Kashmir's Kolhai glacier has been receding steadily. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Aug 31 2012 (IPS)

Jowhar Ahmed, an air-conditioner dealer in Srinagar, is pleased at a spurt in business this summer caused by temperatures soaring over 35 degrees Celsius – unusual in this alpine valley ringed by snow-capped mountains.

“I sold more than 70 air-conditioners in just one month,” Ahmed, who runs the Oriental Sales electrical goods outlet, told IPS.  To cope with the demand Ahmed and other dealers have begun stocking air-conditioners in Srinagar rather than book orders for later delivery.

That the weather is warming over Kashmir is not news for climate scientists who have shown in several studies that the glaciers in the vast Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya (HKKH) region – called the world’s ‘third pole’ – are melting and receding at an increasing pace.

In the latest of these studies, European scientists led by Andreas Kaab of the department of geosciences, University of Oslo, have shown that glacial melt is worse in the Kashmir Himalayas than in other regions of the HKKH.

Kaab’s findings, published in the Aug. 23 edition of ‘Nature’, suggest that Kashmir’s glaciers may be receding by as much as half-a-metre annually, presenting an immediate threat to the rivers that  feed into the Indus basin.

“Glaciers are among the best indicators of terrestrial climate variability,” said Kaab in the study. “They contribute importantly to water resources in many mountainous regions and are a major contributor to global sea-level rise.”

Kaab said that while there is a paucity of glacier data in the HKKH region, there is “indirect evidence of a complex pattern of glacial responses” to climate change.

Prof. Shakil Romshoo, who teaches geology and geophysics at Kashmir University, says that studies that he and his colleagues conducted in 2009 showed that Kashmir’s glaciers were melting at an increasing pace.

“We have been saying for many years now that Kashmir’s glaciers are melting at an ever faster rate,” Romshoo told IPS. His team found that the Kolhai glacier, one of the largest in Kashmir, had shrunk to 11 sq km, losing two sq km over a period of 40 years.

Another scientific study on the Kashmir Himalayas had also shown that the snow cover over the region was on the decline. The study, led by glaciologist H. S. Negi, was published in the December 2009 issue of ‘Journal of Earth System Sciences’, a bi-monthly published in India.

Negi, who is attached to the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment of India’s defence ministry, based his findings on 20 years of remote satellite-based climatic data, covering the period 1988 – 2008.

According to Negi’s findings, where total snowfall in the Kashmir valley was 1,082 cm in 2004-05, it had declined to 968 cm during 2005-2006 and reduced further to 961 cm by 2006-2007.

Experts in Kashmir say that the new findings by the European scientists are a concern since the rivers of the Indus basin are glacier-fed.

“Unlike in the Eastern Himalayas where rivers such as the Brahmaputra are mainly rain-fed, most of the water that goes into the Indus river comes from snowmelt, which includes glacial melt,” says Prof. Mohammad Sultan, who teaches geography in Kashmir University.

“This could cause huge problems for irrigation and generating power in northwestern India and Pakistan through which territories the rivers originating in Kashmir flow before ending up in the sea,” Sultan told IPS.

“The Indus water system is Pakistan’s lifeline as 75 to 80 percent of water received in this country comes from melting Himalayan glaciers,” says Irshad Muhammad Khan, executive director of the Global Change Impacts Studies Centre in Pakistan.

“This glacier melt forms the backbone of irrigation network in Pakistan with 90 percent of agricultural land being fed by the vastly spread irrigation network in Pakistan, one of the largest in the world,” Khan said told IPS over e-mail.

“Any disruption of water flow in the Indus would have grave implications for agriculture production in Pakistan,” Khan said.

The rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting has been the subject of international controversy ever since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations said, in its 2007 report, that they were melting so fast that they could vanish altogether by 2035.

After leading climate experts challenged the IPCC’s claim, the U.N. body’s Nobel prize-winning chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to admit publicly, in January 2010, that the projections had no scientific basis.

A study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam, released in January 2011, showed that glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern part of the HKKH region, were actually advancing and that global warming was not the deciding factor in glacier melt.

Scientists are, however, agreed that changes in the size of glaciers in the HKKH directly affect Asia’s water resources and sea levels, though it has been difficult to accurately measure or monitor them.

‘An Inconvenient Truth’, a 2006 Oscar-winning documentary on former U.S. vice-president Al Gore’s campaign to create global warming had suggested that 40 percent of the world’s population depends on the snows and glaciers of the Himalayas for water supplies.

With opportunities limited in troubled Kashmir, youth mark time surfing the internet. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Dec 13 2011 (IPS)

As armed insurgency in India’s northern Jammu and Kashmir ebbs, the elected state government is keen to hasten a return to normalcy by easing draconian security laws and reopening movie theatres and liquor shops, banned by fundamentalist militant groups.

Since 2003 when the security situation in the Kashmir valley showed signs of improvement, common people, civil society groups and political leaders have been demanding revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which allows spot arrests and indefinite detentions without trial.

“We have been living under the shadow of the gun for over two decades now. Surely we deserve better treatment and a chance to live normal lives,” says Altaf Bhat, who has a postgraduate degree in economics but is unemployed.

Young people like Bhat are whiling away their time in internet cafes because of a drastic drying up of opportunities that followed in the wake of militancy.

The AFSPA was enacted by Indian Parliament in 1990 as a response to the militancy in the Muslim-majority state, the ownership of which is claimed by the neighbouring Pakistan.

“The time has come for the revocation of laws (under the AFSPA), which were invoked in the state after militancy, from some areas of the state,” said Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah late October, triggering a debate that quickly found resonance across the country.

A New Delhi-appointed three-member team of peace interlocutors, which submitted its report to the Indian government in October on wsy to address the concerns of Kashmiris, has recommended a phased withdrawal of the AFSPA.

Politically, Abdullah’s stance has been criticised by the Congress party, which partners his National Conference (NC) party in the state government. The Congress party also leads the centrally-ruling United Progressive Alliance government in which the NC is a participant.

Objections have also come from the Indian army, which is deployed in strength in the state, on the grounds that removal of the AFSPA, which provides legal cover for its personnel, will hamper counter-insurgency operations.

The army, according to news reports published in Indian media, asserts that some 2,500 militants believed to be based in the part of Kashmir that is controlled by Pakistan could return to the Kashmir valley and disrupt the peace if the AFSPA is withdrawn.

Abdullah finds that assertion unconvincing. “Our intention is to lift the AFSPA from areas where army is not required,” he says.

On Dec. 7 he told a gathering of people: “If we compare the situation in the state from 2002 to 2011, militancy has come down to five percent only. That is why I say the time is ripe for revocation of AFSPA.”

In meetings he held with India’s defence minister A.K. Antony in November, Abdullah pointed out that this year has seen a minor boom in tourism with 1.3 million arrivals recorded until October.

At home, the chief minister is under pressure from Kashmir’s largest opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party, civil society and the common people who are insistent that the AFSPA must go without further delay.

“All the human rights violations are taking place because the security personnel know they are protected by this powerful law no matter how grave the rights violations they commit are,” Zameer Ahmed, a Kashmiri youth, told IPS.

Sheikh Showkat, who teaches human rights in Kashmir University, told IPS: “For the revocation of the law, the government has to show seriousness and convince those who are against its revocation. But so far, there has only been rhetoric.”

Said Nazeer Baba, an arts student at Srinagar’s Amar Singh College: “We should not be held hostage to a final solution to the Kashmir issue or the complete cessation of militancy in the valley.”

Meanwhile, as part of its drive to restore normalcy and boost the state’s tourism industry, the Kashmir government has announced plans to reopen movie theatres and liquor shops which were banned by fundamentalist groups as the armed conflict in Kashmir had started in 1989.

Abdullah says that when cinemas and liquor shops are freely doing business in Islamic countries, “it is pointless to ban them in Kashmir valley.”

The Kashmir valley’s six million people are predominantly Muslim and hard-line separatist leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani have criticised the plan to reopen cinema halls and liquor shops.

“I am very interested to know how many OIC (Organisation of Islamic Conference) member countries – including Pakistan and Bangladesh – allow cinemas to function in their countries,” Abdullah said reacting to objections from Geelani set out in a published statement.

But, it is not only the religious orthodoxy which has objections.

Noted columnist Aijaz-ul-Haq says local sensitivities are involved, especially where the plan to reopen case of liquor shops is concerned. “The government should heed the concerns of its own people first – tourists come later.”

“Kashmir is not a theocratic state, but social sensitivities are not bound by religious laws alone,” Tanveer Tahir, a student, told IPS. “If the government says liquor and cinema boosts tourism, does that mean it will also allow prostitution to flourish in the state just to attract tourists?”

By Athar Parvaiz
GUREZ, Jammu & Kashmir, Sep 27 2011 (IPS)

A ruling by the International Court of Arbitration (ICA) at The Hague, staying construction of a dam across a river that flows into Pakistan, has brought cheer to the tribal people who live around the site.

Abdul Razzak with a harvest of prized Kashmiri beans in the fertile Gurez valley. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

Few would want to move out of this idyllic, alpine valley – that stretches 80 km in the high Himalayas and is home to the Dard Shin tribe – through which flows the Kishenganga, called the Neelum after it crosses into the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir.

Najar and other Dard Shins have refused compensation offered by the government at rates twice the prevailing value of land in the Gurez valley, which falls in the Bandipora district of Jammu and Kashmir state.

“The government promised us twice the going rate per acre of land, but we are not willing to leave our homes and move to other parts of Kashmir,” Najar said.

What may save the Dard Shins, who speak a language that is unique and endangered, is the Sep. 24 ruling by the ICA banning “permanent works on or above the Kishanganga/Neelum riverbed at the Gurez site that may inhibit the restoration of the flow of the river to its natural channel.”

Essentially, the ICA considered favourably a plea by Pakistan asking for a stay on further construction of the central government’s 330 Mw Kishanganga Hydroelectric Project (KHEP) that is now 40 percent complete.

Pakistan had argued that Kishanganga dam stands in violation of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty signed by India and Pakistan to share the waters of the Indus and its five tributaries – the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej and Beas.

Under the treaty, Pakistan has exclusive use of the western rivers, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab while India has exclusive rights to the eastern rivers – Sutlej, Beas and Ravi. All the rivers ultimately flow into Pakistan.

Pakistan is building a 969 Mw dam under the Neelum-Jhelum Hydroelectric Project downstream, which Islamabad contends will be affected by the KHEP.

After bilateral negotiations collapsed in April last year, Pakistan took the case to the ICA as a violation of the World Bank-mediated Indus treaty, which provides a mechanism for resolution of disputes over the waters of the Indus basin.

The KHEP calls for the relocation of more than 1,200 people from at least six villages in sparsely populated Gurez valley that falls on the Line of Control, the de facto fenced and patrolled border separating the Indian and Pakistani controlled parts of Kashmir.

“I have four acres of land on which I cultivate different crops like pulses, potatoes and maize worth thousands of dollars, apart from grazing my cattle and sheep on the same land,” Abdul Razzaq, another Dard Shin farmer, told IPS.

“Owning the land not only means food and a livelihood for me, it also represents security for our future,” Razzaq said. “Any compensation from the government may keep me happy for some time, but it means an irreparable loss for my son and three daughters.”

“We made our objections clear when the government informed us about the construction of a power project, but that did not seem to have any impact,” Razzaq said. “Who cares about the opinions of poor people like us who live in the mountains?”

Children in Gurez are equally upset. “As you can see I am helping my mother collect hay, after attending school,” said Saima Shafi, who is in the sixth standard. “I can’t ever think of leaving the water in our mountain springs and going elsewhere.”

An environmental impact assessment (EIA) carried out by Delhi University’s Centre for Inter-Disciplinary Studies of Mountain and Hill Environment warns that the dam will endanger several Himalayan plant and animal species, including the snow leopard and black bear.

The EIA concluded that ecological habitats face the danger of disturbance, degradation and fragmentation because of the heavy deployment of labour and construction activity.

According to the EIA, more than 500 hectares of land, including cultivable and forested areas, are likely to be affected by the project.

The Kishanganga project is being executed by the public sector National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) at a cost of around 560 million dollars through the Hindustan Construction Company and Britain’s Halcrow Group.

Political leaders in Jammu & Kashmir say that while Pakistan and India wrangle over the resources of the territory there is little benefit from hydroelectric projects for the Kashmiris.

Nayeem Akhtar, spokesman for the main opposition People’s Democratic Party in the elected state assembly, told IPS: “We don’t think that what happened in a court in the Netherlands makes any difference to us because we are never consulted by either country.”

“They (Pakistan and India) capitalise on our water resources while we remain mute spectators. What is happening is a huge fraud on Kashmiris, the main stakeholders.”

Akhtar said Jammu & Kashmir continues to be power starved, although it has the potential to produce 20,000 Mw of electricity from hydroelectricity projects.

Shakeel Qalandar, president of the Federation of Chamber of Industries Kashmir, told IPS that all the energy produced by the NHPC in Jammu and Kashmir is supplied to other Indian states while local industries and domestic users are starved of power.

Qalandar is part of a group that in July filed public interest litigation in state high court seeking the handover of all NHPC projects to the state government. “How can we progress unless we have steady power supplies?”

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
MUMBAI, Jul 14 2011 (IPS)

Hastimal Sen mistook the deafening sounds of explosions that shook his office in Mumbai’s crowded Zaveri Bazaar Wednesday evening as cars backfiring.

Aftermath of bombings at Zaveri Bazaar in south Mumbai. Credit: Courtesy of IBNS

Sen, haunted by the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, knew his city was once again a target of terrorism.

“I got many of them in cabs to take them to the hospital. It was a scene I would never forget,” says Sen, a gift shop owner in Zaveri Bazaar, the hub of diamond trade in India’s financial heart of Mumbai.

“But I am angry. This is the third attack in this area and there is no regard for our security or lives as it happens again and again,” he says.

A day after three coordinated blasts tore through Mumbai, whose mostly migrant population tops 20.5 million, anger and hopelessness are overpowering grief and resilience.

“We are called resilient. But the famous Mumbai resilience is forced upon us. We are angry and helpless at the same time,” Jayesh Labdhi, a committee member of the Mumbai Diamond Merchants’ Association, told IPS.

“Life is cheap in Mumbai. I saw it myself yesterday,” says Labdhi. “People lying dead all over and running helplessly. We bring prosperity to Mumbai, but our own lives are valueless since it is happening again and again and the government fails each time.”

Prithviraj Chavan, chief minister of Maharashtra, the western Indian state of which Mumbai is the capital, says the city is targeted because it is the financial heart of India.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Thursday that the perpetrators of the attack would be brought to justice. Meanwhile the opposition blamed the ruling government for its policy failure in dealing with terrorists and security analysts expressed that India is woefully lacking in capacity to fight terror.

