Slow and steady

The failure of the Siachen and Sir Creek talks earlier this year was seen by some as signalling a slowdown in the peace process.

The launch of a second bus service between Poonch and Rawalkot by UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday is a good indication that the India-Pakistan peace process is on track. Linking the 39-km distance between the two towns, the fortnightly service should be even more popular than the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus — simply because in this region, the people on either side of the Line of Control have closer ethnic and linguistic links. In the next stage, we can expect to see the restoration of trade between the divided Kashmiri regions through the movement of trucks.

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The failure of the Siachen and Sir Creek talks earlier this year was seen by some as signalling a slowdown in the peace process. The lack of firm dates for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s planned visit to Pakistan is also being seen in some quarters as confirmation of a slowdown of sorts. Speaking at the Organisation of Islamic Conference meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri claimed that dialogue has been unable to resolve any problem, including Kashmir. A more balanced analysis would suggest that although the process no longer grabs headlines, it is very much on course. For the record: the ceasefire along the LoC is still holding. This has prevented needless loss of hundreds of lives annually and is, of course, a vital condition for cross-LoC transit.

The peace process has a number of elements — negotiations with Pakistan, suppression of terrorist groups, dialogue with separatist Kashmiris, and so on. All these must mesh together to enable the Kashmir problem to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. But it is inevitable that with so many variables at play, the pace of development in each of the elements will vary.

The slow-and-steady approach has been endorsed by the International Crisis Group which has, in a recent report, argued that it is unrealistic to expect radical change and that it was not “feasible or even practical” to expect an overnight change of a very complex problem. The challenge before the two countries is not the ability to work out a solution for this problem, but to create the conditions in which the problem can be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.