Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Consul of Rome in the reign
of Julius Caeser, pronounced on an elementary truth about inter-state
relations when he said that between war and peace there is nothing.
Either two countries live amicably with each other or they engage actively
in hostilities geared to achieving complete military victory. In the
latter case there is a winner and there is a loser and little doubt
about which side is what.
By the 17th century, however, in a Europe ravaged by
religious wars things were not as clear cut any more and a third, very
contemporary, alternative to war or peace, namely, neither peace
nor war gained international sanction. The Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius,
in attempting to codify the "rules of just warfare"1
first made the distinction between declared and undeclared wars, deeming
the former legal and the other as not necessarily illegal.2
The "undeclared war" option, whose ambit covers most of what
has come to be identified as low intensity conflict and proxy wars,
moreover, received approval in treaty law in 1868 with the St. Petersburg
Declaration on the basis of the by then well established principle of
military necessityor kreigraison.3
On the other hand, United Nations General Assembly
(UNGA) Resolution 380 (V), 1950, condemned as a form of aggression the
"fomenting of internal strife". Some twenty-four years later,
the UNGA, vide Resolution 3314, seeking to define aggression, further
elaborated (Article 3) that "the sending by or on behalf of a State
of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts
of armed force against another state of such gravity [such as invasion,
bombardment, blockade] or its substantial involvement therein"
amounts to aggression. The same Resolution also expressly outlawed military
assistance to insurgents a prohibition contained in an earlier
UNGA Resolution 2625, as well.4 Thus,
the conclusion from just these two sets of laws is that aggression of
the covert, less conspicuous and formal kind indulged in by sovereign
states is at once justified and banned!
This opening digression on international law was necessary
to indicate that like any other law, the law of war too is an ass. It
confounds more than it clarifies. In attempting, for example, to safeguard
the sovereign prerogative of states to pursue national interests by
any and all means at their disposal, under the rubric of military necessity,
international law undermines the very concept of sovereignty by approving
instrumentalities that would put nation-states, especially those that
are socially and ethnically heterogenous, at grave risk.
Such contradictory laws would be of no great account
were it not that the Government of Indias entire approach to outstanding
territorial disputes with its two neighbours, Pakistan and China, is
overly legalistic and politically naïve. It exposes the countrys
position on Kashmir, for instance, to the vagaries of a manifestly jumbled
set of laws, thereby increasing the countrys vulnerabilities.
Worse, it seems unmindful of the basic fact of international life that
powerful countries make the laws and, when it suits their purposes,
twist them to subserve their interests. In the event, sticking to the
letter of the law, as New Delhi has done has only produced perverse
results: it has turned the "correlation of forces" in the
subcontinent on its head; the lesser state is in the drivers seat.
Pakistan has ended up enjoying the power of initiative, the power to
direct the course of events in Kashmir and the decisive power to engineer
a denouement to its exclusive satisfaction even as the Government
of India (GOI) is locked into a mainly reactive-defensive-passive mode
and the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) harps unconvincingly about
the legalities of accession, the conditionalities imposed by the 1949
UN Security Council Resolution and the bilateral obligations under the
1972 Shimla Agreement. Underlying the official Indian thinking is the
presumed rigour and efficacy of international law, which in real terms
is non-existent.
As may be readily seen, Pakistan has cannily exploited
precisely this grey area. Incapable of military victory over India,
it has chosen over the last twenty years to wage an undeclared, relatively
low-key conflict in the hope that this will progressively weaken the
Indian grip over Kashmir and, by raising the cost in human lives and
in material terms, New Delhis will to hold on to that province.
Kargil suggests a further honing of the Pakistani strategy into a two-pronged
approach of applying pressure from the inside by orchestrating sustained
insurgent activities within Kashmir, complemented by the external pincer
constituted of military actions by regular forces, but in mufti,
to capture territory along the Line of Control (LoC) with the aim of
slowly nibbling away at the Indian portion of Kashmir and pushing the
LoC eastward. Nuclear weapons in its inventory, Islamabad was apparently
convinced, would serve (1) as adequate deterrent against India responding
forcefully to neutralise violations of the LoC and, in case full-fledged
war broke-out, (2) as a low ceiling beyond which India would think it
imprudent to escalate, bringing the fight quickly to a standstill and
(3) to precipitate mediation by the US and the West.