Ajai Sahni, a counter-terrorism expert with the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, said intelligence is of no use till India builds a nationwide capacity to fight terror.

“Even if you fortify Mumbai, there would be countless other Muffasil towns in India where the network will thrive and bombs will be assembled to take them to cities like Mumbai for blasts,” Sahni says.

“Since the 2008 November terror strikes in Mumbai, the city police have made arrests, especially in recent times Islamist terrorists were apprehended, but it cannot stop terror unless that capacity building is extended across the country,” Sahni explains. “You have to dismantle the terror network across India. Terror cannot be contained at the point of delivery.”

While India’s home minister P. Chidambaram said there was no intelligence failure in the case of the latest terror attacks in Mumbai, Sahni said intelligence networks have to be extended nationwide.

According to B. Raman, director of the Chennai-based Institute for Topical Studies and former chief of India’s intelligence agency’s research and analysis wing, any successful terror attack is an intelligence failure.

“These attacks are not matters of providing physical security. Here it is happening in a crowded public place,” Raman says, pointing out that Mumbai was attacked first in 1993, then in 2003, 2006, 2008 and now again in 2011. “While we blame Pakistan for it all, we have to bring concrete evidence of Pakistan’s involvement. Till that time we have to keep talking with Pakistan.”

According to Sahni, talks with Pakistan are meaningless for India’s security because they have got nothing to do with building internal capacity to fight terrorists.

“Pakistan is exporting terror to India since 1984 and there is no reason to believe that it will ever change its policy,” Sahni says.

L. K. Advani, the leader of India’s main opposition party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said India should not be ambivalent towards terrorism.

“It is not a failure of intelligence, it is essentially a failure of policy,” Advani says. “The Government of India must shed its ambivalence toward terrorism and follow a zero tolerance policy,” he says, hinting at the Manmohan Singh-led central government’s decision to resume talks with Pakistan after they broke down over the 2008 Mumbai attack.

No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attacks of Wednesday.

While there is suspicion that a home grown group called the Indian Mujahideen (IM) – said to be a part of the Pakistan-based militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) – is at fault, Indian authorities have not yet named any outfit.

“All are suspected. We are also interrogating some recently arrested members of IM, but there are no special leads yet,” said U. K. Bansal, internal security secretary under India’s Home Ministry.

LeT was blamed for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack in which 10 gunmen laid a three-day siege to a Jewish centre and two luxury hotels killing 166 people, including foreigners, and wounding more than 300.

While the politicians bicker and the blame game continues, Mumbai residents are livid.

“This is a repeat telecast of the past such attacks. The debate over intelligence failure is a sham and the word resilience is nothing but a cover for our impotency,” said Ashok Pandit, a filmmaker and social activist in a television debate here.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Jun 22 2011 (IPS)

The Pakistani public’s perceptions of the United States have hit their lowest levels since the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, according to a new survey released here Tuesday by the Pew Global Attitudes Project (GAP).

The survey indicates that only 12 percent of Pakistanis hold a favourable opinion of the U.S.

Another key finding is that, contrary to widespread expectations, the overall unfavourable public opinion of the U.S. barely swayed after the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) killed former Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden on May 2, suggesting that “the military operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan had little impact on attitudes towards the U.S. or its policies.”

Despite the arch-terrorist’s fall from grace in the eyes of the Pakistani public in recent years, a majority of those surveyed described bin Laden’s death as “a bad thing”, leaving a meagre 14 percent in support of his demise.

Many believe that the targeted assassination of the former-strongman will exert more pressure on the already-strained U.S.-Pakistani relationship; and over half of the surveyed population expects relations between the two countries to deteriorate as a result of the raid.

In fact, just eight percent of those polled professed confidence that U.S. President Barack Obama will “do the right thing” in international affairs, dragging his “ratings [to] as low as former President George W. Bush’s were in 2008”.

The survey revealed that certain components of the U.S.’s counter-terrorism efforts, particularly the use of drones against Al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in northwestern Pakistan, remain deeply disliked. Opposition to the unmanned aerial attacks has risen hand-in-hand with knowledge of them, with nearly 97 percent of Pakistanis professing they are “a bad thing” and six in ten claiming that they are “unnecessary”.

Pew’s annual undertaking used over 3,000 face-to-face interviews to carry out two surveys – one before, and the other after bin Laden’s death – which collectively covered roughly 85 percent of the Pakistani population.

The survey’s results come on the heels of increasingly strained relations between Washington and Islamabad, as Pakistani officials have accused the U.S. of violating its sovereignty in going after bin Laden without gaining prior authorisation.

A growing number of U.S. lawmakers, in turn, have accused Pakistan of being an unreliable ally and harbouring terrorists.

In the past couple of weeks, accusations have mounted in response to reports that Pakistan ordered U.S. military and intelligence officials to leave the country and arrested individuals alleged to have supplied the CIA with intelligence on bin Laden’s compound.

Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican who currently leads the House Intelligence Committee, stated recently that he had reason to believe that officials of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) protected bin Laden, but offered no substantive evidence for this claim.

Rogers also warned that the Obama administration and Congress might impose restrictions on Pakistan’s annual two billion dollar aid package. Other officials have called for cutting off aid altogether until Islamabad agrees to fully cooperate with the U.S. in its fight against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The discovery that bomb-making factories in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province were reportedly evacuated after U.S. intelligence officials disclosed their locations to Pakistani authorities further fuelled congressmen’s recriminations.

“It seems to me that to restore our confidence in our relationship with Pakistan, they have to make certain steps… and we have to set up some benchmarks as to what we expect,” John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday.

At the same time, senior officials in the U.S. military have reaffirmed the Obama administration’s commitment to Islamabad-Washington cooperation. Addressing a news conference on Jun. 16, the departing U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that, despite the “ebbs and flows” in relations, “We need each other, and we need each other more than just in the context of Afghanistan.”

But despite this official recognition of mutual reliance, the Pew survey found that nearly seven in ten Pakistanis view the U.S. as “more of an enemy than a partner to Pakistan”.

Opinions of the U.S. appear to mirror Pakistani perceptions of India, the survey noted. India’s unfavourable ratings among the public have ballooned to 75 percent over the past five years, with respondents opining that Islamabad’s historic rival is a bigger threat than the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.

Hostility toward allies and enemies overseas has undoubtedly fed into the public’s criticism of its own government’s failings – according to the survey a vast majority of Pakistanis are hugely frustrated by rising prices, crime, a dearth of jobs, and terrorism. Only 13 percent of respondents expressed optimism that Pakistan’s economic situation will improve in the next year.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s popularity has plummeted to 11 percent, while favourable ratings of other politicians like Prime Minister Yusuf Reza Gailani and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif remain higher but have declined in the past year as well.

Excerpt:

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 3 2011 (IPS)

Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. troops, in a safe house adjacent to a Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad, may vindicate India’s charges that its neighbour is a haven for jihadist groups, but it will do little to change that reality.

“We take note with grave concern that part of the statement in which President [Barack] Obama said the firefight in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, took place in Abbottabad ‘deep inside Pakistan’. This fact underlines our concern that terrorists belonging to different organisations find sanctuary in Pakistan,” said P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister Monday.

Later, speaking to the media, Chidambaram said India was not worried so much about bin Laden’s international al-Qaeda organisation, as about local groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the Jaish-e- Mohammed (JeM) and the Hizbul Mujahideen which are believed to be responsible for a series of deadly terror strikes against India over the last decade.

An attack by a ‘fedayeen’ squad of Pakistani militants on the western port city of Mumbai in November 2008 left 170 people dead and brought roller-coaster relations between the two countries to a new low. The Pakistan government steadfastly denied any involvement.

Chidambaram said the Pakistani establishment can “go on pretending that it knows nothing, but with some efforts the handlers of the terrorists responsible for the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai can be apprehended and brought to justice.”

“Chidambaram’s reaction shows that India strongly suspects that Pakistan’s army and its Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) were involved in the Mumbai attack,” said Prof. Happymon Jacob, of the Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament at the School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Jacob said it could be no surprise that bin Laden was finally killed in what appears to be an ISI safe house. “During the invasion of Afghanistan 10 years ago, the U.S. allowed thousands of top Taliban leaders and militants to be airlifted by the Pakistani military out of the besieged city of Kunduz to safe havens in Pakistan.”

India protested diplomatically against the airlift at the time, and fear was expressed that the militants whisked out of Kunduz would be redeployed against India – particularly in the disputed Indian state of Kashmir.

Indian officials have long alleged that the Pakistani military and ISI fund and maintain militant groups as strategic assets to be used in the dispute over possession of Kashmir.

On Dec. 13, 2001 India’s Parliament building was attacked by a fedayeen squad that drove into the premises in a bomb-laden car and started a firefight in which 13 people died. The Pakistan government denied involvement.

“The reality is that India is in no position to exert pressure on Pakistan,” said Rajeswari Rajagopal, strategic analyst with the think-tank Observer Research Foundation. “India can now tell the Americans that it has all along been warning that Pakistan harbours terrorist groups, but this will not result in the arrest in that country of anyone from India’s list of most wanted terrorists.”

At the top of India’s list is Dawood Ibrahim, who is wanted for the 1993 bombings in Mumbai which caused upwards of 250 fatalities and 700 injuries. Ibrahim runs a crime and terror network from a luxury home in Karachi. Another is Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the LeT – which is alleged to have carried out the Nov. 26 attack on Mumbai in 2008.

Also on the list is Masood Azhar who was among the terrorists taken out of jail in India and exchanged for a planeload of Indians and foreigners hijacked from Kathmandu, Nepal to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in December 1999. Azhar went on to become the founder of the JeM -which is alleged to be involved in the attack on Indian Parliament in 2001.

“What emerges out of all this is that the Indian government understands that it will need a multi- layered approach in dealing with Pakistan, whether it is people-to-people interaction or separate contacts with the military and elected representatives,” Jacob said.

“The recent attempts at cricket diplomacy were a good example of building contacts through alternate channels,” said Jacob, referring to the cricket World Cup semi-final played between the two countries at Mohali in Indian Punjab on Mar. 30 as both countries leaders watched from the stands.

Jacob said the killing of bin Laden in a U.S. army raid deep within Pakistan can be seen as a sign that the Indian government’s attempts to impress upon Washington the need to be circumspect with its ally in the war-on-terror may finally be paying off.

“Afghanistan is the wildcard here. Any arrangement that the U.S. may have in withdrawing troops from that country must necessarily involve Pakistan,” Jacob said.

“With Osama dead, Washington can look for an early exit from Afghanistan, and that could mean a return to the dark ages and an arrangement whereby Pakistan will – as before the invasion of Afghanistan – wield influence in that country through the Taliban,” said Rajagopal.

For India, she said, the real worry in the event of a U.S. withdrawal would be greater Chinese involvement in Afghanistan’s affairs. “China will be interested for two reasons – resources and a better handle on its Uighur problem in the Xinjiabg province,” Rajagopal told IPS.

Rajagopal said India’s multiple-approach strategy towards Pakistan can already be seen in the “divergence or even contradictory policies” adopted by the country’s home ministry (MHA) and the ministry of external affairs (MEA).

“While the MEA is trying to reach out to the Pakistani leadership – both civilian and military, the MHA has the responsibility of safeguarding the homeland and Chidambaram’s tough statements need be seen in that context,” Rajagopal said. “Engaging Pakistan is a key factor in India’s diplomacy. Contradictions are only expectable, and it will be imprudent to imagine that anything will come out of cricket diplomacy or other such engagements.”

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, Jan 26 2011 (IPS)

During the summer of 2010 Kashmir saw one of the worst face-offs between pro-freedom Kashmiri youth and law enforcement agencies. Smugglers used the unrest surrounding these outbreaks to conceal their steady ramping up of the black market timber trade, at times with complicity of authorities.

A tree axed by smugglers in Kashmir. Credit: Athar Parvaiz

Manzoor says that his department has started measures to curb smuggling. “We have liberalised the import of timber from outside Kashmir to ease pressure on local sources of timber. We don’t charge any tax for the imported timber upon its entry in Kashmir and allow its transportation within Kashmir without any transit documents,” he told IPS.

But private timber depot owners say that forest officials ask for bribes even for the transportation of imported timber. “They charge 25 rupees per cubic feet of timber,” said Ghulam Ahmad, a private depot owner in Srinagar.

One of the many hotbeds for timber-smugglers is the rugged terrain of Rafiabad in north Kashmir where smuggling of timber is made possible through the use of ponies. Felling of trees is so widespread here that the practice has started triggering landslides.

“Local smugglers, active in the upper belt, are exploited by the timber contractors who make them cut trees for a pittance while they themselves make huge money out of it,” says social activist Ashraf Khan, a local teacher.

“We don’t have any other means of income. We simply feed on the forest,” a timber smuggler who ferries the timber on his pony, told IPS on condition of anonymity. “I know it is not a respectable job, but when I look around I don’t find anything which can fetch me an income.”

Smugglers ignore the risks involved in operating in the forests of a conflict zone where they could be mistaken as militants by the Indian army. In 2005, Farooq Khan was killed, and last year Gull Kalis was killed in army ambushes in the region.

But in many cases timber smugglers enjoy the blessing of security forces and make 90 to 100 dollars a night thanks to agreements between politicians and head timber smugglers.

The construction boom and the lack of any initiative by the government to save forests have fuelled the illegal sale of forest wood in this territory which is in dispute between India and Pakistan.

The large-scale construction is not only feeding on forest wealth, but has also consumed thousands of hectares of agricultural land. According to official estimates, more than 9,000 hectares of agricultural land in Kashmir have been converted into residential and commercial areas over the past few years.

“The concept of horizontal expansion is proving quite disastrous as it, unlike the vertical expansion, consumes additional space and additional construction material including timber,” Nissar Ahmad, central forest conservator in Kashmir, told IPS. Nissar denied that corruption among forest officials was one of the reasons for timber smuggling.

Carin Fisher, a German citizen who has now applied for Indian citizenship, came to Kashmir a few years ago to start a project called “Rural Tourism” sponsored by the Indian tourism ministry, but she has decided to morph the project into a campaign for saving forests.

“To start with I chose Rafiabad area in north Kashmir for implementing my project. But when I went there, I was shocked to see the incredible destruction of forests,” Fisher told IPS.

“Then I thought I should do something to motivate the timber smugglers to give up this habit of axing the trees. So I named my project “Trekking for Trees” and managed to convince 50 smugglers to work as tourist guides and identified 20 houses for the tourists to stay,” said Fisher.

“In the meanwhile, we also built a trekking centre for giving tourist-guide training to the timber smugglers,” she said. “But we had to suspend the whole operation because I was not allowed to implement my project by a nexus of the vested interests.”

