''The Kashmir Conundrum: Can the US Be an Honest Broker between India and Pakistan?''

"Framing" the Conflict and Dealing With It

Those of us who study conflict usually caution our students not to use the word "resolve" in relation to conflict. Conflicts, we say, cannot be resolved; they can only be "managed". So, for those seeking a resolution to this conflict, it would be wise to hasten slowly, take into account history, and consider who will be "good partners" in other world contexts. For the U.S. it is especially important to forget the Cold War alliances, where it used Pakistan to subvert and undermine the Russians in the region, and especially in Afghanistan, and look at India as the more useful, stable, and democratic partner in the region. The U.S. will have to consider the roles of Russia and China in the region, and understand, that Russia is still an infant democratic country, and China is still a manipulative and cunning Communist regime.

If the U.S. is to understand India's relationship with Pakistan it will not only have to remove its Cold War blinkers, but need an effective "theoretical framework" to understand the fractured and fractious sub-continent. I propose that a "systems" model and a co-dependency relationship framework be used to understand India's relationship with Pakistan. Many studies have shown that:

The most powerful predictor of one's conflict behavior was the partner's immediately preceding behavior. Indian reactions are based on Pakistan's actions. Like human partners who tend to mimic each other, raising their voice when the other raises his/her voice, responding to silence with silence, pushing and shoving when the other pushes and shoves, the two countries have reacted to one another in similar fashion (Cupach and Canary, 1997).
People often engage in "unwanted repeated patterns" of behavior, and these patterns are unpredictable in part because rules guiding these episodes are difficult to define. Anyone who studies marital interaction of dysfunctional couples knows that behavioral sequences are repeated over and over. It seems that the couple does not have any control over them as the same patterns of behavior re-occur. In fact, the same issues over which they have fought come up again in the next sequence of conflict, whether it be money, in-law problem, or excessive drinking. The conflict episode may begin for whatever reason but will end up with the same issue. Thus, the issue that has plagued India and Pakistan is Kashmir. However, Kashmir could be simply the external manifestation of a deeper unspoken problem. We can consider that issue later.
Dissatisfied couples are stuck in rigid patterns of negative affect (emotions). Researchindicates that satisfied couples do not reciprocate negative emotion. Thus, when a partner says something negative, the other person would avoid exchanging the insult, complaint, or show of anger. Dissatisfied couples, however, often engage in reciprocation patterns of "attack-defend" or "attack-attack" messages.

From a systems perspective, conflict requires not only that we take into account the internal "wiring" of the individuals but focus on how the dyad interacts over time. Human relationship systems can be or become dysfunctional. There are three widely recognized system dysfunctions:

Transactional redundancy occurs when there is little behavioral variation. Thus, people in dissatisfied relationships engage in negative reciprocation for long periods of time. People outside the system can see how rigid this interaction is and may attempt to offer advice. But chronic transactional redundancy makes it difficult for the couple to adjust to new information. The new information in the context of India-Pakistan relations would be the end of the Cold War, the freer and faster exchange of information through the information superhighway, the pressure groups in the U.S. now including a larger Indian-American presence, the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan and the presence of terrorists like Osama bin Laden, the Chinese fear of separatist movements within their own country, etc.
A sub-system breakdown occurs when one person in the dyad becomes inefficient, ineffective, or otherwise unable to function as a healthy individual; the other person then may try and compensate for the partner, and so may end up further affecting the balance of the system. This will be discussed under the "co-dependency" heading below.
Partners may exceed their roles in the relationship to the detriment of both parties and the system. This too is part of a co-dependency interaction pattern.

Co-dependency: Partners depend on each other for support, happiness, security, well-being, etc. But co-dependency is an unhealthy state where partners play roles and behave in a manner that undermines the relationship and harm the partners physically, emotionally, and mentally. There are numerous characteristics that determine co-dependency, and all of them are not relevant to our discussion here. Thus a strict analogy between a co-dependent couple and co-dependent nations will not hold good. India's co-dependent relationship with Pakistan was in many ways determined by Gandhi and how he related to Hindus and Muslims. Ambedkar bemoaned (Ambedkar, 1990) that Gandhi dealt with the Muslim leadership and Muslims as a loving elder brother deals with a truant younger brother. Ambedkar says that Gandhi forgave the Muslim provocateurs for their acts of violence, disparagement, and destruction. In fact, he never even reprimanded them mildly for those acts. Gandhi, however, chided and scolded Hindus, and went on fasts to expiate for the violence committed by Hindu activists, even when the violence was in response to specific acts of violence committed by Muslims. Thus Gandhi "framed" the relationship between Hindus and Muslims in such a way that it could not but end in dysfunctionality.

