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THE KASHMIR DISPUTE – a cause or a symptom?

Article by Associate Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed, Dept of Political Science, Stockholm University
in Politologen, journal published by the Swedish Political Science Association, Fall 2002, pp. 37-48.

In mid-August 1947 British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent came to an end. The ruler of the princely State of Jammu and Kashmir (hereafter referred to only as Kashmir), Maharaja Hari Singh Dogra, a Hindu, had to decide whether to accede to India or Pakistan or remain independent. Some 80 per cent of his subjects were Muslim. All three options were technically possible, because unlike those territories which formed part of the British colonial state the several hundred principalities could choose to remain independent. (India Independence Act 1947, 1975, p. 4) However, the general understanding was that the rulers should seek a union with either of the two states.

The geographical, ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian composition of Kashmir was quite varied. The most developed and prominent area was the Kashmir Valley which was 96 per cent Muslim, overwhelmingly Sunni. The remainder were composed of the important minority of educated Hindu Brahmins, called pandits. In the Jammu region Muslims were in a majority before 1947, but many of them fled to Pakistan when riots broke out at the time of the Partition of India. At present, 66 per cent of Jammu's population are Hindus, 29 per cent Muslims while the rest are made up of Sikhs and other groups. In the desolate Ladakh region there is a slight majority of Buddhists. The remainder are Shia Muslims. One third of Kashmir is with Pakistan. Azad (liberated) Kashmir, as it is called, is entirely Muslim, the majority being Sunnis. (Ahmed 1998, p. 138)

It is generally agreed that the Maharaja was toying with the idea of remaining independent, but both India and Pakistan desperately wanted to acquire Kashmir and tried to advance their influence through their allies and supporters within the state. The main political organization, the National Conference, was headed by secular-minded Muslim leaders from the Kashmir Valley who preferred to have closer ties with India. In contrast, pro-Pakistan forces were stronger in the Poonch Valley where a rebellion broke out immediately after the end of colonial rule.
The Maharaja employed considerable force to crush the rebels and his men also used that opportunity to attack Muslims in the Jammu region with the result that many of them fled to the Pakistani towns in the plains of West Punjab. (Schofield 2-000, pp. 41-3) It was in these circumstances that a tribal force backed by Pakistani regulars entered Kashmir on the night of 21-22 October 1947 with a view to liberating it and making it join Pakistan. At that point the Maharaja decided to sign the bill of accession with India. The date of the Accession Bill given in Indian publications is 26 October 1947. It must be pointed out that the Accessional Bill mentions that the future relationship between India and Kashmir would be negotiated later and that the accession was temporary. Its legality is thus contested by Pakistan.

The two sides fought a small-scale war in Kashmir during 1948. India internationalized the Kashmir conflict by approaching the Security Council of the UN to mediate. On 1 January 1949 a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations came into effect. The ceasefire line became the de facto border. The Security Council resolutions require the holding of a plebiscite after the Pakistani and Indian troops withdraw and only a handful of Indian administrators remain to facilitate a free and fair plebiscite. The resolutions give the people of Kashmir the right to join either India or Pakistan. (See the United Nations Resolutions on Kashmir) The ceasefire line was renamed as the Line of Control (LoC) following the Simla Agreement on 3 July,1972- between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. According to Indian interpretations of the Simla Agreement, the issue of Kashmir has to be resolved through bilateral negotiations between the two sides. Third party arbitration or mediation is therefore out of the question. The UN Security Resolutions are thus obsolete. In contrast, Pakistan refers to those clauses which require a settlement of the Kashmir dispute and argues that if the two sides cannot reach an agreement the role of mediation by other parties cannot be ruled out. (See the Simla Agreement, 3 July, 1972)

