How Can the Modi Government Resolve Kashmir Issue if it Doesn’t Believe in Its Autonomy?

The Modi government is going through a difficult transition, from viewing all Kashmiri Muslims as hostile to acknowledging that they are very much part of the nation. Although he is usually never at a loss for words, it took Prime Minister Narendra Modi an unusually long time to accept that “those who lost their lives during recent disturbances are part of us, our nation.” His offer “to find a permanent and lasting solution within the framework of the constitution” is the first and welcome step in dealing with the situation from a political viewpoint, rather than dismissing it as a ‘law and order’ issue.
Prime Minister Modi’s only problem is that he lacks a political aide with sufficient heft to take the conversation forward. Home minister Rajnath Singh is simply not up to the job. He went to the Kashmir Valley to follow up on the prime minister’s commitment. But, though he tweeted that all those who wished to come and talk to him were welcome, he did not extend an invitation to anyone in particular, especially not the separatists. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Singh’s mission, his second to the Valley in recent weeks, did not result in anything substantial. No leader of consequence met him in Srinagar.

 

The Modi government is apparently taking recourse to reaching out to Muslim leaders in other parts of the country. It is a well observed fact that Indian Muslims, who have their own problems, have never sought to synchronise their views or protests with those of the Kashmiris. Their response to Kashmiri separatism is the same as that of other Indians.
I first got an idea of how Indian Muslims view the Kashmir conflict when I visited an army unit involved in a major killing – that of the top-most Hizbul Mujahideen militant, Maqbool Ilahi in April 1993. Compared to Ilahi, the foremost Hizbul Mujahideen commander of the day, Burhan Wani was a novice. The operation was carried out by an entire army battalion, but the crucial role in tracking him down was played by a Muslim subedar of a Grenadiers battalion who hailed from Bihar. When I asked the subedar how he felt in fighting against people from his own religion, he gave me a withering look, but quite politely insisted that it was ‘us versus them’. And ‘us’ meant all Indians.
And this has been the reality ever since. Remember, the first commander of the 15 Corps that played a dramatic role in preventing the secession of the Valley in 1990 was Lieutenant General M. A. Zaki who hails from Hyderabad. Subsequently, too, there have been Muslim Corps commanders in Srinagar like Ata Hasnain.
Meanwhile in keeping with the situation, there is another sign of regression in the Valley – this is the return of the Border Security Forces (BSF). In the difficult days of 1990, the force was pitchforked into the Valley and it was asked to establish control over the urban areas. It did this with considerable grit and bravery, but also a great deal of brutality for which it has not quite been held accountable. Reports say that some 26 companies of the force have reached the Valley and another 40 or so companies will be sent.
In many ways the root of the problem lies with the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and BSF. Neither force has been trained for riot or crowd control. The BSF, as its name suggests is a border guarding force. The CRPF is everything to everyone – a counter-insurgency force in Chattisgarh, a last-resort armed police elsewhere and a jack-of-all-trades in the Valley. Besides the lack of training, the leadership of these forces is questionable and their organisation is such that they are deployed in penny-packets without effective direct supervision by their Indian Police Service (IPS) leaders.
If there is one force which seems to have retained its balance, it is the Indian army. In the 1990s, it punished, though did not publicise, several of its personnel for excesses. On the other hand, the BSF kicked the can down the road and held no one accountable for several excesses committed by the force, which had a lasting consequence in keeping separatism alive in the Valley.
This time around, too, its senior officers like Northern Army commander Lieutenant General D. S. Hooda have been categorical in denouncing excesses carried out by their men, instead of brushing them under the carpet or the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). In his recent visit to the Valley, army chief Dalbir Singh commended his forces for their counter-infiltration roles and urged them to uphold human rights.
Some retired officers, clad fancifully in their mess uniform caps, may talk tough on TV, but the institutional view that has evolved in the army in the past decade or so has been that it should keep away from internal security duties to the extent it can. Its job is to fight the country’s external enemies and involvement in internal security saps the morale and the soldiers begin to lose their professional edge. This is the reason the army stayed away from fighting Maoists in central India.
The biggest problem the government confronts is in determining the typology of the Kashmir uprising. Does it arise from the lack of job opportunities and poor development? Is it a Pakistani-inspired event and are the stone-throwers all Pakistani agents, as finance minister Arun Jaitley had suggested the other day?
Common sense and experience would suggest neither. Yes, the situation presents a golden opportunity for Islamabad, which makes no secret for its support to militancy and separatism. But the kind of protests that are rocking the state, especially southern Kashmir, definitely have an element of popular support. We would not have had a casualty count of 67 on the 46th day of the agitation otherwise. For this reason, categorising armed militants like Wani as ‘terrorists’ is self-defeating. For the agitators, Wani is a hero. So you have a dichotomy which indicates two opposing viewpoints which are clearly unbridgeable because you cannot, under any circumstances, negotiate with terrorists.
Just what the agitators are seeking is more difficult to answer because accounts suggest they are largely leaderless. Given their hit-and-run actions and the fact that the protests are spread out across a wide swathe of southern Kashmir, it is unlikely that they are being directed by one individual or agency. That does make it difficult for the government to engage them in talks of any kind.
However, it is clear that they represent an edge of the Valley Kashmiri movement which, for the want of a better word, seeks self rule. What was solemnly promised to them by the government of India at the time of accession or even the Delhi Agreement of 1952 has not been given. However, the BJP’s own belief is in the importance of taking away even the shreds of that autonomy that remains. And so here, we have another conundrum, expecting the BJP-led government to negotiate on an issue it simply does not accept – the need for more autonomy to the state.
A quarter century of armed militancy has revealed that there is nothing in the arsenal of the militants that can force India to concede anything. Prime ministers in the past, like P.V. Narasimha Rao, said that the sky was the limit when it came to autonomy within the Indian constitution. Now Modi may be moving down that path. At some point in time, there is a need to clinch a settlement. The constitution is capacious enough to accommodate diversity, because it was designed to be so. However, short-sighted politics and the insecurity of the security establishment have prevented it from being applied in its full depth.
For the Modi government this should not be entirely new, as it has been negotiating with the Naga separatists ever since it came to power and has even reportedly worked out an agreement with them. The problem actually arises from the Muslim-phobia of many BJP leaders and their security advisers. This is a serious problem and will have consequences not just for Jammu and Kashmir but the rest of the country as well.
The Wire August 26, 2016

