- Kashmir: The Most
Dangerous Game
The Sorrow of War
in Kashmir
by Mark Baker
With mediation from Russia and the United States in June,
India and Pakistan managed to back away from the brink of
nuclear war. But no progress was made on the root of the
conflict—the disputed state of Kashmir, which remains the
subcontinent’s ticking bomb.
The boulevard beside the fabled Dal Lake is deserted,
apart from some grazing cattle and a few forlorn souvenir
stalls. Grand old houseboats are mostly empty and in
disrepair. The lake itself is slowly dying, choked by an
advancing tide of stinking weed and algae, the legacy of
years of pollution and neglect.
This was once the peak tourist season in Srinagar, the
time when thousands of travelers, from billionaires to
budget trekkers, flocked to the Kashmir Valley to unwind
amid the serenity of the lush green foothills of the
Himalayas. Now the tourists have disappeared along with
the jobs and prosperity they brought. Srinagar is now a
city under siege in a brutal war zone. There are military
checkpoints everywhere and fortified guard posts on most
intersections. The streets are patrolled around the clock
by trucks mounted with heavy machine guns and armored
personnel carriers.
For half a century Kashmir has been the center of a bitter
territorial feud between India and Pakistan; for 13 years
it has been gripped by a separatist uprising that has
claimed more than 34,000 lives, and for the past two
weeks, it has been the focus of global trepidation at the
prospect of the world’s first full-blown nuclear war. But
as the military build-up continues on both sides of the
Line of Control (LOC)—the U.N.-mandated boundary that
separates the Indian and Pakistani halves of
Kashmir—attention has scarcely focused on the history that
has brought the two bitter rivals to the threshold of a
fourth war since their partition at independence from
Britain in 1947, this time under the menacing shadow of
their newly acquired nuclear weapons.
India, which has threatened to attack Pakistan in response
to a raid on a military base in Kashmir two weeks ago in
which 34 were killed, and the assault on the Indian
Parliament last December that left 14 dead, has won
widespread international sympathy as a victim of
terrorism. There has also been almost universal acceptance
of New Delhi’s assertion that the root cause of the
problem is Pakistan’s active support for militants
infiltrating across the LOC.
This simplistic line—readily digested in the
black-and-white world of post-Sept. 11 politics—largely
ignores the extent to which India has been the architect
of its own predicament. Equally, it ignores the fact that,
while Pakistan has for years used Kashmir to fight a proxy
war against India, at its heart the militancy in Kashmir
is part of a broad nationalist movement that wants a
future free of both meddling powers.
While acknowledging the provocation of Pakistan’s
longstanding support for terrorist groups and their
tactics, George Perkovich, a senior associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says: “India’s
failure to offer decent governance and constructive
engagement with Kashmiri dissidents created the current
mess....”
The present crisis can be traced back to independence in
1947 when India seized the Kashmir Valley and its
hinterland, promising the Muslim-majority population a
plebiscite on their future, a promise that was never
honored. The conflict turned violent in 1989 after years
of corrupt and patronizing misrule from New Delhi, the
rigging of elections to exclude nationalist candidates
from power, and growing repression and human-rights
abuses.
“For 40 years our people waged a peaceful and democratic
struggle,” says professor Abdul Ghani Bhat, chairman of
the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of more
than 20 separatist parties and groups. “It only turned
violent after the Indians chose not to hear the heartbeat
of the people and came down heavily on people waging a
just...struggle.”
The cycle of violence has grown steadily worse over the
past decade, with the Indian government responding to
attacks on its forces by sending in more troops—estimated
to total more than 500,000 before the latest border
buildup—and cracking down harder on real and imagined
threats.
In a report released last week, Amnesty International said
an average of 100 people a month were killed by security
forces and in indiscriminate attacks on civilian and
military targets. “Hundreds of cases of torture, deaths in
custody, extrajudicial executions, and ‘disappearances’
are reported every year,” the report said. “In most cases,
no one is held to account for such human-rights
violations.”
While its forces behave like an army of occupation, the
government in New Delhi and its notoriously corrupt
surrogate state administration treats the local population
with contempt. Kashmir remains one of the most
under-resourced states in India. There are no mobile
telephone facilities in the state, and after the attack on
Parliament last December all STD telephone and Internet
links were cut.
“Everything is now gone: security, order, honor,” says
Bhat. “All structure of civilized life has come tumbling
down amid the roar of guns....It is only the law of the
jungle that prevails.” He argues that the separatist
alliance does not condone terrorism but understands the
motivation of “freedom fighters” opposing Indian rule.
Moderate Kashmiri politician Mehbooba Mufti, whose father
was the Congress Party national home affairs minister in
the early 1990s, says India is largely responsible for the
present crisis: “They treat us like a
colony....Every-thing is decided by Delhi. People cannot
elect their own representatives. Every election has been
rigged from the first one in 1951.” She says the
international community is putting too much emphasis on
calls for Pakistan to halt cross-border infiltration. “The
question is not how sincere President Musharraf is, but
how much power he has to control the situation. Pakistan
must seek to stop the infiltration to ease tensions, but
the Indian government must also take concrete steps to
bring about a dialogue.”
The assassination of Abdul Ghani Lone—a separatist leader
prepared to negotiate a compromise settlement with
India—is seen as evidence that the terrorism in Kashmir
has moved beyond the capacity of either India or Pakistan
to quickly bring it under control. “The pan-Islamic
jihadis (holy warriors) are pushing India and Pakistan
toward conflict as part of their plan to polarize the
region between Muslim and non-Muslim,” says political
commentator Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to the Bhutto
and Sharif governments in Pakistan. The killing is also
seen as evidence that the militants, estimated to number
as many as 3,000, and some of whom are Arabs and Chechens
linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, will not
only ignore directions from Pakistan but will also fight
any attempts by moderate Kashmiris to reach a peace deal.
Bhat says the Hurriyat parties are willing to be flexible
and consider a wide range of possible outcomes if India is
prepared to sit down and negotiate a solution to the
crisis. One possibility, he says, is that both Indian and
Pakistani troops withdraw from their parts of Kashmir
under U.N. supervision and allow the establishment of an
interim administration pending a referendum on the future
of the territory after five years.
The problem is that India has shown no willingness to
compromise over Kashmir in the past 50 years, and so far,
there is little evidence that the United States and its
allies are ready to acknowledge that New Delhi’s conduct
in Kashmir is fundamental to the present crisis, let alone
pressure India to honor the right to self-determination.
And there is equal skepticism that Pakistan is about to
surrender its political leverage in Kashmir.
“We are being held hostage by these two nations,” says
Sajad Ghani Lone, the son of the assassinated politician.
“Kashmir’s interests do not converge with the interests of
India and Pakistan. They only look at us in terms of miles
of territory....” The pessimists’ view is that peace is as
distant as ever for Kashmir because both Pakistan and
India have powerful reasons for maintaining the
conflict—provided it can be kept at a level short of
outright war. Some analysts in Pakistan believe the
uprising in Kashmir during the past decade has given
Islamabad defense on the cheap with a relative handful of
militants tying up more than half a million Indian troops.
For India, others argue, Kashmir is justification for
maintaining the power elite that has grown up around one
of the world’s biggest armies.
“A lot of people have a vested interest in ensuring the
problem of Kashmir is never solved,” says Sajad Ghani
Lone. “It is a huge moneymaking machine. It’s big business
with guaranteed profits: The more killing there is, the
more money you make. Kashmir is about power and money.
That is Kashmir’s sorrow.”
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Kashmir:The
Most Dangerous Game
