The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Across the border, it became standard practice in Islamabad to blame RAW for all ethnic and intersectarian conflicts. Relations between majority Sunnis and minority Shias became strained during the Islamization process unleashed by Zia ul Haq because of different interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence by their respective religious scholars. The situation worsened when funds from Saudi Arabia, home of the puritanical Wahhabi subsect of Sunni Islam, turned extremist Sunni organizations in Pakistan murderously anti-Shia. That in turn led Shia radicals to hit back. In 1994, the violence between sects and between radical Sindhi nationalists and militant Muhajirin in the country’s largest city, Karachi, claimed eight hundred lives. Unable to reduce the bloodshed, the Bhutto government resorted to blaming RAW. It closed down the Indian consulate in the city. But there was no letup in Sunni-Shia bloodletting.

  In Kashmir, the appointment of K. V. Krishna Rao, former COAS with counterinsurgency experience in the rebellious northeast of India, as governor in 1993 led to the infiltration of militant factions by RAW agents. The strategy was to cause splits in militant organizations. As part of its Operation Chanakya, RAW also sponsored the founding of fake radical groups with names almost akin to the existing genuine ones, thereby confusing ordinary Kashmiris. Thus RAW and the ISI came to confront each other directly in India-administered Kashmir. RAW gained the upper hand. By 1996, whereas the estimate of Indian security forces was put at 210,000 to 600,000, the figure for the militants declined sharply to 6,000 from a peak of 20,000 to 25,000.19

  India’s Abominable Record on Torture

  India had achieved this outcome by beefing up its security forces in Kashmir and violating human rights on an industrial scale.

  By the summer of 1990, a pattern had become established. Armed insurgents’ assaults on specific targets, resulting in reprisals by security forces with arrests and cordon-and-search operations to flush out guerrillas and discover arms and ammunition, lead to Kashmiris heeding the militants’ calls for shutdowns.

  The Delhi parliament passed the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act 1990 (AFJKSP) in July. It authorized the state government to declare Jammu and Kashmir or part of it as a “disturbed area,” where the AFJKSP Act applied. It allowed an armed forces officer to shoot any person who was acting in contravention of “any law” or was in possession of deadly weapons, to arrest without a warrant anyone who was suspected of having committed any offense, and to enter and search any premise to make such arrests. This law gave military officers legal immunity for their actions.20 It was carte blanche for security forces to do what they wished without worrying about accountability. Thereafter they carried out arbitrary arrests, torture, rape of women and men, extrajudicial killings, and arson to crush the raging insurgency.21 By mid-1991 Indian military and paramilitary personnel totaled 150,000. The estimates of the armed militants ranged widely, from 10,000 to 40,000.

  The list of those who were tortured or killed in extrajudicial executions by the Indian security forces grew by the week. Torturing suspects became routine. “They took you out to the lawn outside the building,” a torture victim, “Ansar,” told the Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, years later, after getting assurance that his real name would not be used. “You were asked to remove all your clothes, even your underwear. They tied you to a long wooden ladder and placed it near a ditch filled with kerosene oil and red chili powder. They raised the ladder like a seesaw and pushed your head into the ditch. It could go on for an hour, half an hour, depending on their mood.” Other times the torturers would tie the fully clothed suspect to a ladder, tie his long pants near the ankles, and insert mice inside his pants. “Or they burnt your arms and legs with cigarette butts and kerosene stoves used for welding,” Ansar continued. “They burn your flesh till you speak.” He rolled up his right sleeve above the elbow to show an uneven dark brown patch of flesh.22

  The brutal ways of the Indian security forces in Kashmir were widely and prominently reported in Pakistan, ruled by a democratically elected government after Zia ul Haq’s death in 1988. Equally, the switch from dictatorship to democracy made no difference in Islamabad’s policy on Kashmir, implemented in essence by the ISI. In November 1995 the BBC aired a documentary showing evidence of the JeI’s support in Azad Kashmir camps, where fighters, openly expressing their intent to wage jihad in Indian Kashmir, were being trained.23 This was a clear violation of the 1972 Shimla Agreement between India and Pakistan.

  While Delhi refused to state the total strength of its security forces in Kashmir, it publicized the amount of weapons its security forces and Kashmiri police had seized between 1989 and 1995: 13,450 AK-47 Kalashnikovs, 1,682 rockets, 750 rocket launchers, and 735 general-purpose machine guns. With better intelligence they retrieved 590 bombs in 1995—almost twice the figure for 1994. As for fatalities, the unofficial estimate of forty thousand during the period 1988–1995 was three times the official figure. The London-based Amnesty International mentioned seventeen thousand, plus several thousand unaccounted deaths.24 Of these almost half were believed to be militants.

  This was the backdrop to elections in Kashmir in September and October 1996. On the eve of the election, Prime Minister Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda unveiled a hefty package of financial aid of Rs 3.52 billion ($100 million) to improve infrastructure and wrote off outstanding loans of up to Rs. 50,000 ($1,400) per person—a flagrant example of electoral bribing.25

  Reversing his previous stance, the late Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah’s son, Farooq Abdullah, head of the National Conference, decided to contest the elections. “People like to see azadi [independence] but they don’t see the consequences of that azadi,” he said. “We are landlocked with powerful neighbors of China and Pakistan. If we get independence and India quits, I am sure Pakistan will march in overnight and take over.”26 It was better to take the plunge and see how best to alter the situation, rather than let the situation stagnate with no public involvement, he argued. In marked contrast, leaders of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) stuck to their stance of a boycott of the vote held under the Indian constitution.

  In the face of dire threats by the militants, the candidates sought and secured bulletproof vehicles and security personnel as bodyguards. Very few people voted voluntarily in the Kashmir Valley. Many more were pressed to go to the polling booths by the security forces, who warned citizens of “consequences” if they failed to show indelible ink on their index fingers, used at the polling stations, in the evening. Unsurprisingly, the National Conference won 59 seats out of 87. Abdullah became chief minister.

  The Simmering Nuclear Issue

  In her interview with British TV personality David Frost in November 1994, Benazir Bhutto said, “We have neither detonated nor have we got nuclear weapons. Being a responsible state and a state committed to nonproliferation, we in Pakistan, through five successive governments, have taken a policy decision to follow a peaceful nuclear program.”27 It was true that the military leaders kept the nitty-gritty of the nuclear project from Bhutto, but she was well briefed about the nature of the overall program and had traveled to North Korea a year earlier to facilitate the purchase of missiles suitable for delivering nuclear warheads.

  During her visit to Washington in April 1995 to meet President Bill Clinton, she pressed him to alter the Pressler Amendment to the US foreign aid program. She argued that while it was “a veto in the hands of India, a tool and a club in the hands of those who stood against America and with the Soviet Union for 50 years,” it rewarded “Indian intransigence” and punished “Pakistani loyalty and friendship” with America. At her press conference she offered “to go anywhere, at any time” to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if her Indian counterpart did the same. “I will joyfully agree to a treaty to ban nuclear weapons in South Asia, to create a missile-free zone in South Asia, to stop the production of fissile material in South Asia, as long as the only proven nuclear power on the subcontinent adh
eres to the same treaties.”28

  Her spirited performance in Washington made no mark on her increasingly vocal critics at home. The law and order situation in Karachi remained dire. It provided sufficient rationale to President Farooq Leghari, a PPP stalwart, to dismiss her government in November 1996, citing such grounds as maladministration, nepotism, and corruption.

  Six months earlier the government in Delhi had changed too, but through the ballot, not by the fiat of the president. The general election in India had resulted in a hung parliament. There were two prime ministers belonging to different constituents of the United Front in as many years.

  By the time Inder Kumar Gujral became prime minister in Delhi in April 1997, his counterpart in Islamabad was Nawaz Sharif, leader of the PML-N. Sharif had romped to success with a historic two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

  Born in the West Punjab town of Jhelum in British India, Gujral was a graduate of Forman Christian College, Lahore. A tall, lean, balding man with a graying goatee and oversized spectacles, he was a contrast to the rotund Sharif. As fellow Punjabis equally fluent in Urdu, however, they clicked the moment they met on the margins of the SAARC summit in Male in May 1997.

  Unlike Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto in 1988, they were seasoned politicians. They decided to reactivate the hotline and form working groups on several contentious issues. Crucially, Sharif agreed to adopt “an integrated approach” to resolving mutual differences, instead of focusing on Kashmir. During their interaction Gujral accepted Pakistan’s position that Kashmir was a dispute that would require resolution. But according to Mushahid Hussain, the information minister of Pakistan, this was made public only “on June 23, 1997 when an Agreement was announced between the Foreign Secretaries on the establishment of joint working groups on outstanding issues between India and Pakistan with a separate working group on Kashmir. This was the first time in 50 years that India had agreed to this.”29

  With the Sikh emergency in Punjab over, Gujral ordered the disbanding of RAW’s CIT-J. In Kashmir, the combined strategies of RAW and Governor Krishna Rao had reduced the size of the insurgents to a fraction of their peak of twenty to twenty-five thousand. With Farooq Abdullah installed as the elected chief minister in Srinagar, Gujral saw no reason to maintain RAW’s CIT-X, mandated to subvert Pakistan, as a quid pro quo for stoking insurgency in Indian Kashmir. He disbanded it.

  Following talks between their foreign secretaries in June 1997, India and Pakistan agreed to form joint working groups on eight subjects: Peace and Security, Jammu and Kashmir, Siachin Glacier, Wullar Barrage, Sir Creek, Terrorism, Commerce, and Promotion of friendly exchanges in various fields. But a week later Gujral ruled out a joint working group on Kashmir, which for Pakistan was “the core issue.”30

  In early September 1997 Sharif declared that “Pakistan’s nuclear capability is now an established fact. Whatever we have, we have a right to keep it.”31 There was no prize for guessing what this “capability” was.

  Sharif and Gujral met on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York in late September and on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh a month later. But they failed to end the stalemate on the significance of the Kashmir dispute.

  Gujral’s minority government fell in December. And following the next parliamentary election in February 1998, the BJP-led thirteen-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won a slim majority.

  14: Gate-Crashing the Nuclear Club

  The 286 seats won by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the latest parliamentary election gave it a majority of only 13. As leader of the 182-strong Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) within the NDA, Atal Bihari Vajpayee became the prime minister on March 19, 1998. His immediate task was to consolidate the loyalty of the remaining twelve NDA constituents. This, he realized, was best done by raising the popular standing of his freshly formed government with a dramatic decision—something that would capture the nation’s imagination and raise its self-confidence. That led him to order nuclear explosions within three weeks of taking office.

  Vajpayee’s Long-Nurtured Nuclear Dream

  To seasoned observers, though, this move by the seventy-three-year-old Vajpayee fitted his political persona to a tee. The white-haired Hindu nationalist politician—a broad-shouldered man with chubby cheeks in a jowly face—had been a proponent of nuclearization of India ever since China tested its atom bomb in 1964. Back then, he was a junior member of parliament representing the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (Hindi: Indian People’s Union; BJS), an exclusively Hindu party.

  Born into the Brahminical household of Krishna Bihari Vajpayee, a schoolteacher in the central Indian city of Gwaliar, Atal Bihari grew up as a devout Hindu. At the age of seventeen he attended the officers’ training camp of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu chauvinist organization modeled after the Italian Fascist Party.

  Its members met daily, wearing a uniform of a white shirt, baggy khaki half-pants, and belt; they drilled, played games, and attended sessions of political discussion and indoctrination.1 After obtaining a master’s degree in political science from Kanpur University, a public university in Uttar Pradesh, he became a full-time worker for the RSS in 1947. To devote himself fully to the RSS, he spurned the idea of marrying his college female friend Raj Kumari. He emerged as the only prime minister of India who was a lifelong bachelor, although by no means celibate. A teetotaler in public, he was rumored to drink on the sly.

