DIPLOMACY : Old Foes to Take Fresh Look at Kashmir Issue

It is the last major bit of unfinished business left from the traumatic dissection of British India. The resulting countries, India and Pakistan, fought two wars over it.

Today, it is a land of sparkling alpine landscapes convulsed with bloodshed and violence.

On Jan. 1, the status of the former princely state of Kashmir will be on the table when the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan, both of whom are just weeks from retirement, meet in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

After 45 years of acrimonious disputes and battlefield combat, skeptics have plenty of reasons to doubt that India and Pakistan can ever come to agreement about the future of the “Switzerland of Asia.”

So why are there optimists now?

“Our whole attitude is very positive: We want to sit down and thrash out our problems,” Riaz Khokar, Pakistan’s ambassador to New Delhi, said this month. “And we are also hopeful that India will approach (the talks) in a constructive and meaningful manner so that something will come out of it.”

India’s position is not yet known. But word on the diplomatic cocktail party circuit here is that the government of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao would be ready to give up its claim to the section of Kashmir now under Pakistani control (about one-third) in exchange for keeping the territory on its side of the “line of control.”

The roots of this quarrel run to the very creation of independent India, and of Pakistan as a separate Muslim homeland in 1947. Three-quarters of Kashmir’s population were Muslims. But the wavering maharajah, a Hindu, threw in his lot with India to win military support against invading Pakistanis. India agreed to a plebiscite to determine whether Kashmiris as a whole sided with their prince, but it has never been held.

Four years ago, a Muslim-led rebellion erupted in India’s northernmost state.

Up to half a million Indian army and paramilitary troops have been deployed there; they have, according to human rights observers, resorted to summary executions, rape and torture.

Six rounds of Indo-Pakistani talks on Kashmir petered out in the summer of 1992 as both countries became increasingly preoccupied with domestic affairs.

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The reelection of Benazir Bhutto as Pakistani prime minister last October helped push the negotiating process off dead center. She has ruled out independence--the option many of Kashmir’s 4 million people favor.

The increasing foreign criticism of India for its human rights violations in Kashmir is another reason for Foreign Secretary J. N. Dixit to meet with his Pakistani counterpart, Shahryar Khan. With the demise of the Soviet Union, India found itself without a heavyweight ally on the world scene, and the United States and Britain have been pressuring the Rao government to end its brutal practices in Kashmir.

Dixit has said his goal in Islamabad will be “to emphasize to my colleagues in Pakistan that we are willing to reason with them to find some compromise to this difficult problem.”

Although the formula Dixit and Khan have adopted means the Kashmir dispute can be discussed more broadly than ever before, nobody expects a quick or easy solution. But Khokar, the Pakistani ambassador, is hopeful.

One indicator of whether India and Pakistan are able to do business together is whether they agree to disengage their soldiers from the Siachen Glacier, where they face off at 20,000 feet above sea level in bitter cold. Agreement on withdrawing to lower altitudes was reached in 1989, but disagreement flared about the sites the armies were supposed to pull back to.

“If problems are being resolved in other parts of the world, there is no reason India and Pakistan shouldn’t get down to resolving these issues,” he said.

Caught in the Middle

A 1947-’49 conflict between India and Pakistan left Kashmir divided. Renewed fighting in 1965 and 1971 did little to change this “line of control.”

KASHMIR FACT SHEET

* Population: 9.5 million. * Economy: About 80% of the people live by farming. Main crops include rice, corn, wheat and barley. * Background: The nominally independent state of Jammu and Kashmir was under British authority before 1947. It has been the cause of two of Pakistan’s three wars with India since the Indian subcontinent was divided.