India-Pakistan Hostilities Break Out in Kashmir, as Both Countries Face Problems at Home

By M.M. Ali

When tensions mount and the shadow of war falls across the subcontinent, the peoples of India and Pakistan turn to the BBC for their factual news. In more recent years, CNN has come to share that honor.

Reporting on the “escalating military skirmishes” across the U.N.-determined “Line of Control” that has become the de facto border between Indian- and Pakistani-occupied areas of Kashmir, the BBC and CNN said that India had launched air attacks to cleanse the Indian side of the LOC of “armed infiltrators,” and that Pakistan had downed two Indian MiGs that crashed inside the Pakistani-held territory. (One pilot was killed and the other was returned by Pakistan to India.) These military exchanges came exactly a year after the two countries tested their nuclear weapons in May 1998, thus confirming their nuclear capability.

The BBC said that neither of the two countries seemed to have any game plan and expressed the fear that “if better counsel does not prevail, the crisis could trigger a disaster.” Pakistan’s request for a special U.N. observer was rejected by the U.S., which asked the two prime ministers to resolve the situation through dialogue. India rejected U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s offer to send a special envoy to defuse the military situation in Kashmir.

However, New Delhi agreed to receive Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz to discuss the crisis. Aziz visited Beijing before going to Delhi. Meanwhile Indian artillery continued to pound Mujahedeen freedom fighters, as Pakistan calls them, or infiltrators, as India calls them, in the Kargil area of Kashmir. The reports underscore the powderkeg that Kashmir has become in a nuclear environment.

In a May 30 editorial TheWashington Post observed: “Pakistan continues irresponsibly to stoke insurgents in the part of Kashmir it does not control. India continues to deny self-determination to the people of Kashmir, choosing instead to pursue a policy of hegemony in the Asian subcontinent…Another war now could widen the zone of danger. Both India and Pakistan are new at the nuclear game.”

It’s worth adding that since more than a billion people live in the two countries, a major clash involving nuclear warheads could result in a human disaster that could make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like mere lab experiments.

It may be recalled that Kashmir is a predominantly Muslim-populated territory at the foot of the Himalayas. India occupies almost two-thirds of Kashmir and the rest is held by Pakistan. The two countries have fought two inconclusive wars thus far to end the Kashmir dispute. All indications are that a third one is not likely to be confined to border skirmishes.

Political Instabilities Force Indian Voters to Go Back to The Voting Booths

As India and Pakistan grapple with internal political uncertainties, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of the assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, has been having trouble with the Congress party, of which she is president. It was Sonia who encouraged Jayalalita of the AIDMK to withdraw her support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and bring his government down. Now it appears that both Gandhi and Jayalalita asked for more than they could handle.

The Congress party could not muster enough support in the parliament to form an alternate government, thus forcing India to hold costly mid-term elections in September, while Vajpayee continues to head a caretaker government. To top it all, Sonia underestimated how negatively her foreign heritage would be exploited by Hindu chauvinists in and outside of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Similar attacks also came from within her Congress party. Sharad Pawar, a Congress party stalwart from Maharashtra, questioned the “wisdom” of allowing a foreign-born candidate to run for the office of the prime minister on the Congress party ticket when there are “millions of experienced and talented” Indians available.

Sonia resigned in a huff, but then was prevailed upon to continue as party president by the Congress high command, which expelled Sharad Pawar from the party. Predictably, Pawar now has formed his own “Nationalist Congress Party.”

At this writing it is not clear if Sonia will just remain as president of the Congress party or will enter the national election and be a candidate for the office of the prime minister. Now that she knows that the issue of her pedigree is shelved but not dead, she has to be wary of others within the Congress like Arjun Singh and Rajesh Pilot, who make no secret of their own political ambitions. She also knows that the right-wing BJP, if need be, will pick up the issue where Pawar left off when the national election campaign begins.

With Congress further splintering and the BJP unable to attract any new allies, the September elections are likely to result in another hung parliament, with heads of small parties and regional power brokers playing inordinate roles in formation of a government at the center. Such leaders as Jayalalita in Chinnenai (formerly Madras), Chandra Babu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, Sharad Pawar (new entrant) in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Jyoti Basu in West Bengal and Mulayam Singh in Uttar Pradesh will play major roles in the post-election government formation.

Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif Goes After the Media

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s current actions belie his comfortable majority in the National Assembly. In spite of the strength of his ruling party, the Muslim League, he seems compelled to silence even the mildest opposition to his policies. His recent actions against Pakistan’s media in particular smack of political nervousness and uncertainty.

