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Provocation and Pacifism

Kashmir Times. Dated: 2/17/2017 11:57:42 PM

Chidambaram may be guilty of mishandling Kashmir as home minister but that should be no reason to disregard his saner words

Both the provocative utterances of the Army chief Bipin Rawat with respect to Kashmir's stone pelting mobs and the pacifism of Congress leader P. Chidambaram necessitate an honest inquiry. The former union home minister has hit the nail on the head by calling the General's remarks as 'intemperate' and has favoured a political resolution of the Kashmir issue. The remarks have been inspired by the recent encounters in the Valley in which besides army, the security personnel and the civilians have inflicted heavy casualties. While villagers in Kulgam's Frisal alleged on Sunday that a civilian killed in Sunday's encounter was used as a human shield by the security forces, the latter has averred that combat operations have become extremely difficult in view of the hostile climate created by the protesting local population during encounters. They alleged that the protests are designed to allow the militants to escape. Both allegations require a probe and introspection. The hostility of the local population is much on expected lines, given the recent history of repression and gross violation of human rights in an area where a pending and prolonged political dispute had already made the people edgy. The Army chief has stirred a hornet's nest by threatening to treat protesting crowds as over-ground workers of the militants without even introspecting on what prompts people to come out on the roads in protest against the security personnel or what inspires them to sympathise with the militants or in cases support them. The general's remarks embellished with the jargon of 'anti-national' are indeed fraught with the dangers of being interpreted in various ways and thus exacerbating the levels of gross abuse by the security personnel operating on the ground. Besides, they have the potential of further enraging the population of the Valley.
In response to this extreme provocation, the words of pacifism have surprisingly come from the former union home minister who may need to do a bit of explaining on his government's own poor track record with respect to Kashmir. The genesis of the fresh wave of militancy in Kashmir lies in the poor handling of the unrest of 2008 and 2010 when he was the home minister as well as Afzal Guru hanging, which too happened during the tenure of Congress led UPA government, when he was the finance minister. Chidambaram has spoken about renewing political processes during Vajpayee's and Manmohan Singh's regimes. It would be important to ask why these were abandoned and why this belated wisdom of simply military strategies being the flawed approach to resolving Kashmir comes at a time when Congress is sitting in opposition. The former minister and his party can be absolved of accentuating the Kashmir conflict. However, the inability of the Congress to continue with mechanisms of politically engaging with people of Kashmir cannot be used to trivialize the flaws of the present Modi led BJP government with respect to handling of Kashmir issue. The present government has broken all previous records of complacency, apathy and mishandling of Kashmir with its complete refusal to engage with Kashmiris, by foolishly invoking the 'anti-national' paradigm on every small thing under the sun and by criminalising all voices in and outside Kashmir concerned about human rights situation in Kashmir. Successive governments in New Delhi in the past have functioned with hypocrisy and ambiguity with respect to Kashmir, revealing the lack of political will. The present one stands out for its brazen and open contempt for Kashmiris and goes beyond that in denigrating civil society initiatives instead of backing them. Chidambaram, thus, rightly digs holes in the army chief's immature and provocative remarks and dubbed it as a wrong approach to the Kashmir problem. Without mincing words, he said, "It is a political problem which needs a political solution and a political reach out. I am worried and I request the government to halt this approach and adopt a different one. More infiltration and more encounters are taking place in the state and things are getting very bad." Chidambaram may not be above the board himself. He was the man who called the stone pelters in 2010 as Lashkar agents and set the tone of a policy that is being further strengthened in its belligerence by the present government. That, however, should not be a reason for ignoring the saner worth of his words in response to the Army Chief's reckless belligerence. What Chidambaram says today should not be ignored because of his earlier hypocrisy and mistakes. His words need to be taken seriously. The key to the way forward lies more or less in that.