Siddiq Wahid

Siddiq Wahid currently lives in his native Ladakh where he and Susan Wahid, his wife, run a secondary school. He received his PhD in Inner Asian Studies from Harvard University, a Masters in Education from Harvard University and a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Theory from Gustavus Adolphus College. Dr. Wahid has taught Central Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and at Metropolitan University. He has authored a book on Ladakh and several articles on Central Asia, Tibetan Civilization and the Kashmir conflict; he has lectured widely in South Asia, Europe and the United States. Since 1990 Dr. Wahid has been deeply involved as an activist in Jammu & Kashmir; in 2001 he was named a member of the People’s Election Commission of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. He is a member of the Governing Board of the People’s Commission on Environment and Development India (PCEDI) and a founding member of the India Forum, (IF) a Delhi-based discussion group.

Questionnaire

What topics would you be most interested in presenting at the conference?

My talk is entitled “Resistance, Representation and The Peace Process”. The first part on “Resistance and Representation” will be of approximately seven minutes duration; it will give a thumbnail sketch of the historical development of resistance in the State and its key features. The second part, of approximately ten minutes duration, will suggest ways to circumvent the Indo-Pakistan intransigencies of which the peoples of J & K have become victims, both witting and unwitting. As such, my presentation could therefore be included either in the "Historical Issues" panel or the "Ways to alleviate the problem" panel. I do not have an objection to being included in either panel.

What are the other core issues that you feel must be addressed by any sustainable effort towards the resolution of the India-Pakistan conflict over Jammu and Kashmir?

The core issues that need to be addressed are (a) the historical, legal and political facts of the case, but without prejudice to (b) the changed, and continually changing, international scenario, (c) centrality of the opinions, the plural is important, of the peoples of the erstwhile J & K State, (d) the need to heal the wounds of the refugees from State through restitution of their status, (d) the security interests of the Indian and Pakistan States and (e) the separation of the dispute from the Indian and Pakistani reliance on it to define their respective nationalisms.

Why did you decide to join our conference and commit to engaging in this dialogue with speakers and participants?

I accepted the invitation to the conference because, (i) above all else, the varied peoples of the erstwhile J & K State need to meet and talk amongst themselves to understand that this is not just a Kashmiri ethnic issue, but one that involves at least three other ethnicities. (ii) Because the threat of continued warfare between Indian and Pakistan is real. And (iii) because the resolution of this is essential to the prosperity of South Asia and its neighboring regions of Central Asia, West Asia and South East Asia.

Please share a statement of your hopes for the conference or thoughts about the significance of peace initiatives in areas of conflict.

My hope for the conference is that the participants will return from it having better understood the complexity of the problem, gotten to know each other better even in our paradoxical stances and with a strategy to understand the problem in the context of world wide developments rather than within the limited confines of the Indo-Pakistan paradigm.

As for some thoughts on the significance of the initiative, I believe no ‘peace initiative’ can be sincere, practical and sustainable without some key ingredients as its focal point. In the case of the hostilities surrounding J & K these are, to my mind, as follows:

1. Let us focus on the true victims of the conflict who are all the peoples of the J & K State, the civil societies of India and Pakistan and, by virtue of the size of fallout of the intransigencies of these countries, all the countries of South Asia represented by SAARC.
2. There needs to be an end to the ad nauseam blame game, which is identical to the huge corpus of propaganda that has flooded the discourse on J & K. All the parties need to acknowledge the factual causes of the conflict and propose formulae for its resolution without rancor.
3. It must transcend propaganda of any ilk, be it of the Indian State, the Pakistani State, Islamicist or Hindutva.

Could you suggest to us your preferred news source?

I do not really have any such, but I regularly read The Hindu, Dawn, the Kashmir Times, Greater Kashmir and a variety of sites of the net, including propagandist ones put out or inspired by the Governments of the interested parties.

Recommended book(s)?

I have two recommended books and one document to help all interested parties gain a comparative perspective. Namely: Sumantra Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir, Sage, New Delhi, 1997 (?), Gilmartin and Lawrence (Eds.) Beyond Turk and Hindu, University Press of Florida, 2000 and The Good Friday Agreement document that provides a detailed ‘road map’ for the Irish problem. They furnish, respectively, an incisive analysis of the J & K problem, a perspective that gives us a chance to think of Hinduism and Islam in South Asia as a synthesis and a conceptually comparative approach to conflict resolution.