NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 20, 2002
The Kashmir line
I have a way of looking at Kashmir -- a formula if you will for solving that intractable geopolitical problem and putting it away. It is deceptively simple and does not require the use of violence by anyone except on purely defensive occasions. And it would be an immense improvement on the status quo for all parties (except the Islamist terrorists). Let's see if I can sell it to anyone this morning. But first the news. At the time of writing the military forces of Pakistan and India stand at full alert. Hundreds of thousands of troops are massed along the common border. Both countries are in possession of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. It makes no sense to panic. As I've argued before it is hard to imagine either side having a motive to use weapons of mass destruction. At the moment India has no interest in the annihilation of Pakistan only in the eradication of the terrorist threat in Kashmir itself and because of Kashmir elsewhere through India. An Indian attack if it comes would enjoy immense popular support in what we might call the world's largest fragile democracy. But the support will be specifically for a focused attack on terrorist camps on the Pakistani side of the ceasefire line. At most initially the Indian army would seek to occupy the valley of Muzaffarabad (the capital of "Azad" or Pakistani-occupied Kashmir) to clean out the camps and seize the "jihadists". It has signalled its preference that Pakistan do this job. President Pervez Musharraf responded last week with the second-best speech of his political career again reorienting his nation's policies and even capturing the imagination of many of his countrymen by saying that Pakistan is sick to death of being held hostage by religious crazies. He has followed up by arresting a nice selection of about 2 000 of the same though the list falls short of Indian expectations. Alas neither Gen. Musharraf nor the country he governs is quite ready to sign off on the idea of a Kashmir "freed" of Indian control. Yet Pakistan under the direction of a dictator who is at least sane and seems to have weathered all the immediate internal challenges to his authority will hardly launch a first nuclear strike when its existence is not at issue. For if it did the Indian retaliation would put Pakistan's existence at issue. What Gen. Musharraf understands together with all reasonable Pakistanis is that Pakistan itself is more important to them than Kashmir. That is because it is intimately involved with their physical survival. Symmetrically India's stake in the recovery of that part of Kashmir it failed to occupy after the Partition in 1947-48 is something less than the central national priority. Though on the offensive in battlefield deployment India's stake is essentially defensive. A retreat from its position in Kashmir could crack the unity of the vast secular Indian democratic state. No elected ruler of India will risk everything. Pakistan likewise could not possibly afford to retreat. It has its own problems of unity exacerbated by more than a decade of a pointless ideological campaign in which Pakistani governments have sought to appease Muslim religious fanatics by steering the country into Sharia law. The original conception of Pakistan by Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a modern secular state with a Muslim ethos has been gradually twisted in the direction of full-fledged theocracy. And were Pakistan to actually abandon its territory in Kashmir the stress placed upon the fragile union of Sindh Punjab and other nations-within-the-state would become intolerable. Given an open referendum the great majority of Sunni Muslim Kashmiris would probably opt for an independent state of their own disagreeing violently among themselves about how Islamic it ought to be. Among the minority communities of Shia Muslims Pandits or Hindus Ladakhi Buddhists Sikhs Christians and others neither an independent Sunni-dominated Kashmir nor incorporation into Pakistan would be anything but a nightmare. They would soon be reduced to refugees. A little more than a decade ago the Indian-occupied part of Kashmir experienced a large episode of "ethnic cleansing" that is not forgotten. Hindus were driven en masse out of the Sunni-dominated Vale of Kashmir. They had lived there for centuries much of this time on good terms with their Muslim neighbours. Pakistan was intimately involved with the promotion of this terror and it was the beginning of the present phase of the conflict. It was the moment when Kashmiri nationalist aspirations and the agenda of "Islamism" became inextricably enmeshed. The Indian army was not so easily pushed away however and the result of this was not a happy one for the Muslim denizens of the Vale. They have been increasingly caught in the crossfire between both homegrown and Pakistan-sponsored militants and Indian soldiers who are not gentle with them. Allegations of Indian atrocities have become a central part of the propaganda war. But as in Israel/Palestine there is a failure to grasp the relation between cause and effect. You cannot attack an army without consequences. The most vital distinction between the two sides -- Indian and Pakistani -- is that the former has remained a secular state with impressive credentials in religious toleration whereas the latter has become an Islamic state in which religious minorities are routinely persecuted. The hard fact is that Muslims can enjoy full civil rights and liberties under the Indian constitution non-Muslims can't under Pakistan. So the conflict cannot be reduced to "majority rules". Since the great "majority of the minorities" are already on the Indian side of the ceasefire line and thus already enjoying Indian protection; and since the ceasefire line itself happens to pass mostly through remote and little-inhabited territory between the sides -- it will do as a permanent frontier. The reality is that the people of Kashmir -- worn down by two generations of internecine strife -- have made their accommodations with this frontier. Any attempt to shift it now must lead to further and much worse carnage. I have intentionally avoided the interminable discussion of what would be historically "just". I am looking only at the situation as it stands and as it has settled over two full generations. This to my mind is all that politics and diplomacy can achieve: it cannot rewrite centuries of history. The only way forward is to recognize that arbitrary ceasefire line as the border between Pakistan and India "in perpetuity". (A legal concept not an historical one.) This would not be a confirmation of the status quo. It would be the only way out of a status quo in which both sides are perpetually at war. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top