Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace by Sumantra Bose,

Harvard University Press ISBN 0674011732

In this well written and accessible book, Sumantra Bose argues that the roots of the insurgency in Kashmir lie in the repeated exclusion of the Kashmiri people from democratic politics, and that the solution to the problem lies in India’s willingness to legitimate and incorporate secessionist sentiment into the political process. Bose argues that proposed solutions in the form of a plebiscite or partition are flawed and unrealistic, and that only a comprehensive power-sharing approach drawing in all sides of the conflict—as exemplified by the peace process in Northern Ireland—can best accommodate the divergent political preferences of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. While many readers will disagree with Bose’s unsparing criticism of India’s policies in Kashmir, and his failure to consider why Pakistan’s military establishment or jihadi groups might choose to sabotage such a peace process, the book is an excellent example of how academic theorizing and first-person reportage can combine to make a compelling intellectual case.

The book consists of five chapters, with the first providing a concise overview of Kashmiri political history after 1947. The second chapter presents the author’s view that the increasing authoritarianism of Kashmir’s ruling elites in collusion with India and the systematic exclusion of the opposition from the political process, be it Sheikh Abdullah in 1953 and 1965, or the Muslim United Front (MUF) in 1987, helped destroy many Kashmiris’ faith in Indian democracy. Bose cites the well known stories of MUF candidate Yusuf Shah who after being denied an apparent victory at the polls went on to become the feared leader of the Islamist Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, while his election manager Yasin Malik became a top lieutenant in the nationalist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).

While this story of Kashmiri alienation is now relatively uncontroversial, Bose emphasizes the people’s deep dense of betrayal arguing that—unlike the residents of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir—they had high expectations of India. He writes that it was “particularly galling for them to be denied the civil liberties, democratic rights of participation and representation, and federal autonomy that by and large were respected, with imperfections, in the Indian Union”. As will soon become clear, resolving this alienation is key to Bose’s proposed solution.

In his third, and for readers perhaps his most gripping, chapter, Bose presents a detailed account of how the insurgency developed from a popular intifada phase (1990-1995) to a demoralization phase (1996-1998) and thence to the deadly fidayeen phase (1999-2002) driven by the insurgency’s “Talibanization”. As earlier, Bose uses the stories of individual militants to illustrate wider points about the insurgency and students of the conflict will find his sociological insights valuable.

The fourth chapter is dedicated to a critique of existing proposals. The author condemns the “plebiscitary” approach that originated with various United Nations resolutions and that have been embraced both by Pakistan and pro-independence Kashmiris. Apart from the infeasibility of holding such a plebiscite (or some variation) in the face of Indian opposition, the idea of a plebiscite is blind to minority preferences. In a hypothetical vote, many would expect the Kashmir valley to vote for independence, but such a vote would ignore the preferences of Hindu (Pandit) and Muslim (Gujjar and Shia) minorities. The Jammu region in turn would likely vote for union with India, but the Muslim-dominated districts of Doda, Poonch and Rajouri that have a cultural affinity with the valley might vote differently, even as mostly urban non-Muslim enclaves within these districts would rather stay with India. The point is that a plebiscite, one way or the other, would violate the will of many Kashmiris.

The problem with partition—be it a variant sponsored by the US-sponsored Kashmir Study Group or the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—is that it once again fails to address the interweaving of political preferences within the same land. Describing the multiplicity of ethnicities and faiths in Kishtwar, as an example Bose contends: “the future of Kishtwar—and of Kashmir—depends on devising a framework that can accommodate, however uneasily, the various contending preferences on sovereignty and self-determination. Plebiscitary and partitionist approaches both fundamentally violate the logic of that essential goal.” To make things worse, either of these options would risk triggering ethnic bloodletting on a Bosnian scale, dwarfing the present insurgency.

Bose somewhat oddly clubs India’s preferred option of converting the existing line-of-control (LoC) into an international border with partitionist solutions, noting that this option fails to address the core problem of the “existence of large numbers of citizens who do not accept the legitimacy of Indian sovereignty over their lives and land.” This may be true, but the “LoC as border” seems not to suffer from the pitfalls of partition theory and also appears consistent with Bose’s own framework, as we will see.

Since neither of these approaches seems workable, what is the answer? Recall Bose’s contention that the roots of the insurgency lie in the purposeful stifling of opposition politics by the Indian state since the 1950s in collusion with local client elites. He points to the increased participation by many Kashmiris in the October 2002 elections as suggestive that secessionists are willing to experiment with Indian democracy one more time, but remain reluctant to abandon their sentimental attachment to azaadi. It was this gray zone that the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) successfully wooed in that election, although Bose cites evidence to show that much of the voting was tactical—to defeat the incumbent National Conference—rather than symbolic of an embrace of India.

