Need to move beyond established positions
Though chill winds of winter are beginning to blow in India’s northern-most state of Jammu & Kashmir (pop. 10 million), fresh buds of hope are beginning to sprout in the Kashmir Valley and the windswept plains of Jammu and Ladakh — the major districts of this strife-torn state. There’s new hope that the low intensity war and civic anarchy which this beleagurered area of turmoil has been suffering for the past half century is set to end.
Of course initiatives of great pith and moment have been undertaken before to resolve the Kashmir condundrum which has provoked annual defence and armaments expenditures which neither of the two neighbouring dirt poor nations can afford, and have come to naught. There is insufficient understanding in the external affairs ministries of New Delhi and Islamabad that the essence of the art of negotiation is for each side to move forward from established positions and make concessions without legal nit-picking and hyper historical sensitivity. In particular as the larger, more populous and relatively more developed nation, India has to assume a greater risk of erring on the side of generosity.
For one, Indian negotiators have to cold storage their obstinate contention that Kashmir is an integral part of India and that boundaries cannot be redrawn. Secondly, Indian negotiators should not rule out consensual third party mediation to resolve this 57-year-old dispute. After all our own Constitution of India (Article 51) enjoins the Central government to resolve international disputes through third party arbitration. And thirdly, India should not fudge the reality that half a century ago our very own and much revered prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru promised a UN-supervised plebiscite in the erstwhile kingdom of J&K.
As a practising and provenly democratic nation, India’s objective should be to ensure that the democratic rights and freedoms exercised by people in all states of the Indian Union are also enjoyed — with full protection for the rights of religious and linguistic minorities — by the people of Jammu & Kashmir. The only precaution which needs to be taken in the larger national interest is to ensure that J&K does not metamorphose into a hostile theocracy on our northern border.
Against this backdrop the latest suggestion aired by Pakistan’s President Musharraf to experiment with demilitarisation of several districts on each side of the LoC (line of control) in Kashmir and to permit free movement within them under the supervision of the UN or India and Pakistan jointly, is worthy of consideration. Because it is an entirely new proposal which if successful could be expanded to cover the entire territory of J&K including PoK (Pakistan occupied Kashmir). Such out-of-the-box thinking is required on both sides of the negotiating table because neither India, Pakistan nor the long-suffering people of Kashmir are satisfied with the status quo. If this proposal is unacceptable, India should bite the bullet and agree to adjudication of the status of Kashmir by the International Court of Justice at the Hague.
Radical solutions to resolve the half century dispute over the status of Kashmir need to be entertained because there is growing frustration in both countries about the Kashmir imbroglio which has bled both India and Pakistan dry with arms and armament merchants and their sleazy commission agents being the only beneficiaries of this unbearable impasse. It’s high time that the huge annual budgetary outlays for defence in both the neighbouring nations are cut back and redeployed into education and healthcare sectors of the two countries which host the world’s largest populations of the sick, malnourished and illiterate. That’s why public opinion should not permit the fresh buds of peace which are sprouting in J&K on both sides of the LoC to be frozen by yet another winter of despair.
Vital lesson of US presidential election
The recently concluded presidential election in the United States which returned incumbent President George W. Bush to the White House for another four year term is worthy of comment not only because the United States of America is the most powerful — economically, intellectually and in terms of military prowess — nation in the new unipolar world, but also because its democratic process is of particular interest to India, the world’s most populous democracy. Perhaps for the first time the major issues in the 2004 US presidential election were values rather than bread-and-butter economics.
It’s astonishing but true that women’s right to abortion, same sex marriages, the pros and cons of stem cell research and education reform were major electoral issues. Though liberal intellectuals tend to dismiss them as being driven by America’s religious right, there’s no doubt that all these issues have long-term implications for the orderly growth of society –– all societies. That these value-based issues were extensively debated on public platforms by the presidential candidates is evidence of the moral decency and intellectual depth of the American electorate.
Of course there’s no shortage of liberals and academics in India and the US who have nothing but scorn for the intellectual capabilities of middle America and President Bush. But the Indian intelligentsia should remember that until the general election of 2004 in India proved them all egregiously wrong, they had nothing but scorn for Sonia Gandhi. Like President Bush she proved to be more astute in gauging the national mood than brilliant pundits and editorialists.
It’s arguable that even Iraq, the other omnipresent issue in the recent American presidential election, was a moral conundrum. Though with the benefit of hindsight the overwhelming majority of intellectuals worldwide (after the dreaded weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein were proved to be a figment of the ousted Iraqi dictator’s imagination) have condemned the American invasion of Iraq, it is pertinent to recall that in the panicky post 9/11 period, there was reasonable cause to believe that Saddam had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons which could destroy a major metro in the US.
Against this backdrop the American invasion of Iraq — which initially had UN sanction — to oust a provenly inhuman dictator who routinely used torture as an instrument of governance and had employed chemical weapons in the seven-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s as well as against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq, is understandable and was in the final analysis a moral issue. And by re-electing President Bush who took the difficult decision to rid the world of a cruel and dangerous dictator, the American electorate has grasped the complexities involved in the universally condemned 2002 American invasion of Iraq better than the plethora of anti-Bush pundits in the US and abroad.
The rich-poor divide, the lack of access to quality education of the great majority of the poor, non-merit middle class subsidies, vast defence spending and the pathetic poverty and living conditions of rural India are moral issues which need to be debated extensively and should determine the outcome of general and state elections. That’s the lesson of the US presidential election of 2004.