Kashmiri separatists vow to determine their future

Kashmiri separatist Yaseen Malik has remade himself more times than Madonna. In the late 1980s, he posed for photos as a fashion model. In 1989, he took up the gun as commander of an armed Kashmiri militant group. And in 1994, he changed form again and became a Gandhi-style nonviolent leader for Kashmir's liberation from India.

Today, as head of Kashmir's largest separatist party, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), Mr. Malik and other separatist leaders may have finally found a formula for independence. By calling for the creation of their own election commission and simultaneously for a cease-fire by militants, the top Kashmiri leaders may have broken through an impasse in the 12-year bloody insurrection in a state that both India and Pakistan claim. With nonbinding elections planned for later this year, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a coalition of Kashmiri separatist parties, hopes to show that they - and not India or Pakistan - are the true representatives of the Kashmiri people.

"It is the political right of the people to decide their future," says Malik, chairman of the JKLF, sitting on his cot in his party's Spartan office in New Delhi. "The government of India always raises the question of, if you claim to represent the people, then why don't you stand for election? So we accepted the challenge."

It's not exactly the sort of election that New Delhi was asking for. India, which has claimed Jammu and Kashmir state as an integral part of its territory since its independence in 1947, has called for Kashmiris to decide their future as other Indians do, by holding state elections under the Indian Constitution. Kashmiri separatists, for their part, say that any election under the Indian Constitution would only legitimize New Delhi's control, and so they call instead for a plebiscite, where the Kashmiri people could decide their future: whether to remain in India, to join Pakistan, or to become independent. But whether the Hurriyat's election goes forward or not, it may signal that Kashmiri separatists are opening up to new ideas on how to solve the conflict that has already claimed some 40,000 lives.

"I don't think the Indian authorities will allow these fellows to run around the state organizing elections," says Kanti Bajpai, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University here, who considers Malik one of the more credible figures in the Kashmiri separatist movement. "India has a national election commission to hold national elections, and a state election commission to hold state elections, so if they let them hold their own elections, it's like losing sovereignty in a way."

"But I think this may have been a signal that they (the Hurriyat) may be thinking of joining an election in the near future," says Dr. Bajpai, who has taken part in behind-the-scenes negotiations with Pakistani academics and officials.

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