Kashmir - Solutions

Within the framework of "systems" and of a co-dependent relationship it is futile to seek causes for and effects of individual episodes. Trying to blame one or the other party in an ongoing relationship will not remedy the problem. So, what can be done?

First of all, it is important for India, as well as the mediators in this conflict, to explicitly recognize the "bad behavior" of Pakistan and the Pakistani-inspired violence in the Kashmir Valley perpetrated by the Sunni Muslims in the Valley. Two, bad relationships can be brought to an end, and just as individuals can and do seek a divorce or a separation, India can stop dealing with Pakistan till Pakistan changes. The change has to come from within Pakistani society, and these changes especially have to do with militant Islam, the poor state of the Pakistani economy, social changes that can be wrought through literacy and employment, and political changes through free and fair elections, and so on. Third, any "bad behavior" should be severely punished. Such punishment, without being punitive, should make Pakistan "think twice" before launching another Kargil-like expedition or the continued attempts to destabilize India by exporting violence through Kashmir and in Kashmir.

India should be able to use new information from the world that has changed and fashion new responses to the old problem. The U.S. should not be merely seen as the old protector and ally of Pakistan. The Russians and Chinese are no longer the old actors they were during the Cold War. Thus, India by playing its cards skillfully can rope in the United States, and use its help in dealing with the conflict.

Finally, we should clearly point out that the two principles of foreign policy that have guided the Western world are clearly at odds with each other. The first principle is the right to self-determination. The second principle is the sanctity of national borders. What happens to the right to self-determination, say in Kashmir, when it threatens India's borders? Self-determination, if supported blindly, will lead to the fracturing of the 185 nations that now constitute the U.N. to 5,000 ethnic nations (for there are at least 5,000 ethnic groups in the world today) in a new, bloody world disorder.

There have been a number of proposals and plans put forward by various experts for the resolution of the Kashmir problem. Not one of them is practical, achievable in the short term, or comes cheap. Article 370 that gives special status to Kashmir was the first blunder that Indian lawmakers committed. This was classic Gandhian co-dependency. "We will win them with love" India's Prime Minister Nehru thought, not realizing that neither he nor Gandhi could make Pakistan love India or the Hindu majority in India. Love cannot be bought nor forced, and Nehru should have had the plebiscite conducted immediately after it was announced, or India should have claimed Kashmir as an integral part without being hobbled by Article 370. Holding a plebiscite now, after 50 years of dithering, billions of rupees spent on Kashmir, thousands of lives lost, both Muslim and Hindu, and hundreds of thousands made homeless and refugees is a recipe for further bloodshed. Making the Line of Control the national border has been proposed as an option but nobody has considered whether the Sunni Muslim population in the Valley will buy that option.

To summarize, if the U.S. is going to help India and Pakistan construct a new relationship, it should acknowledge that the two countries are in a bad relationship. The two have to break away from the past patterns of dealing with each other. The U.S. should put its money where its mouth is, and so has to provide massive assistance to strengthen the two countries economically, socially, and politically. Economic strength and political stability are effective panaceas for many conflicts, including religion-based conflict.

The U.S. should realize that a militarily strong India is a good strategic partner in the region. India can and should use the U.S. to position itself in the South Asian region more constructively. In a recent article Jane's Defence Weekly, reported that "despite rising tensions along the Line of Control (LOC) dividing Indian- and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir; increased militancy in the Indian-controlled sector of the disputed province; and India's consistent refusal to resume talks with Pakistan, Washington is sponsoring a round of intensive secret diplomacy intended to bring Delhi, the Kashmiri militants, and Islamabad to the peace table". During his visit to India this year, President Bill Clinton showed a willingness to mediate between India and Pakistan, along with an urgent desire to see tensions reduced between the now two nuclear-armed rivals. In the past, India has vehemently rejected any outside involvement in Kashmir and has constantly maintained that the issue must be resolved bilaterally within the parameters of the Simla agreement of July 1972. However, in the wake of the emergence of a unipolar world and the internationalization of Islamic terrorism, the Indian government this time took a less rigid stance on the issue, Jane's Weekly reported.

