The Supreme Court’s judgment this week, validating the abolition of Article 370 for Jammu and Kashmir and the separation of Ladakh from it — legislated by Parliament on August 5, 2019 — will make one big difference to the geopolitics of Kashmir.
It ends Delhi’s prolonged defensive strategic orientation on Kashmir that emerged at the turn of the 1990s when independent India was at one of its most vulnerable moments. The legal clarity provided by the Supreme Court — that India’s “internal” relationship with Kashmir is not open for “external” negotiation — does provide a good basis to launch a new phase in India’s Kashmir strategy.
The task of the NDA government, which pushed hard to change the terms of engagement at home and abroad on Kashmir over the last decade, is not done. The domestic legal closure on the question of India’s full sovereignty over Kashmir does not automatically end the external meddling in Kashmir.
The resolution of that challenge depends on growing India’s comprehensive national power, enhancing the capacity to deter Pakistan and China from adventurism on the borders of Kashmir, and diminishing the salience of other international factors in Kashmir. Above all, it depends on constructing a sustainable new political compact in Kashmir.
Neither Pakistan nor China will accept the Supreme Court’s decision as relevant in any way to their long-standing policies on Kashmir. The international political interest and diplomatic positions on Kashmir, whether in the Islamic world or the West, are also unlikely to change soon.
Whether they accept it or not, the rest of the world will note that the Indian state — basking in a high degree of political self-assurance and rising weight in the international system — has rallied round to a new and tougher position on Kashmir.
Given the expansive mood of optimism that envelops Delhi today, it is quite easy to forget the enormous difficulties India had in managing the international dynamic in Kashmir over the last three decades. The gathering crisis in Kashmir during the 1980s culminated in the massive insurgency that broke out in 1989. Pakistan, bursting with confidence from its success in driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, seized the moment.
Pakistan’s full-throated military, political and diplomatic support to the insurgency in Kashmir came amidst the breakdown of the old economic order in India, the collapse of one-party rule and the rise of weak national coalitions, fires all along India’s periphery from Punjab to the North East and Tamil Nadu, and the Mandal versus Mandir politics in the heartland.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 convinced Pakistan and the insurgents that a visibly weakened Indian state could be brought down in Kashmir. All it needed was a big strategic push. Internal insurgency backed by cross-border terrorism was matched by a massive global campaign to mobilise international support for Kashmir’s secession from India.
This was reinforced by the Clinton administration’s South Asia policy after the Cold War that questioned the accession of Kashmir to India, focused on the human rights situation in the state, and sought to promote a peace process between India and Pakistan devoted to resolving the Kashmir question.
The series of military crises around Kashmir — in 1987, 1990, 1999, and 2001-02 — saw the international community intervene to prevent India and Pakistan from coming to nuclear blows and pushing for a dialogue on Kashmir.
In navigating this storm at one of India’s most dangerous moments, Delhi, to its credit, did not give away the store on Kashmir. However, successive governments since the 1990s had to signal political flexibility on Kashmir to manage the international pressures. Three signals stood out.
One was to put Kashmir back on the negotiating table with Pakistan. Another was to suggest that there might be room to negotiate on the nature of the institutional relationship between Delhi and Kashmir. A third was to lend credence to Islamabad’s claim that the “people of Kashmir” must be the “third party” to the negotiations with India by engaging with the pro-Pakistan militant groups and facilitating their travel across the border.
During its first term, 2014-19, the Modi government sought to reverse these signals just when India’s tactical flexibility on Kashmir seemed to acquire a troubling strategic life of its own. Even as it reached out to Pakistan right at the beginning of its first term, the NDA government suggested that there was little room to negotiate on the question of Indian sovereignty over Kashmir. It also insisted that the internal aspects of Kashmir were not open to talks. Delhi also put an end to the notion that Kashmir militant groups, either directly or indirectly, had a say in the negotiations with Pakistan. India blocked the Kashmiri leaders from meeting with the Pakistan High Commissioner and visiting leaders from Islamabad as a matter of routine. This had become an unwelcome but accepted practice in Delhi.
Early on in the second term, the Modi government moved boldly to scrap Article 370 to provide a legal basis for its political position on the external aspects of Kashmir. An outraged Pakistan downgraded diplomatic relations with India and sought to get the United Nations Security Council, with the support of China, to intervene against India.
Delhi blocked this move with the support of its new Western partners in France and the United States. The changing attitudes of the US toward Kashmir — which moved from diplomatic activism in the 1990s to put it on the back burner in the 2000s — has been a critical factor in changing the international dynamic on Kashmir. That, in turn, was rooted in the expanding strategic partnership between Delhi and Washington during the last two decades driven by converging Indo-Pacific interests.
The US now has other fish to fry in Asia, and Kashmir is no longer the obsession in Washington’s South Asia policy. The positive transformation of India’s relations with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia has prevented Pakistan from mobilising the Islamic world against Delhi’s Kashmir actions.
Equally consequential has been the dramatic shift in the balance of power between India and Pakistan. Thanks to India’s sustained economic growth and Pakistan’s slowdown, India’s GDP at 3.7 trillion dollars is ten times larger than Pakistan’s. If the current trends persist, the gap between the two will continue to widen in the coming years.
While the support from the West and the Islamic world is very welcome, Delhi is acutely conscious that few of them have given up on the notion that there is a Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. A restive Kashmir will continue to reinforce the old perceptions. Building peace and prosperity in Kashmir, then, is key to permanently transforming international attitudes.
While Pakistan has weakened as a strategic actor in relation to India, its capacity to create trouble in Kashmir remains intact. Pakistan’s deepening partnership with China continues to present challenges to India in Kashmir. Notwithstanding these two negative factors, the international environment has never been as favourable to India as it is today in building a “New Kashmir”.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
