No permanent aman

The ground is being meticulously prepared to take us up the garden path on Kashmir. No good can come of stupidity, but that is where we are being led by the US, our own government and some media groups that think this is the way to build Indo-Pak friendship.

We are told that peace will be facilitated by increased people-to-people interactions. The argument is beguiling. Look, they are simple ghazal-loving, pan-chewing people like us. Indians are always treated like royalty when we visit friends in Pakistan. So let’s ignore the warmongers in our two countries who want us to remain in a permanent state of tension and talk peace.

The truth is different. The constituency for peace has always been larger in India than in Pakistan. We just want to forget about Pakistan and get on with life. This is exactly what Pakistan’s mullahs and powers-that-be are counting on. And this is why we should be wary of falling into the trap. We refuse to learn from history.

If Pakistan is talking about the possibility of peace, there is only one reason: it is under intense international pressure. It needs the breather of talks to recoup its strength before launching its next covert war against India. With Obama focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan being armtwisted to fight its own creation, the Taliban, the country is squirming. It needs time to rethink its war strategy with India which has Kashmir as the key goal. The other player in this game — the US — is backing Pakistan on talks for its own reasons. Obama wants to score some gains in Afghanistan in the shortest possible time. He has willy-nilly bought the Pakistani argument that India needs to make concessions on Kashmir if it is to help the US tackle the Taliban. This is a bogus argument.

Pakistan calculates that if we refuse to talk, it need not do much about the Taliban, because it can claim tension on its eastern border. If we do talk, Pakistan presumes we will have to give in somewhere. It’s win-win for Pakistan, lose-lose for us.

Peacemongers in India need to remember one basic thing: Pakistan is 10 times as motivated on Kashmir than India. This makes it a dangerous peace partner. We need to ask ourselves why we think Pakistan will ever accept status quo on Kashmir now when it has not done so for 63 years? Even in 1971-72, when a defeated Pakistan had every reason to accept peace on our terms, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto did not give in on Kashmir. The Shimla accord was dead the minute 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war left Indian soil. Even after Pokharan-2, when a ground war should have been unthinkable, Pakistan risked one at Kargil.

We should by now have understood that Pakistan will do anything to gain Kashmir, and so peace talks are just a ruse. This does not mean we shouldn’t hold talks — the atmospherics of peace are important to cater to world opinion — but we should always be prepared for the next round of Pakistani perfidy. Strategically, our goal should be to keep Pakistan off-balance permanently to have at least half-peace.

To have a durable peace, our focus must be different. We have to defeat the idea of Pakistan. The idea of Pakistan is that Muslims cannot live in a secular society, and that wherever there is a Muslim majority, as in Kashmir, that state must be Islamic. India is built on the opposite premise. When ideologies are in conflict, only the better one should win. The problem of Kashmir is not territorial, but ideological. Kashmiri separatism is one of a piece with bigoted thinking, which is why the Pandits have been driven out through a process of ethnic cleansing. The logic is clear: once the Pandits are out of the way, the cry of azadi will never be challenged, and the whole battle will be posed as one between Hindu India and Muslim Kashmir.

To say that false ideologies must be defeated is not the same as a call to war. Nor is it a call against the people of Pakistan, or even a call to dismember it. But the war against regressive ideologies must be won decisively if the world is to become a saner place.

There can be no permanent aman with a state built on wrong ideas. We have to prosecute a propaganda war the same way the Americans did during the cold war. They made no bones about the fact that they were against authoritarian communism even while they did peace deals with the USSR to avoid direct conflicts.

Friendship with an unreformed Pakistan, or accommodating its views on Kashmir, means explicit abandonment of secularism. Pakistan will settle for nothing less than the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley, leaving Buddhist Ladakh and largely Hindu Jammu to us. If we accept this, we might as well accept religion as the basis of nationhood. We should have no quarrel with Hindutva, too. Is this what we want?