This Disastrous Charade

By Jawed Naqvi, *How we turned a Cold War into a hot potato* - Dawn.com - Pakistan
Monday, March 22, 2010

Far too many innocent men, women and children have died and many more uprooted from their homes in the Kashmir tragedy since its emergence as a violent and volatile issue in 1947. Its essential history, however, is at variance with most contemporary narratives of India-Pakistan rivalry, brutal military occupation, rabid religious zealotry and an indigenous struggle to keep a moderate inclusive Islam as its nodal characteristic.

I have often wondered who among the Pakistani stakeholders in Kashmir is today more keen for an early solution to the dispute – is it the army, which has its hands full with a raging insurgency in the northwest but may see advantages in getting even with India by establishing the centrality of the prickly discussion as a requirement to meet its vital international obligations of containing anti-west Muslim extremists elsewhere? Assuming and not conceding that Pakistan has its way in Kashmir, with or without overt international help, is it ready for the consequences of adding one more ethnic headache to its existing four or five? And are the Kashmiris going to be happy with an overstretched nation state which is already in a turbulent flux?

Or is it a strategic quest for the narrow-minded religious militant groups who see in the eclectic and primarily Sufi Kashmir a staging post for their wider jihad against India and against everybody who fits into their crosshairs, including, ironically enough, the current pro-west state of Pakistan. The world on its part doesn’t seem to be excited about another Islamic state much less a religious nursery in this part of the world, and India will not allow what it considers to be its territories to be pared down to make itself more vulnerable than it is to Pakistan, China and assorted domestic and foreign insurgents. These are the elements of the regular narrative within which current discussions on Kashmir are staged and its many realistic and far-fetched solutions are posited by nation-states and well-heeled NGOs. Most of the contemporary elements in the Kashmir saga are completely new though and unrelated to the original colonial perfidy that drove its politics before the Cold War harnessed the dispute to American strategies in the region.
Rakesh Ankit, who studied history at Delhi and Oxford, has culled out enough recently declassified British government papers to reassemble a useful picture of Kashmir’s emergence as a key plank in the geographical architecture conceived and planned by colonialism and handed over to the Cold War. 1948: The crucial year in the history of Jammu and Kashmir, published in the current issue of Economic and Political Weekly, could prove to be a seminal work as it seeks to guide us to the roots of the problem and its many lingering shadows from the past that may yet decide its future.

Initially, according to Ankit, the British didn’t want the Kashmir conflict at all for two reasons. First, their military minds held that they needed both India and Pakistan to secure “the peace, welfare and security…from the Mediterranean to the China Sea” and to confront the “intrigue from Sinkiang and intervention from north” with “implications far beyond Kashmir”. They now had to choose one of the two.

Second, they had been worried about the weakening strategic hold in Palestine and Greece, unhappy with the increasingly autonomous and assertive American involvement there “without due regard to British interests”, anxious about Egypt and Iraq and arguing for “…a pan-Islamic federation/Arab league…to thwart Russia”. Against this backdrop, the Kashmir conflict made them concerned about losing control of Pakistan as well.

Losing Pakistan was not an option for London, says Ankit. The British chief of staff (COS) had underlined this five times between May 1945 – when Pakistan was but an idea of a few – and July 1947, when it was about to be a reality for all. They had first reported to Winston Churchill that Britain must retain its military connection with India in view of the “Soviet menace” for India was a valuable base for force deployment, a transit point for air and sea communications, a large reserve of manpower. Moreover, it had air bases in the north-west (now in Pakistan) from which Britain could threaten Soviet military installations. They repeated to Clement Attlee the importance of these north-west airfields.

