprising. During 1991,
844 insurgents were killed in fi ghting with the security forces, of whom
842 were residents of J&K and who were overwhelmingly natives of the
Valley, evidence of the wildfi re spread of armed struggle in the Valley af-
ter the repression and atrocities of 1990. Among the dead militants were
72 young men who were intercepted and eliminated by Indian army
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 7 9
troops on the Line of Control on a single day in May 1991 while return-
ing from Pakistan’s “Azad” Kashmir with weapons and training, at the
start of the summer infi ltration and fi ghting season.
A de cade later, 1,612 militants were slain across the state in 2000. The
majority were locals native to J&K and mostly the Valley. But a sizable mi-
nority were Pakistani religious radicals who belonged to groups who were
closely linked to the Pakistani military’s Directorate for Inter- Services Intel-
ligence and who began to infi ltrate across the Line of Control in the mid-
1990s to fi ght in the Valley and open new theaters of war in the Jammu re-
gion, especially the Rajouri and Poonch districts abutting the Line of
Control. Led and dominated by radicalized locals during the fi rst half of the
1990s, the insurgency mutated over the de cade into a protracted war in
which Pakistani religious zealots assumed a major role. By late 2002,
15,937 insurgents had died in confrontations with security forces since
1990. The deaths of “only” 5,386 militants in the next eight and a half
years, until April 2011, reveals the steady waning of the insurgency in the
course of the fi rst de cade of the twenty- fi rst century, with a steep downward
graph of incidents and fatalities starting in 2004, when the regime of Pervez
Musharraf in Pakistan curbed support for the Kashmir “jehad.” Despite the
intrusion of Pakistani radicals that escalated from the mid- 1990s, over the
period 1990– 2011 fewer than a quarter of the militants killed in combat
were not natives of the Indian state of J&K; these outsiders were over-
whelmingly Pakistanis, most from that country’s Punjab province. This fact
reveals the extent of anger toward Indian authority among the majority of
the state’s population, above all in the Kashmir Valley.
Between 1989 and 2002, 55,538 incidents of violence arising from the
armed confl ict were offi cially recorded in the war zones of J&K, the large
majority in the Kashmir Valley.74 While statistics such as these give an
insight into the intensity of the violence that gripped the Valley after
1990, the magnitude of the trauma that percolates through the Valley’s
society is not readily quantifi able. Hundreds of “martyrs’ graveyards”
dot the Valley’s towns and villages, the resting place of militant and civil-
ian fatalities alike. Alongside the dead are the living relics of counterin-
surgency: the survivors of torture. Starting in 1990, “interrogation cen-
ters” run by the paramilitary police and the army sprang up in Srinagar
and elsewhere in the Valley. Most of those who had the misfortune of
being inmates of such facilities were detained in “crackdowns”—
roundups in which the entire male population of a mohalla (urban neigh-
borhood) or village was screened and suspects, often identifi ed by masked
mukhbirs (informers) accompanying the troops, taken away. Many never
returned. Many others did, but commonly in a broken state (mentally,
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2 8 0 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
physically, or both). The peak of the “excesses”— offi cial jargon for sum-
mary executions, torture, and other violations— occurred during the
peak of the insurgency (1990– 1995), but serious abuses continued on a
relatively diminished scale thereafter. In the second half of 1990 the gov-
ernment of India declared the Valley a “disturbed area” and subject to
the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which is descended from a law
that the British had used in 1942– 1943 to crush the Quit India move-
ment launched by Indian freedom fi ghters and that Nehru’s government
fi rst used in the late 1950s against rebellious tribes of the Naga people on
the India- Myanmar border. These “emergency” regulations remain in
force more than two de cades later.
While loved ones in many families in the Valley have been killed in the
violence or have suffered serious traumas such as torture during deten-
tion, many others have not. Yet even those fortunate to be spared a major
familial tragedy have not escaped the harshness of counterinsurgency.
During the fi rst half of the 1990s the Valley was saturated with paramili-
tary and army forces, and checkpoints were common. Srinagar became a
“bunker city,” as almost every street had a bunker manned by paramili-
tary police, and the other major Valley towns were the same. (Between
1990 and 1993 the central market squares of the capital and other
towns— Srinagar’s Lal Chowk and equivalents in Sopore and Handwara
in the northern Valley, Bijbehara in the southern Valley, and Doda in the
Jammu region— were severely damaged by paramilitary personnel, mainly
from the Border Security Force, who ran amok after being targeted by
militants, and scores of civilians were killed in these incidents.) New army
camps appeared across the rural areas of the Valley after the insurgency
began. The result was a suffocating, prison- like atmosphere in which citi-
zens regardless of age, gender, or po liti cal orientation have been subject to
petty humiliation and abuse at checkpoints, at camps, and at the hands of
ubiquitous roving patrols. Since the mid- 1990s the oppressive atmosphere
has gradually eased, but the essentials remain in place.
The Legacies
One legacy of this experience is the bitter resentment toward Indian au-
thority that is widespread, almost pervasive, in the Valley’s society. It is
important to realize that this resentment is not a post- 1990 development,
though it has certainly deepened and sharpened since then. It dates back
to 1953 and has been transmitted from generation to generation over six
de cades. The rage of the stone- pelters has a long lineage in the Valley’s
collective consciousness.
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 8 1
There are two other signifi cant legacies of the violence that over-
whelmed the Valley in the 1990s. The fi rst is profound disillusionment
with the “gun culture” introduced into the Valley by militancy. This disil-
lusionment became manifest by the mid- 1990s, as the mass enthusiasm
of the fi rst years of the azaadi uprising dissipated. Once the initial eupho-
ria wore off, the Valley’s people came to the (literally) painful realization
that freedom, understood by most as in de pen dence, was not around the
corner and the price of waging armed struggle was relentless repression
and suffering with no end in sight. In the early 1990s it was fashionable
to become a “freedom fi ghter,” and droves of angry young men enlisted
in a variety of militant tanzeems (groups) that sprouted across the Valley.
This fi rst phase also saw the exodus from the Valley, in controversial cir-
cumstances, of the bulk of the Pandit community, who numbered ap-
proximately 140,000 when the insurgency began. About 100,000 Pan-
dits left the Valley for Jammu and Delhi in the space of a few weeks in
February– March 1990. From 1990 to 1992, the Jammu and Kashmir
Liberation Front dominated the insurgency, and its ideology of in de pen-
dence, however far- fetched, had mass resonance among the people. From
1993 on, however, the Kashmiri armed group Hizb- ul Mujahideen, who
were backed by Pakistan’s Inter- Services Intelligence, gained ascendancy
in the insurgency, and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front faded
away by the mid- 1990s. The attempt by Hizb- ul Mujahideen to impose
their own understanding of azaadi, represented by the slogan “Kashmir
Banega Pakistan” (Kashmir Will Be Part of Pakistan), on the Valley’s
people by means of the killing and intimidation of other guerrilla groups
and civilians caused the insurgency to lose pop u lar appeal and triggered
a backlash: some members of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and
other armed groups changed sides and joined the Indian counterinsur-
gency campaign as auxiliaries, seeking protection, vengeance, or profi t (or
all three). In the second half of the 1990s a brutal civil war was fought
between Hizb- ul Mujahideen cadres and these pro- India armed groups
made up of surrendered insurgents.
In 1999 the insurgency in the Valley entered a new phase. Pakistani
religious radicals, especially those belonging to the Lashkar- e-Taiba
(Army of the Pious) assumed center stage and carried out scores of
frontal assaults by two- man fi dayeen (daredev il) teams, effectively sui-
cide squads, against army and paramilitary camps, police stations, and
other offi cial installations. The fi dayeen campaign, which peaked in
2001 and gradually fell off after 2003, caused problems for the coun-
terinsurgency forces but was always a Pakistani rather than Kashmiri
initiative. Some residents of the Valley harbored and helped the
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2 8 2 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
Pakistani militants who came across the Line of Control, and the
Lashkar- e-Taiba and a smaller jehadi group, Jaish- e-Mohammad (Army
of the Prophet), recruited a small number of young Kashmiri men as
cadres. But the role and participation of Valley people remained mar-
ginal in the campaign waged by these organizations, led by Pakistanis
and headquartered in Pakistan.
The other legacy is disenchantment with Pakistan. During the second
half of the 1980s, as the Valley festered with discontent, it was common
for people to hold a positive view of Pakistan. In the fi rst years of the
insurgency, most people in the Valley saw Pakistan as a friendly big
brother and strategic ally in their struggle. This started to change from
1993, once the Hizb- ul Mujahideen gained dominance in the insurgency
and tried to take over the movement by using terror against fellow Kash-
miris. The Hizb- ul Mujahideen’s rise was due to vigorous sponsorship by
Inter- Services Intelligence handlers, who simultaneously worked to un-
dermine and weaken the proin de pen dence Jammu and Kashmir Libera-
tion Front. A large- scale reaction gradually grew in the Valley against
heavy- handed and malign Pakistani interventions executed through local
agents. The shambolic failure of demo cratization in Pakistan through the
1990s and Pervez Musharraf’s Kargil misadventure in 1999 increased
Kashmiris’ skepticism.
Over the past de cade, Pakistan’s crisis- ridden existence has rendered it
unappealing to the Valley’s people. Pakistan’s dire economic situation
and prospects, its unstable civil- military relationship, and above all the
blowback from the radical Islamists nurtured by the Pakistani military
and Inter- Services Intelligence to push its interests in Af ghan i stan and
Kashmir have made Pakistan’s stocks in the Valley plummet to an all- time
low. In the autumn of 2009, a polling agency conducted an extensive
opinion survey on both sides of the Line of Control on behalf of the Royal
Institute of International Affairs, a London think tank. This broadly cred-
ible survey found overwhelming support for the idea of in de pen dence in
the Kashmir Valley, ranging from 75– 95 percent in various districts. It
also reported the percentage of Valley residents who wish to be part of
Pakistan to be in the low single digits.75
The Kashmir Valley’s relationship with the po liti cal institutions of
J&K is complex. In 1996 the government in New Delhi deemed the in-
surgency suffi ciently contained that elections to constitute a new state
legislature and government could be held. These elections, which re-
stored the JKNC and Farooq Abdullah to offi ce, saw generally low turn-
out in the Valley and were marred by security forces coercing people to
vote in rural areas. But there was some genuine participation by voters
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 8 3
who felt that the restoration of a semblance of civilian government might
dilute the oppressive weight of military and paramilitary forces on their
lives. In state elections in 2002, turnout was again generally low albeit
uneven, ranging from moderate to very low across Valley constituencies,
a result of complicated local factors and dynamics. Forced voting occurred
again in some rural areas, on a lesser scale than in 1996, and some fraud
was perpetrated by JKNC members. But the 2002 state elections also
saw some genuine participation in the Valley, mainly due to the emer-
gence of a new regional party, the People’s Demo cratic Party, committed
to India but with a “propeople” stance on human rights and the aspira-
tion to autonomy or “self- rule.” (The PDP was formed in the late 1990s
by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, formerly a Congress leader in the southern
part of the Valley since the 1960s.)
In both 1996 and 2002, election boycott calls given by po liti cal groups
seeking “self- determination,” reinforced by militant violence, achieved
considerable impact in the Valley but were not totally effective. State
elections in November– December 2008 saw moderate to high voter turn-
out in most parts of the Valley, with the notable exception of the city of
Srinagar, where a boycott call prevailed. The regional parties the JKNC
and the People’s Demo cratic Party were the two main contestants, with
Congress playing an also- ran role. There was almost no forced voting.
