Kashmir: Self-Determination is the Solution

by CHANDRA MUZAFFAR

It is a pity that some groups and individuals are urging palm oil importers in India to refrain from buying the commodity from Malaysia. The Solvent Extractors Association of India, India’s top vegetable oil trade body is one such outfit. Apparently, this boycott is a sort of “punishment” for Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s remarks on Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly on 27^th September 2019.

The Indian government has reportedly protested against Dr Mahathir’s criticism of Indian action in Kashmir. However so far it has not voiced support for the call to boycott Malaysian palm oil. There are also groups such as the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee that have come out against the reduction of Malaysian palm oil imports by India because of the possibility of retaliatory measures that could impact adversely upon workers from Tamil Nadu employed in the information technology sector and restaurant business in Malaysia.

This is one of the dangers of trade boycotts and the like in bilateral relations. They escalate quite easily doing irreparable damage to ties that have been cultivated over a long period of time. It is commendable that the two governments have displayed a degree of restraint. Vested interests, political parties and civil society groups in India and Malaysia should also demonstrate their maturity and approach the issue at hand in a balanced manner.

Since both countries are practising democracies, criticisms of certain aspects of the policies and practices of one another should be viewed as integral to their underlying value system. A democracy does not overact to a critical comment about its policy or practice. This is especially so if the state in question is also the world’s largest democracy.

Besides, one should examine the view expressed by Mahathir without any blinkers. Its main thrust was that the longstanding Kashmir conflict should be resolved “by peaceful means.” UN resolutions on Kashmir should not be disregarded. This is a position that a number of other governments have also expressed from various platforms.

At the crux and core of the UN’s stand on Kashmir is the solemn recognition that the wishes of the people of Jammu and Kashmir should be accorded primacy. This is why right from the outset the UN had urged all sides involved in the conflict to allow for a UN supervised plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir which would decide the destiny of the people of that region. In other words, the people of Jammu and Kashmir should exercise their sacred right of self-determination.

In the early decades, self-determination was understood as the people of Jammu and Kashmir joining either India or Pakistan. In recent years, a new dimension has emerged. Self-determination in the real sense must also mean the people’s right to establish their own independent, sovereign state of Jammu and Kashmir which is part of neither Pakistan nor India.

Whatever the eventual goal, self-determination as a principle has not only been ignored but often suppressed. Uprisings by the people have been mercilessly crushed, the most infamous of which was the Jammu Massacre of 6^th November 1947. It is alleged that Indian occupation forces alongside Dogra forces and RSS militants killed around half a million Kashmiri Muslims. Killings have continued in the last seven decades. It was this that Mahathir alluded to in his UN speech.

It is important to emphasise that these massacres have spawned the rise of militants and militancy in Kashmir. While militancy in Kashmir is largely home-grown and is intimately interwoven with the legitimate struggle for self-determination, it is quite conceivable that it receives material and moral support from elements in the Pakistani power stratum. This support and the militancy itself have now complicated the quest for a just solution to the conflict.

Sometimes political decisions made by New Delhi intensify — perhaps unwittingly — militancy among Kashmiris. The recent revocation of Kashmir’s special status through the abrogation of Article 370 in the Indian Constitution on the 5^th of August 2019 is a case in point. A portion of Kashmiris will interpret the revocation and all that it implies in terms of ownership of land, the right of settlement and the alteration of ethnic and religious demographics as the wilful annexation of Indian occupied Kashmir into the Indian Union and therefore a clear repudiation of the desire of the Kashmiri people to determine their own future.

It appears that the abrogation of Article 370 will only perpetuate the violence and the bloodshed associated with one of the longest political conflicts in modern times.

This Time, The World Is Watching In Kashmir

2018 Protest in Srinagar, Kashmir (Faizan Ahmad Sheikh via Shutterstock)

by Shubh Mathur

“The hasty stroke goes oft astray.” This piece of remembered wisdom from The Lord of the Rings seems to be an apt description of the Indian military siege of Kashmir.

On August 5th, at midnight local time, the disputed territory was abruptly cut off from all communication, both with the outside world and within Kashmir, as India snapped internet and phone connections and shut down all Kashmiri television channels. A strict curfew was imposed across Kashmir, a region roughly comparable to the state of Virginia in extent and population (8 million).

