Articles by Prabhu Ghate

The India-Pakistan peace process may have made several encouraging moves in recent weeks, but in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, old suspicions and fears still linger. For too long, militarism has been the preferred political solution. The people in divided Kashmir, separated by decades-old animosity, are now looking to both governments to take proactive steps in the shape of soft borders, open up trade links between the two regions and to ensure a transparent government.

The peace process in Sri Lanka is at yet another crossroads. In mid-June the government forwarded through the Norwegians its latest proposal for an interim administration. This draft has not been rejected outright by the LTTE unlike earlier ones. But whereas the government sees the interim administration as a way of enabling the LTTE to participate primarily in the management of donor-financed reconstruction, the LTTE wants to get much more out of it - it is seeking legitimacy, without, critics say, having to face elections.

If the jails are full in Kashmir, it is not because of preventive detention. The number of detainees is reported by official sources to be less than 500, and by non-official sources as about 1,500. These are very small numbers considering that 35,000 people have been arrested since January 1990 (official figure). When I pointed this out to someone, the answer seemed pretty obvious to him. He asked "how can the number of detainees increase if instead of being detained, people are deliberately killed?" In the context of Kashmir, if this is the only choice, detention, for all its abuses, seems positively benign. Indeed it could be argued that in Kashmir the immediate task of human rights groups should be to focus attention on preventing custodial deaths, even if in the short term this means accepting greater use of detention.



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