Lessons from Pulwama: Conflict ‘management’ must give way to conflict resolution

How much more blood will be spilled in Kashmir?

The shocking fidayeen attack in Pulwama killing over 40 CRPF personnel moving in a convoy once again brings this haunting question to centre-stage.

The exact details of how it happened are still being gathered. According to preliminary reports, a vehicle (carrying over 200 kilos of explosives including Possibly RDX), driven by Jaish-e-Mohammad operative Aadil Ahmad rammed into one of the CRPF buses, part of a 70-vehicle convoy, in Awantipora in Pulwama on Thursday afternoon. Within minutes, the spot resembled a war-ravaged zone with mangled vehicles and wreckage mingling with charred and bloody body parts. The immediate reaction to the gory spectacle is shock and horror over loss of human lives in a brutal manner.

This is a major militant attack after ‘fidayeens’ attacked an army camp in Uri September 2016 and is reminiscent of the far more-deadly attack at Srinagar’s legislative assembly in October 2001, when a car bomb rammed into the gates the Jammu and Kashmir state secretariat. In scale, size and methodology, this attack, however, is unprecedented.

Soon after the attack, condemnations from politicians, officials and people across the spectrum were punctuated by cries for revenge. Union ministers Arun Jaitley and Gen. V.K. Singh (former army chief), while batting for avenging the attack, spoke about giving “terrorists an unforgettable lesson”. Such remarks from people in positions of power once again reveal a misplaced understanding of Kashmir and a penchant for prescribing flawed remedies. They also reveal an official penchant for abdicating responsibility under the façade of glamourizing the ‘soldiers valour’. If the soldiers have a responsibility to fight the borders and fight insurgents, it is the moral duty of the political powers to work for creating conditions where such violent situations can be avoided. Clearly, the actions on the ground do not demonstrate either a responsible role or pragmatism.

An investigation in the case is an imperative and this must take place without any laxity in probing all questions pertaining to the attack including unearthing the master-minds and the probable security lapses in view of the tight security deployed on the stretch of road where the attack took place, also reports that intelligence inputs were available prior to the attack. Before it happened, a video of the Jaish militant Aadil had begun to be circulated in social media wherein he proclaimed he was going to carry out a major suicide attack. The probe should look at evidence of how such a huge quantity of explosives was obtained without jumping to the usual Pakistan bashing, though at this juncture nothing can be ruled out.

More importantly, responsible and liberal democratic states are not expected to be guided by principles of vindictiveness in their policies and actions. Besides, knee-jerk reactions do not guarantee peace. They only foment more bloodshed which both the Valley and India can ill-afford. Instead, the Indian government should be prompted to ask the vital questions of why a cult of violence, claiming lives of soldiers, armed non-state actors and civilians, continues to prevail in the Valley. And, also look at how this situation can be best addressed.

The incident is a clear betrayal of employment of flawed policies and actions while dealing with Kashmir conflict. A strong muscular and military policy coupled with misplaced celebration of militant deaths (while losing a disproportionately high number of soldiers and policemen) as a measure of deemed success instead of wiping out militancy has encouraged more young men to pick up arms and fight the Indian security agencies and has also widened the gap between the masses in Kashmir and New Delhi. Militancy is an off-shoot of a deeper malaise – an unaddressed political dispute, subversion of democracy and democratic rights of people and neglect of human rights violations. Without coupling military pursuit with a political outreach, the Indian government is clearly on the wrong track.

In the last seven decades and particularly since the start of insurgency in 1990, successive governments have dealt with Kashmir by shying away from resolving the conflict and instead focusing on managing the conflict through political manipulations or military methods, occasionally interspersed by cosmetic efforts to woo the disenchanted public. The present BJP government, far from making that much needed departure from conflict management to conflict resolution, has consistently contributed to deepening the conflict by pursuing an all-out military policy with no full stops. Ever since 2016, the sole methods to deal with the entire population of Kashmir has been bullets, pellets, crackdowns and arrests. Such a policy does not end a cult of violence or wipe out militancy. If 250 militants were killed in 2018, an equal number of youth, if not more, have picked up the gun and many more are waiting in the wings.

Unless, there are serious attempts to resolve the deeper malaise – the conflict – through peaceful means, there is no way that blood will stop flowing in the Valley. The Indian government has backed the internationally taken initiative of talks with Taliban in Afghanistan. Why should it hesitate from talking on Kashmir, where besides the gun-totting militants, there is an existing constituency for the over-ground political groups like Hurriyat as well as a robust civil society engaged in peaceful initiatives related to the conflict? Kashmir today is crying for a political outreach. Resolution of the conflict requires out-of-the-box thinking and bold measures like mending fences with Pakistan and beginning simultaneous dialogues with peoples of Jammu and Kashmir, besides facilitating intra-state people to people dialogue, and between India and Pakistan. Indian government should take inspiration from Northern Ireland, which the British government was compelled to resolve through amicable means, when it turned bloody.

Pulwama attack is a warning. It possibly signals a new trend in militancy. The manner in which it was conducted and its deadly echoes can easily be distinguished from many previous attacks. It serves a lesson that flawed policies on Kashmir are pushing us towards a dangerous vortex, in which humans are becoming a casualty, whichever side of the spectrum they are.

Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal is Executive Editor of The Kashmir Times. A slightly different version of this piece was published by BBC Hindi. Views expressed are personal.