During the previous week, an additional 50,000 Indian troops had been moved into Kashmir, to join the roughly 750,000 already deployed there. And on August 6, the Indian home minister announced that India was revoking Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, which gave Kashmir some limited autonomy and restricted outsiders from buying land in the state.

Under the new dispensation, Kashmir is to be ruled directly from Delhi as a Union Territory. The last time Kashmir was ruled directly from Delhi, from 1990 to 1996, it witnessed human rights violations on a massive scale, with extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, disappearances, firing on unarmed demonstrators, burning of homes, crops, and standing harvests, and a complete clampdown on all political activity. The warning signs that this will be repeated are already loud and clear.

The entire operation has been overseen by Home Minister Amit Shah, from the hard-right Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), infamous for his orchestration of the massacre of 3,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Though very little news escapes the military cordon India has thrown around Kashmir, there are reports of mass arrests, including of young children, a near-total clampdown on freedom of movement within Kashmir, and Indian military forces opening fire on protesters with live ammunition, tear gas, and pellet guns. Pellet guns are an Indian invention designed especially for “non-lethal crowd control” and used only in Kashmir. They bullets explode like shrapnel on impact and have been responsible for blinding hundreds of Kashmiris since 2016.

The Narrative Has Shifted 

The long and dismal record of Indian human rights abuses in Kashmir had, until now, been routinely ignored by the outside world. But now, the narrative has changed.

Media outlets across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America either report from the ground or pick up news as it appears in independent Indian outlets. They show images of desolate streets ringed with gleaming new concertina barbed wire and bristling with checkpoints, children injured and blinded by Indian troops firing pellet guns and even using catapults, and doctors and patients trying to reach hospitals turned away by soldiers at checkpoints. An independent Indian news outlet interviewed a young woman who was forced by Indian soldiers, in behavior worthy of Tolkien’s orcs, to walk 6 kilometers while in labor, to reach a hospital where she could deliver her baby. There seems to be no limit to the cruelty with which Indian troops treat Kashmiri civilians.

Perhaps because this is unfolding in a world that is grown weary of war and hatred, these stories and images are striking home. There has been a trickle of news of Hindu nationalist violence against minorities and Dalits in India that western media is no longer able to ignore. Perhaps the true colors of the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (who was rehabilitated by the Obama White House after Condoleezza Rica had denied him entry into the U.S. for his part in the Gujarat pogroms of 2002), are now being recognized.

Perhaps the lynchings, the signs of a sinking Indian economy, and the war mongering emanating from the Indian leadership — whose popular support was reaffirmed in a massive electoral mandate earlier this year — are making investors queasy.

And perhaps most significantly, as the U.S. prepares to pull itself out of the Afghan quagmire, it will need the help and support of Pakistan’s new government.

This combination of factors has enabled the western and U.S. media to get in touch with their conscience. Insightful reporting and editorials are making front page headlines — and even Human Rights Watch has broken years of silence on the issue to warn India, quite rightly, to “step back” in Kashmir. Maybe Churchill was right after all, when he said you can trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.

To be sure, this shift has been some time in the making.

In 2017, the Rafto Foundation of Norway awarded its prestigious annual prize to two Kashmiri human rights defenders, Parveena Ahangar of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons APDP and Parvez Imroze of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society JKCCS. In 2018, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued its first ever report on Kashmir, and a follow up report in June 2019. Reports from JKCCS on torture and Amnesty International on arbitrary detentions (aka arrests without charges) added to the growing evidence of massive human rights abuses by India, putting these squarely in the international gaze. The Turkish news site TRT World picked up the story with sustained reporting.

The other side of the western media coverage on the current crisis has been the near-total blockade on all Kashmiri media, and reports of Kashmiri journalists being attacked by Indian troops. While some independent Indian media sources have been reporting on the situation in a courageous and principled way, the majority of Indian media, traveling freely around Kashmir in army vehicles and helicopters, repeat the Indian government’s lies about peace, “normalcy,” and a glorious future of corporate investment for Kashmir.

Kashmiri journalist Gowhar Geelani, who was able to access an internet connection after nearly two weeks, sent out this message on Twitter: “Kashmir will remember the Instruments of Tyranny. Especially those who raised a toast to celebrate, to mock at Kashmir’s collective misery, helplessness, unprecedented information blockade, crackdown, and mass arrests. History shall never forget their Goebbelsian propaganda!”

Despite the continuing communications blockade, videos are starting to trickle out.

Which Way to the Future?

It was probably the impending U.S. departure from Afghanistan, and the increasing role that China plays in the region through the CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor), that explains the timing of India’s rushed move to annex Kashmir.

The idea may have been to ratchet up tensions in the region to prevent the U.S. withdrawal. But all is not going according to plan. There have been popular protestsaround the world, with global peace activists supporting the Kashmiri right to self-determination. Along with the media, this represents a significant shift in the global narrative on Kashmir.

As was reportedly affirmed at a closed door UN Security Council meeting on August 16, the UN continues to recognize Kashmir as a disputed territory and the unilateral Indian annexation does not change that status. According to Indian reporters with inside sources, Russia surprisingly joined China in calling for an open UNSC meeting, which can have more lasting consequences. This means that a major pillar of the Indian position on Kashmir, that it is an internal matter for India to handle as it sees fit, has been blown to smithereens. And a major foreign policy objective for Pakistan, to internationalize the Kashmir dispute, has been achieved.

No formal statement on the meeting has been issued by the UNSC, and naturally both India and Pakistan are spinning it as a diplomatic victory for their side. What is certain Kashmir is back on the agenda at the UNSC after a gap of 48 years. The threat of nuclear war with catastrophic global consequences may have the effect of focusing the efforts of that august and secretive body on finding a just and peaceful solution.

What would such a solution look like?

The Kashmir Scholars Network, a group of which I am a member, has developed a set of recommendations for action towards a peaceful and just resolution of the conflict in accordance with the wishes of the Kashmiri people. It is based on our collective knowledge of the Kashmir conflict and our connections to multiple actors, including human rights activists, civil society groups, lawyers, journalists, writers, artists, and academics in Kashmir.

“We recommend that United Nations bodies work urgently towards the following goals:

1) Immediate cessation of Indian violence against Kashmiri civilians and restoration of all civil and political rights.

2) Recognize the right of the Kashmiri people to determine their own political future, and mediate a just settlement based on the right to self-determination. In this process, international monitors must ensure that there is no government reprisal or intimidation against the people of Kashmir as they discuss future arrangements and express their political aspirations.

3) Demilitarize both sides of the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. Further, to demilitarize all of Kashmir and immediately revoke Indian emergency laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

4) Create mechanisms and procedures that will allow Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control to meet freely and discuss their political futures.

5) Create a Special Rapporteur with the mandate to investigate and report on crimes against humanity in Kashmir. This would be the first step in setting up credible mechanisms for documentation, accountability, and justice for human rights abuses in Kashmir over the past three decades, including extrajudicial executions, torture, gendered and sexualized violence, enforced disappearances, and unknown, unmarked, and mass graves.

6) Create a UN Commission of Inquiry with the mandate to investigate all instances of human rights violations, which will be the first step in seeking accountability and justice for these crimes.”

As the UNSC faces up to the task of decolonization in Kashmir, what of the rest of India? The trashing of the Indian Constitution by the BJP has grim implications for democratic processes within India, as is already becoming evident. At the far eastern corner of the country, another slow-motion humanitarian and human rights disaster is unfolding in Assam, where the Indian government is ready to strip 4 million Muslims of their citizenship and place them in concentration camps prior to deporting them to Bangladesh. The two leading alerts on Genocide Watch today are Kashmir and Assam.

Minority groups like the Sikhs and Nagas, with their own histories of suffering repression and violence at the hands of the Indian state, are watching events in Kashmir closely, and what they foretell. The long night of Indian fascism has just begun.

What do the Kashmiris make of this? No one knows at present, because they are still under a communications lockdown with leaders, civil rights activists, and teachers under arrest, without charges. But when the Indian clampdown is lifted, their voice will be heard loud and clear, and it will be a roar for freedom. The Indian soldiers will be standing by, armed and trigger-happy, ready to shoot down teenagers, women, and children, as they have done so many times in the past.

This time, the world will be watching.

Update: As of August 22, the number of arrests was estimated to be around 4,000. Reports of torture are surfacing. The UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights has issued issued a statement calling on the Indian government to end the communications clampdown and expressing concern about the reports of arrests and torture. 

A friend received a call from Parveena Ahangar of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, an inspiring human rights defender and one of the mothers of the disappeared. Parveena asked her to tell friends and supporters around the world that she is fine and the spirit of the Kashmiri people is unbroken. 