The turnout was counterintuitive because a few months earlier, in July–
August 2008, the Valley had seen the fi rst mass demonstrations against
Indian rule since 1994, even as militant violence declined to negligible
levels. As Lashkar- e-Taiba launched its infamous terror attack in Mum-
bai in late November 2008, executed by 10 Pakistanis who had arrived
by a sea route from Karachi, people in the Kashmir Valley were preoc-
cupied with voting.
The Valley has learned to combine pragmatic electoral participation
with a dogged attachment to the cause of azaadi. Its politics is overwhelm-
ingly dominated by regional forces, in which establishment parties like the
JKNC— now led by Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson, Omar Abdullah— and
the People’s Demo cratic Party exist alongside a spectrum of po liti cal fac-
tions that advocate “self- determination.” The stone- throwing uprising of
2010 sparked by the death of the teenager Tufail Mattoo revealed that the
Achilles’ heel of India’s democracy remains as volatile as ever. The sim-
mering anger in the Valley was accentuated in February 2013 by the
hanging in Delhi’s Tihar prison of Afzal Guru, a Valley native convicted
of being an accomplice to a terrorist attack by Pakistani religious radi-
cals, in December 2001, on the building where India’s Parliament sits in
New Delhi.
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Figure 9. The Taj Mahal Hotel, Mumbai, on fi re after a terrorist attack
(November 2008). AFP / GETTY IMAGES.
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T H E K A S H M I R Q U E S T I O N 2 8 5
The Future
Despite the tortured history and uncomfortable present of their relation-
ship, the Kashmir Valley will have to live with the Indian Union, and the
Indian Union will have to live with the Kashmir Valley.
A key driver of their uneasy coexistence is likely to be economic. For
de cades the Valley’s traditional shawl and handicrafts trade has depended
on the Indian market— customers in cities across India— and the Valley’s
tourism industry, comatose for many years from 1990, has revived since
the decline of insurgency; its main clientele consists, as before, of masses
of visitors from all over India. There is an additional factor peculiar to
the early twenty- fi rst century. Six de cades ago the Kashmir Valley’s popu-
lation was overwhelmingly comprised of peasants newly emancipated
from generations of serfdom. Now, as in India as a whole, there is a large
and growing urbanized middle class, not just in Srinagar but in middle-
sized and small towns across the Valley. The sons and daughters of the
post- 1990 generation— avid users of Facebook and Twitter, like their
peers across the world— subscribe as strongly as their grandparents and
parents to a Kashmiri identity, many males are experienced stone- pelters,
and the vast majority will tell any opinion pollster that their preferred
resolution to the Kashmir question is in de pen dence. Yet many aspire to
higher education, professional training and careers outside the insular
and often claustrophobic confi nes of the Kashmir Valley— in “India,”
where options “from air hostess to aerospace engineer” exist.76
The po liti cal relationship between the Indian Union and the Kashmir
Valley is likely to remain unsettled for the foreseeable future. The Kash-
mir question in its totality has multiple dimensions: the India- Pakistan
dispute, the cross– Line of Control aspect relating to the two parts of the
divided former princely state, the internal tensions in the Indian state of
J&K between the Valley and Hindus in the Jammu region, and the frac-
tured and fractious politics of the Valley itself. All of these dimensions
have an impact on the relationship between the Valley and the Union.
Moreover, the Kashmir question— meaning above all the “problem” of
the Valley, the Union’s most troublesome region, where “separatist” sen-
timent is deeply rooted and widespread— is a very sensitive issue in In-
dia’s politics and diffi cult and risky for any po liti cal leadership in New
Delhi to engage. The only Indian po liti cal leader of the post- 1989 era
who showed fl ashes of vision and initiative on the issue is Atal Behari
Vajpayee, the moderate Hindu nationalist who was India’s prime minister
from 1998 to 2004. There is also a military command and a civilian bu-
reaucratic establishment which sees the issue purely as a matter of national
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2 8 6 T R A N S F O R M I N G I N D I A
defense and security narrowly defi ned and is protective of the status quo,
even if that status quo is fundamentally unstable and volatile.
It is noteworthy, nonetheless, that the real damage to the relationship
between the Valley and the Union was infl icted from New Delhi between
1953 and 1989, i.e., in a now bygone era in which one party (and one po-
liti cal dynasty) dominated India’s politics and an overweening Center
lorded it or at least held the upper hand over states. In India’s evolution
as a demo cratic federation of regional (state- based) polities in the early
twenty- fi rst century, there is a glimmer of possibility of a positive recon-
struction of the Valley- Union relationship. Any such reconstruction would
require both sides to modify dogmatic positions and go beyond formulaic
proposals. Were the glimmer of possibility to be acted on, it will attenuate
the Achilles’ heel of the world’s largest democracy, and help India’s emer-
gence on the global stage.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
Author(s): Rathnam Indurthy and Muhammad Haque
Source: International Journal on World Peace , MARCH 2010, Vol. 27, No. 1 (MARCH
2010), pp. 9-44
Published by: Paragon House
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752914
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752914
THE KASHMIR CONFLICT:
WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
Rathnam Indurthy
Muhammad Haque
Professor of Government
Assistant Professor of Sociology
McNeese State University
4205 Ryan Street
Lake Charles, Louisiana 70609
USA
Rathnam Indurthy, Ph.D, a native of India, has been at McNeese State University since
1989. He teaches international politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Middle East politics. He
has published on the domestic politics of India and Pakistan, Indo-American relations,
Indo-Pakistani relations and the Middle East.
Muhammad Haque, Ph.D, originally from Bangladesh, teaches in the areas of demography,
medical ethics, and economic development. He has published on population growth and
economic development in Bangladesh.
The Kashmir conflict is the major
source of tension between India and
Pakistan. Each controls a portion
of Jammu and Kashmir which is
divided along the line of control
(LoC). They have fought three wars
and developed nuclear weapons as a
result of this conflict.
This article describes the
conflict that developed with the
British partition of India and why
a peaceful solution has been so
difficult to attain.
The authors list eleven proposed
solutions and why none of them
are completely acceptable to all
sides. In they end they suggest why
a continuation of the status quo is
likely the only peaceful way forward.
Since the partition of British India and
Pakistan in August 1947, the Kashmir
dispute between the two countries
has become an intractable one. They
fought four wars in 1947,1948,1965,
1971 (Kashmir was peripheral to the
independence of Bangladesh), and the
Kargil war in 1999 but have failed to
resolve the conflict so far. So, the pur
pose of this article is first, to present
a brief history of the conflict, second,
to discuss the peace process known
as the composite dialogue launched
between India and the Musharraf, the
Gilani/Zardari regimes, and finally,
to explain why the dialogue has failed
to resolve the conflict between India
and the Musharraf regime and why
the stalemate may continue even with
democratically-elected Gilani/Zardari
regime.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE KASHMIR CONFLICT,
1947-PRESENT
When British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, Hari Singh, the
autocratic and unpopular Maharaja (king) of Kashmir and Jammu, a pre
dominantly Muslim state, resisted the pressure to accede to either Pakistan
or India, hoping to seek independence or autonomy from both countries.
To buy time and to accomplish this goal, he signed a standstill agreement
with Pakistan on August 16, 1947, and was seeking to sign a similar one
with India. India refused, but following the partition, communal rioting
erupted in Punjab between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims as this state was
divided between India and Pakistan. In September the rioting spilled into
Kashmir against Muslims.
Muslim insurgents in Poonch in the
southwestern part of Kashmir, supported
covertly by the Pakistani army with arms,
transport, and men, rebelled against
the King, and established their Azad
(independent) Kashmir government.
By October 22, 1947, the insurgents
pushed themselves fifteen miles from the
state’s capital, Srinagar. Alarmed by this
invasion, Singh sought India’s assistance,
but the latter refused to help him unless
the king signed the Instrument of Acces
sion, a standard procedure under which other princely states had acceded
to either India or Pakistan, which he signed. India agreed to his accession
of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to India, after it had been consented to by
Sheik Abdullah, the secular and popular leader of the National Conference
party (NC) of J&K of the state at that time.
Following Singh’s signing of the accord on October 27, the same day
Indian armed forces entered Kashmir to repel the raiders. The local Mus
lims, mostly members of the NC, provided the logistical support for the
Indian troops. This intervention by India infuriated Pakistani Governor
General Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. On the evening
of October 27 he ordered the British Lt. General Sir Douglas Gracey, the
Kashmir and Jammu, a
predominantly Muslim
state, resisted the
pressure to accede
to either Pakistan
or India, hoping to
seek independence or
autonomy from both
countries.
10
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
Source: From Map No. 4140 Rev. 3 Unted Nations, January 2004, Department of Peacekeeping
Operations, Cartographic Section
chief of the Pakistan army, to dispatch Pakistan regular troops into Kashmir.
But, persuaded by Field Marshall Auchinleck, the Supreme Commander
of both India and Pakistan of the transition period, Jinnah withdrew his
orders. However, in November, Jinnah sanctioned the transfer of military
supplies to the invaders while also sending Pakistan regular troops into
Kashmir to join the rebels early as “volunteers” though not admitting its
direct involvement until July 1948.
As the fighting continued, on January 1,1948, on the advice of British
Governor General Lord Mountbatten, though opposed by his Deputy
Prime Minister Sardar Patel, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru lodged a
complaint with the UN Security Council (UNSC) by invoking Articles 34
and 35 of the UN Charter (that call for pacific settlement of disputes) against
Pakistan, suspecting that it was behind the invasion. In the complaint, as
it had already been pledged by Mountbatten in his letter to Singh, on
October 26, India reiterated its pledge of its conditional commitment to a
“plebiscite or referendum under international auspices,” once the aggres
sor, Pakistan, was evicted. This was a pledge which India later regretted,
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
and which continues to haunt her until today. Following the passage of
UNSC resolutions calling for conduct of a plebiscite in Kashmir, the UN
commission on India and Pakistan (UNCIP) made several attempts to
conduct a plebiscite during 1948 to 1958, but failed as India and Pakistan
had disagreed on the conditions and modalities on the implementation of
the UNSC resolutions.1
The stalemate, therefore, led to another short war provoked by Pakistan
on September 1, 1965 that lasted until September 22, 1965 when both
parties agreed to a cease-fire as demanded by the UNSC. In January 1966,
mediated by the Soviet Union, Prime Minister Lai Bahaddhur Shastri and
President Ayub Khan of Pakistan met in the city of Tashkent (Republic of
Uzbekistan) and signed the agreement known as the Tashkent Declaration
^ ^H agreeing to resolve the Kashmir dispute
Under the 1971 bilaterally without resorting to force.2
* Ai In 1971 India and Pakistan fought a agreement, both India ,. , . _ , . ,& ,,
and Pakistan amon third war in December over Bangladesh s
an a is an, among independence (Kashmiir was peripherally
Others, committed ^ connected) in which the latter was dealt
themselves to settling a humiliating defeat. Here again, it was
their differences through Pakistan’s Yahya Khan military dictator
bilateral negotiations.” ship’s atrocities committed against the
“”” ll B 11 1 1″ people of Bangladesh, followed by the
fleeing of ten million people from Bangladesh into India, that provoked
India’s intervention. On July 2,1972 Mrs. Indira Gandhi signed the Simla
agreement with Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, first as President and later as Prime
Minister of Pakistan, after he succeeded General Yahya Khan in 1971.