Fisher says that she is organising a similar project in Khag-Budgam and hopes to start it in April or May of 2011. “You can’t stop timber-smuggling by booking the smugglers under harsh laws. You have to go after the kingpins and at the same time you have to give community-based livelihoods to the poor people who actually do the axe-work,” Fisher told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Peter Custers
LEIDEN, the Netherlands, Jan 14 2011 (IPS)

Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev signed a large number of contracts with India during a two-day visit to New Delhi in December. These deals were part of a series of agreements that have placed India in progressively more advantageous positions in global arms markets.

The most prominent agreements, as reported in the world press, relate to arms sales and to construction of nuclear reactors. One order focused on the supply of 300 advanced fighter planes – spread over a period of ten years; Russia is set to sell ‘fifth generation’ military aircraft to India. The order is presently valued at more than 25 billion euros.

Under another agreement, Russia will help India to construct two more nuclear reactors – on top of the two reactors it is already building in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

At first sight, these deals may not seem very sensational. Russia’s military and nuclear relations with India have a long history, dating back to the era of the former Soviet Union. Until the early nineties, roughly 80 percent of the military hardware used by India’s armed forces was of Soviet origin. Subsequently, in the post-Soviet period, relations temporarily ‘dipped’, as both sides quarrelled over India’s outstanding debt – which Russian sources have estimated at 16 billion dollars.

In the later part of the 1990s, military-commercial relations between the two powers were reconsolidated. Today, the majority of the armaments used by the Indian military still hail from Russia.

In light of this, the outcome of Medvedev’s Delhi visit may seem unexceptional. Yet, President Medvedev is not the only leader of a world power who recently prioritised visiting the Indian capital.

Medvedev’s visit was very closely preceded by visits of U.S. President Barack Obama, in November; of French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the beginning of December; and of the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

The visits of Obama and Sarkozy are especially noteworthy, if one is to assess India’s current policy regarding foreign military and nuclear purchases. The American president succeeded in finalising two defence deals. The most important of these two covers the sale of ten military transport planes – C-17 Globemaster III airlift aircraft, manufactured by the U.S.’s Boeing Corporation. The plane reportedly can carry tanks and combat troops over 2,500 nautical miles.

The French president brought home contracts for French and European corporations that are equally lucrative. According to the French daily Le Monde, these include: a contract for Thales and Dassault to update 51 Mirage fighter planes, worth 1.5 billion euros; a contract for major European missile manufacturer MBDA, to construct ground-to-air missiles; plus a contract for France’s nuclear company Areva to build two civilian nuclear reactors near the densely populated city of Bombay.

Delhi’s season of foreign military and nuclear orders even at first glance appears quite unprecedented. Yet, it would be wrong to leave it at this, and fail to notice other peculiar coincidences.

Historically, the Indian state maintained intimate relations with Russia’s precursor, the USSR. Yet the above-described military and nuclear deals – both with Russia and with Russia’s former adversaries, the U.S. and France – are best understood against the background of changed relationships between India and the United States.

In July 2005, then U.S. President George W. Bush and India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a framework-agreement for nuclear cooperation. The deal brought to an end the West’s previous attempts to stem India’s rise as an atomic world power.

Officially, the aim of the new deal was to help India expand its production of nuclear energy, through promotion of the country’s access to uranium and to international civilian nuclear technology.

Indian newspapers in 2008 speculated that the size of business to be generated through the deal for Indian and foreign enterprises totalled 40 billion dollars.

When the nuclear deal was being prepared, it was severely criticised by the Indian government’s leftwing allies and by leading Indian peace activists. They emphasised that the controversial deal would legitimise India’s status as a nuclear weapons’ state, and that not all of India’s ‘civilian’ reactors would be put under an international inspection regime. India, Indian critics estimated, would be able to manufacture an extra one hundred nuclear bombs at least.

While public controversies in India have rightly highlighted the dubious implications of the deal for India’s status as military-nuclear world power, Indian media in the wake of the signing of the deal also pinpointed other, equally dramatic implications of the agreement.

Coincidentally, I happened to be teaching at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in September 2008. At the time, consolidation of the nuclear deal had just been cleared by the American and Indian governments. Reading leading Indian dailies, I was stunned by speculation about expansion of exports of U.S. armaments to India under the nuclear agreement.

In an article that appeared in The Times of India for instance, figures were cited for the amount of money India had spent on international arms’ orders since the 1999 Kargil conflict with Pakistan (25 billion dollars), and was ‘poised’ to spend on arms purchases over the next five to six years (another 30 billion).

Arms exports, it was argued, were the U.S.’s objective in the deal. One deal for the sale of weaponry that had already been clinched – described as India’s biggest ever with the U.S. – was one whereby U.S. giant Boeing would supply the Indian air force with eight reconnaissance aircraft.

When Obama visited Delhi in November, further defence contracts were mentioned as having meanwhile been concluded with three U.S. corporations – Boeing, Lockheed Martin and GE Aviation.

According to American sources cited in the Delhi press, U.S. companies had ‘bagged’ 40 percent of military-commercial contracts signed by India.

The deals that have been clinched with the American, French and Russian presidents who were in Delhi in November and December – read conjointly – confirm that the US-India nuclear deal had another goal. It did not just target expansion of India’s production of nuclear energy.

The deal has both legitimised India’s status as a nuclear weapons’ state on the subcontinent, and has also legitimised a new approach of the Delhi government towards handling its international military-commercial relationships.

In the Cold War era, the Indian government needed to walk a tightrope whenever it bought foreign arms. It had to weigh and balance its privileged military relationship with the Soviet Union against its desire to buy weaponry from Western arms’ suppliers.

Now, India is re-strategising its military relations with world powers. India now has a free hand in buying from or co-constructing advanced weaponry with the U.S. and thanks to the U.S.-India nuclear deal – and, one may add, Obama’s follow-up to Bush’s policymaking – India has become a full-fledged participant in the militarisation of the world economy.

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, Jun 22 2010 (IPS)

With threats looming large on the survival of several wildlife species in the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir in northern India, experts warn that these species could go extinct in the coming years unless immediate steps are taken to prevent their extinction.

The hangul, found at the Dachigam wildlife sanctuary in Jammu and Kashmir region in northern India, is in danger of extinction. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

In the 1980s, the estimated population of the hangul was more than 400 in the 141-square-kilometre Dachigam National Park, a wildlife sanctuary in Srinagar district in the region, says wildlife researcher Dr Khursheed Ahmad. Today the endangered animal’s population is down to an estimated 150 to 170, he says.

Ahmad says there is a need expand the range and habitat of the hangul to the sub-alpine and alpine meadows in upper Dachigam to ensure its survival. This requires freeing the area of livestock and “anthropogenic pressures by controlling poaching and disturbances,” he adds.

Ahmad reveals he and his colleagues in the campaign for conservation of biodiversity have forwarded several recommendations to the Jammu and Kashmir government for the preservation of endangered species in the region.

“We also sought funding for importing the latest technology from the countries where technological interventions have achieved the best results in terms of biodiversity conservation,” he tells IPS. He refuses, however, to divulge the details of their proposals pending response from the government.

As early as 1996, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red Data Book – which contains lists of species at risk of extinction – has declared the hangul, or Kashmir red deer, as one of three species that were critically endangered in Jammu and Kashmir.

The others are the markhor – the world’s largest species of wild goat found in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and the disputed Kashmir territory – and the Tibetan antelope or ‘chiru’, found mostly in the mountainous regions of Mongolia and the Himalayas, where Jammu and Kashmir is mostly situated.

Nine other species are also facing extinction in the Himalayas. These are the musk deer, snow leopard, brown bear, ibex, common leopard, Himalayan tahr, serow, Tibetan gazzelle, and golden eagle, says Rashid Naqash, wildlife warden for central Kashmir.

Despite the promulgation of the anti-poaching law, rampant poaching is the chief cause of the decline in hangul population, says Arora.

The Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972, which applies to the whole of India except for Jammu and Kashmir, and the Jammu and Kashmir Wildlife (Protection) Act place the hangul, the chiru, and other wild animal species in Schedule I, which accords them absolute protection and prescribes the stiffest penalties for the corresponding offenses.

But despite the implementation of strict laws, animals like the markhor are still the objects of intensive hunting, which has caused a steady decline in their population. It is also believed that the conflict in Kashmir is affecting wildlife.

“Poaching, overgrazing and constant conflicts at the border areas are the major threats to markhor conservation in Jammu and Kashmir,” says Ahmad. “Therefore collaborative management of areas inhabited by the markhor needs to be undertaken with the Indian army in border areas.”

Kashmir is in the centre of a territorial conflict involving India and Pakistan. Prolonged, bloody border disputes and the presence of armed forces in the forest areas of Kashmir have posed serious threats to the natural habitat of wild animals that are native to this region.

Conservation of the hangul and other endangered species is not “impossible” if the needed measures are pursued immediately, says Ahmad.

To prevent the extinction of certain animal species, he says some countries have successfully adopted certain technologies, including artificial insemination to breed wild animals.

“We can also import this technology to increase the population of the hangul,” he says.

Experts say that the potential extinction of certain animal species is both an ecological and an economic threat, given the contribution of these species to the economy of Jammu and Kashmir.

For instance, the musk secreted by the musk deer – which is used to make perfume –and the ‘shahtoosh’ (Persian word meaning ‘king of wools’) shawls made from the wool of the Tibetan antelope are the backbone of the economy of Kashmir, says Ahmad.

Trade in these products has been banned globally since 1975 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. While the Indian government banned shahtoosh trade in 1991, the Jammu and Kashmir government allowed the trade until the year 2000 for the sake of artisans benefiting from this trade. Shahtoosh is highly valued in South Asia for its softness and warmth.

Ahmad says a special conservation breeding programme on the musk deer and Tibetan antelope needs to be urgently pursued by Kashmir’s Wildlife department using modern technology to revive the livelihood of Kashmiri artisans.

Hussain Abbass, a Kashmiri shahtoosh shawl maker, says he does not favor the ban on shahtoosh trade, which he says does not require killing the chiru. “Fur shed naturally by these animals gets stuck on bushes, and it is then collected and made into wool,” he reasons.

But the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) belies this claim. “Virtually no bushes are found in the steep, snowy and windswept areas where the chiru live for this to be possible,” says WPSI in its book ‘Shatoosh: the Illegal Trade’, which was published in 2006.

“Do not be fooled by myths and rumours spread by dealers to soften the brutality involved in the illegal trade of shahtoosh. Today every shawl seller knows that the Tibetan antelope or chiru is killed and skinned to obtain raw shahtoosh wool.”

Excerpt:

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 10 2010 (IPS)

The death sentence awarded to Pakistani national Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 22, for his role in the 2008 terror attack on the western port city of Mumbai that killed 166 people is being seen as a setback to a campaign to have the extreme punishment abolished in India.

“It is a setback in the sense that there were few voices heard for remission,” Colin Gonsalves, leading human rights lawyer and vocal campaigner against the death penalty, told IPS. “However, I am optimistic that public opinion in the country will swing back towards abolition.”

India was among 54 countries that voted against the December 2007 United Nations General Assembly moratorium on executions, which was passed with 104 votes in favour and 29 abstentions. The South Asian country’s Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that the death penalty may be resorted to only in the “rarest of rare cases”.

While death sentences have continued to be handed down, hangings, the only accepted mode of execution in this country, are rarely carried out for a variety of reasons, including successful appeals in higher courts. India’s last hanging took place in 2004.

Kasab’s case, activists and legal experts agree, went far beyond the “rarest of rare” category. His conviction was easy because he was captured on camera as he and an accomplice, Abu Dera Ismail Khan, went about spraying bullets indiscriminately on commuters at Mumbai’s main railway terminus on Nov. 9, 2008.

Kasab, it turned out, was the only survivor of a 10-man squad of gunmen who had sailed into Mumbai from the Pakistani port of Karachi and then fanned out to attack major landmarks. They attacked two luxury hotels and a Jewish centre and fought off commando teams for two days before being shot dead.

In video-recorded confessions, Kasab admitted that he and the other members of the squad had undergone weapons training at camps in Pakistan run by the Lashkar-e-Toiba or ‘Soldiers of God’ jihadist group, which has been linked to several terrorist attacks on India in the past.

The weight of evidence against Kasab as well as public opinion whipped up by round-the-clock media coverage of the Mumbai attacks was such that it was a foregone conclusion that he would be awarded the death sentence at the end of trial conducted in an ordinary court that was open to the media.

Kasab’s sentence must be ratified by a high court after which he has the right to appeal against his sentence in India’s supreme court and, if that fails, ask for clemency from the president – a process which may well take years, going by past experience.

Indeed, the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, a prominent New Delhi-based rights group, has complained about a lack of timeframe in which executions are carried out.

Since Kasab’s sentencing on May 6, India’s television channels have featured several debates and panel discussions on his specific case as well as the larger issue of death penalty in India.

Well-known rights activist Madhu Kishwar said at one of the TV debates that Kasab’s was an open-and-shut case and that keeping him alive posed a major risk to the country in that it could encourage attempts to secure his release through plane hijacks or kidnappings.

Kishwar’s fear was not baseless. In December 1999 a group of five Pakistani nationals, said to belong to the Harkat ul Mujahideen group, hijacked an Indian Airlines Airbus loaded with passengers from Kathmandu headed to Kandahar in Afghanistan, then under Taliban rule.

After seven days of negotiations, the passengers were exchanged for three Pakistanis lodged in Indian jails on terrorism charges. One of them, British- born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was later arrested and sentenced to death in Pakistan for the 2002 murder of ‘Wall Street Journal’ correspondent Daniel Pearl. Sheikh’s sentence is yet to be carried out.

The attempt to storm Indian parliament, the hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane and the Mumbai attacks have kept relations between India and Pakistan low over the past decade and at times hovering on the brink of open hostilities. Such events have also meant that there is little public sympathy in India for delaying or commuting Kasab’s death sentence.

Nevertheless, rights activists and those in favour of abolition on both sides of the border have continued to argue against hanging Kasab.

“Two wrongs do not make a right,” said Pakistani rights activist Tehmina Abdullah appearing at a panel discussion on an Indian TV channel. “Civilised countries do not sentence convicted people to death.”

Maja Daruwala, who heads the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, told IPS that she opposed the death sentence in a case involving a young man like Kasab because “it snuffs out all possibilities”.

Echoing similar sentiments, human rights lawyer Gonsalves said Kasab could have been given a life sentence instead and “a chance to reform and perhaps become a voice for moderation, even speaking to young people from jail against taking the path of ‘jehad’”.

In the end, what may save Kasab from the gallows for any length of time is the fact that he is the only jihadist to have been captured alive in India and officially acknowledged by Pakistan as a citizen of that country.

“Kasab is the only living proof we have to put pressure on Pakistan and get it to shut down the terror camps that India has repeatedly said are being allowed to be operated from Pakistani territory,” said Kamal Mitra Chenoy, professor of international studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and a human rights activist.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 9 2009 (IPS)

While President Barack Obama’s announcement last week that he will “surge” 30,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan has received all of the attention here over the past week, Pakistan appears to be looming larger than ever in Washington’s strategic calculations and concerns.

