The crisis in Kashmir

THE age-old struggle of the people of Jammu and Kashmir for independence and self-determination has made a great leap forward. The catalyst for massive political reactions proved to be the Srinagar government’s move to donate a piece of land for the convenience of the pilgrims en route to the holy Hindu shrine of Sri Amarnath.

The struggle has achieved a new pitch of intensity and fervour as the leaders of the people are showing unprecedented unity of objective and action. The government of India has acknowledged it by throwing all principal leaders like Ali Gilani, Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah in jail simultaneously. Unprecedented demonstrations all over the state have erupted.

To suppress the demonstrations and rioting, there is curfew everyday.

So dramatic was the political impact of the land donation and the subsequent protests that Ghulam Nabi Azad’s government in Indian Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) fell.

The new governor of J&K had to rescind the order of the transfer of the donated land. That in turn sparked massive protests in the Hindu majority region of Jammu, leading the authorities to decide once more to let the pilgrims use the land.

The Hindu rioters blocked the Jammu-Banihal-Srinagar road cutting the lifeline of the Valley with India. The stoppage of food and other vital supplies revealed to the people of the Valley a hitherto obscure strategic dimension of their geography and their political struggle against New Delhi.

One morning they had the horrible feeling that the people of the Jammu region were capable of controlling their jugular road link with the rest of the world. The Jammu region had demonstrated its power to starve the population of the Valley at will. It could no more be trusted.

Overnight the need for the Valley to have an ever open road link with the world via Muzaffarabad became clear to them. Estimates vary but between 100,000 to 200,000 people marched on the main road from Baramulla to Uri in J&K. They were stopped; many were wounded and killed including Sheikh Abdul Aziz, a prominent Hurriyat leader. That was on Aug 11, 2008.

Since then massive protests have continued. To prevent dharnas and processions curfews are intermittently imposed over large areas of the Valley. The struggle for liberation has acquired unprecedented momentum.

A crisis of gigantic proportion stares the governments of India and Pakistan in the face. The results of the long, painstaking and admirable negotiations between the two governments about a general understanding on the framework of the solution of the Kashmir issue have been washed down the River Jhelum — a great tragedy, indeed.

Like the British in 1946, the governments of India and Pakistan failed to fathom the depth of frustration and anger caused by delaying the solution during the preceding two years. Apparently they paid a heavy price. A little spark proved enough to light a prairie fire.

Our two countries now face a qualitatively new situation. The demand for independence has moved to the top of the Kashmiri agenda.

The governments of India and Pakistan must realise that it will no longer be feasible even with their combined power to impose a solution of the dispute on Kashmir by force.

They must now fully permit the regions of J&K to go the way they want. In the circumstances it is advisable for India and Pakistan to think of negotiating their compacts with the future governments of Kashmir in a new mode.

In yet another way, the situation is not very dissimilar to that of India in 1946. In that fateful year it was the British who were fast losing their grip. The Congress and the League were having a field day working up the emotional aspect of their demands among their followers.

Today in J&K, on one side are the governments of India and Pakistan who have lost moral and political ground. On the other side are the worked-up political forces of Jammu and Srinagar as antagonists. All four parties are highly dissatisfied with the status quo.

India and Pakistan must not repeat the blunder the British committed by relying on elections and referendums to determine the wishes of the people. That is a sure way of widening the distances between communities and nationalities which ultimately result in mass killings and migrations. The 1946 elections in India, 1970 elections in Pakistan, referendum in the former Yugoslavia and elections in Palestine are proofs if any are needed.

The solution lies in arriving at agreements with leaderships and then putting them up to the people through referendum as was done in the case of Ireland.

The writer was the federal finance minister from 1971 to 1974.

Will Democrats rescue Pakistan?

THE US Democratic Party now has its ticket for the elections of Nov 2008. If the ticket succeeds and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are elected to become the next pair of leaders of the United States, what will it mean for Pakistan?

Pakistan still remains dependent on American largesse. In spite of the significant structural change that has occurred in global finance, Pakistan will remain tied to Washington in order to receive the resources it needs desperately to prevent its economy from collapsing. Will the Obama-Biden administration rescue Pakistan? Will the Democratic administration be better for Pakistan than one headed by Senator John McCain?