Under this agreement, both India and Pakistan, among others, committed
themselves to “settling their differences through bilateral negotiations.”
They also agreed that in “Jammu and Kashmir, the Line of Control (LoC)
resulting from the ceasefire of December 17, 1971, shall be respected by
both sides without prejudice to the recognized position of either side.”
The agreement became the basis for the renewal of official relations
between the two countries thus ending any role either for the UNSC or
outside powers.3 And with Sheik Abdullah of the NC finally having had
accepted Kashmir as an integral part of India, on February 12, 1975,
through the signing of the Kashmir Accord with India, it seemed as though
12
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
the dispute had hit the final death knell, the fact that he and his son Farooq
in succession had led the State as Chief Ministers by having been elected
democratically, however flawed the election might have been. They both
ruled the state from 1975-1989.4
It turned out to be an illusory peace. In fact the state plunged into
a secessionist militancy in January of 1990 and continues on until today
though at a declining level, with Pakistan’s active support and promotion.
It was primarily highhandedness and chicanery adopted by Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi and Farooq’s inept, corrupt, opportunistic leadership, and the
fraudulent state legislative elections of 1987that led to the insurgency. The
alienation of the educated but unemployed youth prompted the otherwise
quiescent Muslim community and contributed to the insurgency.5
As the insurgency intensified, the con- ^^mmm^mm^m^^l?^mm^
flict between India and Pakistan assumed ^s ^e insurgency
the portents of nuclear encounter after intensifiedf the conf|ict
they each exploded nuclear bombs in . – . . between India and
May 1998. So, in early 1999 Pakistan’s ” mum aM” i t i. , ‘ A*’ \ xt cu r Pakistan assumed the and India s Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif
and Atal Behari Vajpayee respectively, Portents of nuclear
genuinely sought to reduce tensions encoun*er after they
between their two countries by signing each exploded nuclear
the Memorandum of Understanding bombs in May 1998,
(MOU) in Lahore, Pakistan, in Febru- ^”i^””^””^”^”””^ “””
ary 1999, by which they agreed to resolve the Kashmir dispute peacefully,
and bilaterally.6 But Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as army chief, scuttled the
peace process and engineered another mini-war called the Kargil War in
May-June of 1999. Again, Pakistan provoked another war by sending the
Mujahedeen fighters (Holy Islamic warriors) into the Indian-held Kargil
region of Kashmir State. As the battle turned bloodier and more intense,
and as victory soon turned in favor of India, the Clinton administration
intervened and succeeded in persuading Sharif to withdraw the infiltrators
and the Pakistani regulars from across the LoC, although Gen. Musharraf,
and his generals wanted to fight on.7
On October 12 the military, headed by Gen. Musharraf, ousted Sharif
from power in a bloodless coup on the grounds that the latter had committed
crimes against the country as well as the army. Gen Musharraf declared
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
himself the Chief Executive besides being the Chief of Army. Sharif was
tried and convicted and given a life sentence by Musharraf’s handpicked
Anti-Terrorist Court (ATC). But mediated by the Clinton administration,
Sharif was subsequently exiled to Saudi Arabia in December 1999 for a ten
year period.
INDIA’S TENSE RELATIONS WITH THE MUSHARRAF
REGIME, 1999 TO 2004
To reduce tensions in the aftermath of the Kargil War and find solution to
the Kashmir conflict, Prime Minister Vajpayee and Musharrsaf held a summit
on July 14-16 at Agra (the home of the Taj Mahal) near New Delhi, but
failed to resolve it. They, however, agreed to continue the dialogue.8 Despite
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ their pledge to continue the dialogue,
^ . OAAO – it soon came to an abrupt halt, as the On January 12, 2002 in ., F ‘ , … _ Pakistani-based terrorist groups such as a national address, Gen. ? y ** ^ /T , , T . , ‘ the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) and the Jaish
Musharraf pledged that e_Mohammad (JEM), and other militant
he would no longer allow outfits intensified ^ cross-border ter
his Soil to be used for rorism even after Gen. Musharraf joined
cross-border terrorism. the Bush administration in October 2001
” ” I I ,^ B to fight the Taliban and AI Qaeda (base)
in Afghanistan.
To demonstrate that they were not intimidated by a US-Pakistani coali
tion to fight them, the terrorists launched a suicide bomb that destroyed the
Kashmir’s state assembly building and killed 38 innocent civilians in it. The
JEM took credit for this blast. This blast was followed by another deadly
attack on the Indian parliament building on December 13 by members
of the LET in which 40 people including five terrorists were killed as the
parliament was in session. In response, to compel Gen Musharraf to stop
cross-border terrorism and to show it meant business, the Vajpayee govern
ment took a series of retaliatory measures. For example, it cancelled rail and
road links with Pakistan; it banned its airspace for Pakistani commercial air
flights; it recalled its ambassador from Islamabad, and moved nearly 800,000
troops to the borders along the LoC. Alarmed by the potential threat of
another Indo-Pakistani war, the Bush administration (and this at a time
14
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
when it was fighting terrorism in the neighboring Afghanistan) pressured
Gen. Musharraf into breaking with the Jihadists.
In response, on January 12,2002 in a national address, Gen. Musharraf
pledged that he would no longer allow his soil for cross-border terrorism,
stressing that the issue of Kashmir “runs in our blood.”9 And soon after
that he arrested 2,000 militants and their leaders, but many of them were
released, including their leaders, by Pakistani courts on the ground that there
was no credible evidence against them. However, cross-border terrorism did
not stop as three terrorists reportedly belonging to the LET disguised in
army fatigues killed 30 and wounded 48 at a place called Kaluchak located
on the outskirts of Jammu by dashing into the army family quarters (most
of those killed were children and their mothers). This crime infuriated
Vajpayee so much that he visited the soldiers along the tense frontiers in
Kashmir and asked them to prepare for a “decisive battle” against terror
ists, reportedly to attack 200 plus terrorist training camps located in the
Pakistan-occupied Azad (freedom) Kashmir.
In response, on May 27, Gen Musharraf responded by warning India
that “if war is thrust upon us we will respond with full might,” implying a
threat of the use of nuclear weapons if his country were to lose in a con
ventional war.10
As the military confrontation became more intense with increased
exchange of artillery firing across the borders, calls from President George
Bush and the Secretary of State Colin Powell, and visits by Deputy Secre
tary Richard Armitage, and British Foreign Secretary Jack Shaw to India
and Pakistan, helped to defuse tensions between the two countries. They
successfully persuaded the leaders to avert war and also extracted a pledge
from Gen. Musharraf that he would stop cross-border terrorism and shut
down the training camps.11 Ironically, in an interview with a Time reporter
(July 1,2002), Gen. Musharraf reneged on his pledge made previously by
saying that, “What I said is that there is no movement across the Line.”
India lifted its ban on Pakistan’s commercial airline, withdrew its naval war
ships back to the port of Bombay, and withdrew troops from the border.
However, it insisted that there would be no dialogue with Pakistan unless
Pakistan completely stopped cross-border terrorism and handed over 20
hardcore terrorists to her for trial. But Pakistan did not respond to either
of these demands.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
DEMOCRACY RESTORED IN KASHMIR IN OCTOBER 2002
In the throes of threats by terrorists that they would disrupt Kashmir’s
state legislative elections, the Vajpayee government defied their threat
and conducted fair and open elections in September-October 2002 in
four phases. Although the separatist twenty-three party coalition, All Par
ties Hurryat Conference (APHC), pressured by Pakistan, boycotted the
elections and denounced them as sham, and although the terrorists killed
more than a hundred and sought to disrupt the elections, 45 percent of
the Kashmiris defied the threats and voted. Farooq Abdullah’s party (NC),
the Indian Congress Party (ICP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the
Peoples’ Democratic party (PDP) and six
other separatist groups contested the elec
tions. The Kashmiris rejected the ruling
NC, reducing its strength to twenty-eight
out of a total of eighty-seven seats, while
voting mostly for the ICP and the newly
formed PDP.
The INC and PDP formed a coalition
government with PDP’s leader Mufti
Mohammed Sayeed assuming the post
of Chief Minister. On assuming office,
Sayeed adopted a conciliatory policy of
releasing all those militants who have been
imprisoned. To bring the militants back in to the mainstream society as part
of his “healing touch policy,” he recommended to the central government
that they be released provided they disavowed violence.12
On November 2, 2005, as per the previous coalition agreement, the
state congress party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad succeeded Mufti as Chief
Minister of the Coalition Government. However, even with the restoration
of democracy in the State, terrorism continued. For example, on March 23,
2003, in a tiny Hindu village of Nandi-Marg in the Kashmir Valley’s Pul
wama district, terrorists gunned down 24 of the 52 citizens of that village.
Even then Mr. Vajpayee visited Srinagar on April 18, and in a huge public
rally of 20,000 people, he stunned the Indians by extending the “hand
of friendship” to Pakistan for dialogue and reconciliation. In response,
The Vajpayee
government conducted
elections in September
October 2002 in four
phases. The All Parties
Hurryat Conference
(APHC) boycotted the
elections and denounced
them as sham.
16
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
on April 28, Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamal called Vajpayee on the
telephone and invited him to visit Islamabad. On May 2 Vajpayee told the
parliament that he wanted to start a “decisive and conclusive dialogue”
with Pakistan to end the decades of hostility between the two countries.
He also announced the renewal of diplomatic ties and renewal of air and
land links with Pakistan on a reciprocal basis. On October 22,2003, India
also declared its desire to open up a bus link between Srinagar, the capital
of Kashmir, and Muzaffarbad, the capital of POK.13 On November 22, as
Eid (the day of ending fasting) gesture, Jamal declared a unilateral cease
fire, to which India agreed. Immediately thereafter, the guns fell silent on
November 24, the LoC between the two states was extended to include
the disputed Siachen glacier at the request of India.
On January 6, 2004, Vajpayee and ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Musharraf, while attending the meeting
of the South Asian Regional Cooperation ?n ?Ctober 22′ 2003′ _
(SARC), met on its sidelines in Islamabad, lnd,a dec,ared d?*sire
January 4-6, 2004, and issued an his- to ?Pen UP f bus ,ink
toric joint statement in which Musharraf between Srinagar, the
pledged to stop cross-border terrorism capital of Kashmir, and
and, in return, Vajpayee agreed to engage Muzaffarbad, the capital
in Kashmir talks with Pakistan.14 of POK.
COMPOSITE DIALOGUE LAUNCHED
The Congress-led coalition government headed by Prime Minister Dr.
Manmohan Singh, which succeeded the Vajpayee government in May
2004, pledged to proceed with the composite dialogue with the Mushar
raf regime. The dialogue covered eight issues such as Siachen, Sir Creek,
Wuller barrage project, terrorism, economic, and commercial co-operation,
and promoting friendly relations. The Kashmir conflict constituted the core
issue of the dialogue.15
In response to Musharraf’s proposal calling for the demilitarization of
both Kashmir states, as a peace gesture on November 11 2004, Dr. Singh
announced the reduction of troops in the state of Kashmir. In his November
visit to the state, Dr. Singh announced a package of $5 billion to electrify
all villages, build more roads, open six colleges and five training technical
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
colleges.16 He also offered to talk to the APHC leaders unconditionally.
His government permitted APHC leaders to visit Pakistan to consult with
Pakistani leaders as well as the Kashmiri militant leaders living in exile.
