New Delhi said this week it will adopt "quiet diplomacy" with every section of political opinion to find a solution to the problems in India-ruled Kashmir about four years after it opened a dialogue with separatist groups there.

The response to the announcement is on expected lines -- the moderates welcoming it and pro-Pakistan hardliners reminding any effort at peace without involving Islamabad would be futile.

New Delhi has not yet made a formal offer for talks. But the timing of the development appears to be significant.

Violence is at a low in Kashmir, elections there were largely successful and last year's angry public protests against Indian rule have now subsided.

On the other hand, the security situation is at its worst in Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan appears to be in a decisive phase.

There is also growing realisation in Washington about the impact of the India-Pakistan rivalry on the Afghan war as pointed out in this Reuters analysis.

Pakistan has long demanded that resolution of the Kashmir dispute be made part of any effort to stabilise South Asia, a move strongly resisted by India.

The United States wants Pakistan to concentrate its military efforts on fighting the Taliban and other Islamist groups on its western border. For this Washington would like to see India and Pakistan reduce their tensions.

So could it be that international pressure was devolving on India to resolve the Kashmir issue and New Delhi's latest offer for talks was only aimed at deflecting that pressure by giving the impression that it was engaging with Kashmiris?

Or is it that the time is right to strike a deal with moderate Kashmiri groups? Does New Delhi believe that a Pakistan caught up in a vortex of bloody conflict would now be less attractive to the modern Kashmiri youth aware of India's rising financial and political stature in the world?

The Mint newspaper suggests if India hoped to settle the Kashmir issue it had to engage with those who want meaningful autonomy for the state and politically isolate the hardline pro-Pakistan groups

Clearly the need is for a solution that will be implementable on the ground in Kashmir and not a formula that only satisfies New Delhi and Islamabad.

Do you think New Delhi is finally moving towards that solution in right earnest?

(PHOTO: An Indian policeman stands guard after a grenade blast in Srinagar October 6, 2009. REUTERS/Danish Ismail)

When the British left India in 1947, they bequeathed what was arguably a European notion of the nation state on a region for which the very concept was alien. I say ”arguably” because anything one writes about Partition or the nation state is open to dispute. And until the financial crisis, I relegated this argument to the realm of historians – a subject that interested me personally, but did not seem relevant today.

That was until I noticed a new debate bubbling up on the internet about the future of the nation state. Will it become more powerful as countries scramble to protect themselves from the financial crisis as George Friedman at Stratfor argues in this article?  Or does the need for global solutions to the crisis sound a death knell for the nation state, as John Robb suggests here?

Let’s just suppose the paradigm has shifted and the 60-year-old model defined by the departing British colonial rulers is no longer valid. What does that mean for Pakistan and India? (more…)

While Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is in the United States discussing U.S. military strikes across Pakistan’s border, army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is on a far less publicised trip to China to talk about defence cooperation. The timing may be coincidental, but the potential implications of the United States and China playing competing roles in Pakistan are huge.

Pakistan has always seen China as a much more reliable friend, while support from Washington has waxed and waned in line with U.S. interests (Islamabad has never quite forgiven the United States for using it to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then dropping it when the Russians were driven out in 1989.) 

And nowadays the difference in the approaches of Pakistan’s two giant allies is even more striking.  While the United States and Pakistan argue about U.S. cross-border strikes, China has quietly reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Pakistan stable.

In a condolence message sent after this weekend’s Marriott Hotel bombing, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, “As a good neighbour and all-time friend of Pakistan, China will always support the unremitting efforts made by the government and people of Pakistan to safeguard the country’s stability.”

Of course there is no reason to jump to the conclusion the United States and China will become outright rivals over Pakistan — both have a stake in Pakistan’s stability, and in the past both have managed to maintain close ties with Islamabad without tripping over each other. But the current scenario certainly increases the chances of friction.

Add to that the fact that the strategic picture in South Asia has changed dramatically under the Bush administration. The United States has rewritten its relationship with India — which was still seen as in the Soviet camp back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan –turning it into a crucial ally in Asia and potential bulwark against Chinese influence. It sealed that transformation by reaching a deal with India effectively recognising it as a nuclear power, ignoring any misgivings in China (India’s nuclear weapons programme was developed as much, if not more, as a defence against China as against Pakistan.)

So it will be interesting to see what Kayani brings back from China and Zardari from the United States in the way of promises of support.  Will the United States and China be able to work together to pull Pakistan out of its current crisis? Or are they drifting into a situation where they end up opposing each other?

One of the more troublesome aspects of the latest protests in Kashmir, among the biggest since a separatist revolt erupted in 1989, is the impact on the younger generation.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra writes that India’s attempt to crush the revolt in 1989 and 1990 ended up provoking many young Kashmiris to take to arms and embrace radical Islam. 

“A new generation of politicized Kashmiris has now risen; the world is again likely to ignore them - until some of them turn into terrorists with Qaeda links,” he writes.  Calling on India to take some first steps to ease the situation by cutting the number of troops in the Kashmir Valley and allowing Kashmiris to trade freely across the Line of Control – the military demarcation line which divides the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan – he says the past record does not inspire much hope.

“But a brutal suppression of the nonviolent protests will continue to radicalize a new generation of Muslims and engender a fresh cycle of violence, rendering Kashmir even more dangerous - and not just to South Asia this time,” he says.