The Jang group of newspapers, which includes the English language daily The News, has been the target of official investigations this spring. Jang offices in both Karachi and Islamabad have been raided by police allegedly investigating charges of tax evasion. The newspaper’s political analyst, Husain Haqqani, has been jailed and paraded before the media in handcuffs on allegations of “misappropriation of funds” while he served as a government official under former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Another case that has received worldwide attention is the arrest of Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times, a weekly magazine. Charges leveled against him include making a “seditious” speech at an India-Pakistan Forum in Delhi, the Indian capital, wherein he allegedly described Pakistan as “a failed state” and questioned the reason for its creation in 1947.

Sethi is also accused of making “serious anti-state” remarks in an interview with the BBC for a documentary on Nawaz Sharif’s administration that was aired June 5. Initially Sethi’s arrest was shrouded in mystery when no department of the government took responsibility for it. It now is scheduled for trial in an ordinary court of law. Meanwhile Sethi has been released from jail.

The relentless manner in which Nawaz Sharif has been going after former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband is another story (see box). It may be relevant that, like the Bhuttos, Sharif and his family are accused of amassing ill-gotten wealth, and have defaulted on huge bank loans.

Benazir Bhutto Takes Her Case to Washington

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who has moved her three children to a boarding school in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, arrived in Washington in late May to plead her case. She had been convicted by the High Court in Lahore of misappropriation of public funds, sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5 million. Fortunately for her, the court decision against her came while she was abroad. However, her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, remains in jail on charges of ordering two murders and of taking bribes during his wife’s term of office. She has appealed to the Supreme Court of Pakistan for final disposition of the case.

Whenever U.S.-educated Bhutto has been in trouble, she has turned to Washington for help. While in the U.S. this time she invoked the threat of rising Islamic fundamentalism under Sharif in Pakistan, and thereby appealed to those who subscribe to the theory of an impending Western–Muslim “clash of civilizations.”

“Nawaz Sharif is converting Pakistan into a theocracy,” she charged, “suppressing human rights” and subverting democracy. Bhutto wants foreign aid to Pakistan stopped until democracy is restored.

She conceded that in her two terms as prime minister she made mistakes, but denied that either she or her husband had engaged in graft or corruption at any time. She presented herself as a liberal politician of the Tony Blair or Bill Clinton ilk. At one point she hinted that she would not return to Pakistan in the foreseeable future, but would seek to export political change to Pakistan from abroad as did Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

Although there still seems to be no viable political opposition alternative to Bhutto in Pakistan, her tarnished reputation after two terms in office may have deprived her of the public esteem and stature necessary to bring about change for Pakistan in absentia from a base in London or Washington, DC.

Prof. M.M. Ali is a consultant and a senior fellow with the Center for Planning & Policy Studies in the Washington , DC area.

SIDEBAR

The Case of Benazir Bhutto’s Husband, Asif Ali Zardari

Asif Ali Zardari, husband of former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, has been in jail for more than two years—ever since his wife’s political rival, Nawaz Sharif, became prime minister. Zardari was known as “Mr. 10 Percent,” for the rate of gratuities or kickbacks his detractors claim he took for every revenue-generating government contract he allegedly helped to facilitate. Now he stands charged with transferring public funds into his private bank accounts abroad and, even more seriously, of being involved in two murders.

He is an elected senator from the Sindh province, where much of the political structure remains in the hands of traditional, or “feudal,” landowners, as other Pakistanis call them. He therefore was entitled to certain privileges in jail while his cases were being investigated. However, all this changed in May when the Lahore High Court found Zardari and his wife, Benazir Bhutto, guilty of financial improprieties and sentenced them to five years in prison and a $5 million fine. Zardari was moved to an ordinary jail and reportedly subjected to police “interrogations” in the murder cases.

Events then took a gruesome turn when Zardari was removed to the emergency unit of the local hospital profusely bleeding from the mouth. Police alleged that he had attempted to kill himself by cutting his tongue with a piece of glass. Other sources speculated that Zardari, who is known to use strong language, might have abused the policemen who were “torturing him,” and they in turn threatened to “pluck his tongue out” if he did not desist from the verbal abuse. One thing led to another, the sources say, and Zardari ended up with a deep, vertical cut on his tongue. Since, so far as this writer knows, there have been no cases in history of someone slashing his or her tongue in a suicide attempt, the police version in this incident is not very plausible.

At this writing, Zardari has recovered from his wound. and on May 24 the police filed charges against him in the murder case. They allege that, at Zardari’s behest, the former judge of the Sindh High Court, Justice Nizam Ahmed, and his son, Nadeem Ahmed, were shot dead some two and a half years ago. Nizam Ahmed was at one time the legal counsel of present Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Two alleged hit-men have been arrested and one of them has become a witness for the court.

Meanwhile Benazir Bhutto, who is safely outside Pakistan, has accused the government of filing trumped-up charges against her husband, and accuses Nawaz Sharif of trying to destroy her family. Pir Pagara, a senior Sindhi politician, has charged Sharif with treating Sindh as “a colony of Punjab.”—M.M. Ali