However, he made it abundantly clear that he was opposed to “redraw
ing of the international borders, or any proposal which smacks of further
division on religious lines.”17 The dialogue finally began in late 2004. For
example, in early December 2004 as part of the first round talks, joint
working groups of India and Pakistan met in New Delhi, Rawalpindi and
Islamabad on different dates and held discussions on the issues covered
in the dialogue.18 On December 28, 2004, the groups held second round
talks, and the parties agreed to resume rail links between Kokhrapar (Sindh,
Pakistan) and Munnabao (Rajasthan, India) which were suspended since
1965. They decided to meet again to fix the date of bus service linking
Srinagar to Muzaffarabad (POK), and exchanged a draft of Memorandum
of Understanding (MOU) on cooperation to curb drug trafficking. They
also agreed to future expert level talks on implementing nuclear Confidence
Building Measures (CBM), and promoting regular contacts at people to
people levels, including at designated places to explore further CBMS
along the LoC. The working groups discussed modalities for carrying out
the joint survey of the boundary pillars in the Sir Creek?the disputed
river boundary between the countries. Foreign ministers, Natwar Singh
and Mahamood Khurshid Kasuri of India and Pakistan respectively, joined
the last meeting of the talks on December 27-28 held in Islamabad. The
foreign ministers agreed to an early finalization of a draft agreement on
the pre-notification of flight-testing of ballistic missiles by both countries.
But the core Kashmir issue was not discussed.19
On February 16, 2005, External Minister Singh and his counterpart
Kasuri met in Islamabad and achieved a breakthrough by agreeing to open
a bus route on April 7 between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad so as to give an
impetus to the peace process and enable the families of divided states to visit
each other’s families as part of the CBMs. They also agreed to open another
bus link between Sindh and Rajastan in February. Mr. Singh also met the
new Prime Minister of Pakistan Shaukat Aziz and Musharraf and discussed
with them about moving the peace process. On April 17, as part of cricket
diplomacy, Musharraf visited New Delhi, witnessed the match between
India and Pakistan, and later held talks with Dr. Singh. Later they jointly
18
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
issued a statement agreeing to have normal trade and political relations, and
proceed with the peace process. They also agreed to open two more trade
routes between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad across the LoC, and between
Poonch and Rwalakot, Pakistan. At the press conference Prime Minister Dr.
Singh noted that the peace process was “irreversible” while acknowledg
ing a “hard road ahead.”20 However, terrorists continued to attack India
in order to disrupt the peace process. For example, on October 29,2005,
on the eve of Dewali (the festival of lights), three blasts ripped through
crowded markets in Delhi killing 69 and wounding more than 200 people.
India implicated the LET. Musharraf condemned the attacks, and offered
his condolences to the victims. Subsequently, the terrorists struck in vari
ous Indian cities such as Varanasi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. Even in the
midst of these terror attacks third round hhh^mhhhuhhh
talks were held between relevant specified Even in the midst of
groups in New Delhi and Islamabad on these terror attacks
different dates between January and June third round talks were
2006.They reiterated their commitment he|(, between re|evant
to start bus service between Poonch, and a s? Mm., ^ , f t .if specified groups in New
Rawalkot as had been previously agreed _ . . – , . . ^ , , i . Delhi and Islamabad on
to. They also agreed to start truck service ^ dates between
between Srinagar and Muzzaffarbad, and
make rail links operational between Kho- January and June 2006.
rarapar and Manabao. On Conventional
and nuclear weapons, the groups agreed to strengthen CBMs. And on Sir
Creek, they agreed to carry out a joint survey of the land in the Creek area,
and maritime boundary.21
But on July 11, 2005 terrorists struck again by causing suicide blasts
on the local passenger railway trains in Mumbai killing 200, and wounding
more than 700 travelers. Immediately thereafter, Musharraf again offered
his condolences, and pledged his cooperation in catching the culprits.
India implicated the ISI, and suspended the dialogue with Pakistan. But
the dialogue was put on track after Dr. Singh and Musharraf issued a joint
statement creating Anti-Terror Institutional Mechanism on September 16,
2006 in which both countries pledged to cooperate to deal with terrorism
when they met on the sidelines in Havana, Cuba at the summit meeting
of the Non-Aligned Nations.22
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
Perhaps to persuade India back to a negotiating table on the Kashmir
issue, on August 1, 2006, Gen. Musharraf, in an interview with journalist
A.G Noorani, articulated his specific peace proposal that, among others,
called for demilitarization, self-rule in both Kashmir states, and joint
management of the states by both countries 23 On December 6, 2006, in
an interview with the NDTV (India) Musharraf again reiterated the same
proposal.24 On December 12, 2006, Pakistani foreign minister’s spokes
woman, Tasmin Aslam, threw in a bombshell by telling the Pakistani media
for the first time that under Article 257 of its 1973 constitution, Pakistan
never claimed Kashmir as an integral part of Pakistan. And on December
14, Foreign Minister Kasuri affirmed what she had stated. This statement
upset many Pakistani politicians.25 On December 17,2006, on a flight back
to New Delhi from Tokyo, Dr. Singh welcomed Musharraf’s proposal by
saying, “If any new ideas come, we welcome them. And, I would like to
say that in the last two and a half years, we have had very intensive dialogue
with Pakistan.”26
DR. SINGH HOLDS TALKS WITH KASHMIRI GROUPS IN
SEARCH OF A CONSENSUS.
Dr. Singh initiated talks with the Kashmiri groups to seek a consensus on
the issue. He focused his attention on the internal political dynamics in
Kashmir and held a series of round table conferences with groups of vary
ing ideological orientations. For example, he invited separatists such as the
APHC headed by Mirwaz Umar Farooq and other non-separatist groups.
Dr. Singh agreed to talk to the separatists unconditionally. In September
2005, he met with moderate leaders. In January 2006, he held talks with
People’s Conference (PC) Chairman Sajjad Ghani and the Jammu and
Kashmir Liberation (JKLF) Chairman Yasin Malik. In February 2005,
Dr. Singh convened a conference in Srinagar.27 Although separatists had
refused to take part, all other non-separatists attended it. It was followed
by second and third round table conferences also held in Srinagar in May
2006 and April 2007 respectively.28 But the separatists again refused to
attend them unless the talks were limited only to them, excluding those
groups who supported the state’s integration with India. Dr. Singh also
established five working groups or commissions to deal with various aspects
20
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
of the Kashmir problem including one dealing with center-state relations.
On Musharraf’s Kashmir proposal, Dr. Singh also supported self-rule and
eventual demilitarization of the state while he has been ambivalent about
joint-management of the two states.
On the Sir Creek dispute, talks were held on December 22-23 and both
parties agreed to conduct a joint survey of this tidal channel. Accordingly,
the teams completed the survey in March 2007 verifying the outermost
points of the coastal line. Subsequently, talks were held in Rawalpindi
on May 17-18 but they reached no agreement on this dispute. Similarly,
water secretaries of India and Pakistan held talks over the Talbul/Wuller,
a dispute since 1987, on June 22-23, 2006, and again on August 21-22
in New Delhi but failed to resolve it.29
On February 2,2007, Gen Musharraf hmhmhmmhhhm
told the media that relations with India Qn Musharrafs Kashmir
should not become hostage to “confron- pr0posal, Dr. Singh also
tationists” who are against the peace pro- supported self-rule and
cess, and that^our^”relations have never eventua| demi|itarj2ation been this good before in our history and … . A , & , . ?TT . i. j * of the state while he has
we are happy about it. He indicated that
“both sides have realized there could be been amb’va,en* ab?ut
no military solution to these disputes.”30 joint-management of the
On March 16, 2007, addressing a four- two States,
day 60th Formation Commanders confer
ence held in Rawalpindi, Gen. Musharraf reiterated expressed optimism
on the resolution of the Kashmir conflict, and that relations between India
and Pakistan have “never been better.”31 The fourth round talks were held
in May 2007 but produced no tangible results.
Given the complexity of the disputes, especially Kashmir, fearing that
the round of talks between the countries might not bring them closer to
a resolution, both the Singh government and the Musharraf regime at the
same time launched back channel secret negotiations to resolve these issues
including the Kashmir dispute. As Steve Coll vividly describes, beginning
in 2004, Musharraf’s classmate and bureaucrat Tariq Aziz on behalf of
Pakistan, and a Russian specialist named Satinder Lambah on behalf of
Singh’s government, launched secret non-paper negotiations (text without
names or signatures so as to serve as deniable in the event the agreement
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
became too controversial to sign) on Kashmir, and other issues dividing
India and Pakistan. They met two dozen times in hotels between 2004 and
2007 at different places, and worked out the principles of agreement on Sir
Creek, and Siachen. And on Kashmir, they were working on making the
LoC as “irrelavant” if not a dividing border as demanded by India while
giving each state on either side of the border a measure of autonomy with
eventual demilitarization of both states.
But the secret talks eventually failed to
bear fruit as the Musharraf regime began
to encounter a myriad of political prob
lems at home especially. We proffer some
explanations as to why the Singh govern
ment and the Musharraf regime could not
resolve the Kashmir conflict and other
ancillary disputes notwithstanding, having
held so many rounds of talks including
the secret ones.
EXPLANATIONS FOR LACK OF SUCCESS:
Continued Cross-Border Terror was an Impediment to the Peace
Process
Notwithstanding Musharraf’s pledges to end it, cross-border terrorism
continued, albeit at a declining rate. The Pakistani military’s Kashmir policy
has been to engage India in a proxy war through the instrument of terror
until India came to an amicable settlement with it over Kashmir. Ironically,
today, its policy is boomeranging against Pakistan itself. The fact is that
the jihadists have been relentless in committing a series of suicide bomb
ings since 2007, killing hundreds of people. As Dr. Navnita Behera notes,
although fatalities and cross-border incidents in Kashmir decreased from
1,991 in 2004 to 1,509 in 2005, terror both in Kashmir proper and across
India continued.32 The Frankenstein which the Pakistani military created
to fight India has, ironically, has turned against its own country from early
2007 onward for its shortsighted policy. But the ISI has not abandoned
its embrace of the jihadists to fight India.
Tariq Aziz on behalf
of Pakistan, and a
Russian specialist
named Satinder Lambah
on behalf of Singh’s
government, launched
secret negotiations on
Kashmir.
22
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
Pakistan has become a hotbed as well as a epicenter for jihadists who
have been engaging in worldwide terrorism. The Bush administration,
which had offered more than $10 billion in aid for the regime’s cooperation
for its war on terrorism, subsequently became skeptical about the regime’s
commitment to fighting terrorism, given the resurgence of Taliban and
Al-Qaeda attacks on the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. It is little
wonder that President Hamid Karazai of Afghanistan openly accused the
Musharraf regime for fostering terrorism against his country.33
The Need of the Military to Continue with the Conflict in order to
retain its power.
With the exception of the rule under
Prime Minister Zulfikkar Ali Bhutto
(1971-77), since 1958 the Pakistani
military continued to intervene in the
country’s politics directly or indirectly
to retain its economic, political, and
social interests. This involvement con
tinued even during the time democracy
was reinstated. To retain its power and
perks, the military never hesitated to
manipulate conflict and tensions with
India over Kashmir. Although Mr. Bhutto
had gotten Article 245 included in the 1973 Constitution, declaring any
attempt by the military to abrogate and subvert government treasonous,
the military ignored this injunction. For example, Lt. Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and
Gen. Musharraf, in utter disdain for this clause, staged a coup d’etat against
democratically elected leaders Mr. Bhutto and Mr. Nawaz Sharif in July
1977 and October 1999 respectively, and imposed military dictatorships.
