The Kashmir Integration
The government has taken a calculated risk in Kashmir. The outcome is anybody's guess. It would have been prudent to learn from the epic Ramayana. Lanka would not have been conquered but for the support of Vibhishana. Wish the government could enlist the support of some of the Moderate Kashmiri stakeholders to isolate the separatists.
Some insight might be had from the following reference, though it is purely a theorical work.
Karmeshu, V.P.Jain and A.K.Mahajan (1990), “A dynamic model of domestic political conflict process”, Journal of conflict Resolution 34, pp 252-269
Abstract
The dynamical behaviour of domestic political hostility is modelled in terms of the interaction between hostile (challenger) and ruling (regime) groups. The conditions under which the conflict situation will either settle down in a steady state or evolve in time are derived for various forms of collective action costs. The model presented is a general framework for explaining the various outcomes of the repression/dissent nexus as special cases of the same fundamental process. We also obtain critical parameter values of discontent that bring about discontinuous jumps in the level of hostility.
As researchers our job is not to take sides with lobbies but to understand the evolutionary dynamics of the domestic political conflict process. The model we have presented has been structured to capture the dynamics of the political conflict process in terms of the antagonistic interplay of the regime (ruling group) and the challengers (hostile group) engaged in open confrontation. These conflicts manifest at different levels and with varying intensities in a society. Various social, economic and political factors may give rise to such a conflict situation if they jeopardize the co-operative behaviour and consensus around which a social system is organised and sustained amicably.
We have shown how the hostility increases in response to increase in the grievance of the actors, both old and new ones, but remains confined to manageable levels. The counter measures taken by the regime also remain at the lower level. But, once the grievance parameter reaches the critical point (overloading the tolerance threshold), the level of hostility leapfrogs from the lower branch to the higher branch, akin to a qualitative change in the situation. The increase in hostility level in this case is a clear departure from the normal situation in the sense that the situation cannot be retrieved through the same path (history dependence). The hostility level can be brought back to the lower level branch only by reducing the grievance parameter to a much lower level than the one that prompted the jump initially. It means that once the hostility situation gets out of bound, it needs efforts out of proportion to restore the initial position. In political terms, this may mean that the ruling group would have to accord a lot more concessions to the hostile group than the latter was initially asking for at the threshold point. The regime may now agree to concede lot more ground than what they were willing to earlier, even a negotiated settlement with stakeholders considered, hitherto, untouchable. Three cases may be cited to substantiate this finding: Rohith Vemula's suicide in Hyderabad University, arrest of JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar and the killing of Burhan Wani in Kashmir. In all the three cases there was a quantum jump in the level of violence. It is also possible that strong police action in some cases may restore complete normalcy. It all depends on the interplay of the crucial parameters in the model.
Model at a glance may be had from:
NONLINEAR MODELS OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS
Karmeshu* and V.P Jain ┼
Published in Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, (Review of Social Studies, Perspectives on Mathematics) August 30, 2003.