In 1999, the World Bank financed a modest project under the auspices of the Integrated Watershed Development Program to promote subsoil moisture conservation, but other foreign entities that have expressed interest in financing rehabilitation and relief programs (e.g., the Department for International Development, the United Kingdom’s aid agency) have been talked of in India’s Ministry of External Affairs as busybodies,” he said in his paper. Indian government, he said, rebuffed initiatives by USAID “to address (health) problems such as PTSD”.
Habibullah believed that “restrictions on (foreign) investment” reinforce the commerce-friendly Kashmiris’ feeling of being prisoners, a sentiment that fed the insurgency. “Many angry young men with whom I spoke said that being part of India had prevented Kashmir from becoming part of the global market,” he said.
But the most critical part of Habibullah’s research was what US could do on Kashmir. It was actually this segment that landed him into controversy. He sees US’s inevitability in getting involved in Kashmir on basis of his belief that “most Kashmiris regard the US as an honest broker” crediting her for “all positive developments in the region over the past five years”. But Habibullah wants US as a “facilitator” rather than a mediator. “..Any effort by the United States to impose a resolution will undoubtedly provoke popular resentment and public resistance within both India and Pakistan, even if the national governments are compliant, rendering any enforced settlement unsustainable,” he believes. So it should become a facilitator – like it was during Kargil war and operation Parakaram, for “paving the way toward resolution while leaving the principal stakeholders to determine the form of that resolution.”
America, he suggests, could engage the world’s leading financial experts to help design multilateral investment programs (for J&K) that would be implemented through World Bank and Asian Development Bank on low cost loans. “This approach would neither tread on nationalist sensibilities nor require an overhaul of present practice,” he suggested. Besides, he suggested US a role in promoting investment in the state through its own aid agencies, helping those dispossessed and traumatized by the violence to return to a normal, economically productive life.
When Habibullah had no official role, he kept his links with Kashmir alive. He is perhaps the only person who continues to be an emissary and an interlocutor on Kashmir without actually being appointed formally. In October 2004 before the visit of Prime Minister, Wajahat Habibullah had long interactions with the separatist leaders. Even before that he would always be available to talk to them.
It was during the Hazratbal siege that helped him to lay bridges with some of the separatist leaders. In fact, he has mentioned in My Kashmir, he was always in touch with Prof Abdul Ghani Bhat and Molvi Abbas Hussain Ansari. It was their help along with the fathers of some JKLF leaders that led him to negotiate with the holed up people in the shrine.
Habibullah has already started making the right noises. Though implementation of the RTI is his officially stated responsibility, he will remain in news for the way forward on the resolution of Kashmir mess. He has already told a reporter not to expect any breakthrough (in the proposed talks) as happened in France with the fall of the Bastille fortress. “This is now an evolutionary process and dialogue is its essential element,” he has said. “You may not have any fall of Bastille but quietly slowly, you will find a change. And I believe that change has a positive direction. And that is towards the resolution of this very, very old trouble of Kashmir.”
Right now he is not an official interlocutor. But he says, he will be happy to be one because he has friends in all camps. But for 10-Janpath, he has been the most credible source of information and analysis on Kashmir, a status he still retains. Given the changed situation and efforts by the central government to resume a stalled dialogue with the moderate separatist, Habibullah would have his say throughout. His Srinagar stint will get the CIC an interlocutor’s honour in bonus.
While negotiating with the militants and the civilians holed up inside the shrine, Wajahat had many
