Kashmir Affairs - Security & Conflict Analysis of Kashmir

My Kashmir: Conflict and Prospects of Enduring Peace
By Wajahat Habibullah
United States Institute of Peace, Washington, 2008

Review by: Murtaza Shibli

One of India’s finest and best known Muslim civil servants, Wajahat Habibullah has remained associated with Kashmir through his appointments to various bureaucratic posts for nearly three decades. This has given him a certain vantage point from which to watch the socio-political developments as they unfolded. However, his relationship is formed not only from his professional involvement but also emerges from a personal commitment that is evident in his book. In Srinagar, he is remembered as a pro-Kashmiri Indian bureaucrat who believed in dialogue and accommodation; in the tumultuous decade of the 1990s, he was considered the only human face of the Indian state, at a time when there was a total breakdown of the social contract and trust between the latter and the Kashmiri people. Habibullah worked tirelessly, even risking his life, to repair and restore some semblance of engagement through his efforts at various levels.

My Kashmir: Conflict and the Prospects of Enduring Peace is a perceptive memoir peppered with anecdotes that offer personal and mostly honest insights into the tensions and distrust between Kashmir and India that marked the formative years of their relationship and how such mutual suspicion led to the emergence of one of the deadliest insurgencies in the region that still claims a heavy toll of lives. The book tries to offer a sympathetic view of the Kashmir problem - not from an academic angle or political standpoint, but from a humanitarian perspective. The author draws extensively from his experiences of working both as an administrator under various local Kashmiri governments and in the offices of two Indian prime ministers. In his introduction, Habibullah asserts that although not a Kashmiri himself, he has tried to see the situation through the eyes of one committed both to India and to serving the people of Kashmir.

He points out that the government of India’s constant fear that Kashmiris might gravitate towards Pakistan has meant that ‘national security interests’ have taken precedence over everything else, including the rights of people. Giving examples from his personal experience, he tells us how Indian paramilitary forces ‘accosted…and humiliated [Kashmiris] as they returned home late from work’ [p.26] in early 1970 or how a top Border Security Force (BSF) officer, Brigadier General Randhawa, threatened to enter the homes of Kashmiris and ‘shoot anyone they suspected of intending mischief’. [p.25] This privileging of the ‘national security interest’ affected the author as well as his civilian authority was often bypassed by the Army and police and on one occasion earned him a serious reprimand from the Chief Secretary, the senior-most bureaucrat in the state, for not being quick enough in issuing warrants for the arrest of the workers of an opposition political party. When in 1990, he requested the notoriously anti-Muslim governor Jagmohan to issue an appeal to Pandits (Kashmiri Hindus) not to leave the Kashmir valley and offer them protection, instead, Jagmohan did the opposite, thereby triggering their exodus. It also prompted the widely held belief that the Pandit migration was initiated to clear the field for the Indian Army and paramilitary forces to target Kashmiri Muslims more freely and without any collateral damage to Hindu interests.

Habibullah offers several examples of how the Indian government and its officials continue to see Kashmir through the prism solely of ‘national security’ concerns, enabling all manner of malpractices that have further fuelled feelings of alienation among Kashmiris. He himself became a victim of the same mindset when Governor Girish Saxena selectively edited his report on the notorious Kunan Poshpora rape of 1992 by the Indian Army, giving a clean chit to the personnel involved. This report deeply angered Kashmiris and cost Habibullah his credibility among them - so much so that a militant group tried to assassinate him.

This security-related concern has fed a distrust of Kashmiris in general and pervades the highest levels; the prime minister Indira Gandhi ‘not only rejected the proposal [to upgrade Srinagar airport as an International one] outright but called in her joint secretary, who had recommended acceptance, to admonish him that an ulterior motive must always be suspected in any such proposal received from that state’. [p55]. This deep distrust of Kashmiris was shared by the Indian prime minister Morarji Desai who stated during a meeting in Srinagar that “one doesn’t know whom to trust in Kashmir”. On another occasion, when Indira Gandhi was touring the valley during an election campaign in 1983, she said to Habibullah that her public gatherings ‘looked entirely fake’. The author’s own observation about the Indian Independence Day celebrations is that the Kashmiris never felt enthusiastic and ‘not even the parade or loudly played national anthem could attract an audience’. [p.29]

He makes some insightful observations about the characteristics of the Kashmiri people and calls their dexterity in weaving conspiracy theories legendary. However, his explanation of the Hazratbal siege in 1993 is a no less skilful conspiracy theory when he claims that the police made false assumptions based on the word of a head constable who was a Jama’at-i-Islami sympathiser, thus effectively placing the blame on the Jama’at. He forgets, in the process, that according to the initial intelligence reports quoted by the official media at the time, one of the reasons for the siege was the presence inside the shrine of Syed Salahudin, chief of the Hizbul Mujahideen, and foreign militants, which was eventually proved wrong. If the police constable was a Jama’at sympathiser who raised a false alarm, his information should have been implausible given the official assessments about the presence of Syed Salahudin, himself a former Jama’at activist. However, apart from this seemingly strange explanation for the genesis of the Hazratbal seige, Habibullah’s role in mitigating the crisis was phenomenal as he conducted negotiations with the holed-up militants at great risk to his own safety. His well known opposition to any hard-line military action angered the Indian army high command who allegedly tried to kill him when his car was hit by an army vehicle, severely injuring him.

The incident did not deter Habibullah who continued his efforts to seek dialogue with the pro-independence Kashmiri separatists - both militants and the political leadership. He has held various meetings and discussions with these leaders over the past two decades, opening and sustaining various channels of communications. However, he is too modest and does not give himself enough credit, despite the fact that it is his efforts that have been central to keeping alive the dialogue process between the Indian government and Kashmiri separatists. His assessment of Kashmiri separatists is that they lack leadership and vision and finds them devoid of clarity of thought or goal. He narrates an interesting anecdote about 1977 state elections as to how the Mirwaiz Moulvi Mohammad Farooq (father of current Mirwaiz Umar Farooq) tried to blackmail him by threatening to ‘set Srinagar on fire’ if Habibullah stopped him from taking a procession in support of the Janata Party headed by then Indian Prime Minister Morari Desai to which Mirwaiz was aligned at that time. He characterizes Sheikh Abdullah’s government a ‘sheikhdom’ and observes that ‘in his last years in power, Abdullah was more concerned with securing an orderly succession than with running the government’. He also claims that a Western based JKLF leader came to meet him in 2004 in Washington and offered to work for the peace process.

The author contends that ‘Islam has been pivotal to the evolving politics of Kashmir, but more as a symbol of people fighting for identity rather than its religious ramifications’ and discounts any relationship between the Kashmiri militant groups and Al Qaeda as ‘insinuations ostensibly made to curry US favor’. He questions comparisons between Kashmir and Northern Ireland adding that while there was a demographic change in Northern Ireland , there was no such thing in Kashmir - an argument hotly contested by Kashmiris. The systematic reduction of the Muslim population in Jammu and Kashmir since 1947, as evident from successive official census reports, is seen as a clear proof of demographic engineering, a fact that was raised by the Kashmiri leader Saifudin Soz, now the Indian Minister of Water Resources and head of the Congress party in Jammu and Kashmir. Also, fears of demographic change were the main reason for recent mass protests in Srinagar triggered by the illegal land transfer by the local state government to a semi-government Hindu body, the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB).

Habibullah stresses the symbolic importance of Kashmir to both India and Pakistan and calls for any settlement to keep in mind the question of national pride in both countries so that no ‘substantial compromise on territory can or should be expected - or even hoped for’. He accepts that freedom is the ‘dream of every Kashmiri’ but tends to differentiate between freedom and independence, a term Kashmiris usually use interchangeably. He contends that the Indian constitution guarantees that freedom which ‘can be achieved while retaining the territorial integrity of both India and Pakistan with the present boundaries becoming soft borders’, and advocates against an independent Kashmir saying that ‘true freedom cannot be won by independence, which would bring even more suffering and would be unacceptable to both India and Pakistan’. His argument is that ‘an independent state of 5.44 million people occupying 85,00 mostly mountainous square miles, located in one of the world’s most volatile regions amid rival nuclear powers and a number of smaller states in conflict, with potential oil wealth, is hardly likely to be left free’.

