The Great Game: Goalless in Extra Time

Now that the government has extended the ceasefire in Kashmir for a full three months, one can only wonder why the decision was so difficult. If Pakistan's jehadis spared no effort to sabotage it from the moment it was announced, it must have been hurting them. So why were we debating whether or not to prolong it? The answer is to be found in the confusion that prevails in New Delhi. Put simply, hardly a single decision-maker has walked the streets of Srinagar as an ordinary man for 12 years. All information is therefore second-hand. Building hypotheses concerning Kashmiri aims and motivations has therefore become a hazardous job for all concerned.

Two arguments were put forward to justify ending the ceasefire; that since Pakistan has not responded to the ceasefire, there is no point in continuing with it; that it had allowed the jehadis to entrench themselves and terrorise and kill anti-Pakistani civilian leaders. It was the first argument that reflected the general ignorance about Kashmir.

The purpose of the ceasefire was not to inveigle Pakistan into coming to the conference table but to pave the way for a discussion between New Delhi and the Kashmiri people's representatives. The Kashmiri response to the Hizbul Mujahideen's unilateral ceasefire on July 24 last year had been so overwhelming that it turned the Hizb's leaders into local celebrities and brought the Kashmiri wing of the Hizb closer to the jklf and others who championed self-determination than anyone had dreamed possible even a year earlier. Although Musharraf had apparently approved of the Hizb's offer, the Kashmiri response to the ceasefire evidently came as a rude shock to the Pakistan establishment. It therefore more or less forced Syed Salahuddin, the Hizb leader in Islamabad, to break it off within 15 days.

But New Delhi did not forget the lessons of July. As soon as winter settled into the Valley, Atal Behari Vajpayee announced another ceasefire. The response from the Valley was everything he could have hoped for and this time both Prof Abdul Ghani Bhat and Sheikh Abdul Aziz, two of the Hurriyat's executive council who had held reservations about the Hizb initiative, welcomed the ceasefire. This left the former head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Ali Shah Geelani, isolated.

It was the Hurriyat that decided to go to Pakistan to take up the consolidation of the ceasefire, in order to give peace a chance. In this it was strongly supported by the Hizbul Mujahideen in Kashmir and, with some reservations, by Salahuddin in Pakistan. In an interview given to the Stimson Center of Washington, the Kashmir chief of the Hizb, Abdul Majid Dar, went so far as to say that Pakistan had the capacity to curb the jehadis if it wanted to, and that it should do so in the interests of peace.

This put Pakistan in a quandary. On the one hand, it wanted to bring the Hurriyat to Islamabad to establish personal contact with the leaders and get their backing, if possible, to a peace plan that it would find acceptable. On the other, it was mortally afraid that the Hurriyat would opt for a 'Kashmiriyat' solution that it simply could not accept. If that happened, the Hurriyat visit would backfire and the fiasco would play into the jehadis' hands. If the Hurriyat was to come to Islamabad, it had to be a Hurriyat it could control, or if the worst came to the worst, divide and render harmless.That is where Geelani became invaluable to Islamabad.

Geelani collected a handful of minor militant leaders and divided the Hurriyat by welcoming the jehadis as saviours and asserting Kashmir was a religious, not a political, dispute. He collected all the pro-Pakistani remnants and organised demonstrations outside the Hurriyat office, going so far as to manhandle Lone, Yasin Malik and Mirwaiz Umer Farooq. At the same time, on an uglier level, Lone and even Bhat received threatening phone calls to toe Geelani's line. On January 9, a new outfit called the Mujahideen-e-Haq, consisting of a handful of heavily indoctrinated Kashmiri youth, tried to assassinate Shahid-ul-Islam, a senior leader of the Hurriyat belonging to the Mirwaiz's party. These threats had their effect. Bhat included Geelani in the delegation and New Delhi began to dither. With Geelani in the delegation, what the Hurriyat might or might not end up by saying while in Pakistan became unpredictable.

As New Delhi dithered, the Kashmiri moderates' position deteriorated. With their opposition to Pakistan now fully exposed, with them being daily accused by the Geelani faction of having sold out to New Delhi, India began to lose the advantage Vajpayee's ceasefire had secured for it. In Kashmir, people became increasingly perplexed by the delay. The key question everyone was asking was not why Delhi was not issuing passports to the Hurriyat to visit Pakistan but why was it not talking officially to the Hurriyat.

