Zeeshan Yousaf
Farooq Dar was walking along the road on his way home when Indian military personnel surrounded him and later tied him up to the front of a military jeep. He was used as a human shield for the whole day as military convoy went from village to village. Javiad Ahmad Ahanger, a young boy ready to start college, was sleeping at his home. It was the August of 1990 and the armed conflict in Srinagar was at its peak. The Indian Army had been looking for one Javiad Ahmed Bhatt, shouting his name in the streets at night. Javiad Ahanger, hearing the army shouting panicked and jumped out the window and hasn’t been seen since then. The ordeal of his mother, Parveena Ahangar, has been well documented since. Parveena later started an NGO called Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Indian Administered Kashmir to raise awareness about the missing people in Indian Administered Kashmir. The NGO estimates the number of missing people to be at least 8-10000. Firstly, any solution to the Kashmir conflict mandates a de-militarisation of the region along with an elimination of heavy-handed tactics adopted by the Indian state in Indian Jammu and Kashmir (IJK). Secondly, Pakistan can set an example and strengthen its negotiation position by addressing the grievances of the people of Kashmir area controlled by Pakistan (AJK).
The negotiation process has to be broadly inclusive and mediated by a morally authoritative and disinterested neutral third party. Kashmir consists of various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. While Muslims are certainly the majority, it would be wrong to exclude other groups such as Hindu Pandits, Sikh community and the Tibetans. Likewise, various political organisations have formed to represent segments of Kashmiri society. They all have to be invited to the negotiating table. One of the reasons that Oslo peace accords failed, is because they failed to bring Hamas to the negotiation table. Therefore, the Oslo peace accords had a handicap in the process to begin with. Likewise, the success of the Good Friday agreement is in part because all parties were invited to the negotiation table. Talks between India and Pakistan have failed partly because of the absence of a neutral thirty party mediator. The third-party mediator between the Palestinians and Israelis was the United States. However, the US supported Israel.
Therefore, it was not able to hold Israel to the accords. This is illustrated by its failure to check Israeli settlement building in the Occupied Palestinian territories. The recent peace process mediated between the Colombian government and FARC rebels was mediated by the Vatican — spearheaded by the Pope and the Cuban government. Both command moral authority and were seen as neutral by the parties involved. Therefore, negotiations have been successful.In Kashmir, no natural mediator comes to mind. China has a territorial stake. Russia is historically seen as an Indian ally while the US is always an interested party.
Therefore, negotiations need to take place possibly in secret with a mutually agreed third party mediator. However, before we can even consider the framework for negotiations India needs to demilitarise Kashmir valley and accept the Kashmiris as legitimate political actors. Indian controlled Kashmir is a heavily militarised zone. There are 700,000 military personnel deployed, that is one soldier for every 18 Kashmiri residents. Kashmiris have to negotiate through hundreds of check posts and their lives are even harder during curfews.When Kashmiris protest militarisation of their land, it is the military that heeds them a brutal reply.
For example, in the clashes that erupted in July 2016, at least 80 civilians were killed. Furthermore, the Indian military’s incessant use of pellet-firing shotguns has blinded hundreds of civilians last year. Therefore, de-militarisation of Kashmir is a pre-requisite to bring parties from IJK on to the negotiation table. Pakistan on the other hand, must play a positive role such as taking further steps to empower people and institutions in AJK. The fact that the people of AJK still have no representation in Pakistan’s parliament even after almost seven decades is a constant cause of agitation among the residents of the region. The idea is that Pakistan should show the people of AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan a road map for full democratic representation to show to the world. Doing that would also mean it must be a fair player in helping India demilitarise IJK. I have laid out the details of what a reconciliatory framework would look like which needs to be adopted to reach a permanent solution to the Kashmir conflict. The framework would be a broadly inclusive dialogue process that brings all concerned parties to the table. For any such framework to succeed, the importance of the presence of a neutral and disinterested mediator is also highlighted. This framework must be preceded by two steps. First being the demilitarisation of Kashmir by India. And second being the democratisation of people and political institutions in IJK by India and in AJK and GB by Pakistan.
