The by-all-accounts amicable four hour parleys between Pakistan’s president Musharraff and prime minister Manmohan Singh in New York in mid-September, the conclave of all Kashmiri political parties in Srinagar to which for the first time the prime minister of Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir was invited, and the acceptance of the Hurriyat Conference that the status of Kashmir cannot be resolved by force of arms, offers renewed hope that the Kashmir imbroglio which has bedeviled Indo-Pak relations since 1948, is about to be untangled.

During the six decades past, following the end of the Second World War, cataclysmic changes of history and geography have prompted the redrawing of national boundaries around the world. Most notably the Soviet Union has imploded and over half a dozen satrapies which were integral to the heavily nuclearised Soviet state today happily co-exist with Mother Russia. And in the Middle East implacable foes such as Egypt and Israel have negotiated new boundaries and exchanged territory to buy peace. Only in the Indian subcontinent do negotiations between India and Pakistan over the status of Kashmir, and the Tamil Tigers and Colombo over autonomy in north-east Sri Lanka drone on interminably.

Essentially the 57-year-old Kashmir dispute offers three conflict resolution options: acceptance in India, Pakistan and Kashmir of the LoC (line of control) dividing Kashmir as an international border; a United Nations supervised referendum in the Kashmir Valley and Pakistan occupied Kashmir to determine whether their people wish to accede to India, Pakistan, or become an independent nation.

Despite the traditional portrayal of Pakistan as scheming and villainous in official Indian propaganda and in the regrettably uncritical Indian media, it is high time the reality dawned that the Pakistan establishment has exhibited greater flexibility in the matter of negotiating the status of Kashmir than New Delhi. For instance Pakistan is amenable to the idea of a referendum in both halves of Kashmir; to refer the dispute to third party adjudication, as also to accept the possibility of an independent united Kashmir. New Delhi on the other hand insists that Indian Kashmir is an integral part of India and it is opposed to a referendum and/or third party mediation.

Such obduracy is unwarranted because even in the worst case scenario- the accession of united Kashmir to Pakistan- given Kashmir’s geographical position on the northern periphery of India, there is little likelihood of damage to the unity and integrity of India. Moreover there is a strong likelihood of Kashmiris voting for independence, in which case given its industrial backwardness it will become a buffer state heavily dependent upon tourism revenue from Indian visitors- a consummately favourable development. 

Against the backdrop of people-driven momentum of the Indo-Pak détente and a favourable climate on both sides of the border in Kashmir, this is a good time to give a decisive push forward to the Indo-Pak dialogue on the status of Kashmir. The major stumbling block to the agonisingly prolonged parleys are the machinations of the two nations’ armaments merchants. They need to be timed out in the interest of the greater good of the great number of poor and dispossessed in this unfortunate subcontinent.

Also read: Time to weigh Kashmir excision option

Arresting pervasive urban decay

A narrowly avoided confrontation between the captains of the IT (information technology) industry and the state government over the pathetic state of civic infrastructure in Bangalore, vaingloriously trumpeted as the 21st century IT capital of India; the outrage of industry leaders over the abdication of municipal government officials when 94 cm of rain inundated Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country on July 26; the revolt of citizens in early September in Delhi, the national capital over persistent power outages- all highlight the reality that India’s major cities are afflicted with misgovernance and are on the point of imminent collapse into disease and anarchy.

But while media reports on creeping urban blight have successfully highlighted the scale of the problem, they have been less successful in identifying the root causes of the astonishingly rapid slide of the nation’s high-potential cities endowed with huge wealth of human capital, into incremental anarchy and decay.

The plain but politically incorrect truth is that decades of neglect of the development needs of the rural hinterland has prompted continuous mass migration from village to urban India. Despite this all too obvious social phenomenon, little was done to prepare the cities of India to accommodate the steady migration of short-changed farmers into urban habitats. Moreover in the course of time, newly-arrived rural and small town migrants have swamped the lower ranks of municipal and city corporations bringing with them the unhygenic practices of village India, its casual corruption and lackadaisical mindset.

The failure of post-independence India’s establishment confused by half-baked Soviet ideology to budget for rural-urban migration has been compounded by the failure of Indian academia to seriously study or teach urban planning and civic administration. Meanwhile as Prof. N.S. Ramaswamy the founder director of three of India’s most well-known business schools is given to caustically observing, instead of training professionals to manage India’s vital infrastructure organisations such as power plants, irrigation networks and civic administrations, the country’s globally renowned IIMs and IITs are preoccupied with training managers for already well-managed soap and toiletries vending multinationals.

Therefore there is an urgent necessity for these and other institutions of higher education to import contemporary infrastructure and civic management curriculums (and faculty if necessary) from universities abroad which have developed sophisticated study programmes in these largely unknown disciplines in this country. 

Simultaneously it’s equally important for civic and municipal governments to invite foreign corporations with proven expertise in infrastructure and civic management to work with PWD engineers and contractors to provide on-the-job training. Adoption of this dual policy approach is urgently required to arrest the inexorable slide of the cities of India into disease, chaos and lawlessness.