It is another matter that Pakistans plans did
not pan out. In part because the GOI did not keep to the Pakistani script
and ordered a massive conventional parry and thrust to rollback the
incursion in the Kargil sector without crossing the LoC, which might
have brought the Pakistani armed forces more fully into the war and
led to unpredictable turn of events. And because, the GOI simply refused
to rise to the nuclear bait dangled by Islamabad and studiously ignored
the nuclear threats emanating from high sources there. The dismissal
of the Pakistani talk of using nuclear weapons as sheer "lunacy"
was particularly telling.6
This is what unhinged the Pakistani game-plan, which
depended centrally on the threshold being speedily raised to the nuclear
eye-balling level.7 At this stage,
Islamabad hoped that the Americans and their Western cohorts, frightened
out of their wits by the prospect of a South Asian atomic brushfire
war, would impose a peace inclusive of a settlement of the Kashmir dispute
congenial to its interests.
What happened instead was that while fears were voiced
in Washington and elsewhere about the India-Pakistan imbroglio escalating
into a nuclear confrontation,8 New
Delhis measured, responsible and reassuring stance, both with
regard to nuclear weapons and its conduct of military operations in
Kargil, increasingly marked India out as a mature country. This impression
was reinforced by the fact that this response came notwithstanding the
political uncertainties attending upon a caretaker government in New
Delhi. On the other hand, Pakistan stood out as an unstable nuclear
trigger-happy state, egged on by extremist Islamic elements within its
fold, and spoiling for a fight. Western fears of nuclear escalation,
in the event, boomeranged on Pakistan, and firmed up Western opinion
behind the restoration of the LoC as the basis for any negotiated settlement.9
The all-round success attending upon the Kargil episode
may well be due to the fact, as the Minister for External Affairs, Jaswant
Singh stated, that the challenge of "turning back the aggressor,
in defeating all his designs, in reversing the aggression but with the
maximum of restraint" was met.10
However, if this success is looked upon as validating
Indias longstanding, mainly reactive, policy on Kashmir, and,
thus, as a justification for its continuance into the future, then the
country will be condemned perennially to dealing with the Pakistanis
on their terms.
Pakistan obviously means business. Indias conditions
for resuming a dialogue affirming the inviolability and sanctity
of the LoC and ending "sponsorship of cross-border terrorism"11
have been summarily rejected.12
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs threat of "many more Kargils"
made during the Kargil episode has been followed up by his confidante
and Information Minister Mushahid Hussain revealing that all that has
happened after the mujahideen "disengaged" from the
embattled sector was that they "relocated their positions
[and being] mobile
can surface in Baramulla tomorrow, Doda or Srinagar."13
Moreover, by advancing the fiction of the mujahideen as having
taken on the Indian Army in Kargil,14
he has the larger purpose, which is revealed in the interview, of etching
the supposedly close similarity between Kosovo and Kashmir on the minds
of opinion-makers, especially in the West. The onus of pressurizing
India is thus, cleverly placed on the US/NATO, who are coming off a
successful operation to "demilitarize" Kosovo and to restore,
to the Muslim minority, human rights imperiled by the majoritarian excesses
of a Milosevic.
Again, it is the same pincer policy at work, except
now external pressure is sought to be generated within the international
community. Simultaneously, the bilateral track has been rubbished both
in terms of its efficacy and the prospect it holds for a Kashmir solution.
Pakistan Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmed, for instance, has charged
that New Delhi uses "dialogue" as only "a tactical ploy"
and demanded "an interpreter, as we speak different languages",15
which last was a riposte to Jaswant Singh who, some time back, propounded
a thesis that India and Pakistan, because they share the same cultural
space, can do without third party mediation or even umpiring.
