Lessons we must learn from the Kargil conflict

By Yogendra Bali

Both India and Pakistan will have the occasion to look back at the ten-day shooting war of 1999, which became part of military history of the sub-continent as the Kargil Conflict. Starting on May 5, 1999 it concluded on July 26, 1999.

Pakistan, who launched the high-altitude military misadventure was ultimately defeated and suffered at least 4,000 casualties in the conflict.

Once again, the lesson to learn for Pakistan was that all its attempts to secure military solution to its internal and external political, social and ethnic problems, failed once again as they had always failed in the past and would fail in future too. Better try sane diplomacy and peaceful dialogue.

India's primary lesson not to be forgotten was that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty even while putting its faith in peaceful negotiations and dialogues instead of diatribes for resolution of real and imaginary problems. India should not let its defences down, and thank god will not do so as Defence Minster Pranav Mukharjee said.

The powers that be in India and Pakistan, would increasingly have to face from their constituents the ultimate question : How many lives, and for how long, should we sacrifice to cater to the whims such rulers for whom their coterie and religious corporates were in their jaundiced concept, a nation, and who thought terrorism and nuclear blackmail would fool the world community into accepting false claims and territorial aggression as instruments of legitimacy of fools wars and violent conflicts unleashed by organized hooligans under false slogans and flags?

Was not Kargil also an expression of that politics of creating dishonest claims by regimes which lacked legal and constitutional legitimacy in their own countries ? Was not the Kargil conflict linked with the psychology of neo-colonialism where gun-fire and nuclear threats were claimed to be the voice of this people or that people ? Was it not an expression of the bully-and-bluster practiced by illegitimate regimes within their home and across the frontiers of the country they ruled by gun-and-grab politics ?

Since 1947, the Pakistan Army and its politically ambitious generals, had tried to use on other nations and ethnic entities, the same rule of coercion and aggression as they perpetuated on the Pakistani masses in the first place. "Struggle of the Kashmiri people," "Right of self-determination," "Strategic depth in Afghanistan, "The international military campaign against terrorism," "Bringing law and order into Northern territories," "Building Pakistan's nuclear deterrent" were their false slogans. Engaging in secret nuclear vending of technology and equipment to states which had like-minded autocratic rulers who felt atrocities and repression was the way of ruling their own people.

The 57-year old over repeated song of panic they sang was that India would invade them if they took hands off from the terror machines which spawned like dragon seed in Pakistan. There were all ingredients of the witches brew which many sensitive Pakistani analysts themselves, considered to be songs of hypocrisy sung by those who wanted to keep the people of Pakistan as their eternal colonial serfs more than anything else.

By now the 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999 conflicts should have taught the military rulers of Pakistan the lesson that using costly wars and proxy wars to keep the hounds of democracy at bay from their seats of power would not fool the people of Pakistan and the rest of the world for all times. No more Kargils, was a sentiment which had been brewing strongly and angrily at least in the Northern areas of Pakistan like Gilgit and Baltistan. They felt cheated, humiliated and deprived of their "right of self determination" for the last 57 years.

Before asking questions of India or the democratically ruled Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir, ruled by the elected representatives of the Kashmiri people from Jammu, the Valley and the Ladakh areas, they should first answer questions asked by the once-Kashmiri people of the Pak Occupied Kashmir and areas cleverly amputated away from Kashmir like Gilgit and Baltistan. What kind of "self determination" did they enjoy under the Pak Military-Fundamentalist-Terrorist combine's dispensation? How safe are were their lives, dignity and properties ?

What kind of respect and consideration did the Pakistani military rule show for the Pakhtoon tribes of South Waziristan, for the Baluchi tribals and for the Shias from Sindh to Gilgit ? Were they all not suffering from a series of "Little Kargils" let lose on them in the local military operations of aggression and deceit backed by a flood of lying propaganda to confuse the people of Pakistan, the Muslim world and their world at large ? When they failed in the big Kargil in 1999, would they succeed in these "Little Kargils" at home in 2004?

