Only US largesse has kept Pakistan going all these decades. But recent successive regimes in Washington are increasingly unwilling to yield to Pakistan's demand to intervene in Kashmir
When Minister for External Affairs Salman Khurshid recently decried the Pakistani Prime Minister’s adviser Sartaj Aziz meeting with Kashmiri separatists, he should have also criticised his own party and the Government it leads for keeping the separatists well and kicking for 60 years even as the former have sought to convince everyone that Jammu & Kashmir is an integral part of India.
Mr Khurshid does not seem to realise the incongruity of Article 370 nor does he seem to consider the irrelevance of discussing any part of India with a foreign power, like Pakistan.
Keeping in mind the incumbent regime’s insistence that Jammu & Kashmir is a part of India, the Congress must have the courage to drop Article 370 from the Constitution and put that State on par with others of the Indian Union.
Many States in the country get special consideration in terms of Central funds and application of taxes. For instance, income tax is not levied on residents of Sikkim and Nagaland. If Jammu & Kashmir needs such concessions for its development, they can be granted without having a separate Article 370 that effectively confers a veto power to the State Assembly with regard to application of any Central law.
The incongruity of Article 370, conferring veto power to Jammu & Kashmir while the rest of the Indian Union comes under the Constitution and Central laws without exception, is the prime reason why Kashmiri separatists keep flogging the dead horse of self-determination in that State and look to Pakistan for supporting their illegitimate demands.
If, for instance, the DMK or the AIADMK, that have a shared history of Tamil separatism, were to demand such separation today, the Centre would be justified, nay required, to declare these parties anti-national, ban them and dismiss their Governments right away. In 1967, the united DMK could contest the election only after it formally gave up its demand for a virtually separate Tamil nation.
The Congress and the Governments it has led at the Centre had rightly highlighted the Simla Pact between India and Pakistan to insist that any issue concerning Jammu & Kashmir would be bilateral and not internationally discussed. As a party to that pact, why do successive Governments in Islamabad continue to raise the Kashmir issue at various international meetsIJ
Had there been a strong Union Government in New Delhi, it would have ticked off Islamabad every time the latter sought to approach an international forum on the Kashmir issue. A strong Union Government would have also told Pakistan that it must either to stick by the obligations under the Simla pact or face Indian non-cooperation on any bilateral matter between the two countries. That would have sent a strong message to Islamabad that it cannot afford to ride two horses — bilateral resolution and international talks — on the Kashmir issue, or any other India-Pakistan problem for that matter.
Taking such a strong stand is not impractical, as some of our peaceniks seem to suggest. After several decades of trying out the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s programme of seeking to cower India with a policy of “bleeding it with a thousand cuts” with no substantial result, Islamabad must now be made aware of the price it has to pay for the promotion of terrorism in India. Incidents like the attack on Parliament or the 2008 carnage in Mumbai that killed 260 people hog the limelight but the fact is that Pakistan has already lost the trust of the international community, is condemned by virtually every Western nation and suspected by even its close ally China, for fostering terrorism globally.
Today, it is American largesse that keeps Pakistan going. But successive Governments in Washington, DC, are increasingly unwilling to yield to Pakistani demand to intervene in Kashmir. Similarly, Europe, once Pakistan’s best bet to internationalise Kashmir, is even more reluctant to be Islamabad’s cat’s paw in this regard, as the German Ambassador to India’s role in organising the Zubin Mehta concert in Srinagar reveals.
So, is Article 370 being kept alive because Jammu & Kashmir is a Muslim-majority State within a Hindu-majority IndiaIJ If that is so, then the Congress is betraying the country and supporting the wretched two-nation theory first put forward by the Muslim league of undivided India. Also the party is betraying its own pre-partition stand, taken under Mahatma Gandhi, of opposing partition based on religion.
Besides, the idea that religious majorities or minorities need separate states or treatment is the seed that leads to the vivisection of nations, as history underlines. Kashmir is part of India and its religious composition has nothing to do with that, as India, unlike Pakistan, is by its Constitution a secular country where all religions or other denominations have equal access to every fundamental right.
What is to be discussed with Pakistan is its withdrawal from part of the original State of J&K which it holds illegally and of the part it has ceded to China. Instead of clarifying this issue, New Delhi keeps on justifying its kid-glove attitude to successive Pakistani Governments, pleading that Islamabad needs to be helped out against its own military and religious militancy.
This is a basically false stand. Even a cursory reading of recent books on Pakistan written by its former diplomats like Husain Haqqani (Pakistan between the Military and the Mullah, and the latest Magnificent Delusions) or journalists like Irfan Husain (Fatal Faultlines, for instance) lay out bare the deep ties that Pakistan as a state has with the terrorism based on Islamic orthodoxy and delusions about revival of the Umma/Caliphate and the justification that the Military derives from that mass delusion.
If the civil society and its elected Government in Pakistan today face destablisation attempts from the military and the mullah-sponsored terrorism, that is the price it pays for its initial support when Islamabad had planned the ‘thousand cuts’ policy against India. In fact, the possibility of Pakistan’s destruction at the hands of fundamentalists has its origins in the divisive ideology responsible for the theocratic state’s birth.
Mr Khurshid should have known that if New Delhi wanted it, it could have prevented Geelani and company from meeting Mr nawaz Sharif’s aide in New Delhi. He has to explain why it was not done, instead of merely decrying the meeting itself several days later. The separatists want meetings that give them a certain legitimacy among a section of Kashmiris . In such a situation, Geelani and the Congress’s penchant for Article 370, can only bring them on the same page to keep the pot boiling.