Some claim, as does the defense weekly, that it was mainly as a result of American pressure that India refrained from escalating the Kargil crisis last summer. In return, the Indian government sought U.S. help in ending the Kargil crisis and tried to get another pay-off by trying to persuade Washington to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. According to the magazine, the following considerations have contributed to the Indian government's acceptance of American-orchestrated back-channel mediation over the Kashmir dispute: "1. The Indian defence establishment is increasingly worried about the huge amount of defence resources used up in monitoring the LOC and fighting the insurgency in Kashmir. This is affecting the modernization of India's armed forces. 2. The Indian government hopes that it might face less international pressure to cap its nuclear programme if tensions with Pakistan are reduced. 3. Delhi is using the US's mediation over Kashmir as a bargaining chip for securing American backing for a permanent Indian seat on an expanded UN Security Council. 4. The growing Indo-US understanding has created a congenial atmosphere of trust between Delhi and Washington. Sensing flexibility on the part of India, the US intensified its secret diplomacy soon after President Clinton's visit to South Asia. Its main objective is to push the Kashmiri militants, India, and Pakistan back to the negotiating table".

The White House, the Weekly claims, is being propelled in this direction by two major motivating forces: "1. The US business lobby has deep interests in the huge Indian market, and without peace in the region it will be difficult to tap its lucrative potential. 2. The US wants to curb the nuclear programmes of India and Pakistan which will be almost impossible.

While Kashmir remains at boiling point". It says that the White House is using the services of an American-Kashmiri who is constantly shuttling between Delhi and Islamabad and Washington (The said American-Kashmiri is Farooq Kathwari, the rather anti-Hindu owner of Ethan Allen Furniture).

It was against this background that the Indian government released the top All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) leaders and started preparing for talks with them. The United States is said to have instructed Pakistan not to block the possible talks or any putative peace deal between Delhi and the APHC leaders. The APHC leadership is in a state of confusion and is sharply divided over the issue of talks with the Indian government. It finds itself in a tight corner as it cannot afford to overlook the American pressures to start negotiations with Delhi nor is it prepared to negotiate with the latter within the provisions of the Indian constitution. According to the strategy, once India and the APHC work out a tentative formula to resolve the Kashmir issue, Pakistan will join the talks to find a comprehensive and lasting solution to the five-decade-old problem. The U.S. is also asking Pakistan to limit the activities of the fundamentalist and militant groups in Pakistan and reduce the scale of cross-border terrorist incidents so that direct India-Pakistan talks can be resumed in the next phase.

In the aftermath of the Kargil war, one should note the reasons for Pakistan's continued hostility towards India despite New Delhi's efforts to improve relations with it (For example, Prime Minister Vajpayee's bus trip to Lahore in 1998 to try and begin negotiations with Pakistan). Kashmir has always been a symbol, not the root cause of India-Pakistan conflict. The Pakistani President and Army Chief's recent assertion that even a settlement of the Kashmir issue will not usher in peace in the region confirms that the roots of Pakistan's hostility are in history, religion, civilization and the politics of revenge. The gulf between the two countries is too wide to be bridged in the foreseeable future without major geostrategic or radical policy changes in the region.

India sees Kashmir as an integral part of its territory, central to its civilizational identity, whose fate is inextricably linked to the secular structure of the Indian polity. Pakistan, however, sees itself as incomplete without control over the whole of the Muslim part of Kashmir. After all, its creation was solely based on religion being the basis of a nation-state. For India, religion cannot be the sole basis of a modern nation-state. For India, the real issue is the nature of the state (secular, inclusionist versus theocratic, exclusionist) and the type of society multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural in which a tolerant Islam coexists with other religions and faiths).

Thus, after the Kargil mis-adventure, Indians began to ask what the country could do to contain Pakistan and Pakistan-backed terrorists. It was felt that India had become a softer target for terrorists, and many experts urged that the war against terrorists and terrorism should continue, including Israeli-style quick and retributive action against the terrorists and their supporters who hijacked the Indian plane to Afghanistan last December.

The Israelis were quick and effective in responding to acts of terrorism. They exacted a price from those who encouraged or sheltered terrorists. Second, Indians have to decide it is time to decide. Article 370 should be scrapped. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto believed that India would not let go of Kashmir even if Indians were forced to a point of eating grass. All political parties in India concur that Kashmir is an integral part of India. So, why does India continue with Article 370? With the revocation of Article 370 the Indian government could do what the Chinese have done in Tibet: re-settle the state. More than 300,000 Hindus have been driven out of the Valley. Along with them India could re-settle three million other Indians in the Valley initially. As long as India keeps Kashmir a Muslim-majority state there will be secessionists in the Valley. There will also be poverty and backwardness in the Valley. Revoking the Article will enable Indians to own land and property in the State, and bring in much needed development. They will also provide a bulwark against terrorist activities.

