In the aftermath of the October 2004 meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at the United Nations, the longest unresolved conflict on the agenda of the UN Security Council seems primed to take a step closer towards resolution. The dispute in Kashmir, which was first brought to the United Nations in 1948, has proven to be one of the most intractable and dangerous political disputes facing the international community. Kashmir, which former US President Bill Clinton once called “the most dangerous place on earth,” has been transformed into a perilous war zone since an armed insurgency against Indian rule began in the late 1980s. The three parties involved in the dispute—India, Pakistan, and the Kashmiri people—have remained at loggerheads for over half a century without any party making substantive political gains.

The Kashmir conflict has a long and complicated history. Deep-rooted animosity and distrust have often precluded amicable dialogue between the parties, leaving any substantive joint agreements a distant possibility. The deep-seated disagreement has become progressively more hostile as it has become linked to issues of national pride and national identity. These associations have made compromise all the more difficult to reach. The recent rapprochement between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, sparked by former Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s unprecedented 2003 peace proposal and the subsequent conciliatory Pakistani response, has made considerable headway in preventing hostilities on the subcontinent. The declaration of a ceasefire, the resumption of full diplomatic ties, the planned high-level talks, and a host of confidence-building measures—ranging from softer borders to arms control measures—have created much excitement over the genuine prospects of sustainable peace.

The Doctor’s Spin

While the incipient peace process between India and Pakistan is encouraging, it has contributed to a sense of false optimism. The media hype and its sanguine expectations about the process have masked a recent tragedy on the subcontinent: the collapse of the Kashmir peace process.

Too often the conflict in Kashmir is conflated with the broader dispute between India and Pakistan. While the issue of Kashmir is often at the crux of disagreements between the South Asian neighbors, it is a fundamentally distinct conflict with a separate peace process—a process whose recent failure has unfortunately gone unnoticed. The traditional “Kashmir conflict,” which garners the majority of public attention, finds its origin in the 1947 partition of the subcontinent after British withdrawal. This conflict is over the competing claims of New Delhi and Islamabad to the territory of Kashmir; the conflicting interpretations of the events of 1947 have led to three wars over the possession of Kashmir. Moreover, the Kashmir issue has remained a stumbling block in attempts to bolster ties between the two neighbors. While failing to address the issue of Kashmir, the current Indo-Pakistani peace process has had some success at fighting through the historical baggage between the two adversaries and fostering an environment conducive to cooperation.

On the Ground

An Indian soldier stands guard over a holy site that is part of the pilgrimage of Indian Muslims in Kashmir.

Although often assumed, it is naïve to suggest that Kashmir would cease to be a political-military tinderbox if the South Asian peace process were able to sustain its momentum. Any modus vivendi between India and Pakistan would have little effect on the long-term stability of the region because it excludes a crucial party to the conflict: the Kashmiri people. The real, and arguably more destabilizing, “Kashmir conflict” is the dispute between New Delhi and the state of Kashmir. In response to rigged elections and a track record of poor governance and repression, a popular anti-Indian separatist insurgency took hold in Kashmir during 1989. This dispute, often neglected by media and academic circles, is the essence of the modern problem in Kashmir. The armed insurgency, which now has the support of both Pakistani and pan-Islamic jihad groups, has been met with brutal force by the Indian security forces and an estimated 70,000 lives have been lost over the last decade. While rapprochement between India and Pakistan does little to address the grievances of the Kashmiri people and this conflict, a resolution of the New Delhi-Kashmir dispute could remove the major obstacle to stronger Indo-Pakistani ties and, ultimately, sustainable peace in South Asia.

A visit to the Kashmir Valley during the summer of 2003 showed much hope in the region as Vajpayee’s peace proposal had been gaining momentum. The heavy tourist influx, stable ceasefire, and the negotiations between Kashmiri separatists and New Delhi on the horizon had created an optimistic environment in which Kashmiris had seemingly relegated their pessimism and misery to the past. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of optimism was short-lived, as increased violence and inflammatory rhetoric between New Delhi and the Kashmiri hardliners sabotaged any potential for cooperation before Vajpayee had even set foot in the Kashmir Valley. Ultimately, despite the renewed sense of urgency and purpose in the effort to resolve the crisis, neither side was willing to make substantial concessions on their firmly entrenched political positions. The failure of Vajpayee’s initiative, although disappointing, should not have been a surprise to the people of Kashmir who have witnessed 56 years of failed attempts at reconciliation by successive Indian and Kashmiri governments.

Opposing Strategies

India’s strategy in Kashmir is a paradoxical one: on the one hand, India is aware of the separatist inclinations of the state and has made attempts to initiate some form of dialogue with the separatist leadership. On the other hand, however, India is unwilling to make major concessions on its stated position. Behind closed doors, it held talks on Kashmir with both separatists and the Pakistani government; unfortunately, it has continued to publicly assert that Kashmir is an indisputable, “integral part of the Indian Union” while making no genuine effort to admit wrong-doing and redress the grievances of Kashmiris. The reluctance of India, regardless of whether the Congress or Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance government has been in power, to compromise has led to a severe deterioration of the situation. After Vajpayee’s purportedly genuine peace offer, the moderates within the separatist movement were able to marginalize the political and religious extremists by demonstrating to the public that cooperation with the government may yield results. Just one year after the initial peace offer, while the framework for talks was still being planned, central elections removed the ruling BJP-led alliance and Vajpayee from power. While there is little evidence to believe that the Hindu right-wing BJP would have been willing to make a genuine accommodation on the issue, the process derailed within weeks of the Congress-led government assuming power. Over the summer, as the media blitz hit full stride covering the historic rapprochement process between India and Pakistan, few noticed the end of the parallel Kashmir peace process. The Congress Party’s reluctance to make concessions or signal movement away from their half-century old positions forced the moderates to back down as a result of tremendous political pressure at home. India’s misguided and ambiguous Kashmir roadmap, compounded by a power struggle between separatists and hardliners for legitimacy in Kashmir, resulted in a complete collapse in efforts to resuscitate ties between the two parties.