Even as India is wallowing in a euphoria of sorts,
Islamabad is already on to beefing up its policy of obtaining a Kosovo-like
situation within Kashmir by inducting more mujahideen, this time,
into Jammu & Kashmir,16 supported from
the outside by a Kosovo-type system. At the same time, no opportunity
is spared to internationally project a grim picture of human rights,
abuses. The Pakistani game-plan is clever, clear and ambitious.
But is there an Indian counter-plan? More of
the same is not the answer. It has failed over the last fifty
years to pacify the Kashmiri people, or to prevent Pakistan from meddling
in the states Kashmirs affairs. Worse, it has cost the country
dear in terms of financial, human and military resources. Nor is relying
on American/Western goodwill, seeded by the Indian policy of restraint
in Kargil, going to serve any purpose. This goodwill is ephemeral at
best and is, in any case, tasked for use as a vehicle for the US counter-proliferation
agenda, of which the prime objective is to secure New Delhi and Islamabads
signatures on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.17
It is a design inadvertently furthered by Pakistans imprudent
nuclear sabre rattling at the time of the border skirmish. So, what
is the answer?
A new approach to solving the Kashmir problem, premised
on significantly raising the costs to Pakistan of persisting in its
present policy of non-acceptance of the de facto partition of
Kashmir, of the LoC as the international border, and of aiding and abetting
Kashmiri insurgent activities, was recently outlined.18
It recommends that (a) the Pakistani strategy be reciprocated in its
entirety, requiring (b) forthrightly taking on Pakistan in the political-ideological
realm, (c) informally issuing a brief to the Army to mount sustained
small unit and commando actions all along the LoC to establish newer
Lines of Control and to otherwise enlarge the Indian sphere at the expense
of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and its Northern Areas; and (d) launching
an extensive programme of covert assistance to all manner of malcontents
within Pakistan.
Some of these and other relevant points will be elaborated
upon here, as will the case that an ideological-military offensive is
mandated by circumstances, and that this will convince Pakistan that
freezing the LoC into an international border is the best possible solution.
What is suggested here goes well beyond what is being sold as a "proactive"
policy by other strategic analysts, which emphasizes measures including
permitting the international Press to cover any hostilities unhindered;
highlighting the abysmal human rights conditions in PoK and the Northern
Areas; projecting the clandestine trade in sensitive technologies engaged
in by Pakistan with North Korea and China; heightening the fear of a
"crumbling" state in Pakistan and the threat posed to international
security by its inventory of missiles and nuclear weapons; and asking
for "a detailed discussion on security issues" with Pakistan
as part of the Lahore process.19
These measures are all very well, but by themselves will not make much
of a difference to the course Pakistan has adopted. The iron that needs
to be inserted into a genuinely proactive policy is of a different kind
altogether.
A New Strategy
In international law, the Line of Control is only a
Cease Fire Line (CFL). As a product of a war kept in suspended animation,
it carries the expectations of both sides that a final and satisfactory
settlement can be obtained if not through negotiation than by force
of arms. It is this logic which under-girds Pakistani justification
for trans-LoC military actions, like those in Kargil.
What are the chances that consequent upon the military
reverses in Kargil, and the virtual American demarche to respect
the LoC, the Pakistan Government will hereafter cease and desist from
waging low intensity warfare in Indian Kashmir, or from initiating a
Kargil-like misadventure in future? Nil. This is so because of the balance
of forces in the Pakistani polity. The Punjabi-dominated military, civil
services and legislature have set the agenda and the increasingly active
religious Right provides the motivational force and, in war-like situations
with India, the sheer numbers of indoctrinated cadres who take to the
streets, mobilise popular resentment and otherwise preempt any radical
change in a policy centred on Kashmir and enmity with India.
