Pakistan's adventurism
in Kargil last year has made the month of May a South Asian watershed,
marking the beginning of the Indian campaign to drive out the appalling
gaggle of mercenaries, 'mujahiddeen',
and regular soldiers who had crept in over the preceding winter to
occupy a number of critical heights in this, till-then-peaceful, sector
of Kashmir. May is also of great personal and institutional significance
at Faultlines, since the inaugural issue
was published this month last year, and the present volume marks the
transition into the second year of its quarterly publication.
It has been a year
of both remarkable successes against terrorism, and of considerable
and tragic failures. In Sri Lanka,
even as the world's hopes of a peaceful resolution rose with the prospects
of Norwegian mediation, critical military reverses for the Government
in the Jaffna peninsula
inflicted huge losses of life, and pushed the prospects of peace far
into an uncertain future.
The Kargil debacle
provoked a military coup in Pakistan,
bringing into power the very forces that had planned and engineered
the failed military adventure in this sector. The present military
dictatorship in this country has deep and complex linkages with the
forces and institutions of the Islamic Fundamentalist terror that
has, for over a decade now, been exported from Pakistan,
not only into India,
but deep into Eastern Europe as well, and even
to China.
Within India,
it has been a traumatic year for Kashmir. Violence
escalated steadily as Pakistan
initiated what it apparently and irrationally hoped would be the 'endgame'
in that State. A rising loss of civilian lives, and mounting casualties
among the Security Forces marked much of the year. But the last few
months suggest that the post-Kargil levels of attrition cannot be
sustained by the terrorists in the face of an increasingly, though
still insufficiently, focused Indian response. Despite radical shifts
in international opinion against Pakistan,
however, the prospects of an early peace in Kashmir
remain remote.
Although there
have been sustained casualties in various States of India's Northeast,
there has been much by way of improvement as well. The ceasefire agreement
with the dominant Naga insurgent group has survived an abortive assassination
attempt on the Chief Minister of the State, as well as the arrest
of one of the movement's leaders, Thuengaling Muivah, in Thailand.
The Centre has also forged agreements with the Khaplang faction of
the Naga insurgents, as well as with the Bodos in Assam.
In Assam, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has
weakened steadily since it adopted a pro-Pakistan posture during the
Kargil 'war', and there has been a steady flow of surrenders among
its cadre, culminating in the laying down of arms by over 500 militants,
including a large number of the second-rung leadership, in April 2000.
However, the situation in the Karbi Anglong district in this State
is disturbing, as the Karbi National Volunteers (KNV) have launched
a campaign of mass murder to expel the non-tribal population from
the area. The situation in the State of Tripura is also worsening,
as an increasingly mercenary and criminalised movement spawns dozens
of 'revolutionary' groups whose undisguised objective is extortion
and the criminal appropriation of wealth.
There are disturbing
trends in Nepal as well, though these are yet to produce the upheavals
that terrorism has in other parts of South Asia. Nevertheless, Maoist
'revolutionaries' now move across the rural hinterland in armed bands
of up to a hundred men and more, and casualties are slowly but inexorably
rising. The government has reportedly decided to deploy the Army in
six of the insurgency-affected districts.
The
waning of old movements and the emergence of the new, strategic shifts
and innovations in the technologies and tactics of the new low intensity
wars in South Asia make the tasks of analysis and response the more
urgent. In this volume, Faultlines
takes another look at some of the disturbing realities of terror on
the sub-continent.
K.P.S. Gill
May 10, 2000, New Delhi