India's role in Kashmir's plight

India's role in Kashmir's plight

Martin Woollacott, Guardian News Service, London

When sections of the Kashmiri crowd booed the Indian side and
waved flags similar to the Pakistani flag at a match between
India and the West Indies in Srinagar in 1983, the reaction in
government circles in Delhi was fury. The Kashmiris, or, rather,
the Kashmiri government, by not preventing the outrage, had
failed the sub-continental version of the cricket test. Not many
months afterwards, after underhand maneuvers, the then Kashmiri
chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, was toppled.

Recounting the story in his book on Kashmir, Kashmir: Behind
the Vale, the distinguished Indian journalist MJ Akbar notes that
there was at that time no serious Pakistani-supported subversion
in Kashmir. Instead, there was an established pattern of Indian
subversion of Kashmiri institutions and leaders. From the
beginning, the Indians could not bring themselves to leave well
enough alone in a state that had acceded to the Indian union --
even in the Indian version of events -- on the basis of a
document which gave its government full powers except in foreign,
defense, and fiscal policy.

The story of Indian-held Kashmir had, from 1948, been of
efforts to wear down and abolish the Kashmiri difference. There
were periods when saner policies prevailed. But usually New Delhi
wanted a crude mastery in Kashmir and it wanted Kashmiri leaders,
notably Sheikh Abdullah and his son Farooq, to be utterly
compliant allies.

In this, it ignored the fact that any successful Kashmiri
leader had to reflect to some extent the ambivalent feelings of
part of the Muslim majority toward the Indian connection. It
undermined and detained leaders when they failed to be as loyal
as expected, and replaced them with worse men. Gandhi wanted
Farooq out because he would not go along with what amounted to a
merger of Kashmir's main party with Congress. The cricket
incident was a useful tool in the campaign to unseat him.

Rajiv Gandhi reinstated Farooq in 1987 but the rigged
elections of that year reduced belief in the political
dispensation in Kashmir, Islamic parties gained ground, the ranks
of unemployed youth increased, and significant armed actions
happened. New Delhi's reaction was to send in disastrously hard-
line administrators. One of them famously said: "The bullet is
the only solution for Kashmir." In the resulting campaign, with
its reprisals, rapes, and killing of innocents, the insurgents
were damaged, but the population of the Vale was comprehensively
alienated.

The consequence was that, as Victoria Schofield writes: "No
political leader prepared to voice the demands of Kashmiri
activists and militants would be acceptable to Delhi; any leader
of whom Delhi approved would be rejected by the militants." In
her careful and even-handed account she shows how the first phase
of this deterioration preceded serious Pakistani intervention.
Once it was under way, Pakistan certainly seized on the
opportunity it saw, in both Afghanistan and Kashmir, to follow a
forward strategy which would supposedly enable it to
counterbalance India's much greater strength.

But it was New Delhi which bore most responsibility for the
dismal situation in Kashmir -- first for the years in which
normal politics in the state slipped into decline, and then for a
counter- insurgency effort, which lacked the scrupulous care
which alone brings a chance of true success in such campaigns.
Indian governments later tried to repair the damage done in the
early 1990s, even as Pakistani-supported subversion of a more
Islamist character continued, with Afghan and foreign militants
added to the mix.

But the Bharatiya Janata party's arrival in government brought
new and dangerous uncertainties, something now often overlooked
by an outside world inclined to see an end to Pakistani-supported
cross- border terrorism as a dependable step toward a Kashmir
solution.

That is to forget that the BJP is not a normal political
party, but the parliamentary wing of a Hindu nationalist movement
that has already succeeded in radically changing Indian political
culture for the worse. This is a party whose position on Kashmir
has been not just that there can be no talks with Pakistan until
cross-border terrorism ends, but that there can be no talks until
Pakistan has handed over to India the part of Kashmir which it
holds. This is the party dedicated to the proposition that
Kashmir's autonomous status, so often violated in practice,
should be officially abolished. This is the party intent on
getting rid of the separate civil code for Muslims.

It is true that Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP leader, has
postponed or temporarily amended such BJP objectives in the
interests of building the coalitions at which he is so adept.
Many say that Vajpayee possesses a particularly gentle and
winning personality. He has made an ally of Farooq Abdullah, and
he has met Pakistani leaders twice as prime minister. He has
almost certainly explored, in behind-scenes diplomatic meetings
with Americans and others, prospects for a settlement of the
Indo-Pakistani conflict.

Against this has to be laid the fact that the advent of the
BJP in power has made that conflict much more dangerous. This is
the party that, enjoying the direct support of only a fifth of
the voters, tested and deployed nuclear weapons, provoking
Pakistan into acquiring nuclear weapons too. Some of its members
have openly spoken of using those weapons against Pakistan in the
event of a war over Kashmir, and some have called for the
invasion and occupation of Pakistani-held Kashmir.

Nowhere else in the world, as the leftwing analyst and
journalist Aijaz Ahmad says, have nuclear threats been so lightly
thrown around.

This may be only foolish rhetoric. What is undeniable is that
the BJP has changed the agenda of Indian politics, resulting in a
situation in which the opposition often competes with the BJP in
patriotic and anti-Pakistani statements, rather than providing a
needed corrective. The way in which it has become generally
accepted that India is a Hindu country with non-Hindu minorities,
rather than a secular state of many faiths, is another example of
the BJP effect. For a while there was an unhappy symmetry, with
Pakistan and India veering toward their own forms of
fundamentalism.

Aijaz Ahmad suggests that it is worth remembering, as the
outside world takes a new interest in the sub-continent's
problems, that it is Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan who broke that
pattern. At least let it be understood that India bears more
ultimate responsibility for the Kashmir troubles than Pakistan,
and that the confrontation between India and Pakistan would be a
far less dangerous thing had it not been for the BJP's communal
thrust at home and its attempt to turn India into a nuclear great
power abroad.