An Excuse Of A Valley

Whenever Indo-Pakistan relations seem at their worst, they manage to get worse still. What makes current prospects particularly dismal is Pakistan’s determination to prevent improvement. To say that peace depends on resolving the "core" issue means only one thing: give up your sovereignty over Kashmir or face more of what we have been inflicting. Could ‘more’ include war?

There are three broad possibilities: Pakistan chooses war as a feasible means of wresting Kashmir, either directly or by securing internal intervention at a moment favourable to it-or by accelerating its other schemes to destabilise India; India is goaded into war as the only effective response to Pakistan’s terrorism; or, even without either side intending it, Pakistan’s efforts, or India’s counters, get out of control and war erupts inexorably.

All these depend on Pakistan’s activities. That is not to claim any superior morality for India but simply to get down to realities. India is the status quo power, with no interest in war except to hit at the source of provocation. Most countries subjected to what Pakistan has been doing would long since have chosen that reaction. The very fact that we haven’t signals our preference: the only way India could initiate war is if the provocations exceed endurance, which is Pakistan’s choice, as are the other two scenarios.

India is much at fault; we certainly didn’t wish Pakistan any better to begin with than they wished us and were subsequently guilty of high-handedness, or neglect, or indifference, if not downright hostility. It’s a measure of the embitterment Pakistan has fostered that today hardly any Indian doesn’t feel victimised by Pakistani ill-will but our severest critics would be hard put to put any onus of escalation on us.

Pakistan would retort that our refusal to talk seriously on Kashmir drives them to extremes. Repeated so long, the theory that Kashmir is the "core" trouble is actually believed-by outsiders no less than Pakistanis, but is it true? Gen Musharraf himself pointed out (in a speech in Karachi last April) that even solving Kashmir wouldn’t dispel hostility as it is inherent in our relationship. He blamed this on India’s power pretensions but his key point is valid: he foresaw Pakistan forever working against India. It’s inherent in its power structure.

It’s shallow to blame this on army attitudes or democratic inadequacies. Past wars were caused more by scheming politicians than the military, which actually has some of Pakistan’s most sober and thoughtful elements. Pakistanis dedicated to liberal, ‘modern’ values-which we preen ourselves as being India’s virtues and ‘their’ deficiencies-have done more, in far harder circumstances, to uphold those values than counterparts here: compare the courage of so many journalists and judges, under severe penalties of martial law, with our behaviour under the Emergency. Why Pakistan has such difficulty stabilising a system of governance is a complex issue but the problems of grounding nationhood in religion among varied peoples who never formed a separate unity before and are acutely conscious of other identities, are part not only of Pakistan’s internal difficulties but of the compulsions towards us: tension with India has become the instrument of choice both for a self-selected minority to enjoy political power and to consolidate nationhood.

The nature of the Pakistani state will stay the same whether Kashmir is added to Pakistan or not; indeed, its problems in forging a nation may become harder with Kashmir. India’s consolidation of nationhood and democracy is a striking contrast. Certainly, we face difficulties, but they are of adjustment rather than foundation. We must, in particular, redouble our efforts to strengthen among our peoples their sense of belonging and confidence in their future as Indians. That’s what makes Kashmir so vital, for the nature of Indian state and society would radically change if there were any change of Kashmir as its constituent. Kashmir is really at the core of India’s nationhood and only in the sense that Pakistan can’t abide that nationhood is it at the core of Indo-Pakistan relations.

Pakistan’s past efforts to annex Kashmir failed because, even if India hasn’t exactly won their affections, the Kashmiris at the least acquiesced in the Indian nexus. The criminal folly of small-minded Delhi politicians, who thought they could inflict on such a sensitive area the petty party games they play in other states, provoked an alienation that Pakistan was delighted to exploit; and our regular display of ineptitude, now raising the question whether the state machinery is capable even of basic tasks, surely makes us appear vulnerable to further pressures. Pakistan’s obvious purposes in keeping up its proxy war are to induce international intervention and to prevent India’s retrieval of Kashmiri cooperation. The latter was at last in sight a year or so ago and is still achievable. In what way can a Pakistan so irrevocably committed to preventing that be prevented from going too far?

