India and Kashmir - K is for complacency - Economist.com

http://www.economist.com/node/17800121?story_id=17800121&fsrc=nlw|hig|29-12-2010|editors_highlights

India risks storing up misery over Kashmir. It should grab a chance to do something more positive

MENTION Kashmir in polite Delhi society and noses wrinkle. Indians in the capital much prefer to talk of the economic boom, of India’s flourishing trade and its growing international heft. Old problems in the disputed, Muslim-majority territory in the mountainous north are waved off as a remote affair. They are not for foreigners to poke their noses into. And don’t begin to suggest that the world’s biggest democracy faces a growing problem in Kashmir, or that repressed Kashmiris have anything in common with the Palestinians or Tibetans.

Yet, in recent months, stone-pelting youths have launched their own intifada. Separatists have called for hartals, or self-imposed curfews, across the territory. And ill-trained Indian police have fired tear-gas and bullets with little care, killing over 110 people, mostly young and armed, if at all, only with crude projectiles. Deaths have spread bitterness, as have widespread reports of rape, torture and violent intimidation by Indian police. The chances are high that the miserable cycle of protests, deaths and funerals will resume in 2011.

India’s leaders are at least a bit embarrassed. They have promised better-trained police and sent three independent (if junior) interlocutors to hear Kashmiri grievances. The team is due to report within days. Yet the authorities are also harrying nationalist leaders in the territory. Separatists are often jailed or kept under house arrest. Demonstrations are usually banned. Western leaders, keen to keep India “onside” against China and greedy for its markets, have kept disgracefully quiet about human-rights abuses. On his visit in November Barack Obama uttered the K-word in public only when he was pressed by a questioner to do so.

A less complacent Indian government would work far harder to stop this slide. There is an immediate chance to seize the initiative while a winter freeze holds the troubled valley in its grip and before the pelting and shooting restart. It could signal that Kashmiris’ grievances will be taken seriously, for example by acting on the interlocutors’ report when it is released in January. Reducing the heavy presence of non-Kashmiris in uniform would ease tensions too. Cars cannot drive around Srinagar without manoeuvring past army roadblocks, snipers in pillboxes, lines of soldiers on the roadsides and military convoys. The security forces should be stopped from making arbitrary arrests. They should also allow nationalist political leaders to move and speak freely. That’s what democracies do.It is not all bad. One silver lining is that Pakistan, which once devoted much malign energy to supporting an insurgency in Kashmir, is now preoccupied with its own fragility. Kashmiris, however troubled, are unlikely soon to return to the widespread armed militancy that used to claim thousands of lives a year. But India’s crushing of more moderate Kashmiri leaders is fostering other problems. The young stone-pelters are turning radical and religious. A mostly nationalistic dispute risks becoming ever more theological in much the same way as that between Israelis and Palestinians did.

Look to the horizon

In the longer term Indian leaders need to break their unhelpful silence on Kashmir’s prospects. The government will never allow the state to secede, let alone to join Pakistan. But India could agree to grant Kashmir greater political autonomy. It could concede that the army’s role in the territory will gradually diminish to one of mainly securing the line-of-control that divides it from Pakistani-run Kashmir. That would encourage the many Kashmiris who have taken part in Indian-run elections and who often accept in private that co-operation with India’s authorities would bring gains.

Perhaps India’s ruling Congress party, battered by corruption scandals, may not feel ready to brave Kashmir, especially if the opposition, the Hindu-dominated BJP, is hostile. Yet seeking reconciliation would be a sign not of weakness but of India’s growing confidence. Encouraging Kashmir’s moderate leaders is in the interests of all Indians—and of the West too.