The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  The following chapter describes how in the aftermath of 9/11 and the failed terrorist attack on the Parliament House in Delhi three months later, the United States succeeded in getting Musharraf to jettison the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and stop providing military training and weapons to Kashmiri separatists. But the subsequent lowering of Indo-Pakistan tensions in January 2002 did not last. Following the terrorist assault on a military camp at Kaluchak in Kashmir in May, Vajpayee authorized the bombing of training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir. The lack of enough laser-guided bombs delayed the execution of the order and gave the United States and Britain a chance to douse passions. They ordered their eighty thousand citizens to leave India and Pakistan immediately, cooling Vajpayee’s fervor. The nuclear-armed neighbors stepped back from a nuclear brink.

  Chapter 17 covers the dealings of Congress prime minister Manmohan Singh from 2004 onward. He and Musharraf set up a back channel to reach an accord on Kashmir. Their personal envoys forged a plan that Musharraf outlined in December 2006. It envisaged “open borders” in Kashmir followed by a phased withdrawal of troops from both sides of the LoC. Since this did not mean changing the present borders, the plan received careful examination by the Indian cabinet. But before it could take a definite stand, Musharraf was forced to step down as army chief prior to being sworn in as a civilian president in November 2007. And in August 2008 he resigned as president to avoid being impeached by Parliament, which was dominated by anti-Musharraf parties. Once again the hopes of resolving the Kashmir conundrum were dashed. Three months later, a sixty-hour siege of luxury hotels in south Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists froze Delhi-Islamabad relations. The freeze lasted two-and-a-half years.

  As if the decades-long Kashmir deadlock were not enough, the rivalry between Pakistan and India for dominant influence in Afghanistan intensified as the US-led NATO forces prepared to leave Afghanistan by December 2014. For Pakistani generals brought up on the doctrine of India as the number one enemy, the Indo-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement signed in October 2011 was a step toward their worst-case scenario materializing: a simultaneous attack on Pakistan in the east and the west by the Indo-Afghan alliance. This is the gist of Chapter 18.

  In contrast to the opposite pulls of geopolitics, the cultures of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North India—language, cuisine, dress, sports, and the performing arts—continue to have much in common. Bollywood movies and cricket remain popular on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border. In the economic arena, as signatories of the South Asian Free Trade Area treaty, which specified the reduction of customs duty on all traded goods to zero by 2016 for the eight-member South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, India and Pakistani started liberalizing mutual trade beginning in 2009. In 2013 they agreed on a nondiscriminatory market access protocol, which was equivalent to most-favored-nation status. Describing all this is the function of the penultimate chapter.

  The concluding chapter provides a summary and conclusions.

  The epilogue is not indexed.

  A word about the changing exchange value of the Indian and Pakistani currencies: the exchange value of the Indian rupee fell from Rs 4.75 in 1947 to US$1 to Rs 60 to US$1 in 2014. The Pakistani rupee has depreciated much more.

  My gratitude to Carl Bromley, the now former editorial director of Nation Books, goes beyond the customary thanks. He came up with the idea for a book on India-Pakistan relations. Familiar with my family and professional background, he considered me to be the right author to pen it. And he worked diligently with me to include in the final book proposal an optimum mix of engaging elements.

  London

  September 2014

  Introduction

  In March 2013 the air in East Asia was thick with the threat of Armageddon. In retaliation for North Korea’s underground nuclear test in mid-February, the UN Security Council imposed further economic sanctions on Pyongyang. Its young, newly installed leader Kim Jong Un threatened to transform Seoul, the prosperous, bustling capital of South Korea with ten million residents, into a “sea of fire” and launch preemptive nuclear strikes on Washington. He declared that his country would no longer recognize the 1953 armistice that ended the war between it and UN forces. The United Nations retorted that the truce could not be abrogated unilaterally.

  Yet nothing seemed to change on the ground. The practical outcome of that truce—the demilitarized zone (DMZ) running roughly along the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and divided equally by the military demarcation line—remained intact. So too did the infrastructure at Panmunjom, home of the Joint Security Area (JSA) near the western coast of the peninsula. There was no decrease in the number of busloads of day-trippers from Seoul, an hour’s drive from the border through green fields, scrubby mountains, and army observation posts every few hundred yards.

  The only danger that a tourist who wished to enter the JSA faced was to sign a voucher to take responsibility for “injury or death as a direct result of enemy action” before boarding a UN bus at Camp Bonifas, with a soldier as tour guide. The JSA has been the site of negotiations between the opposing parties inside the building constructed along the military demarcation line.

  The high point for a tourist was to walk around the conference tables where the North Koreans and the UN Command (chiefly South Koreans and Americans) sit on opposite sides. Outside, business remained brisk at the fast food eateries, the amusement park, and souvenir shops selling child-sized military uniforms and DMZ-stamped T-shirts and hats.

