Why Ceasefire Is Too Little, Too Late

Srinagar—The centre’s announcement of the ceasefire on Wednesday took Kashmir by surprise. Nobody expected the central government to heed the Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s call for a truce for Ramzan and Amarnath yatra, after the BJP and even the security establishment expressed their antagonism to it.

But that the Narendra Modi government still went ahead and announced the ceasefire is welcome and shows the growing realization in New Delhi that a militaristic approach to Kashmir may not be after all the right strategy to handle the situation in Kashmir. And even though the PM on his visit to the state didn’t make any anticipated political gesture to further build on the truce announcement, it didn’t detract from the significance of the measure.

But it is also a reality that the move may have come too late in the day.

And the reasons for it are not far to see: Even if the union government sought to top it up with a political initiative,   there is hardly any time left for it  to build upon it.  That is because in the next few months the country would already be in an election mode circumscribing the chance and the space for a sustained and meaningful political engagement with either J&K leadership or Pakistan, which too is going through its national election.

With every passing month, the government in New Delhi will have its eye firmly fixed on the 2019 national polls, dissuading it from a troubled engagement with Kashmiri stakeholders or Islamabad. Already, there have been protests among the rightwing sections in the country against the unilateral ceasefire, a development that is likely to make the BJP further cautious. And any attack by any militant group will make it further difficult to sustain the truce.  

There is a small window though: if New Delhi seeks to build upon the ceasefire by a dialogue with Hurriyat and a new Pakistan government, last quarter of this year and the early quarter of the next could be a period for it. If all goes, well, the engagement could be carried forward with a government in New Delhi next year.   

But  if the centre chooses to squander the chance,  there will not be a chance for re-engagement until after  the mid-2019. The new government in New Delhi, should it be other than the one led by the BJP, will take its own time to frame a policy vis-a-vis Kashmir and Pakistan and might even find it difficult to adopt a moderate policy after a largely popular five years of hardline approach.

The complexities like these leave little scope for the ceasefire to be built upon. And if the discourse in Karnataka polls is anything to go by, the dialogue with Pakistan or the separatists in Kashmir seems to be on nobody’s mind in New Delhi. In fact, the BJP government might see more political advantage in the continuing with its iron-fist approach.

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