When Mr Bhutto (1973-77) and his daughter Benazir Bhutto (1988-90,
1993-96) and Sharif (1990-93, 1997-99) challenged the Punjab-domi
nated military, it found an excuse to dismiss them from power by accusing
them of favoritism, nepotism and corruption before they completed their
terms of office even though the dictators have been accused of the similar
charges, but with no price to pay.
The ISI has not
abandoned its embrace
of the jihadists to fight
India. Pakistan has
become a hotbed as
well as a epicenter for
jihadists who have been
engaging in worldwide
terrorism.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
The military never allowed democratic institutions to take root in the
country. In its lexicon, there has not been any intention to returning to
barracks and subordinating itself to a civilian leadership. It has a stake in
retaining its huge economic interests. In a review article of the book entitled
Military, Inc.: Inside Pakistanis Military Economy by Ayesha Siddiqa, Niru
pama Subramaniam notes that the Pakistani military has built up a huge
commercial empire which will make it very difficult to dislodge it from power.
She points out that its assets account for 10 percent of Pakistan’s GDP. In
cahoots with businesses, the military, she further notes, dominates the three
sectors of the economy?agriculture, manufacturing and services operating
at three levels?institutional, subsidiary and individual, involving billions of
income for the military.34 At an individual level alone, Gen Musharaf placed
between 4,000-5,000 loyalist officers in various positions of authority.35 Dr.
Siddiqa points out that Gen. Musharraf did not grow up rich and he has
accumulated land assets to the value of $10.34 million.36 He is an example
of how the higher echelons of military accumulate wealth in Pakistan. This
is attributed to its penetration of the country’s economy. However, the
military has to keep the Kashmir conflict aflame lest its power should be
challenged by ordinary Pakistanis. India’s former Chief of Army, Gen. V.S.
Sharma, in an interview to Sheela Bhatt of India Abroad (June 4, 1999),
told her why the Pakistan Army needed to keep the Kashmir Conflict alive:
Pakistan’s survival depends entirely on their quarrel with India on Kash
mir, it is endemic to their livelihood. They control the nation: get the
best pensions, best jobs. The Military community in Pakistan is having
a damn good time at the cost of the poor people of Pakistan. How can
they make peace with India.37
The Regime’s Lack of Political Legitimacy
Gen. Musharraf’s lack of political legitimacy became another impediment
to achieving peace with India on the Kashmir conflict, which is of historical
significance and which needs a national consensus in Pakistan to resolve the
conflict. For instance, as noted ealier, on October 12,1999, Gen. Musharraf
ousted Sharif, a democratically elected Prime Minister, in a bloodless coup
and seized power although under article 245 of the Pakistani constitution
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
it is treasonous to do that. To legitimize his praetorian rule, on April 30,
2002, he abruptly conducted a referendum asking the citizens if he should
continue as president for another five years. But the election was fraudulent
and not even 15 percent had voted for him. In August 2002, Gen. Mush
arraf issued the Legal Framework Order (LFO) encapsulating 21 clauses
constituting as part of the 17th amendment to the constitution with the
objective of not only legitimizing and indemnifying his coup, and holding
a referendum, but also to legitimize his extraordinary powers.
In November 2003, supported by a coalition of six Islamic parties
known as the Muttabide Majilis-e-Amal (MMM), an alliance he himself
created, the new parliament led by the pro-Musharraf Pakistani Muslim
League (PML-Q), which was elected in October 2002, approved these
radical clauses as the 17th amendment on the pledge by Gen. Musharraf
that he would give up his title as the Chief of Army by November 2004. He
however, later reneged on his pledge. On October 6,2007, Gen. Mushar
raf got himself re-elected as president by the Senate, National Assembly
and four provincial assemblies. Challenges to the constitutionality of his
reelection as president were rejected by the Supreme Court headed by
Ifftikhar Chaudhary. Chaudhary was the chief justice whom Musharraf
had suspended in March 2007 for asserting the court’s independence,
but pressure from a lawyer’s movement got him reinstated in July 2007, a
successful challenge to Musharraf’s total authority.38
Gen. Musharraf Declares Emergency Rule on November 3, 2007
Fearing a negative verdict on his October 6 reelection by the Chaudhary’s
supreme court, on November 3,2007 Gen. Musharraf declared a state of
emergency?a defacto martial law?by suspending the constitution. He
issued another provisional constitutional order (PCO) under which he
replaced Chaudhary, a thorn in his flesh, with suppliant Hameed Dogar.
He also dismissed eight Supreme Court judges and scores of high court
judges who refused to take the oath of office under his PCO. Gen. Musharraf
also closed private television networks, put in jail nearly 5,000 journalists,
human rights and civil society activists, and politicians who challenged his
emergency rule. He put Ms. Benazir Bhutto and Chaudhary under house
arrest (she was later released, but not Chaudhary); they had demanded that
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
he resign on the ground that he had no political legitimacy. Meanwhile,
in the midst of severe criticism leveled against him by the Pakistanis, espe
cially the Pakistan bar association for clamping the emergency rule, Gen.
Musharraf finally but reluctantiy let Nawaz Sharif, his nemesis, return to
Pakistan. Sharif arrived in Lahore on November 26 to a huge welcome. On
November 12, Musharaf announced elections for January 8, which were
postponed to a later date, and on November 16, he appointed Moham
median Soomro, the chairman of the Pakistan senate as Prime minister of
the caretaker government until a new elected government was sworn in.
On November 21, his handpicked Supreme Court Chief Justice Dower,
dismissed all petitions challenging his election and the emergency rule,
and declared his October election as valid. On November 22, Musharraf
issued another ordinance validating and affirming the proclamation of
emergency rule, and all other orders, ordinances, including the PCO he
issued, and they were declared as constitutional by the supreme court.
After all domestic legal obstacles against him were cleared by Dower, the
Bush administration and the Brown government of Great Britain pressured
him to lift the emergency. And the 53-member Commonwealth also did
the same by suspending the country from membership. On December 16,
Gen. Musharraf reluctantly lifted the emergency and released most of the
arrested persons with the exception of Chaudhary.39
Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination only Reinforced the Regime’s Lack
of Political Legitimacy
Ms. Bhutto, a charismatic and popular leader, was assassinated in a gunfire
attack-cum-suicide bombing on December 26 a few minutes after she had
finished addressing an election rally, ironically in Rawalpindi, the military
garrison city. The interior department spokesperson Javed Iqbal Cheema
told journalists that there was “irrefutable evidence” linking the killing to
the south Waziristan-based Taliban leader Beitullah Mehsud (on August 7,
2009 he has been killed in a CIA launched missile strike, New Tork Times,
August 8,2009) although he denied that he had anything to do with it. But
Bhutto’s supporters blamed the Musharraf regime for the tragedy. It was
rumored that some Islamists facilitated by the ISI might have committed
the crime. In an e-mail sent to her friend Mr. Mark Spiegel in the US on
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
October 26,2007, Ms. Bhutto put the blame squarely on Musharraf if she
were to be assassinated. She also reportedly notified the British government
that she feared a plot to kill her. This belief only reinforced the Musharraf
regime’s lack of legitimacy among Pakistani citizens. However, at the urging
of the Musharraf regime, the Scotland Yard police conducted an investiga
tion and released a report in February indicating that Ms. Bhutto had died
of the impact of the blasts, and cleared the regime of any complicity. But
her family and her party the PPP continued to implicate it.40
In the February parliamentary and state assembly elections, Musharraf’s
party, the PML (Q), was defeated, and the PPP and the PML (N) won,
putting Musharraf’s’ rule in political jeopardy. The PPP asked Musharraf
to exit peacefully on the ground that he lacked political legitimacy, while
the PML (N) called for his impeachment.
Despite his apparent change of mind on the Kashmir issue, given his
lack of political legitimacy, India has been skeptical of negotiating peace
with Musharraf on the dispute. India therefore, had hoped for restoration
of democracy in Pakistan before it could seriously negotiate peace on the
Kashmir conflict and other disputes. This belief by India is given some
credence in that India achieved some tangible results with democratic
governments in Pakistan in the past. For example, Mr. Bhutto signed the
Simla Accord in 1972 with Mrs. Gandhi and reportedly told Mrs. Gan
dhi that the LoC would be an international border.41 His daughter, Ms.
Bhutto, signed two agreements with Mrs. Gandhi’s son, Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi, in Islamabad. The first was not to attack each other’s nuclear
installations and second to respect the Simla Accord,42 for which she was
branded pro-India by the military. On May 25, 1999, in an address at
the Woodrow Wilson International Center she admitted that she had to
be hostile toward India to appease the Punjabi-dominated military. She
regretted not having engaged in dialogue with India.43 In 1997, Sharif and
India signed a composite dialogue agreement, and in February 1999 he and
Prime Minister Vajpayee signed the MOU to resolve the Kashmir conflict
bilaterally.44 Musharraf opposed this and, as noted earlier, engineered the
Kargil War of May-July 1999 to undermine growing Indo-Pakistan friendly
relations. But the prospects of the Singh government and the democratic
government have turned out to be equally bleak especially after the terrorist
Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
THE PROSPECTS OF RESOLVING THE KASHMIR
CONFLICT WITH CURRENT GOVERNMENT ARE
EQUALLY BLEAK
Following the election of Yousuf Raza Gilani as Prime minister in March
2008, Singh’s government congratulated him on his election, and hoped
for better relations with Pakistan by affirming its support for his democracy.
On May 20,2008, the External Affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee visited
Islamabad and met with the Prime Minister, and the leaders of the PPP and
the PML (N), Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif respectively, and President
Gen. Musharraf. Mukherjee noted that he was visiting Islamabad to get
a feel of the new democratic dispensation’s priorities and policies, and to
affirm India’s commitment to dialogue.45 On May 21, Mukherjee and his
counterpart, Makhhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, issued a joint state
ment noting that they had reviewed the progress report of the fourth round
of talks of topics covered under the composite dialogue, highlighted the
bilateral achievements, and indicated that their foreign secretaries, Salman
Bashir and Shiva Shankar Menon, were soon to launch a fifth round of
talks in New Delhi in July 2008.46 But on the Kashmir issue the leaders
began to express discordant opinions. For example, on May 11, 2008,
Prime Minister Gilani characterized Gen.MusharafPs proposal on Kashmir
as “half baked.” In March 2008, Zardari told an Indian TV Network, that
Kashmir should not be allowed to “hijack” from improving trade and other
relations between the two countries.
