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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (31769)	6/7/2002 4:38:13 AM
From: arun gera	Respond to of 281500

Bilow: Another opinion on the MORI Poll in Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir’s longing Prem Shankar Jha hindustantimes.com The Indian government and media have grown so used to expecting only bad news from Kashmir that when good news finally arrives they do not know how to react. This is the only explanation for the routine way in which they all but dismissed the results of an opinion poll in Jammu and Kashmir, carried out by the UK-based MORI, one of the most respected survey firms in the world. But if ever a story deserved top billing it was this one because the MORI poll has destroyed every preconception on which Pakistan’s policy in Kashmir has been based. For good measure it has also trashed some of the deeply held but unspoken premises of Indian policy towards that unhappy state. Before analysing the results it is necessary to ask just how accurate and representative the results might be. The MORI poll is essentially a poll of the urban areas. Of the 55 localities selected for sampling, 22 were in Jammu city, 20 in Srinagar and six in Leh. Only seven were in the rural areas, four in the Valley and three in Jammu. Kargil, Poonch and Rajouri were left out completely. Apart from the fact that the population of these areas is very small, Poonch and Kargil towns would almost certainly adhere to the general trends displayed by Jammu and Leh. As for the urban bias, while it has probably worked marginally in India’s favour in Jammu, it has certainly worked against India in Srinagar. Srinagar recorded the lowest turnout in the voting in Kashmir Valley in 1996, 1998 and 1999. Abstention was a form of protest against New Delhi. The pluses cancel out the minuses. It is safe to assume that the survey results are fairly representative Kashmiri opinion. The most welcome finding of the poll is that, give or take the usual margin for possible sampling error, 61 per cent — more than three in five — of the residents of J&K want the state to stay as part of India. Given the overwhelming preference for India that must have been expressed in Jammu, this is not altogether surprising. But what the poll shows is that this feeling is widespread in the Valley too. Only 6 per cent of the respondents expressed a desire to belong to Pakistan and only 33 per cent said they were undecided. Even if the entire undecided and pro-Pakistan vote was concentrated in the Valley, it would still mean that almost one in three residents of there expressed a preference for India. This does not mean that India was the first choice for the Valley. The survey gave the respondents two options to choose from — Pakistan and India. Had a ‘third option’ — independence — been offered, some of the pro-India vote might have swung that way. The survey shows, albeit indirectly, that this swing might not have been substantial. Only 53 per cent of the respondents asked for ‘the widest possible measure of autonomy’ for both Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. Since independence is one large step beyond autonomy, it is possible that support for this option is not any greater than for autonomy. Then, a three-way choice might have found at most 50 per cent of the respondents voting for independence and at least 44 per cent voting for remaining in India while six per cent voted for Pakistan. The difference is not large enough to warrant a change in the status quo. The other important findings are that 92 per cent of Kashmiris do not want a trifurcation of the state as suggested by Pakistan; 86 per cent want free and fair elections either as a means to getting a government of their choice, or as a step in the negotiation of a solution to the Kashmir problem; 87 per cent want direct talks between representatives of Kashmiris and Delhi. Indeed, 80 per cent want peace above everything else, and an equal proportion want Kashmiri Hindus to return to the Valley. The survey makes short shrift of Pakistan’s claim that it is only giving moral and diplomatic support to the ‘freedom struggle’. As many as 39 per cent of the Muslim respondents said that it was directly fuelling the militancy; 86 per cent confirmed indirectly that Pakistan was sending militants across the border. The survey destroys Pakistan’s claim that the Kashmiris’ struggle is a religious one. This claim was supported vigorously by Ali Shah Geelani, the Jamaat-i-Islami’s representative on Hurriyat’s executive council and in a less overt way by the current chairman of Hurriyat, Abdul Ghani Butt, but was rejected by the late Abdul Gani Lone. The MORI poll invalidates two beliefs that have been a part of Pakistan’s definition of itself ever since its birth: * That since Kashmir is a Muslim majority area it should have come to Pakistan. * Its separation from India and absorption into Pakistan is a part of the ‘unfinished business’ of Partition. The truth is that in 1947, just like the ruling Khudai Khidmatgar in the North West Frontier Province, the ‘Rishi’ Muslims of the Valley had believed in their unique ethnic identity, their Kashmiriyat, and supported Sheikh Abdullah’s decision to choose India. What the survey has shown is the extent to which this sentiment has survived the disappointments of the last 50 years and the violence of the last 13 years. If Pakistan’s preconceptions have been destroyed, many of the unspoken beliefs of Indian policy- makers have also been proved hollow. The most deep-rooted is the belief that since the majority of the Kashmiris are Muslims, they must be pro-Pakistan. While no Indian leader is prepared to admit to holding this belief in public, the truth is that since 1990, this has been the base on which all policies have been built. These policies have rested on the following pillars: * There has been a complete absence of trust in the Kashmiris. All of them have been regarded indiscriminately as enemies of India. This led, especially in the days of the genuine Kashmiri insurgency, to a failure to distinguish between the groups, like the JKLF, that were fighting for Kashmiri independence, and those like the Hizbul Mujahideen, which were fighting to take Kashmir to Pakistan. For the security, the only good militant was a dead one. * The deep-rooted suspicion that all Muslims are Pakistanis at heart also led to a mindless reliance on the gun. Kashmiris could not be wooed into returning to democracy; they had to be clubbed into doing so. One result was that although key Kashmiri leaders like Yassin Malik voluntarily gave up armed struggle in favour of a dialogue as early as 1994, no dialogue has as yet taken place. Shabbir Shah, who was released a few weeks after Malik, suffered the same fate. This mistrust of Muslims was also the reason why Delhi refused to allow a delegation of Hurriyat leaders to go to Pakistan after the Vajpayee ceasefire in the 2000-01 winter. Today it is the main reason why Delhi persists in believing that Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference is the safest bet in Kashmir, and a rigged election is not too high a price to pay for its continuation in power. Perhaps the MORI survey will help it to change its mind