Can Nobel Peace Prizes Bring Peace To South Asia?

By Jean-Pierre Lehmann

The winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are Malala Yousafzai, the admirable young (17) Pakistani Muslim girl who has most courageously defended the right of girls to education, and Kailash Satyarthi, the Indian Hindu who has led a movement for some 35 years campaigning against child slavery in India.

This brings to four the number of Nobel Peace Prize winners emanating from South Asia. The other two are Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma/Myanmar, 1991) and Muhammad Yunus, founder and philosopher of the micro-finance Grameen Bank (Bangladesh, 2006). Kailash Satyarthi becomes the first Indian Nobel Peace Laureate; the Nobel Committee never saw fit to award the prize to Mahatma Gandhi!

Leaving aside the debate about whether the Nobel Peace Foundation makes judicious choices, one critical question could be whether the Peace Prizes can have any positive impact on what is one of the world’s most turbulent regions with lots of sectarian hate, violence and historical grievances?

Indeed as the awards were announced, the Indo-Pakistani conflict continues unabatedly in Kashmir. As pointed out by ISA (International Strategic Alliance) in Kashmir Flashpoint:

“As the world focuses on conflicts elsewhere in places such as Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, it is easy to forget that the disputed region of Kashmir is the only place in the world where two nuclear-armed countries are engaged in periodic clashes along a much-disputed border. However, the fighting that has broken out between Indian and Pakistani soldiers along the dispute Line of Control in Kashmir this week is a reminder of just how tense the situation there is. Furthermore, domestic factors inside India and Pakistan could lead to a serious escalation in tensions between the two long-time rivals that could spiral out of control and implicate a number of other world powers.”

The conflict in the region is not just between two nuclear-armed states, India and Pakistan, but also between two religions, Hinduism and Islam. The 2002 massacres in Gujarat, under then Chief Minister (now Prime Minister) Narendra Modi’s watch, in which over one thousand people were killed, are a painful illustrative reminder. Will the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Kailash and Malala succeed in bringing peace between Pakistani and Indian and Muslims and Hindus? Although there are hardly any Hindus left in Pakistan’s population of some 200 million (97% of whom are Muslims), Muslims represent 13.5% of India’s population of 1.2 billion.

Recently in Burma there has been the persecution by Buddhists against the Muslim Rohingyas minority. Major violence broke out in 2012, leading to a high proportion of displaced Rohingyas having to live in refugee camps. Rohingyas are an ethnic/linguistic group, originating from what is today Bangladesh, estimated to number some 1.8 million worldwide, roughly half of whom live in Burma and have done so for several generations. I go to Bangladesh quite often; when I was there in 2013, at a time when the anti-Rohingyas purges were especially violent, a Bangladeshi friend pointed out that while both Burma (in the person of Aung San Suu Kyi) and Bangladesh (in the person of Muhammad Yunus) have Nobel Peace Prize laureates, they were not even talking to each other, let alone trying to build peace.

[This raises the ancillary question: might it not be better if the Nobel Peace Prize were lent rather than given? In other words, you are awarded the Peace Prize so long as you continue to militate for peace; otherwise you should be asked to give it back!]

Though it is East Asia that is generally presented as the world’s most dangerous geopolitical region, especially with the prospect of a Sino-Japanese war perilously looming, but also in light of acute territorial disputes, in fact since the end of the Vietnam war and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, there has been relatively little actual fighting. In the course of recent decades Southeast Asia has been transformed from a battlefield to a marketplace.

In South Asia, comprising mainly countries formally part – of the British Empire, the situation is very different. For one important thing there has been a considerable contrast between the two regions’ economic growth and poverty reduction. Among the thirteen economies identified by the 2008 report of the Growth and Development Commission that were successful in generating an average annual growth rate of 7% over a 25 year period between 1950 and 2005, nine are from East Asia [China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand], in contrast to not a single one from South Asia. Whereas trade and other forms of exchange (investment, transport, tourism, etc) in East Asia have been booming, South Asia has the world’s lowest rate of intra-regional trade. Crossing borders is difficult.

I do not recommend, as I had to on one occasion, trying to fly between Dhaka and Lahore! Though I do strongly recommend crossing the Wagah border, the only road border crossing between Pakistan and India, as it is quite a memorable experience.

South Asia remains a poverty-stricken, conflict-ridden region that harbours, among other things, great violence against women and children. There are more illiterate females in India than in the rest of the planet put together.

Of course the British deserve much of the blame for this state of affairs. The 1947 partition – against which Gandhi and other thought leaders pleaded – was an unmitigated disaster, arguably one of history’s most brutal acts, even if that was not intended. (Salman Rushdie’s novel 1981 novel Midnight’s Childrenforcefully conveys the bitter flavour of the traumas that ensued. In a very different was the Google advertisement “Reunion” is very moving.) Not only was there and continues to be enmity and violence between Pakistan and India, but also the splitting of Pakistan into two – West and East Pakistan – was a phenomenal blunder that resulted in an atrocious war in 1971, including genocide and mass rape (very movingly evoked in the magnificent novel by Tahmima Anam A Golden Age).


It is impossible to undo what the British did. New foundations are needed to create not only a new regional edifice of peace but also the right spirit. The quatuor of South Asian Nobel Peace Laureates should be encouraged (instructed?) to provide guidance and inspiration.

(On a technical geographic note, it is the case that Burma straddles the two sub-Asian regions, East and South, as it is, for example, a member of ASEAN, but historically it has strong connections to the South and was attached by Britain to its empire in India.)

Courtesy: Forbes.com

Reimagining Kashmir

Christopher Snedden’s “Kashmir: The Unwritten History” looks at the Kashmir dispute from a new angle

“The Kashmir dispute is now so old that if it were a person, it would be entitled to pension,” joked Christopher Snedden, during a discussion with journalist Mehboob Jeelani at the recent launch of his book Kashmir: The Unwritten History (Harper Collins).

It was one of the few light moments in an evening that proved to be a grim reality check. An Australian politico-strategic analyst and author, Snedden’s book provides an alternative history to the Kashmir dispute, locating its origins not in the invasion of Pukhtoon tribesmen from Pakistan, as India has consistently claimed, but in protests in Poonch and Mirpur by people long disenchanted with Maharaja Hari Singh’s rule. The people of Poonch and Mirpur eventually ‘liberated’ themselves from the Maharaja’s rule and formed the government of Azad Kashmir in October, before the king acceded to India.

Providing the context to this ‘liberation’, Snedden said, “Poonch and Mirpur had a rugged terrain and very small land holdings. The people couldn’t subsist on the land they had. So a lot of Mirpuris joined the merchant navy, and the people from Poonch joined the British Indian Army. It seems by the end of the Second World War, there were 50,000 people from Poonch area who had some sort of military experience,” he said. The dispute started, Snedden said, when alarmed by their might, the unpopular Maharaja sent his army to brutally disarm them.

Asked about Pakistan’s unwillingness to challenge the Indian narrative, Snedden said, “At the time, the Pakistan government was heavily involved trying to establish Pakistan; they didn’t have the capacity to find out and report what had happened… The government in Azad Kashmir claimed to be government of all of Kashmir, but naturally they only controlled a little area. And Pakistan wanted all of Jammu and Kashmir and believed that by saying ‘we accept Azad Kashmir government. as a liberated area’, it would weaken their claim to the whole area.”

Apart from the events leading up to the king’s accession, the book also provides new information about how Azad Kashmir and Azad Kashmiris have fared since 1947, through a detailed examination of its resources, economy, administration, elections and internal politics, finding, in all these areas, a heavy dependence on Pakistan.

In addition to interviews with politicians, journalists and bureaucrats, Snedden has relied on primary source documents such as the restricted Report of the Sub-committee on Western Kashmir, 1949, of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan and the Census of Azad Kashmir, 1951. “I wanted to tell the story of Azad Kashmir as accurately as possible,” he said.

Talking about the larger Kashmir dispute, Snedden said that a resolution should be reached by involving the legitimate stakeholders — Kashmiris — and not treating them as the third party. But given India and Pakistan’s position of seeing Kashmir as an indivisible entity means, he argued, that a solution will not be arrived at unless there is a “circuit-breaker” — an unpredictable natural disaster, or an even more unpredictable Chinese invasion into Kashmir.

