The Kashmir Conflict:
Its Origins and Its Escalation
By M.P. Prabhakaran
The Kashmir problem has poisoned the relationship between India and Pakistan all through their existence as independent nations. They have fought two wars and engaged in numerous skirmishes over it. Major powers of the world, especially the United States, dismissed it until recently as a bilateral issue between two South Asian neighbors.
Lately, though, there has been a noticeable change in that attitude. The reasons for the change are mainly two: the Kashmir issue is now inextricably linked to international terrorism, which an American-led coalition is currently fighting to crush; and the next war over Kashmir, if allowed to happen, will most likely be a nuclear war. Both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons and means to deliver them.
Before we explore any possible solution to the Kashmir problem, it is worth examining how it originated and how it escalated into what it is today. Today, it is a threat to world peace. Its origins lay in the very partitioning of the subcontinent over half a century ago.
Partitioning of the Subcontinent
When Britain ended its rule in the subcontinent in 1947, it partitioned the land into two independent nations: a mostly Hindu India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan. India, though a Hindu-majority country, has persistently refused to attach that religious label to it. It prides itself on its secular credentials. On the other hand, Pakistan was the outcome of a long, bloody campaign spearheaded by those Muslims who argued that the Muslims and Hindus of India were two separate nations. The interests of the Muslims, the argument went, would never be protected in a Hindu-dominated India. As a result, the northwestern and eastern wings of India where Muslims were in an overwhelming majority were carved out to create Pakistan.
While Britain partitioned the areas it had directly administered until 1947, the 565 princely states that lay scattered around the subcontinent, which were under British paramountcy but autonomous in all other respects, were given the option of joining either India or Pakistan. The option was to be governed by two criteria: the religious composition of the population of the state in question (whether Hindu-majority or Muslim-majority) and its geographical contiguity to the country it wanted to join.
By the first criterion, Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state, should have joined Pakistan. But most Kashmiri Muslims are of a different kind. They are followers of Sufism, temperamentally distanced from both Sunnis and Shiites, the two main sects of Islam. The sect that is dominant in the subcontinent is Sunni. There was also another factor that was crucial. Shaikh Abdullah, who was Kashmiri Muslims’ undisputed leader at the time and for whom secularism was an article of faith, was opposed to joining Pakistan whose raison de etre was religion. It is also relevant to mention here that he and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the man who led the movement for the creation of Pakistan, did not see eye to eye.
By the geographical-contiguity criterion, Kashmir, wedged between India and Pakistan, could join either. There was also another problem: the Muslim-majority Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu raja. As was expected, the ruler, Maharajah Harisingh, was not keen to merge his kingdom with a Muslim country. This is not to say that he was keen on joining India. In fact, rumors making the rounds at the time had it that he was toying with the idea of declaring his kingdom as an independent nation, independent of both India and Pakistan. He was too naive to entertain such a fancy. Under the transfer-of-power arrangement the British had made with leaders of the Indian independence movement, no such option was available to any princely state. They had to choose either India or Pakistan.
While vacillating, the Kashmiri raja sought to enter into what came to be called standstill agreements with both India and Pakistan. In other words, he wanted to buy time to make up his mind. Pakistan entered into such an agreement, while India refused to do so. This was the situation as of August 15, 1947, the day India became independent. Pakistan had declared its independence the previous day.
The situation dramatically changed in a matter of two months when armed tribesmen from Pakistan, aided by its regular army, infiltrated Kashmir. The ostensible purpose of the infiltration was to extend help to their brethren in the state who had been revolting against the Hindu raja’s rule. The real purpose, however, was to help their country end the stalemate over Kashmir and annex it by force.
Harisingh panicked. He asked for India’s military help to drive the marauders out. It was at this critical juncture that he decided to integrate his kingdom with India. Of course, the fact that India persuaded him to do so should not be ignored. The accession treaty was signed on October 26, 1947. Jammu and Kashmir, as the state is officially called, thus became one of the states in the Indian federation.
While the legality of Kashmir’s merger with India was not in question, as the instrumentality involved was the same as in the case of other princely states that joined either India or Pakistan, the fact that the accession treaty was signed under pressure diminished its validity. India, recognizing the point, decided that “the question of state’s accession should be settled by a reference to the people.” Thus was born the idea of referendum or plebiscite on Kashmir which we all have heard about a lot. It needs emphasizing that the offer to conduct the plebiscite was originally made by India, of its own volition. Unfortunately, the conditions under which the offer was made changed rapidly, forcing India to withdraw it later.
First India-Pakistan War
Deriving authority from the newly signed treaty, India sent its army into Kashmir to expel the intruders. What followed was a war with Pakistan that dragged on for 14 months.
Even as the war was going on, with India steadily winning, it brought the Kashmir issue, including the plebiscite offer, to the U.N. Security Council. India had liberated two-thirds of Kashmir from the invaders when the Security Council passed a resolution calling upon the two countries to cease fighting. Abiding by the resolution, which was passed on January 4, 1949, India and Pakistan signed a cease-fire agreement. A cease-fire line was drawn across Kashmir. The line, in effect, placed two-thirds of Kashmir under India’s control and the other third under the control of Pakistan.
