In at least one regard does India behave like China: our attitude to J&K mirrors China’s towards Tibet (fortunately for us, there’s no Kashmiri Dalai Lama). Honest newspaper reporting is rare; writing anything that questions the government line is considered treasonous; analyses are nothing more than chest-thumping manifestoes or home ministry plants; and even well-intentioned journalists tend to look through the foreign office policy prism rather than take into account the situation on the ground. This is also true for much of the political and historical literature on Kashmir. For a long time, several books by Western “academics” were just exercises in Pakistani polemic. The Indian books were no better: even respected authors like M J Akbar and Ajit Bhattacharjea could not bring themselves to question the essential premise of India’s legitimacy in Kashmir.
Thankfully, things have changed for the better. Abroad, American think-tanks have devoted considerable time to careful research on Kashmir. And in India, ever since the insurgency took hold in the Valley in 1989, authors have been making the Kashmiri point of view increasingly central to their study. And what does that point of view say? In December 1963, the holy relic called the moi-e-muqqadas, said to be a strand of the Prophet Mohd’s hair, went missing from Kashmir’s most politically important mosque, the Hazratbal shrine. Kashmir erupted in violent protests and even more violent repression. A young American diplomat was sent to the Valley to report to the US State Department on the disturbances. He wrote: “The most fundamental cause for this acute dissatisfaction is the Kashmiri Muslims’ feeling of separateness. They do not consider themselves Indians.” Obviously, Kashmiri feelings towards India have not changed much.
The diplomat who wrote this was Howard B Schaffer, the author of the newly published The Limits of Influence: America’s Role in Kashmir (Penguin/Viking, 201 pages, Rs 499). Though a 36-year veteran of the US Foreign Service and having served extensive stints in South Asia, some readers may better recognise him as the husband of Ambassador Teresita C Schaffer. Now deputy director of the diplomacy institute at Georgetown University, Schaffer obviously wrote this book for US President Barack Obama who during his campaign promised to get pro-active on Kashmir. Funnily, there has not been any comprehensive study of America’s “involvement and non-involvement” in Kashmir; Dennis Kux’s India and the US: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991 has a broader canvas. So it is a timely book that fills a void.
Just as importantly, though the book is carefully and comprehensively researched from State Department and White House papers, Schaffer at the outset acknowledges his debt to Farooq Kathwari, the founder of the Kashmir Study Group (and CEO of American furniture giant Ethan Allen). The KSG has been a driver behind the more realistic proposals to sort out the Kashmir dispute. Some of those found their way into former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s out-of-the-box suggestions, made in 2006, to resolve the dispute. It is now widely acknowledged in official India that Musharraf’s 2006 initiatives, in which he broke from Pakistani precedent (not easy in a country ruled by the Army) by implicitly accepting the permanence of the Line of Control, were the best chance India had of settling the matter (other than the 1971 military victory). It is not certain if the opportunity will repeat itself in the near future.
Allow me to state here that even if India is in a strong political position, the fact of the matter is that Kashmir is a disputed territory, and it has been since its ruler Maharaja Hari Singh acceded to India on October 26, 1947. The resolutions against India at the United Nations Security Council are a huge stumbling block to our ever holding one of the permanent SC seats. It is morally repugnant to hold the Kashmiri Muslims against their will. And Kashmir provides a powerful recruiting and motivational tool to Islamists.
Even if you disagree with this, and many Indians do, Schaffer’s book is an interesting and engrossing study into how the US has tried to sort out the Kashmir dispute. Not surprisingly, since the Americans pride themselves on being problem-solvers with their can-do attitude, Kashmir has been a source of exasperation for them, mainly because of India’s China-like intransigence. Schaffer sees America’s Kashmir history in three phases: (i) Deep engagement to bring about a settlement, 1948-63; (ii) Diplomatic quiescence, 1964-89; and (iii) Crisis management, 1990-now. Basically, the Americans have always seen South Asia as a strategically key region, and saw the Kashmir dispute as a window of opportunity for the Soviet Union to increase its influence in the region and the Indian Ocean. Peaking with the Kennedy administration (which saw an opportunity after China defeated India in 1962), the US has tried to nudge India and Pakistan to sort Kashmir out. When Kennedy failed, official US attitude, according to Schaffer, became “a plague on both your houses”.
The Americans learnt some lessons: that India would never accept any solution that was seen to be “made in America”; that India as the status quo power would benefit from the dispute being dragged out over time; and that if any arm-twisting had to be done, it had to be done in complete silence. These lessons came in handy when the insurgency broke out; and the US decided that it could no longer ignore Kashmir after two events — the 1998 nuclear tests and 9/11. As Schaffer points out, the US has to focus not on the content of negotiations, but on the process of negotiations. He concludes that any settlement that Washington promotes should include: (i) the LoC (or something close) as a permanent border; (ii) letting the border be porous for people and goods; and (iii) greater self-government for Kashmiris on both sides of the LoC.
Tantalisingly, Schaffer points out that after former Prime Minister A B Vajpayee’s 2003 “hand of friendship”, it took American diplomacy to get Musharraf to respond (which got the ball rolling and eventually led to 2006’s proposals). The narrowing of positions between India and Pakistan happened because of gentle US nudging (invisible to the public) and back-channel talks (which makes you wonder what external affairs minister S M Krishna’s derision of back-channel talks really means). Now that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stuck the hand of friendship back out again, one wonders if “invisible” US diplomacy, fired by Obama’s zeal for a solution, will bring us another 2006-like opportunity. By some people’s reckoning, Manmohan Singh has an 18-month window in which to seize it. Over to Obama; here’s your chance to earn that Nobel Peace Prize.
editorchief@epmltd.com
About The Author;
Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express' and is based in Chennai