If there is anything more pointless than dialoguing with an unreformed and unreconstructed Pakistan, it is to dialogue with Pakistan's agents and puppets in Jammu & Kashmir—the separatist agglomeration which operates under the label of All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC). Formed in the early 1990s on the direction of their Pakistani masters to emerge as the political face of the Islamist insurgency that Pakistan was supporting, sponsoring and spawning, the Hurriyat has always functioned as Pakistan's proxies in Jammu & Kashmir. It’s nothing short of self-deception for anyone in either Delhi or Srinagar to imagine that these characters can become partners in a serious and sincere political dialogue in Kashmir.
What India needs desperately is not a dialogue with the Hurriyat; rather what it needs is hurriyat from the Hurriyat. But if reports and remarks of officials and separatists are anything to go by, it appears as though a move is afoot to pull the Hurriyat out of the hole it finds itself in, resurrect it and bring it back to the centre-stage of politics in Jammu & Kashmir. If indeed this is the game-plan, then it’s clear that this plan has disaster and failure written all over it. Worse, it will undo whatever good the Modi government had started doing in terms of dismantling the ecosystem that sustained the separatists, enriched them and incentivised them to continue with their anti-India agenda.
There is absolutely no evidence that the Hurriyat has severed its links with Pakistan. Nor is there anything to suggest that the Hurriyat leadership has renounced separatism and denounced terrorism. Without either of these prerequisites, what purpose will be served by engaging the Hurriyat? The only reason why the Hurriyat lot has expressed its willingness to give a positive response if talks are initiated by the Centre is because it has started feeling the pinch. Otherwise it was this same Hurriyat that, not too long ago, arrogantly turned awayfrom its doorstep an all-party delegation which included Union ministers.
So what has changed?
One, the Hurriyat is fast becoming irrelevant to the situation in Kashmir. Most of these characters were never more than mohalla level leaders. But over time, the foolishness of the media, and the stupidity of the spooks who tended to give these guys more importance than they deserved, catapulted them onto the centre-stage of Kashmir’s politics. But in the last decade or so, the Hurriyat is once again plumbing the depths of irrelevance. They still serve as figureheads and their masters still use the Hurriyat to shut down Kashmir. But the fact is that the Hurriyat neither controls the street anymore nor do they control the guns. As such, they politically pull virtually no weight. By agreeing to talks with the Centre, the Hurriyat thinks it can regain its past notoriety and nuisance value.
Two, right from 2014 when Modi came to power, his security establishment was quite clear that the Hurriyat was a dead horse. That is why within the first month the government puts its foot down and called off the talks with Pakistan because the then High Commissioner of Pakistan had invited the APHC for consultations on the eve of talks between the two countries. But later there was a bit of a flip-flop on the Hurriyat issue. Efforts were made post Burhan Wani to reach out to the Hurriyat. But with Kashmir once again in flames, the Hurriyat thought they could rebuff the overtures from Delhi. Since then, the shoe is on the other foot.
In the last two years of Modi Season 1—and even more after the collapse of the PDP-BJP coalition—the Centre has started a crackdown in Kashmir, one that isn’t limited to just the kinetic operations against terrorists, but even more on dismantling the ecosystem of separatism. The focus is no longer only on the weapons of terrorism but also on the money-laundering networks that fuel terrorism and separatism. But this is still a work-in-progress and a lot more needs to be done to deny the conflict entrepreneurs in Kashmir the fruits of their dirty money. The myopic and brainless strategy of “buying out” the support of Kashmiris has clearly failed. And the Modi government seems to have understood the simple fact that instead of incentivising separatism and making terrorism lucrative, what was needed was to visit the wrath of the state on these conflict entrepreneurs—businessmen, journalists, lawyers, politicians, civil servants, clerics, you name it—and reduce them to penury.