  The 160-mile-long and 2.5-mile-wide buffer between the two Koreas is hyped as the most heavily fortified and dangerous border in the world—even though it no longer is. That honor goes to the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, the 460-mile-long UN-brokered cease-fire line of 1950 that demarcates the Indian and Pakistan controlled parts of that territory. In March 2000, during a trip to India to defuse tensions in the region, US president Bill Clinton called it “the most dangerous place in the world.”1 Both belligerents possess nuclear weapons and have the means to deliver them. The attempts by Pakistan to change the truce line in Kashmir have led to two wars: one major in 1985 and the other minor, in the Kargil region in 1999.

  The Globe’s Most Dangerous Place

  India started to fence the LoC in the mid-1990s but stopped because of shelling and gunfire from Pakistan, which has opposed any change to the status quo. India resumed the project in 2001 and finished it in September 2004. The end result was a formidable 375-mile-long barrier. Covering all of the 178-mile border in the Jammu region and 197 miles in Kashmir, it passes through dry land, green pastures and valleys, wooded hills, and rugged mountains.

  The barrier is terribly intimidating. It consists of a double row of twelve-foot-high wire fencing. The space between the rows is filled with thousands of land mines. At some spots the fence is equipped with thermal imaging devices and motion sensors along with built-in alarm and lighting systems that alert troops of infiltrators from Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The soldiers themselves are equipped with sensors, thermal imagers, and night vision devices. Only the areas of highest altitude—the 88-mile stretch of glacier running from Kargil at 10,764 feet to the Siachen Glacier at 18,875 feet—have been left unfenced. The total cost of fencing has been an astronomical Rs 1,620 million ($324 million)—$864,000 a mile.2

  The fence is not strictly along the LoC. It stands about 150 yards to a mile or so away from it—inside Indian-controlled territory. This has created a no-man’s-land. And because this area is often dotted with agricultural plots and hamlets, it has become a source of periodic killings of soldiers and civilians, leading to furious accusations and counteraccusations by Delhi and Islamabad.

  In some areas, however, the fence cuts through farms or orchards. Such was the case with Touseef Bhat’s seven-acre plot near Gurez in the scenic valley of the same name in Indian Kashmir’s Bandipora district. “The fence is creating serious difficulties for us,” Bhat told the journalist Athar Parvaiz. �
�Sometimes we have to walk several kilometers to a crossing point just to visit a neighbor who may only be a shouting distance away on the other side of the fence.”3

  Though the latest cease-fire agreement signed in November 2003 held, sporadic infiltration into the Gurez Valley from the Pakistan-administered territory continued despite fortification along the LoC. The bomb shelters built near schools and other public buildings in Gurez, a town of thirty-five thousand souls, testified to the time when artillery exchanges along the LoC were a common feature. For now what worried the residents of Gurez was the sustainability of farming and livestock breeding. “There may be no firing but cattle put out to graze in the area between the fence and the LoC wander off to the Pakistani side and are lost forever,” Bhat’s neighbor Rashid Lone told Parvaiz. Bhat agreed. “In July [2011], 85 heads of cattle, belonging to my village of Budap, vanished and they were worth at least 50,000 dollars,” he said. “We cannot afford to bear such losses and have asked the authorities to help us recover the animals or compensate us.”4

  Consequently there are no day-trippers bussed to the LoC from Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, or Jammu, the winter capital. The nearest the most enterprising Indian journalist can get to this barrier on his own is to arrive at Uri, a town surrounded on three sides by high hills, about two miles from the LoC. Uri lies at the end of a taxi ride of twenty-one miles through green valleys and 8,200-foot-high mountains from Baramulla, thirty-five miles from Srinagar. On arrival he or she would find the settlement swarming with police and informers, since it is situated in an area bristling with separatist militants.

  Four hundred thousand heavily armed soldiers and paratroopers are posted on the Indian side. Perpetually fearful of invasion from India, Pakistan has deployed two-thirds of its 610,000-strong army along the LoC. Repeated pleas by the administrations of US presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Islamabad to bolster its troops in the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistan tribal region to help crush the Afghan Taliban by reducing its military deployment in Kashmir have received no response.

  The statement by Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf that “Kashmir runs in our blood” remains as valid today as it did when he made it in January 2002. At that time 700,000 Indian troops and 300,000 Pakistani soldiers faced one another across the LoC in a high state of alert that lasted a whole year.

  The conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan poisoned relations between the two sovereign states within a few months of their inception in August 1947. The Pakistani government could not bear to see a Muslim-majority area in British India end up as part of Hindu-dominated India. At the core of this conflict, which has remained intractable for almost seven decades, lies the far longer history of unreconciled relations between Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent.

  Historic Roots of Discord

  Hinduism is polytheistic and centered around idol worship. Islam is monotheistic and forbids graven images. Abraham started with breaking up idols, and Muhammad did the same in Mecca. Hindus worship idols of gods and goddesses. They believe in reincarnation, with the eternal spirit taking different physical forms in an endless cycle of birth, death, and re-birth. Muslims believe that in their afterlife they will be judged by Allah on the Day of Judgment, known only to Allah. Caste is an integral part of Hinduism whereas it has no sanctification in Islam.

