Window of opportunity is wide open in Kashmir

Arun Joshi

A window of opportunity is wide open in Kashmir and the  occasional  smoke screens have not closed it. That’s   becoming increasingly clear. All the fears that  Kashmir would shut down and there would be massive violence  over the hanging of 1993 Mumbai blasts convict Yakub Memon remained in the realm of thinking  only.  There were sleepless nights, but the people behaved  in a mature fashion. They debated the issue and felt bad, but did not allow themselves to be used as a tool for violence on streets.

View it in the backdrop of the hanging of  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto  in  April 1979 and the   death of  Pakistan’s military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in a  plane crash  in August 1988  when violence swept across the Valley. There were waves of arson  in  protest against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging and many dwellings of Jamait-i-Islami activists were burnt down.  Seventeen people had died and many others were wounded  while protesting against the death of Zia-ul-Haq while not a single person had died in Pakistan.

Indeed  a debate will go on  in Kashmir whether Memon’s hanging was a miscarriage of justice or justice, but the fact is that Kashmir has shown a great sense  of maturity that academic debates, howsoever  vibrant, should not be allowed to be converted into arson  and violence.  A religious angle has been added to the debate, but that’s  where it stands. It has its dangerous portents, but  Kashmir has seen the limits to which the  things can go. They have their own anger over the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru  in February 2013. That’s still there.

For Kashmir,  the understanding of what others are doing for them has become clearer. It has been especially  so  after the   meeting of  Prime Minister Narendra Modi  with his Pakistani counterpart  Nawaz  Sharif in Ufa, Russia, on July 10, in which  for the first time Kashmir  did not  find any mention nor  there was any discussion on that. Pakistan  might have tried to  demonstrate that  Kashmir was discussed and that there would be no talks with India without the  “core issue” of  Kashmir, but the prescient people  of the Valley have seen through volte face of  Pakistan.  India has stood its ground and has not reacted to all this because New Delhi wants to keep its  commitment to the dialogue alive.

The upshot is that  Kashmir has understood where Pakistan stands and what India is.  A hope is  still alive among Kashmiris. It is  for the Indian nation to translate this hope into a reality. There are so many problems and so many issues which cannot be addressed all at once, but some issues can be picked up  one by one and addressed  in a phased manner. The people are impatient, but the  real test of the governance is to keep the hope alive  and take everyone along  on the path of development, transparency and accountability.

An underlined  and collective responsibility  is also  to ensure  that there is no human rights violation in Kashmir from the state forces. In the past  25 years, Kashmir has become a template of human rights abuses  from both sides — the state forces and militants.  A  2006 Human Rights Watch report, “Everyone  Lives in Fear:  Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir”, documented the abuses, including custodial killings   by  the security forces and  unspeakable atrocities by militants,  armed, aided and abetted by Pakistan.

The people of Kashmir have been caught in such a situation that  this year — 2015 — they are recalling all the human rights abuses that took place in the state in the past quarter century. The calendar year for the start  of armed militancy in Kashmir is pegged at 1990. The people  don’t  want to see any human rights abuses from either side. They want to step into the future, not live  in the past.

Narendra Modi government has to honour the mandate that the people of the  state had given to his party  BJP and the PDP.  Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed  had displayed his  conviction in embracing the  mandate  delivered by the people of Jammu. So far, the things are going the way those  should have been — it’s only five months that the PDP-BJP government is in place — but there is an urgent  need to end  polarisation  and radicalism.  For that  both Modi and Mufti have  to  open wide the window of opportunity in  the  state. This is a moment which should be seized.