Renewed Kashmiri Eruption Undermines Subcontinent Stability

By M.M. Ali

"An Indian army siege of Muslim militants holed up in one of Kashmir's most revered Muslim shrines ended before dawn today with a fire that destroyed the shrine," reported correspondent John F. Burns in the New York Times of May 12. "The destruction of the 15th century mausoleum of Sheikh Nooruddin Wali, considered Kashmir's patron saint, and an adjoining mosque followed a two-month standoff between several thousand Indian troops and 150 Muslim militants."

Reported Qaiser Mirza in a dispatch from Srinagar, Kashmir in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Fighting in the holy town had begun Monday night, setting much of Charar-e-Sharief ablaze and sending most of its 25,000 residents fleeing. More than 1,500 homes and businesses were reported destroyed."

Indian Muslims held their breath and maintained a tense calm.

Many recalled the demolition by Hindu religious radicals of the Babri Masjid in India that not only erased an historic Muslim place of worship but resulted in widespread communal killings all over the country. This time, Indian Muslims held their breath and maintained a tense calm.

The Indian government accused Pakistan of fomenting the trouble in Charar-e-Sharief. The Indian military had barred journalists from getting anywhere near Charar-e-Sharief during the two-month siege. Therefore all reports coming out were either from government spokesmen or from residents who escaped the burned-out area. The two sources gave totally different accounts.

In a courageous and candid tone, Khushwant Singh, a senior Indian journalist and politician, wrote in the Telegraph of Calcutta on May 29: "I have not the slightest doubt in my mind about the identity of the goons who destroyed Babri Masjid and why they did it. Nor do I have any doubt about the identities of the goondas [hooligans] who tried but failed to destroy the Hazartbal Mosque but succeeded in bringing down the Charar-e-Sharief."

He continued: "The Babri Masjid was destroyed by our own people to settle some unsubstantiated historical score and send a message to our Indian Muslims that they were no longer our brethren and they better learn to accept a second-class status." With a finger directly pointing at Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, Khushwant Singh charged the government of India with doing nothing to protect Sikh or Muslim places of worship that have been destroyed in the past 10 years. Each time, he said, Rao was in charge.

The Timing of Charar

What preceded the destruction of the shrine at Charar-e-Sharief is very important to an understanding of the tragic incident. In public statements Prime Minister Rao, in unequivocal terms, vowed that there would be elections in the Indian-held part of Jammu and Kashmir once the President's Rule, which has been in force in Kashmir for the past five years, ended on July 16th. (Under President's Rule all local political activity and authority is suspended and New Delhi assumes all powers to run the state.) Rao's decision to introduce a political process in Kashmir ignored a very volatile and hostile climate of resistance in the Valley.

According to published Indian press and intelligence reports, there was no way in which fair elections could be held after the All Party Hurriyat Conference, a conglomerate of 36 Kashmiri groups that spearheads the political movement, announced its opposition to Indian-managed polls.

Therefore, the prime minister had painted himself into a political corner. If he pushed for the elections against all advice and few voters showed up at the polls, it would be a farcical exercise. If violence erupted as happened five years ago, he would be faced by another dilemma.

This gave rise to the belief among some observers that New Delhi staged Charar-e-Sharief to get out of a political bind. In any case, Prime Minister Rao finally announced postponement of the Kashmir elections and obtained Indian parliamentary approval of a further six-month extension of the Presidential Rule in Kashmir.

There are other circumstances that also must be factored in to understand Charar-e-Sharief fully. Rao's Congress party is badly split. Opposition parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are preparing to take over power.

With Indian general elections due next year, Rao can ill afford a further decline in his political standing. His government's tough stand at Charar-e-Sharief may have provided him with a temporary boost in national opinion, although probably not enough to carry him through the general elections.

On a sobering note, Kamal Mitra Chenoy asked in a May 30 op-ed piece in the Telegraph of Calcutta: "Even if the ruling party is willing to go in for desperate, and, arguably, suicidal measures in its frantic effort to hold on to power, why should others oblige?...The political elite and opinion makers will have to realize and admit that Kashmir is not merely a territorial dispute between Pakistan and India...The crucial problem is the alienation of the masses in the Valley. There can be no military solution in Kashmir...In fact, warmongering, or further conflicts between India and Pakistan, will only worsen matters, both nationally and internationally."

U.S. President Bill Clinton, welcoming Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to the White House in April, also expressed his concern at the security situation in the subcontinent and his hope for a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute. As a result, India Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukerji rushed to Washington to explain New Delhi's viewpoint on the current situation in Kashmir and the subcontinent. How far he was able to sell Indian perspectives on the issues to Americans is not yet clear.

A little before the May 11 Charar flare-up, activist American Ambassador to India Frank Wisner initiated shuttle diplomacy between New Delhi and Islamabad. He also announced plans to visit Srinagar, a trip he was forced by events to call off.

A week after the Charar-e-Sharief conflagration, Indian authorities allowed visitors to enter the site. On May 23rd, newspapers reported that "over 8,000 people, led by All Party Hurriyat Conference leaders, marched to the devastated town." The Hurriyat leaders, including Maulavi Omar Farooq, Abdul Ghani Lone, Shabbir Shah, Maulavi Abbas Ansari and Mohammed Sultan, spoke at the charred remains of the shrine. They reiterated their resolve to continue their "liberation struggle" and promised to rebuild the shrine themselves.

Disagreeing with the government's decision to postpone elections, the conservative Financial Express of New Delhi observed in a May 31 lead editorial: "The cumulative impact of all this is that India will be seen not only to be unable to protect the life and property of the people but unwilling even to give them an effective say in their affairs...Nothing but an assertion of the will of Kashmiris...can end this dangerous impasse."

In a stinging rebuttal to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao's remark that he would be satisfied "even if 10 percent of the people vote" in Kashmir, Ashok Mitra proposed in the May 31 Telegraph of Calcutta: "The electorate in the Valley comprise roughly 2.5 million voters. Ten percent of 2.5 million works out to 250,000 voters. The strength of our military and paramilitary personnel in Kashmir will be no less than 250,000. Since they have been there over the past several years, they can honestly be described as 'ordinary residents' there and entitled to vote...If the command is issued, they could all march in formation to the polling booths and cast their votes in a manner as would proclaim to the world that Kashmir remains an inalienable and inseparable part of India...How many billions of rupees worth of this poor nation's resources have until now been frittered away in order to sustain the fiction of Kashmir being an inalienable segment of India?"

In fact, Mitra's scenario might appeal to a lot of Indians who still are not prepared to acknowledge the ground realities in Kashmir. But the people of Kashmir seem prepared to continue to pay the very heavy price of continued resistance to Indian rule. There may be many more Ayodhyas and Charars to come if world opinion does not become engaged. If nothing else, it needs to be recognized that continued denial of self-determination to the Kashmiris, essentially a human rights issue, is the underlying cause of continued political and military instability in the Indian subcontinent.

M.M. Ali is a professor at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC.