 |
 |
|
 |
World & I School | World & I Homeschool | World & I College | World & I Library | |
 |
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
World & I School | World & I Homeschool | World & I College | World & I Library | |
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
Hindu and Muslim hatreds may run too deep to be resolved by governments in either New Delhi or Islamabad.
 he December crisis between India and Pakistan, precipitated by the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, was not sparked by simple terrorism but by the half-century fight over Kashmir that remains a festering sore in South Asia.
In his January 12 televised speech, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan admitted for the first time that force cannot resolve the Kashmir question and invited India's prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, for talks. But he could not abandon Pakistan's moral and diplomatic support for the "freedom struggle" in Kashmir and called on the international community to help put an end to "state terrorism" in Kashmir, "in accordance with the wishes of the Kashmiri people." A look at the history of the Kashmir dispute can help answer these questions: Is it now time for the international community to wade into the Kashmir dispute? Is the risk of war, perhaps even a nuclear exchange, so great that the United States cannot afford to remain aloof? Could international involvement make the matter worse? Or will it remain a quagmire ready to engulf all outsiders in a local war of ethnic hatreds? History of a crisis  or nearly two centuries, Central Asia has been a chessboard. In 1819, Kashmir, Muslim since the reign of the Moguls, was invaded by Indian Sikhs led by British advisors. In 1847 the British sold the entire realm of Kashmir--land and people--to a Hindu maharajah, Gulab Sikh, for seven and a half million gold rupees (about 75 million dollars).
Queen Victoria retained sovereignty, but the maharajah took rule over its Muslim tribesmen in the high Karakoram, over 100,000 square miles of towering peaks and glacier fields between the Indian plain and the frontier deserts of western China and the Tibetan plateau. Until August 1947, the autocratic rule of the Hindu maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir was tempered by the oversight of the British viceroy in Calcutta (and later Delhi) in the same way that the British ruled the other 564 feudal monarchies of the vast Indian subcontinent, whose domains comprised two-fifths of India and a population of 99 million.
But after World War II, an exhausted Great Britain no longer had the political will or the financial resources to continue as an imperial power in a world where imperialism had become a dirty word. With the election of a Labour Party government in London in May 1945, Britain finally agreed to an independent India, and wartime hero Lord Louis Mountbatten was named the "last viceroy" to supervise the transition to independence. Just as the core of the Kashmir dispute is the ancient cleavage between Muslim and Hindu, the independence of India also hinged on the Muslim-Hindu divide. Hindus had resisted the British during the war, while the Muslims supported the empire. When the time for independence came, Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah, citing his people's loyalty to the king, demanded a separate state for his people. This, of course, meant that the vast colonial territory of India had to be divided among two hostile populations. At first, Mountbatten tried to push the task onto the United Nations, but it declined. Mountbatten then recruited Sir Cyril Radcliffe as the author of one of cartographic history's greatest debacles. Radcliffe, director of the Ministry of Information in London, was neither a geographer nor an expert on India. Independence Day was to be August 14, 1947, and Radcliffe was given only 36 days to complete his work. Redrawing the map of India was a procrustean task that was completed hastily and haphazardly. It resulted in the amputation of India's two frontiers, East and West Pakistan, along a vague delineation of areas of Muslim majority. The feudal monarchies were given a choice of joining India or Pakistan. Kashmir--a state between two nations  hortly after independence, the monarchies had largely made their decisions; most joined India. Some had their decisions made for them. When the Muslim rulers of the Hindu-majority states of Hyderabad and Junagadh decided to join Pakistan, India's new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, ordered his army to occupy them, ostensibly to reflect the will of their peoples.
But Maharajah Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir, situated between
Meanwhile, Pakistan's president, Jinnah, became increasingly alarmed that the maharajah of Kashmir would choose India, and that his ally, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, a local Muslim leader friendly with Nehru, would go along. Jinnah urged Pashtun Muslim tribesmen in the upper Kashmir mountains to form an indigenous rebellion called the Azadi (Freedom) Movement. By October 1947, it had pressed its way to the outskirts of the maharajah's seat in Srinagar, halting the supply of food and gasoline. The Azadi rebellion was successful in that it forced Singh to make his decision. He chose India, requested Indian intervention, and deputized Abdullah as prime minister. But in the process, Pakistani soldiers battled Indian troops to a standstill in the high mountains in the first Indo-Pakistani war and claimed some 50,000 square miles for Pakistan. Half of Kashmir, the Pakistanis felt, was better than none. Demand for a plebiscite here also came another subtle Pakistani victory. Mountbatten believed the Kashmir tinderbox would be less volatile with the promise of an election to ratify Kashmir's incorporation into India. Pakistan viewed this as a victory. Through 1947 and '48, the United Nations sought to resolve the fighting with several UN resolutions also demanding that "the question of accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan will be decided through the democratic method of free and impartial plebiscite."