Let me get the McCain-Pakistan question out of the way before discussing the likely Pakistan policy of the Obama-Biden administration. The McCain administration will remain obsessed with the issue of terrorism and its impact on the security of the United States. In this respect, John McCain will basically follow the approach of the Bush-Cheney era, putting aside all other concerns. For McCain the ‘war on terror’ remains the central concern in relations between America and its allies in both the developed and developing parts of the world. He will also follow a muscular foreign policy as indicated by his response to the Russian involvement in Georgia.

If pronouncements by the leaders are to be treated as providing some guidance to their conduct in office, it can be said with some certainty that the Obama-Biden administration will follow a different approach. This will have enormous consequences for Pakistan. What will be the approach, what will be its consequences, and how should Pakistani policymakers position themselves are some of the questions that deserve serious reflection in Islamabad.

Senators Obama and Biden have approached Pakistan from two different angles. The former has looked at it from the perspective of the American war in Afghanistan. Obama believes, and for good reason, that Washington should not have gotten involved in Iraq. When it did it diverted its attention away from Afghanistan and allowed the situation there to deteriorate. He wants to pull the Americans out of Iraq as soon as such a withdrawal is practical and get more fully engaged in Afghanistan.

He does not seem to be happy with the way Islamabad has conducted military operations against Al Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban on its side of the border. At one point he declared that he would not hesitate to send American troops into Pakistani territory if such a move was warranted by developments on the ground. His approach, in other words, focused on the military aspects of the solution to the Al Qaeda-Taliban problem.

It was after this declaration, which was understandably not well received in Pakistan, that he travelled to Afghanistan and met President Hamid Karzai in Kabul. He has not spoken in any kind of detail on that subject since his visit but it can be assumed that the Afghan president must have encouraged him to pursue that line of thinking. For Karzai blaming Pakistan for his troubles has been a convenient way of camouflaging his failure to stabilise his country.

Senator Joe Biden has approached the Pakistan problem from an entirely different angle. He has focused on the need to economically stabilise the second largest Muslim country in the world. Working with Senator Richard Lugar, the senior-most Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee that Biden heads, he has tabled a resolution that aims to provide Pakistan with $1.5bn a year of economic assistance for at least five years, perhaps even 10 years.

This amount will be spent on Pakistan’s social and economic development in a way that the rewards of economic growth reach the poorer segments of the population and poorer regions of the country. The Biden-Lugar approach is premised on three assumptions: that economic deprivation is a major reason for growing extremism in the Muslim world, that Pakistan is central to the problem of Islamic extremism, and that Pakistan does not have resources of its own to get the country’s economy moving in the right direction.

I have no doubt that once the Obama-Biden administration is in place there will be much greater emphasis on economic and social development as a way of fighting Islamic extremism than on the use of force. The Biden approach will prevail. This should be welcome to Islamabad. However, in the discussions I have had with various people involved in developing positions for the Democratic administration, there is some scepticism about Pakistan’s ability to proceed on that course.

The neglect of the economy by the new set of leaders in Islamabad has not increased the confidence of the policy and opinion-makers in Washington. They are not convinced that Pakistan fully understands the real nature of the problem it faces on the economic and social fronts. With some Pakistani leaders scurrying around the globe trying to raise funds for bailing out the country from its current predicament, it can be suggested that the emphasis is on applying the band-aid once again rather than on finding a lasting solution to the country’s economic problems.

What is it that Islamabad must do to restore confidence among the people in the world of finance and in the political arena in Washington that it has the ability and the expertise to strategise for developing its economy and its society in a way that would bring its young people into the economic mainstream rather than let them drift into extremism?

This is not a hard question to answer. The answer has three components. First, there must be a demonstrated ability to plan for the future. Second, there is the need to focus the state’s attention on building institutions in the areas of both economics and politics that would help to secure a better future for all citizens. Third, there also the need to give a clear signal to the world that Pakistan wishes to join the community of nations as a partner rather than continue to operate from the margin as a force for disruption.