In July 1946, they identified the crucial arc from Turkey to Pakistan, in view of essential oil supplies, defence and communications requirements, with the Russian threat. In November 1946, they summed up that “Western India” (post-1947 Pakistan) – with Karachi and Peshawar – was strategically and ideologically crucial for British Commonwealth interests. Five weeks before Partition, the COS concluded:

“The area of Pakistan is strategically the most important in the continent of India and the majority of our strategic requirements could be met by an agreement with Pakistan alone. We do not therefore consider that failure to obtain the [defence] agreement with India would cause us to modify any of our requirements.” Can we see shades of the current expediencies in that comment?

The Foreign Office (FO) viewed the Kashmir conflict as a religious war which “might be used by Russia as a pretext for intervening”. It felt that the “Russians tend to favour India as against Pakistan”. Moreover, any initiatives had to keep in mind “the present difficult position over Palestine” which made any “talks about HMG being unfair to Pakistan (over Kashmir) undesirable”. It reminded the Muslim countries via its embassies: “HMG might easily have handed over the whole of India to the Hindu majority. But they loyally protected the Muslim minority, even to the point of facilitating the creation of a separate independent Muslim state by going out of their way. This is what the Muslims themselves demanded. We have recognised Pakistan as a Dominion and have supported its admission to UNO. We would always come to Pakistan’s help.”

As India and Pakistan battled for their claim on Kashmir, the British had their own axe to grind. When India got the Instrument of Accession, disputed by Pakistan as a confirmed fact, and Indian troops landed in Srinagar, Lawrence Graffety-Smith, the UK High Commissioner in Pakistan (1947-51), spoke for many when he sent this report to London two days after Kashmir’s accession to India: “Indian government’s acceptance of accession of Kashmir [was] the heaviest blow yet sustained by Pakistan in her struggle for existence. Strategically, Pakistan’s frontiers have been greatly extended as a hostile India gains access to NWFP. This will lead to a redefinition of the Afghan policy for worse. Second, Russian interests will be aroused in Gilgit and NWFP which creates a new international situation which HMG and the US government cannot overlook. Third, there is a serious threat to Pakistan’s irrigation systems; hydroelectric projects from the accession [all five rivers draining the Pakistani Punjab flow from India, three through Kashmir] and finally, two-three million Kashmiri Muslims will worsen the already massive refugee problem with five-and-a-half million Muslims having been driven out of East Punjab.”

But the British were even-handed in their dealings with the new Dominions were they not? Here’s how they did that. Philip Noel-Baker headed the Commonwealth relations Office (1947-50). He worried that “incursions now taking place in Kashmir constitute an ‘armed attack’ upon Indian territory in view of their scale and of the fact that Kashmir has acceded to the Indian Union. This is so irrespective of whether forces in question are organised or disorganised or whether they are controlled by, or enjoy the convenience of, Government of Pakistan. India is therefore entitled to take measures which she may deem necessary for self-defence pending definitive action by Security Council to restore peace – prima facie – repelling invaders but possibly pursuit of invaders into Pakistan territory. Security Council could not decide out of hand that India was not justified in so doing in the case envisaged.”

The newly released British papers certainly make the current diplomatic and military manoeuvres on Kashmir and other colonial era disputes stalking the region look tame by comparison. There is much to laud in Ankit’s effort in putting together an argument. And there is much to ponder in the new and dangerous direction all the unresolved issues are taking us. It’s a shame that India and Pakistan, in the tradition of good old client states, continue to engage in a mindset that helps their foreign minders sow more discord between them. The Kashmiri people are the worst sufferers in this disastrous charade in which national servility on both sides passes for national interests.

Picture: The mother of a missing Kashmiri youth, cries during a demonstration by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Srinagar. On the tenth of every month, members of APDP assemble in a park in Srinagar to highlight the issue of missing persons in Kashmir and remember their loved ones. The APDP says that more than 8,000 people have gone missing, most of them after their arrest by Indian security forces in the troubled Kashmir region since a rebellion broke out at the end of 1989. But authorities deny the allegations and say their investigations have revealed that most of the missing people have crossed the heavily militarised Line of Control which separates India and Pakistan into Pakistani Kashmir for arms training. –Reuters Photo/Fayaz Kabli