FPIF contributor Shubh Mathur writes about nationalism, minorities, borderlands, counterinsurgency, and human rights. She is the author of two books — The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict: Grief and Courage in a South Asian Borderland and The Everyday Life of Hindu Nationalism, as well as many articles and commentaries. She is currently working on a comparative history of Indian counterinsurgency since 1947.

Jammu and Kashmir: the Legitimacy of Article 370

by NYLA ALI KHAN

Photograph Source: Motohiro Sunouchi – CC BY 2.0

Introduction

The recent unilateral decision of Prime Minister Modi’s government to revoke Article 370, which guaranteed the special status of Jammu and Kashmir; dismemberment of the State, and its diminishment are flagrant violations of the sovereign Constitution of India. These maneuvers jeopardize the federal structure of India. The erosion of the rights and privileges of a State is an unhealthy precedent to set in a diverse and federal country. The current curbing of political and civil rights in Jammu and Kashmir is deplorable.

Historical Perspective

On 26 October 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh signed the “Instrument of Accession” to India, officially ceding to the government of India jurisdiction over defense, foreign affairs and communications. The accession of J & K to India was accepted by Lord Mountbatten with the proviso that once political stability was established in the region, a referendum would be held in which the people of the State would either validate or veto the accession. After signing the Instrument of Accession, the maharaja appointed his political adversary, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, as the head of an interim government.

On 2 November 1947, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, reiterated his government’s pledge to not only the people of Kashmir, but also to the international community, to hold a referendum in Indian and Pakistani-administered Jammu and Kashmir under the auspices of a world body like the United Nations, in order to determine whether the populace preferred to be affiliated with India or Pakistan. Nehru emphasized this commitment several times at public forums over the next few years.

In January 1948 India referred the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations. Prime Minister Nehru took the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir beyond local and national boundaries by bringing it before the UN Security Council, and seeking a ratification of India’s “legal” claims over Kashmir. The UN reinforced Nehru’s pledge of holding a plebiscite in Kashmir, and in 1948 the Security Council established the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) to play the role of mediator in the Kashmir issue. The UNCIP adopted a resolution urging the government of Pakistan to cease the infiltration of tribal mercenaries and raiders into J & K. It also urged the government of India to demilitarize the State by “withdrawing their own forces from Jammu and Kashmir and reducing them progressively to the minimum strength required for the support of civil power in the maintenance of law and order.” The resolution proclaimed that once these conditions were fulfilled, the government of India would be obligated to hold a plebiscite in the State in order to either ratify or veto the accession of J & K to India.

In the meantime, the Government of Jammu and Kashmir negotiated with the central government to ensure that it would be allowed to function as a fully autonomous unit within the federation. Article 370 of the Constitution of India ensured that apart from defense, foreign affairs, and communications, decisions with regard to other matters would be determined with the consent of the Government of Jammu and Kashmir. There was a reason that special status was guaranteed to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. On 13 July 1950, the new government of J & K, headed by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, made a landmark decision.

“Between 1950 and 1952, 700,000 landless peasants, mostly Muslims in the Valley but including 250,000 lower-caste Hindus in the Jammu region, became peasant-proprietors as over a million acres were directly transferred to them, while another sizeable chunk of land passed to government-run collective farms. By the early 1960s, 2.8 million acres of farmland (rice being the principal crop in the Valley) and fruit orchards were under cultivation, worked by 2.8 million smallholding peasant-proprietor households.” (Bose 2003: 27–28)

This metamorphosis of the agrarian economy had groundbreaking political consequences. This revolutionary measure, which greatly improved the human development index in the State, would not have been possible without Article 370. The political logic of autonomy and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was necessitated by the need to bring about socioeconomic transformations.

The legislative bill, which had orchestrated this transformation, won the unstinting support of thousands of erstwhile disenfranchised peasants. But displaced landlords and officials in the Dogra regime made no bones about their hatred of the political supremacy of the new class of Kashmiri Muslims. This hatred unleashed a reign of terror and brutality against the Valley’s new political class.