Bose points to the power-sharing regime of Northern Ireland as a model, in which Protestant and Catholic parties have overcome serious obstacles to participate in a transitional government. Three elements of that process stand out: (1) legitimation of both Unionist (pro-British) and Nationalist (pro-Irish) identities, and their accommodation in an institutional framework; (2) acceptance of a cross-border component with the establishment of a North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC) consisting of Irish and Northern Irish officials to regulate mostly local-level policies concerning the Irish island as a unit; and (3) a forum chaired by the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland to give the Republic of Ireland a consultative role in higher-level policymaking concerning Northern Ireland in higher level areas that have not been devolved to the NSMC.

Following this model, Bose calls for Parliament to approve the formation of a “broadly based, power-sharing transitional government including representatives from each of the three basic political segments of (the state’s) population and all regions, ethnicities and faiths.” Bose argues that secessionist forces should be treated as legitimate actors, and that the government’s attempts to divide the All Party Hurriyat Conference, the Hurriyat, will produce failure by repeating the decades-long “twin tactics of co-optation of those willing to play the game and repression of the rest.” To deal with what he terms the “matryoshka doll complexity” of political allegiances, Bose also calls for a multi-tiered devolution to deal with intra-regional differences such as “those between the Jammu region’s three Hindu-majority and three Muslim-majority districts, and those between the Muslim-dominated Kargil and Buddhist-dominated Leh districts of Ladakh”, suggesting that the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council formed in 1995 is one model. While he acknowledges that the relationship between India and Pakistan is more complicated than that between Ireland and the United Kingdom, Bose suggests that a permanent India-Pakistan intergovernmental council with senior representation be established to institutionalize the dialogue promised in the 1972 Simla Agreement and the 1999 Lahore Declaration.

The argument that Kashmiri Muslim alienation has contributed to the current mess is reasonable. To suggest that India might, in retrospect, have attempted to co-opt rather than coerce secessionist elites also seems fair. But Bose does us a disservice by neglecting the very real conflicts within Pakistan over Kashmir policy, and the track record of at least some factions in the Pakistan Army and jihadi groups to sabotage talks between moderate secessionists and the Indian government. While India might be criticized for its glacial approach towards peace talks, Prime Minister Vajpayee has clearly brought the major political groups on board and the chief opposition party—the Congress—is an active participant in this process as the PDP’s coalition partner. While Pakistan’s civilian leaders appear genuinely keen on negotiations, the army and its jihadi allies have time and again acted as spoilers, be it with the 1999 Kargil misadventure or by aborting the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen ceasefire in the summer of 2000 or by killing moderate leaders like Abdul Ghani Lone of the People’s Conference and the Hizb’s own Abdul Majid Dar. President Parvez Musharraf’s true preferences remain a mystery, given his erratic swings from conciliatory to hard-line rhetoric.

On the positive side, the evidence shows that even the hard-line Jaish-e-Muhammad—that organized the 13 December 2001 attack on Parliament—has a moderate wing, since the intelligence that helped Indian security forces locate and kill its Kashmir leader Gazi Baba and his deputy Ansaar appears to have emanated from within the organization. The July visit to India of Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the leader of Pakistan’s Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Pakistan, demonstrated that not all jihadis are averse to a peace process (if only to avoid a two-front confrontation with India and the United States). But the point remains that even if India chose to implement every element of the “Bose plan”, his analysis suffers from this weakness. While the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement contributed to the 1998 Good Friday agreements, a similar India-Pakistan rapprochement would be the goal, not the cause, of a peace settlement. To be fair, Bose acknowledges Pakistan’s past disruptive role, but does not explain why its behavior will be different in future.

What about the idea of a power-sharing government? Power-sharing agreements have been successful in getting warring sides to come to the table by giving everyone a stake in the system, but have done little to promote peace and reconciliation. Rigid quotas are by definition undemocratic and work to reinforce communal identities (political scientist Donald Horowitz has called this the “frozen quota pitfall”), negating the very patchwork of allegiances that Bose identifies as central to Kashmiri identity. For peace and reconciliation to work, new coalitions and identities must be allowed to emerge: A hypothetical power-sharing arrangement after the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen ceasefire in 2000 would certainly have excluded such an ambiguous force as the PDP, and prevented it from building a coalition between pro-independence and pro-Indian Kashmiris. If secessionists wish to demonstrate their power, they should do so via the ballot. Bose’s prescription ironically neglects the forces that produced the PDP, even though his narrative is in many ways close to the PDP’s view of the conflict.

Bose is arguably correct that the Indian state could go further in wooing ardent secessionists such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, and offering more creative forms of devolution (although unlike Britain, India is constitutionally constrained from explicitly legitimizing secessionism). Note that Bose’s prescription is consistent with the LoC-as-border option, and that the PDP has advocated cross-border links as well. But while the Indian state has cautiously embarked on the road to talks, Pakistan’s real commitment remains unclear. Time will tell.

There is little doubt that Bose has written the clearest and most appealing presentation of the liberal perspective on Kashmir. Provided that the author’s personal preferences are kept in mind, this book can serve as a good introductory text, given the writing quality and the engaging manner in which the author blends personal narrative with academic analysis. The flaws described above are serious, but the book is worthy of consideration in the debate over Kashmir’s future.

A. Dubey