archive: In media coverage on Kargil, India comes out better
In media coverage on Kargil, India comes out better
Ramesh Chandran
The Sunday Times of India
July 4, 1999
Title: In media coverage on Kargil, India comes out better
Author: Ramesh Chandran
Publication: The Sunday Times of India
Date: July 4, 1999
ALMOST seven weeks into the Kargil crisis, the American media still
covers the intense fighting in the mountain peaks in fits and starts.
The mainstream papers dutifully report the latest fighting while
television networks have scarcely shown much interest. Op-ed columns
of newspapers have had a few thoughtful pieces but it is nothing
compared to the reams of copy that probed and analysed the Indian and
Pakistani nuclear tests in May 1998.
Even with the waning of interest in Kosovo when sizable ccontingents
of the media have gradually returned home, the Kargil crisis, viewed
through the media prism, tends to come across as remote and exotic.
The print media -- notably The New York Times and The Washington Post
have covered the fighting fairly extensively with editorials,
reportage from correspondents and opinion pieces. The news magazines
have done the odd commentary. However, judging from even this sporadic
coverage, especially if the opinion pieces and comments are
scrutinised, there seems to be a greater degree of appreciation of the
Indian position on Kargil than Pakistan.
Among the first to question the legitimacy of the ``freedom fighters''
occupying the mountain ridges in Kargil\Drass\Batalik are Michael
Swetman and Yonah Alexander of the Arlington-based Potomac Institute
for Policy Studies. In an article titled: ``Freedom Fighters or
Terrorists'' in The Washington Times, the authors suggested that these
``freedom fighters'' ought to be considered terrorists for three
reasons: One -- the Kargil attack ought to be considered a violation
of international law because it is aggressive rather than in defence
of a legitimate political order. Two: ``freedom fighters'' are engaged
in selective forms of violence within the framework of the laws of
armed conflict when other options are exhausted. In contradistinction,
terrorists utilise indiscernible and unrestrained psychological
violence via ``extra-legal means.'' The indiscriminate attacks on
innocent civilians was reflective of the terrorism that has been
unleashed against both Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir. And third, the
mixed paramilitary force of ``infiltrators'' includes not only
Kashmiri militants but also Afghan and ``British'' terrorists and
other extreme Muslim volunteers linked with a loose network of
international terrorists. The authors omitted to mention, among this
motley collection, Pakistani army regulars.
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post last month, two other
writers -- Teresita C Schaffer, a director at the Centre for Strategic
and International Studies who heads a lively South Asia programme and
Howard B Schaffer, director of studies at Georgetown University's
Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, argued that there is ``good
evidence that Pakistan supported the infiltration of heavily armed
fighters.''
The authors, both retired US ambassadors with rich experience in South
Asia, wrote: ``Even those sympathetic to Pakistan and its position in
Kashmir, however, will have no patience for flirting with nuclear
disaster.'' The Schaffers suggested that the answer to the current
conflict is: ``freeze.'' This meant turning the India-Pakistan Line of
Control and the current India-China Line of Actual Control into
recognised international borders and giving final recognition to the
China-Pakistan border settlement that India disputes. Of course, they
pointed out, this would not bring stability to Kashmir but the Indian
government ought to ``allow the development of a popular
representative political process in Kashmir.''
In its first editorial on the crisis, The Post wondered how two
hostile nuclear powers could neglect the ``tried and tested rules of
coexistence: Don't shoot, keep the rhetoric cool and treat grievances
with heavy doses of diplomacy.'' It complained that yet, here are
India and Pakistan flexing their power in a ``raw border clash as
though their respective tests had never altered the nuclear equation
holding between them.'' In subsequent editorial comments, the daily
has clearly branded Pakistan as the instigator of the current crisis
and for irresponsibly stoking an already inflammatory situation.
Former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto in her contribution to
the New York Times acknowledged her mea culpa for being obsessively
focussed on Kashmir and ignoring other tracks on diplomacy that might
have built a stable relationship with India. Benazir's seductive
proposal for a Camp David type accord for Kashmir made good copy but
scarcely created a flutter. While the LA Times, the Wall Street
Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe have all
covered the crisis in intermittent fashion, they could be termed as
``balanced'' from an Indian standpoint. Pakistan's viewpoint came
across quite forcefully in the capital's second daily, the
conservative Washington Times owned by the controversial Reverend
Moon.
A succession of articles painted stark scenarios of nuclear
confrontation and ``India's nuclear blackmail.'' Nizer Ahmed -- rather
Lord Nizer Ahmed -- the first Kashmiri to be appointed by the British
Queen to the House of Lords in his litany of complaints maintained:
``At a cost of $4 million per day, more than 600,000 Indian soldiers
are deployed there (Kashmir) -- the most militarised region on the
planet.'' He recommended international recognition to be accorded to
the All Parties Hurriyet Conference and mediation in Kashmir by an
``internationally commanding figure'' like Nelson Mandela, Jimmy
Carter or Margaret Thatcher. His conclusion was that ``nuclear war
over Kashmir is too important and frightening to be left to India and
Pakistan.''
Mansoor Ijaz, who heads a New York-based investment company and whose
father was described as ``an early pioneer in developing Pakistan's
nuclear programme'' wrote about dissimulated nuclear command
structures such as those in India and Pakistan, require ``vigilance,
not alarmist policies,'' The Washington Times also ran a half-page
feature authored by Pakistan's former defence minister and currently
governor of its Punjab province, Shahid Hamid who visited the US
capital last month. Hamid's treatise were on familiar lines:
Questionable annexation of Kashmir, four decades of alleged torture,
rape and plunder by Indian troops and how a ``major blow'' was struck
to the bilateral dialogue process by the Indian nuclear tests. Hamid
squarely accords credit to Pakistan for bilateral initiatives -- among
them: unilateral release of fishermen/boats, other civilian prisoners,
starting a bus service between Lahore and New Delhi, offer to sell
electricity and resumption of exchanges in the sports field. He adds:
``The most significant, however, was Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's
invitation to his Indian counterpart to visit Pakistan.''
After the Lahore Declaration, conjuring up a scenario Hamid writes:
India made an abortive attempt to capture the Shyok sector along the
LoC. Thereafter, ``under the bogey of infiltrators, India launched a
massive military operation in the Kargil sector.'' In response, wrote
the governor, Pakistan has demonstrated restraint. And Kargil was only
``one facet'' of the main issue of J & K, which is at the ``heart of
tension and conflict in South Asia.'' Gauging from the US official
reactions so far -- notably in the Congress -- as well as in the
opinion columns of its print media, such bald-faced arguments have
found few takers.
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