Kargil has also brought to a head the disjunctions
within the Pakistan Army. The Army Chief, General Parvez Musharraf,
and his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Mohammad Aziz, both with
Special Forces background, as well as the Special Service Group (SSG),
have now to contend with the differing perspectives of the corps commanders
of the field army. The differences apparently came to a head around
the last week of June 1999 when an infantry brigade was detached from
the Pakistani I Corps, an armoured strike formation stationed at Mangla,
and moved to the Skardu plains to stiffen the defences in case the Indian
Army attacked across the LoC in the Kargil sector. The fear of the nine
Corps Commanders was three-fold: that by thus denuding their units of
fighting forces, the GHQ, Rawalpindi, was imperilling war plans, i)
by weakening the ability of the mobile strike formations to go on the
offensive-defence, i.e., fighting defensively to protect the Pakistani
Punjab, but on Indian territory; ii) by making the country as a whole
vulnerable to attacks by Indias "poised to strike" three
armoured corps; and iii) by stressing gains in a lesser theatre, putting
the heartland at risk.
These factors suggest that the mainstream Pakistan
Army may be unable to resist the popular demand for helping the mujahideen
wage war in Kashmir but, at the same time, are unwilling to prosecute
a full-scale war in PoK and the Northern Areas if this means putting
at risk the defence of Punjab. Also, the inherent tensions between the
SSG and the Corps Commanders can be sharpened by the Indian Army pressing
across the LoC in an unconventional war-fighting mode. The three Indian
Strike Corps (I, II and XXI) can "fix" the bulk of the Pakistan
Field Army south of Suchetgarh. This would free the Indian Mountain
Divisions, in small components, to adopt a policy of "grab as grab
can" a peak here, a Pakistani post there across the
LoC, in order stealthily but steadily to push the Line westwards in
the Poonch and Rajouri sectors, northwards in the Kargil sector, and
northwestwards in the undemarcated glaciated regions beyond Point NJ
9,842. The Pakistani ruse of dressing up regulars in mufti and
deploying them across the LoC is an excellent example to follow for
all actions across the Line. The Pakistani military establishment would
certainly find the prospect disconcerting if Indian "irregulars",
for instance, in slow stages capture one ridge after another, until
they sit astride the mountains overlooking Skardu, Forces Command Headquarters,
Northern Areas; or sit atop hills looking down on Domel or Muzzafarabad.
This would, in effect, impose "Siachenisation" on the Pakistan
Army, which would have to scramble to build up all-weather defences
and to garrison strongly-held lines in the mountains.
Such a policy, however, will require the GOI to rid
itself of its several inhibitions about what it believes the Shimla
Accord enjoins. Its view that senior Indian and Pakistani army officers,
deputed by their respective Governments, cartographically marked out
the LoC, and, therefore, that there is an implicit ban (perhaps formalised
by a 28-year old custom) on the use of conventional armed forces across
the CFL will have to be tempered by reasons of "military necessity".
The "hot pursuit" option abjured so far by the Indian armed
forces, but permissible in international law under the principle of
droit de voisinage or nachbahrrecht,20
will have to be activated.
Such a course of action will open up opportunities
for territorial augmentation because the logic of the CFL/LoC offers
it. The trouble is this logic seems to be better appreciated by Pakistan
than by India. Once Islamabad had determined that there was no chance
of peacefully wresting Kashmir from India, its actions whether
in support of the low intensity warfare waged by freedom fighters
in the Valley or of the trans-LoC aggression in Ladakh have been
in tune with the longstanding Pakistani conviction and policy that Kashmir
rightfully belongs to them, and that they mean to secure it, come what
may.
The same cannot be said about India. Prime Ministers,
beginning with Indira Gandhi, including Narasimha Rao and right up to
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, have in response to the Pakistani stance that
Kashmir constitutes the "unfinished agenda" of Partition,
claimed mostly for effect that the only unfinished part of that wretched
business remains the return of PoK to India. And that there was nothing
else to negotiate. But these were statements devoid of serious intent
and designed merely to protect leaders against the charge of selling-out.
In the event, the Indian Government has ended up treating the LoC as
sacrosanct, at great cost to the country.
