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India's outreach in Kashmir could calm ties with Pakistan

The release of The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace, written by former Indian spy chief AS Dulat, former Pakistani spy chief Asad Durrani and myself, coincides with an imminent breakthrough in strife-torn Jammu and Kashmir. After four years of a hardline policy towards the valley - not dispelling the perception that it treats Kashmir not as a people/political problem but as a land dispute - New Delhi is finally taking an initiative.
Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh has recently said that the government was not averse to talking to the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has never shown interest in the Hurriyat - in mid-May he visited Srinagar but did not mention talks, instead saying that the solution to any problem was "development, development, development". BJP trouble-shooter Ram Madhav in April reiterated that the Centre would not budge from not talking to separatists and those "not loyal to India". Indeed, most BJP supporters see the Hurriyat as Pakistani; during an interaction that Dulat and I had at a think-tank in Delhi, one panelist savaged Dulat for kow-towing to separatists. (Her polemic had little use for the truth. Dulat has always been criticised, ironically, for his closeness to former J&K chief minister Farooq Abdullah, who is as pro-India as it gets in Kashmir. Dr Farooq came for the The Spy Chronicles launch, not any separatist. And I wrote his biography 22 years ago.)
Rajnath Singh's outreach is heartening because one of our book's key lines is that J&K ought to be "the bridge between India and Pakistan". The Kashmiris were over the moon and has been quoted repeatedly in the valley's press. Of all the establishment faces in Kashmir, Dulat, though retired, is arguably the most accepted. Another irony: in a terrorism-affected area, a former spy chief is the most trusted. It is no coincidence that Dulat served Kashmir's favourite prime minister, AB Vajpayee (we co-wrote Dulat's bestselling 2015 memoir, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years).
This isn't the first initiative; last October, a former Intelligence Bureau chief, Dineshwar Sharma, was appointed as the Centre's interlocutor to talk to "all sections of society" in J&K. However, his repeated visits to the valley have not borne fruit, mainly because the prime minister's office had earlier on dismissed the idea that he would talk to separatists (the minister of state called Sharma just another official). Naturally, Kashmiris lost interest in the "non-interlocutor".
Rajnath Singh's outreach comes in the backdrop of a "Ramzan ceasefire" offered by the Centre in Kashmir, at the urging of CM Mehbooba Mufti. Though the ceasefire has been marred by shelling across the Line of Control (the LoC, with Pakistan's Kashmir), and by a confrontation between locals and the para-military over the weekend, it has provided relief to Kashmir.
On Thursday and Friday, Rajnath will be visiting J&K. (Sharma briefed him earlier this week.) He is expected to push his outreach to the Hurriyat a bit forward. It may not be earth-shattering, as Vajpayee's April 2003 visit to Srinagar when he said Delhi would talk to Kashmiris "within the bounds of humanity"; the frostiness of the past four years will take time to thaw. Any approach, thus, has to be incremental. Yet however small the step forward is, it will still be a breakthrough.
Linked to this are the growing contacts with Pakistan. If you recall, Vajpayee's initiative was followed by a re-engagement with the then President, General Pervez Musharraf; similarly, there has been an understanding between the two countries' director-generals of military operations to keep things cool on the LoC. Recently a Track 2 initiative between the two countries - one not sponsored by a third country - was restarted with retired Indian officials visiting Islamabad. There was a meeting recently of the two nations' Coast Guard, and the two National Security Advisors, who quietly met in Bangkok late last year, have been in touch over the phone.
This comes after the Pakistan army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, made statements twice in the last six months in favour of talks. On December 19, he briefed Pakistan's senate and said "if the government decided to hold talks with India, then the army would back the government"; and in April he said that the only way for a peaceful resolution to India-Pakistan disputes is a "comprehensive and meaningful dialogue". Perhaps after the Pakistan general election on July 26, bilateral relations may get a high-level kickstart once again.
At our interaction with the think-tank, Dulat speculated on the reasons for the new initiative.
He noted that the Trump administration in the US had stopped criticising Pakistan in the last few months, implying that they were coaxing Islamabad toward action. He also noted that during their informal summit in Wuhan in April, Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke for nine hours; the topic of Pakistan would have definitely come up during that time. But whatever the reason, the initiatives come not a moment too soon, beginning with Rajnath trying to repair the India-Pakistan "bridge".
Aditya Sinha's latest book, The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace (HarperCollins India), is available now.