Kashmir the cause of discord

By Fazal Mehmood

A Gallup Outlook opinion poll in Pakistan reveals that there is no solution to Indo-Pakistan hostility unless the Kashmir issue is resolved to the satisfaction of Pakistan. Seventy nine per cent of Pakistanis feel no other option is acceptable to them; and 54 per cent of Pakistanis consider India as their enemy. Forty seven per cent consider Indian Prime Minister’s recent peace initiative as a "Gimmick". A peace formula brokered by the USA is acceptable to 62 per cent of the population; and 69 per cent are unwilling to accept the LoC as the International border between the two countries.

In view of such a hardened posture the peaceniks comprising members of parliament and media who recently visited Pakistan should be disappointed. For over five decades Pakistanis had been taught to consider Kashmir as the territory India had occupied by force; and as a Muslim majority state, the state should have been an integral part of Pakistan. Moreover, the Kashmir issue is a staple diet whether it is a democratic dispensation or military dictatorship in Pakistan. The talk of the rights of Kashmiris by Pakistan is a big joke when such rights are denied to people in Pakistan. It is indeed much easier to seal a hole in a baby’s heart, a la Noor Fatima, than to "liberate the future from the past". If Pakistani rulers want American intervention in Kashmir, they should know what is happening in Iraq.

History is witness to the fact that to a large extent the Western world is responsible for the plight that Pakistan today finds itself in. Right from Independence, Pakistan was pampered, both politically and militarily, due to a subtle US strategy to make Kashmir a Cold War issue so as to forge a ring around the erstwhile USSR as a policy of containment.

To a large extent, the "Kashmir problem" has been exacerbated by the open partisanship of the West towards Pakistan within and outside the UN. Unfortunately, Pakistan has all along played into the designs of thrusting an ideological wedge in the psyche of the people of the subcontinent. Fifty-six years ago, a populace exploited by the invaders and plagued by poverty was forced to choose an independent albeit mutilated homeland for the fear of communal violence, which ultimately brought into existence two nations, which have everything common to each other except their name. The hostility engendered by Partition has been aggravated by active hate provoking propaganda and inherited poverty, making a rapprochement all the more difficult.

With the end of the Cold War, and Pakistan now having been reduced to a pawn for serving America’s strategic interest, how do we ignore that Kashmir, being strategically important for access through land to China and Central Asia, will be eyed by the US? Who knows by withdrawing our claim over the occupied portion of Kashmir as a solution being pushed forward by the US, we are stepping into a big trap? How can we deny the fact that in our eagerness to be on high moral ground we have bundled the Kashmir issue politically, diplomatically and militarily not once but several times and can hardly repeat the same blunders? J&K’s accession to India is as irrevocable as the accession of any other princely state like Patiala, Cochin, Mysore, etc.

We must understand that the slight American tilt towards India is more tactical and expedient in accordance with its foreign policy dictated by self-interest. Sine in today’s unilateral world what is good for the US is not appropriate for India, can we truly allow a benefactor who feigns to be a honest broker to dictate us? Therefore, Mr. Vajpayee should keep in mind that any compromise on the basic complexion of J&K and its territorial limit as it existed in 1947, would cast aspersion on our own existence. He must insulate himself from American self-interest so that both the neighbours can move towards lasting peace.

Despite a Muslim majority, the people of J&K had closely identified themselves with the Indian National Movement. Even during the subsequent wars with Pakistan, the local population threw in their lot with the Indian forces and provided them with all possible help. After years of militancy, the Kashmiris are today tiered of bloodshed. Therefore, the Prime Minister must concentrate on discussing the occupied portion while talking to Pakistan. He should make efforts to make the Pakistani leadership realise that in the altered world scenario they could suffer US wrath any time just like Iraq. And who knows the consequences for agreeing to be another pawn in America’s diplomatic armoury might be a devastated Pakistan? Mr. Vajpayee should carry with him only one message, in the words of Richard Bach: "The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each others life. The miracle is this the more we share the more we have."

For the last 56-years India has been nurturing a dream–where the people of the Valley and elsewhere sleep in the warmth of serenity. But this dream should not be fulfilled at the expense of our sovereignty and territorial integrity. INAV

Why Pak accuses Indian intelligence agencies?

By Dr. Golam Yazdani

More than 20 years ago young and beautiful girls, if they happened to be intelligent as well, faced a peculiar threat in Pakistan. The threat came not from criminals but from a well- orchestrated propaganda through the Urdu press that India’s RAW had pushed a number of dazzling-beauties into different parts of Pakistan particularly into Sindh and Baluchistan where they put their spell on officials and carried on the task assigned to them. Thus Pakistani girls who visited India or Indian girls who visited Pakistan were all suspects and so were the Pakistani female artistes who visited Mumbai. Pakistan’s former Attorney General Yahya Bakhtiar’s actress daughter Zeba caused frowns for playing the leading role in Heena.

A host of factors were behind this fantastic propaganda. The military Government of Gen Zia-ul-Haq and his ISI were getting nervous at the growing craze among Pakistanis to visit India and participate in cultural and intellectual activities in a free atmosphere. The Zia Government gave advertisements in newspapers to advise Pakistanis not to visit India. It also used fundamentalist parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami to try to tell Pakistanis that as Muslims they did not share India’s composite culture. A virulent campaign was launched against saree, which was described as Hindu attire. It was also blamed for the liberation of Bangladesh because Bengali women wore saree and put bindi on their foreheads. That showed Hindu cultural influence in Bangladesh, they said.

