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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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