This statement by Zardari was swiftly disapproved by various groups
in Pakistan. For example, the new army chief Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani,
who assumed this position in October 2008, visited the forward locations
along the LoC and issued a statement stressing “national consensus” on
the Kashmir issue and reaffirmed the army’s commitment to the Kashmir
cause. And on May 1,2008, in an address to the Pakistan-administered
Azad (free) Kashmuir’s joint session of the Legislative Assembly and the
Legislative Council in Muzaffarabad, Gilani assured the members that
there would be no compromise on Kashmir and that his Government was
seeking “result oriented” talks with India. On July 12, 2008, in a lecture
at the Brooking Institution in Washington DC, Foreign Minister Qureshi
said that India and Pakistan “have to look at innovative ways of resolution
28
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
to the Kashmir Issue beyond the CBM by ‘looking outside the box’.” He
pointed out that Pakistan had shown “flexibility.”47
Meanwhile, perhaps to scuffle the peace process, for the first time after
the ceasefire agreement of2003 has been signed, in late July 2008 skirmishes
along the LoC flared up between the Indian and Pakistan troops in which
four Pakistani soldiers and one Indian soldier were killed. India blamed the
Pakistani army for this provocation. On July 13 a suicide bomber attacked
the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in which 60 Afghans and four
Indian diplomats were killed. India’s National Security Advisor M.K. Naray
anan openly accused the Pakistan’s ISI as being behind the bombing and
stated that it should be destroyed. President Karazai also implicated the ISI
for the attack prompting President Bush to ask the Gilani government to
investigate although Pakistani defense minister Chaudhary Ahmed Mukhtar
denied any involvement.48 In early August mmmmm^mmmtmmmmmmmmmmmm^
2008 Gilani, while attending the South India’s National security
Asian Association Regional (SAARC) advisor M.K. Narayanan
summit in Colombo Sri Lanka, pledged openly accused the
to Dr. Singh that he would investigate Pakistan’s |S| as being
the Kabul incident and do everything to behjnd the bombjng and
put the India-Pakistan dialogue process – – j -. ^ – . , . . \ t i i i , Tox stated that it should be
back on track, while the ISI was trying to . – .
undermine relations49 These episodes and y
rising internal turmoil in Pakistan with
coincidental terrorist attacks by a shadowy new group known as Indian
Mujahideen in India impeded the peace talks for more than six months.
On September 7, 2008, Zardari was elected President after Gen.
Musharraf was forced to resign on August 20. Following his election, on
September 10, Zardari declared there would be soon “good news” on
Kashmir which set off a cross border guessing game, as he did not explain
what he meant.50 While attending the UN General Assembly session in New
York City, Zardari met Dr. Singh on September 24, 2008 and embraced
him and spoke to him in their native language, Punjabi, calling him the
“founder of modern India.” They pledged to renew their co-operation
to fight terror and agreed also to launch the fifth round of the composite
dialogue within three months.51 He is the first Pakistani leader to refer the
Kashmiri militants as “terrorists,”52 while the other Pakistani leaders call
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
them “freedom fighters.” To the disgust of the army, Zardari violated the
army’s long-standing nuclear doctrine by offering a “no first strike use”
nuclear weapons agreement that India welcomed. But Zardari had to take
a quick u-turn on the offer after Gen. Kiyani reportedly rebuked him.53
Although the Pakistani army continued to maintain an unfriendly posture,
the Singh government and the Gilani
Zardari government genuinely began
to move toward a rapprochement. But
surprise horrendous terror attacks by
the Pakistan-based terrorist on the city
of Mumbai November 26-29, 2008,
brought Indo-Pakistan relations to their
nadir, and doomed the prospects of
resolving the Kashmir conflict.
Zadari is the first
Pakistani leader to refer
to the Kashmiri militants
as “terrorists,” while the
other Pakistani leaders
call them “freedom
fighters.”
The Mumbai Terror Attacks November 26-29, 2008; From Tense
to Cold Relations
Ten terrorists boarded a merchant ship at Karachi port. En route to their
destination they changed ships and arrived in Gateway, Mumbai, on
November 26, 2008. Then they stole taxi cabs, and rode in five teams of
two to launch their vicious and dastardly attacks on their intended targets.
They first shot commuter train passengers at CS railway terminus, and
thereafter moved into the Oberoi-Trident hotel complex, Taj Mahal Palace,
the Cama Children’s Hospital, the Jewish Center in the Nariman home,
and the Leopold Cafe, and they took the visitors and occupants there hos
tage, singled out Britons, Americans, and Jews, and began shooting them
indiscriminately. As the city police could not flush out these motivated,
determined, and disciplined terrorists, the Indian elite national security
guards flew in to battle them. It was only after 60 hours of battling the ter
rorists that they were struck and hostages released. The one lone terrorist
named Mohammad Ajmal Amir Imam “Kasab” was captured alive after he
was wounded in a shoot out with the police. The tragic episode ended on
November 29. In this terror attack, 150 people were wounded and 171
Indians and others were killed including six Americans, three Britons, and
Rabbi Gabriel Holzberg and his wife Rivka.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
Amir Kasab has admitted a connection with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET)
in Pakistan. As suspected, he told his interrogators that he was from the
village of Faridkot in Punjab, Pakistan, and born of poor parents with a
fourth grade education. He confessed that he, along with nine other ter
rorists, was recruited and trained for more than one year by army men
under the patronage of its founder, Hafez Mohammad Saeed, (who later
founded the Jamat-Ul-Dawah (JUD) after LET was banned in 2002), and
its commanders Zaki-Ur Rehman Lakhvi, Zaraar Shah, and Yusuf Muzam
mil on how to use explosives, grenades, AK-47s, and what targets they
should hit. The investigators found the cell and satellite phones that the
terrorists used, indicating that they had constant communication with the
LET operatives in Pakistan. The police published the pictures of the other
gunmen with reference to their age, place of residence, etc., in the Indian
newspapers showing evidence beyond
any shadow of a doubt that they were all
from Pakistan. The lone terrorist Jamal
Kasab later confessed his involvement by
implicating the LET, and others, before
the special court presided over by judge
M.L.Tahilaani.54 Thereafter, the sched
uled composite dialogue with Pakistan
was immediately suspended by India, and
relations turned hostile bordering on war
between the two countries.
The Indian External Affairs Minister Mukherjee, on December 4,
warned that India was taking the “strongest measures” to ensure there was
“no repetition of such acts,” describing the attacks as the “most vicious
in the history of independent India.” He expected Pakistan to honor its
“solemn commitments and not to permit the use of its soil for terrorism
against her neighbors.” He, however, disavowed any military option. The
Gilani government responded by saying that it seeks “friendly relations,”
and does not seek war, but, if provoked, it said that its forces will defend
its sovereignty. Based on unconfirmed reports that India had given Paki
stan a deadline of December 26 to return some 20-40 alleged terrorists
and fearing an attack by India, Pakistan withdrew some of its troops from
the western Afghanistan front and redeployed them on the eastern front
Amir Kasab has admitted
a connection with the
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) in
Pakistan. As suspected,
he told his interrogators
that he was from the
village of Faridkot in
Punjab, Pakistan.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
with India, to the displeasure of the Bush administration. Mr. Mukherjee
characterized Pakistan’s behavior as diversionary.
On December 5, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, accompanied by
Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited both
India and Pakistan and asked Pakistan to cooperate with India in locat
ing the non-state actors in Pakistan and punishing the guilty. She told the
Pakistani leadership that it was responsible as its territory was allegedly used
by non-state actors. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain, who
visited India and Pakistan on December 15, asked the Pakistani leadership
to cooperate with India in locating the culprits. It was time for action, he
said. He bluntly told Zardari that three quarters of those who were involved
in serious plots in England were of Pakistani ethnic background and had
ties to AI Qaeda in Pakistan. In view of the fact that citizens of 22 foreign
nations were affected by this attack, on December 12, the UN Security
Council passed a resolution imposing sanctions on four leaders belonging to
the LET/JUD, and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM). In response, Pakistani
authorities put some of these leaders under house arrest and reportedly
seized their assets.
Pressured by the international community and India’s coercive diplo
macy, the Gilani government finally appointed the Federal Investigation
Agency (FLA) under the auspices of its interior minister, Rehman Malik.
Mr. Rehman also admitted that police took into custody six of the eight
conspirators of the attack including Zaki-ur-Rehman, Zarar Shah, Hamad
Amin Sadiq, and Javed Iqbal. Meanwhile, New Delhi prepared a dossier
of evidence, and delivered it to Pakistan implicating 35 persons belonging
to the LET in the attack. In response, Pakistan sent New Delhi a 30-point
questionnaire prepared by its FI A. On March 13, India handed over its
response to clarifications sought by Pakistan to Pakistan’s High Commis
sioner, Shahid Malik, in New Delhi, by enclosing a plethora of primary
documents running into 400 pages implicating the LET. India, however,
did not implicate the Gilani government, but it did implicate the ISI. In fact,
on February 6,2009, India’s foreign secretary, Shivashanker Menon, in an
address to the Institute Francais de Relations, Paris, openly charged Pakistan
that the organizers of the plot “were and remain clients and creations of the
ISI.”55 The lone terrorist Azmal has admitted that some of those who trained
them had military background, especially a major general named Sahab. But
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
despite submitting clarifications by India about the accomplices, the Gilani
government, as of this writing, has not conducted any trial of the indicted
personnel. Pakistan continues to ask India for more evidence and clarifica
tions again and again. India considers the queries as diversionary tactics.
It remains to be seen if the Gilani-Zardari government has the courage to
try and convict those implicated in the attack given the ISI involvement.
India declared a “pause” on restarting the composite dialogue until
the guilty parties were punished, while the Zardari government desperately
seeks talks.56 As Dr. Stephen Cohen noted, the terrorists committed a “bril
liant stupidity” in unraveling the peace process.
The army, which became an unpopular institution under the Musharraf
regime following the Mumbai attacks, regained its ground as Pakistani citi
zens rallied behind it in the face of India’s alleged threats. The army could
conveniently use this conflict with India to ???mmmammmm^H^m^l^B^
deflect citizen’s attention from its alleged The army whjch became
comply an unpopu|ar institution Sanger, in his book entitled The Inheri- , , Lnn^ i i ^ta under the Musharraf
tance (2009), points out that the CIA .
bugged telephone conversations of the rj|^’J^!6 ?u ?aWin9
Pakistani generals including Gen. Mush- the Mumbai attacks,
arraf and Gen. Kiyani, in which they called re9ained ?*s ground as
the Taliban a “strategic asset for Pakistan Pakistani citizens rallied
in fighting its enemy, India.”57 As already behind it in the face of
noted earlier, unlike the Gilani/Zardari India’s alleged threats,
government, the military has an interest ^ma^mmmmmmt^mmmmmmm^
in keeping the Kashmir conflict aflame to justify its dominance in Pakistani
domestic politics. It never wants to submit itself to civilian authority.
PLEDGE TO RESTART THE COMPOSITE DIALOGUE
Six months after the Mumbai assault occurred, for the first time, on June
17, 2009, Dr. Singh and Zardari met on margins of the summit of the
Shanghai Cooperationorganization (SCO) held in Yekaterinburg, Russia
and broke the dialogue logjam when they agreed to renew talks at foreign
secretary levels. However, the mild mannered Dr. Singh was blunt with
Zardari when he told him in front of the media that Paksistan should not
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
allow terrorists to use its soil for terrorism against India. Although Pakistan
found his remark unacceptable, it nonetheless was happy that the meeting
had broken the ice.58 Again on July 17, on the sidelines of the summit of
the Non-aligned Nations held at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egyt, Prime Ministers
Dr. Singh and Gilani met and, to the delight of Pakistan, the leaders issued
a joint statement agreeing to renew the composite dialogue by delinking
it from action on terror. The statement also included Gilanis’ controversial
mentioning “some information on threat in Balochistan” implying obliquely
that India may have a hand in the separatist movement in that state. They
announced that their foreign secretaries would meet as often as necessary and
report to their foreign ministers S.M. Krishna and Shah Mahmood Qureshi
of India and Pakistan respectively.59 Because the Prime Mintster reversed
his position on terrorism and let Gilani mention Balochistan in the joint
statement, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-National Democratic Alliance
(NDA) went berserk and denounced his stand as a sell out.60 On July 29, in
his speech in the Lok Sabha (Lower House), Dr. Singh clarified his position
saying that he has not diluted his stand on terrorism, and expects Pakistan
to prove its bonafides by action. He stressed the dialogue was only brought
forward to achieve peace between the two countries.61
On August 1, the foreign minister Krishna told the Rajya Sabha (upper
House) that no progress in dialogue with Pakistan was possible in an atmo
sphere vitiated by violence or threat to use violence.62 At the conference of
112 heads of missions held in New Delhi on August 25, Mr. Krishna ruled
out a meaningful dialogue with Pakistan until it fulfilled its commitment of
completely dismantling the terrorist infrastructutre from its soil as has been
agreed to. As of this writing, no movement toward resolving the Kashmir
conflict has beebeen taken by the two governments. On the margins of the
UN General assembly session on September 27,2009, India’s new foreign
secretary, Ms. Nirupama Rao, met her counterpart, Salman Bashir, and
discussed only the progress Pakistan has made investigating and punishing
the accomplices of the Mumbai attacks. And on September 29, Mr. Krishna
met his counterpart Quresh at the UN in New York and told him that the
resumption of broad-based dialogue with Pakistan hinged on its prosecution
of all those involved in the attacks.63 Therefore, the prospects of resolving
the Kashmir conflict with the Gilani/Zardari government are equally bleak,
although, as a democracy, it initially produced a lot of euphoria in India.
34
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
The Gilani/Zardari government faces a myriad of political, economic,
social, and military problems making it very weak and fragile. Withdrawal
of the PML (N) from coalition only further added to its fragility With the
17th amendment still intact, Zardari as president remains a powerful leader
endowed with the same extraordinary powers as those Gen. Musharraf
had. The parliament is not sovereign yet without doing away with the 17th
amendment. Zardari attained notoriety as “Mr. Ten Percent” for his alleged
extraction of 10 percent bribes on government contracts while serving as a
minister in his wife’s cabinet. (He was imprisoned for eleven years although
he was not convicted.) He has become a very unpopular leader with an
approval rating at about 19 percent. Structural reforms which the country
badly needed to overcome this economic crisis have not been introduced.
Gilani and Zardari themselves are feudal ^mmmmmm m^m^t^mm
lords who are incapable of initiating The Gi,ani/Zardari
badly needed land reforms. It is bailed . , ., ., j, . , r i government faces a out with aid and loans received from the . .
US, the IMF, and Friends of Pakistan. myr,ad ?f Pollt,cal’
The $7 billion in economic aid approved economic, social, and
by the US Congress in October 2009 for military problems ^
a five-year period for infrastructure may making it very fragile,
certainly help the country provided it is l?l IB ll^””””ll^ B”
not diverted for other purposes.
Terrorism by Pakistani Taliban and Al-Qeda has increased, threaten
ing the very fabric of the nation. The Jihadists who started their terrorist
attacks in early 2007 under the Musharraf regime have intensified them,
especially suicide bombings. The deadly brazen wave of attacks launched
by an alliance of Pakistani Taliban, AI Qaeda and Jihadi groups of Southern
Punjab in October 2009 in various places, especially police and military
installations, vividly show how audacious and powerful these groups have
become and how shaky and vulnerable the Gilani government has become.
For example, on October 6, a suicide bomber struck the lobby of the UN
Food Program office in Islamabad and killed all five of its employees. On
October 10 an explosion at a crowded market in the northwestern city of
Peshawar (NWFP) killed 42 and wounded over 60 innocent civilians. On
October 11, to the embarrassment of the military, four militants dressed
in army fatigues entered its headquarters and took 42 hostages. Pakistani
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
commandos had to rescue them, killing seven men including the mili
tants. On October 13, a suicide car bomber attacked a military vehicle in
a crowded Alpuri market in the Shangla district in the Swatt Valley, a sup
posedly liberated area of Taliban militants, killing 41 people and wounding
dozens more. And on October 16, in coordinated attacks, three groups
of militants dressed in police uniforms simultaneously attacked three law
enforcement agencies in the city of Lahore, the cultural center, and the
capital, in which more than 30 people were killed including 19 police offi
cers and 11 militants as commandos fired on the militants. On October
17, three suicide bombers, including a female one, attacked a police station
in Peshawar killing more than 11 people. Terrorists did not spare even an
Islamic university in Islamabad when two suicide bombers attacked it, killing
four people including a female student on October 21. These attacks are not
only aimed at discouraging the military offensive against South Wazirstan,
the hot bed of Taliban and AI Qaeda, but also presumably, as Hakimullah
Mehsud has declared, to establish an Islamic state in Pakistan by remov
ing the current government. Mehsud seeks to fight India after this goal is
achieved. However, troops did move into South Wazirstan, and it remains
to be seen if the army will be able to dismantle terrorist infrastructure and
its threat.64 In addition, separatist armed struggle is raging in Balochistan,
especially after its leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in August 2005
by the military at the orders of Gen. Musharraf, although the government
falsely accused the Indian government for this ongoing movement.65 The
government appears helpless and impotent in addressing these problems.
The Gilani government is losing its political legitimacy.
The military continues to play a dominant role in the country’s politics
with little interest in submitting itself to civilian authority. As noted earlier,
the military and the ISI continue to support the Pakistan-based militants
including the Taliban as strategic assets to fight India, despite the fact that
the Gilani-Zardari government opposes this strategy. India’s accusation
of Pakistan’s military support for terrorism was finally acknowledged by
Zardari on July 9,2009 when he told the retired civil servants that militant
groups were “created and deliberately nurtured” as a policy for “short-term
tactical objectives.”66
No wonder on July 25, 2009 in Dubai, the US Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, made a damning indictment of
36
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
the ISI by saying that it was fomenting “chaotic activity” in Kashmir and
Afghanistan. He hoped that “in the long run the ISI has to change its stra
tegic thrust.”67 The suicide bomb attack near the Indian embassy in Kabul
on October 8, 2009 in which 17 people were killed and over 80 injured
was claimed credit by the Pakistan Taliban headed by Hakimullah Mehsud
for the blast. However, Afghanistan and India blamed the Pakistani army
and the ISI which want to undermine Indian-Afghan friendly relations and
force India to leave Afghanistan.68
And to the dismay of India, the LET after its involvement in the Mumbai
attack largely remains intact, robust and is determined to strike India again
and the ISI continues to maintain its ties with the outfit belying Pakistan’s
commitment to dismantle it.69 No wonder Dr. Singh expressed the same
concern about the pervasive jihadi threat ^mm?mammmmmmmmmmmmam*
from Pakistan. On August 18, inaugurat- The military in general,
ing the Chief Minister’s conference on ancj the ISI in particular,
internal security in New Delhi, the Prime wou|d \\ke to keep the
Minister warned the heads that there was Kashmir conflict aflame
“credible information of ongoing plans jn ^ tQ majntajn |ts
of terrorist groups in Pakistan to carry . . n – ^ r i i ^7n^ni i dominance in Pakistani
out fresh attacks. 70 The military in gen- .
eral and the ISI in particular (which has _”_
become a state within a state) would like
to keep the Kashmir conflict aflame in order to maintain its dominance in
Pakistani politics. For example, on July 3, in his meeting with Indian defense
advisors of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, Lt. Gen. Shuja Pasha asserted
that the ISI and the Pakistan army were involved in framing Pakistan’s India
policy along with the Foreign Office and, therefore, he wanted India to
deal directly with these three institutions including the army and the ISI
although it is in breach of a diplomatic protocol to do so.71
Notwithstanding Dr. Singh’s pledge, his government is hesitant to
renew the composite dialogue until the Gilani government has produced
some tangible results in punishing the conspirators of the Mumbai attack.
But as India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram told NDTV network on
September 7,2009, India does not rule out the involvement of state actors
such as the ISI.72 If that is true, Gilani may never be able to try and convict
the culprits, as the ISI is likely to resist. This may lead to a death knell to
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
the dialogue as India insists on punishment of the conspirators as a condi
tion to restart the dialogue.
Therefore, in light of problems cited above facing the Gilani-Zardari
government, one wonders if it will be in a position to reach an amicable
settlement with India on Kashmir. India may be averse to deal with such
a fragile and shaky regime which is at a crippling point. But what is the
solution to the conflict when circumstances permit the Gilani/Zardari
government supported by its military to make a genuine commitment in
resolving the Kashmir conflict?
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE KASHMIR CONFLICT
There are many alternative solutions suggested to resolving the Kashmir
conflict in terms of their pros and cons. Given the space constraints here
below, we simply identify some of them and suggest the one that India, and
the Kashmiri Muslims could agree to if Pakistan is willing to compromise.
Raju Thomas and Sumit Ganguly suggest the following alternative solutions:
1. Maintain the territorial status quo in Kashmir along the LoC.
2. Secure Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan.
3. Create an independent Kashmir.
4. Secure a “Trieste” solution (like the disputed city of Trieste which
was partitioned between Italyand Yugoslavia) by territorial transfer
of the Vale of Kashmir to Pakistan.
5. Manipulate a Tibetan solution by transforming the demographics
in Kashmir (as China allegedly reduced the Tibetan population into
a minority by settlingTibet with its Han Chinese, so should India
with Hindus and Sikhs in the Valley).
6. Generate an exodus of Kashmiri Muslims into Pakistan through
repressive or persuasive measures.
7. Achieve joint Indo-Pakistani control over Kashmir.
8. Foster a subcontinent of several independent states.
9. Promote a decentralized sub-continental confederation of several
autonomous states.
38
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
10. As required by the U.N. Security Council, hold a plebiscite to ascer
tain the wishes of Kashmirs.
11. Grant a protectorate status to Kashmir.73
The authors argue that most of these alternative solutions are either
impractical or unacceptable to India, Pakistan, and the Kashmiri Muslims,
including the militants. Of these solutions the one that Pakistan and the
militants prefer is a plebiscite as has been called for by the UNSC resolu
tions. But India considers this option as irrelevant, outdated, and rebus
sic stantibus. Even Gen. Musharraf admitted that option is not practical
today. A number of Kashmiri militants also oppose the plebiscite, the fact
that under the UNSC resolutions they cannot have the option of inde
pendence. Therefore, the only possible solution to this festering conflict is
the first alternative. That is, maintaining the LoC as the current territorial
status quo with some border adjustment favorable to Pakistan, and by
granting a measure of autonomy to both ma^K^mmmmim’^mammm^m^
parts of divided Kashmir. This is what Even with high-handed
Prime Minister Jawaharhal Nehru and policies of previous
Sheikh Abdullah had agreed to when they Indian governments, the
signed the Delhi Accord in 1952.74 Even Kashmiris Still prefer to
Musharraf, as we noted earlier, suggested be with India than with
some variation of this arrangement. As Pakistan which has
pledged, if India grants autonomy under become almost a “failed
Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, s^a^e ”
and demilitarizes the state as demanded ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
by separatists, and allocates sufficient
funding for the states’ economic development as has been already done by
Singh’s Government, one should not be surprised if the militants gave up
their insurgency and joined the democratic forces to rebuild their heavily
damaged state due to insurgency.