  In the Indian subcontinent, the Hindu-Muslim antagonism is grounded in eight centuries of history. In 1192 Muhammad Ghori of Afghanistan’s army, in a surprise attack before sunrise, defeated the formidable Rajput army of Hindu emperor Prithvi Raj near Delhi and established the Delhi Sultanate, which went on to cover most of north India. In 1526 it fell to a siege by Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, then ruler of Kabul, who founded the Mughal dynasty. It gave way to the British Raj in 1807.

  Unlike the previous foreign rulers of the subcontinent, the British, arriving by sea as fixed-term contracted employees of the trading East India Company, had an island homeland with a distinct identity to which they returned after their tour of duty. This was not the case with their Afghan and Mughal predecessors, who settled down in the conquered land and became an integral part of the indigenous society.

  By 1807, Muslims were a quarter of the Indian population, most of them outcaste and lower-caste Hindu converts to Islam, with a sprinkling of the original Afghan and Mughal ruling elite settling at the top of society. In predominantly rural India, Muslims lived in hamlets outside the main villages and had their own wells. In towns and cities, Hindus and Muslims voluntarily lived in separate neighborhoods.

  Social intercourse between the two communities was minimal, with intermarriage nonexistent. At the popular level the communal points of friction centered around Hindus’ reverence of cows and Muslims’ religiously sanctified loathing of pigs and their flesh. In Hindu kingdoms killing a cow was deemed a capital offense since the fourth century ce. To retaliate against Muslims’ slaughtering of cows, die-hard Hindus resorted to desecrating a mosque by a stealth depositing of a pig’s head or carcass at its entrance, or by playing music or musical instruments outside a mosque during prayers.

  During the British Raj, the emerging apartheid between the ruling, white Christian minority and the large, subjugated Indian majority created widespread resentment against foreign imperialists among locals. This sentiment came to dominate the predominantly Hindu Indian National Congress (henceforth Congress Party) formed in 1885 in Mumbai with a modest demand that “the Government should be widened and that the people should have their proper and legitimate share in it.”5

  On the whole, having lost their empire to the British, the Muslim elite sulked, refusing to accept their dramatically diminished circumstances. Contrary was the case with upper-caste Hindus. In the past they had adjusted to the reality of alien rule, learning Persian, the court language of the Muslim dynasties for seven centuries, to administer their rule. With the advent of the British Raj, they switched to mastering English. As such, Hindus started to spawn an English-educated urban middle class. By contrast, Muslims remained divided between the extremes of illiterate peasantry and richly endowed aristocratic landlords.

  A minority among the Muslim nobility adapted to the new reality. Prominent among them was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898). A highly educated, pro-British, richly bearded aristocrat, Sir Syed was a political thinker and an educationist who urged fellow Muslims to learn English. He founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh in 1875. He advised his coreligionists to stay away from the Congress Party and focused on expanding the Muhammadan Educational Conference.

  He perceived the Congress Party’s demand for a wider role for Indians in the government as the thin end of the wedge for the departure of the British from the subcontinent. “Now, suppose that the English community and the army were to leave India, taking with them all their cannons and their splendid weapons and all else, who then would be the rulers of India?” he asked in a speech in March 1888. “Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations—the Mohammedans and the Hindus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable. . . . But until one nation has conquered the other and made it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land.”6

  Sir Syed’s statement reflected the rising friction between the two communities, which he pointedly called “nations.” At times these tensions escalated into violence. The first recorded communal riot occurred in the North Gujarat town of Godhra in 1854. Details of the episode are sketchy.7 More is known about the communal riot in Bombay (later Mumbai) in August 1893. It erupted against the background of the rise of a militant cow protection movement—Gaorakshak Mandali—that many Muslims regarded as provocative and was launched in Bombay Presidency in late 1892. Muslim worshipers leaving the Juma Masjid, a striking mosque in South Bombay, after Friday
prayers attacked a nearby temple on Hanuman Lane. In a predominantly illiterate society in a prebroadcasting era, wild rumors spread rapidly over the next two days. The army was drafted to restore control. All together seventy-five people lost their lives.8

  In December 1906 the Muhammadan Educational Conference meeting in Dacca (later Dhaka) decided to transform itself into a political party, the All India Muslim League. Dominated by feudal lords with a sprinkling of religious scholars and educationalists, it elected Adamjee Pirbhoy as its president. He was followed by Sir Ali Imam and the twenty-three-year-old Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah—popularly known by his title of Agha Khan (or Aga Khan)—in successive years. The League was headquartered in Lucknow. Its primary goal was to promote loyalty to the British crown while advancing Muslims’ political rights.

  It demanded separate electorates for Muslims when the British government decided to introduce the concept of conferring the right to vote on Indians with the enforcement of the 1892 India Councils Act. It turned the hitherto fully nominated central and provincial legislative councils into partly elected chambers. Nominated municipal boards, chambers of commerce, landowner associations, and universities were authorized to submit lists of elected members from which the viceroy and provincial governors made a final selection of council members. These members, forming a minority, had the right to debate the budget but not vote on it. In popular terms it meant franchise for 2 percent of the adult population, about a third of literate Indians.