The “defining moment in Jammu and Kashmir’s post-Indian independence history” came in 1950 when disenfranchised peasants “were freed from the shackles of landlords through a law that gave them ownership rights on the land they tilled. . . . The sweeping land reforms under the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act passed on July 13, 1950, changed the complexion of Kashmiri society. The historical image of the emaciated local farmer in tatters, with sunken faces and listless eyes, toiling to fill the granaries of landlords changed overnight into one of a landowner who expected to benefit from the labor he had put in for generations” (Ahmed, F.). This program emphasized the necessity of abolishing exploitative landlordism without compensation and enfranchising tillers by granting them the lands they worked on. Many policy makers in the Indian subcontinent, political scientists, and economists have acknowledged the effectiveness and rigor of land reforms in Jammu and Kashmir, which benefited underprivileged farmers in all three parts of the State—Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh.

In August 1952, the government of J & K reiterated the commitment of to the principles of secularism and democracy which enabled the forging of ties with the Indian nation-state: “The supreme guarantee of our relationship with India is the identity of secular and democratic aspirations, which have guided the people of India as well as those of Jammu and Kashmir in their struggle for emancipation, and before which all constitutional safeguards will take a secondary position.” For the layperson, the “new Kashmir” in which the hitherto peripheralized Muslim population of the Valley and marginalized women would reinsert themselves into the language of belonging a welcome development.

But the nationalist project of the Praja Parishad had sought the subsumption of religious minorities into a centralized and authoritarian state since the 1940s. These integrative and centralist measures were met with massive opposition, which the government of India suppressed with bloody maneuvers. The volcanic nature of the protests in the Valley gave a veneer of legitimacy to its action of large-scale repression of leaders of the Plebiscite Front. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was also arrested, for the umpteenth time, under the Defense of India Rules, to further hush the voices of dissent.

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah underlined in his letter to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, founder of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, in February 1953,

When talking about the constitutional aspect, it is sometimes conveniently forgotten that the Praja Parishad wants that Article 370 should be expunged from the Constitution. So far as we are concerned, we have maintained that the special position accorded to the State can alone be the source of a growing unity and closer association between the State and India. The Constituent Assembly of India took note of the special circumstances obtaining in the State and made provisions accordingly.

To entertain the doubt that the Muslims of Kashmir would now give up their secular ideals would be uncharitable, although the statements and the pronouncements made by the leaders of communal parties in India from time to time and the inspiration and guidance they are providing at the moment to the Praja Parishad leadership in Jammu is, no doubt, giving them a rude shock. But let me assure you and the people of India that the Muslims in Kashmir will not falter from their ideals even if they are left alone in this great battle for secularism and human brotherhood.

As I’ve said on other forums, the Constitution of India seeks to guarantee respect for the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the integrity of the electoral process. But time and again, provisions of the Constitution of India have been breached in Kashmir, and the ideals that it enshrines have been forgotten. In Kashmir, rights relating to life, liberty, dignity of the people, and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution, embodied in the fundamental covenants and enforceable by courts of law, have been flouted. The revocation of Article 370, without consultation, makes it clear that the much lauded parliamentary democracy in India has been unable to protect a genuine democratic set-up in Kashmir.

Heads of Governments cannot avoid their ethical and moral responsibilities toward the peoples of the States in a federal country. The lives of those people cannot be torn asunder by paramilitary forces and other “upholders” of the law.

Blow to Kashmiriyat 

“Kashmiriyat” was not handed down to me as an unachievable and abstract construct. On the contrary, it was crystallized for me as the eradication of a feudal structure and its insidious ramifications. It was the right of the tiller to the land he worked on. It was the unacceptability of any political solution that did not take the aspirations and demands of the Kashmiri people into consideration. It was the right of Kashmiris to high offices in education, the bureaucracy and government; the availability of medical and educational facilities in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. It was the preservation of literatures and and historical artifacts that defined an important aspect of “Kashmiriyat.” It was the formation of the Constituent Assembly of J & K to institutionalize the Constitution of the State in 1951, which was an enormous leap toward the process of democratization. It was the fundamental right of both women and men to free education up to the university level. It was, constitutionally, equal opportunities afforded to both sexes in the workplace. It was the nurturing of a contact zone in social, political and intellectual ideologies and institutions. It was pride in a cultural identity that was generated in a space created by multiple perspectives.

Trust cannot be won and unity cannot be maintained by the display of national chauvinism and erosion of Kashmiriyat.

Nyla Ali Khan is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, The Life of a Kashmiri Woman, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan has also served as an guest editor working on articles from the Jammu and Kashmir region for Oxford University Press (New York), helping to identify, commission, and review articles.