At any rate, the fact remains that both countries have shown no signs of vacating the territories under their control. Additionally with Pakistan allying itself in the 1950s with the West and India moving closer towards the Soviet Union through the Non-Alignment Movement the Kashmir dispute became a pawn in the overall Cold War politics. (Ahmed, 1998, p. 143) At present, roughly two-thirds of Kashmir is with India and the rest with Pakistan. India accuses Pakistan of having illegally ceded some portions to China in the 1960s when both negotiated a friendship treaty much to the consternation of India. In 1965 Pakistan dispatched guerrillas into Kashmir in the hope of fomenting a popular uprising. That objective failed and instead both states fought a war along the international boundary and in Kashmir itself, which ended after 17 days when the Security Council brokered a cessation of hostilities.
The situation at present is that India claims that the whole of Kashmir is legally an integral part of its territory. It refers to the 1954 Accession Bill approved by an elected Kashmir Assembly whereby the state was declared an integral part of India. This being said, it enjoyed a special status within the Indian Union. It is to be noted however, that Kashmiris from the Pakistani side were not represented in the assembly. In contrast, Pakistan maintains that an independent Kashmir government exists on the territories liberated in 1948. (Schofield 2000, PP. 78-91).

IDENTITY-RELATED AND EMOTIONAL ASPECTS

Apart from the legal fictions maintained by both sides, problems of identity and self-image complicate matters. India considers the retention of Kashmir an essential feature of its secular-composite national identity while Pakistan considers its Muslim identity incomplete as long as Kashmir has not joined it. After all, the principle according to which British India was to be divided between India and Pakistan was that contiguous Muslim majority areas were to be given to Pakistan and in geographical terms Kashmir is directly contiguous to Pakistan.

Moreover, the third letter in the acronym PAKISTAN stands for Kashmir. Strong ethnic factors compound the difficulties even more. Kashmiri Brahmins who have been a conspicuous element in the Indian intellectual and political elite, epitomized by Prime Minister Jawarharlal Nehru, have been a very powerful lobby pleading for Kashmir to remain an integral part of India. (Widmalm 1997, pp. 46-7) Whereas, the man celebrated in Pakistan for dreaming about a separate Muslim homeland, Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal (photo to the right), was a Kashmiri. Kashmiri refugees who fled the Indian-administered Kashmir as well as the sizable community of ethnic Kashmiris who have been settled in the Pakistani Punjab for more than a hundred years, constitute an equally powerful lobby demanding the union of the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan or its independence. Besides such identity clashes and emotional traumas the deeper reasons for claiming Kashmir are economic and military. It is indeed quite intriguing that neither side clearly stakes its claims on such bases.

HYDRO-POLITICAL ASPECTS

Notwithstanding the various aspects mentioned above, it can be argued that the Kashmir dispute is primarily a hydro-political problem which carries profound economic and military implications and ramifications. Indeed hydro-political conflicts have been at the bottom of many wars in European history and currently such problems exist in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Both India and Pakistan have to feed huge populations, and the pressure is increasing because of rapid population growth. The most developed regions of Indian agricultural production and almost the whole Pakistani agricultural sector are dependent on the waters from rivers which originate in the mountains of Kashmir or the adjacent Himalayan range. These rivers meander into the territories of both states. Consequently, the state which controls the upper riparian enjoys a strategic advantage because it can divert the flow of water or even deny it to the other. This advantage at present is enjoyed by India.

Surprisingly, although tension and hostility between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has remained high and erupted twice in wars, both sides realized that they could not afford to postpone an agreement on water sharing until the final status of Kashmir was settled. Consequently, under the auspices of the World Bank, the Indus Waters Treaty was agreed between them in i96o whereby the waters of the three eastern rivers – Ravi, Sutlej and Beas – were awarded to India. Pakistan was allocated water from the western rivers – Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. (The Indus Waters Treaty, 1960, pp.302-303) The treaty allowed Pakistan to construct a system of replacement canals to convey water from the western rivers into those areas in West Pakistan which had previously depended for their irrigation supplies on water from the eastern rivers. (Bhatnagar 1986, pp. 230-31).

In subsequent years, Pakistan has built the Mangla and Tarbela dams and several other similar facilities on the waters of the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. The funding has come from international donors. Similarly India has been building various dams and barrages on the Ravi, Sutlej and Beas. As a result, the stability of the Indian and Pakistani economies is dependent upon the status quo over Kashmir not being disturbed too radically.

