INDIA-PAKISTAN: War of Words Intensifies Over Kashmir

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ann Ninan

NEW DELHI, May 20 1998 (IPS) - The governments of India and Pakistan seem to be pushing perilously close to armed confrontation in the wake of last week’s nuclear tests carried out by India that threaten to snap their tenuous ties.

Both sides are making shrill war noises over the disputed state of Kashmir in north India, a 50-year-old bone of contention that could again be a flash-point for another round of fighting in the Indian subcontinent.

Home Minister Lal Kishan Advani of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) flexed India’s new nuclear muscle on Monday by threatening to “deal firmly” with Pakistan if it does not “roll back its anti-India policy with regard to Kashmir”.

After a high-level meeting here to discuss threat perceptions, that was attended also by the Indian army chief, Advani said, “Islamabad (must) realise the change in geo-strategic situation in the region and the world”.

His nuclear sabre-rattling drew immediate, sharp reactions in Islamabad. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said Tuesday that he was “taking this threat very seriously”. Pledging to nip any aggression, he said, “India is threatening every day … that they will attack (Pakistan-held) Azad Kashmir.”

The two hostile neighbours have clashed repeatedly over Kashmir since the Indian subcontinent won independence in 1947. The acrimonious war of words has twice erupted in bloody fighting, once in 1948 and again in 1965. A third war in 1971, and the last military clash, was over Bangladesh.

Both countries are again trying to gain the military upper hand. The arms race in the sub-continent could go ballistic with India’s shock entry into the exclusive nuclear club as its sixth member, and Islamabad threatening to take the nuclear plunge.

Sharif is under tremendous domestic pressure for an immediate nuclear test, that is mounting “every hour” he told reporters in Islamabad, even though world leaders have urged restraint. High-level delegations from the U.S and Japan were in and out of Islamabad, trying to persuade the Pakistani leaders.

But the prime minister has said his government will not buckle under any international pressure, and chastised the international community for not punishing India. At last weekend’s G-8 summit in Birmingham, leaders of the seven richest countries and Russia were divided on the issue of economic sanctions on India.

“Had the world punished India, I could have told my people that now there is no justification to detonate our nuclear device … but this is not happening,” Sharif was reported saying.

Meanwhile Pakistan’s foreign office issued a strong statement in response to the Indian home minister’s warning of “firm” action against Pakistan, calling it a “naked assertion of Indian hegemonistic policies now backed by overt nuclearisation.”

Pakistan has time and again, at various international fora, accused India of using military force to crush a pro-independence movement in Kashmir. In 1989, the valley erupted in armed insurrection.

India has accused Pakistan of aiding and training the militants, including hired mercenaries from the war in Afghanistan, to fight its “proxy war” in Muslim-majority Kashmir.

But the charges are denied by Pakistan, which is demanding a referendum by all Kashmiris to decide whether a united Kashmir should join Pakistan or India, a demand that New Delhi will have nothing to do with.

Instead last year, elections were held in Kashmir for the first time since 1990, when the state government there was dismissed. Kashmir Chief Minister Dr. Farooq Abdullah is now allied with India’s new ruling BJP-led coalition government that looked likely to collapse any moment, until the nuclear blasts.

The tests, ordered by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee within three weeks of his taking over power in March, were conducted May 11 and May 13 in complete secrecy in the Rajasthan desert, in northwestern India, close to the border with Pakistan.

It caught everyone here and abroad by surprise, though Prime Minister Vajpayee told the widely-circulated newsmagazine ‘India Today’, in an interview, that it was consistent with “our commitment made to the people of India during the elections.

“Now that we are in government, people expect us to translate our long-standing commitment into action. And we have (with the tests) showed them that we mean business,” he added.

Along with the nuclearisation of India, a uniform civil code,

the building of a temple over a medieval mosque that was razed by Hindu mobs in December 1992, the repeal of Article 370 which gives special status to Kashmir, India’s only Muslim state, has been an article of faith for the BJP.

The Vajpayee government has chalked out for Kashmir an ‘Action Plan’ with three clearly defined objectives: effectively deal with the “proxy war”; focus on development goals and resettle and rehabilitate the mainly Hindu migrants who left Kashmir as the civil war intensified.

Unlike its predecessors, the BJP-led regime in New Delhi is not interested in engaging Kashmiri militant groups — some grouped together in the Hurriyat alliance — in any kind of dialogue. Home Minister Advani, a hard-liner in the BJP, categorically said, “talks were not on the agenda”. Hardening positions rule out the possibility of peace in the subcontinent.