Photo and News Courtesy: The Hindu

India Makes another Kashmiri Hero

By Mazhar Iqbal/

By exterminating Guru India has facilitated the making of another Kashmiri freedom hero. He was not a heroic figure like Maqbool Bhat when he entered into Tihar Jail on allegations of facilitating an attack on Indian Parliament, but became a hero when he was buried inside the jail premises.Nobody including his fellow party members was willing to give him a status equal to the founder of armed freedom struggle in Kashmir but India herself did this job.

While Guru’s standing is not parallel to that of Bhat, he can be another Maqbool Bhat in years to come. When Bhat was hanged to death in 1984, nobody in Indian government could envisage a strong reaction and violent protests by people of Kashmir, especially his own party , the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).

Guru was neither the founder of the JKLF nor the top leader of his party; he was a just an activist who had attempted to renounce militancy more than once.  Still, he can be a catalyst for another spell of violent struggle against India’s brutal and tyrannical rule in Jammu & Kashmir. There are suggestions that his figure will raise high not because of a staunch and forceful expression of anger over his death but by the pull factor of the state defensive policies vis-à-vis Jammu & Kashmir.

Guru was a true embodiment of a person who lived all his life struggling hard to reconcile with the nature of conflict that has shaped since the revival of insurgency in Kashmir. The insurgency which Guru lived all through his life was not available to Bhat, rather later himself became a founder of violent struggle against oppressing rule. Bhat is revered not only for his patriotism and heroic stature but also for his unfettered allegiance to a cause. There is a clear deviation in characters of Guru and Bhat, but they truly represent the nature of freedom struggle in their own times.

The political struggle in Guru’s time is not confined within the charter and framework of a single revolutionary political party; it has been more vigorously expressed by other segments of Kashmiri society than freedom fighters themselves. It is not just one freedom fighter who with his revolutionary mental approach does not want to blindly follow the authoritarian rule but it is a whole generation that has gone through a first-hand experience of militant struggle and counter-insurgency tactics of a strong government.  They are all passengers of a same boat and they have personal experiences of the whole journey.

India took more than a decade to hang ‘the mastermind of an attack on Indian Parliament’. There is a speculation that ‘the new hero’ of Kashmiri’s freedom movement can attract more people toward militancy than Maqbool Bhat. So, one can imagine where India will be in next two decades, especially in a context of time taken to punish a ‘traitor’.

According to Indian government’s version Guru had provided the major logistical support to the militants who had besieged Indian parliament. Thus, he met his logical end, but, what India will do with another horde of masterminds of future attacks. India did not hand over Guru’s body to his relatives to avoid a possible anger in the region. This decision might have been taken carefully after weighing the possible options. However, Indian security establishment would be proved mistaken if the protest against the execution prolongs.

When Bhat was hanged in 1984, nobody in India had been able to predict that it would be an ignition for a scorching fire of militancy as the decade of 90’s witnessed India burning in that fire.

Noted human rights activist and author Arundhati Roy and many other critics have already described in detail how there were too many loopholes in the Guru’s trial. It will be matter of shame for India’s secular stature when historian will prove that by hanging one person India not only jumped back into decades of anarchy but also pushed its own people toward rebellion and hatred against the centre.

Apparently, the Indian security apparatus believes that Guru’s execution will not have that kind of mass appeal as it was witnessed after Bhat’s hanging. However, major political parties including Congress are worried over this development.  India is not in a position to take it for granted that Guru’s hanging would not give a fresh lease of life to the extremist groups operating in the valley and it will not have negative impact on overall security situation in the northeast of the country.

In fact, the impact has started making its way. When Guru was being hanged in Tihar Jail, Sonia Gandhi’s election campaign in northern states was at full swing. In a blow to the campaign of opposition Congress for the February 14 assembly polls in Tripura, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi have cancelled their trips. The prime minister has also postponed his election campaign tour to Nagaland.

The government decision to bury Guru inside the Tihar Jail is a beginning of a state defensive policy which India will be bound to follow in coming months. Yet, the policy of avoiding a situation of mass outburst on the streets of Srinagar and Sopore can be exercised for a short span of time but not for ever.

(The writer is a peace and human rights activist and member of Press for Peace.)

