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| No third party meddle in J&K | | | Inder Malhotra
IF there has been a great deal of anxiety over, and hostile comment on, the United States President-elect Barack Obama’s remarks that presage yet another American effort to mediate between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue — he has even sounded former President Bill Clinton to be a special envoy for this purpose — the reason is not far to seek. All similar American efforts in the past, more under Democratic Presidents than Republican, have done more harm than good. Evidently, nations and individuals learn nothing from history.
The arrivals and departures of successive mediators or special representatives of the UN during the years when the matter was on the anvil of the world body were in a different category. In any case, in the late 50s, Gunnar Jarring, the last of them, had recorded that circumstances having changed radically, the UN resolutions on India and Pakistan had become inoperable. Nor has either the Security Council or the General Assembly of the UN done anything about the Kashmir question despite some attempts to rake it up at Turtle Bay.
America’s unilateral projects to "solve" the Kashmir issue by "butting together" Indian and Pakistani heads have been class apart. Ironically, these were initiated not by a US president but by the Democratic presidential aspirant who lost to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Adlai Stevenson. He arrived in Srinagar, ostensibly for a houseboat holiday, but used much of his time to "encourage" Sheikh Adullah, then "prime minister" of Jammu and Kashmir, to work for an independent Kashmir, assuring him of the US support. Some sources have it that in this mission, Stevenson was helped not so much by the then US ambassador to this country, Loy Henderson, as by his wife. The result of these exertions was the dismissal and detention of the Sheikh in August 1953.
Thereafter, there was a lull in the apparently irresistible American impulse for mediation. Until the traumatic border war with China in high Himalayas in 1962 when President Kennedy, together with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain, promised India military aid and political support. But there was a condition: that Pakistan’s concerns must be addressed, and the Kashmir question resolved. Hardly had the Chinese announced a unilateral ceasefire and withdrawal in stages when Averell Harriman, assistant secretary in the US state department, and Duncan Sandys, British secretary for Commonwealth relations, landed in the subcontinent and started shuttling between New Delhi and Rawalpindi (Islamabad was still under construction).
While Harriman was an accomplished and skilful diplomat, Sandys was something of a blunderbuss. He caused much annoyance to the Indian government and public by his bland suggestion that India could give away large parts of Ladakh "because these are of no value". In the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, the US ambassador to India then, "Sandys is the man best calculated to shove Nehru into his shell. There could be a better messenger". Even after agreeing to the famous but totally fruitless Swaran Singh-Z.A. Bhutto talks, Nehru told a press conference, "I will not be pushed around by Sandys or anyone else".
After the collapse of the Singh-Bhutto talkathon, the US did not give up. John F. Kennedy offered the services of Eugene Black, a former president of the World Bank, as a mediator. This too flopped because there could be no agreement whatever on Black’s exact role. "What looked like a vigorous initiative became a disastrous bungle," recorded Galbraith in Ambassador’s Journal.
What followed hasn’t been recorded in this book but Galbraith told me in Boston in 1988 that President Kennedy had invited him to the White House for two weeks during which he had, among other things, persuaded JFK to stop bothering about mediation over Kashmir. "The President," Galbraith added, "was in his bath tub, opening or closing faucets with his toes, and discussing high policy." Philip Talbott, then assistant secretary, came on a visit to Delhi in August 1963 and volunteered to the media the information that he had brought no proposals about Kashmir.
Against this backdrop, Mr Obama’s enthusiasm for solving the Kashmir issue through Mr Clinton’s mediation in the expectation that, having given Pakistan satisfaction over Kashmir, he could persuade it to focus on its "real problem on the Afghan border" is manifestly ill-conceived. He obviously does not know the reality of India-Pakistan relation or even the history of the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis. The Taliban, now resurgent, are the creation of the CIA, Saudi Arabia and the ISI, with full backing of Benazir Bhutto, then Prime Minister, and Mr Clinton’s highly favoured points-person for South Asia, Robin Raphael, who had also meddled in Kashmir by helping the formation of Hurriyat.
Someone from among his advisors should have told Mr Obama that the mediation proposal would never be accepted by India. Mr Clinton knows, even if the President-elect doesn’t, that in 1999 when Mr Clinton had offered to mediate in the Kargil War, the then Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had courteously declined.
Possibly, before his inauguration, Mr Obama would see the light. But the worst feature of his present stance is that it could not have been more ill timed. The sensitive state of Jammu and Kashmir is on the verge of crucial state Assembly elections. Hurriyat and other secessionists, already hell-bent on boycotting the poll, would be strengthened in their resolve. The Pakistan Army would also draw its own conclusions. Some well-meaning Indians, including Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, are under the illusion that "facilitation" of a settlement of the Kashmir issue by America would bring Indians closer to Pakistan’s largely secular middle class. They forget that the most secular of all Pakistanis, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was the author of Partition and had later authorised the October 1947 invasion of Kashmir.
As foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee has said, the best way to solve all problems between India and Pakistan is the bilateral peace process that was interrupted only because of Pakistan’s internal problems last year. Even so, the Line of Control has already started turning into the Line of Commerce. This bilateral process should be allowed to continue and indeed pursued with greater vigour than before. There is no room in it for any third party interference. |
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