It would be wrong to overstate the role of radical Islam in the revolt – the Kashmir Valley is primarily Sufi and the hardline brand of Wahhabi/Deobandi Islam followed by al Qaeda and the Taliban has never really managed to take root there.

And nor would it be correct to hold India alone responsible — many Pakistanis will admit privately that Pakistan played its own role in encouraging the separatist revolt, in part to use as a pawn against its much bigger neighbour.

But no amount of finger-pointing or bitter wrangling over history can take away from the fact that children who were born after the revolt erupted and grew up in violence, are now turning into teenagers as the troubles flare anew. What hope for them?

As the comments on my last post on Kashmir  showed, the Kashmir question is one that still stirs powerful and divisive emotions.

There is no “quick fix” solution. The former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, promised a plebiscite after partition in 1947, is an intricate mosaic of different ethnic, national and religious identities, now held in parts by India, Pakistan and China, and caught between the strategic interests of all three.

It’s also hard also to see how India and Pakistan can now muster the political will to seek a solution on Kashmir when they failed to do so in the space that opened up after they agreed a ceasefire on the Line of Control at the end of 2003. In Delhi, the Congress-led government faces elections due by May next year, and would be vulnerable to accusations by the Hindu right of betraying India were it to give too much ground. Pakistan is stumbling through a chaotic transition to civilian government, whose leaders will be watched carefully by the powerful Pakistan Army for any signs of weakness in dealing with India.

But then again, what is the price of doing nothing? Children born when the Kashmir revolt erupted will be 20 next year. What will they tell their children? What legacy will they hand on to the next generation?

The People’s Daily does not run editorials very often about Pakistan and India, so when it does, I pay attention.  It just published an op-ed about the latest talks between India and Pakistan on counter-terrorism. The talks themselves appeared to yield little in actual results. Yet according to the People’s Daily, it was an “important step towards mutual political trust”.

“The efforts for peace once again prove that dialogue is the sole path to resolving differences between countries,” it says. “India and Pakistan’s steps on this road are not big yet; but they are moving, in a positive direction.”

Is this an example of China taking on a U.S.-style role of regional policeman? Would India and Pakistan feel uncomfortable about such a role?

Maybe not. India and China decided years ago to put the bitterness of their 1962 border war behind them in order to concentrate on winning a place at the top table in the global economy. India’s nuclear deal — the centrepiece of its rapprochement with the United States — appears to be running into trouble at home – leaving it all the more in need of friendly neighbours on its own doorstep.

Pakistan has always seen China as a more reliable friend than the United States, as underlined in this Yale Global Online backgrounder. With relations between the United States and Pakistan getting tetchier by the day, you would expect Islamabad to turn to China for help.  Plus China seems to be pumping investment into Pakistan, of which this story in the Daily Times about it offering Chinese skilled labour to build a dam is just one example.

So is the United States losing its place in South Asia? And is China stepping in to fill the gap? It’s worth remembering that China, India and Pakistan all have a stake in Kashmir since all of them control parts of what was once the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.  And the Siachen war is the only conflict in the world to have been fought in a place where three nuclear-armed powers meet.  If these three countries are now trying to pull together, what kind of role does the United States have left in the region?

Defence analysts in South Asia have been saying for so long that India and Pakistan might solve their problems over Kashmir only to end up at war over water that I had almost become inured to the issue. That was until I read the following comment on an earlier blog about Gulf investors buying up farmland in Pakistan to offset food shortages at home:

“Tough challenges await the investors in this sector due to serious water and energy shortages that the country suffers from at the moment,” it reads. “For effective investment in the agriculture sector, the government must clear these impediments first.”

The comment prompted me to hunt around for evidence of growing tension between India and Pakistan over water, needed to irrigate the land to cope with food shortages and for hydroelectric power — an increasingly attractive alternative in view of high fuel prices.

A quick trawl turned up this overview in the asia sentinel: “Water is destined to be a determining factor in the regional conflicts of South Asia in the years to come, particularly between India and Pakistan,” it says. ”While the West is busy concentrating its efforts on securing a ready supply of oil, in South Asia the governments are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that in the not too distant future water is going to be equally, if not more, important to the survival of their people.”

More specifically, Ijaz Hussain in the Daily Times analyses a row between India and Pakistan over Indian plans to build a hydroelectric project – the Kishanganga dam — on a river on its side of divided Kashmir. Pakistan fears the project will disrupt its own plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the same river on its side of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers they share in divided Kashmir through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived a period of intense antagonism which began with the nuclear tests in 1998 and ended with a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in late 2003. 

How well will it hold up in the current global crisis over food shortages and high oil prices? Relations between India and Pakistan are better than they have been for years, yet the challenges they face in providing food and electricity for their people and their industries are greater than ever.

I shall return to this subject and would appreciate comments offering links or ideas about how far water is going to replace Kashmir as the main irritant between India and Pakistan.

In the meantime, here is an observation to be going on with. The Stimson Center, in a history of the Indus Waters Treaty, attributes the success of the World Bank in brokering the deal to its insistence that the “functional” aspects of sharing water resources for mutual benefit must be separated from the political aspects of the India-Pakistan relationship.

Yet when Indian Power Minister Jairam Ramesh spoke of the row over the Kishanganga dam earlier this month he said: ”This is an issue with geo-strategic and foreign policy implications. The prime minister would have to give it a thought.”

Did he misspeak? Or were his words about the geo-strategic implications of water a sign of things to come?