Chinese chequers: Why India needs to think through its policy on Gilgit-Baltistan and POK

“Uska hal bhi hoga [That problem too would be solved],” said the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Chief Mohan Bhagwat on Sunday, referring to the so-called Azad Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and Aksai Chin, parts of Jammu and Kashmir that are not with India. Whether occupied by Pakistan or China, they had to be brought back, he added.
Parliament had twice passed a unanimous resolution proclaiming that Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, or POK, was an integral part of India and even though it was somewhat complicated, the government would find a way out, Bhagwat said, while speaking at a meeting in Agra whose aim was to encourage Hindu couples to procreate more, in the face of a “demographic imbalance” caused by what the RSS characterised as a disproportionate increase in India’s Muslim population.

 Bhagwat was following up on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks on August 12 at an all party meeting on the situation in Kashmir. There was a need for the government to highlight the plight of the people of POK to the world community, Modi had said. Revisiting the theme in his Independence Day address, Modi expressed his appreciation for the positive response he had got for his August 12 remarks from “the people of Balochistan, the people of Gilgit and the people of POK”.
That has been enough to set the proverbial cat among the pigeons.

The demographics

Many Indian officials have, somewhat grandiosely, claimed that Modi’s remarks were the “uncoiling of history” with a specific strategic objective. But whether, in seeking to upend a studied Indian policy to formalise the partition of the state, the Modi government has thought through its endgame is difficult to determine.
To take first things first, and in view of the concerns expressed by Bhagwat over the decline of the growth of Hindu population at the same meeting, the BJP-led government may like to consider that recovering POK would add roughly 6.4 million, mainly Sunni Muslims, to the current 13 million population of J&K and decisively tilt the political balance against the BJP and like-minded parties, in the state. It would further contribute, albeit marginally, to the rise of the proportion of Muslims in the national population as well.
If this populace is not hostile to India – and that is a very big assumption – regaining the so-called Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan will be a major strategic gain for the country, enabling India to dominate Pakistan on one side, cutting off its links with China, and giving it access to friendly Afghanistan and onwards to Central Asia.
Of course, these are assumptions, but surely they should figure in the calculus of policy-making given what appears to be some sort of a strategic design.

Gilgit-Baltistan

India’s case on Gilgit-Baltistan rests on the accession of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to India in 1947. From 1852, the British had maintained a Resident in Srinagar and a Political Agent in Gilgit Wazarat, a tract of semi-autonomous states like Nagar and Hunza, north of the Kishenganga, to keep a watch on the Russian empire.
In March 1935, after the Soviets established control of Central Asia, the British took the territory on a 60-year lease from the Maharaja and it was administered by a British officer and policed by the Gilgit Scouts.
On August 1, 1947 the British terminated the lease and handed the territory back to the Maharaja. On October 31, two officers of the Gilgit Scouts, Major William Brown and Capt SA Mathieson, along with Subedar Major Babar Khan, a relative of the Mir of Hunza, led a revolt of the state forces and the Gilgit Scouts, arrested the new governor Ghansara Singh and hoisted the Pakistani flag at the residency.
Karachi later claimed that the Rajas of Nagar and Hunza had acceded to Pakistan, but the only record of Gilgit’s accession seems to have been a wireless message to Pakistan, requesting that they send a political agent to take charge from the republic that had been set up in the wake of the coup. In any case, none of this was legally tenable since they were part of J&K, and the only authority who could legally accede to anyone was Maharaja Hari Singh, who signed the Instrument of Accession to India.
Non-Muslim soldiers, many of them Sikhs or Gurkhas were killed or captured and the Muslim rebels constituted irregular forces, later supplemented by Pakistani regulars who attacked Skardu, Dras, Kargil and Leh. Skardu held out heroically for eight months before surrendering, the Indian Army managed to clear the Pakistani forces from Dras, Kargil and Leh before the ceasefire came into force on December 31, 1948.
Pakistan also claimed legal rights through the so-called 1949 Karachi Agreement signed with Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, the supreme leader of “Azad Kashmir”. No copy of this agreement can be found in the Pakistan government records. The “Azad Kashmir” government never had any control over the region, and so handing it to Pakistan was a sleight of hand to disguise outright annexation of territory that legally belongs even now to the State of Jammu and Kashmir, whose capitals are Srinagar and Jammu.
The extent of official British complicity is not clear. Brown apparently received a high British award in 1948. But, as brought out by C Dasgupta in his 2002 book, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, it is also visible in the coordination of the British High Commissioners in Karachi and New Delhi who got the British commanders of both forces to ensure that the Indian Air Force did not interdict Pakistani air supply missions to their forces in Gilgit.