That the Indian leaders are periodically compelled
to take this inane position is traceable to the fact that Indira Gandhi,
as the leader of the victorious country in the 1971 War, deliberately
forsook the last legitimate chance afforded by international law of
imposing a peace which might have included the conversion of the LoC
into an international border at Shimla. She failed to press home the
advantage because, like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and all the Indian and Pakistan
leaders since, she, too, feared a political backlash for giving
away territory and retaining only a part of Kashmir.
Over time, this political compulsion has turned into
complacency vis-a-vis the LoC, leading to contradictory Indian
policies. For example, the pronouncements of Indian leaders if taken
at their face-value would mean that New Delhi is as keen in absorbing
PoK as Islamabad is in taking over the Indian part of Kashmir. In that
case, the LoC loses its standing of inviolability any way, which New
Delhi swears by. Because the Pakistanis are no more likely to amicably
hand over PoK and Northern Areas to India than India is likely to transfer
J&K to Pakistan, the disputants are left with only two alternatives:
go to war and risk an attendent catastrophe now that the milieu is nuclearised,
or engage in low-level but sustained military actions grabbing
a peak here, a post there aimed at continually increasing the
size of the real estate in their possession.
Islamabad has cannily opted for this last, risk-free,
option; risk-free because the Indian Government, 1972 onwards, has stood
national security interests on their head in choosing to regard the
LoC as a de facto international border and in accepting in its
train a whole lot of obligations that are not mandated by international
law with regard to a CFL. A shackled Indian military, moreover, is stuck
with the difficult task of dealing with well-armed Pakistani troops
and guerillas-for-hire after they infiltrate en masse,
as in Kargil; their difficulty enhanced further by the GOIs unmerited
respect for the LoC. The militarys frustration is, perhaps, what
boiled over into the Chief of Army Staff, General V.P. Maliks
plea to the government to rethink its attitude on cross-LoC operations.
Whatever we understand the obligations of the bilateral
agreements and understandings between India and Pakistan to be, the
fact is that most of the world considers the LoC as nothing more than
a CFL pending a final solution. This is the political and ground reality
and it is this status that has the sanction of international law. The
most obvious manifestation of this is the continuing presence of the
United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP)
set up as a result of the original 1948 UN Security Council Resolution.
India has, of course, unilaterally decided that the UNMOGIPs functioning
is invalidated by the Shimla Accord, and has restricted its working
to a closed compound in Srinagar.21
But this position is not agreed to by Pakistan nor supported by any
major country.
It is this status of the LoC, for instance, which is
the basis for the growing Western view voiced by former American diplomats
Teresita C. Schaffer and Howard B. Schaffer each of whom headed
the Bureau of South Asian Affairs in the US Department of State
in favour of freezing the LoC into an international boundary.22
New Delhi will have no trouble backing such a proposal, because that
is what, without putting it in so many words, it has been working to
realize these many years. The problem is how to persuade Pakistan that
this is the only feasible way out of the quagmire?
Talking alone will not do. Experience shows that Foreign
Minister and Foreign Secretary-level meetings are all very well but
that these have so far resolved nothing except issues on the margins.
Nor will ill-considered actions, like striking conventionally across
the international border, do anything other than possibly prompt nuclear
weapons use by Pakistan. The real challenge is to provide negative incentives
to the Pakistanis to settle along the desired line, because positive
incentives, such as promises of hugely beneficial trade and economic
ties and of cultural exchanges, etc., have failed to convince Islamabad.
The track guaranteed to fetch results is to informally
order the army to keep pushing the LoC outwards. Sustained and relatively
inconspicuous military actions by small sized units and commandos backed
up by the occasional battalion-strength operation, at varying depths
in PoK, recommend themselves as the obvious instrumentality for a policy
of incremental additions of territory to the Indian Kashmir. Like its
counterpart in Pakistan, the Indian government can, in the meanwhile,
offer political cover for such activity by continuing to harp on the
Shimla Accord, the LoC, etc. and to simply deny any evidence of the
LoC-changing measures.
