Some Highlights
Some moreWhen PDP released its Self Rule document, not before the Working Group on Centre State Relations, but in Pakistan, NC president Omar Abdullah openly blamed the Indian High Commission in Pakistan of having facilitated the entire process. The Foreign Ministry did not contradict the allegation. Many Kashmir analysts privately believe that the Self Rule document is the creation of a section of the PMO. In the recent past, we have many instances wherein we come across a process where GoI acted almost in tandem with the Muslim leadership of the Kashmir Valley, both mainstream and separatist.
I hope I never live to see the day if and when India will be balkanised againDuring the Vajpayee regime, a US-based Kashmiri secessionist leader, lobbyist and fund raiser, Farooq Kathwari, arrived in India with the full knowledge of the Government of India in March 1999, ‘carrying a series of proposals for the creation of an independent Kashmiri State’. At that time both USA and GoI underplayed his Jihad connections: his son had died in Chechnya while fighting the Russians!
Kathwari met very important persons in the Indian intelligence services and the ruling BJP. On March 8, Kathwari had a closed door meeting with Dr Farooq Abdullah and some of his top Cabinet colleagues in the Jammu Secretariat. This meeting induced urgency in the Farooq Government to come out with its reports on Greater and Regional Autonomy in the State. During his visit, Kathwari seemed ‘encouraged enough to push ahead with a new version of his blueprint for the solution of Kashmir’.
The blueprint - Kashmir: A Way Forward - became known as Kathwari Proposals. The National Conference reports had ‘striking similarities’ with Kathwari Proposals; the latter resembled Sir Owen Dixon’s proposals! Noted columnist Parveen Swami commented, “As significant, Abdullah’s maximalist demands for autonomy dovetail with the KSG’s (Kashmir Study Group) formulations of a quasi Sovereign State.”
It was not a coincidence that almost simultaneously the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Ministers met in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in March 1999, and reached an agreement envisaging ‘plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir on regional/district basis’, ‘maximum possible autonomy to Kashmir and its adjoining areas’, division of Jammu province along the Chenab River and so on. Significantly, the BJP-led NDA was in power at the time.