Not only is Washington increasing pressure on Islamabad to deny safe haven to the Pakistani-backed leadership of the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda, it is also cracking down hard on associated groups – notably Lashkar-e-Taiba which carried out the deadly Mumbai attack one year ago.

The administration is also making increasingly explicit its fears about the fragility of the Pakistani state – the fears were fanned further this week as militants bombed supposedly well-secured targets in Rawalpindi, Lahore and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). The fate of President Asif Ali Zardari also became increasingly tenuous amid new corruption charges.

It was Obama himself who spelled out Washington’s worst-case scenario in his nationally televised speech on U.S. “AfPak” policy Dec. 1 in what officials insisted was not mere rhetorical hyperbole.

In justifying his planned military escalation in Afghanistan, he declared that “the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that Al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.”

That threat has been critical in persuading sceptical U.S. lawmakers to temper their criticism of the administration’s plan to send more troops to Afghanistan.

“In our public sessions, the talk is all about Afghanistan,” noted one Congressional source just before Obama’s speech. “But, once they close the doors [to go into executive session], it’s all about Pakistan and the nightmare scenarios that could develop there.”

While Obama went into considerable detail about U.S. plans for Afghanistan, including a pledge to begin drawing down what will be more than 100,000 U.S. troops in the country in July 2011, he stuck to generalities when it came to Pakistan – in part because much of Washington is currently doing and hopes to do in the future is covert.

Most experts here believe that the administration’s hopes of reversing the Taliban’s gains in Afghanistan over the last several years, let alone achieving its ultimate goal of “defeat[ing]” Al Qaeda, cannot be achieved without significantly greater co-operation from Pakistan than it has received in the past.

And if that co-operation is not forthcoming, according to recent published reports, Washington may very well take additional unilateral measures to deal with the persistent threats that it sees across the border.

In particular, top U.S. officials recently warned Islamabad that if it fails to act more aggressively against the leaders of the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda based in Pakistan, Washington will expand the range of its Predator drone attacks – more than 50 of which have been carried out so far this year – beyond the tribal regions that straddle the Afghan border, according to high- level sources both here and in Pakistan cited this week by the New York Times.

The officials – Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, and his counter-terrorism chief, John Brennan – also reportedly warned that Washington was prepared to resume raids by U.S. Special Forces against suspected Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda hideouts, the last of which was carried out in September 2008, provoking a storm of protest throughout Pakistan.

As U.S. officials themselves concede, the costs of carrying out such threats could be very high in a country of 180 million people who, according to a series of recent polls, have become perhaps the most anti-American in the world. One recent international survey found that only six percent of Pakistanis hold a favourable view of the U.S.

In that respect, cross-border raids could be particularly damaging, according to retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as top “Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” official at the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) until early in the George W. Bush administration.

“Pakistanis don’t want [American forces] in their country, and their mere presence will drive many people towards the zealots,” he warned in a blog discussion featured on the National Journal’s website.

Indeed, some experts believe that the escalation in the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will by itself further radicalise Pakistanis, especially if the anticipated increase in violence results in a major exodus of Afghans fleeing across the border.

Washington has been heartened by the Pakistani army’s campaigns since last spring against the country’s own Taliban in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, and by increased intelligence co-operation that has resulted in a significantly higher level of successful drone attacks – more than 50 so far this year – including one that killed Baitullah Mehsud, the founder of Pakistan’s Taliban, last August.

Despite such enhanced co-operation – which also includes limited covert missions by the Central Intelligence Agency and the deployment of several dozen Special Forces counter-insurgency trainers to work with the army – Washington believes that Pakistan is not doing nearly enough, especially against the Afghan Taliban leadership which it believes is based in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan.

Indeed, U.S. officials are currently negotiating with their Pakistani counterparts over permission to extend their Predator attacks to Baluchistan.

While the administration sees denying the Afghan Taliban sanctuary in Pakistan as critical to its counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan, Islamabad – and especially the army – has long used the group as a weapon against what it sees as an increasingly powerful India, its historic enemy, which has greatly expanded its influence in Kabul since the Taliban’s ouster in 2001.

Obama’s announcement that he intends to begin reducing the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan in mid-2011 makes it less likely, according to most analysts here, that Islamabad will go along with Washington’s demands to move against the group, lest it lose a trump in the scramble to fill any vacuum left by departing U.S. troops.

Thus, the administration is assuring Islamabad that it is committed to remain long enough to ensure that no such vacuum develops.

Washington is also offering carrots to induce Islamabad’s co-operation. In addition to the five-year, 7.5-billion-dollar economic and development aid package approved by Congress earlier this fall, legislation providing generous trade preferences remains on the table.

In addition, the administration has promised to press India toward serious talks on Kashmir, to increase intelligence sharing, including enhanced consultation on drone strikes, and military aid, including consideration of a long-standing request by Islamabad for additional F-16 fighter jets – a request that, if granted, would almost certainly irritate India.

Excerpt:

“A bullet whizzed past us smashing the window to smithereens! My terrorised daughter slid under the nearest table. Everybody ran helter-skelter to save their lives. Just then three menacing-looking youths dressed in black exploded into the wedding hall, brandishing AK-47s. They started shooting indiscriminately, and soon our wedding venue was transformed into a battleground for dead bodies.”

Tilu Mangeshikar, a Mumbai-based doctor, was attending a wedding at the Taj Mahal Hotel on the fateful night of Nov. 26 last year when a Lashkar-e- Taiba assault squad laid siege to the hotel. Her eyes were misted over with tears as she relived that night’s horror to IPS.

It has been a year since India’s financial capital, the 14 million-strong Mumbai—the world’s largest city—was pulverised by 10 heavily armed men, who killed 166 innocent people, injured hundreds and wrecked property worth billions.

For three whole days, India—and the rest of the world—watched in shock and disbelief as the Mumbai massacre unfolded before their eyes. The images of the Taj Mahal Hotel, with its iconic dome enveloped in plumes of smoke, intrepid fire fighters disgorging hundreds of hostages from charred sites, wailing relatives of the dead, the tsunami of anti-government protests led by angry Mumbai residents are still fresh in the nation’s collective memory.

But today, on the first anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on Indian soil, the question on every Indian’s mind is—‘Are we any safer now than we were a year ago?’

The responses are indeed mixed. Experts feel that though Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s efforts to contain terrorist exports from Pakistan have at least shielded India from another major terrorist strike in the past year, the country needs to do much more to tackle terrorism. India not only needs to beef up its internal security systems and plug the existing loopholes but also put in place a long-term programme for fighting terror.

A report by a task force of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry on national security and terrorism released last month offers some insights. By charting out what went wrong during the Mumbai attacks, the report has highlighted the exiting lacunae in the country’s security architecture and given recommendations for both the security agencies and civilians that could stonewall a 26/11 repeat.

Security experts have warned in the report that Pakistan’s dubious policies on terrorism and its military establishment will continue to threaten India’s security in the coming years. “Pakistan will continue to maintain its infrastructure of terrorism—including networks that recruit, train, equip and finance jehadi outfits—inside Pakistan territory,” the report said.

Indeed, the underlying fear of external threat lurks in many minds. “The Mumbai attacks were expected to mark a turning point in the global struggle against terrorism, but for the common man not much has changed,” said Dr Prakash Kalra, head of a citizen action’s group in Delhi and a former army official.

“The outrage expressed by people, the media and political leaders raised hopes that Nov. 26 would mark a watershed to end terrorism, but in reality the terror threat still looms large over the country.”

The Indian government’s response to the 60-hour long complex Mumbai attacks highlighted several key flaws in the country’s general counterterrorism and threat-mitigation structure. These include intelligence failures and lack of coordination between the central security agencies—the Research and Analysis Wing and the Intelligence Bureau (IB)—and the local police in Mumbai.

The attacks also accentuated the gaps in India’s coastal surveillance and the coast guard’s shortage of equipment: a ludicrous 100 boats for more than 5,000 miles of shoreline and minimal aviation assets.

Writes defence analyst Maroof Raza in ‘The Times of India’: “… In an era when a terrorist carries an automatic AK-47, many of our policemen are still stuck with the antique action rifles. While a terrorist uses GPS (Global Positioning System) navigational systems, our policemen and soldiers use VHF (Very High Frequency) radio sets that can’t function in cities like Mumbai with high-rise buildings. In short, we have to equip the police to fight the terrorist like a terrorist.”

According to a senior navy official, who declined to be named, the physical security reviews based on vulnerability perceptions have to be an ongoing process in India.

“Follow-up action to plug gaps in physical security does become arduous in a country of India’s size, given its huge population and numerous potential soft targets. But despite this, to prevent a 26/11 replay, we must have a constantly updated vulnerability map,” he said.

However, mention must be made of Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s slew of measures to strengthen the country’s anti-terror mechanism. Over 40 billion U.S. dollars have been set aside for India’s defence modernisation by 2012. The home ministry has also fortified the Intelligence Bureau and galvanised Multi-Agency Centres in the IB to function more efficiently.

In addition, the National Security Guards, whose commandos tackled the Mumbai terrorists last year, now have four hubs, each with an operational strength of 250 personnel, across multiple cities.

The ministry is also establishing more pan-India Counter-Insurgency and Anti-Terrorism Schools across the country. Coastal security is also being beefed up. In addition, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has been amended to reinforce the legal and punitive provisions of law to combat terrorism with renewed vigor.

“I have been warning Pakistan,” Chidambaram said in a speech earlier this month, “not to play games with us. The last game should be the Mumbai attacks. Stop it there….”

Although such measures augur well for national security, the accountability of the Indian political class has come under the scanner. For instance, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government—which was ruling at the centre when the Mumbai attacks transpired—bounced back to power in New Delhi this May.

The return of the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party combine in the Maharashtra assembly last month also drew outrage from concerned sectors. Maharashtra—whose capital is Mumbai—has even reappointed Home Minister R.R. Patil, who had been sacked last year on charges of incompetence. Ditto for erstwhile Maharasthra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who has been inducted as a central union minister.

There is also considerable rancor among the Indian public about Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone Pakistani terrorist caught after the Mumbai carnage, who has not been sentenced for his dastardly act. On the contrary, the Indian government has spent a whopping 30 crore India rupees (6.447 million U.S. dollars) on his security and health since last year.

However, renowned Supreme Court advocate Kamini Jaiswal believes that all citizens—including criminals—have a right to a fair trial, according to the Indian criminal justice system. “The whole world’s eyes are focused on this sensitive case,” the lawyer told IPS. “So India not only has to do full justice to Kasab but also be perceived to be doing so. We don’t believe in instant justice as there’s no concept of Shariat law in our country. So the court may take time, but the verdict has to be just.”

Experts feel that apart from the judiciary and political class, there is an urgent need to involve civil society, too, in tackling terror threats in India. “The government isn’t the only solution in such cases, it is only a part of the solution,” opined Ashok Aggarwal, senior advocate of the High Court and convenor of Social Jurist, a citizens’ action group.

“Voluntary organisations, citizens’ groups, non-government organisations should all work cohesively to put an end to terrorism. The United States and Britain both have programmes for public participation to increase awareness of terrorist threats.”

The U.S. has not allowed a repeat of 9/11. India must similarly say an emphatic no to a repeat of the Mumbai-style attacks that threaten the very fabric of its existence.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jul 17 2009 (IPS)

If the leaders of India and Pakistan were looking for out-of-the-box solutions to their long-standing dispute over Kashmir and the related issue of cross-border terrorism, they could hardly have done better than the joint statement they released this week after their meeting at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

After considering the ‘entire gamut of bilateral relations,’ India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Yousaf Raza Gilani, acknowledged on Thursday that terrorism was the main threat to both countries.

But, remarkably, both leaders also agreed on the need to insulate the dialogue process from their ongoing battle against terrorism.

“Action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and these should not be bracketed,’’ the joint statement said.

Even more curiously, while Kashmir did not find mention in the statement – it isn’t clear if it was privately discussed – the issue of Pakistan’s troubled western province of Balochistan was one of the highlights.

Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have often accused India of backing and even arming separatist groups in Balochistan, charges that New Delhi has denied. At Sharm el-Shaikh, Gilani made references to India’s alleged involvement and Singh apparently responded by saying that India had nothing to hide and was prepared to discuss the issue.

Indian analysts say that by conceding to Gilani’s demand of including Balochistan in the statement, Pakistan appeared to have turned the tables on India, a country that has long played the role of a victim of terrorism rather than a perpetrator.

Almost predictably, on his home turf, Singh came under attack in Parliament by the right-wing, opposition Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) for de-linking terrorism from the issue of resuming the composite dialogue process. This process, begun five years ago, was suspended by India as a response to the terrorist attacks on the port city of Mumbai in November 2008 which claimed 180 lives.

“If terrorism is set aside, then how does the dialogue become composite?” Sushma Swaraj, BJP member and deputy opposition leader in the lawmaking lower house, or Lok Sabha, said on Friday.

Singh defended India’s radically new stance by saying that “action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and therefore cannot await other developments.”

India, he explained to parliamentarians, sought engagement with Pakistan as “the only way forward to realise the vision of a stable and prosperous South Asia,” and that his government was ready to “go more than half way, provided Pakistan creates the conditions for a meaningful dialogue.”

Lal Krishna Advani, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, said that by “de-linking terrorism from composite dialogue the government had capitulated to Pakistan’s demand seven months after the Mumbai attacks.”

Advani then led his party to walkout of the Lok Sabha in protest, boycotting the parliamentary session.

The Communist Party of India -Marxist (CPI-M)’s Sitaram Yechury said the government appeared to be acting under pressure from the United States which had stakes in Pakistan, a frontline state in the war on terror in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Probir Purkayastha, a well-known commentator and peace activist, opines that the statement is symptomatic of India and Pakistan’s growing proximity with the U.S., which appears to be playing the role of a peace broker between the two countries.

“India would like to take the position that it is big enough to talk to Pakistan directly, but whenever [a terrorist attack] happens, it turns to Washington,” he told IPS. As a prelude to her five-day tour of India, starting Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wrote in a column in the Times of India, an Indian daily, that both India and the U.S. should “encourage Pakistan as that nation confronts the challenge of violent terrorism.”

“Whatever the case, the need to resume talks was paramount and what has just occurred is an intelligent response to Pakistan’s difficult internal situation,” Purkayastha said. “It is irresponsible to say we don’t care about Pakistan’s internal troubles or to believe that Pakistan is a single homogenous mass.”

Purkayastha also said that while it was okay to temporarily suspend the composite dialogue in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, this cannot be seen as a permanent solution.

“The mention of Balochistan in the Sharm el-Sheikh statement,” said Purkaystha, “could be seen as a concession to Gilani that might give him room for manoeuvre within the political space in Pakistan.”

