Author: Amulya Ganguli
Publication: Boloji.com
Date: January 24, 2009
URL: http://www.boloji.com/opinion/0688.htm
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may have overstated
his case when he said that George W. Bush was loved in India. But there was
a reason for the accolade. Bush was the only American president who understood
India's special place as a multicultural society in the midst of dictatorships
and hobbling democracies.
Not surprisingly, there is a sense of unease
in India as to whether Barack Obama will show the same appreciation of India's
distinctiveness or whether he will return to the old American, and Western,
policy of equating India with Pakistan and trying to bind India with routine
restrictions of the nuclear order.
The signs so far have indicated more of the
second approach. The US envoy to the United Nations, Susan Rice, for instance,
has echoed the earlier observations of the Western world about Kashmir being
a nuclear flashpoint. Before she compared Kashmir with other "hot spots"
like the Balkans, Liberia, East Timor, et al, there were reports about the
possibility of the Obama administration appointing an emissary for South Asia.
What these initiatives underline is a revival
of the belief in Washington that a solution to Pakistan's jehadi adventures
lies in "solving" the Kashmir problem. Considering that the British
foreign secretary, David Miliband, also said that Kashmir provided a "call
to arms" to the terrorists, it is not only in the US that such an attitude
prevails.
Needless to say Pakistan will be delighted
with this approach. Since India believes that Islamabad has been sponsoring
terrorism, overly and covertly, to blackmail the West in order to secure concessions
on Kashmir, Pakistan cannot but welcome the change of guard in America.
The same satisfaction has also been expressed
by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the Pakistan-based terrorist organizations,
which has said that it may call off its jehad if there is a solution to the
Kashmir "problem". Pervez Musharraf, too, had said while addressing
the UN General Assembly a few years ago that Islamabad could use its influence
to restrain the "freedom fighters" of Kashmir if there was a solution.
Obviously, Pakistan's links with the "non-state actors" are not
so hidden after all.
Although Bill Clinton partly agreed with India's
case on Kashmir when he said that Pakistan must understand that borders could
not be redrawn in blood, how far this assessment is shared by the new Secretary
of State, Hillary Clinton, is not clear.
The West's perception of the Kashmir issue
is shaped by the belief that India runs a repressive regime there and that
all will be well if self-determination is allowed. The fact that there isn't
much "self-determination" in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and that
the present democracy in Pakistan itself is a mockery considering that the
army still runs the show is forgotten. Nawaz Sharif's characterization of
the Asif Ali Zardari government as a dictatorship will probably be seen in
the West as overblown oppositional rhetoric.
What the US and the West do not seem to understand
is the fateful consequences of a surrender to jehadi blackmail on Kashmir.
First, any such step will at one stroke bring the spectre of Talibanisation
from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border right up to India. Far from dousing the
flames of terrorism, any retreat by New Delhi will be a huge morale booster
to the Al Qaeda and the Taliban, one of whose first tasks may well be to close
down all education facilities for women in Kashmir.
Secondly, the threat of the religious extremists
will not be only to India but also to Pakistan, where the few tottering civil
institutions will face the danger of being subsumed by harsh Islamic tenets.
Thirdly, it is unclear how true is the belief
that the Pakistan Army will be better able to fight the terrorists in the
north-west if there is a "settlement" in Kashmir. Instead, the Islamic
elements in the force and in Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who were encouraged
during Zia-ul Huq's dictatorship, would be as emboldened as the jehadis by
any sign of India's humiliation and become even more defiant of the West.
The recent offer made by the terrorists that
they would fight side by side with the Pakistan Army in the event of a war
with India would then become a reality as the distinction between the two
disappears.
In India, a setback in Kashmir will spell
the ruin of any secular government. The poisonous fruits of the bitter harvest
will be reaped by the Hindu fundamentalist forces which, in turn, would boost
the growth of Islamic militants. The resultant communal conflagration will
mean the end of India as a multicultural society.
However, in its present belligerent anti-Pakistani
mood, India is unlikely to yield any ground on Kashmir. Instead, it may point
out that the basic reason why the West does not understand the implications
of its simplistic line on Kashmir is because none of the countries there lives
next door to an epicenter of terrorism, where an army indoctrinated with Islamism
has long been smarting under the two defeats it suffered under Ayub Khan's
and Yahya Khan's dictatorships in 1965 and 1971 and also during Musharraf's
Kargil misadventure in 1999.
As Manmohan Singh has pointed out, India's
very pluralism and democracy are a threat to the jehadi worldview and army
dictatorship. If Pakistan were to accept the prime minister's earlier offer
of making borders irrelevant, it would have meant the slow infusion of liberalism
into Pakistan, complete with girls' schools and video shops.
The terrorists and the army in Pakistan cannot
allow that. Their only objective, therefore, is to incorporate Kashmir into
the terror heartland. The Obama government must avoid this trap.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He
can be reached at aganguli@mail.com)
