[The News International, March 26, 2005]
MARCHING TO PEACE
New citizens' initiatives are afoot, which could significantly boost the India-Pakistan peace process
by Praful Bidwai
The past ten days have witnessed two events that could significantly transform the shape of the India-Pakistan peace process. The first was the inauguration in New Delhi on March 17 of an exhibition based on the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front's leader Mohammad Yasin Malik's two years-long campaign to demand the inclusion of the Kashmiri people in the India-Pakistan dialogue.
And the second was the flagging off on Wednesday of a citizens' joint march from Delhi to Multan to highlight the case for peace and celebrate the composite culture that India and Pakistan share via the Sufi tradition. The march retraces Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia's journey circa 1257 from Delhi to Ajodhan and Multan to meet Baba Farid, the great Sufi saint-poet.
Both events have the potential to galvanise public opinion. At stake here is not just a limited concept of peace as the absence of war, but a durable peace based on a meeting of minds. The two developments must be welcomed without reservation.
Yasin Malik did something unusual, indeed unique, when he began a walking tour of major towns and some 5,000 villages in Indian Kashmir, with a one-point agenda: a signature campaign. The one-line statement demanded that "we, the Kashmiri people" must be seriously involved in the India-Pakistan dialogue, purportedly undertaken to resolve all disputes, including Kashmir.
Malik has collected some 1.5 million signatures or thumb impressions of people, with names and addresses -- something completely unprecedented in the state, which has long suffered a compression and distortion of the political process under the rule of the gun.
Malik's march, which covered all three regions of J&K, barring the districts which he wasn't allowed to visit for security-related reasons (like Uri and Poonch), succeeded in putting a positive agenda before the people, one that counters the negation-driven slogans that have dominated the Kashmir Valley for 15 years amidst violence both of the state and separatist jehadi militants once supported by Pakistan.
The affirmation of a Kashmiri identity cutting across religious, regional and ethnic divides is itself welcome. Even more welcome is the language of peace and the Gandhian mould of activism in which the march is embedded. However, two things impart Yasin Malik's initiative a very special significance. It comes just when India and Pakistan have for the first time ever seriously pledged themselves to discussing the Kashmir issue.
There is a sweet irony about the nature of this bilateral dialogue. The more progress India and Pakistan make in the dialogue, the weightier will the case become for taking the process beyond the bilateral framework! The absurdity of resolving the Kashmir issue without consultation with and participation of the Kashmiri people will become increasingly evident.
Democratic principle, as well as elementary requirements of fairness and justice --namely, voice and representation -- dictate that the Kashmiri people must be involved at some point of time in a discussion of their fate.
Yasin Malik, a former militant who announced a unilateral ceasefire a decade ago when the JKLF was being targeted by all other armed groups and state agencies, has had the foresight to see that the ground for the Kashmiri people's involvement must be prepared right now. The Kashmiris must assert themselves and start thinking creatively about a just and peaceful solution to the issue over which two and a half wars have been fought -- in their name. Only then will some imaginative solutions emerge, as well as rudimentary structures and forms of association, through which their involvement could be brought about.
The second worthy aspect of Malik's overall initiative is that it's not confined to Kashmir, although the march itself was. Rather, he wants to take the Kashmiri people's message to the Indian and Pakistani publics and policy-makers.
The two-day exhibition in Delhi was only the first step in the larger process. It was nevertheless important. Malik's audience included Pakistan's High Commissioner and his deputy, as well as a former Indian foreign secretary, numerous political leaders, civil society activists and intellectuals. The gathering also included P.N. Dhar, former top-ranking civil servant and Indira Gandhi's aide during the Shimla conference of 1972.
Malik's exhibition, and the activities organised around it, mark a major step forward in the growing, empathetic, interaction between Kashmiri civil society and political groups, and their counterparts in the rest of India.
This conversation is relatively recent. But its importance cannot be overemphasised. Nothing like it existed during the worst phase of violence in Kashmir, or even until a couple of years ago, when the first signs of a thaw appeared. Rather, mutual apathy, and even suspicion, dominated such limited civil society interaction as existed. The process must be extended to the rest of India and to Pakistan as well.
The effects of this new interaction are already becoming evident at the political level, with their focus on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus. While conservatives within the National Conference, led by Farooq Abdullah, have joined hands with the BJP in voicing reservations over the bus, the majority strongly roots for it.
Omar Abdullah, refuting his father, demands that India and Pakistan "should do a lot more to sustain the goodwill and the 'feel-good' atmosphere" the trans-LoC bus has generated: "It needs to be a big bus and a daily service. Travellers should not switch the buses and cross the LoC on foot. A big concrete bridge should be constructed ...let them ply a fortnightly service for six months but for God's sake, let them make a commitment of making it a daily-service, or otherwise it will boomerang."
The Delhi-Multan peace march is an excellent idea. But its success will depend on whether the two governments cooperate by granting visas to the marchers. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz recently received a delegation of them and offered to be generous in granting visas to the Indian contingent.
At the time of writing, New Delhi had still not acted on its promise to give visas to the proposed 40-strong Pakistani contingent. (Three of them are in Delhi: A.H. Nayyar, physicist, peace activist and able dissector of prejudice in Pakistani school textbooks, Irfan Mufti, and Muqtida Ali Khan.)
The Indian side is led by Sandeep Pandey, a Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace activist, who was awarded the Magsaysay prize (which he returned). In 1999, Pandey led a peace march from Pokharan to Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh, where the Buddha delivered his first peace sermon.
The Delhi-Multan marchers are inspired by the Sufi tradition stretching from Bulley Shah, through Amir Khusro, to Kabir and Guru Nanak, as well as more contemporary figures in Hindustani/Urdu literature like Ghalib, Faiz, Krishan Chander, Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and Ahmad Faraz. The emphasis in the marchers' message is not just on ridding the subcontinent of nuclear weapons and militarism, but on a meeting of minds through a celebration of our common culture and heritage.
It is no coincidence that the march began on Pakistan Day (also Bhagat Singh's death anniversary) and ends on the anniversary of the first Pokharan tests seven years ago. The Indian government must not drag its feet on visas. It will earn goodwill by showing exemplary broad-mindedness and generosity.
