Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

With parliamentary elections behind it, India shouldn’t be back at square one in its quest to settle the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir, one that has led to three full-scale wars with Pakistan and that nearly brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear combat.

India missed its great opportunity to resolve the burning dispute with Pervez Musharraf before he was overthrown from the Pakistani presidency last year. According to the British and American diplomats I talked to 18 months ago in New Delhi and Islamabad, a deal was tantalizingly close. One British ambassador told me that India had to make very few concessions to strike a final deal and that the main barrier to the agreement was merely “psychological.”

If Musharraf wasn’t prepared to give away the store, the Pakistani compromises came close to it. But despite the seemingly friendly diplomacy of Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the unwarlike prime minister Manmohan Singh and, in the background, (another peace-loving figure) the chairwoman of the Congress Party Sonia Gandhi, India couldn’t bring itself to go the extra mile.

Observers had different explanations for Indian intransigence: that Musharraff was trying to force the pace; that the Indian army, the intelligence services, and senior bureaucrats in the foreign ministry were resisting an accord; that the leadership had not made an effort to educate the electorate as the Pakistan government had done; that the prime minister was weak and only focused on the economy; that his (successful) attempt to lower the grinding poverty in the rural areas was also a preoccupation; that the time consuming nuclear deal with the U.S was critically important; and that India rather liked the status quo, since stubbornness fitted in with its self-image of being the subcontinent’s super power.

There was also the failure of the Bush administration—it pushed a deal through Congress that lifted the long-standing embargo on selling nuclear materials and reactors to India—that was, in Singh's words, “loved” by his country. America could have used the muscle afforded by the nuclear deal to instead help push India to sign on to Musharraf’s magnanimous offer.

In early 2007, while reporting on the conflict in India-controlled Kashmir, I sat at a small tea shop in Srinagar discussing the political trajectory of this troubled region with two friends—a Kashmiri attorney named Malik Aijaz Ahmad and a student named Idrees Kanth. I saw in Kashmir, as I have in other countries such as Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire, how the majority of the populace was caught in a vicious war of attrition between opposing sides with very little recourse or protection. Witnessing the situation in Kashmir led me to write my first long-form feature for World Policy Journal, the flagship publication of the New York-based World Policy Institute, where I have recently been named a senior fellow. During my time in India, I also became aware of the country’s complicated religious and ethnic dynamic. On one hand, this saw frequent and repeated episodes of discrimination and violence against the country's Muslim minority, including the murder of some 2,000 people—the vast majority of them Muslims—in a bout of ethnic cleansing in the state of Gujarat in early 2002. On the other hand, representatives of the Muslim community in India could also often behave in ways that reeked of intolerance, such as when members of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) political party, including Indian lawmakers, attacked the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen as she attempted to speak at a book release event in the city of Hyderabad in 2007. A recent email from Idrees, studying at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, demonstrates vividly to me that these tensions evident in Indian society as a whole do not shy away from rearing their heads even in a university setting. If communal violence, such as that which India witnessed in Gujarat in 2002, is also allowed to flourish in places of higher learning such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, it is a worrisome sign for a country that this month undertook another exercise in its vast experiment with democracy.

Mira Kamdar, a senior fellow with the World Policy Institute, talked to MTV Iggy about the ongoing dispute over Kashmir and why the conflict is more about territory than religion.