As support for insurgency in Kashmir has declined, the insurgency is
declining. In fact, quite a number of Kashmiri militants are returning to
Kashmir from Pakistan as they are tired of the unproductive insurgency.75
The self-chosen leaders of the APHC who refused to participate in rounds
of talks convened by Dr. Singh pressured by Pakistan, and some militant
groups, today, are willing to do so as they are being marginalized in the state
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
where there has been a functioning democracy since 2003.76 Hindus and
Buddists who constitute the majority in Jammu, and Ladhak respectively,
and who want to be an integral part of India may accept this deal. Even
with high handed policies of previous Indian governments, the Kashmiris
still prefer to be with India rather than with Pakistan, which has become
almost a “failed state.”
For example, in an opinion poll conducted by the independent UK
based Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) in June 2002,
61 percent of Kashmiris said they are better off remaining as part of India
as opposed to 6 percent choosing to be part of Pakistan.77 Moreover, ethni
cally and ideologically and religiously, one can argue that Kashmiri Muslims
in the Valley are much more close to India than they are to Pakistan. The
Kashmiri Muslims are mostly moderate, eclectic in their religious beliefs
and values and have incorporated some aspects of Hindusim and are pre
dominantly sufi, which is pacifistic in its theological orientation.78
CONCLUSION
We have first briefly discussed the history of the Kashmir conflict, and the
insurgency the conflict produced in 1990, and that continues until today
supported by Pakistan. Second, we have looked at the peace process that
India and the Musharraf engaged in, and we have offered some explanations
why they failed to resolve the Kashmir and other conflicts under the rubric
of composite dialogue. Third, we have explained why India and the Gilani
Zardari government may not be able to resolve the conflict. And finally,
we have suggested a viable solution to the conflict if and when democratic
Pakistan is willing to compromise on the Kashmir conflict.
Notes
1. For a comprehensive discussion of the origins of the conflict and the first
Kashmir war, Sisir Gupta, Kashmir, New York: Asia Publishing House, 1966.
2. For a detailed discussion of the war and its leading to the Tashkent
Declaration see Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in the Cross Fire, New York: LB.
Tauris 1996, pp. 193-206.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
3. For more discussion of the Bangladesh war and its leading to the Simla
Accord, see Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: Indian-Pakistan Tensions Since
1947, New York: Columbia University, 2001, pp. 51-78 and 168-169.
4. For a discussion on Sheikh Abdullah and his son’s rule, see Schofield,
Kashmir in the Cross Fire, pp. 216-223.
5. For discussion of the insurgency, see Ibid., pp. 230-236.
6. For text of the memorandum see in Ganguly, Conflict Unending,
pp. 170-171.
7. For discussion of Gen. Musharaff’s role in engineering the Kargil war
and of President Clinton’s role in ending it, see Ibid, Ganguly, pp. 114-129.
8. For discussion about the failure of the Agra summit talks, see Ibid.,
pp. 135-7.
9. New Tork Times, January 13, 2002.
10. In January-June 2002, India was on the verge of striking terrorist camps
in POK, see India Today International, December 23, 2002, pp. 13-19.
11. Ibid., June, 10, 2002, pp. 10-11.
12. For more discussion about the elections, and the Sayeed government’s
policy toward militants, see Ibid., October 21, 2002, pp. 12-18, and November
18, 2002,pp.24-29.
13. Ibid., May 12, 2003, pp. 23-25, and Economist, May 10, 2003, 31-32.
14. For details about the joint statement, see New Tork Times, January 7-8,
2004, and Dawn, January 7, 2004.
15. Hindu, May 13,2007.
16. New Tork Times, November 12, 2004.
17. India Today International, November 29, 2004, p. 8.
18. For details of the initial talks between the Singh’s government and the
Musharraf regime, see Fahmida Ashraf, “India-Pakistan Dialogue under Con
gress Government,” at www.Issi.org.pk/journal2004-files/no-3/article/2.htm.
19. For details about the second round of talks, see “A Status Report,” Insti
tute of War and Conflict (IPCS), January 31, 2005, pp. 1-3.
20. Hindu, April 18, 2005.
21. Priya shree Andley, “Third Composite Dialogue: An Overview of Indo
Pak Relations in 2006,” IPCS, March 2007, pp. 1-5.
22. For text of the joint statement, see Hindu, September 17, 2006.
23. For more details about the interview, see A.G. Noorani, “There is So
Much to Gain Mutually,” Frontline, Vol 23, No.16, August 2006, pp. 12-25.
24. Hindu, December 7, 2006.
25. Ibid., December 12, and 14, 2006.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
26 Ibid., 17,2006.
27. Navina Behera, Demystifying Kashmir, Washington, DC: Brooking Insti
tute, 2006, pp. 54-5,138-141, and 167-169.
28 Ibid., pp. 139-142.
29. For a detailed discussion of these disputes, see Ashutosh Misra, “An
Audit of the India-Pakistan Peace Process,” Australian Journal of International
Affairs” vol. 61. no 1. pp. 506-528; Bharat Bushan, “Tulbul, Sir Creek, and
Siachen: Competitive Methodologies”, and Ahmed Bilai Soofi,Wuller Barrage,
Siachen, and Sir Creek,” South Asian Journal, January-March No 5, 2005 at
southasiamedia.net/magazine/journal/7.htm.
30. Hindu, February 3, 2007.
31. Ibid., March 1 2007.
32. Behera, Demystifying Kashmir, pp. 52-53.
33. For details about the Taliban insurgency and Karazai’s accusations of
Pakistan, see India Today International, July 31, 2006, pp. 22-24.
34. Nirupama Subramanyam, “Military in Its Businees Business in Pakistan,”
Hindu, 19, 2007.
35. Economist, July, 8, 2006, pp. 22-24.
36. Ayesha Siddiqua, Military Inc Inside Pakist Pakistanis Military Economy,
London. Pluto Press, 2007, pp. 190-91.
37. India Abroad, June 4, 1999, p. 20.
38. For more discussion about how Gen Musharraf came to powe, and how
he consolidated it, see Rathnam Indurthy, “Explaining Why the Musharraf Mili
tary Regime is Not Likely to Restore Democracy in Pakistan,” Asian Profile,
vol.34, no. 4., pp. 371-74.
39. For a detailed discussion about Musharaf’s emergency rule and why he
subsequendy lifted it, see Hindu, November 4 -6, 2007; December 1, 2007, and
December 19, 2007.
40. For a detailed discussion about Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, the citizens’
reaction to her death, and the conclusions of the Scotlan Yard report, see Ibid.,
December 28-31, 2007; January 5, 2009; January 9, 2008; January 15, 2008;
January 21, 2009; February 5, 2009, and February 9, 2009.
41. Cited in Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in the Crossfire, IB Tauris, London,
1996, p. 214.
42. Ibid., pp. 225-35.
43. Cited in India Abroad, June 4, 1999, p. 20.
44. For text of the MOU, see Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending, Woodrow
Wison Center Press, Washington, DC:. 2001. 170-71.
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
45. For details about Mukherjee’s visit, See G. Parthasarathy, “Symbolism
Amid Turmoil,” The Hindu Business Line, May 11, 2008, at the hindubusiness
line.com/2008/05/09.
46. For text of the joint statement, see at meaa.nic.in/
pressrelease/2008/05/21js02.htm.
47. For details about differing positions of Pakistani leaders, see Hindu
March 3, 2008, May 1, 2008, May 11, 2008, and July 13, 2008.
48. For details about the cease-fire violations, the Kabul attack, and their
impact on Indo-Pakistan relations, see Hindu, July 13-14, 2008; July 16-17,
2008; July 31, 2008, and August 5, 2008.
49. Ibid., August 3, 2008, and August 5, 2008.
50. Ibid, September 10, 2008, and September 11, 2008.
51. India Abroad, October 3, 2008, pp. A5, and A9.
52. Hindu October 6, 2008, and October 7, 2008.
53. India Today International, December 22, 2008, p. 8.
54. For more details about the attack, see India Today International, Janu
ary 5, 2009, pp. 18-31, and India Abroad, July 31, 2009, pp. A-A6.
55. For a detailed discussion about Indo-Pakistan relations in the aftermath
of the terrorist attack, see, Hindu January 1, 2009; February 4, 2009; February
6, 2009; February 10, 2009; February 13-16, 2009; February 20, 2009; Febru
ary 26-27, 2009; March 1-2, 2009; March 4, 2009; March 7, 2009; March 12,
2009, and March 14, 2009.
56. Ibid., March 13, 2007.
57. The book excerpts are cited in “Why the US Bugged the Pakistan Army,”
Asian Times, February, 16, 2009.
58. Hindu, June 17, 2009, and June 18, 2009.
59. For text of the joint statement, see Islamicterrorism.wordpress.
com/2009/18.
60. Hindu, July 18,2009.
61. Ibid., July 30, 2009.
62. Ibid., August 1.2009.
63. Ibid., October 27, 2009, and October 29, 2009.
64. For more detail about these terrorist attacks, and government response,
see New Tork Times, October 6, 2009; October 10, 2009; October 11, 2009;
October 13, 2009; October 16, 2009; October 17, 2009; October 17, 2009;
October 18, 2009, October 22, 2009, and Hindu, October 16, 2009.
65. For more discussion about the secessionist movement, see Malik
Siraj Akbar, “Balochistan Situation 28, Getting Bleaker by the Day,” Hindu,
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THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION
September 2, 2009, and Hamid Mir, “India and the Baloch Insurgency,” Ibid.,
July 2009.
66. Ibid., August 25, 2009.
67. Ibid., July 9, 2009.
68. Ibid., October 9-11, 2009.
69. New Tork Times, September 30, 2009.
70. Ibid., July 25, 2009.
71. Ibid., July 18,2009.
72. Ibid., September 7, 2009.
73. Ibid., July, 23, 2009.
74. Raju Thomas (ed), Perspectives on Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict in South
Asia, Boulder, CO: Worldview Press, 1992, pp. 30-34, and Sumit Ganguly, The
Crisis of Kashmir: Portents of War, and Hopes of Peace, Woodrow Wilson Center,
Washington, D.C., pp. 133-150.
75. For details about the 1952 accord, see Sumantra Bose, Kashmir Roots of
Conflict: Paths to Peace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
76. Praveen Swami, “The Hurriyat’s Moment of Decision,” Hindu, Septem
ber 5, 2009.
77. Cited in India Abroad, June 4, 2002, p. 6.
78. For discussion about the cultural affinity of Kashmiri Muslims with
Indians, see Rathnam Indurthy, “Kashmir in Indo-Paksistan Relations: Mutual
Claims to the State as Causes of the Conflict” Asian Profile, vol. 30, no.l, Febru
ary 2002, pp. 54-59; and Praveen Swami, “The Hurriyat’s Moment of Decision,”
Hindu, September 5, 2009. Cited in India Abroad, June 4, 2002, p. 6.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WORLD PEACE
44 VOL. XXVII NO. 1 MARCH 2010
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International Journal on World Peace, Vol. 27, No. 1 (MARCH 2010) pp. 1-96
Front Matter
FROM THE EDITOR: POWER POLITICS IN SOUTHWEST ASIA [pp. 3-8]
THE KASHMIR CONFLICT: WHY IT DEFIES SOLUTION [pp. 9-44]
A RESPONSE TO “THE KASHMIR CONFLICT” [pp. 45-53]
REJOINDER TO AKTHAR’S COMMENTS ON KASHMIR [pp. 55-59]
ISRAEL’S RESPONSE TO A NUCLEAR IRAN [pp. 61-78]
BOOK REVIEWS
Review: untitled [pp. 79-83]
Review: untitled [pp. 84-88]
Review: untitled [pp. 89-94]
Back Matter