Neena Gopal: Manmohan's reality check in Kasmir

In the final analysis, no country's foreign policy can be separated from its domestic conundrums.

As the Indian prime minister is also finding out after his first test in Jammu and Kashmir, his own view that "economics is politics and vice versa", depends on the physical reality of where you are.

The two contrasting images this week one, of Manmohan Singh in the Netherlands, feted by the Dutch prime minister and two, in Srinagar, barely visible behind an almost opaque bullet proof glass and yet reaching out to the Kashmiri people with a slew of developmental programmes, tell their own story.

The first is an acknowledgement that India's burgeoning economy that led to its strategic partnership with the EU has made New Delhi's stand on Kashmir secondary to strategy and trade.

It's the track India would like to follow where the economic mantra makes the political almost irrelevant.

The second image underlines the dangers of believing that a purely economic package for the rehabilitation of a people brutalised by the gun for 15 years would be enough in Kashmir where all policy has political undertones as it impinges on relations with an agile adversary like Pakistan.

As promises go, they run from creating jobs and building infrastructure. But it also begs the question.

How can Singh believe there can be economic resurgence when there is militancy? Or that anyone will invest in the future when the status of the state is being called into question across the border.

Singh's vision of carving out a South Asian economic bloc is in keeping with the thinking in the international community that has seen the EU, the architect of the sovereign state make international borders irrelevant.

But Singh's first visit to the Kashmir valley and to Jammu, where his own Congress party has a support base, is a reality check.

In the winter capital of Jammu, he visited camps where hundreds of thousands of angry Kashmiri Pandits live in shabby one room tenements.

In Srinagar, his speech was disrupted by young people desperate for a livelihood and marred by intransigent separatists, who would not clasp his hand of friendship.

True, there was no official invitation to talks, and flanked by his own alliance partners in government it would have been difficult for him to break with them and talk to the Hurriyat.

His visit, no doubt a bid to reiterate Indian sovereignty over the disputed state, was also to remind the incoming Bush administration of the importance of keeping Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf's January 6 promise not to allow his territory to be used to launch cross-border attacks.

Little choice

In other words, Singh was left with little choice but to restate India's position for status quo, without letting his Kashmir policy be hijacked either by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which believes it set the agenda for peace or by Pakistan, which sees itself as the moral guardian of the Kashmiri people's right to self-determination.

Although, in saying one thing in Brussels and another in New Delhi, he raises questions on whether India's Kashmir policy is all his own.

To a question on de-militarising Kashmir, Singh told a reporter in Brussels: "Jammu and Kashmir is a part of India and the deployment of troops there is not a subject of discussion".

Only days later he ordered a reduction of troops from areas deemed to have lower levels of militancy. Could the behind-the-scenes diplomatic track by the Indian and Pakistani national security advisers be setting the agenda for the startling concessions that are being sought and given by each side?

It was Musharraf who first raised the issue of demilitarisation of the valley where a reported half a million Indian troops battle devastating militancy.

He was echoing issues brought up by key members of his own Kashmir council who cite human rights violations by armed forces as a mitigating factor but are also worried about the movement being hijacked by non-state players.

On cue, Manmohan raised Musharraf's January 6 promise not to back militancy with Pakistan's officials swiftly claiming that they had successfully brought down and contained any cross-border adventurism.

Again, on arriving in Srinagar, Singh said in a veiled message to the separatist Hurriyat he was inviting "anyone and everyone who abjures violence" to unconditional talks with his government.

The Hurriyat's tired "no" came with a caveat that they must travel and speak to their Pakistani and Kashmiri counterparts first, a condition they raised just before agreeing to meet the previous Indian government's hawkish leaders.

In a not so veiled message to Islamabad, Singh also said he would not countenance the redrawing of boundaries, that there would be no second partition of the country.

Musharraf, who met Kashmiri leaders on Thursday once more aired his "food for thought" that Muslim majority areas in the state must be delineated and given a separate status.

It is clear that the bone of contention, when it comes down to the nub is, and will always be the future status of the valley.

Formal proposal

As Pakistan's Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz arrives in New Delhi this week, with what many believe will be a formal proposal from the Pakistan government on the state, it is hoped there will be clarity after the public posturing.

Three things must also happen. Despite their inner disquiet on the pace of talks, both sides must recall their tacit agreement not to score points in public and not hint at the concessions that are being sought in private.

Certainly, the Hurriyat, which has for so long claimed to be the legitimate representatives of the Kashmiri people must whether they travel to Pakistan or not win a water-tight assurance from their militant counterparts that they will not be targeted and killed as so many of them have before, for talking to the Indian government.

In addition, the Hurriyat and others who stand for independence of the state must trust that a bilateral track between India and Pakistan is not aimed at keeping the Kashmiris out.

That, in insisting on a formal triangular dialogue rather than an informal trilateral interaction that is India-Pakistan, India-Hurriyat, Pakistan-Hurriyat they are standing in the way of moving the process forward.

Neither Singh nor Musharraf, set to meet at the Saarc summit in Dhaka early next year, would like to see this process felled on the slippery slope of one-upmanship after climbing this far.