The optimal use of military manpower in this "slow
creep" policy will ideally mean reorganising the army in such a
way as to create a Special Forces Command headed by a Lieutenant General-rank
officer, the equal of an Army Commander. This has become an imperative
both because there is an immediate necessity for such a structure to
prosecute sustained actions in hostile territory as envisaged in this
paper and, more generally, because future wars are likely to resemble
small-scale operations which are best prosecuted within the Special
Forces ambit,23 rather than as a
lesser branch of conventional warfare characterised by masses of men
and machines rolling across plains or fighting uphill in mountainous
terrain, as is the present case. All operations to be carried out across
the LoC and possibly the Line of Actual Control (with China) would be
the responsibility of the GOC-in-C, Special Forces Command. He would
have under him fighting units, most of them extracted from existing
Mountain Divisions and, by way of integrating all the available fighting
assets when necessary, the paramilitary police forces, such as the Border
Security Force, the Central Reserve Police Force, the Indo-Tibetan Border
Police, et al. As an opposition Member of Parliament, Jaswant
Singh, in fact, suggested just such a scheme some four years back.24
With the hindsight of what worked, it will be preferable
to have units in the proposed Special Forces Command recruited from
among mountain-folk. The singular successes notched up in the Kargil
heights by elements of the Naga Regiment, the Garhwal Regiment, the
Gurkha Rifles, the Jammu & Kashmir Light Infantry, and the Ladakh
Scouts indicate that the onerous high altitude acclimatisation regimes
can be short circuited when it comes to soldiers who are highland natives.
(It takes upwards of three months to properly recondition troops from
the plains for fighting in the mountains.)
The other prong in this more aggressive approach will
require external intelligence agencies methodically to assist discontented
groups within Pakistani society, starting with those in PoK and the
Northern Areas which should not be difficult since the latter
are denied basic human rights even according to a judgement handed down
by a Pakistani High Court Bench.25
The Mohajirs in Karachi provide a second fertile ground.26
Destabilising Karachi, Pakistans commercial capital and the source
of most of its tax revenues, and the Sindh province at large, can be
facilitated by linkages with the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM). Similarly,
the Taliban in Afghanistan and their offshoot in Pakistan can be distracted
and neutralised by reviving the independent Pakhtunistan movement, and
by installing some kind of an air-bridge for military supply of the
ousted Rabbani government, comprising the Northern Afghan tribes and
factions who are fighting Kabul. Cooperation with Iran to assist the
Afghan Hazaras can also be diligently pursued. Separatists in Baluchistan
were brutally crushed in the Seventies. Judicious aid could easily resurrect
their movement as well.
Such policies are not merely a mirror to the Pakistani
role in Kashmir and other parts of India. They serve two specific purposes:
first, to demonstrate to Islamabad that, as in the conventional military
sphere, India has a decisive edge in the unconventional military field
as well. Second, and more important, to compel the Pakistan government
and elites to rethink their risk calculus.
The objective simply would be to make Islamabad fully
comprehend the costs, both in terms of domestic disorder, and the ever-shrinking
territory it would control in Kashmir, as well as the unaffordably high
bill it will have to pay to finance military and police effort to tackle
such Indian initiatives. Islamabad is already reduced to surviving from
one World Bank tranche of credit to the next. It sequesters in
excess of 90% of its annual budget on debt repayment and the maintenance
of its military and civil service. Even if it wished to, it cannot spend
more on internal and external security, short of inviting complete economic
collapse.27
The beauty of this tit-for-tat policy is that Pakistan
will not be able to match the Indian effort in either the conventional
or the unconventional/covert spheres. Ultimately the Indian weight of
numbers and the disparity in all kinds of resources, including military
and economic, will begin to tell. In case a frustrated Pakistan, in
this pressure situation, hints at using nuclear weapons, the threat
will be as incredible and infructuous as a like Indian threat would
have been in the Kargil crisis. Such a threat would also have the world
opinion ganging up full square against Pakistan.
