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This is an archive article published on July 1, 1998

Unfreeze this turbulence

In the summer of 1990, on a visit to cover one of the many political upheavals in Pakistan, I ran into a former defence services chief who, ...

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In the summer of 1990, on a visit to cover one of the many political upheavals in Pakistan, I ran into a former defence services chief who, over a cup of green tea, made a candid admission. This was when Benazir Bhutto was exhorting Kashmiris to chop Jagmohan into pieces and the air was thick with rumours of the inevitable fourth war. The former chief wasn’t very excited. "If there is a war, I will offer to go and fight for my country, in any capacity," he said. "But the sooner my countrymen realise that it is not possible to take

Kashmir either by military or by diplomatic means, the better it will be for Pakistan," he said.

Will you say so on the record, I asked.

"Are you crazy?" he asked. "If you ask me officially I will say I am itching to drive to the Valley, if necessary in my own Pajero, and settle scores with your guys for what they are doing there."

Now see this in the light of Jaswant Singh’s plight this week for merely suggesting that if Pakistan offered to make the Line of Control (LoC) theborder, thereby forfeiting the Valley, Ladakh and Jammu in round one of the negotiations India would be willing to talk about it. What is India expected to do even if such a fantasy were to come true? Tell the Pakistanis to go back and return only with their side of Kashmir neatly gift-wrapped as well? And please do not forget Gilgit, Hunza and whatever else remains of the Northern Areas.

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Look at the map of the world today and see how few of the international boundaries are marked with dotted lines or shaded areas, indicating disputed borders. Then fetch a map a couple of decades older and see how far the world has come in resolving territorial disputes. If today one of the very few regions with that dubious, dotted-line privilege is ours there is no point blaming the British nor the history of Partition or pulling out any of the other perennial subcontinental excuses. A total lack of statesmanship, foresight and a dangerous ignorance of larger security issues have bedevilled our region to such an extentthat we could soon be left with the distinction of nursing the last property disputes in the world.

Nothing underlined that fossilised thinking better than the outcry over Jaswant Singh’s veiled, and in fact quite devious, suggestion that India could be willing to even discuss a solution around the Line of Control in Kashmir provided "it is raised by somebody" as "India is not going to raise it". Singh himself was issuing angry denials the same evening and complaining that the interview had been over-interpreted in the TV channel’s Press release, which probably was the case since electronic media giants now seem to measure their success by the kind of headlines they get in print media rather than the size of audiences they attract. In the same spirit Brajesh Mishra, the prime minister’s principal secretary, was on a rival television channel the same evening reading out parliamentary resolutions binding any government to recovering every inch of occupied Kashmir. All this over what, in fact, was no more thanan extremely shrewd articulation of a new, improved Indian position on the Kashmir dispute. Not even a defeated Pakistan at Simla in 1972 was willing to make such a settlement. To expect a nuclear-armed Pakistan to do so now is pure fantasy. Yet, so frozen have the two countries’ positions on Kashmir been over the decades that even such a hypothetical suggestion is considered heresy.

This is no way for a mature, democratic and self-confident society (the adjective "liberal" is being deliberately avoided) to debate its most serious security concerns. All around the world, trading land for security has become an accepted policy. Even the Israelis have done it vis-a-vis Egypt (Sinai), are in the process of doing it on the West Bank and have 67 per cent popular support for giving away the Golan Heights in return for durable peace. Israel has seen sense in doing so after decisively winning two and a half wars. Let us not suggest that India trade land for security. But why must we deny the Pakistanis even thatnotional privilege?

The Pakistanis won’t do so. In fact a Jaswant Singh making a similar suggestion on their side would raise a storm the size of a hundred Hiroshimas. But this plea to accept the reality that "cartographic altering of the South Asian situation cannot go on" is a significant step forward for India where diplomacy has traditionally been overloaded with dogma and short on creativity.

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Listen to Jaswant Singh seriously not merely because he is a thinking politician but also because he is a former soldier. Any military commander would tell you (as several former chiefs told this paper a year ago when Farooq Abdullah suggested making the LoC the international border) that militarily it is nearly impossible to take Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

We can defend our part of Kashmir more than adequately, make some rationalisations by capturing a few posts here and there but completing the "unfinished agenda" of the 1948 military campaign is a different matter altogether. And even if it somehowhappened, are we prepared to accept an addition of a half crore or so Punjabi Muslims to our population? How will it affect the demography of our part of Kashmir? The LoC, quite significantly, is also a kind of ethnic line of division in Kashmir with the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims left on our side and the Mirpuris and the predominantly Punjabi-speakers on the other. Mian Nawaz Sharif, for example, is a Punjabi of Kashmiri extraction.

This is not to say that India should give up its claims across the LoC in a hurry. But these factors must be studied, understood, and exploited to evolve a better informed national consensus. Territorial claims and disputes are but one facet of overall national security. In the last three decades there have been two major "cartographic alterations" in the subcontinent, the dismemberment of Pakistan and then the merger of Sikkim. Both were successfully engineered by us and have worked fully to our advantage.

Post-Sikkim, India has defined its vital national interests in termsof three crucial points: that its nuclear option must remain secure, that its pre-eminent place within the region is not challenged by any outside power and that its frontiers should not shrink any more. On each of these, today there is no great cause for concern. Irredentism is for the romantics and the believers, and who knows the Pakistanis might prove them right by disintegrating as a nation-state in our lifetime. But until then, let’s have the confidence to toss around some creative new thoughts on our neighbourhood problems. Jaswant Singh’s characteristically complex but profound formulation on Kashmir can be a pretty interesting beginning.

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