The changes

Since Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s time, the Pakistani armed forces have pushed in Sunni settlers and encouraged sectarian conflict in a bid to coerce the Shia residents of the region. In May 1988, Sunni tribals from the North Western Frontier Province (known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since 2010) were allowed to rampage around Gilgit, killing more than 150 people before the police stepped in.
Such episodes of violence have been repeated since. These tensions were enhanced after the opening of the Karakoram Highway, as it led to Sunni settlers from the NWFP and Punjab setting up businesses in Gilgit and altering its sectarian balance. In the 1990s, Sunni dominated areas in Chilas, Darel and Tangir hosted camps for those fighting against India in the Kashmir Valley. Subsequently, the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and the Harkatul Mujahideen established camps in the region. In 2005, Aga Ziauddin, the Imam of the main Shia mosque in Gilgit was killed, again leading to a cycle of violence in which more than 20 people were killed.

All the violence has led to a powerful nationalist movement, demanding self rule and independence calling the region “Balawaristan”. While India has not in the past asserted its legal claim to the region strongly enough, it does have the duty to draw the attention of the world to the blatant violence and ethnic cleansing policies being pursued by the Pakistani government, on grounds that it is the legal claimant of the region, as well as in terms of international humanitarian law.
The Pakistan Supreme Court had, in 1999, directed Islamabad to provide fundamental rights to the region, and to draw up a system that would enable the people to have an elected government. So finally, a decade later in August 2009, a Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self-Governance Order was passed by the Pakistani Cabinet and signed by President Zardari. It gave self rule to the region, now renamed Gilgit-Baltistan, and created a Legislative Assembly and a council to oversee this. However, as the origin of the order revealed, Gilgit-Baltistan remained an administrative, not a constitutional part of Pakistan.
Thereafter chief ministers and governors have been appointed for the region, but real power rests, as it always has, in the hands of the Minister for Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan in the federal cabinet.

New perspective

The Modi government’s new perspective was evident when Pakistan announced elections in Gilgit-Baltistan under the new dispensation in June 2015. New Delhi objected to the procedure saying that the region “is an integral part of India”. It denounced the sham efforts at providing self governance for the people of Gilgit-Baltistan, noting that the fact that a Pakistani federal minister was the governor of the region “speaks for itself”.
However, those who today claim that India should have recovered all of the state of Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan control before agreeing to a ceasefire need to read the Official History of the war, Operations in Jammu & Kashmir (1947-48), published by the Ministry of Defence.

It was with enormous grit and sacrifice, and some ingenuity, that India managed to secure Poonch and recover Kargil and Dras on the eve of the ceasefire to ensure our ability to hold Ladakh, the official history reveals. Repeated efforts to move beyond Uri were foiled. The people of the so-called Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan were hostile to India. It would have possibly taken several years of fighting to recover the entire territory.
Whether or not it would have been wise to do so was a matter of judgement of the leaders of the day, and the hawks of today should note that the decision was not just Nehru’s, but also involved Sardar Patel.
Coming back to the present. Today, there is a shift. People in Gilgit-Baltistan are not too happy with Pakistani rule but, even so, while some leaders may thank Modi for raising their cause, it would be folly to see this as an invitation to liberate them from Pakistani rule. What they are looking for is what a section of the Valley is seeking – self rule.

The China factor

Shaksgam Valley in the Karakorum Mountains/Wikimedia Commons

And let us not forget, there is another factor that is now in play: China.
It is a major presence in the region, by virtue of being a neighbour. In 1963, Pakistan ceded 5,180 sq kms of the Shaksgam Valley to Beijing. In the late 1960s, China began constructing the Karakoram Highway to link Kasghar in Xinjiang province of China with Abbotabad in Pakistan, through the Khunjerab pass.
Earlier in 2009, India had also formally objected to China undertaking projects in the region, noting that:

“Pakistan has been in illegal occupation of parts of the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir since 1947”

and that the Chinese side was fully aware of

“India’s position and our concerns about Chinese activities in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir”.

You can be sure that any Indian move to recover the region for India will be resisted not only by Pakistan, but China as well, which is digging into the region so as to create a cushion between the jihadi bad-lands of its ally Pakistan.
So, the Chinese have been active in a range of hydro and road-building projects such as those relating to the Neelum Valley, Diamer Bhasha dam, the extension of the Karakoram Highway, the Sost dry port, the Bunji dam etc.
Last year when, during the visit of Xi Jinping to Pakistan, China announced massive investments in what is now called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, India protested again because the corridor passed through Gilgit-Baltistan. The corridor will comprise of oil pipelines, roads and a railway linking Gwadar in Balochistan with Kasghar.