Islamabad will then be faced with some severe options:
to settle permanently for PoK as its part of the final Kashmir bargain,
formally accepting the LoC as an international border, or gradually
losing strategic portions of the State it now holds and steadily getting
enervated economically and internally, in terms of law and order. However,
a promise can be held out as a further incentive to Pakistan that in
case it agrees to settle on the LoC as the international boundary (rationalization
of the border apart), the LoC prevailing at the time of the Shimla Accord
would be the settled border, and that India would surrender any territory
captured/occupied by its "irregulars".
An activist policy cannot now be avoided. Kargil has
fired up the people, so much so that even conservative journals have
called editorially for "Avenging our dead."28 If
Pakistan follows through on its avowed policy to nurse the insurgency
in Kashmir back to life, then, in international law, this will amount
to animus belligerendi conclusive behaviour from which
the intention to wage war can be inferred. This, in turn, may be a casus
belli, justifying almost any Indian counter measures, including
resort to use of force or to stratagems of the kind discussed above.
The policy fleshed out here will, above all else, satisfy the punitive
mood of the people and advance Indian interests in Kashmir without precipitating
a general war. Unfortunately, the core problem is something more troubling.
The Ideological Divide
Distrust is endemic to India-Pakistan relations.30
Its sheer intensity is an intimation of a graver, more enduring ideological
rivalry and a deep and unresolved socio-cultural issue: Indias
fundamental premise that the obvious differences in caste, creed, religion,
ethnicity and language, within a vast and gloriously heterogenous society,
can be moderated to a point where the perception of common good transcends
narrower affiliations, and a nation-state is constituted.
The central idea of Pakistan rests on the contrary
and an equally basic assumption that no such reconciliation is possible
at least not between Hinduism and Islam. Whatever the merits of the
Pakistan-argument it entirely ignores the reality that sub-continental
Islam is as varied as Hinduism and as much a product of syncretic and
tolerant cultural impulses what it ultimately reduces to is the
glorification of fairly trivial differences. As Mohammad Ali Jinnah,
in 1946 , told the visiting Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff, Field
Marshal, the Viscount Montgomery, who queried him about the chances
of India and the Indian Army remaining united, "How can I talk
with the Hindu? He worships the cow; I eat it." The Quaid,
thus, touched at once on the most profound and petty aspects of the
communal divide in India; a divide that, as a result of Partition, has
been internationalized.
Seen in this light, Islamabads diplomatic campaign
to portray Kashmir as another Kosovo is pregnant with dire possibilities.
The crux of the matter is not that it is an inapt analogy but that,
as an American political scientist concluded in a recent analysis of
developments in Kosovo, "the new logic of national self-determination,
while it may reinforce state sovereignty in ethnically homogeneous states,
frequently challenges it in multinational states."31
The fact that multinational states today comprise a majority
of the countries of the world provides some protection against international
attempts to intervene in Kashmir, as does the dawning realization in
the US and West Europe that self-determination, while fine as rhetoric,
can be extremely disruptive of the social fabric woven over the millennia
in traditional polities. But this cannot by any means be considered
a long-term deterrent. Superpower interests may be differently interpreted
at any time.
The war for Kashmir is less military than one of competing
ideologies. Tackle Pakistans ideological stake head on, and the
military problem will, of itself, dissipate. What is at issue? The right
of the Kashmiris to decide their own future, but a future that is within
the Indian whole. After all, had there been no Partition would the people
of the erstwhile "princely state" of Kashmir have had the
option not to join the Indian Union? Could they have chosen to couple
with Afghanistan or China or be independent? Obviously not. The tyranny
of choice came only with the reality of Partition. This to say that
the incumbent Maharajas prerogatives with the lapse of British
paramountcy had nothing to do with prior linkages between Kashmir and
the rest of India, which were and still are as integral to the whole
and as organic as of any other constituent province. The history and
ties of culture, ethos and even shared religion cannot be suddenly sundered
on the basis of arbitrarily imposed criteria, which are spurious at
best. It is the Partition criteria, then, which become the lynchpin
for the argument that all of J&K stays with India or that it seeks
a future as part of Pakistan.