With the noose tightening with the NIA raids on the financial networks and money-laundering syndicates that fuel the fires of separatism and terrorism, the Hurriyat would be hoping that if it enters into a dialogue, even if it is desultory, it will be able to win some relief. After all, if the Centre starts engaging with the Hurriyat, then it is a legitimate expectation that there will be an easing up of the pressure. The Hurriyat guys would have been praying hard for Modi to lose the 2019 general election because the Opposition parties would have once again bent over backward to accommodate and appease the Hurriyat and other separatists. This much was clear from the Congress manifesto or from the Mamata Banerjee’s utterances on the issue.
Alas, this didn’t happen and Modi swept the elections. This means that for the next five years—possibly even longer, given the state of disarray in the Opposition—there is only Modi (and now Amit Shah) to deal with. The Hurriyat fears that the Modi-Shah duo will probably not adopt the namby-pamby approach of the past, and therefore there is some urgency to try and carve out some space.
But it is not just the Hurriyat. Even their masters across the Line of Control would feel that some kind of a dialogue with the Hurriyat would ultimately pave the way for a dialogue with Pakistan, which in turn would reduce the pressure on them. It is inconceivable that the Hurriyat would even move an inch without a nod from their puppeteers in Pakistan. In the inimitable words of Governor Satyapal Malik, “The Hurriyat don't even go to the toilet without seeking permission from Pakistan”. The Pakistanis also know that despite all their efforts to internationalise the Kashmir issue, there is virtually no interest in the international community to intervene and interfere in this issue. Even the “fallacious, tendentious and motivated” report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on “The human rights situation in Kashmir” has got not resonance. In this situation, Pakistan feels that a dialogue at any level will open up opportunities to gradually bring Kashmir once again on the international agenda.
The thing is that even if the Hurriyat come on to the table, they have neither the political capital nor the will to engage in a serious dialogue. Every Hurriyat leader knows that the moment he tries to put the interests of Kashmiris above the interests of Pakistan, he is killed. The Mirwaiz’s father, Abdul Ghani Lone, Abdul Ghani Bhat’s brother, Fazal Haq Qureshi, it’s a long list of people who were done down by the Pakistanis the moment they were seen to be taking an independent line. The Mirwaiz himself is known to be petrified of the Pakistanis and is unlikely to take a single significant initiative without first getting an endorsement from his masters in the GHQ, Rawalpindi and Aabpara, Islamabad.
For close to three decades, Delhi has on and off tried to woo the Hurriyat and mainstream it. Not only has a very benign view been taken of their links with the Pakistanis and jihadists, they have in fact been given security by the Indian state. What is more, despite knowing about their dodgy finances, the government has turned a blind eye in the hope that this bunch will see the error of their ways and re-join the political mainstream. In all these years, all these efforts have absolutely nothing to show for them. So what makes officials and politicians think that this time will be different, when on the face of it nothing has changed.
One explanation is that Delhi feels that it needs a new political initiative in the state. The last experiment to throw up a political alternative to the National Conference turned out to be a disaster. The PDP, especially under Mehbooba Mufti and her uncles, has belied every hope that had been behind support for this party. In some ways, the PDP is even worse than the Hurriyat because it pretends to be a mainstream party but has been damaging the Indian state from within. The Hurriyat at least is honest about where it stands. Not so the PDP, whose top leaders often mock the pro-India element by asking them when they will get “azadi”. If now the dice is being rolled on getting a PDP+ type of pro-separatist entity into mainstream politics, then clearly the people making this policy have lost the plot.
Instead of trying to rope in the Hurriyat, the need of the hour is to side-line it and make it irrelevant. The government needs to double down on the clean up operations—both kinetic and non-kinetic—to demolish the infrastructure of separatism and terrorism. Of course, this is not going to happen overnight. If anything, fixing Kashmir will take the better part of the next 10 years, maybe even 20. But unless this surgery is done, the cancer of separatism will keep relapsing in ever more virulent forms. Instead of political engineering by spooks who write tell-all books and are no wiser today than when they were in charge and botched things up, it is better to create conditions in which the polity of Kashmir throws up its own leaders.
But these conditions have to be such that they strongly disincentivise separatism, strengthen the voices that stand with India and destroy the jihadist elements with the full might of the Indian state. Talking to the Hurriyat is simply the worst thing that the government can do at this stage.
This commentary originally appeared in Newslaundry.
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