Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Kashmir
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carry. It had been such an accident-prone relationship that any incident
could derail the whole process.
Musharraf’s turnaround divided the separatist movement in Indianadministered
Kashmir. The moderate elements supported his peace
initiatives. For them, militancy could not provide the solution to the
festering problem and it was time for the political parties to play their
roles for a negotiated settlement of the issue. Once dismissed by the
Pakistani military establishment as ‘weak links’, the moderate Kashmiri
leaders became Musharraf’s new allies.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a charismatic young Kashmiri leader,
remembered his first meeting with Musharraf in New York in
September 2001, when the Pakistani military leader accused him of
being ‘cowardly’ for suggesting a non-militant course towards the
solution of the Kashmir problem. ‘The meeting ended on a bitter
note,’ Mirwaiz recalled when I met him in his heavily guarded house
in Srinagar in April 2005.
The mood had completely changed when the two met again in
Holland three years later, following the Indo-Pak rapprochement. ‘It
was I this time asking him to go slow on the peace process. Musharraf
sounded too enthusiastic about the prospect of reaching a settlement,’
Mirwaiz said. The Kashmiri leader was thrown into separatist politics
as a teenager after the death of his father, Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq,
in 1989. As a prayer leader at Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid, he wielded
considerable spiritual and political influence in the disputed state.
He led the moderate faction of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom)
Conference (APHC), a loose coalition of more than 32 organizations,
that wanted militancy to give way to political struggle. ‘Militancy has
played an important role in drawing international attention to the
Kashmir issue, but now we should concentrate on a political struggle,’
he declared. 31 The moderates were also concerned about the struggle
falling into the hands of the extremists.
The resumption of the Indo-Pak talks was fully backed by the
moderates, though Musharraf’s change of tack shocked the hardliners
who had been fighting for the annexation of the entire disputed state
with Pakistan. Their bitterness was palpable when the bus service
between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad was restored on 7 April 2005,
after a 57-year hiatus. It was a momentous occasion when the new
Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, waved off the first bus with
its 19 passengers. Described as the mother of all confidence-building
measures between India and Pakistan, the bus link reunited divided