The Proxy Trap
J Jeganaathan
An all too familiar pattern recently repeated in South Asia-every few years, when the region appears to be moving towards stable peace, disruptive elements linked with Pakistan spring into action and splinter those hopes. When the Kashmir valley was easing into the air of peace, order, and promise for the future, terror reared its ugly head again from the shadows. This served as a fitting response. However, it had achieved what it had to do, halting any potential for tranquillity and cooperation between the two neighbours, India and Pakistan.
The seeds of discord between the two nations are even older than themselves. A few months into their independence, the two neighbours went to war with each other over the priced territory of Kashmir. Pakistan, which was not able to accept the valley’s ruler’s decision to chart an independent path, sent out militias to conquer the land. The king, Maharaja Hari Singh, called on Jawaharlal Nehru to come to his rescue in return for acceding to the newly formed union of India. The events that followed, including the mediation by the United Nations, left the two countries with a temporary cease-fire line, which was designated the ‘Line of Control’ (LoC) in 1972. Pakistan occupied 1/3rd of Kashmir, which it currently maintains. Another bloody war took place between the two in 1965 when Pakistan launched an offensive across the cease-fire line. The next year, Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistani President Ayub Khan agreed to drop arms and resolve issues through peaceful means.
The 1970s commenced with a mortifying blow for Pakistan, as its eastern part, which was typified by Islamabad’s atrocious rule, revolted to demand independence. India, driven by humanitarian and strategic imperatives, assisted the freedom movement to bring about the foundation of Bangladesh in 1971. Since then, gauging the severe lack of strategic depth and conventional parity in comparison with India, the Pakistani establishment, particularly its interservice intelligence (ISI), has recalibrated its security doctrine. Pakistan’s involvement in arming and training Afghan Jihad, as part of the US-led response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, granted it the requisite architecture to execute the new strategy-proxy warfare.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus stoked armed insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir, leading to years of normalised bloodshed and radicalisation. Pakistan exploited its strategic instrumentalization of proxy terror groups to maintain plausible deniability. The skewed civil?military relations also ensured that the military sabotaged any and every step by civilian governments in favour of bilateral dialogue to preserve its primacy.
When the world was looking at India and Pakistan with anxiety as they gained nuclear power, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif to sign the landmark 1999 Lahore Declaration. The two countries affirmed their willingness to engage in confidence-building, multilateral cooperation, counterterrorism, nuclear and conventional safety, and dialogue over Kashmir via diplomacy. However, a few months later, Pakistani military-backed infiltrators seized strategic positions in Kargil in Kashmir, triggering a limited war that claimed the lives of 527 Indian soldiers. As expected, this undid diplomatic progress and deepened Indian mistrust toward Pakistan.
Again, India decided to move past the hostilities and give neighbourly relations with Pakistan a chance. President Pervez Musharraf, projecting himself as an ally of the US in its post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, met PM Vajpayee at the Agra Summit in 2001, raising hopes about India-Pak dialogue. However, in a few months, India suffered a dreadful attack on its Parliament that killed 9 people, orchestrated by terrorists linked to Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
Between 2004 and 2007, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh endeavoured to establish comprehensive peace with Pakistan and render the LoC “just a line on a map”. Through backchannel diplomacy, he engaged with the Pakistani President on what came to be known as the ‘Manmohan-Musharraf formula’. This entailed free movement and trade across the LoC, the historical Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service, the momentous 2006 Havana meeting where the two decided to build a joint anti-terrorism institutional mechanism, among other things. However, all these efforts were futile and deceptive when terrorists from Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba stormed Mumbai in 2008 and killed more than 160 people. The only terrorist out of the 10 that was caught alive, Ajmal Kasab, directly implicated the ISI in his statement by revealing that it had trained him and assisted with picking the targets.
When Narendra Modi displayed friendly gestures toward Nawaz Sharif after becoming Prime Minister, there was again optimism. Nevertheless, it was quickly quashed as JeM-linked terrorists attacked the Pathankot airbase. Later that year, the same outfit conducted the Uri attack, killing 18 soldiers and prompting surgical strikes from India at terrorist hideouts in Balakot. Following the Uri attack, the SAARC summit that was scheduled to take place in Islamabad in 2016 was cancelled, and the forum has not met since then. The JeM was again involved in the gruesome attack in Pulwama in 2019,in which a suicide bomber targeted a CRPF convoy, killing 40 personnel.
The recent terrorist attack in Pahalgam, which killed 25 Indian civilians and one Nepali citizen, occurred after a steady and significant decline in militancy in the valley. In recent years, there has been increased integration of Kashmir with India, particularly after the abrogation of Article 370, ballooning tourism, opportunities, and developmental prospects. Therefore, the Deep State in Pakistan jolted into action to disrupt this promising trajectory for the Kashmiri people as well as the region.
Any reliable peace process between India and Pakistan hinges on the sincerity of action and transparency of conduct. Pakistan’s use of proxy terror groups as strategic assets not only impairs India-Pak dialogue but also efforts at regional cooperation and prosperity, as seen in the case of the SAARC. There is a long and difficult road ahead for Pakistan if it intends to shift its ways that have brought insufferable bloodshed in the region. That road begins with radically altering its civil?military relations and pruning its outsized, dubious, terror-supporting military.
(The author is an Associate Professor in the Centre for European Studies at the School of International Studies, JNU)
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