State of the "peace" process

Kashmir settlement nowhere in sight, says USIP study

Washington: A new US study has expressed doubts about a settlement of the Kashmir dispute in the near future.

According to a special report issued by the US Institute of Peace (USIP), which is based on the findings of a roundtable of South Asia experts, while there are tangible grounds for optimism, there are “equally compelling reasons” that a settlement of the Kashmir issue is not close at hand. The most fundamental reason for this lack of optimism is the “inherent asymmetry of desired objectives with respect to the disposition of Kashmir.” India wishes to engage Pakistan to legitimise the territorial status quo by finding some means of formalising the Line of Control as the legal international border, whereas Pakistan seeks to engage India to find some means of altering, in various ways, the status quo and publicly rejects the possibility of transforming the LoC into an international border as a viable means of dispute resolution.

The USIP study found that the internal constraints of both countries also do not bode well for a fundamentally new approach to resolving their conflict. The political and security dynamic in Pakistan is “not comforting” and even if India were to accommodate Pakistan’s demand on “process,” it is far from obvious that Islamabad will be capable of packaging this and marketing it to its citizens and other stakeholders, such as the army, as a form of “progress” of the country’s core concerns. The study took the position that a resolution of the Kashmir issue means that Pakistan’s extensive and “formidable militant infrastructure” will have to be dismantled.

According to this analysis, India too has a number of domestic compulsions of its own. It is a vibrant, if imperfect, democracy and reaching a consensus on contentious issues such as relations with Pakistan, can be even more of a challenge to its diverse and active polity. “Since the Kargil crisis and the ongoing attacks within Indian-administered Kashmir and within India proper, many Indians have grown weary of Pakistan’s tactics.

Hardliners felt that they should not have to reward Pakistan for ceasing activities that Islamabad should not have started in the first place. The results of India’s April-May 2004 general elections have also added an additional layer of uncertainty to this analysis: the electorate dismissed the Bharitya Janata Party that spearheaded the recent peace overture. Although the new Congress Party government affirmed its commitment to the peace process, it is far from certain that it has the domestic clout to continue the engagement.”

The study, taking history as its guide, took the view that the likelihood of the present peace process breaking down is high and the probability of a meaningful breakthrough is quite slim. The South Asia experts assembled by the USIP agreed that the outcome of the present round of engagement ultimately will turn on the understanding held by New Delhi and by Islamabad on the core issues of the engagement and the concomitant progress made on each. Many of them felt that while a breakthrough was unlikely, a breakdown of the kind witnessed after the 1999 Lahore Declaration was not on the cards either. The bottom line of their exchanges was that a “stalemate” is the most likely outcome of the current engagement process.

Those who took part in the roundtable were Stephen Cohen, Dennis Kux, Ms Teresita Schaffer, Marvin Weinbaum, Ashley Tellis, Shahid Javed Burki and Husain Haqqani. khalid hasan