,
along the line of control, demilitarised, with or without UN peacekeeping
forces, the issue resolved through a unitary plebiscite, a regional plebiscite,
elections, bilateral negotiations, tripartite dialogue, with or without mediation.
No specific proposal, however, has ever left the drawing board.
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The reasons are self-evident. Firstly, the Indian government is in physical
possession of the valley of Kashmir, which is the main area of contention. It
has therefore not felt the imperative to engage in dialogue beyond that it has
so far unsuccessfully pursued with the disaffected Kashmiris in the valley.
Secondly, despite their stated desire to improve their relationship, India and
Pakistan still have far too great a legacy of mistrust, dating back to partition, to
be able to jettison their historical and emotional ‘baggage’. As time has passed,
the Indian attitude towards Pakistan has, if anything, hardened. Contrary to
longstanding descriptions of the state of Jammu and Kashmir as ‘disputed
territory’, Indian officials are now attempting to move away from calling the
Kashmir issue a ‘dispute’ at all. ‘A dispute,’ Governor Saxena said to me in
April , ‘is about two people having the potential right to something. In
this instance you have a situation where we have a house; another person
wants the house; they come in, occupy one third of it and then tell me we
have a dispute.’
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And, although privately many Indians admit their mistakes in
handling Kashmir, the government continues to blame Pakistan whole-
heartedly for the insurgency. In the hostile climate of , defence minister,
George Fernandes’ more enlightened statement in seems to have been
forgotten: ‘I do not believe that any foreign hand engineered the Kashmir
problem. The problem was created by us, and if others decided to take
advantage of it, I do not believe that one should make that an issue; given the
nature of the politics of our sub-continent, such a development was
inevitable.’
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Across the border in Pakistan, despite the warmth which exists between
Pakistanis and Indians at a social and intellectual level, the Pakistani
establishment has likewise fallen victim to the belief that India is committed to
destabilising Pakistan and seeing the country fragment. This has become
especially true since the advent to power in of the BJP government,
under the dominant influence of home minister, L.K.Advani, appointed
deputy prime minister in July . Mirroring the extremism of the radical
Islamist groups in Pakistan, India’s fundamentalist Hindu organisations have
been alarmingly ‘rewriting’ Indian history in order to define India as a Hindu
rather than a secular country. This sort of propaganda has made Pakistanis
even more concerned about the fate of their Muslim brethren across the line
of control in the valley of Kashmir. At the same time, Pakistanis have also
been adept at re-writing their own history, whether it is analysing the causes of
the Kargil conflict or conceding the extent to which they have aided the
insurgency militarily for their own objectives.
Until there is a complete change of heart in both countries, it is therefore
going to be impossible for any leader to sit down and discuss an issue in good