BY EVA CHENG
The rulers of India and Pakistan — both nuclear-armed allies of Washington in the US-led "war on terrorism" — are terrorising each other with the threat of nuclear war.
The Pentagon estimates that a full-scale nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could kill as many as 12 million people immediately and injure seven million more. Not included in the estimate were subsequent deaths caused by urban firestorms ignited by the heat of a nuclear exchange, or deaths from long-term radiation, or the disease and starvation expected to spread.
"Even a 'more limited' nuclear war — as measured in number of warheads — would have cataclysmic results, overwhelming hospitals across Asia and requiring vast foreign assistance, particularly from the United States, to battle radioactive contamination, famine and disease", the May 27 New York Times reported.
Around a million Indian and Pakistani troops have already amassed on high alert along the "line of control" which divides the sections of the disputed territory of Kashmir which the two countries control. Their trading of heavy artillery fire escalated in recent weeks, taking the death toll since March to more than 700.
Over the last few weeks, the Hindu chauvinist government of Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani military dictator General Pervez Musharraf have escalated their war threats against each other. In response, for example, to Vajpayee's May 25 vow that India will win a "decisive battle" over Kashmir, Musharraf answered on May 27 that Pakistan would "respond with full might".
Musharraf fuelled the explosive situation further with three missile "tests" in four days in late May.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the number of people displaced across Kashmir by recent Indo-Pakistani military confrontations has risen to 40,000.
Tension between the two countries rose in December last year when Muslim fanatics stormed the Indian parliament building. Vajpayee used this as an example of Pakistan's alleged facilitation of "cross-border terrorism" and demanded Musharraf hand over 20 related suspects. The situation turned explosive on May 14 when "Muslim militants" launched a suicide attack on a bus near an Indian army base in Kashmir, killing 34 people.
The two countries' immediate excuse for threatening to go to war is Kashmir, control of which has been under dispute since the 1947 partition of British colonial India into what the independent, secular state of India and the Muslim state of Pakistan.
At partition, Pakistan claimed that Kashmir, with a majority Muslim population, should be part of its jurisdiction. But Kashmir's Hindu ruler chose to join India, a move that sparked a Pakistan-initiated war in 1947. Pakistan and India again fought a war over Kashmir in 1965, which resulted in Pakistan controlling about a third of Kashmir.
The two countries fought again in 1999, for 11 weeks, over control of the Kargil region of Kashmir.
Though that confrontation occurred after Pakistan's 1998 announcement that it possessed nuclear weapons, the possibility of their use in any new Indo-Pakistan war is significantly higher.
On the Indian side in 1998, the ruling 24-party National Democratic Alliance led by the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party was enjoyed voter support after coming into power in early 1998. The BJP is now seriously discredited, especially since the state-sponsored massacre of Muslims broke out in Gujarat in late February. The NDA is threatening to implode.
On the Pakistan side, Musharraf seized power in a coup a few months after the Kargil war and is still struggling to secure legitimacy. Musharraf's decision to support the US war in Afghanistan against the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime in Kabul has generated considerable hostility toward his government from Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan. Anti-India war fever has enabled Musharraf to diffuse this hostility.
Ever since 1947, the Indian and Pakistani rulers have used Kashmir as an excuse to maintain high military tension to bolster public support for their respective regimes. The Pakistani rulers have the additional need of keeping the Kashmir issue on the boil to help maintain a sense of Muslim "national identity" among the different nationalities that make up Pakistan's population.
The immediate and continuing pretext for India to threaten war against Pakistan are the repeated terrorist attacks carried out by "Muslim militants" crossing into Indian-held territory from Pakistan.
There is little doubt that these terrorist groups have been funded, armed and trained by the Pakistani military.
While the US and Britain have sought to present themselves as peacemakers between India and Pakistan, Washington has has for decades involved Pakistan in its military alliances and provided it with arms and training, and Britain has been a major supplier of military equipment to India..
According to a June 2001 report by the Washington-based Non-Proliferation Project: "During the Cold War, India was viewed as a potential counterweight to China and the Soviet Union. The US was therefore willing to overlook India's fledgling nuclear program, and even provided nuclear technology to India under the Atoms for Peace program. The US also trained Pakistani nuclear scientists and supplied Pakistan with a nuclear research reactor."
Since January, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been pushing India to buy 66 Hawk fighter jets US$1.46 billion to India. Some 126 Jaguar fighter bombers, adaptable to carry nuclear weapons, are currently being built in India under British licence.
Since September 11, under the pretext of the so-called war against terrorism, the US has provided US$73 million in military equipment to Pakistan — despite the fact that Pakistan continues to fund, arm and train terrorists.
From Green Left Weekly, June 5, 2002.
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