In response to Nawaz Sharif’s address at the United Nation’s General Assembly (UNGA), where he raised the conflict in and over Kashmir rather pointedly, India’s Minister for External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj addressed the General Assembly. Even though Swaraj did not sound belligerent and waxed lyrical about larger issues facing the world in the 21stcentury, stripped and shorn of accretions, the address – both by explication, implication and subliminally – revolved around Kashmir. I will not go into detail and reproduce Swaraj’s address. It is well known and available online to bear repetition. However, what I will emphasize is that the External Affair’s Minister’s address – which by dint of her position – reflects the position of the Indian state attempts to cast India as apparently interested in larger issues (even to some extent transcendental ones) and hence as a responsible state or power. India was also attempted to be portrayed as a victim of “terrorism” displaying restraint against repeated provocations (Pathankot and Uri) despite the country’s friendly overtures to Pakistan.
The fact, however, in terms of Kashmir remains that neither Sharif’s address nor Swaraj’s speech do anything to resolve either the impasse in Kashmir or the conflict in and over Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan have attempted to put a subjective gloss on an objective reality that obtains in Kashmir. On part of India, the aim is to maintain the status quo while as Pakistan wants to change it. Kashmir remains as it is and was – a frozen conflict caught in the cross hairs of deep structural animosity and sovereign jealousies between India and Pakistan. In this sense then India’s status quoism jostles with Pakistani irredentism.
Both nations then could be said to be guilty of playing games in international fora.
Pakistan, it would appear, sought to bear its energies to turn the events that obtain in Kashmir to its advantage. It pointedly referred to the will of Kashmiri people and the Indian state’s response to the protest movement. The country sought to play up and employ the human rights violation idiom to cast India in a negative light. Further more, it would appear that Pakistan understood very well the new security doctrine promulgated by India’s National Security advisor, Ajit Doval and sought to use Doval against Doval, so to speak. Pakistan appeared to want to use Doval’s instincts and reflex against him and by extension India. But India displayed what in strategic parlance is called “strategic restraint”. And India then sought to use this restraint against Pakistan by pointing out to the international community or more accurately audience that it was a responsible power interested in peace.
Whose narrative, the question is, will the world buy?
World politics, as I have maintained in my writings , is in the midst of great flux, churn and fluidity. It is at an “inflection point”. The post cold war “unipolarity” has or is giving way to multipolarity; the thrust and direction of this multipolar structure revolves around the United States and China with other key players like India and Russia playing an auxillary role to the determining rivalry of the 21st century. Given this condition, there is potential for instability in the international system and therefore world politics. Great powers would want “order” and stability and would expend their energies towards these ends. In this schemata, given India’s attempts to cast itself as a responsible state and stakeholder, the world might buy India’s narrative.
Where does all this leave Kashmir?
Frozen in the mists of history and international politics is the answer. Does this mean that the conflict will die down?
No. Frozen conflicts, by their very nature, are ripe for recrudescence or slide in to conflict again given the “right” conditions. Moreover, Pakistan is a dissatisfied power which has not and will not attain closure re Kashmir unless some sort of a satisfiscing solution is arrived at. In so far as the conflict in Kashmir is concerned, this condition means, it will remain on the boil; this, in turn , creates conditions for the conflict over Kashmir to remain a stark bone of contention and hence conflict between India and Pakistan. Sharif’s or Swaraj’s eloquent addresses at the UNGA then do nothing to change or alter the fundamental political reality that obtains re Kashmir. That is, while the conflict might be frozen but Kashmir can implode and then explode anytime. All that is needed is a spark or a catalyst. Do powers that be either on the Indian or the Pakistani side understand this? Probably but their very short termism does not perhaps allow them to accept this reality. In the final analysis then, what may lead to some kind of a resolution of the conflict in and over Kashmir is history and the historical process – ideas and themes that would render both Sharif’s and Swaraj’s UNGA addresses relics of the past and as part of a passing but atavistic world order
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