Wajahat Habibullah lives up to his reputation of being sympathetic to Kashmiris as he repeatedly refers to the pain and agony they have suffered ‘as a result of confrontations between India and Pakistan during the intervening half century’. He laments strongly the oppressive treatment of Kashmiris by the Indian state at various levels, a treatment that could be easily classified as structural violence. He observes that personal relations between political leaders of India and Kashmir ‘played a marked role in the trajectory of Jammu and Kashmir’s history’ effectively suggesting that they were overwhelmingly elite arrangements that lacked popular consent or appeal. He places the need for the restoration of Kashmiri dignity and self respect at the heart of his argument. Expressing sympathy with the Kashmiri perception of a long history of continuous humiliation since accession to India in 1947, he calls upon India to concede those rights and liberties that are the entitlement of ‘every Indian citizen’ and prophesies that otherwise ‘simmering resentments in Kashmir will render any abiding peace elusive’. He is greatly perturbed about Kashmiris being held in contempt by both India and Pakistan as a people that can be ‘bought and sold’, and argues that such an attitude has added to the complexities in the relationship between India and Kashmir.

He describes the autonomy report prepared by the Farooq Abdullah government in 2000 as flawed, but calls its rejection by the central Indian government as an opportunity squandered. Habibullah constantly points out the confusions and contradictions in New Delhi’s Kashmir policy as a result of competing and confusing views across various government departments. In his view, the dialogue between the Hurriyat leaders and New Delhi’s interlocutor NN Vohra (currently the governor of Jammu and Kashmir ) failed due to this sort of confusion, which eroded the credibility of the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee among the Hurriyat leaders. He assesses the deep-rooted suspicion of Kashmiris as the main bottleneck for future negotiations and argues that the credibility of Indian institutions in Kashmir remains fragile. He calls for a ‘balance between immediate security concerns and long-term good will and cooperation’, tacitly admitting that the current peace process remains inconclusive due to the slow or absence of responses from the Indian side. He observes that the US government also shares the view that Pakistan has been more forthcoming with compromises than India in the present peace process and quotes Pakistan’s High Commissioner in India, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, who told him in early 2002 that ‘officially Pakistan was willing to compromise on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir ...however, a settlement along the LoC (Line of Control) would be seen by the Pakistani people as surrender unless the settlement was accompanied by some accommodation on India’s part”.

Despite its valuable insights and richness in anecdotal detail, Habibullah’s claim that principal reasons for militant groups to find new recruits for insurgency are more linked to economic incentives of greed rather than the grievance, grossly underestimates the effects of massive human rights violations, humiliation felt by Kashmiris on multiple accounts including increasing marginalisation. The recently held massive public protests in the streets of Srinagar that was spearheaded and sustained by the common people should be an eye opener about the frustrations and anger of the Kashmiri population. There are also some glaring omissions in the author’s references to certain historical events. While discussing the problem of communalism [p23] he briefly mentions that Muslims in Jammu ‘migrated to Pakistan to avoid bloodbath’, conveniently forgetting about the massacre precipitated by the Maharaja that killed thousands of Muslims and forced hundreds of thousands to migrate to Pakistan. Similarly in the beginning of the chapter two, he briefly mentions the attacks on Jamaa’t-i-islami supporters following the death of Zulfiqar Bhutto in 1979, but omits the details about widespread loot, plunder and arson that was engineered with the tacit support of the National Conference led government headed by Sheikh Abdullah. Several people were killed while hundreds were rendered homeless, but this does not find mention in the book. Habibullah also tends to read the history of Partition one-sidedly and places the onus on Sir Syed Ahmad Khan for the ultimate division, but fails to recognise the role of Hindu fundamentalists, or Gandhi’s responsibility in his choice of leadership of the Congress, his distrust of Muslims as well as his invocation of Hindu symbols and mythology to cultivate mass political support. And, lastly, the time line provided at the end of the book needs expanding to include events like 11 February 1984 - the hanging of Maqbool Bhat and other such important events that have shaped the recent history of the beleaguered region.

The merit of the book lies in the clarity of its arguments and the modest approach of the author. My Kashmir: Conflict and the Prospects of Enduring Peace is a wonderful contribution to understanding Kashmir and the efforts at peace-building there. It is hoped that the USIP will further broaden its commendable efforts to promote the peace in the region by expanding its work and resources, engaging more scholars from the area, in order to help the ongoing peace process and offer specific insights into the problem that Wajahat Habibullah strongly believes is ‘tractable’.