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COMMENTARY
Chasing a mirage in
Kashmir
By Navnita Chadha Behera
NEW DELHI - President General Pervez Musharraf
and the Pakistani establishment are chasing a mirage in
Kashmir. His latest salvo entails threatening India with
an unconventional war. Musharraf's public spokesman,
General Rashid Qureshi, explained that its centerpiece
will not be a nuclear confrontation, which perturbed the
international community, but thousands of Muslims rising
against the Indian army on both sides of the Line of
Control (LoC) that divides the Indian and
Pakistani-administered sections of Kashmir. The
blueprint of Pakistan's master plan for liberating
Kashmir has clearly not changed in the past 55 years.
It also re-affirms two basic assumptions that
have shaped Pakistan's Kashmir strategy since 1947.
First, Kashmiris are suffering under the Indian military
occupation and, given a free choice, they will accede to
Pakistan. Second, Pakistan cannot wrest Kashmir in a
conventional duel, hence it must resort to
unconventional methods to achieve its political goal.
Both are seriously flawed. Kashmiris have always aspired
for independence and not accession to Pakistan. And,
unconventional methods can, at best, yield limited
dividends. Without popular support, these cannot secure
Kashmir's liberation and in the long run, they are
checkmated by India's conventional military strength.
The root cause of these flawed assumptions lies
in the "religious lens" Pakistan has consistently
deployed to view Kashmir: Kashmiris are Muslims and
naturally aspire to be part of the "Muslim homeland in
the subcontinent" (read Pakistan). On the other hand,
Kashmiris have traditionally accorded primacy to their
ethnic identity. As early as the 1940s, Sheikh Abdullah
had defined the Kashmiri qaum (nationality) as
encompassing "all the 100 percent state-subjects". He
stressed, "They are not Muslims alone, nor the Hindus
and the Sikhs alone, nor the untouchables and Buddhists
alone, but all those living in the state." The
characterization of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) state
as a Muslim-majority state is factually correct, but
politically misleading. Besides the large Hindu and
Buddhist minorities, the Muslims of the state are not a
monolithic group. They include Kashmiri Muslims, Gujjar
and Bakkarwal Muslims, Shi'ite Muslims (of Kargil) and
Punjabi-speaking Muslims in Rajouri and Poonch - each
with diverse political aspirations.
Another myth
widely shared among Pakistanis across the political
spectrum is that J&K's accession to India was
secured through fraudulent means by a fleeing Hindu
Maharaja. They choose to ignore the fact that it was
backed by the Muslim leadership of the National
Conference, with a mass support base in the Valley,
which had unequivocally rejected the two nation theory.
Sheikh Abdullah believed that Kashmir's political
interests would be better protected in a secular and
democratic India than a feudal Pakistan. He insisted
that religious alliances alone do not and should not
normally determine the political alliances of the
states.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah's disdain for the
sovereign will of Kashmiris was another determining
factor. Pakistan champions the cause of Kashmiris' right
of self-determination, but before 1947, it was not
willing to abide by that principle. Sheikh Abdullah, in
his autobiography, quotes Jinnah's reply to a Kashmiri
activist's question whether the people of Kashmir would
decide its future as "let people go to hell". The
National Conference leaders Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed and
Ghulam Sadiq have corroborated that they had approached
the Pakistani government at the highest levels, to let
the Kashmir issue be determined by a referendum but the
latter refused.
Pakistan's entire strategy had
then revolved around Maharaja Hari Singh, urging him to
declare independence, hoping that he would be forced to
share power in a Muslim-majority state. It was only when
the Maharaja started considering holding a referendum
that Pakistan changed its stand and then, accession of a
Muslim-majority state was presented as integral to the
very idea and raison d'etre of the Pakistani nation. The
strategy of unconventional warfare was first tried in
1947-48 when Pakistan decided to force the accession by
cutting off all essential supplies through road and rail
links and sending armed tribesmen and irregular soldiers
of the army to invade Kashmir.
The raiders
succeeded in the Poonch-Mirpur-Muzzafarabad belt that
now comprises Azad Kashmir. This area was a stronghold
of the Muslim Conference, closely aligned with
Jinnah-led Muslim League, and where the people had
revolted against the Dogra forces. But they were stalled
in the Valley. It was the National Conference's
volunteers corp - the Peace Brigade and National Militia
- mobilized by Sheikh Abdullah (and not Maharaja Hari
Singh as many Pakistanis like to believe) who resisted
the raiders until the Indian army landed in Srinagar and
vacated the aggression. Jinnah had to reckon with
Pakistan's military weakness in rescinding his orders
declaring a war because Field Marshall Auchinleck warned
him of its "incalculable consequences", in that "western
Punjab and eastern Bengal alike would fall like overripe
plums into the Indian basket". India's military might
had thwarted Pakistan's first plot of wresting Kashmir
by force.
