An interesting article about Indian Prime minister Man Mohan Singh by BBC Correspondent.
(I personally believe that India is as much on the wrong side of the history on Kashmir issue as Israel is on Palestine issue. My Indian friends at this forum will out rightly reject this statement considering it a biased observation by a Pakistani but the attached article written by an unbiased writer also supports my viewpoint. )
India’s accidental prime minister
By Nick Bryant
BBC, Kashmir
When India’s premier visited the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir for the first time since he took office in May, Nick Bryant was in Srinagar to hear him address the crowd and found the most significant message was “no change”.
Manmohan Singh speaks from behind a bullet-proof screen
Mr Singh became premier when Sonia Gandhi turned down the post
Standing behind what looked like a bullet-proof telephone box, with his back ram-rod straight and his head perfectly still, Manmohan Singh prepared to deliver perhaps the most eagerly awaited speech of his six-month premiership.
He was wearing his trademark sky-blue turban, a matching buttoned-up tunic and a scarf with the saffron, green and white of the Indian flag - less a fashion statement than a nationalistic avowal.
The venue was a leaf-strewn cricket stadium, the site of a famed one-day international in the early 1980s, when many Kashmiris in the crowd decided to cheer on Clive Lloyd’s West Indies rather than the Indian national team.
Insurgency
By the end of the decade, an armed insurgency against rule from New Delhi had taken violent hold - Srinagar was full of Indian soldiers, and its cricketers never returned.
Perhaps the most significant comment of Mr Singh’s visit came when he stated New Delhi was unprepared to grant any territorial concessions
Today the crowd was more friendly, but then many - perhaps the majority - had been bussed in by the Congress Party and its local ally.
Even moderate leaders of the Kashmiri separatist movement had decided to boycott this two-day visit.
Around the ground were larger-than-life posters featuring the enigmatic face of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the Congress Party, whose inner voice told her not to lead her country.
Indian Border Security Force soldiers in a gun battle with militants before Dr Singh’s speech
India says it will not to give in to separatist militants
That explained the presence of Manmohan Singh, India’s accidental prime minister - stiff and ill-at-ease, looking about as at home as Jane Austen at a Star Trek convention.
Just hours earlier, militants - suspected Kashmiri separatists - had already tried to sabotage the event. Overnight, two of them had taken up positions in a derelict cafeteria on a hillock within sight, if not range, of the cricket ground.
For three hours the Indian army tried to overwhelm them, in a hill-top assault with the sounds of gunfire and grenades echoing around the Kashmir valley. It was hardly the most auspicious start.
Frailty
Nor was the opening line of Mr Singh’s speech, delivered with such frailty and hesitancy that most of us didn’t even realise he’d begun talking.
Manmohan Singh
Mr Singh said $5 billion would be invested in developing the region
He speaks, not with the blustery rhetoric of a natural-born Indian politician, but in the measured tones and precise language of a natural-born technocrat.
A big-brain economist, his thoughts are better distilled in sums rather than sermons.
So, when he talks of India’s limited troop withdrawal from Kashmir, he says it’s a risk, but a calculated risk - a typically neat formulation.
And when he speaks of the problems of this disputed state, he talks of cash injections and infrastructure development.
The emotions and passions which the Kashmir dispute arouses seem completely alien.
Insoluble
But the stark simplicity of economic models helps explain why the problem of Kashmir is so insoluble.
map of Kashmir
You see, both India and Pakistan have long regarded this disputed territory as a zero-sum game where, if one side gains, the other side loses.
In New Delhi, at least, another calculation is also at work. If India compromises over Indian-controlled Kashmir, then other separatist movements will be emboldened, and its territorial integrity will be at risk.
Perhaps the most significant comment of Mr Singh’s visit came when he stated New Delhi was unprepared to grant any territorial concessions.
Dogmas
That has caused disappointment in Islamabad, where President Pervez Musharraf recently called for both sides to go beyond the dogmas of the past and to think afresh about this 57-year-old dispute.
General Pervez Musharraf
Musharraf’s suggestions on border changes were rejected by Singh
The difference in their personalities could hardly be more marked.
Musharaff is brash, impulsive and debonair, with a penchant for finely tailored suits and finely blended whisky.
One of the few things they have in common is that they both received at least part of their education in Britain, but Singh went to Oxford and Cambridge, and Musharraf went to Sandhurst.
That helps explain why the doctor loves Urdu poetry and the general loves his Glock pistol, which he keeps within reach in the back of his presidential limousine.
Odd couple
Whereas Singh prefers the mathematical, Musharraf prefers the martial.
The strange thing is that Singh grew up in what is now Pakistan, while Musharraf was born in Delhi.
So they stand as South Asia’s odd couple - committed, for the time being, to an ongoing peace process but wholly uncertain quite where it will lead.
Right now, India seems to favour the status quo - and the status quo equals stalemate.
If Mr Singh has made a new reckoning, then this week in Srinagar this famously introverted prime minister kept that thought to himself.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 20 November, 2004 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.