J&K ceasefire difficult to implement

J&K chief minister Mehbooba Mufti’s proposal for a “ceasefire” in Kashmir, to cover the period of the Islamic holy month of Ramzan as well as the Hindu pilgrimage of the Amarnath yatra, would ordinarily have been a perfect idea to put a brake on the accelerating militancy and terrorist actions with which Kashmir has struggled for the past two years.

If a pause in militant violence can be effected even for a few weeks with reciprocation by the security forces, the Valley will receive badly-needed respite and that may perhaps lead to some fresh thinking on the part of the government as well as extremists-terrorists that may bring longer-term relief. However, the idea seems hobbled by practical as well as conceptual considerations.

At the practical level, it is evident that young, home-grown cadres have been entering militant ranks on an increasing basis in the past three years, and there seems no “leadership” point for this group. On the other hand, the overall inspiration and control, not just command and control, by Pakistan is self-evident.

In such a situation, it is unlikely that the Pakistani mentors and nurturers of the “Kashmir jihad” would let up even for Ramzan, let alone the Amarnath yatra. Last Saturday, Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, who is behind the terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Tayyaba that operates quite freely in Kashmir, prayed in public for Kashmiri “martyrs”. If nothing else, this puts paid to CM Mufti’s well-intentioned proposal.

There is a conceptual problem as well. When, in the past, Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh pursued their notion of a “ceasefire”, they saw this in the framework of a political conversation with the people of the Valley through their political representatives, and that included elements associated with Hurriyat. In the case of Mr Vajpayee, he did his best to open a secret channel contact with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, though this was sabotaged by the ISI eventually.

The situation at present is wholly different. The Narendra Modi government has indicated no plans of introducing a political input in the search for peace in Kashmir. That leaves the idea of a ceasefire hanging in the air, with no ballast on the ground. If the militancy had been exclusively home-grown, without any link to minders in Pakistan’s security set-up, a ceasefire could have been attempted even in the absence of an imagined political framework. This is on account of the belief arising out of the cultural construct of Kashmir, that, generally speaking, a Kashmiri Muslim will not inflict violence on Hindu pilgrims even if he is an insurgent, and is even less likely to resort to violence during Ramzan. However, in the Valley, local militancy is just a small part of the story.

Even so, let the principal political actors at the Centre and the state mull over the idea. However, the Army must stay out of the public discussion and tender its advice to the government through official channels only. That, alas, has not been the case lately.