Kashmir spat shows
political-military splits By
Priyanka Bhardwaj
Although 2013 is less
than a month old, tensions have already spiked
between nuclear-armed neighbors India and
Pakistan, this time at the Line of Control (LoC)
between the countries' administrative regions in
Kashmir.
The Indian side claims that in
clear violation of ceasefire agreement signed at
Geneva in 2003, Pakistan soldiers on January 9
killed two Indian soldiers, decapitating one and
mutilating the other's body. Two Pakistani
soldiers were also killed in a fire-fight the same
week.
Outraged at the killing of Indian
soldiers - and the nature of their death - the
country's media, public and opposition parties have
demanded the government take
a firmer stance towards Pakistan. Opposition
leader Sushma Swaraj has called for "10 heads of
Pakistani soldiers in return for one".
Emotions were further heightened when the
Indian Chief of Armed Forces, General Bikram
Singh, declared the killings "intentional" and
"pre-meditated", adding at a press conference that
they could provoke India into exercising its right
to retaliate "at a time and place of its choice".
The site of two wars in 1947-48 and 1965,
Kashmir has been a flashpoint for Indo-Pakistan
relations since the state's partition in 1947. It
sees more regular eruptions of violence than other
disputed areas such as Sir Creek, dividing the
Indian province of Gujarat from the Pakistani
province of Sindh, and the Siachen glacier, in the
eastern Karakoram range in the Himalaya Mountains.
Angered at the reported brutality of the
killings, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has
said that relations with Islamabad now "cannot be
business as usual", suggesting recent progress in
talks will be rolled back. Delhi was preparing to
implement a landmark visa-on-arrival deal for
Pakistani senior citizens at the Wagah crossing on
the Grand Trunk Road.
However, some
policymakers are moving to retrieve the situation,
with Indian External Affairs Minister Salman
Khurshid saying "jingoistic conversations" need
not color the peace process.
“I think the
peace process is going well," he told CNN IBN's
Devil's Advocate program. "Just in order to
overcome something that is unpleasant [the LoC
incident] we are not going to reopen everything
going back to 1950. We have to look forward. But
something has happened right now and we cannot
give the impression that nothing causes concern to
us."
Khurshid said that as the reported
beheading had "caught the public's imagination",
leaders had to respond.
A telephone
conference between directors-general of military
operations on both sides on Monday resulted in an
agreement to resume cross-border trade and bus
services and to generally de-escalate border
tensions.
India is likely concerned that
Pakistan will take advantage of its current
presidency of United Nations Security Council and
internationalize the issue, such as by demanding
the presence of UN Military Observers Group at the
LoC.
While Islamabad has long sought such
intervention, India says the UN cannot play a role
in the region as its observers cannot prevent LoC
violations.
Military
posturing The tensions on the LoC come as
the Pakistani government is reeling from internal
problems. The country's Supreme Court on January
15 ordered the arrest of Prime Minister Raja
Pervez Ashraf, while in the same week cleric
Tahir-ul-Qadri led a protest of tens of thousands
on the capital and sectarian tensions between
Sunnis and Shi'ites have seen a spate of fatal
bombings. Indian critics say the Pakistan army
has provoked a fight in Kashmir to buttress its
position as the nation's number one security
provider, potentially in preparation of a coup
d'etat- of-sorts that leads to a more formal and
legal sharing of legislative powers with the
civilian government.
Pakistani officials
have played down the beheading incident, with
Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar saying an
inquiry into the death had "yielded nothing",
while accusing India of "war mongering".
She added that South Asia could not
withstand a fully-fledged India-Pakistan conflict,
and that the Pakistani government wanted the
bilateral dialogue to remain "uninterrupted and
uninterruptible"".
The Pakistani Foreign
Minister to India, Salman Bashir, has assured
India that a probe has been ordered into the
incident, but this has prompted disbelief in some
Indian political circles.
Priyanka
Bhardwaj
is a New Delhi-based freelance
journalist. She can be reached at
priyanka2508@yahoo.co.in.
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