Organizer: Patricia Ann Gossman, Human Rights Watch
Chair: Paula R. Newberg, Georgetown University
Discussants: Mustapha Kamal Pasha, American University; Gowher Rizvi, Ford Foundation
For fifty years, thinking on Kashmir has been held hostage to India and Pakistan’s cold war and the zero-sum game that has been played out in the Kashmir valley. This panel brings together activists and academics to propose new ways of looking at the conflict in Kashmir and suggest steps necessary for any resolution of the problems that have led to the conflict. The first paper examines the conflict in Kashmir together with the war in Afghanistan as two seemingly endless conflicts that have defined Indo-Pakistan relations over the past decades, and discusses how their very intractability has shaped the way policymakers and politicians see the future of their regions. The second paper proposes an alternative gradualist approach to the conflict aimed at generating broad agreement on the creation of genuine representative institutions in Kashmir and the institutionalization of a multi-tiered framework of substantive self-rule for the region. The third discusses the prospects for community activists and community-based organizations in Kashmir and in South Asia more generally to play a role in addressing problems that have fueled the insurgency in the Kashmir valley, and proposes measures that could be taken to reclaim public space from both the state and the militants in order to create institutions that have genuine popular support. The final paper examines obstacles to information flow in Kashmir and how press coverage of the conflict has shaped the way it has been viewed by policymakers in South Asia and beyond.
Paula R. Newberg, Georgetown University
Wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir—together and separately—now define significantly the strategic and political environments of South and Central Asia. What are the consequences of these political-military imbroglios for regional relationships and, equally important, for the ways that policymakers and politicians see the future of their regions?
These two wars are treated as fixtures in Asia: each is the locus for insurgency, fragmented political alliances, terrorisms and violent movements that challenge state authority, particularly in Pakistan and India. Moreover, the relationships between fighting in Kashmir and Afghanistan—guerrilla movements and gun trafficking, local instabilities and regional uncertainties—have led observers to believe that neither can be fully resolved unless both are solved. Over time, however, resolutions seem increasingly distant.
The seeming intractability of both conflicts has created a sense of timelessness about both conflicts, in the halls of power as much as in the mountain passes that are home to protagonists and victims alike. Although neither conflict has been permanent—the war in Afghanistan is of some twenty years duration, and the conflict in Kashmir has alternatively surfaced and submerged over the past five decades—governments in the region have fixed on their stubborn continuation, allowing them to dictate Indo-Pakistan relations, south-central Asian relations, and the politics of energy of ethnicity from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Bengal.
This paper/presentation will address the contours of this policy environment.
Sumantra Bose, Columbia University
The Kashmir problem is conventionally viewed in the framework of three contending claims to its territory and population—the nation-state ideologies of India and Pakistan, and the position of the Kashmiri independentist movement, which aspires to create a new nation-state encompassing all the territories of the pre-1947 princely state. This paper argues that these three positions—which share an essentially identical nation-state framework—are inherently incompatible and irreconcilable with each other, involving as they do conflicting claims to absolute sovereignty over the same territory and citizenry. As a result, this zero-sum framework has absolutely no room for progress towards a substantive solution to the Kashmir conflict based on dialogue and negotiations between the three parties concerned.
The impasse can only be broken if the Kashmir question is reframed in alternative terms, which avoids the dead-end of competing and irreconcilable nationalist claims.
Patricia Ann Gossman, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
This paper discusses the significance of the 1996 election of the National Conference government in Kashmir and analyzes how the changes that have taken place since then are likely to affect the insurgency and the prospects for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
The paper also discusses the prospects for community activists and community-based organizations in Kashmir and in South Asia more generally to play a role in addressing problems that have fueled the insurgency in the Kashmir valley and providing alternative leadership controlled neither by the state nor by the militant factions. Efforts to identify persons capable of representing various segments of the Kashmiri public and of entering into negotiations toward a settlement of the conflict have generally not looked beyond established political and religious figures to identify the organization behind resistance to both India and the militants at the popular level, and to bring community-based groups into the political dialogue. Repressive tactics employed by both Indian security forces and militant groups and individuals in Kashmir have made it difficult for anyone not controlled by one side or the other to be heard and to create a safe opening for political activity in Kashmir. The paper concludes with a series of proposals for steps that could be taken to widen that opening and create institutions that have genuine popular support, are seen as legitimate, and that can provide some alternative to state and militant violence.
Vikram Parekh, Human Rights Watch
This paper examines obstacles to information flow in Kashmir posed by the Indian government, Kashmiri militants, and state-sponsored counter-insurgency militias. It examines how legal devices, such as press gags and detention laws, as well as extra-legal measures, such as threats, kidnappings and assassinations, have deterred the press from carrying out objective, investigative reporting on disputes related to the conflict in the Kashmir Valley. It also discusses avenues available for mediating disputes affecting the press between rival militant groups, and between militants and the Indian government. The second part of the paper analyzes coverage of the Kashmir conflict in the Kashmiri, Indian, and international press, and how this coverage has in turn shaped the way it has been viewed by policymakers in South Asia and beyond.