The casualties of peace

By Balakrishnan Rajagopal

The coming summit between the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee and the Pakistan President, General Pervez Musharraf, is hailed as the harbinger of hopes for a transition to peace in Jammu and Kashmir and a thaw between the two neighbouring countries. Yet the tragic irony of this process is that it seems to have trampled upon the principles of democratic legitimacy that are necessary for the process itself, an issue that will not go away in the contentious post-summit years.

At one end, General Musharraf's unilateral and abrupt decision to appoint himself as President has effectively ended Pakistan's flirtation with democracy and at the other end, the failure to include any representatives of the Kashmiri people in the summit makes it unlikely that the summit will be seen as legitimate during the coming years.

Yet, the Indian side seems to be utterly oblivious to the need to respect the principles of democratic legitimacy; instead, the Prime Minister is reported to have called General Musharraf, before the official announcement was made, to congratulate him on his self-appointment. The Indian establishment interprets this as a strategic message from the Indian side about the effectiveness of its intelligence about Pakistani high politics, which it may well be. But it is also a callous disregard for the elementary norms of democracy.

What is doubly ironic is that this anti-democratic attitude is adopted by the world's largest democracy. Indeed, India has always maintained a total disregard for the democratic credentials of the countries that it deals with since its foreign policy has traditionally been dictated by a realist focus on geopolitics.

One must question this apparent incongruity of commitment to democracy in the domestic policy and a disregard for it in the foreign policy. While there is no need to flaunt one's credentials and lecture others as the U.S. often does, a principled foreign policy in India can no longer ignore the consequences of its own political and constitutional character as a democracy. This means that at the least, the Prime Minister should not be congratulating General Musharraf for dousing the embers of Pakistan's democracy. In fact, there is no reason why India should not raise the need to restore Pakistan's democracy as an issue in future summits and meetings. A militarised Pakistan, ruled by generals, will never be a real partner for peace with India. While the restoration of democracy can not by itself lead to peace, India can ill-afford to ignore the yawning gap in political culture between itself and Pakistan.

The failure to invite any representative of the Kashmiri people to the summit may be a consequence of complex factors but that too opens the summit to charges of illegitimacy in the future. Experience from around the world shows that it is impossible to negotiate peace in ethnically or religiously divided societies without a genuinely open negotiating process that attempts to accommodate the legitimate demands of all key actors. Negotiating the future of Kashmir over the heads of the Kashmiris is hardly a recipe for lasting peace.

If it was not possible to engage all the key representatives of Kashmiris (including PoK) directly in the summit, ways could have been found to involve them in some other manner, perhaps through a series of mini-summits between working groups of senior officials from both Governments and Kashmiri representatives. The key objective must have been to clearly indicate a willingness to recognise Kashmiri people as dialogue- partners. Without even such a minimal involvement, it is hard to see how any deal struck in the summit between India and Pakistan will be seen as acceptable by all key actors in Kashmir, especially over the years. This is not only a principal requirement of legitimacy, but also a necessity of practical politics.

Negotiating a lasting peace in deeply divided societies is an arduous task, as the world has witnessed in the Balkans most recently. That task becomes simply impossible if the key combatants are not truly represented, or if the framework for peace is not sufficiently democratic. On both counts, the forthcoming India-Pakistan summit offers little hope.

(The writer is Director, MIT Program on Human Rights and Assistant Professor of Law and Development, MIT.)

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