Need for clarity

Indian policy towards Jammu & Kashmir and its relationship to Pakistan has never been explicitly spelt out. New Delhi made a commitment to hold a plebiscite and gave the state special status under its constitution. It has also signalled that it is willing to accept a de facto partition of the state. This was most clearly manifested by the acceptance of the ceasefire of December 31, 1948, when it secured the current boundaries of the state which would

1. Include Kashmiri-speaking Muslims
2. Allow Pakistan some depth in relation to its Punjabi heartland. 

The Indian view was also shaped by the demographics of the state. Having safeguarded Ladakh, the Valley of Kashmir and the Jammu and Poonch areas, the government probably felt that leaving the balance to Pakistan would satisfy it. After all, when all of India had been partitioned, why not partition the state as well?
Later in 1972, Mrs Indira Gandhi pushed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to make the ceasefire line the international border during the Simla talks. The wily Bhutto went along with the argument and agreed to change its nomenclature to the Line of Control and promised to follow it up by hardening it into an international border.
In 2007-2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his readiness to freeze the boundaries as they were, and soften them to enable the two parts of Kashmir to interact.
By doing what he is doing, Modi may be simply raising the pitch on Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan as a tactical device to soften up Islamabad. In that case, he cannot be faulted, given Pakistan’s recalcitrance in refusing to abandon terrorism as an instrument of state policy.
And in all fairness, Modi’s recent remarks are, indeed, fairly innocuous.
But the more sinister sounding background briefings about the “uncoiling of history” do suggest the need for caution. If you are seeking to overturn the policy of the past, you better think through the consequences in all their starkness, including the risk of an India-Pakistan war, with an important supporting role played by China.
As the Balochis and the Gilgit-Baltistanis who are looking to Modi for succour, they may have to be told, at some point of time, that this could well be another jumla – an empty promise.
scroll.in August 25, 2016

Is it really in India’s interest to deepen Pakistan’s turmoil and help break it up?

Since 1990 India has had a consistent policy towards Pakistan: “Let them hit us with whatever they can, we will harden our defences but not retaliate in kind." The policy has been remarkably successful. In this period, Pakistan has descended to chaos, whereas India, the world’s third-largest economy, is talked of as a potential great power.
However, over the years, politicians, many of them from the Bharatiya Janata Party, have instead argued that this success is somehow a failure – and in not hitting back at Pakistan, India has been the loser.
This is the worm that is eating the insides of the Modi government’s Pakistan policy.
Modi, on assuming power, made dramatic outreaches to Pakistan, such as calling Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in ceremony and his drop-in visit to Lahore on his birthday last December. But he has lacked the stamina that is so vital in dealing with Pakistan.
There is a view, of course, that he has not been able to align his domestic political compulsions of winning state elections on a strong anti-Pakistan ticket, with his foreign policy of seeking regional stability and pre-eminence.
In recent remarks to an all-party meeting on Kashmir and on Independence Day, Modi has now sent an over-the-top signal, expressing concern over human rights violations in Balochistan. In doing so Modi and his team are fully aware of the fact that this will only confirm the Pakistani establishment’s worst fears about India’s role in aiding the Baloch insurgency.
This is payback for Pakistan’s claim that it only provides moral and political support for the Kashmiri insurgency, whereas the grim reality was listed by Modi in his speech at the all-party meeting on Kashmir – 34,000 AK-47s, 5,000 RPG launchers, 90 light machine guns, 12,000 revolvers, 63 tonnes of explosives seized and 5,000 foreign militants killed by the security forces since the start of the 1989-1990.
A word about Balochistan. In 1947, the Khan of Kalat (which is modern Balochistan), along with his adviser advocate Mohammed Ali Jinnah, sought the status of Nepal from his British overlords. Jinnah argued that all princely states had the right to do what they wanted – even seek independence. Jinnah hoped to embarrass and cause problems for India. However, later, when the Khan of Kalat wanted to remain independent, Jinnah made an about-turn and the Pakistanis subsequently forcibly annexed Kalat. Nehru, the man of principles that he was, insisted all through that princely states had no right to independence and specifically opposed Baloch independence, along with other claimants – Bhopal, Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir.
Dealing with Pakistan
India's policy on Pakistan was not set by IK Gujaral, as many believe, but by another “tough guy” – Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar. It was he who refused to authorise retaliatory covert operations against Pakistan in 1991. This was a time when the situation in Punjab was none too good and Kashmir was going up in flames. That is why barring the late Sarabjit Singh, Islamabad does not have a single Indian against whom it has built up a case for terrorist actions on Pakistani soil, whereas India has a massive dossier on how Pakistan has armed, equipped, trained tens of thousands of militants to operate in Jammu and Kashmir as well as scores of terrorists, Indians and Pakistanis, to set off bombs and attack targets in other parts of India.
Whether through Pakistani nationals or disaffected Indians sheltering in Pakistan, terrorist outrages against India steadily grew, culminating in the ghastly Mumbai attack in 2008, yet India held its hand and endured.
As Pakistan itself began to suffer a blowback in the hands of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Islamabad sought to blame India for its travails. But its claims found few takers. Charges of Indian interference in Balochistan or Federally Administered Tribal Areas remained what they were – allegations without a shred of proof.
In 2009, in the context of sharing real time information on terrorist threats after his Sharm-al-Sheikh meeting with his Pakistani counterpart, Manmohan Singh, in a fit of generosity, agreed to put the following into the joint statement:

“Prime Minister Gilani mentioned that Pakistan has some information on threats in Balochistan and other areas".

