The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Bhutto had broached the subject of working out a trade agreement. But in their joint communiqué issued on July 17 she and Gandhi merely expressed their desire to work toward a comprehensive settlement to reduce the chances of conflict and the use of force. It turned out to be a pro forma statement that changed little on the ground.

  By early 1989 the image of Rajiv Gandhi as Mr. Clean was tarnished because of the scandal surrounding his government’s $1.3 billion deal for 410 field howitzers from the Swedish company A B Bofors in March 1986. He did what US Republican president Richard Nixon had done when the illegal break-in of the Democratic Party offices in Washington’s Watergate apartments came to light in 1974: devise an elaborate cover-up plan to sustain the myth that the Bofors payments were not commissions paid to acquire the much-coveted contract. His ploy failed. In October, a month before the general election, the prestigious Hindu published the facsimile of the secret part of the report by the Swedish National Audit Bureau, which concluded that the Bofors payments were “entirely proven commission payments to [the receiving] companies’ accounts in Switzerland in relation to the Bofors FH-77 deal.”6 That was the smoking gun that destroyed Gandhi’s credibility and led to the electoral defeat of the Congress Party by the National Front, an unwieldy alliance of opposition parties. One of these was led by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who became prime minister.

  In Pakistan Benazir Bhutto narrowly survived a no-confidence motion in the National Assembly in October 1989. She had proved to be an abysmal administrator. She faced charges of corruption leveled not just at her cabinet colleagues generally but specifically at Asif Ali Zardari, appointed minister for investments. He soon earned the nickname of “Mr. 10 Percent”—that being the percentage he allegedly charged for government contracts, which was paid to his father.

  Kashmir Overshadows All

  Islamabad’s relations with Delhi turned frosty because of events in Indian Kashmir. By placing the Kashmir issue into a wider ideological context of Islamism, Zia ul Haq had provided an opportunity for nonstate jihadist organizations to wade into the dispute. Among others the Lashkar-e Taiba (Urdu: Army of the Righteous; LeT), the armed wing of the charity organization of the Jamaat-e Islami (Urdu: Islamic Society; JeI), supported by the ISI, became an active player in the ongoing Kashmir drama. The conditions seemed ripe for it in Delhi-controlled Kashmir. On India’s Republic Day, January 26, 1989, Kashmiris went on a protest strike. During that year, one third of all working days were lost because of strikes. This warmed the cockles of Pakistani leaders’ hearts. For many years their efforts to foment strikes in Indian Kashmir had failed. Now they loudly welcomed the Kashmiris’ nonviolent protest, which they had mounted on their own.

  Between early 1988 and late 1989 many young Kashmiri Muslims crossed over to Pakistan-held Kashmir to receive military training. It was provided by the armed wing of the Jammu and Kashmir JeI, popularly known as Hizb ul Mujahideen (Arabic: Party of Mujahedin), as well as the LeT—and other organizations associated with the ISI. These included the secular, nationalist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. On their return home with arms and ammunition, they trained others clandestinely.

  Kashmiri militants went on the offensive. The number of bomb blasts and assassinations increased in 1989. So too did the intimidation of pro-India National Conference activists, with the aim of forcing them into retirement and bringing about the collapse of the political process. In January 1990, V. P. Singh’s administration appointed Jagmohan as governor of Kashmir and imposed direct rule, which would continue until October 1996—a record. Given Jagmohan’s anti-Muslim bias, Delhi made a colossal mistake. Kashmiri Muslims’ alienation from India widened and deepened.

  Benazir Bhutto’s government protested volubly but in vain. Her domestic problems were multiplying, and she proved unequal to the daunting task. On August 6, 1990, President Ishaq Khan dismissed her cabinet on account of corruption, incompetence, and failure to maintain law and order in Sindh, as well as the use of official machinery to promote partisan interests. He dissolved the National Assembly and the Provincial Assemblies in Sindh and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and declared an emergency, citing external aggression and internal disturbance. Bhutto denounced his action as “illegal and unconstitutional”—to no effect.