Pakistan's second attempt to annex
Kashmir in 1965 further evolved the technique of
unconventional warfare. The Operation Gibraltar sought
to sabotage military targets, disrupt communications and
distribute arms to the Kashmiris and initiate a
guerrilla movement to eventually start an uprising in
the Valley. General Mohammed Musa, commander-in-chief of
the Pakistan army, in his book My Version,
acknowledges that this was a well planned strategy,
albeit it backfired totally. Ayub Khan had made a grave
political miscalculation that given support, Kashmiris
would revolt against India. Instead, Kashmiris turned in
Pakistani infiltrators to the Indian army. When the
Pakistan army joined the war, Indian unleashed its full
military strength and crossed the international border
in Punjab. The war ended in a stalemate.
When
the Kashmiris launched a violent secessionist movement
in 1989-1990, it presented a rare and perhaps the only
opportunity for Pakistan's unconventional methods to
hive off Kashmir. The basic ingredients were in place.
There was a mass upsurge against India and for the first
time, Kashmiris had a romantic vision of the "Promised
Land of Pakistan". It was widely perceived as a friend
and an ally in Kashmiris' battle against India. The
early generation of Kashmiri militants who crossed the
LoC to get arms training was indeed promised that once
the insurgency was underway, Pakistan would attack to
help Kashmir secede from India.
Pakistan never
attacked presumably because its top leadership was
acutely aware that azadi (independence) was the
driving force behind Kashmiris' revolt. They realized
that if the "Kashmiri card" was allowed to persist to
its logical conclusion, it might backfire because
independence and re-unification of divided J&K state
and not accession to Pakistan was the JKLF's (Jammu
& Kashmir Liberation Front) political goal. The
resulting strategy of "curbing the independence
sentiment" by depriving JKLF of arms, training and
cadres; creation of several pro-Pakistan outfits
especially Hizbul Mujahideen gave away Pakistan's
gameplan: its support for Kashmiris' right of
self-determination had come with a rider - it must
translate into accession to Pakistan. Azadi was
ruled out.
When Hizbul Mujahideen began to lose
momentum in 1994-95 and failed to recruit new Kashmiri
cadres, Pakistan pushed in Afghan veterans and foreign
mercenaries, radically changing the character of the
militancy. For these Islamic warriors, Kashmiris'
independence struggle and the right of
self-determination was irrelevant, their goal being
creation of an Islamic caliphate.
Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen's proclaimed "the slogan
that Kashmiris should decide their own future has given
rise to an evil, which was distorting the Islamic
identity of the present movement and reducing it to a
mere democratic movement. From the Islamic viewpoint,
the people's opinion has no importance".
This
alienated Kashmiris not only from the militants but also
from Pakistan. They were also exposed to the social,
economic and political realities across the LoC where
Kashmiris were even denied basic civil and political
rights. Before October 1994, the people of Northern
Areas had no right to adult franchise, for 47 years
after they came under Pakistan's control. They had no
elected assembly, or even a municipal council and no
elected representatives in the Federal Assembly.
Azad Kashmir too, is azad only in
nomenclature. The right to adult franchise was first
granted in 1970, two decades after becoming independent.
The constitutional regulations still bar any person
"propagating any opinion or acting in any manner
prejudicial or detrimental to the ideology of the
state's accession to Pakistan" from any elective office.
The ground realities in Pakistan's own backyard exposed
the hollowness of Pakistan's assumed leadership of human
rights, self-determination, democracy and development
across the LoC.
Kashmiris no longer look to
Pakistan as their savior and are less willing to do
Pakistan's bidding. The Kashmiri perception of their
protector buckling under international pressure during
the Kargil crisis and in jilting the Taliban has
confirmed their worst fears: that Pakistan does not have
the military wherewithal or political will to go to war
with India to liberate them.
The Pakistani
establishment must reckon with the metamorphosis in
Kashmir's ground realities. First, Kashmiris' anger
against the Indian state has not translated into an
embrace for Pakistan. Popular disillusionment with
Pakistan runs deep for hijacking their movement for
azadi and turning it into a jihad. Second, the
extremist Islamist orientation of the jihadi groups like
Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammed is alien to the
socio-cultural ethos of the Kashmiri society. They are
no longer regarded as "guest mujahideen" fighting for
Kashmiris' cause.
Even the separatist leadership
ranging from the Hurriyat Conference, the Democratic
Freedom Party (led by Shabir Shah) and top Hizbul
Mujahideen militants have, from time to time, spoken out
against the jihadi groups. Third, Pakistan's strategy of
keeping the heat on India through the use of proxy
militant groups has failed to pressurize India to even
come to the negotiating table, leave aside giving up
Kashmir.
Finally, in the post-September 11
world, jihad as an instrument of state policy is not
only discredited but also unsustainable. At home, it is
at cross-purposes with Musharraf's professed goal of
ending the sectarian violence and ridding Pakistani
society of extremist elements. Pakistan has suffered
from the presence of radical Islamic groups no less than
India. In the external realm, it will inevitably lead
Pakistan to clash with the US policy of zero tolerance
of transnational terrorism. Unless General Musharraf and
Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali's new civilian government in
Islamabad remove their blinkers in devising Pakistan's
Kashmir strategy, they will continue to hold South Asia,
especially Kashmiris, hostage to their make-believe
world.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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