  While working for the RSS, he edited a Hindi magazine promoting Hindu revivalism until 1951, when the RSS set up the BJS as its political arm. As an MP, he proved an effective speaker in Hindi. On the death of Deen Dayal Upadhaya, a BJS cofounder, in 1968, he was elected the party’s president. The BJS developed as an opponent of the Congress Party, decrying its perceived pampering of Muslims. During the national emergency, imposed by Indira Gandhi in mid-1975, Vajpayee and other BJS leaders were jailed. Their eighteen-month incarceration gave them the aura of political martyrdom. Their participation in the cabinet of Prime Minister Morarji Desai, leader of the Janata Alliance an anti-Congress coalition that included the BJS and won the 1977 general election, enhanced their popular standing. Vajpayee served as foreign minister.

  After the breakup of the Janata Party, the BJS transformed itself into the BJP and opened its membership to non-Hindus. In practice, however, its RSS-rooted anti-Muslim ideology remained intact. The BJP became the political face of the Rama Janam Bhoomi Mandir movement, initiated by the RSS, to build a temple to Lord Rama at the site of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. Musing on the demolition of the Babri Mosque in December 1992 by a clandestinely organized four-thousand-strong group of militant Hindus, Vajpayee wrote: “Now, I think, the Hindu society has been regenerated which was the prime task of the RSS. Earlier, Hindus used to bend before an invasion but not now. . . . So much change must have come with the new-found self-assertion.”2

  In its campaign manifesto for the general election in April and May 1996, the BJP referred to India exercising “the option to induct nuclear weapons” and declared that “India should become an openly nuclear power to garner the respect on the world stage that India deserved.”3 As leader of the largest group in Parliament (187 seats), Vajpayee was invited to form a government on May 16 with the proviso of securing the MPs’ vote of confidence within two weeks. He immediately ordered nuclear tests. Three nuclear devices were rushed to the Pokhran Military Firing Range in Rajasthan, ninety-three miles from the Pakistani border, and placed in the test shafts. On May 28 Vajpayee concluded that he lacked majority support in Parliament and resigned. But before doing so, he rescinded his authorization for the nuclear explosions.

  Indian Consensus on Nukes

  Actually, what Vajpayee did was nothing more than complete the process inaugurated by Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, with his order to upgrade the nuclear testing site in Pokhran, first used in 1974, to make it suitable for a detonation on short notice. In 1995, his s
uccessor, P. V. Narasimha Rao, decided to conduct an underground test on a nuclear device. Preparations built to a climax in early December. The telltale signs were recorded by four powerful US spy satellites.

  On December 15 the New York Times quoted unnamed officials of the Clinton administration that Washington had recorded activity at the Pokhran test site in recent weeks. Instructed by the State Department, the US ambassador to India, Frank Wisner, showed satellite photographs to top Indian officials to dissuade them from testing. In a telephone call, Clinton urged Narasimha Rao to abandon the plan. Rao assured Clinton that India would not act “irresponsibly”—nothing more. On December 18 the Indian government declared that it would not succumb to external pressure. The next day Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee denied that any nuclear tests had been planned. In the end, Narasimha Rao abandoned the project but instructed nuclear scientists to be ready for tests within a month of receiving an executive order.4

  Two subsequent prime ministers, H. D. Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral, continued this state of readiness. According to Gujral, “the nuclear file was on our table all the time.”5 With the exception of the two communist factions, all major political parties favored acquiring nuclear weapons. The reason was contained in a much-quoted Gujral-Clinton exchange on September 22, 1997, on the margins of the UN General Assembly session in New York, as recounted by the Indian leader. He told Clinton about an ancient saying from the subcontinent that holds that an Indian is blessed with a third eye. “I told President Clinton that when my third eye looks at the door of the UN Security Council chamber it sees a little sign that says ‘Only those with economic power or nuclear weapons are allowed.’” Having grabbed Clinton’s attention, Gujral added, “It is very difficult [for India] to achieve economic wealth.”6 The moral was that in the absence of India becoming a heavy-weight economy, its only way to getting a permanent seat at the UN Security Council was to become a state with nuclear arms. It is chastening to recall that it was this logic that drove Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to urge his Pakistani scientists at a top-secret gathering in Multan a quarter century earlier to build the bomb within three years.7