Moses Manoharan
NEW DELHI, Feb 6, (1991) – India’s best known Kashmiri leader, Farooq Abdullah, appealed to Washington on Wednesday to mediate between India and Pakistan in their dispute over Kashmir.
Abdullah, whose National Conference government resigned amid growing Kashmiri separatist violence more than a year ago, told foreign correspondents former U.S. president Jimmy Carter would be a good choice as mediator.
“Americans have a good influence over the government of Pakistan…if American good offices can be used,” he said.
New Delhi accuses Pakistan of backing a Kashmiri militant separatist campaign in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state which comprises two-thirds of the disputed Himalayan region. Islamabad, which rules the rest, denies the charge.
Some 2,000 people have died since the campaign exploded in January last year.
Abdullah, who was chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir — India’s only Moslem-majority state — said Carter had mediated in other countries and could do the same on Kashmir.
“India and Pakistan must bury the hatchet,” he said in a reference to their three wars, two of which were fought over Kashmir. Abdullah said Islamabad had suggested a proposal to India recently, but would give no details.
He said a solution could be based only on current control on the ground. The present division of the region dates from the last war with Pakistan which ended in 1971.
But a political solution would mean concessions to the Kashmiris, Abdullah added.
He said New Delhi would have to create more jobs in an area almost entirely dependent on the tourism that has vanished in the violence.
Militant suspects, mostly young men, should be released swiftly and what he described as atrocities committed by security forces had to be stopped, Abdullah said.
“There have been atrocities on both sides,” he said, adding that the government on its part must stop security forces from burning towns, shooting innocent people and using what he called ‘black laws’ to enter houses at will to arrest people.
“We have to remove tortures,” he said in an apparent admission of a charge frequently denied by the administration which has ruled Kashmir on behalf of New Delhi since Abdullah quit.
He also backed the Constitution’s Article 370, which ties formerly independent Kashmir into the Indian system.
“Article 370 is the symbol of our accession to India. Remove that and you are cutting your own feet,” he said.
The right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the second most powerful group in parliament behind Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress, has demanded the repeal of the article, which preserves a ban on non-Kashmiris owning land.
The BJP plans a march through Jammu and Kashmir starting on March 23 to demand the repeal of the article.
Abdullah said the march would be able to pass through Hindu-majority Jammu, but not the Moslem heartland of Kashmir.
“The feeling is that these people (the BJP) do not want their hearts, but only their land,” Abdullah said.
He said a 1986 agreement with Gandhi to align the National Conference with the Congress had alienated him from his people.
“I betrayed my people,” he said in an apparent reference to a feeling in the valley that the alignment meant a selling out of Kashmiri interests to the national government in New Delhi.
