We must not read too much into Pakistan’s proposal for conflict resolution in Kashmir. Instead of chasing a chimera, New Delhi should concentrate on countering the threat that Islamabad poses
There is nothing to get excited over the reported statement by Pakistan’s Minister for Human Rights, Shireen Mazari, that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Government was preparing a proposal for resolving the Kashmir conflict and that it would be ready in a week. Without providing any details of the proposal, she has stated that it would be circulated among “all stakeholders” and presented to Pakistan’s Cabinet. The latter is unlikely to reject it. Director-General of Pakistan’s Institute of Strategic Studies, before assuming her present office, she is known to be close to the Pakistan Army. Hence, any proposal, drafted within her knowledge, is unlikely to contain anything that the Generals disapprove of. The Cabinet knows this as well as the fact that the military has the final say in all matters relating to defence, foreign policy and relations with India. It also knows the price that civilian Government’s pay if they buck the Generals. In any case, the question of any defiance of the Generals is unlikely to arise here because it is the military which has rigged the parliamentary elections, held on July 25, 2018, and installed Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Government in power.
Herein lies the first hurdle. Any proposal blessed by the Pakistan Army would have to rest on two givens. First, Kashmir is the core issue in India-Pakistan relations, which cannot be normalised without a solution to it. Second, a solution acceptable to it must mean — whatever the language used — India handing over at least the Kashmir Valley to it. On its part, India does not regard Kashmir as the core issue in ties. It is cross-border terrorism and an end to it as well as bringing to justice those masterminding the terror attack on Mumbai that lasted from November 26 to 29, 2008, and killed 166 people and nine terrorists. The tenth, Ajmal Khan, was caught and hanged.
Pakistan has done precious little against the lashkar-e-Tayyeba (leT), a terrorist organisation banned by the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia and Australia, which had planned and executed the attack. Islamabad’s formal banning of it is clearly a joke as it continues to enjoy protection of the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. Indeed, the political party established by it, the Milli Muslim league, contested the July parliamentary elections in Pakistan. It is another matter that it performed miserably. Pakistan’s prosecution of Zaki-ur Rehman lakhvi, the man who planned and implemented the November 26, 2008, attack on behalf of the leT from the blueprint to the implementation stage, was clearly conducted as a sham and he was finally released from jail on bail on April 10, 2015. He remains at large, as does Azam Cheema, the mastermind behind the serial train blasts in Mumbai on July 7, 2006, and other operations in India until he ceased to be operationally active about four months before 26/11, reportedly because of diabetes.
As to the “core” issue, India cannot hand over Kashmir not just because it is an integral part of the country but for strategic reasons. Pakistan’s annexation of Kashmir would be the first step towards the realisation of the most important goal of its strategic doctrine — India’s balkanisation. That the latter is the goal becomes clear to anyone who reads the book, India: A Study in Profile, by lt-Col Javed Hassan of the Pakistani Army, who retired as a lieutenant-General. Representing a study conducted for the Pakistani Army’s Faculty of Research and Doctrinal Studies, Command and Staff College, Quetta, it was distributed by the Services Book Club, Rawalpindi. Neither of these could have happened without official sanction from the highest level, which, in turn indicated that it articulated — or was at least in sync with — the official doctrine.
The book states, “India was hostage to a centrifugal rather than a centripetal tradition.” Stating that this country “had a historical inability to exist as a unified state”, lt-Col Hassan identified Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Tamil Nadu and “six” north-eastern States (wonder why he left one of the seven sisters out) as being completely alienated from mainstream India. Husain Haqqani, who refers to the book in his well-known work Pakistan: Between Mosque And Military, writes that Hassan felt that with “some encouragement, the alienated parts of India could become centres of insurgencies that would, at best, dismember India, and, at [the] least weaken India’s ability to seek regional domination for years to come.”
lt-Col Hassan’s book was published in 1990. Pakistan’s assistance to separatist and secessionist elements in India began much earlier. As B Raman pointed out in his book, Terrorist State as a Frontline Ally, this was “was initially the outcome of an assessment made by the Pakistani intelligence community in the early 1950s that keeping India destabilised and its military preoccupied with internal security duties would be one way of neutralising, at little cost, the superiority of the Indian armed forces over their Pakistani counterpart.” Its “proxy war against India dates back to the 1950s and 1960s when it started training and arming the Naga and Mizo hostiles. It suspended it after the humiliating defeat of its Army in 1971 and started it again — this time in Punjab — after General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in 1977.”
letting Pakistan have a role in Kashmir would deprive India of the mountain ranges that now constitute its first line of defence against that country along the loC in Kashmir and the international border in Jammu. This would enable Pakistan to bring its tanks across the mountains to the new border along the plains of Jammu, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, cutting off India’s links with ladakh and making it possible for it to launch a three-pronged armoured attack against India, the other two being from the lahore border and through the deserts of Rajasthan at a place like Jaisalmer. Even if a war does not occur, infiltration of terrorists to the rest of India to ignite Hindu-Muslim tensions and stoke regional ethnic or linguistic fires and/or commit acts of sabotage, would be very difficult to stop.
Clearly, there can be no question of handing over Kashmir or even diluting India’s sovereignty over it. Since this would be unacceptable to Pakistan’s Generals, it is doubtful whether the talks would even start. Instead of wasting time in preparing briefs over it, New Delhi must focus on how to foil Islamabad’s sinister designs.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