Whatever the merits of the historical case made by
either side and the reasons for the absence of a negotiated settlement
so far, the fact is that a solution has to be sought in the here and
now, and not in the sharply differing versions of the reality that existed
in 1947-49. That is one constant. The other is the Partition criteria
according to which chieftains of over six hundred small and large kingdoms
decided to merge with one or the other of the successor States. The
two operative principles followed were those of contiguity and of the
religion of the majority of the people within the princely state. The
first criterion was straight forward; the second less so because, unlike
Pakistan which opted to don an Islamic identity and to adopt Islam as
State religion, India remained firmly secular by Constitutional diktat.
Moreover, however many Muslims chose to migrate to Pakistan, the bulk
of them stayed behind. In other words, Partition was not a clean communal
break, necessitating full and complete transfer of Hindus and Muslims
from one Dominion to the other, but merely a dissociation by a rump
State.
Muslims may have many grievances against the Indian
State, but nothing distinguishes these from the grievances that other
sections of society also have against the same State. Low literacy levels,
for example, plague many regional, caste, tribal and other sub-groupings,
as they do the Muslims (assuming they can all be treated as similarly
disadvantaged, like-thinking, people, which is simply not the case).
And Kashmir, if anything, has received a much better deal than many
others. Here the investment of the Indian taxpayers money is so
great, that barring some North-Eastern States, it is the most highly
subsidised State in the Republic nearly three-quarters of its
revenues emanate from the Centre, up from less than four per cent in
1950-51.32
To argue in this fashion may beg the question, since
demography was the basis of Partition. But the logic of demography has
itself altered radically since Maharaja Hari Singhss Accession
decision of September 1947. At that time Pakistan was, in fact, the
State with the larger Muslim population. This and the contiguity principle
favoured Kashmirs merging with Pakistan. But that was then. Today
there is an independent Bangladesh, which seceded from Pakistan in 1971.
As a result, the Muslim population in India first equaled and, by some
accounts, has now exceeded the strength of Muslims in Pakistan. Indeed,
if the latest census figures are any guide, the Indian Muslim population
stands to surpass that of Indonesia by 2010-2015.
As the soon-to-be largest Muslim country in the world,
Indias Kashmir policy is instantly endowed with heft. New Delhis
claims on Kashmir acquire unmatched credibility, both in terms of the
main Partition criterion because it is now joined to the successor country
with the larger Muslim population, and because of the evidence of more
than fifty years of good faith efforts to protect Kashmirs autonomy
within the Indian Union and to protect its special identity, vide the
controversial Article 370 in the Constitution.
It would be of even greater conseqeunce, from the point
of view of undercutting the residual Pakistani claims on J&K, if
the GOI were to henceforth declare that this country is also the guardian
of interests of all Muslims in the subcontinent, including those in
Pakistan. This guardianship role is the one coveted for Pakistan by
Jinnah. Indias assumption of this role can effectively destroy
all of Pakistans pretensions as a leader of Muslim countries world-wide,
and at home, would fatally undermine the mischievous Two-Nation theory.
Wouldnt it be a soul-destroying prospect for Islamabad to find
the Mohajirs of Karachi and Sindh turning to India for protection against
the predatory Punjabi State of Pakistan? This can happen, if New Delhi
adopts some version of the policy suggested here.
The hitch in all of this is, alas, the Government of
India which is unlikely to imperil its secular credentials by so boldly
furthering Indian interests in Kashmir by exploiting the
fact that India is the largest Muslim country in the world, just as
it is the largest Hindu, Sikh and Jain country in the world. Indian
foreign policy generally is in a rut and particularly so where Kashmir
is concerned. In lieu of any bright ideas, the same old time-worn rhetoric,
policy and statements are dusted up. Any surprise that the Kashmiris
dont listen and the international community is deaf to the Indian
case as traditionally pleaded?
* Bharat Karnad is Professor in National Security Studies at the Centre
for Policy Research, New Delhi, and was a Member of the National Security
Advisory Board. He was formerly Adviser on national security expenditure
to the Tenth Finance Commission.