Other suggestions for the Kashmiri resolution include the following, as reported in the Indian Express (May 24^th, 2000): Panun Kashmir, the organization of displaced Kashmiri pundits, favors dialogue between the Center and Kashmiri groups but wants Jammu and Kashmir divided into four parts to put an end to the "apathy" towards Kashmiri Pundits and the people from Jammu and Ladakh. It also wants the conversion of the Line of Control into an International Border. According to the organization, "Jammu will be for Dogras, Ladakh for Buddhists, part of Kashmir for Muslims while another part for Kashmiri pundits". It also wants that part of Kashmir handed over to Pundits to be given a union territory status. In a more detailed report it was stated that Agnishekhar, the convener of Panun Kashmir, said the separate homeland for the Pandits should be created in the Kashmir Valley (comprising about four percent of the area), northeast of the river Jhelum. Panun Kashmir's demand is similar to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's (RSS), the ideological parent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that Jammu and Kashmir should be divided into three parts along demographic lines. Agnishekhar said that Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which confers a special status on Jammu and Kashmir, should not be applicable to the proposed Union Territory for Kashmiri Pandits. He also criticized the recent demand of the Jammu and Kashmir government for greater autonomy for the state. Referring to the Central government's efforts to initiate a dialogue with the All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC), Agnishkehar said that his organization was not satisfied with the responses from APHC leaders, particularly with regard to the genocide of Pandits. It should be noted that the Central government has made any dialogue conditional on the APHC's readiness to talk peace under the framework of the Indian Constitution, an offer the APHC has rejected.

This is the scenario that the U.S. confronts in its attempts to bring about some kind of a rapprochement between the two nuclear-armed nations. But this is an election year, and President Clinton's power to persuade, let alone force, is limited if not minimal. Also, there are still remnants in the American military and diplomatic establishment who have a soft-corner and fondness for Pakistan. They will do their best to scuttle any attempts at bringing real pressure on Pakistan to mend its ways. However, one could note some changes even in the public airing of views during Clinton's visit to the sub-continent on Indian security needs. In a recent book (Buzan & Segal, 2000) two prominent Asian security experts had visualized the area west of India comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia emerging as a zone of chaos by 2030. The signs are already visible. The Pakistan-Afghanistan area is now the main center of Islamic fundamentalism, drug trafficking, illicit trade in small arms and international terrorism. It is time therefore for the likes of Representative David Bonior, who visited Pakistan recently to lend its leaders support, to understand what kind of game they are playing and how dangerous it is, not just for India but for the whole world. The U.S. and its political, military, and diplomatic establishments should carefully study the region's conflicts and make sure that they don't fall into the easy and old habit of Cold War maneuvering but realign their thinking to fit the realities of a multi-polar and messy world.

References

Akbar, M. J. (1985). India: The Siege within. London: Penguin Books
Ambedkar, Bhimrao. R. (1990, reprint). Pakistan or partition of India, Bombay: Government of Maharashtra Education Department
Barry Buzan, Gerry Segal. (2000). Anticipating the Future. New York: Simon and Schuster
William R. Cupach, & Daniel J. Canary, (1997). Competence in Interpersonal Conflict. New York: McGraw Hill
Koenraad Elst, (1999). Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan
"Panun Kashmir for dialogue between Centre and Kashmiri groups", Indian Express, May 24^th, 2000
Jagmohan (1992, 2^nd Edition). My frozen turbulence in Kashmir. New Delhi: Allied Publishers Ltd.
"Secret diplomacy for Kashmir deal", Jane's Defence Weekly, May 2000
Kamath, M. V. (May 25, 2000). "Will division of Kashmir solve the lingering dispute?", Free Press Journal.
Schofield, V. (1996). Kashmir in the Crossfire. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers

Related Books:

The Crisis in Kashmir : Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Woodrow Wilson Center Series) - Sumit Ganguly
India and Pakistan : The First Fifty Years (Woodrow Wilson Center Series) - Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg, Dennis Kux
India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute : On Regional Conflict and Its Resolution - Robert G. Wirsing
Kashmir in Conflict : India, Pakistan and the Unfinished War - Victoria Schofield
The Human Rights Crisis in Kashmir - Human Rights Watch Staff
The Kashmir Tangle : Issues & Options - Rajesh Kadian
Jammu and Kashmir - R. C. Dogra
India-Pakistan: The History Of Unsolved Conflicts - Lars Blinkenberg

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