The division of Kashmir that occurred on that day was supposed to be very temporary. It was supposed to last only until the proposed referendum would finally decide the fate of all of Kashmir. The U.N. resolution also stipulated that certain conditions be fulfilled before the conduct of the referendum. The main condition was that Pakistan withdraw its troops from the territory it occupied through invasion. That condition has remained unfulfilled until today.
In the beginning, India kept delaying the referendum, waiting for Pakistan to withdraw its troops. Various external factors soon began to enter the equation, making the issue more complicated. Notable among them were the Cold War politics and the rise of Islamic militancy in the region. With the advent of the Cold War, the world got split into three--a capitalist world led by the United States, a socialist world led by the Soviet Union, and a collection of nations that, refusing to be led by either, grouped together under a broad umbrella known as the Non-Aligned Movement. Ideologically, they were a mixture of both, capitalism and socialism. Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India, was one of the three leaders that gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement. The other two were President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and President Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia.
Pakistan was expected to throw in its lot with the nonaligned countries. Most of them, like Pakistan, were former colonies of Western powers. But it chose to become an ally of America. Also, soon after independence, it began to fall under military dictatorships at frequent intervals. Obviously, the paths of India, which steadfastly remained democratic, and Pakistan diverged from the very beginning.
America’s policy of bolstering up its allies with modern, expensive weapons came in handy for Pakistan in its subsequent wars against India. It was ironic that while America professed to champion the cause of democracy around the world, its weapons and resources, which were supposed to be used to fight Communism, were used against India, a fledgling democracy in those days. The American policy drove India and Pakistan further apart. India’s decision to withdraw its plebiscite offer on Kashmir was mainly prompted by America’s Cold War policy in the subcontinent.
Rise of Terrorism
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, mainly in the Middle East and South Asia, also made a major contribution toward making the Kashmir issue more complicated. Pakistan found willing volunteers among fundamentalists who were brainwashed into believing that their fight against India for Kashmir was part of their holy war against infidels. For over a decade now, Pakistan has been training terrorists and sending them across the cease-fire line in Kashmir, into India. It might have hoped that terrorists would accomplish what its regular army could not. The proxy war that Pakistan has been waging against India through these terrorists has caused untold miseries to Indians in general and Kashmiris in particular. As any one can see, it has not helped the cause of Kashmir one bit. If anything, it earned Pakistan the reputation as a promoter of terrorism and Islamic extremism.
However, the promoter of terrorism jumped on the bandwagon of the anti-terrorist crusade launched by America in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on it. What prompted it to do so was not any overnight change of heart. It was American money and muscle power.
The present confrontation between India and Pakistan, which could flare up into a war any moment, is the result of the duplicitous role Pakistan has been playing with regard to terrorism. The U.S. ignored the duplicity as long as it could. It needed the support of Pakistan very badly in its war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in neighboring Afghanistan. However, it was compelled to change its see-no-evil-in-an-ally attitude after the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament. It was presented with mounting evidence that the groups that masterminded the attack were based in Pakistan. They were Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (the Army of Muhammad). In a matter of days the Bush Administration officially declared them as foreign terrorist organizations.
While pleading with India not to take any precipitous action that would explode into a war with Pakistan, that in turn would jeopardize the campaign against terrorism in Afghanistan, President Bush openly declared that India’s anger and war preparations were understandable. He went to the extent of indirectly validating India’s complaint that the actions the Pakistani president had been taking against terrorism were only cosmetic.
President Musharraf responded with a few arrests and crackdown on the two groups’ offices. But when it comes to curbing cross-border terrorism, bred in Pakistan and exported to India, he is still ambivalent. He looks for ways of providing the terrorists with loopholes. That is why he still insists on calling some of them Kashmiri freedom fighters, in spite of the fact that most of them are Afghans and Arabs fighting on behalf of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.
It seems Musharraf is still not convinced that the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament was a terrorist attack. Addressing the National Press Club in Washington, on February 14, he said: “The excuse that there was a terrorist attack on Parliament--of which we have not got any evidence--should not have been taken for this brinkmanship, for this response of moving forces on the border and creating a climate of possible war between the two countries holding nuclear potential. This is brinkmanship at its worst.”
Remarks like these are reckless, he should know. One only hopes that India does not take them too seriously and add to the severity of the present crisis.
The purpose of going into all this is not to open the old wounds India and Pakistan have inflicted on each other, consequent upon Pakistan’s seeking a solution to the Kashmir problem through war, direct and proxy. The purpose is to drive home to it the futility of resorting to that method. Every war it fought against India ended up in its defeat. The decade-long proxy war it has been waging against India with the help of terrorists has raised the question whether it is serious about seeking a peaceful solution to the problem at all. As Pakistan can see for itself, its shortsighted policy of using terrorists to achieve political goals has started boomeranging on it. It is threatening to tear apart the Pakistani society itself.
A solution to the Kashmir problem can be achieved only through negotiations with India. Well-wishers of India and Pakistan hope that the leaders of the two countries go back to the negotiating table without any delay. Time is running out.
[First published in February 2002]
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