US scholars release policy report on South Asia

Jammu, May 10: Nine scholars of South Asia have constituted a Working Group on South Asia which aims to discuss the politics of knowledge concerning South Asia as it connects academic and policy work in the United States of America.
 Working Group members Amrita Basu, Shah Mahmud Hanifi, Nyla Ali Khan,David Ludden, Zia Mian, Senzil Nawid, Sahar Shafqat, Kamala Visweswaran, and Chitralekha Zutshi have met at New York University's Institute of Public Knowledge on March 6, 2009.  The group has released a policy report on South Asia titled Reframing a Regional Approach to South Asia: Demilitarisation, Development, and Sustainable Peace. It has recommended to Obama administration that the U.S. and NATO set a timetable to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan and replace them with U.N. Peacekeeping forces. It has also asked the U.S. to substantially curb arms sales to India, and make economic and development aid the center of its foreign policy in South Asia.
 
On Kashmir, the report says, "If the objective of U.S. foreign policy in South Asia is demilitarization to help bring peace to the region, then the peoples of Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan also have the right to participate in crafting a sustainable peace process that will best meet their needs over the long-run.
In Kashmir, for example, the Kashmiri people have never been made partners in a peace-process, despite sixty-odd years of war, conflict and on-again-off again negotiations between India and Pakistan. The violence in Jammu and Kashmir, which has extracted an enormous price from the people was generated by the systemic erosion of democratic and human rights, discrimination against the Muslims of the valley, socio-economic marginalisation and relegation of the right to self-determination to the background."
 The other highlights of the report are U.S. foreign policy based on India ignores the exponential growth of Hindu nationalism or Hindu terrorism. But a U.S. foreign policy focused primarily on counter-insurgency programs in South Asia detracts from the larger issues of social, economic, and political inequality that feed terrorism and contribute to instability in the region, the report pointed out. Source KT