London – Elections do have a way of clearing the air, sometimes as with Turkey’s earlier this week, bringing in an entire new weather pattern. So it was too with last month’s election in Kashmir. The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, presiding over a government of Hindu nationalists, gave his opposition rival, the Congress party of Sonia Gandhi, tacit encouragement to form a coalition government with a local moderate Muslim party, the People’s Democratic Party. Despite being scorned by the Congress secularists for too often playing the Hindu chauvinist card and despite being continuously brow beaten by the ultra nationalists, in particular the Bombay-based politician Bal Thackeray, who regularly threatens to bring down the prime minister, Vajpayee not only masterminded the first free election in Kashmir for as long as any one can remember, he has in effect handed over a large part of India’s Kashmir policy to those who don’t have much sympathy for his government.

For sure, policy vis a vis Pakistan and decisions on military deployments in Kashmir or up against the Pakistani border rest in New Delhi, but the local government in Kashmir, while no means autonomous, does have a say on such important questions as whether to apply India’s draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act . It is also likely to release prisoners held on less serious charges and will be tough on atrocities carried out by Indian security forces, a long standing legitimate grievance of local people.

In 1948 newly independent Pakistan and India went to war over Kashmir. The UN was called into mediate and a “line of control” was drawn between the one third of Kashmir (overwhelmingly Muslim) under Pakistani control and the two thirds under Indian control. The Indian controlled part, called Jammu and Kashmir, has a Hindu majority in Jammu, a Buddhist and Shia Muslim majority in Ladakh district and, in the most populous part, the central valley, a Muslim majority. It is in this latter district that most of the tension against Indian rule spills over. In the last twelve years, as India has become more Hindu nationalist and as the Pakistan military has encouraged and licensed militants demobbed from the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to undermine Indian rule in its disputed province, the bloodletting has been ratcheted up and with it the military stakes. Now, to cut a tortuous story short, India and Pakistan face each other with nuclear weapons, with some powerful voices arguing in the regular crises of confrontation to use them if the other side doesn’t back down. The American intelligence services have said repeatedly that humanity’s first nuclear war is most likely to be fought over Kashmir.

American academics and strategic thinkers have all sorts of good ideas for defusing the tensions that regularly blow up between India and Pakistan. It is suggested, for example, that the U.S. should use its capabilities with high tech monitoring to keep a close watch on the line of control so that violations are aired for all to see. Even going further, that the UN Security Council should recognize the line of control as an international border. Some argue that the U.S. should beef up the much depleted Pakistani military so that there is a better, and therefore safer, balance of power. And that both sides should be offered America’s sophisticated technologies to control the misuse of nuclear weapons by rogue commanders or political factions.

All these have their use and the experts should go on debating them. But in truth the only thing that really works is elections and democracy. It is democracy that has finally broken the log jam on the Indian side. And if real democracy were allowed to return to Pakistan, even if it meant the old corrupt parties of Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif winning power, it would introduce a flexibility on the Pakistani side that is just not there under military rule, a military that since General Zia ul-Haq’s time has funded and encouraged the Taliban on the one side and the Kashmiri Muslim militants on the other, all to make India’s life more difficult.

This is not to exonerate India’s responsibility. India has failed long ago to honour the promise made by its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to allow the Kashmiris a free vote on what country they wanted to belong to. (Probably if held today they would say a plague on both your houses and opt for independence if that were the third choice)

An Indian government, even a Congress government, might find it difficult, even impossible, to wind the clock back that far in the immediate future. But it could implement the thinking of one of Pakistan’s finest thinkers, the late ex finance minister Mahbub ul Haq. He proposed that the UN be invited to establish a trusteeship involving both Pakistani-run and Indian-run Kashmir for fifteen years. The UN, having secured the withdrawal of all troops, would open all the borders, especially across the line of control, encourage trade and the free passage of peoples. This would give time for passions to cool inside Kashmir and for local city and village government to find its feet. It would remove the threat of war that constantly hovers like a sword of Damocles. At the end it would have given India the breathing space to accept that a referendum is inevitable and Pakistan the time to understand that the Muslim central valley might vote to be independent.

I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com

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