There was a furore in India because it was felt that Singh had needlessly pandered to Islamabad’s paranoia. India had been doing nothing, and now the government was giving Pakistan a means of claiming equivalence with India’s constant references to Pakistani activities in Jammu and Kashmir.
Mumbai and Sharm-el-Sheikh effectively ended Manmohan Singh’s hope of détente with Pakistan. The Indians were frustrated by the turn of events because it seemed that every effort to reach out to Pakistan was being met by bigger and more elaborate acts of terrorism whose origins, despite claims to the contrary, seemed to reach to the Pakistani deep state.
When the Modi government came to power, it reflected the deep unhappiness of Indians with their condition and Modi’s powerful electoral rhetoric helped him to take his party to the first majority government in the country since 1989.
Effective deterrence
Pakistan began to worry about the Indian attitude towards Pakistan in the run up to the General Elections of 2014. Foreign policy had not been a major issue in the campaign. Rhetoric against Pakistan was par for the course, but nothing unusual. It was at this time that Ajit Doval’s comment in February 2014, on how a new government may respond to Pakistani sub-conventional conflict surfaced:

“You can do one Mumbai, but you may lose Balochistan”.

Later, after he was appointed National Security Adviser and speaking in October 2014 at the Munich Security Conference meeting organised in New Delhi, Doval spoke of the need to maintain “effective deterrence” against terrorism emanating from Pakistan.
Just what this implied was not clear, except that when using the language more common to nuclear weapons, it would clearly mean the capacity to hit back in a like manner. In the speech, Doval also disclosed the other, international leg of the Modi policy – seek the passage of an international convention on terrorism as a means of cornering Pakistan diplomatically.
Let us be clear all we have as of now is a throwaway line of Doval dating from before he became NSA, the capture of a naval officer who Pakistan alleges was operating in Balochistan and now Modi’s statement expressing concern over the human rights issues in Balochistan.
None of this makes for a compelling case that India is, indeed, sheltering, arming and training Balochis or setting off bombs in Balochistan. What it does reflect, though, is a shift of gears in New Delhi, signalling its intention of a new direction with reference to Pakistan.
In great measure this has a domestic context. Attacking Pakistan plays well with a domestic audience during elections. Modi’s bitterest attacks on Pakistan came in the context of his attacks on Arvind Kerjriwal and the Delhi State Assembly Elections, and earlier in the Gujarat elections that led to his appointment as chief minister in 2001.
As of now, the BJP’s main focus is in winning the state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. The party and Modi assign this as the highest political priority they have. So we may see even more rhetoric and threats, possibly accompanied by tit-for-tat bombardment on the Line of Control, especially in the Jammu area.
Walking the talk
However in our capacities we are nowhere near Doval’s “effective deterrence” on terrorism. Pakistan retains the initiative in this area for the simple reason that it has the infrastructure in terms of trained personnel already in place for carrying out attacks against soft targets, which does not require any particular bravery or effort.
On the other hand, escalating from rhetoric to actual cross-border attacks would actually hurt India more than Pakistan. Despite periods of firing, the ceasefire holds. Its breakdown will enable Islamabad to step up infiltration through providing cover for incoming militants, and by destroying large portions of the LOC fencing.
India can, of course, stir up trouble in Pakistan through the same route that Islamabad uses against India – the Gulf. Pakistan has numerous fault-lines – religious, sectarian, ethnic differences among its people – which can be made wider. But at the end of the day, we need an answer to that big question: Is it in India’s interest to deepen Pakistan’s turmoil and possibly help break it up?
This is a question with multiple answers and intriguing consequences. Encouraging the breakup of a nuclear armed state is a high-risk strategy with a significant risk of a blowback. This could range from the flow of refugees into India, to nuclear weapons and materials falling into the hands of bad guys and to an actual nuclear strike.
With power, they say, comes responsibility and so, the world community would expect New Delhi to pick up the pieces of the country it breaks. Remember Colin Powell admonition to George W Bush on the war in Iraq: “You break it, you own it.”
Does India have the time or the money to afford this policy? Clearly not.
The current decades are our moment of opportunity to achieve our most important national aim – the elimination of poverty through sustained high economic growth. For this we need regional peace, not tit-for-tat covert wars.
As far back as 1992, the confession of Lal Singh aka Manjit Singh revealed the Pakistani strategy of targeting of institutions and symbols of India’s economic potential such as its Stock Exchange, nuclear power plants, and busy commercial centres and hotels with a view of undermining India as an investment destination.
And this is where we come back to the wisdom of our past leaders from Chandrashekhar onwards. They clearly understood that economic growth was our key national objective, not revenge or undermining some other country. So there was need to rein in the national ego, deflect blows as they come and focus on the issue of transforming the lives of the poor and wretched of the land. Their foresight has become clearer as Pakistan slipped into an abyss and India is seen as the future of the world economy.
A regression at this stage, largely driven by electoral considerations and the egos of ultranationalist hawks, is a recipe for disaster. We need to grasp the essence of Deng Xiaoping’s 24-character strategy which was to advise his successors to keep the Chinese national ego in check so as to become a world leader that China has become.

“Observe calmly;
secure our position;
cope with affairs calmly;
hide our capacities and bide our time;
be good at maintaining a low profile; and
never claim leadership.”

India, too, needs to secure its position and deal with its internal problems calmly rather than throw its weight around in the neighbourhood.
Scroll.in August 18, 2016

PM's Baloch reference only for Bhakts

Independence Day is an annual occasion for celebration — and of reflection — in a sense of summing up the year gone by, and setting benchmarks for the year to come. We don’t have much to celebrate this year; we’ll celebrate the good monsoon only in the coming year.
But there are other downers to ruin the mood. Despite two years of promise, the economy remains bumpy, tensions in the countryside exacerbated by triumphalist Hindutva hard-liners pose a grave risk to the social peace of large parts of northern India, and the situation in Jammu & Kashmir is, perhaps, the worst since the 2008 Amarnath yatra agitation.