The violent but inconclusive warfare finally ended in a UN-arranged cease-fire on January 1, 1949, and subsequent signing of the Karachi Agreement on July 18. The UN agreement demarcated a cease-fire line that gave India two-thirds of Kashmir and established a UN Military Observer Group of 38 officers (a mission that still operates today). Pakistan waited for the plebiscite, but it never came. In 1952, Sheikh Abdullah led the elected and overwhelmingly Muslim Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir in a vote to confirm accession to India, a poll that India considered adequate for the purposes of the UN resolution. Kashmir was made an autonomous state within India, and the sheikh was appointed prime minister. The matter was supposedly settled. In New Delhi's view, all of Jammu and Kashmir was now Indian, and there was no need to discuss the matter further--with the United Nations, with Pakistan, with anyone. China in the Kashmir calculus  ossession is nine-tenths of the law, however. Pakistan's troops remained on the cease-fire line in the Karakoram ridges, where Indian forces could not dislodge them. At the same time, unbeknownst to India, Chinese troops were grading a highway through the Aksai Chin region of Kashmir, a broad valley on the Chinese side of the Karakoram Range.
Indian intelligence finally got wind of the Chinese road in 1957 but kept it under wraps, hoping to avoid conflict with China, India's socialist
By August 1959, the Chinese road had become a major thoroughfare from Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang) and the western Tibetan plateau. Word was beginning to seep out of the intrusions on India's territory. India's burgeoning political and economic ties with China's then-ally, the Soviet Union, were another major factor in India's alarm. When the Sino-Soviet ideological split became apparent in August 1959 (Moscow was already pulling out all its aid missions from China), India lost its inhibitions. On August 29, 1959, Nehru informed parliament of the Chinese incursion into--indeed, occupation of--the Aksai Chin, and it demanded military action. What few mountain troops the Indian army had were promptly sent across the 16,000-foot ice fields to see what the Chinese were doing. They were promptly fired upon by the Chinese, touching off two years of sporadic border fights.
All along the Sino-Indian border, incident mounted upon incident. By 1962 a full-scale war had erupted between the two Asian giants. Seeing India's closer alignment with the Soviet Union, Pakistan and China found solace in each other's arms. Kashmir became a strategic square on the geopolitical chessboard that China and Pakistan could occupy interchangeably. In March 1963, as the Indo-Chinese war died down, the Pakistani government signed a border agreement with China claiming that its Kashmir border lay to the south of the Aksai Chin. Moreover, China and Pakistan pledged to build a highway through the Karakoram range as the first land bridge between the two countries. In August 1965, evidently reassured by its strategic ties to China, Pakistan jabbed the Kashmiri tiger once again. On August 5, Pakistani forces began to infiltrate the cease-fire line in increasing numbers. Indian troops responded by pushing into Pakistani mountain positions. Back and forth it went until India launched a full-scale invasion of central Pakistan's Punjab province on September 6 in what has come to be called the second Indo-Pakistani war. India's massive troop formations prevailed against Pakistan's superior armored units and air force. Without "strategic depth," narrow Pakistan could not win against massive India. Pakistan was bloodied, and the Indian army had acquired a taste for blood. The third Indo-Pakistani war ix years later, in December 1971, the third Indo-Pakistani war resulted in Pakistan's utter defeat and the creation of Indian-dominated Bangladesh. The 1971 war halted with the signing of the Simla Accord on July 2, 1972, which yet again demarcated the Kashmir Line of Control (LOC) along the old cease-fire line. This time Pakistan promised to resolve differences with India through dialogue and bilateral talks. The Simla Accord's significance was that it removed the Kashmir question from the international arena. Pakistan still urged a plebiscite along the lines of the 1948 UN resolution, but India claims the Simla agreement supersedes the UN documents.
Still, the disastrous 1971 war didn't settle the Kashmir issue. In the 1970s, India reinstated Abdullah as Kashmir's prime minister. He was succeeded by his son,
By this time, the strategic dynamic of the two countries was complicated by the fact that both sides had (undeclared) nuclear weapons. The United States, China, and the Soviet Union leaned on both sides to back down, but increasing Muslim activism in Kashmir was met with increasing Indian military suppression. In 1998, both countries conducted open nuclear tests, dramatically raising the stakes in the conflict over Kashmir. The dispute flared again in the spring of 1999, when Muslim guerrillas backed by Pakistan crossed into the Indian side of the Kashmir LOC around Kargil. Conflict was contained, but hundreds died on both sides. The fighting in Kargil was a political disaster for the embattled Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. He was removed and arrested in a military coup in 1999, and General Musharraf was installed in his place. A symptom, not a cause he chronic crisis in Kashmir has taken on a new significance in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. Although only one civilian was killed in the December 13 terrorist attack on the Parliament House in New Delhi, and no damage was done to the building, in India's eyes it was the same as the September 11 attacks.
Following President Bush's lead, India now sees terror attacks--of whatever size--as a legitimate casus belli for massive military attacks on states that harbor or protect terrorists. As such, another crisis involving hundreds of millions of people could be sparked by the atrocities of a handful of terrorists. But can the Kashmir question ever be resolved? Hindu and Muslim hatreds run too deep to be controlled by governments in either New Delhi or Islamabad. On February 28, 2002, Muslim mobs in the Indian city of Godhra attacked and firebombed a train of Hindus coming from Ayodhya, killing 57 (including 25 women and 15 children). What sparked this rampage? The train was carrying a group of Hindu nationalists who were shouting insults and provocative slogans at the Muslims. They were returning from a site where militants are attempting to erect a Hindu temple on the ruins of a sixteenth-century mosque destroyed by Hindus in 1992. The root cause of Indo-Pakistani enmity, it seems, is not Kashmir. It is India and Pakistan. 
John H. Tkacik Jr. is a research fellow at the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. |
|
Copyright © 2003 The World & I. All rights reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy |
