Visiting U.S. and U.K. Officials Find Worsening Kashmir Dispute

By M.M. Ali

Three explosions at an Indian Republic Day rally in Jammu, the winter capital of disputed Kashmir, killed two Indian soldiers, four Kashmiri policemen and officials and one civilian on Jan. 26. The deaths, apparently caused by remote-controlled bombs detonated by someone in a stadium filled with 15,000 people, added to a toll that, by some accounts, has reached 40,000 deaths over the past four years, most of them at the hands of heavily armed Indian military and paramilitary forces.

Although Amnesty International, Asia Watch, the International Red Cross and other international organizations have ascribed to his government hundreds of human rights violations inside Kashmir each year, India's Prime Minister Narasimha Rao appears to be in a state of denial.

Against the advice of his cabinet colleagues, Rao announced last June that elections will be held in Jammu and Kashmir this year along with those in other parts of India. This is despite the fact that the current militant unrest in Kashmir followed abortive elections held in 1990, and that since then the state has been under presidential rule, with civil administration suspended.

In a more recent bid to win support from the Kashmiris, the Rao government set free Kashmiri leaders who had remained imprisoned without trial for years. Two of them, Yasin Malik and Shabir Shah, who received tumultuous receptions upon their release, now have joined the Hurriet Conference, a grouping of Kashmiris opposing the Indian occupation.

Perhaps the Indian prime minister originally calculated that after possible victories of his Congress party in the November 1994 elections in some of the southern states, including his own home state of Andhra Pradesh, he would sweep the February-March 1995 elections in the northern "Hindi-belt" and would be able to carry Kashmir in the victory sweep. If so, his calculations have gone wrong.

Congress lost in major states like Karnataka and Rao's own Andhra Pradesh. As a result, the Congress high command is cracking up, with top leaders like Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari challenging Rao's leadership. Nor do early readings hold any great promise for Congress in the north. Aside from Rao's declining political fortunes, however, Kashmir seems far too troubled for elections.

Hurd, Perry Visits

Nor have visits to the subcontinent by British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry helped to calm troubled Kashmiri waters. During his visit in early January, Hurd suggested bilateral talks between India and Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir issue. During the 47-year history of the dispute, such talks have come to naught. Nor did the British minister, whose words seemed aimed to please the Indians, indicate what role, if any, his government was willing to play to make such talks productive. He drew unfavorable reactions from Pakistan and the Kashmiris.

The U.S. secretary of defense, who visited at almost the same time, took what he described as "an evenhanded" approach, expressing U.S. willingness to help in bilateral talks "if invited by the two parties." The United States has taken this position for the past two years, but it is obvious that India does not want third-party involvement. Therefore, Washington knows, it will not be receiving invitations "by the two parties" unless it pushes Delhi to send one.

In the unlikely event that the U.S. asked and India agreed to hold U.S.-sponsored talks with Pakistan, Kashmiris would want a seat at the table. After all, it is their fate that is to be decided. That is the very reason India is opposed to an internationalization of the Kashmir dispute.

At the beginning of 1995, however, India reluctantly took a small step toward appeasing the Kashmiris when it allowed two leaders from the Hurriet Conference, Maulana Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq and Maulana Abbas Ansari, to attend the 52-nation summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Morocco in January. In a candid interview in the Jan. 19 Arab News of Jeddah, Mirwaiz Farooq remarked: "We are not interested in elections and have categorically said that elections cannot be a substitute for self-determination. The 40,000 of our people who gave their lives for the cause did not die for elections or political process but for a noble reason, the right of self-determination." It would be comforting to believe that Washington and London are listening.

The Congress government, absorbed in its own political woes and facing difficult elections in crucial states in the north, appears to be oblivious to realities in the Valley—the heart of Kashmir. Prime Minister Rao has declared Kashmir a "backward" area and has offered economic incentives, tax breaks and promised relaxation of the political restraints. There are no takers—at least not of the right kind.

"Elections cannot be a substitute for self-determination."

Indian paranoia with Pakistan has taken several forms in the past—as in the furor over the U.S. "tilt toward Pakistan" at the time that Bangladesh, with Indian help, seceded from Pakistan. It is interesting now to hear Indian diplomats raising the specter of "Islamic fundamentalism" spreading from Pakistan to the whole of Central Asia if any attempt is made to resolve the Kashmir issue. Such talk finds eager listeners both in London and in Washington, particlarly if the sudden appearance of the evil genie is attributed to the oil lamps of Israel's critics in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

It is in this context that recent international travels by Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto are interpreted as efforts to mobilize international support should a continued deadlock in Kashmir result in increased unrest on both sides of the Line of Control and make it difficult for Islamabad to hold back armed Kashmiris from crossing into the Indian-held part of the state. A small border clash resulting from just such an adventure might escalate easily into a major military confrontation. In such a case, the acknowledged nuclear capability of both India and Pakistan would not augur well for regional or world peace.

Although this realization does not seem to exist in Moscow or major European capitals, it increasingly appears to be on the minds of Clinton administration officials. Answering a question on Secretary Perry's visit to the subcontinent, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Kenneth Bacon offered on Jan. 17 a somber appraisal of what might happen if the Kashmir question remains unresolved by India and Pakistan:

"Now [that] they both have the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons...a fourth war could be potentially much more dangerous and devastating." The Kashmir dispute, he added, "has to be solved with an eye to the will of the people in Kashmir."

Professor M.M. Ali is a faculty member at the University of the District of Columbia.