Narendra Modi was elected prime minister to transform the economic life and governance of the country. He says he remains committed to those goals though the problems are obvious. Though the economy is on the mend, the recovery process is taking an uncommonly long time and has yet to gain momentum. The persistent refusal of private sector investment to put down serious money in the economic plans of the country is leading to what is being called ‘growth without investment’ which is now accompanying jobless growth.
For the common man, there is as yet no respite from inflation with almost all staples like dal and vegetables selling at astronomical prices. A consumption bump of sorts will come with the release of the arrears of the 7th Pay Commission, but it is well known that this is the worst way of trying to achieve high economic growth.
The problem of governance has emerged with the rise of the gau rakshaks in states ruled by the BJP such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, or where the party is a member of the coalition, as in Punjab. The issue, which pits the upper caste Hindus against the Muslim minority and Dalits, has the potential to destroy India’s rural economy and social fabric. Some of this has been recognised by the PM in his Independence Day address; the only problem is that while he senses the political danger of alienating the Dalit community, he sees no need to address the equally dangerous effort to marginalise the Muslim population.
The situation in the foreign policy front is equally dismal. New Delhi seems to have lost the plot in dealing with its difficult customers —Pakistan and China. There is an argument that, given the way that these two countries have pushed around India in the past, the Modi government’s hawkish tit-for-tat approach is a long-needed corrective. But foreign policy is not about satisfying the national ego and assuaging national angst. It is about preserving and extending one’s national interests. It is here that the sheer negativism of the approach stands out. The PM’s references to Balochistan may have gladdened the hearts of his bhakts, but they are likely to achieve little, other than to satisfy our ego. No matter how you look at it, no country in the world questions Balochistan’s accession to Pakistan, whereas virtually no country in the world categorically recognises Jammu & Kashmir’s accession to India.
The border conversation with China or the effort to pin down Pakistan on the issue of terrorism have little to show for themselves. There seems to be alarming subtext in a lot of government declarations that India would not mind a bit of a scrap, if push came to shove. The least that our chicken hawks should consider is the lamentable state of our military which could well land us with egg on our face, were we to seek some ill-advised military adventure.
Indeed, when doing the sums on Independence Day, the one area we find that the plus side of the ledger is empty, is that of the defence services. The much vaunted Make in India is proving to be like the proverbial tale of the blind men and the elephant. Figuring out just what ‘Make in India’ means is proving to be equally problematic. But that is the least of the worries, the bigger ones relate to the delays in carrying out the deep restructuring and reform of the military services themselves.
The performance of the Prime Minister himself has been less than stellar. It took him four weeks to react to the Una incident which took place in a state that he had run since 2002. However, the hopes of the country continue to rest in his leadership. He remains the premier political figure of the country and the citizens continue to place their trust in him. His own inclination is to avoid controversial issues and seek the high ground where he can. He now seems to be adopting a strategy of bashing Pakistan to seize the nationalist high ground with his core constituency at home. The problem is that verbally chastising Islamabad is one thing, but trying to execute those policies on the ground are a recipe for disaster.
As it is, there is a feeling that his effort to consolidate his political position by eliminating as many Opposition ruled governments in states, and winning as many state assembly elections as he can, have detracted from the ability of the government to deliver on its promises of good governance and economic growth. But if in the consolidation of his government the constitutional and social order are damaged, there could be long-term negative consequences for the country.
Mid Day August 15, 2016

Modi's focus on Pakistan in J&K is one-dimensional

At a public level, the Modi government has articulated a desire to deal with the Jammu & Kashmir issue within the parameters outlined by Atal Bihari Vajpayee -  “Insaniyat, jamhuriyat, Kashmiriyat”.But in reality the government is working along quite distinct lines from those taken by past governments.

The outline of the Modi strategy rests firmly on the belief that without Pakistan there would be no problem in Jammu & Kashmir.

Modi's strategy in Jammu & Kashmir rests firmly on the belief that without Pakistan there would be no problem in Jammu & Kashmir.(Pictured: A masked Kashmiri holds up the Pakistani flag during a protest in Srinagar, J&K)

So, the government’s focus will be on Pakistan’s misdeeds.

Terrorist actions will get a tough response. The government will seek to isolate Pakistan across the world as an irresponsible state sponsor of terrorism.

Confusion

There were some confusing moments during Modi's recent speech about the need to talk about all its four parts - Jammu, Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and POK.

Just why this should be done, considering there are no real problems in Jammu and Ladakh is not clear.

If the PM is signalling the need to focus on regaining POK, then he should say so - it is a perfectly legitimate aim.

It would give India a huge geo-political leverage, although I am not sure whether the BJP would be happy to see the proportion of Muslim voters rise sharply in the state and the country.

At some level, it seems the issue is of “Kashmir” - the real estate - in opposition to Kashmir - the place - where millions of people live, the majority of them Muslims. 

Holding on to the real estate is fine but when it comes to the people, especially the ones who are agitating, there is less clarity.

The PM is unhappy, as he noted in his speech that - “children are not able to study, apple produce is not able to reach to the mandis, shopkeepers are not getting their daily income and government offices are not able to implement works of public interest”.

But who are the agitators? Are they dupes of the Pakistanis? Overground workers of the jihadi organisations? Or, to use the favourite phrase of our politicians, “misguided youth”?

We don’t know how they will be dealt with, because we don’t know how the government classifies them.

Sure, as a senior security official told Mail Today on Tuesday - there will be restraint “in dealing with citizens”, though “terrorists will not be spared”.

The problem is that neither the PM, nor the security official, gave any indication as to whether those involved in the current agitation fell in the “citizen” or “terrorist” bracket - and herein lies the real problem. 

Complexity

Once again, the PM spoke of the Vajpayee path. But that path was much more complex than the one we are seeing unfold under Modi and Doval.

Pakistan-origin violence was far more intense in the Vajpayee years, yet he reached out to Islamabad and succeeded in obtaining a ceasefire on the LoC in 2003.

This had a huge impact in reducing the casualties of service personnel and civilians in the border zone and took away a crucial cover under which the militants infiltrated from Pakistan.

Importantly it enabled India to build a border fence which has curtailed the movements of men and weaponry.Another key effort of the Vajpayee government was to seek a ceasefire with the Hizbul Mujahideen.

Kashmiri protesters throw stones towards Indian government forces

The government took the bold step of declaring a ceasefire to facilitate the process in 2000.

Just why and how this was sabotaged is another story, suffice to say, the opponents of the efforts do not live only on the other side of the LoC.

All this enabled the first genuinely fair elections to the J&K Assembly in 2002.

What we have today is a one dimensional policy of focusing on Pakistan as the sole cause of the problems in Jammu & Kashmir.

So, the government seems determined to take the war to the Pakistani camp.

Whether or not it can succeed is another matter.

+5

The Modi government plans to isolate Pakistan across the world as an irresponsible state sponsor of terrorism. (Pictured: Masked Kashmiri protesters throw stones at police).

Few results

The thinly-veiled anti-Pakistan edge of the Modi government’s global anti-terrorist campaign has yielded few results in the past two years.

Far from being isolated, Pakistan has succeeded in rebuilding its American ties, strengthened its Chinese ties, and established a new bridge to Russia.

Since Modi is the Prime Minister of India and the head our government, he is fully entitled to take a new approach to a chronic problem.

A caveat that emerges from his approach is whether the government have thought through the end game in relation to Pakistan and J&K - or are they merely retailing slogans under the guise of policy.

Mail Today August 14, 2016

Modi Will Not Get Very Far in Kashmir By Pretending the Problem Doesn’t Exist

The Modi government’s strategy for what are, with some understatement, called “law and order” issues, work on three tracks. The first is of  delivering homilies,the second of being relentlessly tough in all circumstances, sometimes more in words than in deeds. Union home minister Rajnath Singh’s statement blaming Pakistan for the Jammu and Kashmir disturbances appears to have created a third track, where the government holds Islamabad responsible for the ongoing crisis.
So, the prime minister’s response to the “gau rakshak” rampage was the homily on the necessity of differentiating between  fake gau rakshaks and, presumably, the good ones. And in his over-the-top style, Modi made a grandiloquent declaration that “if you have to shoot, shoot me, but not my Dalit brothers.” No one is about to take up Modi at his word, but he knows that. It is another addition to the list of his famous jumlas, or false promises. On Kashmir, he carefully spoke about the national love for Kashmir – not for Kashmiris though – and somewhat unconvincingly repeated the Vajpayee formula for dealing with the issues through “insaniyat, jamurihat and Kashmiriyat.”
The government’s tough track has been visible in dealing with Pakistan, the Patidar agitation in Gujarat and the Maoists of Chattisgarh. And now it is showing up in the handling of Jammu & Kashmir, where over 55 persons have been killed and 1,000 injured and there has been a continuous curfew in many parts of the state for over a month in the face of what are essentially violent civil protests. The only answer the government seems to have is more of the same, and now there is talk of handing over parts of the state to the Army.

 

The third track was on display on Wednesday when the government got the National Investigation Agency to put out the confession of a captured Lashkar-e-Tayyeba terrorist, Bahadur Ali, in order to suggest that the whole agitation in the Valley is being run out of Pakistan  and that LeT cadres have been asked to throw grenades at security forces while mingling among civil protestors. Actually, till now there has been no recorded instance of a police officer being killed through firing from the mob or grenade attacks. Confessions are not even considered evidence in Indian courts, so the whole purpose of the NIA’s exercise was part of a political theatre to back up the home minister’s performance on Kashmir during the debate in the Lok Sabha.