Dipankar Banerjee, a retired Indian army general who now heads the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, a New Delhi based think tank, says the mention of Balochistan should have been avoided, considering it can dampen prospects of taking the dialogue process forward. But he was relieved to find that the statement contained no signs of bellicose finger pointing.

“Going by what was reported to have transpired at Sharm el-Sheikh and what the prime minister stated afterwards, the resumption of the composite dialogue would depend on how Islamabad deals with the Mumbai attacks,” Banerjee told IPS. “This is a reasonable position.”

Banerjee points out that the endeavour by the two nuclear rivals to create space for “back channel or track-two diplomacy” to work is significant.

“It is in the interests of both countries to continue talking to each other and it is certainly in India’s interest to find ways to ensure that Pakistan remains stable and secure,” Banerjee said.

Excerpt:

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jul 8 2009 (IPS)

It is hard to say whether U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will find herself being quizzed more on Washington’s ‘AfPak’ strategy to contain global terror or her appeasement of a financially muscular China, when she lands in India mid-July.

Already much is being read into the fact that Clinton’s visit comes a full five months after she landed in Beijing where, to the consternation of international rights groups, she refused to allow human rights to “interfere” with talks on more pressing issues such as the financial crisis, climate change and security.

Abandoning the George W. Bush policy of ‘containing’ China through building up strategic ties with India (as well as with Japan and Australia), Clinton has described U.S.-China relations as “the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century.”

But when she gets to India, Clinton will be expected to spell out the future of the landmark Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear agreement which was seen in China as part of the ‘containment’ strategy. Beijing had therefore opposed the special waiver sought by the U.S. from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to enable India to resume nuclear commerce.

Clinton will also be asked to explain the AfPak policy of jointly dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan to contain terrorism with the focus on providing Pakistan more economic and military aid – though there have been complaints that it was being funnelled into militancy in Indian-ruled Kashmir.

“At a time of deep economic crisis and when the spectre of terrorism looms large over the world, India can only be supportive of the U.S. initiatives in engaging China and Pakistan,” says Prof. Sujit Dutta, an expert on India-China relations and currently attached to the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution in New Delhi.

“On the other hand,” Dutta told IPS, “engaging with China must not lead to a reversal to the time during the late 1990s when the U.S. was beginning to look favourably at parcelling out hegemony over Asia to Beijing.”

Dutta pointed to the dramatic revelation by the U.S. Pacific Command chief Admiral Timothy J. Keating during his visit to India on May 14 that a top-ranking Chinese naval official had sounded him out on a proposal to split control over the world’s seas between the navies of the two countries.

Keating was reportedly told: “You (the U.S.) take Hawaii East and we, (China) will take Hawaii West and the Indian Ocean. Then you need not come to the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean and we will not need to go to the Eastern Pacific.”

China’s new maritime ambitions were on display last month when it formally laid claim, under the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Seas, to thousands of square miles of maritime territory in the South China Sea based on its unilateral claims to offshore islands off the coasts of Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Recently, in the name of dealing with piracy, the Chinese fleet sailed into the Indian Ocean. It has also been steadily building facilities and bases along the Indian Ocean rim through partnerships such as at the ports of Gwadar in Pakistan, Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Sittwe in Burma.

India’s quest for better relations with the United States took a dramatic upswing when it stormed into the ‘nuclear club’ with weapons tests in 1998 and then explained to then U.S. president Bill Clinton that the reason the tests were carried out was China.

Although Pakistan followed those tests with its own nuclear explosions two days later, India’s status was quickly ‘dehyphenated’ from Pakistan and it was accorded strategic parity with China – at least on the nuclear issue.

According to Prof. Brahma Chellaney at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), an independent and respected think tank in New Delhi, Washington under President Barack Obama has once again begun looking at India “through the AfPak lens rather than the Asian geopolitical prism.”

Chellaney says this reality is unlikely to be changed during Clinton’s stop in New Delhi. “While re-hyphenating India with Pakistan and outsourcing its North Korea and Burma policies to Beijing, the U.S. wants China to expand its geopolitical role through greater involvement even in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

This approach spells trouble for an India that has been unable to call Pakistan to account for such spectacular acts of terrorism as the November attacks on the western port city of Mumbai by a suicide squad sent in by the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba group that left behind a trail of death and destruction at two of the city’s landmark hotels and at the main railway terminus.

Following the November attacks, the China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS) stated, in an analysis dated Dec. 4, 2008, that in the event of war breaking out between India and Pakistan, Beijing could “firmly support Pakistan” and even speculated on the possibility of “strategic military action in Southern Tibet (India’s Arunachal Pradesh state) to thoroughly liberate the people there.”

A second CIISS analysis on the following day stressed the importance of an ongoing China-Pakistan project to link the disputed territory of Kashmir with China through the Karakorum highway project. China already holds 8,000 sq km of territory in Kashmir ceded to it by Pakistan.

Interestingly, the CIISS analysis admits that the main aim of the Beijing-Islamabad alliance is to give advantage to China on the long-standing Sino- Indian border dispute.

The seriousness of China’s territorial claims over Arunachal Pradesh became clear in April when Beijing held back board approval for a 2.9 billion dollar loan sought by India from the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) on the grounds that 60 million dollars of the loan were intended for a watershed development project in the north-eastern state.

Analysts in India believe that China’s new territorial aggressiveness is the direct result of cosier relations with the United States.

India’s response has been to deploy some 50,000 additional troops in the remote Himalayan state, induct a squadron of advanced, nuclear-capable Sukhoi Mk1 fighters into the area and begin work on building airstrips and military infrastructure closer to the 1,000 km border that Arunachal Pradesh shares with the Tibet Autonomous Region of China.

While India and China have signed a treaty to maintain ‘peace and tranquillity’ along their 3,500 km common border, a political solution is yet to be found to disputes over large chunks of Himalayan territory that erupted into full-scale war between the Asian giants in 1962.

That war was also the price that India paid for giving support and asylum to the Dalai Lama and his followers as they fled across the high Himalayas to form a government-in-exile at Dharamsala in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

“India has been supportive of many issues that are supposed to be dear to the U.S., such as making democratic changes in the Xinjiang and Tibet regions, but these have been relegated to the status of long-term issues while attention is being paid to the economic crisis and terrorism,” Dutta explained.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
KARACHI, Jul 8 2009 (IPS)

The months following last year's Mumbai terror attacks have seen a renewed sense of urgency among peace activists in Pakistan and India. Citizens are pushing their governments to resume the composite dialogue process between the two nuclear-rival nations.

India's Kavita Srivastava meets with Pakistan's Rajasthani women Credit: Shakeel Silawat/IPS

"Both countries are going through a critical phase," says Jatin Desai, a veteran Mumbai-based journalist.

A frequent visitor to Pakistan, he was in the country with two other Indians, meeting community-based organisations, political leaders and media persons in Karachi, Lahore and Hyderabad to take the push for peace to the people. His proposal to 'twin' the press clubs of Karachi and Mumbai was positively received.

"After the Mumbai terror attacks, Mumbai residents sent a clear message – No to war, No to violence, No to terror," said Desai. "Thousands joined hands for a hundred kilometre long ‘human chain for peace’ on Dec. 10, 2008, to say this and urge a resumption of the peace process."

He was speaking at a seminar in Karachi to underline the need for peace in South Asia and to honour Nirmala Deshpande, a prominent peace lobbyist, who passed away in May 2008.

A majority of participants in the seminar were women from low income localities whose husbands work as daily wage labourers. Mumtaz, a young woman suckling her toddler, told IPS that this was the second such event she had attended.

"I understand what it's about," she said. "They want peace between India and Pakistan. We should live in peace with our neighbours. Maybe then our lot will improve. We all want that."

Breakthroughs between India and Pakistan are routinely subverted by violence like the Mumbai attacks.

The security establishments and military machines also have vested interests in keeping tensions simmering.

"There will be no peace until the arms race ends," said Mohammad Ali Shah of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, representing a community severely impacted by the hostilities, with whom the Indian delegates spent an evening.

"There are currently over 500 Indian fishermen in Pakistani prisons, and over 150 Pakistani fishermen in Indian prisons," Shah told IPS. "Fishermen on both sides caught violating the maritime borders are treated as prisoners of war."

A consular access agreement of May 2008 – aimed at facilitating early release of prisoners – requires both sides to exchange updated lists of each other’s nationals in their custody every Jan. 1 and Jul. 1.

Pakistan handed over its list to the Indian government. "But India defaulted both times this year, and has been unable, for unspecified reasons, to provide Pakistan with a list of Pakistani prisoners in Indian jails," reported The Hindu on Jul. 2.

The lists in any case are incomplete, with many prisoners unaccounted for.

Jaipur-based Kavita Srivastava of India’s People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), on her maiden visit to Pakistan, wanted information about five Indian prisoners incarcerated in Pakistani prisons since 1991.

"Only two are in touch with their families, we don’t even know if the other three are alive," she told IPS. "When they heard that I got my visa, their families walked for a whole day to meet me. With tears in their eyes they begged me to bring any information I could."

She was unable to ascertain their whereabouts but left with a promise from the provincial minister for prisons that "next time" she would be allowed to visit the prisons and verify for herself.

"Such visits are important to increase contacts. After all, we are one region. We should be able to meet," Shakeel Silawat of the Youth Progressive Council told IPS, after arranging a visit for Srivastava with girls and women from his community. Silawats are Rajasthanis who often have families on both sides of the border.

"If there was dual citizenship for Indians and Pakistanis, believe me, many would take it," asserts award-winning social activist Sandeep Pandey from Lucknow.

Pandey participated in the 2005 peace march from Delhi to Multan in the south of Pakistan’s Punjab province. The marchers had also received enthusiastic welcomes from Pakistani villagers along the way.

Karamat Ali from the Pakistan Peace Coalition which organised the visit said that the Indians left with "a sense of the urgency for peace with India which appears to be greater among Pakistanis".

"They realise that they need to push the Indian government to change its attitude towards the elected government of Pakistan, go beyond pressurising the Pakistani government to 'take action', in order to break the grip of the establishment here," he told IPS.

Such visits may not yield immediate results, but the fact that the governments allow them to take place is in itself a step, if not forward, then at least not backwards. And in the context of India and Pakistan, that can only be seen as positive.

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, Jun 29 2009 (IPS)

The alleged rape and murder of two women by Indian troops in the remote Shopian district of Kashmir state has triggered renewed calls for demilitarisation of the Indian part of Kashmir, with street protests running for close to a month now.

The bodies of Neelofar and her sister-in-law Aasiya were discovered in a stream on May 30 – a day after they went missing, sparking off massive protests across the state.

The agitations come at a time when relations between India and Pakistan – which have divided Kashmir but lay claim on the entire territory – seem on the mend.

Kashmir has remained a bone of contention between India and Pakistan ever since the two countries achieved freedom from British rule and were divided along religious lines in 1947. Presently one-third of Kashmir’s territory is with Pakistan while the rest is under Indian control.

Ever since the partition Kashmiris have urged India and Pakistan to resolve the issue in consultation with them. An armed rebellion against Indian rule in Kashmir has also been going on since 1989. More than 60,000 people are reported to have died in the conflict as per official estimates.

India and Pakistan had started a peace process in January 2004 to resolve all outstanding issues including the contentious, Kashmir issue. Barring a few minor hitches, the composite dialogue continued till the Mumbai terror strikes on Nov. 26, 2008.

India has accused "some elements in Pakistan" of masterminding the attack which had the effect of bringing the composite dialogue between the two countries to a halt. However, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Yekaterinburg-Russia on Jun. 16. Interestingly, Singh raised the issue of terrorism and asked Pakistan to deliver on the promises to combat terror as demanded by India. Both leaders agreed to resume the stalled dialogue.

"Of course, terrorism has become the core issue between India and Pakistan, but delivering on Kashmir on the part of India is as important as delivering on terrorism is important for Pakistan," says Prof. Gul Wani, a political scientist at Kashmir University.

"Having more troops in Kashmir at a time when a peaceful political movement is going on here, is going to have a negative impact on India’s image as one of the major powers in the world," Wani told IPS. "It is very difficult for a democracy to fight a peaceful protest movement by military means."

Hamida Nayeem of the Kashmir Centre for Social-peace and Development Studies (KCSDS) contends that "the recent spurt in human rights violations, which has seen people getting humiliated and killed should serve as an eye- opener for the government of India" that the situation is grave.

"All these incidents should be convincing enough for them to start troop withdrawal at least in the civilian areas," says Hameeda adding that the culprits behind the Shopian incidents should be handed down exemplary punishment.

"Since the officials of the Indian military claim that there are only about 800 militants left in Kashmir, then where is the need to maintain more than 500,000 troops in Kashmir?" Hameeda argues.

Wani extended the conduct of two peaceful elections – one for the state assembly and also the general elections – as additional reasons why the time was right for troop withdrawals.

Intriguingly, the government employees’ Joint Action Committee (EJAC) has also thrown its weight around the troop-withdrawal demand saying the government should initiate measures for withdrawing security forces from civilian areas.

In fact, government employees have joined the peaceful protests wearing black armbands as a mark of protest against heavy troop deployment in rural areas which they said was responsible for Shopian- like incidents.

"More than the government servants, we are human beings and the natives of this land. We feel that the presence of security forces in civilian areas creates a situation wherein unfortunate incidents occur," the president of EJAC, Abdul Qayoom, told IPS.

Troop withdrawal, release of political prisoners and revocation of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) are among demands being consistently made by separatist leaders.

The head of a faction of Kashmiri’s main political alliance, All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference (APHC), Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said: "New Delhi should start immediate measures for withdrawing troops from Kashmir in a phased manner and revoke AFSPA. Apart from this political leaders should be allowed to hold public contact programmes."

Mirwaiz and other separatist leaders including the chairman of another faction of the APHC, Syed Ali Geelani, Liberation Front Chairman Yasin Malik and several other leaders from the pro-freedom camp have either been put under house arrest or sent to jail after the Shopian incident triggered widespread agitation all across Kashmir.

The government has ordered a judicial probe into the incident and its interim report filed a week ago suggested that action should be taken against police officials for "destroying evidence" and possible involvement in the crime. Accordingly the state government ordered the suspension of five police officials on Jun. 22.

Excerpt:

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 17 2009 (IPS)

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit at Yekaterinburg Tuesday appears to have been motivated chiefly by the security environment in the region shaping up around Washington’s ‘AfPak’ policy.

While India has since 2005 been an observer at the SCO – which groups China, Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian republics for mutual security – this is the first time that a summit of the organisation is being attended by its prime minister. Like India, Pakistan also enjoys observer status at the SCO.

Singh was blunt when he met Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari at Yekaterinburg on Tuesday. “I have come with the limited mandate of discussing how Pakistan can deliver on assurances that its territory would not be used for terrorist attacks on India,” he said in the full glare of television cameras.

