POLITICS: Replay of Kargil in Indo-Pakistan De-escalation

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 10 2002 (IPS) - When U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lands in India this week, he will be arriving in a country grateful for having extricated it from the brink of a possible nuclear war with Pakistan for the second time in three years.

His trip follows last week’s crucial mission to the region of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who manaded to defuse tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours who have mobilised up to one million troops and hardware along their border.

Observers feel a sense of “déjà vu” in the denouement of the current crisis, the pattern of which closely follows Washington’s intervention to end the bloody 1999 conflict at Kargil on the Line of Control (LoC) which divides disputed Kashmir.

If not for then U.S. President Bill Clinton’s tough handling of the situation, the Kargil conflict, in which warplanes were shot down on both sides, could easily have escalated into nuclear exchange.

Officially, Islamabad maintained that the heavily armed men who crossed the LoC and set up fortified bunkers on the Indian side were Kashmiri “mujahideen” (freedom fighters) but Clinton came close to publicly exposing the Pakistan army’s role in the conflict, as recently revealed by his aide, Bruce Riedel, in a published monograph.

This time around, Armitage did not waste time quibbling about the identity of the armed men who have continued to infiltrate across the LoC, in spite of the fact that after Sep. 11, Pakistan pledged to fight “jihadist” terrorism.

Armitage extracted a promise from Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the man who masterminded the Kargil operation and seized power in a military coup in Oct. 1999, that he would not only stop infiltration over the LoC but also permanently and visibly shut down terrorist camps within Pakistan.

Expectedly, there has been a guarded response from New Delhi. Reflecting the still unbending mood, an official of the external affairs ministry said: “India will decide on the reciprocal steps and calibrate them according to our own judgement.”

Indian analysts are under no illusion that terrorist activities will now dramatically wind down in Kashmir especially between now and elections due to be held in the state in September.

“While we are mounting diplomatic, political and limited military pressure on Pakistan, the litmus test would be our being able to effectively neutralise Pakistan’s long term intentions,” said former foreign secretary J.N. Dixit, adding that India has no alternative but to act decisively in Kashmir.

On Sunday some of that determination was on display when police in Srinagar arrested Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the most prominent of the pro-Pakistan, Kashmir leaders under anti-terrorist laws and packed him off to prison in the city of Ranchi in eastern Bihar state.

Political commentator G. Parthasarathy said in the current crisis, which stemmed from the December attack on Indian Parliament which government blames on Pakistani extremists, India has finally succeeded in convincing the world that “it is in fact a victim of terrorism”.

When Pakistan responded to India’s “coercive diplomacy” with a matching military build-up on its side of the border, and test launches of a series of nuclear-capable missiles, it found itself rapidly isolated by the world community.

It brought back memories of the Kargil episode, which Parthasarathy, a former Indian envoy in Islamabad, said proved to be a disaster for Pakistan. “It was seen internationally as an irresponsible power, possessing nuclear weapons, yet indulging in military adventurism.”

Analysing the turn of events, C. Raja Mohan, commentator on strategic affairs, said Indian diplomacy appeared to have entered a “complex, testing, end-game”, which has succeeded in finally getting both the United States and Britain to pressurise Pakistan to end what New Delhi claims as more than ten years of sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir.

That India is pushing for a conversion of the LoC into a formal international border as an end to the Kashmir problem is evident from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s offer of joint-patrolling by the neighbours, which seems to have gone down well in Washington.

During the last full-fledged war between India and Pakistan in 1971, resulting in the creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan, the Nixon administration openly sided with Pakistan and sent the seventh fleet into the Bay of Bengal — but hesitated to intervene because of threats from Moscow, India’s ally during the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War, and with it America’s fear of communism, resulted in U.S.-Pakistani relations cooling off.

But until Kargil, the popular impression in both South Asian countries was that in a crunch situation, the U.S. would still back Pakistan rather than India in spite of the latter being “the world’s largest democracy” and attractive as a rapidly globalising country with a sizeable untapped economy.

The following year, 2000, Clinton arrived in India for an unprecedented week-long visit hailed as a watershed in Indo-U.S. relations which for the 50 years preceding was marked by suspicion, especially over the difficult question of Kashmir.

In an address to Indian Parliament, Clinton emphasised “the role of American diplomacy in urging the Pakistanis to go back behind the Line of Control in the Kargil crisis” as a positive example of getting outsiders to solve the Kashmir problem raging for more than half a century.

Apart from urging outside intervention, to which New Delhi is notoriously allergic to, Clinton said everything that his hosts wanted to hear such as that Kashmir was essentially a bilateral issue and that the LoC should be respected — a stand his successor, George W. Bush seems inclined to follow.