One extreme contingency, though much talked about, can be dismissed straightaway: nuclear war is wholly unthinkable. It is part of Pakistan’s strategy to encourage do-gooders and other interventionists, especially anti-proliferation gospellers, to project apocalypse; two inimical neighbours, three times at war, with an endless quarrel verging on explosion, now add nuclear dimensions to escalation. "Something" must be done about Kashmir, or else. But Pakistan’s leaders well know their disadvantages of smaller size and fewer weapons; India would suffer horrid damage but Pakistan simply couldn’t survive nuclear war. To list it even theoretically is to attribute a degree of insanity even the most rabid India-hater does not merit.

What if conventional war went badly for either side-would that not compel escalation? The deterrent effect that enforced peace in the Cold War is applicable here and logically rules out conventional war precisely because of the nuclear danger. What India has to deal with is brinksmanship-Pakistan manouevering conflict so close to war that the world steps in.

Coping with this requires preparation, purposeful diplomacy and keeping our nerve. It is hard for any democracy to practice these skills, particularly in a transitional stage as ours when excitability, gallery-playing and unfamiliarity with (and indifference to) the way the world ticks, impose severe constraints on statecraft. A three-part approach is necessary: gearing up our military machine; resolving the domestic, as distinct from the Pakistani, aspect of our problems in Kashmir; and a sustained effort to gain international support for the formalisation of status quo as the only possible solution.

The first is an obvious imperative. The surest shield against Pakistani adventurism is manifest superiority. Those who protest we neither need nor can afford this simply have to be lived with. Successive regimes here have been far too prone to let problems simmer till force becomes a sine qua non; we’ve to guard against this and against calling in the army for fighting fires that should’ve never been allowed to erupt but vis-a-vis our Pakistan problem we’ve no choice.

So too, Kashmir. There’s no administration there, billions still elude the people they’re meant for, the situation cries out for political leadership. Everyone knows this and the equations that are obstructing even the beginning of a process, let alone progress. It is not a situation to be turned to briefly, in between the crisis in Bihar or UP or whatever. Full-time, well-planned and sustained efforts just cannot be delayed.

Our most intractable problem is Pakistan’s insistence on totally changing the status quo in Kashmir, when for India status quo is the maximum concession we can make. Shorn of all its righteous cloak of merely giving "full moral, political and diplomatic" support to what it projects as a tyrannised people’s valiant struggle for freedom, Pakistan’s position is simply that Kashmir belongs to it. Not once, in over 50 years of preaching that a people should determine their own future, has Pakistan wavered in its exclusion of the logical end of that principle which, if it were really applied, would mean option (c): independence. On that, at least, India and Pakistan are fully agreed. Whatever would-be problem-solvers, or problem-makers, abroad might think, no other government has ever subscribed to the "third" choice.

Pakistan’s insistence on the UN resolutions on a plebiscite limited to a choice between the two of us has been carefully thought out to suit its needs: it knows full well that if the self-determination principle were really applied, Pakistan itself would disintegrate. No other country today looks to these UN resolutions and theories of partial plebiscite, or separating the Valley while Jammu and Ladakh go our way. All fail to address the consequences of changing the status quo. Pakistanis who urge that this is Partition’s unfinished business and should be settled on the same ‘principle’ overlook India’s inability to accept that ‘principle’ or to forget the attendant horrors. In 50 years, India has come well on the way of consolidating its pluralism; we simply cannot risk the revival of communalism which any change in Kashmir’s status would provoke.

Tashkent and Shimla gave Pakistan a peg on which to hang its insistence on Kashmir talks so it could move towards letting its political opinion accept the inevitable but it only hotted up the issue. It’s right in thinking India only accepts talks to put off the issue, that’s what it too should be doing. Kashmir can’t be tackled by itself; unless Pakistan allows the issue to be embedded in a totality of relations in which cooperative elements balance the contentious, and solutions unthinkable today become possible, there can’t be progress. We’ve to work towards wisdom dawning on it, or live with its animosity.