After a five-month lull, a fresh wind is filling the sails of the Kashmir peace process. The prime minister's formal invitation to the Hurriyat to meet him in Delhi ends the suspense. A meeting is now certain to take place next week and will be a valuable prelude to Manmohan Singh's mid-September talks with President Musharraf in New York.
But will it achieve anything? The history of the Hurriyat's relations with the Centre has been one of consistent non-communication—from their refusal to talk to the NDA interlocutor K.C. Pant, to their inexplicable failure to meet Manmohan Singh during their visit to Delhi in January for talks with Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Why should anything be different today?
The short answer is—the dialogue between Pakistan and India has reached a point where both countries recognise that a Kashmiri ethno-nationalist input is essential to take it forward. Both have conceded—Musharraf explicitly and Manmohan Singh implicitly—that the Hurriyat is the most capable of providing it.
Even considering the possibility that the moderate faction under the Mirwaiz most truly represents Kashmiri sentiment has not been easy for either country. In Musharraf's case, it has meant a volte face on policies consciously adopted less than two years ago. In September 2003, Pakistan TV announced it no longer recognised the Moulvi Abbas Ansari/Mirwaiz faction as the genuine Hurriyat and considered Syed Ali Shah Geelani the real leader of the Kashmiri separatist movement. The ISI followed it up with threatening phone calls to the leaders of each of the Hurriyat's 23 constituent organisations, urging them to make their way to Geelani's residence with the utmost of despatch.
From that day onwards, the Hurriyat found itself fighting a defensive battle against a well-funded Geelani onslaught, backed by the ISI, to paint them as Indian stooges in public and threaten their lives in private. When Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, who had replaced Moulvi Abbas Ansari as chairman of the Hurriyat, insisted on going ahead with his meeting with deputy prime minister L.K. Advani a second time, early in 2004, unidentified elements punished him by killing his gentle, apolitical, uncle and burning his 100-year-old school to the ground.
The change in Musharraf's perceptions began after he met the Mirwaiz last year in Amsterdam and was completed during his visit last March to Delhi. Musharraf had already been briefed by Aziz about the latter's meetings with various Hurriyat leaders. Over almost five hours of meetings with various Kashmiri factions, Musharraf came to the conclusion that Geelani represented the same narrow, bigoted ideas as Qazi Husain Ahmed of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, and was even less representative of mainstream Kashmiri Muslim opinion than the Jamaat. It speaks volumes for his clear-sightedness and intellectual honesty that he admitted he had been misled about Kashmir by his advisors in the ISI and the foreign office.
Manmohan too has had to overcome several obstacles before recognising the Hurriyat's ability to be an interlocutor between India and Pakistan. To begin with, Kashmir has its own recognised political parties, which collectively command the loyalty of at least a quarter of the population in the Valley. These have legitimately questioned the claims of a formation that has never fought an election to represent the people of even the Valley, let alone the whole of Kashmir. Secondly, the 'separatists' have themselves been hopelessly split. Not only has Geelani questioned the very raison d'etre of the moderate faction, but even leaders like Yasin Malik and Shabir Shah, whose perceptions are, at worst, marginally different from those of the official Hurriyat, have belittled it by withholding their support.
Every Indian prime minister has faced a coalition of doubters stretching from the home ministry in Delhi to the state administration and sundry separatists in Kashmir. While this has not prevented them from periodically expressing their desire to meet the Hurriyat, the offer has always been hedged with conditions that have made it unacceptable to the latter.
This tacit coalition between the ISI in one country and hardliners in the other came to an end when nearly all Kashmiri separatist leaders crossed the Line of Control to visit PoK and Islamabad in June. During his meetings with them in Islamabad, Musharraf made it clear in the presence of his generals that he was prepared to work only with the Mirwaiz and no longer considered Geelani to be a representative of Kashmiri opinion. The generals got the message. Musharraf's forthrightness lifted the threat of death that had hung over the Hurriyat leaders and gave them the confidence to meet the Indian prime minister that they had previously lacked.
In Delhi too, Manmohan Singh had been quietly making it clear through backchannel contacts that he does not entirely share the home ministry's low regard for the Hurriyat. Musharraf's change of strategy and the confidence it gave to the Hurriyat opened the road to next week's talks.
It would be naive to expect any dramatic breakthrough. The PM and Hurriyat still have to feel each other out. But Mirwaiz and his colleagues have made no secret of the fact that they wholeheartedly endorse the framework for a dialogue on Kashmir that was forged by Musharraf andManmohan Singh in Delhi, and believe the way ahead lies in making the LoC progressively less relevant. This is a solid platform to build upon.