An apparently embarrassed Zardari reacted by saying, “Please let them [television cameramen] go.” The two then proceeded to the first face-to-face top level meeting between leaders of the two countries since the November attacks on the port city of Mumbai by a squad of ten heavily armed terrorists that left 166 people dead and hundreds of others injured.

New Delhi’s interest in the SCO has been building up since the group’s seriousness about tackling terrorism became apparent at a meeting in June of its security chiefs in Moscow, where they recommended that the Yekaterinburg summit be used to push Pakistan to put an end to terrorist training camps said to be operating from its territory.

“It is imperative that we genuinely cooperate with one another and on a global scale to resolutely defeat international terrorism,” Singh told delegates to the SCO.

Madvan Palat, a noted international affairs expert who specialises on the Soviet Union said India realizes that the SCO summit also offered India additional options in dealing with terrorist threats emanating from Pakistan – rather than depending on the United States.

“While India is keen to avoid going back to any cold war style security arrangement or to confront the U.S., it still needs to position itself to play a more effective role in the AfPak situation,” Palat, currently a distinguished fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), a prestigious think tank, told IPS.

Credit for finding a way to get an Indian prime minister to attend the SCO summit should go to host Russia which decided to hold the meeting alongside the first formal Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) summit at Yekaterinburg. India, which previously had shied away from entering a security arrangement that did not involve the U.S., seemed only too happy to oblige an old and trusted ally.

Palat pointed out that, despite the end of the cold war and a steady improvement in relations with the U.S., India continues to depend heavily on Russia for critical military hardware such as advanced Sukhoi fighters – while also ensuring that these do not fall into the hands of its regional rivals like Pakistan and China. India is now in the process of buying an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered submarine from Russia.

During the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush relations between India and the U.S. bloomed to a point where the two countries could sign a landmark, civilian nuclear cooperation deal, but things have been less congenial since.

The U.S. under Obama is keen that India resumes dialogue with Pakistan – suspended since the November attacks. Washington’s reasoning is that lowered tensions between the two South Asian countries would enable Pakistan to move troops away from its eastern border with India and concentrate on fighting the Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan.

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group for the attacks on Mumbai, and made dismantling of the group a condition for resuming a five-year-old composite dialogue process. But, a Pakistani court order released, earlier this month, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, founder of the banned LeT, on the grounds that there was no evidence to link him to the Mumbai attacks.

Saeed was put under house arrest on Dec. 11 after the United Nations Security Council banned the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which he now leads, declaring it a front for the LeT.

To India’s disappointment the U.S. took the stand that the arrest and release of Saeed was Pakistan’s internal matter. On Jun 3, while addressing a press conference in Islamabad, U.S. special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke refused to comment on Saeed’s release saying: “It is Pakistan’s internal issue. That’s all I can say.”

While concern has been expressed both in India and in the U.S. that funds provided to Pakistan to combat terrorism along the Afghan border have been diverted to the eastern front, New Delhi complains that little is being done to check this on the ground.

Perhaps sensing the more accommodative mood of the Obama administration, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani recently declared that the “Kashmir dispute holds the key to durable peace in the region.”

In an article on the editorial page of the Times of India newspaper Wednesday, Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary suggests that resumption of dialogue with Pakistan is pointless when its “establishment continues to deflect pressure [to investigate the Mumbai massacre] with its devious tactics of partial action, double-dealing and exploitation of international anxieties about its internal situation, not to mention leveraging to its advantage U.S. compulsions in Afghanistan.”

Last week, on a trip to India, William J. Burns, U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, ruffled feathers by suggesting that the wishes of the Kashmiri people should be taken into account in any settlement between India and Pakistan over their long-standing dispute over the territory. India considers Kashmir a bilateral issue with Pakistan.

Burns, who was here in preparation for a visit to India by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in July, said Clinton intended to launch a “new phase in the partnership” that would include defence and counter-terrorism.

Clinton is expected to outline the Obama administration’s policy towards India when she delivers the keynote speech at the U.S.-India Business Council’s 34th anniversary summit on Wednesday – the first after India’s general elections were completed in May and Singh’s new government was sworn in.

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, Mar 5 2009 (IPS)

As political parties in Indian Kashmir debate the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in the insurgency-hit state, civil rights activists hope that this will fructify into a withdrawal of the sweeping powers given to armed forces in this state since 1990.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah responding to the debate in the state assembly on repeal of the AFSPA. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

After the incident sparked protests by local people India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram admitted that ‘’standard operating procedures were not followed by security forces’’.

The main opposition party in the Indian Kashmir assembly, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) moved a resolution in the assembly days after the incident blaming the deaths of the innocent youth on ‘’unbridled powers given to security forces,’’ through the AFSPA.

"Scrapping of this Act (AFSPA) is a must to prevent loss of human lives at the hands of the troops,’’ PDP legislator Choudhary Zulfikar Ali told the Indian Kashmir assembly which is currently in session.

Most political parties in Muslim-majority Kashmir region favour repeal of the AFSPA irrespective of whether they favour secession from India or are nationalist.

The one exception is the right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), which has a presence in the Hindu- dominated Jammu region of Kashmir. "If the AFSPA is scrapped, it would deprive the security forces of the necessary powers to fight insurgency,’’ says Chaman Lal Gupta of BJP. Jammu city serves as the winter capital of the state.

The AFSPA, a federal law, was introduced into Kashmir in 1990, a year after secessionist militants began an armed struggle against Indian rule and the region was put under the direct central rule.

"The Act was supposed to remain in effect for a short period, but successive governments that followed its imposition never showed any will to revoke it even after the security situation improved in Kashmir,’’ said Sheikh Showkat, a professor of law at Kashmir University.

‘’On the contrary, the National Conference government in 1997 enacted an additional law called the Disturbed Areas Act (DAA) and then declared the whole state as disturbed,’’ Shhowkat recalled.

Civil rights activists assert that the stage is now set for scrapping the Act going by the prevailing security scenario. "The chief minister himself announced in the state assembly that the number of militants, active in Kashmir, has been reduced to 800. This is far below the number of militants in early 1990s when their numbers ran into thousands,’’ says civil rights activist, Hameeda Nayeem.

India controls only two-thirds of the territory of Jammu and Kashmir while a third is administered by Pakistan. Both countries have laid claim to the entire territory ever since they gained independence from colonial rule in 1947 and were partitioned along religious lines.

India claims that Pakistan has been financing and backing separatist militancy in Kashmir in a bid to push for a permanent settlement of the territorial dispute but this has been steadfastly denied by Islamabad.

Several wars fought between the two countries have also failed to resolve the issue and the territory remains divided by a fenced Line of Control (LoC).

Pakistan’s civilian leadership under President Asif Ali Zardari has suggested that India and Pakistan could set aside the Kashmir issue for a future generation to resolve while concentrating on first improving bilateral relations.

This approach has led to a reduction of militant activity in Indian Kashmir which, at least partly, facilitated the smooth and peaceful conduct of assembly elections stretched over November and December, last year.

PDP president, Mehbooba Mufti says that the Working group regarding Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) set up by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during a Round Table Conference (RTC) on Kashmir in February 2007, had also recommended that the AFSPA should be repealed.

"If measures like revocation of AFSPA and troop reduction are taken, they can help build an atmosphere of goodwill among the people,’’ Mehbooba told IPS.

A working group, which was headed by the Hamid Ansari, now Vice President of India, had further recommended: "Certain laws made operational during the period of militancy (Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Disturbed Area Act) impinge on fundamental rights of citizens and adversely affect the public. They should be reviewed and revoked."

The Washington-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) observed in its report released in August 2008 that: "Enacted on August 18, 1958 as a short-term measure to allow deployment of the army against an armed separatist movement in India’s northeastern Naga Hills, the AFSPA has been invoked for five decades… A variant of the law was also used in Punjab during a separatist movement in the 1980s and 90s, and has been in force in Jammu and Kashmir since 1990."

"The AFSPA has not only led to human rights violations, but it has allowed members of the armed forces to perpetrate abuses with impunity. They have been shielded by clauses in the AFSPA that prohibit prosecutions from being initiated without permission from the central government. Such permission is rarely granted."

According to HRW the law grants the military wide powers to arrest without warrant, shoot-to-kill, and destroy property in the so-called "disturbed areas."

Abdul Rahim Rather, law minister of the provincial government said that although law and order is a provincial subject under the Indian federal system "the [Kashmir] state government has no power to scrap these laws’’.

Senior advocate Zaffar Shah opines that the government of Indian Kashmir cannot scrap the AFSPA on its own. "Since the Act is regarding the armed forces like the regular army and paramilitary forces, which are under the direct control of the federal government, the state government cannot scrap it."

But Shah says that the Kashmir government can make the Disturbed Areas Act (DAA), which applies to the state police, ineffective by simply withdrawing the notification which it had issued in 1997. "However, the approval of the entire assembly is necessary for its repeal.’’

Responding to the demand of the PDP regarding the scrapping of the AFSPA, Kashmir’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah recently said in the assembly that his government would work towards it. "My government is creating the conditions conducive for the withdrawal of the AFSPA from the state.’’

Abdulah’s statement was welcomed, among others by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, leader of the Hurriyat, a grouping of several pro-independence political groups. "In the backdrop of our agenda, this statement can be perceived positively,’’ the Mirwaiz, an influential, hereditary religious leader, told IPS.

‘’Hurriyat wants revocation of all black laws and complete withdrawal of the army,’’ the Mirwaiz said. ‘’Statements cannot make any difference… something practical should be done. "

Rights activists say the sudden interest in repealing the draconian laws may have to do with the upcoming general elections. "These parties need issuses that appeal to the voters,’’ says Shaheen Iqbal, a human rights activist.

India’s Election Commission has announced five-phased, general elections in the country due to roll from Apr. 16 to May 13.

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, Feb 28 2009 (IPS)

Trade and travel between the Indian and Pakistan parts of Kashmir, as part of confidence building measures (CBMs) between the two rival countries, appear to have become a casualty of the Nov. 26-29 terror attacks on the port city of Mumbai.

Pakistani trucks carrying goods across the Line of Control into Indian Kashmir in Oct. 2008. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

Trade between the divided parts of Kashmir, which had started in October 2008, was already faltering thanks to the lack of infrastructure and facilities, which, according to traders, may have come up but for the renewed acrimony between India and Pakistan over the Mumbai attacks.

Over the last three years India and Pakistan began a number of CBMs, as part of a peace process, and these included the reopening of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway which has remained sealed since 1947 when the disputed territory was carved up between India and Pakistan.

In 2005, India and Pakistan agreed to reopen the highway to allow families divided by the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border, to cross over to meet their kith and kin. By 2008 warming relations between the two countries allowed the opening of the road across the LoC to trade as well.

Although the actual volume of trade cross the rugged terrain was limited and on a barter basis, traders in Srinagar appreciated the measure and had hopes that it would expand with time.

"We were told that all the facilities regarding the facilitation of trade between the two parts of Kashmir would be put in place by the end of 2008, but nothing of the sort happened,’’ Mubeen Shah, president of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told IPS.

"The fact is we are yet to settle the account of the trade items which we have exchanged on the occasion of resumption of trade across LoC on Oct. 21, 2008,’’ Shah said.

Several demands by the traders are pending. The most significant of these is the restoration of telephonic links between the divided parts of Kashmir and the setting up of bank branches at cities like Srinagar and Jammu in Indian Kashmir and Muzaffarbad and Mirpur in Pakistani Kashmir.

"The chief minister Omar Abdullah has himself stated many times that trade across the LoC was meaningless unless traders were able to exchange phone calls. The government should do some practical work to ensure it,’’ says Shah.

"Communication facilities for Kashmiris stand snapped for decades even as people elsewhere in India and Pakistan can make or receive phone calls to each other,’’ says civil rights activist Hameeda Nayeem. ‘’People on this side of the divided Kashmir can only receive calls from the other side, but can't make calls from here," she said.

Nayeem asserts that exchange of business ideas is a basic requirement for trade to flourish and trade. "And it has not been helpful for confidence building that there are no facilities to allow money transactions.’’

Shah is worried by the fact that the trade has been mostly confined to traders who happen to have relations on the other side of the LoC. "This is mainly because no trader wants to risk his goods. Traders need to be assured about costs and profits. Since there is no security traders are hesitant to send across goods,’’ Shah said.

"Presently, the trade goes on only in a cosmetic and subdued manner,’’ Shah said. "We are having problems reconciling accounts. For example, our fruit growers had sent fruits worth Rs three million (58,662 US dollars) in the first consignment, but they didn't get what they consider the equivalent, in return, through the barter system."

With general elections in India slated for April, observers expect no improvement on this front at least till the election process is over as political parties focus more on political rhetoric than on peace-making with its sub-continent rival Pakistan.

"The present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government – a coalition of more than a dozen political parties led by the Congress party – is wary of the opposition alliance, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the right-wing, pro-Hindu Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) which slams it for any softness regarding Pakistan or Pakistan-backed Kashmiri pro-freedom leadership," says political analyst Noor Baba.

"At this point in time, UPA government would not like to take any risks which may give a handle to the BJP as the parties gear up for the elections,’’ Baba said. ‘’It would rather focus on those issues which would better its prospects in the general elections."

The Indian government is currently putting pressure on Pakistan to do more on the Mumbai terror strikes since India believes the plan was entirely orchestrated in Pakistan and Islamabad recently admitted that the plan was partially devised there.

"The Indian government cannot afford to relent and will try its best to sustain the pressure so as to better its chances in the upcoming elections," Baba told IPS. ‘’The Congress-led coalition government has to do this in order to deny leverage to the BJP,’’ he said.

Chances of the Indian government resuming peace talks with Kashmiri separatist leaders appear bleak, especially after the successfully conclusion of state assembly elections.

During her recent visit to Kashmir, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi called on separatist leaders to take part in the democratic process indicating the "massive people’s participation" in the assembly elections – which saw a coalition of the Omar Abdullah-led National Conference and Gandhi's Congress party coming to power.

The central government and pro-India political parties were encouraged by the good voter turnout in Kashmir, especially when the elections were held amidst a wave of anti-India sentiment triggered by the allotment of land to a Hindu shrine board in May 2008. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured in protests and clashes that followed.

Kashmir continues to simmer. On Feb. 22 two youth were shot dead and another seriously injured allegedly without provocation by security forces. Earlier in the month a youth was killed in Lolab, north Kashmir, and another in Kuil-Pulwama.

These killings have led to demands for the revocation of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act by political parties and rights activists. "The special powers give the security forces a sense of impunity and they go to any extent, including killing of innocent people,’’ said Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP).

Excerpt:

A week after Islamabad admitted that the plot to carry out the Nov. 26-29 attacks on Mumbai was partially planned in Pakistan, and that Pakistani nationals were among the assailants, there are tentative signs that the strained relations between the two neighbours may be thawing.

At least five such signs are now discernible.