THE RISE OF FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE KASHMIR DISPUTE

In 1974 India exploded a nuclear device. Although it did not proceed immediately to produce a nuclear bomb such a demonstration resulted in Pakistan considering the option of developing its own nuclear capability. At around that time, increasing interaction with Saudi Arabia and the emergence of a fundamentalist type of corps commander such as Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq converged to foster Islamic radicalism among the Pakistani armed forces. (Kapalia 2001, 277-8) During the 1970s, Pakistan provided covert help to the Sikhs who wanted to establish a separate state of Khalistan by breaking away from India. (Rizvi 1990, pp. 18-19)

In the late 1980s, a popular insurgency began in Indian Kashmir among the Muslims of the Kashmir Valley. Loyalty and trust towards India had been eroded over the years because despite an agreement to allow the Kashmir State special autonomy, the Indian government had been constantly interfering in its affairs. Rather than working with strong Kashmiri leaders, the Indian state sought to promote stooges and lackeys. Corruption was rampant and by the early 1980s thousands of educated Kashmiri youths were finding it difficult to find employment. (Ahmed 1998, pp. 152-4) In 1977 General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and established a fundamentalist regime. In April 1978 the Communists came to power Afghanistan and in February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini installed his theocratic republic in Iran. Suddenly the Cold War began to rage west of the subcontinent.

All these developments affected Kashmir. Although a movement for an independent Kashmir had begun to take shape in the Indian-administered Kashmir from the 1960s, it developed into a mass movement for independence from the second half of the 1980s onwards. (Schofield 2000, pp. 136-60) The conflict in Afghanistan indirectly led to the increasing Pakistani involvement across the LoC. The United States was desperately looking for regional allies to stem the tide of Soviet expansion southwards towards the warm waters of the Arabian Sea. Zia-ul-Haq responded favourably to US overtures and agreed to allow the Afghan resistance to set up headquarters in the northern city of Peshawar. Several million Afghan refugees also made their way into Pakistan. In return for such help and cooperation Gen. Zia received massive economic and military aid. The Americans also adopted an attitude of indifference towards Pakistan's hectic efforts to develop a nuclear bomb. Peshawar and various other Pakistani cities along the Afghan border became the home of Islamic mujahideen (warriors), many of whom were outsiders coming from as far away as Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, the Philippines and so on. (Ahmed 2002, p. 24)

After the Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, many of the mujahideen got involved in the internecine conflict between the various Afghan factions for control of that country. The Pakistani military expanded its role in Afghanistan and succeeded in helping the Taliban regime to establish its control over much of it. It also began to re-define its stature in the region. Pakistani defence strategists had always worried about Pakistan's lack of strategic depth' vis-a-vis India. (Bidwai 2002) Many major Pakistani cities and towns were too close to the international border with India. In the event of war, that gave the Indians a considerable advantage because whereas the latter could retreat in the face of military set-backs to various cities and industrial and military complexes Pakistan could rather quickly be paralysed if roads were cut off in the face of an Indian advance.

Such thinking had given birth to the idea of creating of an Islamic superstate comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan and a liberated Kashmir. Many of the mujahideen from the Afghan theatre had already shifted their activity to Indian-administered Kashmir. Within Pakistan militant fundamentalist organizations were openly active in recruiting volunteers to fight in Kashmir. The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the Laskar-e-Toiba were the biggest among them. The mujahideen regularly crossed into Indian-administered Kashmir and carried out armed attacks against what they perceived as Indian occupation forces. (Hussain 2000)

Meanwhile, in India from about the middle of the 1980s the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had begun to look for populist issues to expand its electoral base. The Hindu nationalists-fundamentalists identified Muslims as a fifth column in India and began a general campaign against minorities. Following a year-long campaign of marches and demonstrations, on 6 December 1992 Hindu hoodlums descended upon the northern India town of Ayodhya and destroyed the Babri Mosque which they alleged had been constructed on the site of a Hindu temple and the birth place of the god Rama. (Berglund 2000, pp. 121-56).
Thereafter, the BJP began to make swift progress in elections with a programme based on an aggressive Hindu cultural nationalism, a hard line on Kashmir, no concessions to Pakistan and a general suspicion of minorities. This campaign was to bring it rich dividends. Thus, in 1998 the B]P gained the largest number of seats in the national elections and it currently heads a grand coalition of more than 20 parties.