I have no intention of sitting in judgment on the people of Pakistan who were no different from the people of India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan or Iran, or for that matter people of any other country in the world. I am sure they too craved for a better and dignified quality of life, freedom from hunger, unemployment and corruption and see their country progress and develop peacefully and with pride.

But did the big Kargil and the "Little Kargils", or for that matter all the wars fought by the military emperors and their satraps, against their neighbours and against the constituents of Pakistan itself, bring them the fulfillment of their small and simple dreams of food, shelter and clothing with the dignity and pride which the simple people of the agrarian state so cherished ?

The final lesson which Pakistan must learn from Kargil, and also India, is that no wars can solve any problems between the two countries. Bullying language and nuclear blackmail cannot defeat India and certainly cannot fill the bellies of the hungry and the unemployed people of Pakistan or the territories grabbed by the generals over the years by wars of aggression and deceit.

Five years after Kargil, having lost the war of guns and grenades, Pakistan's war of diplomatic double-talk and saturated propaganda bombing too has not convinced either its Western allies and the Europeans, or some of the other Muslims countries, that Pakistan should be given the sanction of annexing Kashmir by military aggression.

In India, we must learn that carrying on the blame-games, five years after a war has been fought and won valiantly, will do nobody and good. We must have full faith in our Armed Forces, assure them all the facilities for modernization including the latest weapons and equipment and keep our defences in high gear and our fighting men super fitness.

There might be more Kargils ahead because striking at neighbouring countries with their armed forces, dressed as guerillas and mercenaries or mujahideen was a tactic which had been honed into a fine art by Pakistan.

Since the uncalled for and shameful 1947 invasion of Kashmir by looting complements of Afridi and Mashuds from the North West Frontier, backed by full fledged Pakistani Armed Forces, the story has not changed. Infiltrators being sent to Kashmir in 1965 by President Ayub Khan, the 1971 surprise attack by Pakistan which brought a crushing and humiliating defeat for it and loss of East Pakistan, and Kargil operation in 1999, had all been the repeat misadventures that ended in disasters.

The peace initiatives, continuing between the two countries, are thin rays of hope. May they be fruitful some day. The lesson for us must remain, "Keep your faith in God but your, gunpowder dry". That would be the befitting tribute the nation could pay to its martyrs of Kargil, who made the supreme sacrifice in defence their nation. - (ADNI)

Interstate consensus for development

By Sisir Basu

"The market" is often assumed to be the sole determinant of national choices. However, it is not an undifferentiated unit. Every national economy has multiple levels with regional and class components. These levels specifically indicate ways for managing investment baskets and forms of revenue extraction. They require different approaches to problems of effective governance and welfare. Examples are the multiple specificities of certain major Indian regions. Those, in which modern capitalist development – as distinct from earlier Asian feudal or despotic growth – originated, are the three hinterlands of the East India Company’s port towns and headquarters, now called Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai. Three others are the central uplands – known in British Indian geography as Deccan, Gondwana, and Chhota Nagpur – till the northern outliers of the Vindhyas; the upper Gangetic heartland of Malwa, the less-desert part of Rajasthan and eastern and northern Punjab; and finally, the arid tract from Kutch and the Thar to westernmost cis-Sutlej Punjab. The socio-economic potential of each require recognition of their diversity for unified planning.

Kolkata’s hinterland stretched till the early 20th century, from Visakhapatnam in northern Andhra to Chittagong, now in Bangladesh, along the Bay of Bengal’s shallow headwaters into which pour the silted sludge of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Mahanadi river systems. This made the Bay increasingly inhospitable in the late 20th century – the age of containerised shipping transportation – for anything larger than small motor vessels.

From each estuarial tract, stretch northwards on either side, narrow coastal strips backed by hill ranges in western Orissa, Jharkhand and the north-east hill states. The main agrarian block is Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. Paddy and legumes as well as other fruits from the soil were always the core of subsistence of this region. In the last two centuries, peripheral mineral extraction also developed with great plantation industries – indigo that died out by the 19th century, and then tea – in the northern high ranges and foothills.

