LONDON – After the publication this week of two important reports – one by the ambassadors of the European Union to India and the other by Human Rights Watch – confirming that what took place in the Indian state of Gujarat was nothing less than a state government-planned massacre, when Hindu mobs ran amok through Muslim neighbourhoods, we should start to worry less about a supposed Muslim/Christian clash of civilizations and worry more about the actual Muslim/Hindu divide of civilizations, especially so when the two sides have nuclear weapons pointing at each other.
Why any Indian government should now expect to solve the Kashmir problem in its favour is beyond comprehension. If 180 million Muslims can no longer feel safe and secure inside India, despite the Herculean efforts of the country’s founding fathers to make the world’s largest secular democracy function without religious rancour, there is no chance that the Muslim dominated state of Kashmir will ever feel comfortable inside the Indian union.
Yet Muslim agitation in Pakistan over Kashmir has jangled on Indian nationalistic nerves for so long it was only a matter of time before Indian angst spilled out in this appalling way. Not for nothing did the Muslim mobs taunt their victims in Gujarat with cries of “dirty Pakis”. Until very recently both the U.S. and the European Union have preferred to stay on the sidelines of Hindu/Muslim disputes. But so deep have they been drawn into the affairs of the sub-continent by the Afghan war they no longer can sidestep the issue. On the one hand, America has embraced Pakistan with such fervour that not much these days gets decided in Pakistan without an American say. On the other, America, understandably, has taken advantage of India’s euphoria in seeing Pakistan’s ally, the Taliban, get its comeuppance. India has rushed to do what it never has done before, welcome a foreign power with open arms to use its airbases, military facilities and anything else that America needs to wage its war on terrorism.
America, to put it bluntly, has become pig in the middle. On the Pakistani side, President Pervez Musharraf has been courting Washington’s favour as a useful prop to his own regime. With American largesse poring into what was before September 11th a near bankrupt country he has been able to face the electorate this week in his bid to be an elected dictator without fear of significant opposition. Yet he has paid an enormous price for running with the Americans. Pakistan’s northern ally in the war of attrition with India is now out of the picture. The anti-Western militants who moved in and out of service to the Taliban and Al Qaeda to help in harassing India from Pakistani Kashmir have had their wings clipped. Thus the undermining of India’s grip on Kashmir is for now effectively stalled. Not least, the Americans de facto have put under their custodial protection Pakistan’s stock of nuclear weapons. Everyone now knows should either the Pakistan government move to deploy them for action against India or should militants make a move to topple Musharraf and grab them, the U.S. special forces would move in to secure them before you could say Kashmir.
On the Indian side matters are no less serious if perhaps a little more complex, partly because if Pakistan was bankrupt enough and small enough to be pushed around, India is too large, too economically independent and too democratic to be dealt with in quite so blunt a manner. On the one hand, Washington has realized that the U.S. and India are victims of the same forces and that its own earlier mistakes have contributed mightily to the situation. Washington has accepted that it was the U.S. and Saudi funnelling of arms to the anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency that led to the Afghani war veterans coming to haunt first the security of India and then later that of the U.S. itself. Thus America and India are truly brothers in arms. Moreover, America does not have to watch its back in India as it does in Pakistan. On the other hand America can only see disaster ahead if Hindu/Muslim violence gets out of hand as it did in Gujarat and if the central government seeks to excuse it and tolerates senior members of its political camp perpetuating it. One suspects that Washington is no longer going to allow India such an easy ride on Kashmir, however much India wants to dress the dispute up as a war on terrorism.
Fifty three years ago the UN mediated an agreement to a four-part sequence – a cease-fire in Kashmir, followed by the withdrawal of Pakistan’s forces from all occupied territories, the thinning of India’s military presence and a plebiscite to ascertain to which country the people of Kashmir wished to belong. Only the first two and a half steps were taken.
These steps look uncannily right for today’s situation. Pakistan has already been forced to do some of its somersaults. India will have to do its in due course. Never since the parting of the ways between India and Pakistan has the opportunity for a peaceful settlement looked more necessary – or more propitious.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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