The main reason for New Delhi's silence was a bunker-to-bunker struggle by Farooq Abdullah and the National Conference to cast doubt on the Hurriyat's credentials to speak for the Kashmiris. After his 1996 election victory, Abdullah had gratuitously thrown away the mantle of Kashmiriyat. His first mistake had been to renege on his promise to renegotiate Kashmir's relationship with India. Politically, all this needed was to take up the two clauses on which the Sheikh had failed to move Mrs Gandhi in 1975—the repeal of Article 356's extension to Kashmir and the choice of Sadr-e-Riyasat by the Kashmir assembly. But instead, Abdullah set up an elaborate commission that frittered time, and his goodwill, away.

His second mistake was to join the UF and then nda coalitions. This made him a part of New Delhi and therefore of the oppressor. But his third and biggest mistake was to create the Special Operations Group (sog) of the Kashmir police to conduct anti-terrorist operations. The sog was successful but it leaned heavily towards coercion. This gave a large number of bad eggs, who had perforce been recruited into it, a chance to indulge in unlimited extortion for private gain. The modus operandi was to descend upon a former militant's house claiming that another captured militant had incriminated him. He was then told to produce an unspecified number of hidden weapons or, failing that, to pay a large sum of money. Most of the victims complied but those who did not or could not often ended up dead. The toll of custodial deaths mounted and with it, tension, fear and finally anger returned to the Valley once more. In peoples' eyes, Abdullah and the National Conference turned from being the inheritors of Kashmiriyat, into the inheritors of New Delhi's earlier reign of terror.

By mid-1998, Abdullah was visibly losing ground but a revival of the political process was under way.All of the formerly militant tanzeems were attempting to hold political meetings. They had not accepted being part of India but there was a studied ambivalence about their utterances that suggested that in the right circumstances, they would return to democratic politics. But the process was not allowed to get under way. The meetings were regularly stopped by the Kashmir police on one or other flimsy ground. Worst of all, in sharp contrast to Nagaland and Mizoram decades earlier, although 31,000 militants had given up the armed struggle, none was granted amnesty. They therefore remained prey of the sog.

When New Delhi finally released the Hurriyat leaders in May 2000 and announced that it was prepared to hold talks with them, Abdullah began a last-ditch attempt to sabotage the talks that has so far succeeded. He first tabled the Autonomy Bill, which had been gathering dust for two years, in an effort to upstage the Hurriyat. The cabinet repulsed his effort but at the cost of delaying talks with the Hurriyat and generating considerable misunderstanding in Kashmir and abroad.

The second effort was to sabotage the meeting of the home ministry with the Hizbul Mujahideen on August 3. Invited to a secret meeting, the Hizb found a hundred journalists and TV crews present. Enquiries revealed that the office of the igp, Kashmir, had called them on pagers and mobiles at 12 noon to tell them that there would be a press conference at the Nehru guest house. This could have been an excess of zeal on the part of the police but the use of pagers and mobiles to announce a press conference that was at least four hours away, when a hand-delivered letter would have done, smacked of an ulterior purpose. As it happened, that was the 'betrayal' that Salahuddin cited to break off the ceasefire.

The third attempt was to highlight through the national dailies the damage that the ceasefire was doing to the security forces' capacity to fight the jehadis every time the question of renewing the ceasefire arose. The reports tended, with rare exceptions, to be one-sided. They highlighted that the number of civilians killed had risen from 145 to 182 during the first 58 days of the ceasefire but omitted any mention of the fact that the total number of killings had fallen from 575 to 348; that the number of deaths among the security forces had dropped from 120 to 62; and, best of all, that the number of militants and civilians killed in crossfires fell five-fold from 310 to 64. This is what had made the ceasefire popular.

In January, as the jehadis went into a frenzy of civilian killing, the toll of custodial deaths at the hands of the Kashmir police also mounted. And a frightening new rationale was developed for custodial killings: after the death of Jaleel Ahmad Shah at Haigam, an official spokesman for the Kashmir police said that Shah had been "killed in a retaliatory action".

Today, the immediate danger to the ceasefire has passed. But Abdullah has continued his struggle to prevent talks and a confused New Delhi has continued to dither. Each passing day without talks undermines the Hurriyat and increases the risk to the lives of its leaders. The danger will pass the instant Vajpayee starts talking to them, because no one in Kashmir will believe that India would eliminate precisely the people whom it is talking to. Vajpayee needs to understand that and to accept that he might hold their very lives in his hands.