The Centre will not speak to the Hurriyat Conference, maintaining that they will only speak within the Indian constitution. The separatists have never been agreeable to this.

In the past, both parties have gotten around this condition by either invoking ‘Insaniyat’ or by adopting a convenient silence about the Constitution.  But if a similar mechanism is adopted yet again, Hurriyat will still find itself unable to talk.

Why? Because Hurriyat’s reasons not to talk are much more complex than the Centre’s not to engage with it.

Hurriyat Skepticism

To begin with, much like the discourse in New Delhi about the futility of engaging with the Hurriyat, the separatists also have a longstanding narrative about the pointlessness of talking to the Centre in addition to a profound sense of grievance. For them, the basic problem about a dialogue with New Delhi rests on what the latter is ready to concede in terms of a political settlement and the impossibility of such a settlement without taking Pakistan on board.

The Hurriyat believe that the Bharatiya Janata Party in New Delhi does not possess the kind of open-mindedness such an engagement requires. The BJP’s advocacy of an integrationist agenda on Kashmir, one which includes the abrogation of Article 370 which gives Jammu and Kashmir its autonomous status in the Indian Union — albeit drastically eroded — is a polar opposite to the Hurriyat’s secessionist goal.

This raises fundamental questions about the nature of dialogue between the two. While the BJP will hardly find it politically tenable to encourage or endorse an absolutist secessionist position or be seen to engage with it, Hurriyat can hardly be approached with an integrationist aim. It will kill the political raison d’être of the separatist amalgam should they become part of such an engagement, especially when Pakistan is also being left out of the process. This effectively rules out any chance of the Hurriyat participating in talks with New Delhi.

Pakistan Factor

Certainly, an ongoing bilateral dialogue with Islamabad will remove Hurriyat’s inhibitions about engaging with Delhi – that is, should the latter do an unlikely about turn on its policy of not including Pakistan. But with relations with Pakistan at their bitterest, there are fewer prospects for a repeat of the Vajpayee-era “triangular dialogue” – one, between India and Pakistan and their respective engagements with the Kashmiri stakeholders.

So far, India has been adamant about speaking directly to Pakistan on Kashmir rather than engaging with the Hurriyat. Pakistan has also not been insistent on separatist participation once New Delhi agrees to a bilateral dialogue. They have preferred to humour the Hurriyat through invitations from the Pakistan High Commission or to pro-forma meetings with visiting Pakistani dignitaries before their talks with Indian counterparts, something that the Centre has put a stop to.

But it will always be hard for Hurriyat to speak directly to New Delhi with Islamabad out of the loop. One reason for this is that the separatist political objective is not an internal Delhi-Srinagar settlement of the Kashmir issue, but a Delhi-Srinagar-Islamabad solution.

Secondly, Islamabad will be deeply skeptical about a Hurriyat-New Delhi track, let alone countenance an internal settlement. Local and minor political and administrative re-adjustments will hardly suffice for a solution. On the contrary, Hurriyat runs the risk of becoming mainstream in the Valley, leaving its political space to be filled by the new political and militant actors, who are probably much more hardline than the current crop of separatists.

Pakistan did not recognise the 1975 accord between Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Abdullah which ended the latter’s 23-year-long pursuit of a plebiscite for Kashmir and enabled his re-entry into the state’s political mainstream. Separatists believe the accord was one of the major factors which fueled the armed revolt of 1989 and its continuation ever since. They believe that speaking to New Delhi without Pakistan on-board and going through an endless chain of discussions without hope of even a tonal change in New Delhi’s Kashmir rhetoric will only end in discrediting them with a likely attendant violent fallout for them and their families. There is substantial recent history to endorse this apprehension.

Troubled talks

The dialogue between the  Mirwaiz Umar Farooq faction of Hurriyat and New Delhi through the late 90s and early 2000 proves the fraught nature of such an engagement. Several rounds of talks were held between the Mirwaiz-led delegation and the National Democratic Alliance government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee which was called an “institutionalised dialogue”. The process was carried over into the succeeding United Progressive Alliance regime but was discontinued when then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sought to broaden the dialogue to include other “stakeholders” in the state. Hurriyat, which claims to be the sole representative of the anti-status quo political camp, refused to be “downgraded as one among many political stakeholders in Kashmir”.

This was followed up with a secret dialogue with then-Home Minister P Chidambaram in 2009, which was also abandoned when it was reported on by a newspaper. Following this, a veteran member of the Mirwaiz faction, Fazl-e-Haq Qureshi was shot at by unidentified gunmen. Qureshi hasn’t since completely recovered. Earlier, suspected militants killed an uncle of Mirwaiz and burnt his family’s century-old Islamia School – for talking to the Centre in defiance of the hawkish separatist opposition. On its part, New Delhi didn’t release even one political prisoner to give its interlocutors some sense of usefulness in such an engagement.

Unity hitch

Top separatist leaders, Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik have united – albeit not merged their respective outfits – to lead the current upsurge. The Centre is adamant in its position that they will not speak to anyone in Kashmir outside the framework of the Indian constitution and refuse to include Pakistan in the talks. The separatists’ hardline is that it is futile to speak to the Centre without including Pakistan and what they call the “nationalist straitjacket”.

Already, the hardline Hurriyat patriarch Syed Ali Geelani has made it clear that there can be no dialogue between the separatists and New Delhi as it will be “a futile exercise” in the absence of Pakistan. Although Geelani’s stand on talks with the Centre has traditionally been hawkish, the positions of Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik are no different now, although their reasoning is more modulated. In the past, both have had no problems in sequencing the talks – first between India and Pakistan followed by their inclusion or the vice versa.

The question is, when will the government and the separatists escape this impasse? If history has taught us anything, it is that this won’t be happening anytime soon.

The author can be contacted at contact@newslaundry.com