WASHINGTONS: In a scathing indictment of both India and Pakistan for the simmering imbroglio in Kashmir, a noted South Asian expert has ‘accused both countries of being unwilling to resolve the crisis hey helped create.
Instead, according to Paula R Newberg, a senior associate at the ‘Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prestigious think tank here, “both countries have allowed ‘war to become the dominant meta Phor for the subcontinent’s politics.”
Ina 75 page study titled “Double Betrayal: Repression and Insurgency in Kashmir,” Newberg says that India, “long a champion of its citizens’ rights,” has “mocked its own democratic values in this war,” where Kashmiri militants have been locked in a struggle since 1989 with hundreds of thousands of Indian security forces deployed in the valley.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s “support for Kashmir insurgents, founded on its geostrategic self-interest more than disconcert for Kashmiris,” Newberg argues, “has provided India additional justification for counterinsurgency.” ‘Consequently, she writes that ‘Kashmir already a tinderbox for Indo-Pakistani relations, has become a symptom of the subcontinent’s poisonous politics and possibly the source of future instabilities.”
She says that both New Delhi and Islamabad also believe that time is on their side, adding that India is of the opinion that “it can wear down the insurgency and craft its relationship to Srinagar on its own terms,” Pakistan, by the same token, she says, thinks that “keeping Indian troops ‘occupied at tremendous costs weakens India beyond repair.” In this context, she notes that ironically, “Kashmiris sensitive to betrayals by India and Pakistan, and cognizant of the world’s inattention as they live through the violence of insurgency and repression believe that time has passed them by.”
Newberg in her study takes Delhi to task, saying that in recent years, ‘the Indian government has rationalized its Kashmir policies under the rubric of political development,” She charges that “it locates the source of discontent in Kashmir’s sense of relative economic deprivation, and then offers the prospect of future Kashmiri state elections as a carrot to defuse the force of its security stick.” She notes that New Delhi has “combined these proposals with intermittent though as yet unrealized, offers of economic assistance, “but that to date no one in Kashmir has been willing to participate in these plans, a which have required that decisions about autonomy be postponed until insurgency ends.” Thus, the fighting rages on, and with each instance of human rights abuse, she says, “Kashmir’s problems with India, and hence with Pakistan, increase.” The expert states that in the process, “the original issue of self-determination has been indelibly colored and even redefined by the way that war has been pursued.”
Elaborating, she writes that ‘a war about political sovereignty has be: ‘come a battle for individual dignity,” Human rights abuse, insurgency and counter insurgency “are now intertwined,” she says, and “cumulatively, the abuse of nights has become as significant as the problem of self-determination, and more immediate.”
At the outset of her study, Newberg makes no bones about her interpretation of Kashmir’s insurgency, which she declares is “about the right of Kashmiris to achieve self-determination, about the freedom to speak and the right to be heard.” Placing special emphasis on human rights violations, she states that the rights abuses “by security forces does not and cannot justify the violence of insurgency, ‘any more than insurgency justifies the brutality of security forces.”
She notes that Kashmiri civilians have “urgently protested the terror Unleashed on’ lies ‘by insurgents ‘and security forces alike,” but acknowledges that “despite the enormous toll that insurgency has taken on their communities, however, their port for it has not ended.”
Thus, Newberg’s contention squares with that of the Clinton Administration, particularly that of Robin Raphel, Assistant Secretary of Sate for South ‘Asian Affairs, that the insurgency is “homegrown and indigenous” and not wholly Pakistan sponsored as New Delhi continues to allege.
Newberg writes that even though to outsiders it might seem that such a conflict could not continue indefinitely, it not only has, but it could, She says that surrounded by some of the world’s highest mountain peaks, important only to the powers that seek to own it, Kashmir at war is a private purgatory.
In her study she talks about the general apathy of the United Nations, charging that although the world body was seized with the Kashmir problem almost from the beginning, it pays Kashmir only verbal heed; its monitors patrol the line that partitions Kashmir, but the U.N. and its member states do little else.”
She ridicules Islamabad’s attempts to revive world attention, saying that its strategy, “of tying its professed concern for human rights in Kashmir to the rest of its angry agenda with India,” had backfired to the extent that it has been self-defeating.
Furthermore, she argues that Pakistan’s modus operandi has been for the Kashmiris counterproductive, to the extent that it has envisaged the Indian government to “limit both humanitarian relict and human rights investigations” to the extent that New Delhi “wages war with impunity.” New Delhi, according to Newberg, has worried since the beginning that external interest would expand the scope of the conflict and legitimize new actors in its Management.” But she takes the view that” outside assistance from human rights groups and humanitarian agencies might have helped contain the carnage,” and also that allowing these groups to work in Kashmir“ might have transformed the scale of war into something more manageable for Kashmiri civilians, and perhaps made it easier for them to contribute to a political settlement.” Newberg’s prognosis for a resolution of the conflict is pessimistic. While acknowledging that because of war, “Kashmiris have begun to pay more attention to the world they ignored for so long,” she says, “Their ‘expectations arc uncertain and conditioned by the constant fact that they themselves are ignored by the world they are trying to join.” Consequently, she notes the Kashmiri cognizance that “the war can end only if they, with Indians and Pakistanis, can establish common goals for themselves and the region. But she predicts that “this elusive task becomes increasingly difficult as time passes, repression continues, policies harden and more people die.” Courtesy: IA/81895.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 25, 1995