On 11 and 13 May India exploded nuclear devices and Pakistan followed suit on 28 and 30 May. Nationalist euphoria rose to high levels in both countries but subsided once the Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee (India) and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (Pakistan) met in the Pakistani city of Lahore to discuss peace and a solution to all their existing disputes including Kashmir. The Lahore Declaration was signed on 21 February 1999 whereby both countries declared their intention to work towards the normalization of relations, increasing trade, easing visa and travelling restrictions, and to solve all their disputes through bilateral negotiations.
However, soon after in May both sides were drawn into a limited war on the daunting heights of the Kargil range inside Indian-administered Kashmir. The Pakistani army had apparently been able to surreptitiously occupy strategic positions across the LoC. The conflict resulted in hundreds of deaths on both sides and involved heavy artillery and air strikes as well as pitched battles between infantry. It was widely feared that the conflict could escalate into a nuclear war. (Cloughley 2000, pp. 375-92).

CONCLUSION – COULD WE LEARN FROM THE ÅLAND ISLANDS?

It is to be wondered whether the Kashmir dispute is the cause or a symptom of the India-Pakistan rivalry. Whatever its real nature is, one cannot deny that its resolution is imperative so that the two states do not plunge themselves into an all-out nuclear war. The United Nations, the United States, the European Union, Russia, China and the former colonial power, Great Britain, can together pressure both sides to agree to a reasonable solution.

There are several potential solutions available, but unless India and Pakistan abandon the combative mindset no progress is going to be possible. Neither can win a war against the other even if a surprise attack was launched. Both are likely to inflict irreparable damage on each other. It is clear that no zero-sum approach or `winner takes all' solution is likely to succeed. The UN resolutions regarding a plebiscite are clearly not workable. The third option which relates to an independent Kashmir will always be opposed by the Hindu and Buddhist minorities.

One can draw inspiration from the Åland model that helped satisfy the interests of not only Finland and Sweden but also the people of the Åland islands. Both sides succeeded because they acted maturely and agreed a formula that could preserve the peace and deliver advantages to them both. In the case of India and Pakistan, it is not simply a matter of territory but also of real and imaginary security considerations, national pride and most centrally, of economic interests.
One needs to begin with the hard fact that Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan. It is therefore important that both Pakistan and India be persuaded that a rationalized Line of Control needs to be converted into an international border. As soon as that happens, both states should start withdrawing or at least drastically reducing their armed personnel from their respective parts. Kashmiris from both sides should be allowed substantial autonomy, but without the right to maintain their own armed forces.

This should be accompanied by the relative freedom of movement between the two sides for bona fide Kashmiris, though without the automatic right to settle on the other side. Finally, the Indus Waters Treaty should continue to be the basis of water sharing between India and Pakistan. Such steps should be accompanied by increasing contact between the peoples of India and Pakistan. It is only when the people from both sides have an opportunity to meet and communicate with one another that the suspicions and grievances of the past can be forgiven and forgotten.

It is also clear that the ultra-nationalist postures of India and Pakistan will have to be abandoned, religious extremism weeded out and democratic forces given a free hand. The combined impact of all these measures will finally enable both sides to exorcise the Ghost of Partition from their midst. This is essential because South Asia needs a cooperative framework not only for progress but also for mere survival. India and Pakistan can continue to challenge each others' strength on the playing fields. Just as football is the medium through which former European rivals test and challenge each other's strength, cricket, land hockey and the popular South Asian sport of kabadi should provide ample opportunities for friendly competition and combat. A South Asian Union of Independent States seems to be the only solution that can deliver rich dividends in terms of peace and prosperity.

Ishtiaq Ahmed

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