Twenty years later, General Musharraf and his Government showed same nervousness when suddenly interaction between the peoples of India and Pakistan increased following Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee’s peace offer on April 28. Perhaps the most unnerving event for the Pakistani regime was the medical treatment given to Noor Fatima in Bangalore. That event gave India magnanimity a worldwide publicity. Then started exchange of delegations between the two countries. It was at the height of these exchanges that Pakistan made two allegations against India. First, the Indian army was preparing for military action in Kargil which was denied by Indian Defence Ministry. The other allegation was that India has started 55 training camps to destabilise Pakistan. This too was denied.

Some of the accusations against Indian intelligence agencies make hilarious reading. For example, an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked from Srinagar to Lahore in January 1971 by Kashmiris who had been trained for the purpose by Pakistani intelligence men in Rawalpindi. According to Hashim Qureshi, one of the hijackers, the petrol for burning the hijacked plane in Lahore was provided by a Pakistani intelligence man. The hijackers were taken into a procession as heroes. But when India reacted by banning Pakistani flights over its territory, the Pakistani Government felt stupid. As a result, its army was trapped in then East Pakistan, which subsequently won its freedom. The hilarious part of the story is that now Islamabad saw a conspiracy in the hijacking drama to bring about the separation of East Pakistan. It sounded that all the preparations for the hijacking were innocently made by the Pakistani intelligence mesmerized by its Indian counterparts.

A great point about Pakistani Government leaders is that they don’t feel bad when their accusations against Indian intelligence are proved wrong. They are always ready with new allegations. For example, Wall Street Journal’s South Asian Bureau Chief Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi in January 2002 and subsequently butchered. He was kidnapped while investigating the effectiveness of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's ban on terrorist organizations. Pakistan Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi held a press conference in Islamabad to claim that Indian Government and the RAW were behind the kidnapping. Gen. Musharraf parrotted this allegation during his interview with Washington Post although his ISI was well aware of the facts of the case through Syed Omar Saeed Sheikh whom an anti-terrorism court in Hyderabad subsequently sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing Daniel Pearl. The death sentence had become necessary because the Musharraf Government was under pressure to hand him over to America. Anyhow, the ISI’s role in the kidnapping and murder of Pearl will always remain suspect.

The faux pas in the Pearl murder case apparently had no sobering effect on the military-civilian leadership. For the past about two years, Shias in Baluchistan had been under attack from anti-Shia Islamists. The bloodiest incident occurred on July 4 when some gunmen entered a mosque in Quetta and gunned down 53 Shia worshippers of the Hazara tribe. Many more were injured. Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali at once blamed it on India’s Consulates in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Khost in Afghanistan. His Interior Minister Saleh Hayat supported this allegation and claimed these Consulates were not doing any diplomatic work. But Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said it was a case of Islamic terrorism. He also expressed the doubt that it could be because of the Gawadar Port development. Locals in Baluchistan are bitterly opposed to the Gawadar project. Mr. Jamali and his Interior Minister did not find any support for their allegation against India. Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmed Jalali snubbed his Pakistani counterpart by reminding him that sectarian killings had been going on in Pakistan much before India opened its Consulates in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Khost. A Baluchistan National Party (BNP) leader, Mr.Habib Jalib strongly refuted official allegations against the Indian Consulates and said if India was given to organising sectarian killings in Pakistan, it could have done this in Sindh and Punjab where it has a long border with Pakistan.

But Baluchistan Interior Minister Samaullah Zuberi, who resigned after the Shia massacre, said the ISI had turned the province into a police state. The civilian Government had no writ. It was the ISI, which ruled the province. Zuberi’s claim raises a doubt about ISI’s own role in sectarian violence in Baluchistan . There is reason to believe that since Gen. Zia’s Islamisation programme in the 1970s-80s, the Army has considered Shias expendable. See, for example, what the Army did to Shias in Northern Areas in the 1980s.

Within Pakistan the ISI is notorious for organising violence for political reasons and blame outside powers for it. Examples are countless. But a few should suffice to prove this point. After the return of Ms. Benazir Bhutto as the Prime Minister in 1973, ethnic violence was engineered in Karachi and the Indian Consulate was blamed and ordered its closure. During 1995 alone, 2000 Muhajirs were killed and it became clear that it was all in preparation for the removal of Ms. Bhutto. She was sacked in 1996.

But the ISI is known to have organised more horrible incidents with external ramifications. The hijacking of PIA plane from Karachi to Kabul in 1981 was suspected to be the handiwork of the ISI to bail out Gen. Zia-ul-Haq at a time when political parties had formed the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) to pressure him to hold the promised elections. The hijacking was very cleverly made to look like the work of AI Zulfikar of Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto, the sons of executed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Again in March 1991, the IB under Brig. Imitiaz Ahmed, organised the hijacking of a Singapore Airlines plane from Kuala Lumpur. The four hijackers claimed themselves to be supporters of the PPP. The four were killed and thus the real story was not known. But this incident sabotaged the move towards cooperation between Ms. Bhutto and the caretaker Government of Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi and the possible release of her jailed husband Asif Zardari.

Military Government’s policies since Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s rule have made Pakistan a cradle of violence of all hues. No outsiders can add to it. It is a country where the institution of police has collapsed; where judges cannot give justice and where killing of Shias is considered to be a service to Islam.