INDIA-PAKISTAN: Expulsion of Top Envoys Sends Ties to New Low

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 8 2003 (IPS) - Diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan hit a new low Saturday after the two neighbours, in dispute since 1947 over possession of the former princely state of Kashmir, expelled each other’s top envoys.

Diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan hit a new low Saturday after the two neighbours, in dispute since 1947 over possession of the former princely state of Kashmir, expelled each other’s top envoys.

India first announced the expulsion of Jalil Abbas Jilani, Pakistan’s acting high commissioner, Saturday morning, saying he was involved in supporting militants in Kashmir. Within hours, Pakistan retaliated expelling India’s charge d’ affairs Sunil Vyas.

Both envoys have been given 48 hours to leave. These are the first such expulsions since 1971, when India intervened militarily in a civil war in Pakistan that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh out of its eastern wing.

Saturday’s expulsions included four other Pakistani diplomats from New Delhi and four too from the Indian mission in Islamabad – and comes after the souring of India’s ties with another neighbouring country, Bangladesh, over the past week.

”For us, the most disconcerting aspect of terrorism is that it is sponsored, supported and funded by Pakistan as a matter of state policy,” Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said at the conference which focused on internal security Saturday.

Relations between India and Pakistan are ”extremely bad” now, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Aziz Ahmed Khan was quoted as saying by Pakistani media. ”It is bad because of the actions that India has been taking, and it appears that they are interested that this atmosphere remains vitiated.”

Jilani was expelled after he was named in a case registered under India’s Prevention of Terrorism Act of passing on money to All-Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC), an umbrella organisation of Kashmiri separatist groups based in Srinagar, capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Jilani, who enjoys diplomatic immunity, has described the charges as baseless and as another attempt to ”harass and intimidate Pakistan high commission officials.”. Other Pakistani officials said New Delhi had framed the Hurriyat activists.

Pakistan’s last full-fledged high commissioner in New Delhi, Akbar Jehangir Qazi, was asked to leave and the mission downgraded after a suicide squad stormed the gates of India’s Parliament and tried to blow up the building with a car bomb in December 2001.

India blamed Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of being behind the suicide mission as part of its desire to support the insurgency in Indian Kashmir. It had moved troops and armour to the Pakistan border, only to be restrained from going to war by intense international diplomacy led U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Powell had then extracted a promise from Pakistan’s President Gen Pervez Musharraf that he would end support for armed militancy across the Line of Control (LoC) that separates the two halves of Kashmir – one controlled by Pakistan and the other by India.

Kashmir was not included in the process of decolonisation and granting of independence in 1947 to British India, out of which Pakistan was created for the sub-continent’s Muslims.

Although India and Pakistan, which declared themselves nuclear powers in 1998, took steps to pull back close to a million troops from the border last year, international diplomacy has failed to bring them to negotiate peace across the table.

In December, Musharraf said publicly that he would not have hesitated to resort to nuclear weapons had India in fact attacked Pakistan during the tense military standoff that lasted through most of last year.

Further provocation came on Feb. 5, celebrated in Pakistan as Kashmir Solidarity Day, when Musharraf vowed ”steadfast and unflinching” support for the ”struggle for self-determination” in Kashmir.

The next day, police said they intercepted APHC activists Anjum Jamrud Habib as they were leaving the premises of the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi and recovered large sums of cash from them.

India’s foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna said Jilani had been found indulging in activities ”incompatible” with his official status, and accused Pakistan of pursuing the path of ”confrontation, compulsive hostility and brinksmanship”.

Saturday’s expulsions follow a round of tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomatic staff ordered by the two countries in January, which effectively reduced the strength of their missions to the level of counsellors.

The Indian government’s expulsion of the Pakistani high commissioner received support from diplomatic analysts here, including former foreign secretaries M K Rasgotra and J N Dixit, both of whom recommended the closure of Pakistan’s mission in this country.

New Delhi’s uncompromising mood was reflected in an address made Saturday by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at a conference of state chief ministers, in which he said Pakistan had, despite promises made in public taken ”no significant action against terrorist camps and infrastructural support to terrorism”.

What India calls terrorism however Pakistan calls a genuine separatist movement.

Vajpayee also accused Pakistan’s ISI of pursuing its anti-India agenda by supporting subversive activities in other South Asian countries like Nepal and Bangladesh.

”We have to intensify our efforts to counter terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and in those states that border these two countries and elsewhere”, he said Saturday.

India recently moved to identify and expel immigrants from Bangladesh who, according to Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, number some 20 million people, sparking a serious diplomatic row with that country.

For decades, India allowed impoverished Bangladeshi to cross the porous border between the two countries to seek employment in the large metropolises of this country, but Advani said the illegal migration had to be stopped because of a changed security environment in the region.

The coming to power in Bangladesh of Khaleda Zia’s right-wing Bangladesh National Party, supported by Islamic fundamentalists, has not helped improve relations with an India ruled by a right-wing coalition led by the pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party.

India has been openly suspicious of diplomatic overtures made in recent times by Musharraf toward Bangladesh, overtures that would have been impossible under the previous ‘pro-India’ Awami League regime of Sheikh Hasina.