The story of the project, and why it failed, doesn’t necessarily bear out his suggestion that New Delhi could have talked its way out of trouble in Kashmir.
One sunny winter afternoon in November 2009, three men, holding the keys to history in their hands, slipped past the restaurants and coffee shops in New Delhi’s Khan Market, and walked towards the rear parking lot. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of the All Parties’ Hurriyat Conference, and his colleagues Bilal Lone and Abdul Gani Butt, got into an unmarked car that would take them to India’s Home Minister, P Chidambaram, and a chance to shape Kashmir’s future.The meeting, however, saw nothing but recrimination — and the death of New Delhi’s years-long effort at bringing about a grand reconciliation in Kashmir.
New Delhi had hoped for a homecoming of the forces that had thrown their weight behind the Islamist insurgency in the wake of the rigged elections of 1987. The starting whistle had been blown — but the political thoroughbreds that New Delhi had bought and reared, no expense spared, responded by sitting down and refusing to budge.
Former Research and Analysis Wing chief Amarjit Singh Dulat’s new book is, at its core, a defence of that peacemaking project — and, in turn, a criticism of the decision to turn off the tap on Hurriyat taken in the closing years of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s regime.
The story of the project, and why it failed, doesn’t necessarily bear out his suggestion that New Delhi could have talked its way out of trouble in Kashmir.
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The story dates back to 1997, when former Jama’at-e-Islami chief Ghulam Mohammad Bhat emerged from prison, and called for “a political dialogue”. His position — an attack on the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which had been born of the Jama’at — opened political space. Then, in 1999, the Hurriyat’s Butt publicly broke ranks, and called for conversation between secessionists and mainstream political parties.
Led by Dulat, who served as RAW chief in 1999-2000 and continued as the Prime Minister’s envoy, New Delhi’s Kashmir policymakers saw an opening. In 2002, RAW helped broker a meeting between the Hurriyat’s Abdul Gani Lone with Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lieutenant-General Ehsan-ul-Haq, at which Lone pleaded for Pakistani backing for the dialogue.
Not long after the meeting, though, Lone was assassinated by a Lashkar-e-Toiba hit squad — a blunt message to all those contemplating making a deal with New Delhi.
Having already seen her husband assassinated on suspicion of opening peace talks with New Delhi, the Mirwaiz’s mother had no wish to lose a son, too.
In an effort to revive the process, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani met with the Hurriyat leadership for the first time in January 2004 — irking hardliners in his own party. This was followed up with a second meeting that March. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held two more rounds of talks, in May and September 2005.
Fearful of jihadist wrath, though, the Hurriyat held off bringing an agenda to the table. Then, in March 2006, APHC leaders promised mediators that they would attend Manmohan Singh’s second Roundtable Conference on Jammu and Kashmir — but backed off after threats from the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.
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New Delhi now refocussed its energies on trying to cut a deal with Pakistan directly. In secret meetings that had begun in 2005, Prime Minister Singh’s envoy S K Lambah and his Pakistani counterpart, Tariq Aziz, agreed on two key points: no redrawing of the Line of Control, and greater political autonomy on both its sides.
Even as the Lambah-Aziz secret talks continued, New Delhi began reaching out to secessionists outside the Mirwaiz-led coalition. In 2005, Sajjad Lone met with Singh — a meeting that was followed, on November 28, by a secret meeting between Yasin Malik and the Prime Minister.
To the Mirwaiz, the deal seemed done. “I think the agenda is pretty much set,” he told an interviewer in April 2007. “It is September 2007,” he went on, “that India and Pakistan are looking at, in terms of announcing something on Kashmir.”
History didn’t work quite to plan, though. Prime Minister Singh delayed signing on to a deal until after elections in Uttar Pradesh — and by the time those ended, President Pervez Musharraf was caught up in a maelstrom of domestic opposition. The deal slipped through New Delhi’s grasp.
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For the next two years, Hurriyat leaders kept up contact with New Delhi’s envoys — and continued to sell the idea of a negotiated deal to their own constituency. “Let us come out of our delusions,” Mirwaiz Farooq said at a May 19, 2008 seminar in Srinagar.
Loath to admit that the goal of independence was off the table, though, the Hurriyat still refused to bring a formal agenda to the table. The Hurriyat leadership, moreover, was acutely aware of its limited electoral reach — particularly after the People’s Democratic Party began appropriating many of it slogans and issues.
The secessionists wanted a guarantee of power — and that demand led to determined pushback from mainstream parties that had shed blood to fight elections.
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In 2008, the inevitable breaking point came. Syed Ali Shah Geelani had successfully using ethnic-communal issues to mobilise against what he described as a sellout. He warned, at a rally in Baramulla, that India was seeking to change “the Muslim majority into a minority by settling down troops along with their families”. Then, “they will either massacre Muslims as they did in Jammu in 1947, or carry out a genocide as was done in Gujarat.”
In the summer of that year, murderous violence swept the state, driving the Hurriyat into a corner. New Delhi felt betrayed by the Hurriyat’s refusal to come out against the violence, while the Hurriyat felt New Delhi wasn’t giving it enough to make the risk worthwhile.
The Khan Market meeting the next year was meant to open the way for a fresh round of talks, but no clear proposals came from the Hurriyat leadership — which was fearful more than ever of the consequences of appearing to be betrayers.
M K Narayanan, India’s National Security Advisor, as well as many in India’s intelligence community, had always been sceptical of the Dulat-led effort to bring the Hurriyat on board. Now, their voice prevailed in the Prime Minister’s Office: the Hurriyat moderates, the new wisdom held, were a bad investment.
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It’s tempting to say that a historic opportunity was lost — but that answer is too facile. In truth, the leadership New Delhi had engaged, products of politics of the 1970s and 1980s, had lost its relevance.
The Mirwaiz and other Hurriyat centrists simply did not have the capital to contain the forces that were being unleashed in 2008, and would never recover it. In Kashmir, resistance to India was being led by a new generation that had grown up after the disintegration of the state’s political system — their belief system informed by radical Islamism, not democratic accommodation.
Ever since then, Kashmir has been trapped in a place called impasse — a grim landscape with which it is only too familiar. Moving forward must be informed by genuinely new ideas, not nostalgia.
praveen.swami@expressindia.com
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