WORLDVIEW:The West will continue to look away from the conflict in the disputed region at its peril, writes PATRICK SMYTH
IT HAS been a bloody week in Kashmir. On Monday, 17 people died in clashes with the Indian army and a steady daily attrition has brought the death toll to 94 since the latest outburst of violence began in June after a teenager was killed by a police tear gas shell.
The casualties are overwhelmingly protesting young people, many of them children, armed only with stones, shot by overzealous troops in one of the most militarised regions of the world.
The conflict in the disputed territory has in the last 20 years seen a brutal jihadist terror campaign – largely funded and trained by Pakistan, and largely broken by 2003 – evolve in the last couple of years into what is a separatist popular intifada against India’s 500,000-strong military presence. Major towns in the 97 per cent Muslim Kashmir valley are under indefinite curfew and for thousands of Kashmiris daily life is made miserable by widespread arrests, beatings, torture and “disappearances” of civilians by the authorities
Following a fruitless all-party meeting on the violence convened by Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh in Delhi on Wednesday, separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani has now called for sit-in protests outside Indian military bases on Tuesday as part of an escalating campaign that is certain to trigger a violent response from the army.
Moderate separatists feel let down by Delhi’s failure to engage meaningfully. “India is talking through the barrel of gun,” separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference insists.
Since the partition of India in 1947, Kashmir, unfinished business in the sectarian remaking of the continent, has been a critical flashpoint in India-Pakistan relations, a regional destabilising factor that has been the cause of two of their wars, and is capable of tipping the two nuclear-armed countries again into open conflict.
It has also sorely tested India’s democratic credentials – in the aftermath of the 1989 insurgency, a response to elections rigged by Indian authorities, an army backlash and jihadist violence led to more than 47,000 deaths
Kashmiris complain with some justice, however, that their conflict is largely hidden from the world, their plight ignored because of the need to placate geostrategically important India.
Although the immediate causes of current protests range from the continuing use of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives security forces sweeping powers to shoot, arrest and detain, and false reports that Korans had been burned in the US, underlying the protests has been growing support for secession from India for the notionally autonomous region of Jammu and Kashmir.
At independence, in the partitioning of India, Kashmir was one of hundreds of princely states that were offered by the British the chance to opt for either India or Pakistan. It was ruled by a Hindu maharajah, polo-loving playboy Hari Singh, who favoured independence. But when the region was invaded by tribal Pathans from Pakistan, he agreed to join India in exchange for military help.
Pakistan’s claim remained, and India eventually approached the UN to mediate. It urged a referendum to determine which country Kashmir would join, but, at Pakistan’s insistence, independence was not to be included as an option and the referendum never took place. Now a heavily fortified, disputed border called the line of control divides the region between the two giant neighbours.
But the issue will not die. A poll in the Hindustan Timeslast week found that two-thirds of those living in Kashmir wanted independence. Fewer than one in 10, however, wanted to merge with Pakistan. The survey also reflected the reality that residents of the Hindu-majority Jammu and the mostly Buddhist Ladakh regions did not share the desire for independence. And the Delhi official line remains that Jammu and Kashmir, its only Muslim-majority state, is integral to its national identity.
The issue is hugely sensitive in Indian domestic politics. The right-wing Hindu opposition BJP is particularly virulent in opposing any easing of military powers or concessions to separatists. Up to 200,000 Kashmiri Hindus, who had once lived comfortably beside Muslim neighbours, fled from Kashmir in 1989-1990, driven out by jihadists, and their exodus has provided Hindu extremists with some of the rationale for pogroms against India’s 150 million Muslims.
Throughout its history, India has accommodated an extraordinary diversity. It has coped with widespread Maoist insurrection in the countryside and occasional tribal wars. But through it all, what has been remarkable is the country’s essentially robust multi-ethnic and inherently stable democracy, the largest in the world. It remains an essential pillar of regional security and peace.
But for a major caveat. That would be so if it were not for the bloody suppression of Kashmir by an army that appears to be completely out of control. And Delhi is apparently burning its own bridges – the possibilities of accommodation, of reconciling the majority of Kashmiris to sharing in the Indian state, are being destroyed precisely by that violence and a refusal to talk.
A month before his election, Barack Obama declared that resolving the “Kashmir crisis” was among his “critical tasks”. Since then the West has looked away, preoccupied by Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere. It continues to do so at its peril.