First, and most important, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday ruled out a military option against Pakistan and emphasised that New Delhi would only use diplomatic means to get Islamabad to act against the terrorist network involved in the attacks.

Mukherjee strongly defended India’s diplomatic approach towards Pakistan even as he emphasised that India would continue to demand that Pakistan dismantle “the terrorist infrastructure” in the country “in a verifiable and credible manner”.

He said: “Diplomacy has not failed. Diplomacy has prevailed. They (Pakistan) had admitted the involvement of elements from their country behind the terror attacks… We did not mobilise a single soldier, we did not press the panic button, we did not lay mines on the border, but we said we expected Pakistan to fulfil its commitment. They informed us in February admitting the involvement of elements in their country.”

Islamabad’s admission came five weeks after India handed over a detailed dossier on Mumbai to the Pakistan government, containing evidence of the involvement of Lashkar-e-Toiba militants in the Mumbai assault.

Mukherjee was careful to add India ”doesn’t mean to rub [Pakistan] on the wrong side. We know the complexity of our neighbour. Everyone knows that [the] Pakistan situation is complex”.

This is the clearest statement so far from an Indian high official indicating that New Delhi does not intend to use coercive means to secure Pakistan’s cooperation in preventing and punishing terrorist activities carried out from its soil.

“This is undoubtedly a marked departure from the recent rhetoric employed by India accusing Pakistan of denial, evasion and prevarication,” says Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor in the School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Second, according to Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, “India has expressed a wish that a team from the FIA [Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency] should visit India. We are considering this request.”

India has not officially confirmed this. But if this is true, then New Delhi may be more willing than in the past to accept Pakistan’s offer of a “joint investigation” into the Mumbai attacks, or at least, to explore a cooperative approach.

Third, India has made it clear that it does not intend to suspend communication links and people-to-people contacts with Pakistan.

Last week, Mukherjee said: “I must underline that we have no quarrel with the people of Pakistan. We wish them well and we do not think that they should be held responsible or face the consequences of this situation. We have, therefore, consciously, and after due deliberation, not thought it necessary or fit to curtail people to people contacts, trains and road links.”

Fourth, New Delhi has dispelled fears that it would not appoint a new high commissioner (ambassador) to Pakistan as soon as the term of the present incumbent expires at the end of this month.

Earlier, there were reports that India would delay the appointment of his successor until a new government is in power in New Delhi in May after the coming general election partly as a way of temporarily downgrading diplomatic relations with Islamabad in response to Mumbai.

And finally, India is likely to respond in a cooperative and professional fashion to questions about the Mumbai attacks raised by Pakistan. A week ago, Islamabad had highlighted 30 issues on which it wanted further information and clarifications from India.

“All this suggests a measured, friendly and mature response to Pakistan’s change of stance,” argues Mitra Chenoy.

He adds: “It is a sign of sobriety that India resisted calls for retaliation against Pakistan, and that Mukherjee said that ‘human liberty and values are sacrosanct. We cannot imitate certain other countries and their actions’ which are causing the loss of innocent lives every day. Mukherjee was implicitly referring to the United States’ global ‘war on terror’.

Ironically, however, the U.S. is reported to have played an important role in facilitating intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, which led to Pakistan’s admission of the involvement of its nationals in the Mumbai attacks.

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 16 that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a proactive role and “orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing [them] to quietly share highly sensitive evidence.”

“The intelligence,” says the Post, ”went well beyond public revelations and included sophisticated intercepts and an array of physical evidence. Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks.”

The Mumbai police had allowed the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to interrogate the sole surviving attacker, Amir Ajmal Kasab. The FBI reportedly shared the information it gathered, with intercepts of conversations between the attackers and their minders, with the Pakistani authorities.

In their briefings, Mumbai police officials have said FBI personnel might be requested to appear as prosecution witnesses against Kasab.

The FBI is known to have contributed to the writing of the Mumbai dossier and probably played a major role in persuading Pakistani investigators to accept its authenticity.

Perhaps even more important was the recent visit to South Asia of U.S. President Barrack Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke.

“Holbrooke is a hard-driving diplomat, who used unconventional means, including bluster, bullying and deception, to reach the Dayton agreement which ended the Balkan war in 1995,” says Karamat Ali, a Pakistani political analyst and social activist.

“It is inconceivable that he did not press the Pakistani leadership to admit that the Mumbai attacks originated on Pakistan’s soil, and to promise to act against the culprits,” Ali said.

“This does not argue that India’s bilateral diplomacy and Pakistan’s domestic politics did not play a major role in pushing Islamabad,” Ali added. ‘’They obviously did. But U.S. pressure was probably an important factor in enabling the civilian leadership of Pakistan to mount pressure on the military and break its resistance to responding positively to India.”

Despite the new signs of a possible thaw, not all is hunky dory between India and Pakistan. New Delhi still expects decisive action not only against the six men that the Pakistan government has arrested, and also against the larger terrorist networks of which they are part.

It is not clear if Islamabad will move quickly to dismantle what India calls “the terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan.

India has expressed serious concern at the just-concluded agreement in Swat between the government of the North West Frontier Province and Islamic militants who have overrun the area, attacked and shut down girls’ schools, and are bent on implementing the Shariah code.

New Delhi believes this will encourage jehadi extremists connected with the Taliban, and poses a serious danger to the entire region.

Whether and to what extent that complicates India-Pakistan relations remains unclear. But if both governments continue to reciprocate positive and friendly gestures, a fruitful dialogue on how to contain and combat terrorism might become possible.

Almost three months after the terrorist attacks on India’s commercial hub of Mumbai, which soured relations between India and Pakistan, the prospect for renewed cooperation between the nuclear-armed neighbours looks dim, two eminent analysts from the region conceded at a policy dialogue here.

“Relations between India and Pakistan are at a critical stage,” Dipankar Bannerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, said Tuesday at the dialogue organised by the European Policy Centre and supported by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

“The target of the Mumbai attack was India, but also Pakistan,” Bannerjee, a retired major general in the Indian army, told the audience. “The immediate objective was to set off an Indian-Pakistan war. That purpose has been defeated.”

However, Bannerjee added that India and Pakistan will have to go a long way to rebuild the trust that is needed for the two South Asian neighbours to work together.

Last week brought a glimpse of hope. The highest official in the Pakistan interior ministry, Rehman Malik, admitted that the attacks on Mumbai were partly planned in Pakistan. He announced that suspects from the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba have been held and may be prosecuted.

“That is a courageous statement and a reversal from previous denials,” Bannerjee commented. “Now, Pakistan will have to complete the investigation, punish all the people that were involved in the attacks and dismantle all terrorist facilities in the country. Pakistan will need support from India and from the international community for that.”

However difficult normalisation between India and Pakistan may look, the climate in the South Asian region is propitious for a new beginning, Bannerjee thinks.

“Look at the results of the elections in Bangladesh. Now there is a secular party in power, whereas the Islamist parties are reduced to a few seats,” Bnnerjee said. ”Or take the elections in Kashmir: a lot of people went to vote, expressing their desire for change.”

According to Bannerjee, India and Pakistan need to continue their dialogue, improve trade relations and cross-border people movements and strengthen regional cooperation.

“We are at a critical stage in economic history, while the war in Afghanistan and in the border regions in Pakistan needs to be overcome as well. We will need enormous political will for that, and a major international effort is needed, but main job has to be done in India and Pakistan,” Bannerjee said

Talat Masood, an independent military and political analyst in Islamabad, sounded less optimistic. “The Mumbai attacks illustrated the fragility of India-Pakistan relations,‘’ he said, speaking after Bannerjee. “Our optimistic assessment before was wrong.”

Masood, a retired Pakistan army lieutenant general, fears that the rapprochement efforts of the last five years are likely to fall entirely apart given that even before the attacks on Mumbai, the dialogue between the two countries had deteriorated.

“In Pakistan, the transition from dictatorship to democracy meant a great distraction from the peace process. And India was too much preoccupied with its international agenda. It did not bother much anymore about regional problems. That was a great mistake,” he said.

For Masood, the biggest drawback in the composite dialogue was the lack of success in the territorial disputes around Kashmir, Siachen and Sir Creek. “If those problems had been handled, that would have transformed the relations.”

Masood sees as a setback the abandonment of plans for a gas pipeline from Iran to India through Pakistan, due to pressure from the United States. “Both countries need the energy, and the pipeline would also have increased the mutual dependence between India and Pakistan.”

Masood appeared extremely unhappy with the Indian accusations that the Pakistan government or government agencies played a role in the attacks on Mumbai, the Indian announcement that all options were open – including military action – to deal with Pakistan, and Indian “attempts to isolate Pakistan”.

“That is poor strategy. Pakistan is facing its greatest challenge with radicalism. The country needs the support of the region and of the international community. If you try to isolate Pakistan, you play into the hands of the militants,” Masood said.

According to Masood, relations between India and Pakistan can only improve in a sustainable way if a solution to the Kashmir problem is found. “It all depends on the political will: if you want it, you can do it. The process has to be really started, it can lead to a solution. But is the will there? Currently, I cannot see it.”

Since being elected to office five months ago, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has often declared that Pakistan’s single biggest challenge stems from ‘religious’ militants.

Taliban cloud moves to Pakistan. Credit: Muhammad Zahoor, 'Daily Times', Peshawar

These include the Taliban, the international al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s own home-grown ‘holy warriors’, cultivated during the 1980s Afghan war against the occupying Soviets.

The approach taken by Zardari, Pakistan’s first popularly elected president in over a decade, differs markedly from the Pakistani establishment’s long-held stand that the country’s real enemy is India.

Since gaining independence from colonial rule and partition on religious grounds, in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought four wars, counting the Kargil ‘war-like situation’ of 1999 – a year after both countries tested nuclear weapons.

“India,” Zardari has said categorically, “is not our enemy.”

Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik recently took many by surprise with his belated public acknowledgement that the Mumbai attacks of Nov. 2008 in which 180 people died were partly plotted in Pakistan. He also announced criminal proceedings against eight suspects, including three alleged ringleaders.

“I want to assure the international community, I want to assure all those who have been victims of terrorism, that we mean business,” said Malik said at a news conference on Feb. 12 in Islamabad, showing journalists a copy of Pakistan’s findings that were later handed over to India.

This was, as Indian journalist Siddharth Varadarajan wrote, “the first time the Pakistani state has ever publicly acknowledged that specific individuals and organisations based on its territory were actively involved in staging a terrorist attack on India” (‘Time for India to think of carrots too, not just sticks’, The Hindu, Feb. 13, 2009).

Pakistan’s admission appears to have confounded critics in India who had been certain that Pakistan would never admit to India’s allegations that the conspiracy was hatched in Pakistan or that the attackers were Pakistani nationals.

The admission “raised suspicion in New Delhi’s paranoid security establishment,” commented Sanjay Kapoor in the ‘Hardnew’s magazine, New Delhi, “The obvious questions that are being asked are: why did Pakistan do a volte-face and where will this new trajectory of their probe lead to?”

There is a widespread perception that Pakistan’s admission was due to pressure from Washington, which has repeatedly voiced concern that tensions between the two countries would distract Pakistan from the ‘war on terror’ against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Both Washington and New Delhi have welcomed the move. So have peace activists.

“They should have made this admission much earlier,” said Musarrat Hilali, a former (and first woman) additional advocate general of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) that borders Pakistan’s tribal areas next to Afghanistan, and vice chairperson of the NWFP chapter of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

“Everyone knew that the attackers came from Pakistan,” she added. “What was the point of denying it for so long? It would have built up confidence if they had said it earlier. Perhaps the rift between the two countries will decrease if Pakistan takes an honest stance to what is an international level problem, so that we stop being seen as liars around the world.”

Even so, the “dramatic reversal of Islamabad’s long-standing policy of denial and its significance ought not to be minimised in any way… The international political cost to the establishment of turning back from here has risen dramatically,” said Varadarajan, writing that this was possibly the main reason behind the delay in Pakistan’s admission.

The Indian government must now “resist the temptation to gloat or to pick quick holes in what the Pakistani investigation into Mumbai has revealed”, and it must take “a constructive approach” to sharing information and evidence, he urged.

Analysts hope that such information sharing can lead to the possibility of starting a joint-terror mechanism or reviving one that exists under the largely toothless South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

Varadarajan wisely suggests communicating responses “directly to Pakistan rather than through piecemeal, or even misleading, leaks to the media” and an urgent “moratorium on hostile rhetoric and accusatory statements”.

However, nothing will really change as long as Pakistan continues to invest heavily in Afghanistan in a bid to develop what policy makers term as ‘strategic depth’ and counter the growing Indian influence across Pakistan’s western border, says lawyer Kamran Arif, speaking to IPS over the phone from Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province NWFP, where he is based.

“If Pakistan continues this policy, things will just continue as they are,” Arif said. “Afghanistan, India and Pakistan – it’s all linked.”

The United States includes itself in this loop, as special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke acknowledged during his recent visit to India.

“For the first time in 60 years, your country, Pakistan and the U.S. all face an enemy (the Taliban) that poses direct threats to our leaderships, our capitals and our people,” Holbrooke told reporters in New Delhi after meeting with top-level Indian ministers.

Hilali and Arif were both among the high-profile 24-member delegation that recently visited India under the aegis of South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR), a non-government organization started, among others, by the prominent lawyer and HRCP Chairperson Asma Jahangir.

“Everyone we talked to agreed that war is not an option,” said Arif. “But there was great anger among ordinary people who saw continuous coverage of the Mumbai attacks on numerous television channels for three days straight. There was also anger about how the Pakistan government and some journalists handled matters.”

Arif noted two positive aspects. One was that in the state elections just after the Mumbai attacks, people did not vote for the right-wing parties which tried to whip up war hysteria.

Secondly, public anger was not directed against India’s sizeable Muslim minority (150 million) as has happened in previous cases of tension between India and Pakistan.

Pakistan and India have also maintained diplomatic ties – although the composite dialogue process remains on hold – despite pressure from the hawks.

Still, either due to disorganisation or reluctance to give Pakistan a face other than the stereotypes popularized in the media, the Indian media largely ignored the delegation, according to Jawed Naqvi, a senior Indian journalist who works as New Delhi-correspondent for the Pakistani daily Dawn.

Naqvi criticised the Indian media for its self-absorbed, blinkered view of Pakistan, “happy to show repeated looped shots of a mullah on a Pakistani channel ranting that India be destroyed, if necessary with nuclear weapons” (‘Peace activists are great folks, so why are we still in trouble?’, Dawn, Jan. 26, 2009).

The security establishments of both India and Pakistan rely on stereotypes about each other, reinforced through the school curricula, popular media and entertainment industries of both countries, to build up an image of ‘the enemy’ populated by ‘the other’ to buttress nationalism.

Peace activists in both countries reject these stereotypes at the risk of being labeled ‘traitors’ and ‘anti-national agents’.

Hilali told IPS that an Indian delegation is due to arrive in the near future in a bid to continue the “people to people links between the two countries, which is so important”.