With the change in its own leadership and with change about to occur in Washington in the next few months, Pakistan may have the opportunity to correct the course on which it has been moving for many months. This opportunity must not be lost. This has been a constant refrain in many contributions I have made to this space. Sometimes the message needs to be repeated.

Abstinence is not enough

OUTSTANDING in the mess the gentleman who just vacated the president’s office left is the ambivalence of what lies ahead in terms of constitutional rectification where parliament is supreme for citizens but bows to a new supremo, Mr A. Zardari. Should he take presidential office then presidential powers could well be retained or enhanced.

Why should people be uncomfortable ask the candidate’s supporters, if a president also co-chairs a party or if parliamentarians opt to be in that masterly grip? In America the president is essentially a party man. He is the chief executive and commander in chief and he too reaches office through the votes of an electoral college.

But there is a major difference in that in America the House and the Senate show minds of their own about advice and consent to key appointments despite party affiliations; and the judiciary is independent. As things stand at home, the future president’s predecessor (Pervez Musharraf, remember him?) got himself elected by an outgoing parliament.

An innovative successor could reach the post through a foregone parliament. He might then win plaudits for backing the renunciation of arbitrary power to dissolve the parliament for it could be in his party’s interest to assure its tenure and in the opposition’s interest to appeal to their head of state for relief.

The person of the president embodies the unity of the federation and is implicitly apolitical. The incumbent and thereby candidates should be above controversy, let alone suspicion. To the voters who elected his electoral college, the president does not represent a constituency: he symbolises the dignity and persona of the state and every citizen.

Perhaps no other candidate ever to be nominated by a party is viewed with as much moral reservation as Mr Zardari. (The former COAS Musharraf’s candidacy was faulted because of his already being in government service not because of his personal character or his public image.)

The NRO may give Mr Zardari and others legal coverage; but amnesty and indemnity of the sort which many deemed wise for Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain was never pleaded for publicly in relation to spouses. And it is to that identity that Mr Zardari owes his remarkable political rise.

For that very reason he has also been demonstrably victimised. But irrespective of the letter of the law (which changes so frequently in Pakistan it demands an unusual degree of literacy to keep up) only those bracketed with him in the amazing proliferation of allegations, indictments and cases where accountability was used politically, categorise them as wholly unjust whatever their specificity.

If the manner of investigative procedures was scandalising so was the manner of its renunciation. To put it bluntly hardly anyone thinks him innocent of fiscal crookedness and more than a few think of him as conducive to more serious crimes. The Justice Nizam case is perhaps the least incendiary instance to cite. Rather than command respect, Mr Zardari inspires fear.

Media savvy, silver-tongued, and politically dexterous Mr Zardari is, but even these gifts occasion alarm if perceived as masking insincerity of purpose and unreliability. One of the reasons negotiations between Mr Bhutto and the PNA were so fraught was that the PNA knew Mr Bhutto could talk rings round them any time. Being able to outwit the political opposition does not mean that you have convinced them. It just leaves them feeling vaguely cheated.

How, with the best will in the world, may common Pakistanis view a President Asif Zardari as possessing the requisite objectivity about what constitutes the supreme national interest that his self-interested immediate predecessor was reviled for lacking?

As for neutrality: PPP jiyala exultation broke bounds in Governor House Punjab, and their leaders pledged to do the same for the presidency. But Pakistan is not the equivalent of a PPP fief — yet. Nor do its citizens want it to become one. Mr Bhutto successfully for himself (initially) but disastrously for the provinces and federation reconstituted provincial governments that were not PPP-hued. Fears that the PPP’s diminished first family will activate another set of FSF-type goons may prove groundless, but there should not be the slightest shadow of such apprehensions surrounding the persona of a presidential candidate.

For far too many Pakistanis over a wide-ranging spectrum Mr Zardari’s nomination as a presidential candidate is outrageous. Surely the PPP’s co-chairman and the 19-year-old who is his boss can find a less stigmatised party man.

They could find someone consensually acceptable if they put their minds to it.