Kashmir's Exiled Bhattyein

Varad Sharma :

Kashmiri Pandit women are commonly known as ‘Bhattyein’. The word is a distortion of Sanskrit word “Bhattini” which means lady belonging to a noble family.The over two-decade old Kashmir conflict has adversely affected the people of valley; be it men, women or children. Kashmiri women have faced the brunt of conflict since the beginning. While the Kashmiri women living in the valley are considered a part of debate/discussions regarding the impact of Kashmir conflict, there are women living on the other side of the tunnel who are ignored. Having witnessed the killing of their community members and then subjected to forced displacement from the Kashmir valley, the psyche of exiled ‘Bhattyein’ have got affected. Such a generation of women have seen the turmoil/insurgency in the valley and have been at the receiving end of terrorism. During the rise of insurgency in Kashmir valley, the Pandit women were raped, brutalized and killed. In 1990, a nurse named Sarla Bhat, resident of Anantnag, working in Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (Soura) was gang-raped and then murdered by Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) militants. In the same year, a woman named Girja Tickoo, resident of Bandipora, was gang-raped and then chopped into pieces on mechanical saw by the terrorists.

A Cherished Dream of Laissez-faire Unfulfilled

Zulfikar Majid:   Amid subdued insurgency in Kashmir and consensus on Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) between the two nuclear powers - India and Pakistan – Kashmiris, after a decade-and-a-half long conflict, saw semblance of peace and tranquillity dawning upon them with the opening of travel routes across the Line of Control (LoC) dividing the two parts of Kashmir, in April 2005. The 2003 ceasefire between the two historic rivals buoyed New Delhi and Islamabad to go one step further. Although sceptics on both sides of the border refused to acknowledge it as a substantial step towards building the much needed confidence between the two countries, the cross-LoC bus service between Srinagar (capital of J&K) and Muzaffarabad (capital of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) succeeded in bringing together the divided families on the two sides of the line without going through hassles of obtaining passports and applying for visas.

AIDS spreads tentacles in Kashmir

The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is gradually spreading its tentacles in Indian Held Jammu and Kashmir with the official data putting the number of total cases with HIV in the state to 3300 against 200 in the year 2001. The officials in Jammu and Kashmir State AIDS Control Society (JKSACS)  have so far been able to detect 3300 HIV cases against an estimate of 5000 cases projected by the society.

Stateless Kashmiris call to join Olympics community

London: Organisers of 2012 Olympic Games on Sunday were urged to include athletes of Jammu and Kashmir, a disputed state controlled by India and Pakistan.


A group of Kashmiri Diaspora Community members took part in a demonstration near the Olympic Park Village in London to protest over the forcibly division of their homeland, Jammu and Kashmir.


Agitators, who belong to various political parties and groups, issued a memorandum to extend congratulations to all the members of LOCOG for successfully organising 2012 Olympic Games.


They said that they want to join 2012 Olympic Games, however, India and Pakistan do not allow this.


They also alleged that in the Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir playgrounds have been turned into military camps and our fields in rural areas where young people use to play have been turned into mass graves.


“Jammu and Kashmir is the world’s most militarised place and despite our young people desire to become world champions in javelin throw they have been forced to become stone pelters", they further added.


“We want to break the chains of subjugation and control over our freedom of speech and movement so that we can build a peaceful and better world for our future generations to enable them to participate in Rio 2016 Olympic Games".


They also vowed to use sports as a catalyst for bringing change and peace in Jammu Kashmir.


The protestors belong to various groups like Jammu Kashmir National Liberation Conference (JKNLC), Kashmir Freedom Movement (KFM), Jammu Kashmir National Awami Party (JKNAP), Kashmir Liberation Organisation (KLO) and Association of British Kashmiris .


So far the LOCOG has not issued any comment on the demand.


Since 1989 when militancy erupted in Jammu and Kashmir, Kashmiri overseas communities settled in the Western countries have raised human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir but this is the first time that Kashmiris showed their interest to join Olympics community.


(writer is a freelance correspondent who also works with Press For Peace (PFP)- an NGO that promotes peace and development in Jammu and Kashmir. He could be accessed via: www.pressforpeace.org.uk) News Source: Ground Report
http://www.groundreport.com/Business/Stateless-Kashmiris-call-to-join-Olympics-communit/2947419

Photo Credit: Dadyal Online www.dadyal.pk