Can we restart the Kashmir ‘thing’?

Azad Kashmir leaders are once again ‘addressing’ the Kashmir issue after having abjured jihad under Musharraf. The message from Islamabad has changed. India is once again in trouble in Kashmir, somewhat like what happened in 1989 — when the world believed the trouble was not of Pakistan’s making.

The Indian army chief thinks that Pakistani jihadis are once again active although many in India, including Arundhati Roy, don’t agree with him. Hafiz Saeed of the banned Jamaatud Dawa has resumed his roaring in Pakistan with two ‘mammoth’ outings in Lahore (waters) and Islamabad (Kashmir). The Kashmir Committee has resumed its expensive global campaign while the national economy is belly up.

Can we start up the Kashmir ‘thing’ after the punishment we got for having ‘highlighted’ it with our Operation Kargil? We say we will take Kashmir with international support, but when we look around, there is no such support. The world is worrying about our economic collapse which might lead to the undoing of the state. This worry is not altruistic. The world fears an increasingly extremist Pakistani population falling into the trap of al Qaeda.

India is ‘shining’. The world loves it. Together with China’s, its economy is growing at a high rate when the global economy is in a trough. Pakistan’s non-state actors inspire fear and Hafiz Saeed is a global bugbear. The freedom fighters that we sent into Kashmir have destroyed the culture there and are now busy killing us. The Azad Kashmir prime minister who felt uneasy about resuming the war in Kashmir has been ousted. Is the stage set?

When it all started, Pakistan had international support. D N Panigrahi in his book Jammu and Kashmir, the Cold War and the West (Routledge 2009), tells us: British prime minister Clement Attlee favoured Pakistan because of the Middle East and its oil; the Americans were leery of India because of its closeness to the USSR. The book says: “Attlee, in his correspondence, categorically stated that Kashmir was an issue so germane to the Muslim world that they must support Pakistan keeping in view British interest in the Middle East” (p.3).

Some Englishmen thought India had not accepted Partition and might undo it. Field Marshall Auchinleck feared that India might “invade” Pakistan “if guerrilla war ensued” anywhere in the Punjab. He wrote: “I and my officers have been continuously and virulently accused of being pro-Pakistan and partial, whereas the truth is that we have merely tried to do our duty impartially and without fear, favour or affection” (p.8).

Editor of Calcutta’s Statesman, Ian Stephens wrote Pakistan (1963), in which he declared that the root cause of the problem in South Asia was India’s “basically expansionist aim to unite the entire holy soil of Bharat Mata (Mother India) by force, if need be, regardless of international law or Gandhian pacifist teachings.”

Sir Olaf Caroe wrote of Pakistan’s potential role for the Middle East. In his book Wells of Power: The Oilfields of South Western Asia, a Regional and Global Study (1951), he argued that Middle Eastern oil held the key to progress and to international relations in the future. He argued that Pakistan had a better chance of serving British interests in the Middle East than India (p.25).

H V Hodson in his book The Great Divide (1969) had declared that Pakistan was ‘inevitable’ since the Hindu-Muslim divide dated back to the Arab invasion and supported Jinnah’s ‘two-nation’ theory. He thought India would eventually “disintegrate” or be “re-conquered” (p.208).

And today British Prime Minister David Cameron thinks Pakistan is involved in terrorism while pretending to be an ally of the Nato forces in Afghanistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2010.