  Gandhi and Bhutto, the two rising stars in the subcontinent, met the same fate. But the manner of their fall illustrated a sharp contrast in the political cultures of the neighboring countries. In India it was voters who refused to give Gandhi a fresh mandate once irrefutable evidence of his involvement in the Bofors graft was established by the prestigious daily the Hindu.7 In Pakistan it was the decision of the president, who, acting at the behest of top military leaders, sealed Bhutto’s fate without providing evidence of the charges of misrule he laid against her. The president had been given this power by the eighth amendment to the constitution, passed by the bicameral parliament in November 1985. This provision had turned Pakistan’s parliamentary system into a semipresidential one, thereby making Pakistan stand apart from India in political administration.

  In the National Assembly election that followed in October 1990, the ISI, headed by Lieutenant General Asad Durrani, intervened directly. It once more brought together nine chiefly right-wing parties, led by Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), under the banner of the IJI. It also channeled funds to Nawaz Sharif through Mehran Bank to finance the IJI’s election campaign, a clandestine action that would come to light twelve years later in a case filed by Asghar Khan, a former air marshal of Pakistan, in the Supreme Court.8 The IJI and its ally, the MQM, trounced the PPP-led People’s Democratic Alliance, whose strength plunged to 44 versus the IJI’s 106 and the MQM’s 15. Nawaz Sharif, a Lahore-based industrialist, became the country’s thirteenth prime minister.

  A rotund, balding man with a pudgy face, the forty-one-year-old Nawaz Sharif was a protégé of Zia ul Haq. After the 1985 nonparty elections, urged by Washington but boycotted by the PPP, Zia ul Haq appointed him finance minister of Punjab and then promoted him to chief minister. Now, on becoming the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who had made liberating Kashmir an important and emotional theme in the election campaign, backed his mentor’s strategy of subversion in Indian Kashmir.

  Pakistan’s formal contacts with India at the highest level, however, continued. Meeting on the margins of the SAARC summit in Male, the capital of the Maldives, in November 1990, Sharif and Indian prime minister Chandra Shekhar decided to set up an additional hotline between them, the earlier one dating back to 1972. They also agreed to resume foreign-secretary-level talks between their republics.

  Around that time Indian intelligence sources claimed that some ten thousand Kashmiri Muslims had gone to Pakistan for arms training and that there were forty-six safe houses in Pakistan-held Kashmir, where militants were trained how to handle weapons and explosives. In its 1991 report on global terrorism, the US State Department referred to credible reports of Islamabad’s support for Kashmiri militant groups, involving military training and supplies of arms and ammunition. By then the ISI was busily aiding Pakistani and other foreign militants, including veterans of the anti-Moscow jihad in Afghanistan, to infiltrate Indian Kashmir.

  This raised the prospect of Washington naming Pakistan as a state that sponsors terrorism. US law mandated strict sanctions on such a country, including restrictions on bilateral commerce and vetoing of financial assistance by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In his letter to Sharif in May 1992 American secretary of state James Baker referred to the reliable information he had received regarding the ISI and others continuing to provide material aid to terrorist groups, added that “US law requires that an onerous package of sanctions apply to those states found to be supporting acts of international terrorism.”9

  After discussing this missive with his top officials, Sharif decided to channel aid to Kashmiri separatists exclusively through “private channels” consisting o
f such organizations as JeI and its subsidiary, LeT. In his response to Baker, he offered the assurance that any clandestine assistance by his government to anti-India militants would cease forthwith.10 Such duplicity would become the norm in Islamabad’s relations with Washington in the coming decades.

  Demolition of a Historic Mosque in India

  On May 21, 1991, during the election campaign for the lower house of Parliament, Rajiv Gandhi’s motorcade headed to a rally for a local party candidate, Maradadam Chandrashekhar, in Sriperumbudur, a town twenty-five miles southwest of Chennai. Carnival lights twinkled around the open-air gathering of several thousand people, mostly men, in a meadow. Men were dressed in sarongs and sport shirts, and women in cheap, colorful saris. Security was nonexistent, with knots of people milling around the platform, albeit calmly, even though Rajiv Gandhi was late by two hours that evening.

