BY EVA CHENG
Riding on the back of US President George Bush's "war on terrorism", the Hindu fundamentalist Indian regime led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan's military dictator General Pervez Musharraf are massing troops along their shared border around the long-disputed territory of Kashmir. The two countries have been arch rivals for 54 years and their nuclear weapon capabilities make any military confrontation between them particularly dangerous.
Musharraf warned on January 3 that "should a mistake of attacking Pakistan be made [by India], they would regret their decision".
Pakistan's crucial role in facilitating Washington's bombing of Afghanistan has scored Musharraf significant brownie points with the world's only superpower, seriously undermining India — a position which Vajpayee is keen to correct.
India seized on the October 1 suicide attack on the state legislative assembly of the Indian-held part of Kashmir by a Pakistan-based Muslim terrorist group (see accompanying box), which killed 35 people. A similar attack on India's national parliament on December 13 killed 14.
Vajpayee held two of Pakistan military's most favoured groups — Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) and the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) — responsible and demanded that Musharraf close them down. This put Musharraf in a catch-22 position because banning the two organisations could have explosive domestic consequences, while not doing so could undermine its perceived loyalty to his US masters.
Pakistan-sponsored terrorism
LT, the largest of Pakistan's fundamentalist political organisations seeks to wage a jihad (holy war) against India. It is reportedly a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the US and Israel. LT was allegedly behind the attack of the Red Fort on December 22, 2000.
JEM, which the US government accuses of being a recipient of funds from bin Laden and operates training camps in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the October 1 attack.
Musharraf has refused to close them down, making only symbolic arrests of the groups' members. This has hardly satisfied Vajpayee. The Indian PM hopes to kill at least three "birds" with this offensive. Apart from scoring points with the US imperialists at Pakistan's expense, Vajpayee is using the terrorist acts to blacken the name of all Muslims, building on Bush's "war on terrorism", to the advantage of Vajpayee's viciously anti-Muslim Hindu-chauvinist forces. He also aims to strengthen India's claim on Kashmir.
Pakistan's ruling class founded the state in 1947, after the British partition of India, in the name of defending the Muslim religion. The Indian ruling class, meanwhile, zealously promoted Hinduism to consolidate its rule. Both ruling classes have encouraged antagonism between the two countries and the two religions to maintain their domination of each country.
Kashmir
Kashmir's independence struggle also risks being a victim. The rulers of both India and Pakistan have claimed Kashmir as their own since 1947. Pakistan appears to have a superficial advantage because a majority of the Kashmiri population is Muslim. Pakistan has paid lip service to promoting the Kashmiris' independence cause.
India has backed away from an earlier promise to give Kashmir an independence vote and it has increasingly claimed Kashmir is an "inseparable" part of India.
Both ruling classes have increasingly painted the Kashmir issue in religious colours, with their fundamentalist wings seeking to hijack the independence struggle. Delhi's high-handed rule of the two-thirds of Kashmir which it controls has fuelled widespread resentment among the Kashmiris and, ironically, helped keep independence aspirations alive.
The spill-over from the Afghan civil war that began in the late 1970s has caused real damage to the Kashmiri struggle. While resistance against the occupying forces, especially the Indian occupation, has been ongoing since Kashmir was carved up, significant armed insurgency only began in 1989.
How much of this was driven by genuine pro-independence forces is hard to ascertain but the domination by pro-Pakistan forces in Kashmir is beyond doubt. The key role that Pakistan played in distributing CIA arms and other supplies to the anti-Soviet mujaheddin groups of Afghanistan improved Pakistan's position in Kashmir.
The armed activities of the pro-Pakistan or Pakistan-based jihad groups in Kashmir were greatly stepped up, fuelling speculation that many of those arms had been diverted to Kashmir to promote Pakistan's interests.
These pro-Pakistan mujaheddin groups have shown little regard for the Kashmiris' safety with their indiscriminate terror tactics towards the Indian occupying force or the impact of India's subsequent repression. Their commitment to genuine national self-determination for the people of Kashmir is rhetorical as most are attempting to have Indian control replaced with domination by Pakistan.
A 1999 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report noted: "In their effort to curb support for pro-independence militants, Indian security forces have resorted to arbitrary arrest and collective punishments of entire neighbourhoods... The militants have kidnapped and killed civil servants and suspected informers ... Although militant groups in Kashmir continue to draw recruits from among the local population, since 1996 ... [it has] been predominantly Pakistani Kashmiris who support the independence struggle, or Pakistanis from elsewhere in the country ... The groups often include Afghan and other foreign fighters who have no local base, although they may recruit local Kashmiri men to join them."
The report goes on: "The remaining groups [outside the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, the biggest Kashmiri pro-independence organisation which abandoned armed struggle in 1994], most of which have close ties with Pakistan [between 1997 and mid-1999 alone] ... have massacred more than 300 civilians ... Although so-called foreigners operating in Kashmir outside the Kargil region number at most a few hundred, they represent a dangerous development in the conflict as they have no accountability to the local population and engage in acts of extreme violence with little regard for the outrage such attacks elicit from Hindu and Muslim Kashmiris alike."
A HRW world report 2001 says: "The Indian army, operating under the Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act and the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, continued to conduct operations in Muslim neighbourhoods and villages, detaining young men, assaulting other family members, and summarily executing suspected militants."
The November issue of Liberation, the monthly magazine of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), provided an analysis of Vajpayee's intentions, including a recent banning of a Muslim student organisation in India: "It was designed to send a strong signal to the USA that India could be a more trustworthy partner in the global fight against terrorism than Pakistan ... against international (read Islamic) terrorism ... offering unconditional support, including ground facilities, to the US troops ... not only to isolate Pakistan ... but essentially to create the atmosphere of war in the country (if not turning the entire South Asia into a theatre of war), giving the imagery that a 'Hindu' India in league with the US is fighting 'Muslim' terrorism in Kashmir, aided and abetted by Muslim Pakistan."
From Green Left Weekly, January 16, 2002.
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