Single Lane to Nowhere

It may be simply an illusion created by the media but the impression is gaining ground both in Delhi and Srinagar that the government is preparing to enter into dialogue with only the Hizbul Mujahideen. If this is indeed so, it would exceed the wildest expectations of both the Hizbul and Pakistan, for it will concede that the Hizbul, not the patient and long-suffering jklf, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq or Shabir Shah of the Peoples' Democratic Front, are the real representatives of the people of Kashmir. This will marginalise the defenders of Kashmiriyat, the only people Delhi can do business with, give the lie to everything analysts and the government have been claiming over the past 10 years about the nature of the struggle and make Delhi's position untenable both in its talks in Kashmir and with the international community.

The marginalisation of the jklf, despite its being without doubt the most respected of the militant organisations in the Valley, is nothing new. What is incomprehensible is the way no one in the home ministry or pmo seems to have understood that talking only to the pro-Pakistan chairman of the Hurriyat, Abdul Ghani Bhat, backed by the Hizbul, and responding only to the latter's publicly-stated demands and threats as Delhi has already done twice in the past week, will destroy India's entire 10-year-old case on Kashmir. For one, since the Hizbul were doing all the fighting till a few days ago (barring of course, the foreign militants) it will amount to an endorsement of what Pakistan has been claiming all along, that the struggle in Kashmir was not a proxy war but a domestic uprising against India with the aim of secession and that Pakistan, or for that matter the jehadis, have only been playing a supporting role. Second, and of more immediate relevance, it will make utter nonsense of the Indian refusal to talk to Pakistan until it stops cross-border terrorism. What terrorism? Haven't you conceded that it is the Hizbul that is doing the fighting? How can we (Pakistan) stop it from recruiting a few foreign sympathisers to bolster its firepower?

India will therefore go into any dialogue with the Hizbul in much the same condition as the soldiers who fought and died in Kargil - with no line of retreat if the talks fail. And talks that are held with the Hizbul alone cannot but fail. For, it does not require a crystal ball to divine that the Hizbul's bottomline will be to separate Kashmir from Jammu and Ladakh (remember Ali Shah Geelani's first statement after coming out of jail 10 weeks ago?), rejoin the two parts of Kashmir in an international, UN-supervised protectorate and hold a referendum in five years offering at best a three-way choice of India, Pakistan or independence. This is almost certainly why the Hizbul has insisted on no preconditions to the talks. Once this 'entirely reasonable' proposal is on the table in formal talks and becomes known to the US and the European Union, India will be crushed under the pressure to agree. When the proxy war in Kashmir starts again, India, not Pakistan, will be completely isolated.

There is a historic blunder in the offing. This is to treat the hardest-line opponents in an insurgency as the ones one has to strike a deal with and spurn all the rest no matter what their standing with their people. This can lead to peace when there is a single, united insurgent command as was the case in Mizoram but leads to disaster when the insurgents are divided and competing with each other, even without the looming shadow of a foreign power behind one of them.

The first time this happened was in Punjab in 1987, when then home minister Buta Singh sabotaged an agreement hammered out by then head priest of the Akal Takht Darshan Singh Ragi and the Jain sage Acharya Sushil Muni with the heads of all major militant groups in Punjab. Buta did this because a Darshan-brokered peace would have strengthened the Akalis in Punjab and weakened the faction of the militants under a hardliner nephew of Bhindranwale, Jasbir Singh Rode, with whom he had developed secret links. He did this again after operation Black Thunder in May 1988, which destroyed the militant network built up by the first Panthic committee. Immediately after the operation, he swooped on the Akali leaders who had issued an innocuous statement in Amritsar, put them in jail and actually began talks with Rode, which ultimately led nowhere. But this gave the Khalistanis and Pakistan time to set up a new network under a second Panthic committee. That led to five more bloody years in which 63 per cent of the 10,000 civilians killed were innocent Sikh villagers. The rest were Hindus, political cadres of the Akalis, Congress and the Left, and policemen's families.

The second time a government committed the same mistake was when V.P. Singh tried to resolve the dispute over the shifting of the Babri Masjid by talking only to the diehards at the far ends of the communal spectrum - the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas - and ignored the hundreds of sensible middle-of-the-road Hindu and Muslim organisations, intellectuals and public figures who daily filled the letters columns of newspapers with sensible suggestions on resolving the conflict. As both groups had their own political agendas, 18 meetings with them led precisely nowhere. Though V.P. tried to cobble together a centrist consensus among moderate elements like noted sage and scholar Ali Mian and the Shankaracharya of Kancheepuram, it was the end of September, a month before the VHP's October 30 deadline for pulling down the mosque. By then, the BJP had formally announced its support for 'moving' the temple and the die was cast. The result was 2,000 Muslim civilians killed over the next three years, 13 bomb blasts in Mumbai that took nearly a thousand (mostly Hindu) lives and a permanently alienated Muslim middle-class not too unlike the middle-class of the pre-Partition days.