Kashmir for the last four years has been, politically speaking, a grim place. The reciprocal Delhi-Kashmir antagonism, the acquisitive Delhi-Islamabad rivalry and the brutally muscular display of state power has defined the atmospherics.
For a while the shrill BJP confidence after the 2014 general elections enamored both domestic and world audiences, as promises to alleviate poverty raised expectations internally and bluster was mistaken for confidence internationally. Four years later, the miseries of the farmer and the unemployed, an emboldened politics of polarization and a confused foreign policy have resulted in probing questions about India’s hurtle towards authoritarian rule and majoritarian domination.
The down swing in India’s self-image and global doubt has not gone unnoticed in Kashmir, where India-watching is a serious and sophisticated activity. There is a sense here that the political direction of the central Government of India is on the wrong side of history, even if the how and why is not always articulated. But, to put it succinctly, the government of India’s relentless drive towards a homogenous polity internally and a hegemonic regional power externally are overly ambitious goals if history is a key.
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A broad-spectrum explanation of this assertion would be as follows.
We have come full circle from 1947, when the current dispute over the State of J&K was born. The British withdrawal from South Asia coincided with the collapse of the Western colonial regimes between 1945 and the 1960s. The failure of large political entities – empires like the British, French, Portuguese, Italian and others – were the latest in a cycle that had started three decades earlier with the breakup of the Qing, Russian and Ottoman expansionist great states. This folding of the colonial empires gave way to an international world order that we came to know as “the Cold War regime”. India was drawn into its orbit, and the State of J&K was the cause. Nehru reneged on his pledge of a referendum in the state after the Soviet Union endorsed India’s claim to the state in the mid-1950s. So Delhi opted for an alliance with Moscow despite its claims to leadership in the so-called Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Soviet veto power to favor its case for possession of J&K became the bedrock of its foreign policy.
By 1971, Delhi sensed it no longer needed overt Soviet protection. Thanks to its role in the creation of Bangladesh that year, India’s military prowess was less questionable. A year later the dispute over J&K was portrayed as a “bilateral issue”. In other words, the Cold War world order made Kashmir puzzle less of a geopolitical discourse, more one of territorial and ideological battles between the allies of the two super-powers. At the 1972 “Simla Agreement” negotiations, a confident India sought to take the dispute over the State of J&K out of the Cold War, and so international, paradigm.
But then the bipolar world regime itself was suddenly dismantled in 1990-91. We were told that we were in the age of a unipolar world. Everything pointed to the victory of the west inspired “liberal” world order. Its immediate effects were felt in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Central Asia. It had implications for the State of J&K but, given that the fresh global disorder was concentrated in central Europe and the breakdown of larger states caused panic among the status quoist ones. So the Kashmir conundrum escaped remedial action, even if it continued to gnaw at stability in South Asia.
Empires, as Eqbal Ahmed has told us, need enemies. So, after the defeat of the “evil [communist] empire”, the west latched on to Islam (later modified to mean “radical” or “fundamentalist” Islam, as the new enemy. But it proved to be a complicated adversary, because it was not the assumed monotoned cultural entity that could be labeled a monolithic opposition.
Simultaneously, globalization of political economy was theorized as the victory of western ideas of polity and announced as the “The End of History and the Last Man Standing”, with the celebration of Francis Fukuyama’s essay (1989) and later book (1992) of that title. But it proved a complex proposition, as rebellions asserting history and against homogenization sprang up across the globe. Two other elements in the mix of the search for a “new world order” were the discovery of vast reservoirs of energy in Central Asia and the rapid rise of China. Largely without comment, geography and political interests converged along the seam of Central Eurasian and South Asian landmasses. The presumed “unipolar” world became too simplistic a prediction. Today, almost three decades later, the search continues for a “new world order”, with Washington and Beijing as the protagonists. Sound familiar?
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So, what does all this mean for the dispute over the State of J&K? Even a cursory glance at the map is enough to illustrate how the trilateral dispute has worked itself back to being a geopolitical issue. China’s increasing footprint in South Asia (thanks to China’s takeover of Tibet, a dysfunctional South Asian theatre of political economy and U.S. overreach in Afghanistan-Pakistan) is a development that Kashmiris watch with interest. There is also a perception that the Sino-Indian rivalry threatens to become a pan-Himalayan (remember Doklam) conflict zone from Arunachal Pradesh in the east to the divided State of J&K (with Gilgit, Baltistan and Ladakh in the forefront) in the west.
Call me “Kashmir-centric”, but it seems to me that the sooner the dispute over the State of J&K and the Sino-Indian boundary quarrels along the Kunlun-Karakorum-Himalayan massif get resolved, the sooner the world can breathe easier about a region where three nuclear-armed states converge with growing contention and hostility over a virtual cornucopia of languages, ethnicities and cultures with very strong survival instincts.
In the language of globalization, this ought to transform the dispute over the State of J&K from being a territorial rivalry in the India – Pakistan paradigm to being the start of a Himalayan zone of cooperation, with economic benefits for borderland dwellers between Eurasia and South Asia. It is how the millennium-old interactive relationships have defined the boundary between Eurasia and South Asia. Primarily not as a territorial and political one but a geo-economic and geo-cultural one.
In economic terms, it means we must recall that the markets of Kashmir and Kashgar were linked for centuries and that re-establishing those linkages will be a boon for their peoples, not a threat to the status quo states. In the more “palatable” language of culture, we must recall that the clay oven-baked meat-filled delicacy called “samso” in Bukhara traveled to Ladakh and Baltistan as “samsa”, was reborn in Srinagar’s Yarkendi Sarai as “samso”, and became the grandparent of the deep-fried and ubiquitous vegetal “samosa” of South Asia.