Kashmir Is Not The Core Issue

FOR the past five years, Indian diplomats adopted a curiously passive position on Kashmir that has ended by putting India and not Pakistan in the dock before world opinion; and making it Indias responsibility to be reasonable and make concessions in the interest of peace. This little drama has been played out once again at the SAARC summit. Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif reiterated that the Kashmir problem lay at the core of tension that had bedeviled Indo-Pak relations for five decades, and was now threatening the subcontinent and the world with a nuclear arms race. Atal Behari Vajpayee did nothing to rebut this powerf ulassertion, and contented himself with asking for a comprehensive and composite dialogue between the two countries at the level of their foreign secretaries.

This is not the first time that such exchanges have taken place. On the contrary, ever since India and Pakistan exchanged a set of non-papers on confidence-building and the reduction of tensions in 1990, it is Pakistan that has been on the moral offensive and India on the defensive. India has only itself to blame for getting caught in this position. For, not once has it had the guts to state that Kashmir is not the core issue in the strained relations between India and Pakistan.

The core issue the root cause of tension in the subcontinent is an attempt by one country to change an international boundary and annex territory that has been part of another country for half-a-century, through the use of force. This endeavour began on October 22, 1947, and has never ended. Only the modus operandi has changed. In 1947, Pakistan sent in Pathan raiders by the thousands. In 1965, it sent in soldiers disguised as infiltrators in the confident but utterly unfounded belief that they had only to declare their presence for the people of the state to rise against India. All that changed in 1989 was that the infiltrators were no longer Pakistani servicemen, but Kashmiri youth angered by the abuse of democracy in Kashmir and beguiled by promises of help from Pakistan. In the last three years the wheel has from Pakistan. In the last three years the wheel has turned once more, and the infiltrators are once again Afghans and Pakistani servicemen and ex-servicemen re c ruited by Pakistans Inter Services Intelligence to do a stint in the Valley.

Over the years Pakistan has built layer upon layer of justification for its interventions in Kashmir, from spinning elaborate conspiracy theories to explain how and why the British handed over Kashmir to India; to throwing doubt on the accession itself; to appealing to Kashmirs Muslim essence and the underlying principles of the Partition of India. Some of these claims are demonstrably false, others are debatable. But five decades of incessant propaganda have engraved them on the heart of every Pakistani in letters of fire. As a result not a single Pakistani can afford to demand, in public at least, anything less than the transfer to it of the Muslim majority areas of Jammu and Kashmir, if not of the whole state.

However, this fervour of belief simply cannot justify what Pakistan is doing, which is to try and change the status quo on the subcontinent unilaterally, by force. That is what lies at the root of the nuclearisation of the subcontinent, the spectre of a nuclear arms race and the threat of an accidental holocaust.

Only one other part of the world has seen sustained efforts to change a de facto international boundary by force, and that is Palestine. Not surprisingly, that is the only other part of the world trapped in endless war, and the only other nuclear flashpoint where peace is being maintained at the point of the gun and the missile.

Since Pakistan is the instigator of violence in Kashmir, for it to ask for a negotiated settlement of the dispute, and to cite the threat of war to back its demand, is pure blackmail. No Indian government can give in to such a demand, made in such circumstances, and possibly hope to survive. But that is the least significant part of the story. Even giving in to these demands will not restore peace, but only increase the threat of violence and war. For a second partition of India based on religion precisely what Pakistan feels it needs to complete its identity will unravel Indias identity as a secular state. Such a partition would unleash a Hindu communal backlash that would destroy the status, property and possibly even the lives of large numbers of Muslims, especially in northern India. What is worse, since no such communal event has ever occurred in either country without causing a sharp reaction in the other, a generalised outbreak of rioting would increase, and not decrease, the risk of war between the two countries.

Pakistanis react with great hostility to the merest suggestion that this might happen and level bitter accusations that Indian Muslims are being held hostage. But this is no more than a debating point, and a rhetorical one at that. The plain fact is that no responsible government can ever take the risk that such a thing might happen, much less get out of hand. Thus no other government has the right to ask it to take such a risk.

Indias leaders understand that their room for manouevre on this sensitive issue is precisely zero. That is why they have been advocating settling other issues, increasing economic and cultural cooperation and allowing ties to submerge the two countries differences over Kashmir. This is precisely what the A S E A N nations have done with the score of border and maritime disputes they inherited when they gained independence four decades and more ago. But Pakistan is not interested in simply settling the dispute. It is determined to settle it only on its own terms and with a complete disre gard for the consequences.

Where India leaders have gone wrong is in assuming that the rest of the world does not see, or cannot be made to understand, what is obvious to them. For at least two years foreign observers have been asking Indians whether New Delhi would accept a solution based on the Line of Control, and this question has gained a new edge after the nuclear tests. Given its past experience with mediation, India is right to distrust this method of dispute resolution. But it is doing the nation a disservice when it does not use every forum available to it to warn the world against the dangers that inhere in trying to change the status quo in South Asia. As for talking with Pakistan, it should make it crystal clear that it will only do so when Islamabad reins in the ISI and stops sending mercenaries to murder innocent men, women and children in the state.