  Gandhi, who had been talking to two foreign correspondents sitting in the back of his modest India-made Ambassador car during his ride, sought quick advice from Chandrashekhar about the subject he should cover in his speech. “Village development” was her crisp reply. Gandhi’s car stopped twenty-five yards from the dais. He got out, followed by the other occupants of his car. As he walked toward the short stairs to the platform, a young woman—later identified as Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan Tamil militant—garlanded him. She then stooped to touch his feet as a sign of respect and pressed the button of her suicide belt containing RDX explosive and thousands of tiny steel balls.

  “As Mrs Gopal [of the Gulf News, Dubai] and I followed [Gandhi] there was a sudden burst of what sounded like firecrackers and then a large boom, an explosion and a cloud of smoke that scattered people all around,” reported Barbara Crossette in the New York Times. “It was over in a matter of seconds.”11 It was 10:10 pm. Gandhi was dead, and so were fourteen others. All that survived of his body were his head and his feet, shod in expensive running shoes. Rajaratnam was part of a conspiracy.12

  Gandhi had earned fanatical hatred of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by dispatching an Indian peacekeeping force into Sri Lanka in 1987 to assist the Colombo government in squashing LTTE insurgents fighting for an independent Tamil state. His mother, Indira Gandhi, lost her life battling Sikh irredentists at home, while he ended up sacrificing his own in the cause of averting the partition of India’s small neighbor in the Arabian Sea. His scant remains were cremated on the banks of the Jamuna (aka Yamuna) River in Delhi.

  The privilege of leading the Congress Party fell on P. V. Narasimha Rao, a seventy-year-old, lackluster, diminutive lawyer and a party veteran from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. His party’s 244 seats were 18 short of bare majority. This compelled him to rope in small groups to be able to govern. He succeeded.

  With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the United States emerged triumphant in the Cold War. The world became unipolar, with America as the sole superpower. With the counterpull of the Kremlin gone, the friendship between Delhi and Washington became warmer, much to the discomfort of Islamabad.

  Continuing the past practice of using regional and international gatherings to hold bilateral talks with the Pakistani leader, Narasimha Rao had three meetings with Nawaz Sharif between October 1991 and September 1992. During that period the 120-strong opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Hindi: Indian People’s Party; BJP) took advantage of the weakness of Narasimha Rao’s government.

  The BJP had raised its popularity substantially by recycling the narrative of the marauding Muslim tribes of the past butchering native Hindus of the Indian subcontinent. It then targeted the mosque built by Emperor Babur in 1527 in the northern town of Ayodhya, claiming that it stood at the site of an ancient temple built at the birthplace of Lord Rama. The fact that there was no evidence about the existence of King Rama of Ayodhya in recorded history did not matter a jot to the BJP leadership.

  It launched its campaign just as the armed insurgency by separatist Muslims in Kashmir, aided by foreign jihadists, was intensifying. The jihadists equated assisting Kashmiri Muslims to achieve self-determination by expelling Indian troops from their state with their earlier, successful guerrilla actions against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The BJP’s campaign took off. In other words, insurgency in Kashmir helped spark Hindu revivalism.

  Before obtaining official permission to hold a rally in front of the Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992, the nationalist Hindu organizers assured the Supreme Court that the mosque would not be touched. Yet on that day, nearly two hundred thousand Hindu militants, working in cahoots with BJP leaders, stormed the barricades erected around the mosque. Armed with pickaxes, ropes, and sledgehammers, some four thousand demonstrators demolished the historic structure within four hours. The Narasimha Rao government’s later decision to block off the site and heavily increase security around it was a classic example of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Indian Muslims felt stunned and enraged in equal measure. When they protested in the streets in various cities of India, they were attacked by militant Hindus. The subsequent rioting left more than two thousand people, mostly Muslims, dead.

  Pakistan promised to appeal to the United Nations to pressure India to protect the rights of Muslims. Sharif’s call for a nationwide strike on December 8 was observed universally. Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto outdid him by blaming the tragedy on his flawed foreign policy, claiming that such an event would not have occurred if she had been in power.13 She had realized that there was political capital to be made by adopting a hard line toward India.

