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| Are we fighting terrorism? | | |
THE External Affairs Minister Mr Pranab Mukherjee, emphatically told the Lok Sabha on November 24 that Chinese territorial pretensions notwithstanding, Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India. But does the Manmohan Singh government regard Jammu and Kashmir an integral part of India in its composite dialogue with Pakistan? Is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir not as serious an offence as terrorism in other parts of India?
New Delhi has conveyed the impression to Pakistan that issues relating to terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir will not figure in the meetings of the much-touted “joint terror mechanism”, whose discussions will be confined to terrorism only in other parts of India. Despite Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad asserting that infiltration across the LoC had doubled in the past year the Indian side did not raise the issue or instances of cross-border terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir during the Foreign Secretary-level talks in New Delhi on November 14-15.
Speaking to political leaders from Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) in Islamabad on November 21, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmoud Kasuri and Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammed Khan said “matters pertaining to Kashmir will not be part of the joint mechanism to share intelligence on terrorism”.
The Convener of the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference in PoK, Mr Youssuf Nazim, said after the meeting: “The Foreign Secretary told us that the Kashmir freedom struggle movement was not part of the decisions taken in the recent Indo-Pak talks”. No one should be surprised by these developments. Ever since the Havana meeting with President Musharraf, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appears to feel that government ministers and senior officials should not directly name Pakistan or Bangladesh while referring to terrorism against India sponsored from across its borders. The government appeared to develop cold feet on this score after General Musharraf accused it of “finger pointing”.
Dr Manmohan Singh also appears to have decided that while he will speak of “misguided elements” in our neighbours sponsoring terrorism, he will not blame General Musharraf or the ISI for such acts. The Home Minister, Mr Shivraj Patil, unlike the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, also seems to believe that the Pakistan government should not be publicly accused of sponsoring cross-border terrorism. This was evident from the text of his address to senior police officials on November 22.
This astonishing approach to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism is going to have disastrous consequences. Rather than focusing attention on macro-level issues like the need for Pakistan to ban terrorist groups and organisations like the Jamat-ud-Dawa and the Muzaffarabad-based United Jihad Council, our government will now be devoting all its time and effort to providing Pakistan with evidence on individual acts of terrorism, which will naturally be rejected by Pakistan.
More importantly, we will be ignoring the fact that unless we publicly take up these issues of ISI involvement and the nexus between Pakistani terrorist groups acting against us and those involved in terrorism in Madrid, London, Sydney, New York, San Diego and Virginia, we will be unable to get international pressure mounted on Pakistan to ban terrorist outfits acting against India. Dr Manmohan Singh’s approach to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism is strikingly similar to that of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair who refuse to directly name the ISI for its support to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Is our approach to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism being unduly influenced by Washington and London?
Mercifully, the External Affairs Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, and the Defence Minister, Mr A.K. Anthony, have made it clear that an authentication of actual ground positions on maps is an essential pre-requisite for us to even commence talking about pulling back our troops from the heights of the Saltoro range in the Siachen region. They realise that if Indian forces are pulled back from the strategic heights of the Saltoro range there is nothing to prevent General Musharraf from seizing the positions vacated and claiming, like he did in Kargil, that the “mujahideen” had captured the positions vacated by India. If and when this happens, we would have the Pakistanis looking down the Nubra and Shyok valleys at Indian defences in Ladakh, with the Chinese present at the Karakoram Pass. But pointing out such realities today would be regarded as a sacrilege to those who believe in constantly thinking “out of the box”.
Jammu and Kashmir evidently figured prominently in discussions between the Foreign Secretaries. This is a welcome development and is in no small measure due to the forthright position taken by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that while India would not accept any change on boundaries, it would work to transcend boundaries and make them “mere lines on map”. Speaking recently in Delhi, former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran has clarified in response to General Musharraf’s call for a “Joint Mechanism” for Jammu and Kashmir that India would not be averse to establishing a “cooperative mechanism” between democratically elected institutions of the two parts of Jammu and Kashmir.
It is now for General Musharraf to set up truly representative and empowered institutions in PoK and the Northern Areas before we can proceed ahead with his proposal for self-governance. Quite obviously, if there is to be a “cooperative mechanism” between the legislatures on the two sides of the Line of Control, there has to be a symmetry in the nature of self-governance and devolution on both sides.
In these circumstances, Pakistan’s strategy will be to force its proxies like the leaders of the Hurriyat Conference to demand more and more autonomy, virtually bordering on independence, while continuing with cross -border terrorism and threatening to kill those Kashmiri leaders who do not listen to it. We thus have today leaders from even “mainstream” political parties in J&K who are demanding that the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir should be appointed by the state legislature and that J&K should not be subject to the provisions of Article 356 of the Indian Constitution. Surely, no government in New Delhi can agree to such demands, given its implications for demands one hears from elements in other states in the country.
There is thus need to see that there is a measure of symmetry between the progress we make in arriving at a framework for the settlement of the issue of Jammu and Kashmir in discussions with Pakistan on the one hand and the “internal dialogue” that the government has embarked on with different sections of the people in Jammu and Kashmir on the other. Failure to do so can have serious implications for the nation.
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