What’s missing is statecraft
Anyone familiar with Kashmir knows that there are at least 150 hard-core militants – about half the number being Pakistanis, probably belonging to the LeT – in the Valley at any given time. Also, that July, August and September are months of high infiltration when Pakistan sends its replenishments in terms of men and material into Kashmir. A Bahadur Ali by himself means little; there have been scores, if not hundreds before him. We have killed many, caught a few and in that scale he is not particularly significant. Pakistanis do use sleeper assets, but at a time of their own choosing and there are no indications – except claims by the authorities – that the disturbances are being masterminded by Islamabad.
All this is surprising, considering that the government Modi heads traces its DNA to the sages of ancient India, none of whom is more revered than Chanakya,  whose niti (policy), they believe is the cure all for India’s sorry modern-day plight.  Both India’s adversaries and its votaries attribute to the legendary Mauryan adviser, the strategy of handling politically difficult issues by an amalgam of  saam (persuasion), daam (purchase), dand (punishment), bhed (division).
Even a cursory survey of the past 69 years of the history of the republic, most of them under the rule of the Congress party, will show that these have, indeed, been the principal means through which this famously diverse nation has been kept as one.
It was persuasion that ended the separatist threat in Tamil Nadu whose residue is still visible in the state’s opposition to the GST. In the North-east, military means have been combined with generous largesse to the elite and in a region replete with tribal identities, sowing division, based on these identities has not been difficult. New Delhi’s response to the Mizo rebellion was harsh, but it quickly changed tracks and resorted to a successful strategy of purchase and suasion, in an operation that gave current NSA Ajit Doval his reputation.
Separatism in Punjab was scary, if only because it was so close to the heartland. But fortunately it did not have much political support because of its use of terrorist tactics and so a policy of relentless punishment finished off the Khalistani movement.
J&K, being a big headache, has seen all four strategies being liberally employed at all times. The huge dand (punishment) component does not require much elucidation;  suffice to say it numbers hundreds of thousands of soldiers and policemen and it has, in the past, seen the extensive use of torture and extra-judicial executions. The bhed part has been manifested in the successful, if dangerous, strategies of raising counter-militant forces in the mid-1990s to take on the militancy.
Suasion has been forgotten in the mists of time when Pandit Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah signed the Delhi Agreement in 1952, or when Mirza Afzal Beg and G. Parthasarthy worked out an accord in 1974 under the auspices of Indira Gandhi and the Sheikh. Note, both the agreements were not between individuals, but between the Union of India and the putative representatives of the state of Jammu & Kashmir.
Daam has wide currency across the state and was actually confirmed by no less than the minister of state for external affairs,  General V.K. Singh who acknowledged, after an initial “misunderstood” statement, that money was paid to some politicians “to win hearts and minds of people.”  Subsequently, A.S. Dulat, who headed both the R&AW and the Intelligence Bureau,  bluntly disclosed that no one was immune to bribes in J&K, not the militants, not politicians and not the separatists. “Over the years, they have all been paid by intelligence agencies.”
The strategies employed by the first NDA government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, are both instructive and illuminating. Even while seeking to engage with Pakistan, despite obstacles like the Kargil back-stab, Vajpayee remained focused on the need to fix the Kashmir problem. The most dramatic manifestation of this was the 2000 ceasefire negotiated with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which could have led to an end of Kashmir’s armed militancy. Unfortunately, here too, there was an element of back-stabbing from within the system and without, and the initiative failed.  Yet, Vajpayee captured hearts and minds in J&K so effectively that today, a decade and a half later, people, including Modi, still swear by his policies – located as they were, within the bounds of insaniyat (humanity).

Terrorists and militants are not the same
What is striking is that the Modi government’s only response  has been “dand”. True, ministers have decried the havoc caused by shot-guns, but police-bureaucrats have opined that there is no alternative to these weapons. More forces have been rushed and there is talk of giving the Army a larger role in policing the Valley. And now we have the NIA suggesting that the whole thing is actually being run by Islamabad. No doubt Pakistan is fishing in troubled waters, but it doesn’t have to do much; the shoddy handling of the issue by New Delhi is doing the needful.
The main way of doing this is to refuse to acknowledge that the issue has local roots. Another is the insistence that Burhan Wani was a “terrorist” and not a “militant”. Clearly,  the government does not want to give any quarter to the sentiment that has caused the state to be in a state of turmoil for the last 30 years. The problem with using emotive  rather than analytical categories is that you usually end up with the wrong answers.
Like it or not, there is a difference between a “terrorist” and a “militant”. The latter fights against the state and its symbols – the police, army etc – while the former targets innocents. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Mumbai attacks of 2008 where men, women and children were targeted was an act of pure terrorism. Whereas the Pathankot attack, which targeted a military facility comes under the category of militancy. There is no evidence that Wani targeted, or intended to target, non-combatants. Terror is not an “ism” as such but a method – where the perpetrator, by attacking unarmed and helpless people, aims to overawe them, and thus the state.
Both the terrorist and the militant live by the sword, and they must be defeated by the sword, just as Wani was. There is, however,  a difference: You cannot negotiate with a terrorist, but you can with a militant, just as Vajpayee sought to do in 2000.
Indeed, Chankaya niti suggests that the sword alone cannot be the instrumentality. A wise state uses a mix of strategies depending on the situation and common sense suggests that the most drastic is adopted only when there is no option. Unfortunately, in the current situation, daam is not working. You can buy off politicians and militants, but you cannot buy off a mob. Neither will bhed work with the centrists and mainstream politicians scared to speak given the current public mood.
The problem of persuasion, or saam, is more complex. The fact that the BJP as a party believes in closer integration of J&K with the Indian Union makes the use of saam even more complicated. Indeed, a key ideological shibboleth is its belief in the need to delete Article 370 from the constitution – the one that gives J&K a unique relationship with the Indian Union. So there can be no question of addressing the sentiment of the separatists and their supporters that they lack something by way of self-governance. This despite the fact that the same government is willing to address the sentiment of an equally important group – the separatist Nagas led by the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah).
So this leaves dand, then, as the only way out. Home minister Rajnath Singh is in any case always inclined to give a “muh torh jawaab” (‘jaw breaking’ response)  to adversaries. Brilliant tacticians like Doval have no strategy except to declare that India would exercise utmost restraint with  “our own citizens”, even while coming down hard on “terrorists” –  a distinction that does little or no justice to the situation obtaining in Jammu and Kashmir. So we seem destined to live with the self-defeating, self-destructive option of dand, and more dand.
The Wire August 11, 2016