Hurriyat back home

The Hurriyat now has to contend with the altered geo-political realities of the region or risk being sidelined. Its trip to Pakistan suggests that it is still trying to define a role for itself. The first challenge it faces concerns its own identity, which is in disarray. There always were tensions between hardliners and moderates within the Conference, but today they are very much in the open. Leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Yasin Malik are still caught up in an old paradigm of thinking about Kashmir. They have not quite accepted the fact that terrorism is not acceptable to the global community. Malik unwittingly did India a favour by exposing the complicity of Pakistan8217;s information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, in running terrorist camps. It does not seem to have occurred to him though that, at this juncture, any evidence of Pakistan having supported armed groups would be a source of embarrassment to it, rather than a sign of its commitment to Kashmir. As for Geelani, he continues to sing the old tune. The crucial query for India is the extent to which forces like this can be marginalised.

Other Hurriyat leaders, like Mirwaiz Omar Farooq and Bilal Lone, seem to recognise some of the fundamentally altered realities. They acknowledge that there is a serious political price to be paid for engaging in violence. And they have finally recognised that thinking in old paradigms 8212; including in terms of the 1948 UN resolutions 8212; are counter-productive. But this recognition has not brought any clarity to their stand, as evident from the numerous trial balloons they float, including the nebulous idea of an United States of Kashmir. Like President Musharraf, who comes up with a new proposal every now and then, the Hurriyat too is struggling to articulate what exactly it wants. So did the Hurriyat gain from the Pakistan trip? At the end of the day, they did not get the unambiguous support in Pakistan they probably hoped they would. Its argument that it should be a participant in the Indo-Pak dialogue is undermined by its own nebulous and fractured identity. If the Conference wants to play a role in Kashmir8217;s future it will have to rethink its strategy and do two things: disavow terrorism unambiguously and engage with New Delhi without preconditions.