Pakistan’s recent attempts at normalising relations with India and rumours of peace talks involving the illegal Indian occupation of Kashmir sound promising. However, it is concerning that peace talks have resumed unconditionally and without addressing the core issue; that is the removal of Article 370. Moreover, the world's longest curfew, which has imprisoned Kashmiris, still continues. So what is the agenda of the peace talks?
There are several reasons why both India and Pakistan seek to control Kashmir. An everlasting peace in South Asia is desirable and essential for the economic and social development of people of the subcontinent. In Pakistan’s case, being able to administer all of Kashmir would raise its standing in the Muslim world and enable it to claim that it has accomplished its founder’s, Mr Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s, dream of giving colonial India’s Muslims a homeland. It would mitigate, at least to an extent, the loss of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. India would like to have control of Kashmir in its entirety because that would give it immediate access to Central Asia’s energy resources and markets, allow it to outflank Pakistan, in part by cutting it off from its all-weather friend, China, and demonstrate to the world that it is truly a secular nation, one that is comprised of both Hindus and Muslims who share equal rights and liberties, as its own founding fathers envisioned. Both countries also want to absorb Kashmir because of its water resources and tourism potential.
No matter how promising negotiations over Kashmir sound for a normal relationship between the two countries, the opinions of ordinary Kashmiris are missing. Both sides are talking, but where are the Kashmiris? Is the fate of the Kashmiris in the hands of generals and politicians? Who decides on behalf of oppressed Kashmiris? Thousands of people in Pakistan and Kashmir are calling it a “betrayal” of Kashmir.
Despite both India’s and Pakistan’s claims to Kashmir, two-thirds of the Kashmiri population want to go their own way and seek independence. In a private poll conducted in 2010 by the Sunday Hindustan Times newspaper, 66 per cent of respondents in the Kashmir Valley wanted ‘complete freedom to entire Jammu and Kashmir as a new country’ and only six per cent wanted a ‘complete merger of the entire Jammu and Kashmir in Pakistan’. In effect, the people of Kashmir have made it clear that they no longer wish to be pawns to either Pakistan or India.
It is high time for people in power in to rethink and revisit their promises to the people of Kashmir before decades of peaceful struggle and sacrifices are in vain.
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