IRAQ: Kashmir Problem Muddies India’s Stand on Iraq

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Mar 31 2003 (IPS) - Activists staged here on Monday the biggest of a series of rallies aimed at eliciting a stronger official stand against the war in Iraq from India, a government that says it needs western support on its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir.

Effigies of U.S. President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were set alight, and prominent women’s rights leader Syeda Hamid read out a statement condemning the U.S.-led invasion and India’s failure to officially condemn it.

The highlight of Monday’s ‘No Blood for Oil’ rally was a huge bonfire of goods made in the United States and Britain, symbolising a boycott call that has already drawn a massive response in several cities including western Mumbai, eastern Kolkata, and southern Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai.

While the anti-war movement, led by intellectuals, opposition leaders and left-wing politicians, is picking up across the country, it has so far not moved the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee which has actively sought strategic alliances with Washington.

On Sunday, Vajpayee made it clear to the party’s allies in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that any stance beyond what his government has already taken could boomerang on the long-standing Kashmir issue.

The NJP’s allies were disappointed and the leader of the Janata Dal (People’s Party), Ramjivan Singh, remarked that ”failure to stand up to this assault on Iraq’s sovereignty could result no one coming to India’ aid if we are similarly attacked tomorrow”.

Soon after the war began, opposition groups led by the Congress Party as well as several of BJP allies demanded a parliamentary resolution condemning it. But the BJP refused to allow it or even give an assurance that India would not provide logistical support to the U.S.-led forces.

Since then, the country was rattled by the Mar. 23 killing of 24 Hindus in Indian-controlled Kashmir by militants, raising the possibility of hostilities breaking out with Pakistan – which country New Delhi has accused of being behind the attack and similar ones in the past.

An attack on an army barracks in Kashmir last year resulted in India mobilising 700,000 of its troops, deploying them along the Pakistan border and bringing the nuclear-armed neighbours to the brink of war.

The crisis was defused through intense international diplomacy led by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who conveyed to India an assurance from Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf that he would stop militants crossing from his country into Kashmir.

Powell said in a recent interview with the ‘New York Times’ that ”Indo-Pakistan and the whole subcontinent problem” was part of a ‘broader agenda’ that Washington planned to address as soon as the war on Iraq was over.

”We want to make sure we don’t find ourselves in the same situation we were in a year ago. When everybody was predicting war, we managed to solve that. People forget. If we had a nuclear war they wouldn’t have forgotten it, but we didn’t have one so they forgot it,” Powell said.

”A hell of a lot of work went into preventing an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war,” he was quoted as saying.

While the BJP leadership, including Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, have taken cognisance of public sentiment in this country by taking critical references to the war, they have taken care never to name the United States.

Advani was being typical when, while speaking at a public meeting on Monday, he referred to ”some countries having the most sophisticated equipment think they can win a war in one or two weeks, but if truth is not with them the conflict could be prolonged and one never knows what would be the consequence”.

But the government has studiously refused to answer charges that reconstruction deals in post-war Iraq worth five billion dollars have been signed with Washington or give assurances that India would not allow logistical support for the war on Iraq.

A six-city poll carried out by the highly reputed Centre for Forecasting and Research (Cfore) for the ‘Outlook’ weekly magazine found that 86 percent of Indians opposed to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, while 65 percent wanted the government to condemn it.

The poll also found that 56 percent of the 2,047 persons it interviewed in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Bangalore and Hyderabad thought India should risk annoying Washington and openly condemn the war.

India’s response to the war, glaringly muted for a country that once saw itself a leader of the non-aligned world, has not earned it Washington’s gratitude. After the recent killing of Hindus in Kashmir, its officials told India: ”Dialogue remains a critical element in the normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan.”

It was only after an official spokesman suggested sarcastically that dialogue would have been better than war in Afghanistan and Iraq as well that a joint statement from Powell and Straw asking Pakistan to stick to commitments to halt cross-border terrorism was forthcoming.

So far, the biggest gesture of defiance that India has made in favour of Iraq, an old friend from the Cold War era, has been to reject a request from Washington, soon after the war began, to expel Iraqi diplomats.

The government has also allowed anti-war rallies across the country in another sign that it was mindful of popular sentiment.

In states like Marxist-ruled West Bengal, anti-war protests have been led by party stalwarts. A mass rally organised on Sunday was attended by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who called on the ”whole country to rise up against this unjust war”.

More radical organisations like the extremist People’s War Group have stormed godowns owned by the transnational beverage manufacturer Pepsi in southern Andhra Pradesh state, and smashed several hundred cases of softdrinks.