Not healing anytime soon
It is no longer just the case that Pakistan has failed to highlight the present Kashmiri crisis properly before the international community. Now the outside world must also shoulder some blame for refusing to take the current Kashmiri uprising and the brutal Indian crackdown for what it is – state terrorism deployed to root out a genuine freedom movement. Granted, Pakistan has also failed to highlight the fact that the present uprising is hundred percent indigenous. India can no longer play the Pakistani proxy card in Kashmir. But the international community must also answer for its silence in the face of unrelenting Indian oppression.
It was no surprise that both Kabul and Delhi leveraged the Heart of Asia conference to badmouth Islamabad once again. It is surprising, though, that Pakistan willingly walked into this expected unpleasantness. Yet dragging Pakistan into an international conference on Afghanistan only betrayed Modi’s sense of desperation. The escalation in Kashmir is not sustainable. Modi wanted to look strong to his core constituency by using muscle in Kashmir. But once the uprising refused to die down, despite the use of pellet guns, etc, he could only use more force or lose face by backing down. Now, with more lives lost and the movement not subsiding, that question has only become more urgent.
Pakistan still seems unsure about the most practical way forward. Nobody even in the ruling party thinks anymore that the 22-envoy initiative was really a smart idea. Opening the world’s eyes on state-sponsored terrorism the like India is using in Kashmir ought to be an open-and-shut case for a government like Pakistan. Yet we are, in practical terms, not very far from where we have been for a very long time. It is clear that there is no bilateral solution to the problem on the horizon. There is no option, therefore, except rallying international pressure. Failing that, there’s no end in sight to the Kashmiri people’s problems.
