Understanding the Kashmir conflict

A closer look

Michael Kugelamn, senior associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center agrees: “Pakistan wants to revisit Kashmir’s status while India believes the matter has long been settled. Pakistani meddling in J&K won’t change anything in that calculus.”

The recent killing of an admired Kashmiri Jihadist, Burhan Wani, by Indian security forces, has initiated a new round of violence in the region. The fallout of the latest political turmoil in Kashmir might pose a serious political and security challenge for India.

The roots of the Kashmir conflict go back to the imperial conflicts of the nineteenth century when the British rulers tried to implement a buffer zone between British India and the Tsarist Empire. While the British rulers were able to control Kashmir successfully, they could not make it part of British India. In Pakistan and India’s context, the dispute by and large has remained the same: New Dehli and Islamabad have been trying to control Kashmir for their respective interests while the region remains in defiance and suffering.

While, to some extent, it’s true that external factors and forces have, over the last many decades attempted to inflame the regional insurgency by supporting different Jihadist groups, Indian government’s historic reactionary behaviour of cracking down hard on sporadic violence has kept the resistance narrative alive as a nationalist struggle. India’s inability to win over the local population amicably in the last six decades has turned the militant problem into a dilemma. The dilemma can be termed a “paranoia” where mitigating the local insurgency by calling in a brute force has become more common rather than truly addressing the real issues tied with the regional insurgency.

India likes to call Kashmir its integral part but has never tried to incorporate the region into the state like it has done in other parts of the country. To begin with, the mere presence of a large number of troops in the valley tells the story of a region that has been turned into a fortress. “India’s political mismanagement and repression of Kashmiris, however, seem to have deeply alienated the people in the valley which throws serious doubt on the sustainability of any solution that disregards their aspirations, said Aqil Shah, professor of South Asian Politics at the University of Oklahoma.”

On the other hand, historically, beyond the rhetoric of diplomatic and moral support, the policy makers in Pakistan have never truly supported the Kashmiri struggle whose foundation goes back to the UN passed regulations at the time of partition which demanded certain policy decisions from Pakistan that Islamabad has never implemented. “Under international law, Pakistan and India are both parties to the Kashmir dispute. In 1948-1949, the UN passed several resolutions to settle the question of the princely State’s accession to either country through a plebiscite,” said Shah. He further added that “The UN resolutions on Kashmir (e.g., August 1948,) required Pakistan to withdraw its troops from the area as a precondition for a plebiscite followed by a reduction of Indian troops to a level necessary for keeping order in Kashmir.  However, Pakistan obstructed the process by refusing to meet its obligation to demilitarise the area unless India simultaneously withdrew its troops.”

Shah believes that both countries have never been serious about honouring their legal commitments beyond their individual political and security interests: “Basically, neither country was serious about honouring its legal commitments and both have been unwilling to compromise on their entrenched positions since.”

Shah contends that Pakistan’s policy of using religious proxies to settle political scores in Kashmir has actually weakened Pakistan’s stance over the issue. “Despite Pakistan’s tired official rhetoric of extending moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmir struggle, its default policy has been to use/sponsor Jihadi groups, including the designated global terrorist organisation LeT. This policy only helps delegitimise the Kashmiri struggle in the eyes of the international community.”

Shah is of the view that Pakistan’s continued attempts to internationalise the issue by continuing some small level military conflicts with India are actually a reflection of a failed policy. “The lesson from Pakistan’s failed revisionist attempts to wrest Kashmir from India (e.g., 1965, Kargil) is clear:  there is no military solution to the conflict. The presence of nuclear weapons means war is really not an option anyway, says Shah.

“The military high command’s apparent patronage of Let, JeM, etc. certainly signal its resolve to keep the pot boiling in Kashmir in the futile hope that the international community will take the bait.” 

However, Shah recommends that the only feasible solution to the Kashmir problem is that both India and Pakistan should accept Line of Control as an international border. “It is also clear that India is not going to agree to the redrawing of the LoC.  Therefore, the most feasible option for both sides is to accept the LoC as an international border, demilitarise on both sides, and allow the free movement of people, commerce across the border (as envisioned in the Singh-Musharraf non-paper).” Michael Kugelamn, senior associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center agrees: “Pakistan wants to revisit Kashmir’s status while India believes the matter has long been settled. Pakistani meddling in J&K won’t change anything in that calculus.”

While answering whether any peaceful and bilaterally accepted solution to the Kashmir conflict was possible anytime soon, Kugelman said that “I cannot imagine any resolution any time in the foreseeable future…simply because each side is so far apart on the issue, and India has insisted that any change in Kashmir’s status is effectively impossible and won’t happen.”

Commenting on Pakistan’s blatant intervention in Kashmir, Kugelman contends that “Pakistan wants to criticise Indian tactics not just so the world will pay attention to a flashpoint that it often ignores, but also because it makes India look bad and undercuts the global image that New Delhi fervently wants to sparkle. In this sense, by calling attention to Indian excesses, Pakistan garners two benefits: It gets the world to take notice of Kashmir and it makes India look like the bad guy.” Shah agrees: “The military high command’s apparent patronage of Let, JeM, etc. certainly signal its resolve to keep the pot boiling in Kashmir in the futile hope that the international community will take the bait.”

Above all, disputed political boundaries, particularly Kashmir, are not the only points of discord between India and Pakistan: as long as the concerns of the local population of Kashmir are addressed beyond New Dehli and Islamabad’s bilateral conflict, Kashmir will continue to simmer.