By Abanti Bhattacharya
Separating Kashmir from Pakistani relations could help solve India’s sovereignty problem.
The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cancellation of ministerial level talks with Pakistan this week has drawn wide criticism and is being seen as inept and short-sighted. The majority of the criticism is focused on the impact that it would have on the Kashmir issue. While indeed this issue is a primary irritant in Indo-Pakistani relations, and cancellation of the talks would certainly not sit well with either the Pakistani establishment or separatists groups, Modi’s decision to cancel the meeting is essentially a signal to Pakistan that India is not going to play by Islamabad’s rules any longer.
Pakistan has indelibly impaired India’s national security, not simply by supporting and sponsoring cross border terrorism, but also by openly colluding with separatists flouting India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. In other words, while the Pakistani military has been condoning a low intensity conflict with India, its government is engaged in separatism in Kashmir. What Modi essentially did was to end the tripartite nature of the Kashmir issue, which hitherto defined the otherwise bilateral relations between India and Pakistan.
By involving the Hurriyat group, the earlier UPA government essentially included the Kashmiris as a third party to the question of Kashmir. This has ominous security implications for India. For one, it legitimated not only the separatists’ role in the decision-making process, but more importantly extolled separatism in the narrative of the nation. Second, it emboldened the Pakistani government to openly challenge India’s national integrity. Third, it has convinced the Kashmiris that their problems cannot be solved by their government but by outside forces, thus distorting the Kashmir issue itself. Under the patronage of Pakistan, the Kashmir problem, which hitherto was a governance problem, soon metamorphosed into an identity issue and coalesced into a separatist movement. After which those Kashmiri leaders who dared to discuss the Kashmir issue within India were assassinated, in attacks linked to Pakistan. It is no wonder that a solution on the Kashmir issue remains elusive.
Read the full story at The Diplomat