Commentary/Saisuresh Sivaswamy

Use the Kashmir key to turn the Pakistan lock

The restoration in succession of popular rule in Jammu and Kashmir and the country that is contiguous to it in more ways than one is perhaps a reminder that to be able to ease our tensions with our 50-year-old neighbour we need to use the former. But use with more imagination and dexterity that what we have done so far.

And it is in this context that Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah's wellknown stand -- to let Pakistan retain to what we derisively call Pak Occupied Kashmir while we retain ours, even while converting the actual Line of Control between the two countries into the international border -- which was reiterated recently at an election rally in Chhindwara, needs to be re-examined.

But if the past is any indication, Abdullah's would continue to remain a lone voice in the wilderness. Already Union Minister of State for Home Maqbool Dar -- who is also a Kashmiri -- has debunked the claim, while one can be sure that what we can expect from other politicians will be a dignified silence. For relations with Pakistan seems to be all tangled up in emotions and paranoia, and no one really wants to use the psychiatrist's couch.

It is not that these reactions will be confined to this side of the LoC alone; Islamabad, which has often spoken of the unfinished business of Partition, has no real alternative in mind to solving the problem between the two countries. It has often been derided that for Pakistan, created rather like Eve was in the Bible out of India's ribs, needs to use India as a bogeyman to buttress its founding principle that was anti-Indian, but surely New Delhi, rather in the nature of an elder brother than big brother, can make a grand gesture to bring things to normal between the two peoples.

The need for fence-mending is now, and what better time to do it is now, in the two countries's fiftieth year of Independence. If Partition was indeed a British ploy to weaken what they felt could be a potential world beater, then why are politicians on both sides hesitant to extend the hand of friendship? Or, why hasn't India done anything so far that will turn international opinion against Islamabad and force it to reciprocate in similar manner?

If India is waiting for a time when the military in Pakistan will tire of playing the commanding role in Pakistan's political life, then it does not need a clairvoyant to know that the wait will go on after the kingdom has come. We have to tackle the issue with the army very much around.

For India, which often prides itself on not being a puppet of any nation, the stakes are higher than it is for Pakistan. Fifty years of attrition with our neighbour has bled us, of resources that are scarce in the first place and unlike Pakistan we don't have a munificent uncle with a bottomless bag in the background who will give us what we want.

Gone has the time when we could have said that since our destinies are being governed by a generation that went through the trauma of Partition we are unable to see the problem though a clear prism. More than half the nation is filled with people for whom Pakistan's creation is being brought home only through text-books, and dull ones at that. This huge segment will like nothing better than living in peace, since that will enable it to chase the pot of gold that is at the foot of the rainbow.

The following scenario is not altogether impossible: A parent is teaching his ward history, when the latter will turn around and say, 'But daddy, if we did win three wars against Pakistan as you say, then how come they are holding to half of Kashmir? Why didn't we take it back?' The poor father will then have little choice but to scratch his head and say 'I don't know son'. Apparently cricket is not the only game that Pakistan has worsted us in.

Alas, our rulers are spared such innocent querying; being men of resources, they needn't go through the ritual of teaching their children, theirs is the rigmarole of educating the people. In fact, the closest one can recall Indian politicians even referring to PoK was a couple of years when P V Narasimha Rao, in his Republic Day speech from the ramparts of Red Fort, thundered that India would reclaim that barren land lying with Pakistan. Mercifully for the rest of us, he was more a man of inaction or what will a country that is unable to manage one piece of Kashmir do with another?

What Indian politics lacks is a touch of realism, or our politicians will have wondered about the status quo. For Indians, going to Srinagar remains an often unfulfilled dream, so of what use is PoK to them? Second, if USA and USSR could bury the feud between them in this decade/century/millennium, why are India and Pakistan, linked umbilically till Armageddon, still looking at each other down the barrel of a gun? The reality for the common man is that India has a part of Kashmir, a more luscious part, and Pakistan has one, so why not call the whole thing quits? Why don't we convert what is a fact into reality? Why don't we expend our energies on more interesting things, say like beating Pakistan in cricket?

The problem seems to be that we are unable to rid ourselves of our emotional baggage of more than 50 years vintage. The same sense of denial and superiority complex that characterised our dealings with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which led to the birth of Pakistan, still appears to haunt us. And it is this that will keep our heads and minds rooted to the past, at a time when the entire world is looking ahead to a new global environment.

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