An agrarian and peripherally extractive economy controlled by an increasingly impoverished rentier class, which was dependent on state capital regulation and in recent years on subsidies for sick industries, had its heyday a hundred years ago. Latter-day British Indian imperialism, sick of upper-caste politics, shifted its capital to New Delhi. Protests were assuaged by a new Bengal, a linguistic province that broke the essential business and managing agency unity of Kolkata’s hinterland, which included Telegus, Oriyas, tribals, Biharis and Assamese as well as Bengalis. The collapse of the managing agency system and then the de-colonisation policy produced further built-in depressors that still persist. One has only to look at what are now called heritage buildings and monuments, to see the grim ruins of the urban culture of the Bay of Bengal hinterland. This is as true of the Waltair railway settlement (older than Vizag port) Cuttack, old Ranchi, Patna, Malda and Burdwan or of the Brahmaputra valley towns.

History can be defied. This is possible only if a sufficiently critical mass of people develop cultural initiative and the political will – and not just political rhetoric - to change. Since independence, the slow-paced Parsi compradors of Bombay were radically transformed into the modern Maratha hustle and Gujarati entrepreneurial people of Sharad Pawar’s, or the Ambanis, Mumbai. Refugees from Punjab and the North-West Frontier provinces transformed the Delhi metropolitan sub-region into a thriving state. Transformation has taken place in the once easygoing feudal Bangalore and Hyderabad. The point is to spark endogenous creativity and capacity to develop better working conditions and job satisfaction – as distinct from IT loops redistributing existing capital within a slowly expanding circle of consumers, or from simple building booms to accommodate normal urban population growth. This can come by generating radical improvements in traditional industries.

Transportation across the hinterland and out of it (and that includes revitalisation of the ports), improvement and overhaul of the steel manufacture on the Bengal-Orissa borders, plans for bringing tea production in northern Assam and Bengal back to prosperity – all these require much more coordination among neighbouring states. The business prospects of the region cannot be determined by Kolkata alone, nor by New Delhi, which has a range of other considerations to satisfy. The present conjuncture of coalition politics may be a better opportunity for constructive intermediate regional consultation, than a welter of controversy and adversarial counter-charges across parties.

Narrow state-based political choices would be disastrous from the regional point of view. That would take us back to the self-interested pettiness by which the National Democratic Alliance hived off the Hajipur segment of the railways, or it would take us forward to the Jharkhand demand for shifting Coal India’s office to Ranchi. These give no real impetus to socio-economic growth. Only political propaganda gets leeway. Leaders, not only of parties, but also of chambers and confederations of commerce and industry, and of the intelligentsia must get together and work out a regionally composite view. This will pack more punch in negotiations with financial authorities. It will offer more profit than "packages" for small segments, each a linguistic state. This is what all of them in this region, except for West Bengal, are: West Bengal has been able to transcend linguistic chauvinism and accept other language cultures such as Urdu, Hindi or Nepali.

In each of the six regions that we started with, the business system and its leadership have come to represent the real leaders, power centres, social patronage of the arts and financing of initiative. Politicians of all parties, with only a few honourable exceptions, have become the butt of buffoonery for television shows such as The Great Indian Tamasha. Independent initiatives are necessary in the public interest to create clearer alternative social choices for the moribund eastern Indian regional culture and for its more vital future.

Only its territory does not define a hinterland. The electorate has given a mandate for the politics of national coalition. It is time for thinkers, entrepreneurs and politicians, middle class or worker, to accept regional realities, intermediate between their own state and the nation. Congress chief ministers in West Bengal and Bihar half a century ago had sought a regional merger of the two states. This sort of mechanical union is not what is being pleaded for. All one is looking for is more clout for interstate consensus, based on a mood of common understanding and activism for the economic and social necessities of region-specific difference.

A realistic use of the coalition model at the intermediate level would also give people much more leverage vis-à-vis over centralisation from the capital city. INAV