U.S. is roadblock to peace between India, Pakistan

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

TEHRAN - The inaugural 2+2 ministerial dialogue between India and the U.S. held in New Delhi last week has again threatened to jeopardize recent efforts made by New Delhi and Islamabad to bury the hatchet and open a new chapter in their bilateral ties. The joint statement issued at the summit has drawn sharp reaction from Islamabad, making it amply clear that the Americans don’t want India and Pakistan to be friends and they don’t want peace and stability to prevail in this region.

In the joint statement, India and the U.S. called on Pakistan to ensure that the territory under its control is not used to launch terrorist attacks on other countries, adding that Pakistan should expeditiously bring to justice perpetrators of the Mumbai, Pathankot, Uri, and other cross-border terrorist attacks. Without going into the merits of this statement, the timing is suspect.

U.S., which recently cancelled $300 million military aid to Pakistan, has been chagrined with the growing proximity between Islamabad and Beijing and the new Pakistani government’s hand of friendship towards Iran. Americans are known to unceremoniously dump friends and allies, and the recent developments indicate that the Trump administration has embarked on a mission to dump Pakistan now. Not just that, it seeks to hijack any efforts to improve ties between Pakistan and India.

Reacting sharply to the Indo-U.S. joint statement, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it takes “strong exception to the unwarranted references” against it in the statement, adding that Pakistan has conveyed its position to the U.S. on the issue. The spokesperson said the ministry is of the view that mentioning of a third country with “unsubstantiated accusations” in a formal document is “inconsistent with the established diplomatic norms”.

The statement has reopened old wounds that have prevented the two South Asian estranged neighbors from demolishing the giant wall of hatred and animosity between them. This regional disintegration, it must be noted, serves the regional policy of the U.S. well. We have seen in Afghanistan how the U.S. imposed a war and forced peoples and nations to fight against each other. The war has entered its 17th year now, and the U.S. war machinery is busy fanning the flames of war.

Since the new government assumed power in Pakistan, Islamabad and New Delhi have shown signs of a thaw, expressing desire to work with each other and resolve the contentious issues, including Kashmir. Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan, in his victory speech, asserted that he would take two steps if India took one step. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a letter to Khan, congratulating him on his election. These developments rekindled hopes of a breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations and brought cheer to peaceniks on both sides of the border.

Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan Ajay Bisaria last week said that Prime Minister Imran Khan's government has opened a political window and India is “filled with cautious hope”. Bisara had met the cricketer-turned-PM earlier this month and presented him a cricket bat signed by the members of present Indian cricket team. It was hailed as a sign of cricket diplomacy, which works when the political diplomacy fails.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry, reacting to Bisara’s statement, said it wants to “utilise the same window and see how we can move forward.” So, it’s apparent both sides have been making indefatigable efforts to break the status quo and make substantial progress on improving their relations.

On Thursday, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it was ready for talks with India and was awaiting an official response from New Delhi on how to move forward on the issue. “We are ready for talks with India. We have also conveyed our position to the international community. It remains for India to respond,” spokesman Dr Mohammad Faisal said during the weekly media briefing, corroborating reports that Pakistan had approached India for peace talks.

“We are also saying since long that dialogue is the only way forward to settle all outstanding issues between Pakistan and India. We are officially waiting for a response from India on how they want to move forward. We have a consistent position on this,” he asserted, adding that there were few Track-II initiatives with India which were not official.

So, at a time when the two neighboring countries are trying to resurrect the peace process and open a new chapter of bilateral relations, it is important for the policy makers in both New Delhi and Islamabad to understand that there are forces that do not want them to shake hands. U.S. regional policy seeks to create wars and discords, not peace or agreements.  

Unlike his predecessor, Prime Minister Imran Khan seems to have realized the futility of Pakistan’s alliance with the U.S. At an event in Rawalpindi a few days ago to mark Pakistan’s Defence Day, he said the country “won’t fight the wars of others” anymore. “I was opposed to the war on terror, I didn’t want Pakistan to get involved in someone else’s war,” Khan said. “I pledge today that Pakistan won’t fight someone else’s war. We stand for our people and we will have a foreign policy that works for the betterment of Pakistanis.”

The BJP government in India, which signed important defense deals with the U.S. during 2+2 dialogue last week, would do well to remember the words of party patriarch Atal Bihari Vajpayee: you can change your friends, but you can’t change your neighbors. Good relations between India and Pakistan are in the best interests of peace and stability in the region, something the hawks in Washington don’t want to see.