  For three days Muslim mobs in Pakistan went on a rampage, shouting “Death to Hinduism” and “Crush India.” In Karachi they attacked five Hindu temples and hurled rocks at and set ablaze twenty-five temples in towns across Sindh, where 85 percent of Pakistan’s 1.5 million Hindus lived.14

  The demolition of the Babri mosque put India at a disadvantage in the international arena, although the ransacking of the Indian consul-general’s house in Karachi brought Pakistan a notch or two down from its moral high ground.

  Far more significantly, Pakistan had to deal with the prospect of being added to the list of states supporting terrorism maintained by the United States. Such a prospect sharpened after a bomb exploded in the basement of the World Trade Center in New York on February 26, 1993. The hand of terrorists based in Pakistan was suspected. A nervous Nawaz Sharif dispatched his foreign secretary, Akram Zaki, to Washington in early April to reassure the State Department that he would curb extremists at home. The ISI drastically reduced direct support for Kashmiri militants but continued it indirectly, through the JeI and the LeT.

  On April 18 President Ishaq Khan sacked Nawaz Sharif for alleged maladministration, corruption, graft, and nepotism. Sharif challenged this decision in the Supreme Court. Stalemate ensued. COAS General Wahid Kakar intervened. He compelled both of them to resign in July. Ishaq Khan was succeeded by Wasim Sajjad, chair of the Senate, as acting president.

  Reelected Bhutto Plays Hardball with India

  In the October 1993 parliamentary election, Benazir Bhutto’s PPP emerged as the largest group but fell short of a majority by 23 seats. So she ended up heading an unwieldy coalition, which included the Islamist Jamiat Ulema-e Islam (Urdu: Association of Islamic Religious Scholars; JUeI), led by Fazlur Rahman. Along with the JeI, the JUeI had been a leading participant in the Afghan jihad.

  Spurred by Rahman, Bhutto gave the green light to Lieutenant General Pervez Musharraf, then director general of military operations, to dispatch ten thousand new jihadists to Indian Kashmir. Under her watch, Islamabad’s annual budget for the insurgency in India-held Kashmir spiked to $100 million.15

  In a candid interview with the Delhi-based Tehelka magazine after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007, Retired Lieutenant General Gul said, “She was rather protective of the jihadis in the past. Benazir was never soft on the Kashmir issue, let me tell you that. I
served as the ISI director-general under her [December 1988 to October 1989]. The Taliban emerged during her second tenure in office and captured Kabul when she was the prime minister. Her interior minister [General Naseerullah Babar] used to patronize them openly.”16

  She ruled out a meeting with her Indian counterpart, Narasimha Rao, until Delhi ended its brutish violations of human rights in Kashmir. This was not in the cards.

  Actually, behind the scenes, to get even with Islamabad, the Indian RAW’s Counter Intelligence Team-X (CIT-X) and Counter Intelligence Team-J (CIT-J) worked furiously to subvert Pakistan and eliminate the Khalistani groups respectively. The aim of the CIT-X Team was to exploit the ethnic fault lines in Pakistan—between Sindhis and the Urdu-speaking immigrants, called Muhajirin, in Sindh, between nationalist Baluchis and the Punjabi-dominated federal government, and between irredentist Pushtuns in the NWFP and Islamabad. Widely published reports in Pakistan alleged that between 1983 and 1993, as many as thirty-five thousand RAW agents entered Pakistan: twelve thousand in Sindh, ten thousand in Punjab, eight thousand in the NWFP, and five thousand in Baluchistan.17

  As for the CIT-J Team, it had helped undermine the Sikh insurgency in Punjab sufficiently to let the Delhi government end its direct rule and return the state to democratic rule in February 1992. Following the election, the Congress Party’s Beant Singh became the chief minister. Remnants of Sikh militancy continued, however, for another year or so. During the decade-long violence, more than twenty thousand people lost their lives in Punjab.18