Only two Indians attended the recently concluded Kara Film Festival in Karachi, the prominent director Mahesh Bhatt and the actor Nandita Das whose directorial debut ‘Firaaq’ (Separation) made its Pakistan premiere at the international festival.

Das, the only Indian on the flight to Karachi she took, told the audience that people were surprised she was making the trip. “It is when times are difficult that there is more of a need to speak out,” she said.

Outraged by an attack by right-wing Hindu militants on women emerging from a pub in Mangalore, Karnataka state, activists in India have initiated a ‘Pink Chaddi’ (underwear) campaign in which they are sending pink panties to members of the Sri Ram Sena (Army of Lord Ram) on Valentines’ Day.

Credit: Pink Chaddi Campaign

Television cameras caught the attack, on Jan 24, in which a group of men chased and beat up women as they came out of a pub, kicking some of the women who tripped and fell. Some 30 men, including the SRS chief Pramod Muthalik were later arrested.

But, apparently emboldened by the fact that Karnataka state is ruled by the pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), SRS leaders have announced that the group will attack anyone caught celebrating Valentine’s Day.

The Pink Chaddi campaign has defiantly called for a Pub Bharo (fill-the-pubs) action on Valentines Day.

“Go to a pub wherever you are. From Kabul to Chennai to Guwahati to Singapore to LA women have signed up. It does not matter if you are actually not a pub-goer or not even much of a drinker. Let us raise a toast (it can be juice) to Indian women,” Delhi-based journalist Nisha Susan, who started the campaign on Feb 5, wrote in the blog http://thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com/ .

The move has resonated in pub-less Pakistan, where women are equally threatened by right-wing militants who claim to have Islamic sanction for curbing women’s visibility and movements in the public sphere.

Muslim extremists in Pakistan oppose the celebration of New Year and Valentine’s Day with as much fervor as their Hindu counterparts in India.

However, shops in all major Pakistani cities were reported stocking Valentine Day cards and other red and pink paraphernalia while street vendors were doing brisk business selling red roses and heart-shaped balloons.

This is far removed from Saudi Arabia’s Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice which, last year, banned the sale of Valentine’s Day material with officials from the ministry seen scouring shops in Riyadh and ordering removal from shelves of anything in pink or red, including roses.

Commenting on the Pink Chaddi campaign, Pakistani filmmaker Aisha Gazdar who recently joined the Pakistani Facebook group ‘Fashionistas Against Talibanisation’ told IPS it was a great idea. “But since we don’t have pubs in Pakistan, we need to find some other way to respond.”

Several people from Pakistan have contacted Susan, says Aniruddha Shankar, also a journalist in Delhi. He told IPS via the internet that Pakistanis have been calling Susan and saying, “Why don’t you send pink underwear to our mullahs (Muslim priests) also?”

“The reason why we picked ‘chaddi’, underwear, is because it’s also the slang word for a right-wing person,” Susan explained in an audio interview to the BBC.

Regarding Muthalik’s response – he has said he will respond by sending pink ‘khaddi’ (homespun) saris to “all of us, thereby shaming us into modesty,” Susan added, “that was an excellent action. It works because we’ve been non-violent, maybe we can get him to be non-violent too.”

“There is of course a point to being light-hearted about this,” she said. “They seem to take Valentine’s Day extremely seriously. For most people, Valentine’s Day doesn’t matter, going to pubs doesn’t matter. We’re not promoting high-consumption lifestyles… What we do object to is people using a certain dislike of high consumption lifestyles to control women’s actions.

“This group has attacked Christians before, they’ve attacked Muslims before, we’re only the latest constituency.”

Some 30,000 people, including older men and women in their 50s, have so far joined the Facebook group ‘Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women’ that Susan started against religious extremists in India.

“We’ve been crazily busy since but it’s quite an exhilarating experience,” said Shankar. “Thousands of pink chaddis are on their way to Muthalik (the chief) of the Sri Ram Sena.

“What’s so awesome is that so many Hindus who are teetotalers and vegetarians and quite religious are speaking out and saying this is not on, from teenagers to grandmothers, they have all sent bright gulabi (pink) chaddis to the Sri Ram Sena.”

The Pink Chaddi movement has no relation to the Gulabi Gang in India, Shankar told IPS when asked.

The Gulabi Gang http://www.gulabigang.org/ is a movement of some 60,000 stick-wielding pink-sari clad rural women in India’s Uttar Pradesh, mostly poor and illiterate, led by the 47-year old gadaria (cowherd) Sampat Devi Pal. Her aim is to educate the women and empower them to fight against injustice.

They had actively participated in the first Ahimsa (non-violence) Day on Jan. 30 this year in New Delhi, aimed at reviving the spirit of non-violence popularised around the world by the assassinated, independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.

Ridicule and humour of the Pink Chaddi type were also weapons in Gandhi’s armoury. He handspun his own clothes – mostly a simple loincloth – which he wore to a 1931 audience given him by King George V at the Buckingham Palace. ‘’His Majesty had on enough clothes for the both of us,’’ he famously said, when asked about his disregard for dress protocol.

Paris-based, peace activist Akshay Bakaya, who initiated Ahimsa Day, has roped the Gulabi Gang into the event.

In an email to IPS at the time, he said he had been in close contact with Sampat Devi since being her French-Hindi interpreter in Paris when her autobiography ‘Moi, Sampat Pal: Chef de gang en sari rose’ (I, Sampat Pal: Warrior in a pink sari) was published last October.

Bakaya now likens the Pink Chaddi movement’s call to fill the pubs on Valentine’s Day to Gandhi’s non-violent ‘Jail Bharo’ (fill-the-prisons) call as part of peaceful resistance against British colonial rule.

In this case, said Bakaya, it “marks determination not to be cowed down by ‘Hindu’ movements that take British khaki shorts to be symbols of Indian culture!”

Many ‘Hindutva’ (Hindu right-wing) organisations in India wear uniforms of khaki shorts.

“They would just as soon burn the Vedas and most Sanskrit literature as ‘pornographic’ and smash Hindu temples from Konarak to Khajuraho, rather than – more creatively – suggesting that the ‘Vatican conspiracy’ of Valentine’s Day be countered with a true-blue Krishna-Gopi festival on a more suitable Hindu day like Holi, India’s very own festival of love,” said Bakaya.

“If the mostly-urban Pink-Chaddi campaign and the rural Pink-Sari gang joined forces, they could easily take the khaki shorts off the Hindutva goons.”

An email from Nisha Susan doing the rounds invites people to join the Pink Chaddi Campaign. “Be imaginative, have fun and fight back!”

“It does not matter that many of us have not thought about Valentine’s Day since we were 13. If ever,” says one email. “This year let us send the Sri Ram Sene some love. Let us send them some PINK CHADDIS.”

The post provides an alternative to those who don’t want to mail it themselves: “you can drop it off at the Chaddi Collection Points” detailed on the Pink Chaddi Campaign blog.

However, because “we should not colour-discriminate”, those who “really, really can’t send pink chaddis, send those in other colours,” says the blog, providing the Karnataka address of Muthalik.

The last step after Valentine’s Day, is to “get some of our elected leaders to agree that beating up women is ummm… AGAINST INDIAN CULTURE.’’

“For right now, ask not what Dr V.S. Acharya, Home Minister of Karnataka can do for you. Ask what you can do for him. Here is his blog. http://drvsacharya.blogspot.com. Send him some love.”

By IPS Correspondents
KARACHI, Feb 5 2009 (IPS)

With national boundaries continually being redrawn in the post-colonial world, it’s time to deal with the reality of partitions and find a way "to make peace with our partitioned selves", contends international banker-turned-art curator Hammad Nasar.

Naeem Mohaiemen's 'Kazi in Nomansland' underlines how India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have each tried to 'own' the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Credit: Jamal Ashiquain/IPS

"Why is there no memorial?" asks Nasar. "People tell me that’s not our culture. But there are mausoleums for various saints from Kutch to Khyber, we garland graves and photographs, and commemorate death anniversaries."

Over the last 30 years, holocaust museums have been built around the world but until 2007, Partition was not taught as history to British states. "The 9/11 monument museum is already up in New York. When I asked the director why they put it up so quickly, he said memorials are a promise from the past to the future about the present."

The difference, comments the prominent Karachi-based writer and editor Muniza Shamsie, "is that holocaust had clear cut perpetuators and victims. With India and Pakistan, it is not so clear. We have a collective guilt and a collective anger."

Through his work, and struck by "how little the shadow of Partition has impacted our visual culture," Nasar is attempting to address these issues.

"Visual artists help us to understand on a deep level where words fail us," he told IPS at the opening of the ‘Lines of Control’ exhibition in Karachi at the VM Rangoonwalla Art Gallery (Jan. 28 – Feb. 28).

The show is organised by Green Cardamom (www. greencardamom.org) a London-based arts organisation that the Pakistan-born Nasar and his journalist wife Anita Dawood Nasar co-founded in 2004. It develops and runs visual arts projects informed by a South Asian cultural perspective but in an international context.

Originally launched in 2007, ‘Lines of Control’ features exhibitions, talks, films and a publication, exploring what Nasar calls the "productive spaces" beyond partitions.

It is currently also showing in Dubai (The Third Line, Jan.15 – Feb. 8) and will open in London at Green Cardamom’s own space on Feb. 18.

The process began with a two-day symposium that Green Cardamom organised in December 2005 at the Royal Geographical Society, London, with artists, filmmakers, and historians.

"We wanted to think ahead to 2007, to commemorating 60 years of Independence [from British colonial rule] and Partition with a big India-Pakistan show. Then we agreed not to ‘fetishise’ that moment," said Nasar. "We ended up several small things that continue to build on each other like a constellation".

The initial activities included a series of talks by young Indian and Pakistani artists. Nasar interviewed the Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar, whose impressionistic 1997 "A Season Outside" commemorating 50 years of India’s independence and partition is part of the ongoing exhibition at the VM Gallery.

"Much of Amar’s work is about failure, failure to understand, failure to govern," said Nasar. "It’s very poetic, very searching."

The film uses introspective narration in English (another colonial legacy) over black and white footage of the 1947 Partition of India interspersed with modern footage evoking the continuing shadow of Partition over the present.

In one instance, the camera dwells on the recurring pattern of feet belonging to the barefoot or poorly shod ‘coolies’ (manual labourers) from either side meeting at the line that demarcates the Wagah check post on the border between Pakistan and India, as they transfer heavy bags of wheat or onions to each other’s heads.

The narrative raises the issue of ‘being armed with your truth’ versus ‘arming your truth’ as Kanwar explores issues of violence and nationalism. There are no answers, just many questions as the camera focuses on a duel between two massively horned rams and the faces of the men watching the fight.

The only Bangladeshi in the show, Naeem Mohaiemen, has a three-edition series at all three venues. His ‘Kazi in Nomansland’ digital prints series combines words and images to underline how nations appropriate histories.

The narrative focuses on the attempts of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh to ‘own’ the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam – the only person represented on postage stamps in all three countries. Ironically, the poet himself always resisted being bound by narrow nationalist identities.

"I am really startled by how little I really know of our history," commented a middle-aged viewer, reading Mohaiemen’s commentary below digital prints of the poet’s eyes.

The exhibition includes an intriguing installation by the Dutch video artist Sophie Ernst who developed it from a series of film clips of the Indian artist Nalini Malani and her mother that Ernst shot over several days for the 2007 launch.

The final installation, "Home" (2008), uses film clips of Malani’s hands sketching her mother’s old house over an architectural model, their conversation accessible through headphones.

The Dubai show includes a few huge pieces, says the show’s co-curator Nada Raza, showing images of it on her laptop computer.

Among them is the young New York-based Pakistani artist Seher Shah’s 5’x10’ piece ‘Monumental Fantasies – Impermanence I’ including archives from her Indian husband’s family. "He is [iconic Indian writer] Khushwant Singh’s grand nephew," explained Raza.

In 1997, the Pakistani visual artist Iftikhar Dadi, who now teaches art history at Cornell University in the United States, collaborated with the Indian artist Nalini Malani to create ‘Bloodlines’, a large piece using sequins. They have a re-imagined version of it in the Dubai show.

Green Cardamom plans to eventually bring all three shows together in museum spaces looking at the global issue of partition, including in India, although taking art works in and out of India is "very difficult," Raza told IPS.

It was also difficult in the current post-Mumbai tensions to bring the Indian artists over to Karachi for an accompanying symposium and dialogue that had been planned.

"There was an incredible amount of enthusiasm, they really wanted to come," said Nasar. "But it’s an ongoing project, so we hope to bring them over another time."

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
KARACHI, Jan 23 2009 (IPS)

As high-profile delegations from Pakistan visit India after the launch of a month-long cross-border signature campaign to press for resumption of dialogue between the two countries and call for peace, IPS interviewed three Pakistani women who are pushing this agenda in their own unorthodox ways.

Pakistani artiste and peace activist Sheema Kermani displays reviews of her theatre group's performances in India. Credit: Beena Sarwar/IPS

Reiki, a spiritual healing practice developed in Japan, 1922, is based on the idea that an unseen "life force energy" flowing through people causes us to be alive. Although Reiki is most often administered using the palms to transfer healing energy, it can also be sent ‘long distance,’ says Ilahi.

She estimates that there are thousands of Reiki masters in Pakistan. Although Reiki is most often used as complementary and alternative medicine for all kinds of physical and mental ailments, "it can also be used to send positive energy to the world at large".

"Every night I send Reiki to Pakistanis, to Indians, and to the planet in general," she told IPS. "It’s great that the peace delegation is visiting India. We must all do what we can".

Relations between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, have been tense since the November 26-29 terror attack in Mumbai which left 180 people dead.

India has blamed the attack on the banned Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and demanded that its leaders be brought to Indian justice.

The Indian demand and Pakistan’s refusal to comply have been grist for the media in both countries to hype up hostility to a point where there has been talk of ‘surgical strikes’ on LeT camps by India and warnings of retaliation by Pakistan.

Many people cautioned Sheema Kermani, the well-known dancer and activist who runs the Tehrik-e-Niswan (Women’s Movement) theatre group against going to India to participate in the National School of Drama (NSD) festival, the Bharat Rang Mahotsav, earlier this month.

"At times like these it is all the more important to make the effort and go there, to show that artists and people like us bring goodwill and have the courage to fight these bad feelings," said Kermani.

She took a 17-member group to the festival, making the arduous 18-hour train journey to Lahore in near freezing night-time temperatures, crossing the Wagah border on foot and then taking a bus to New Delhi. Still, "it was a wonderful experience, we got a standing ovation, and so many people thanked us for coming".

Tehrik-e-Niswan performed the powerful ‘Jinnay Lahore Nahin Vekhiya’ (One who has Not Seen Lahore) on Jan. 11 in New Delhi. Written by the Indian playwright Asghar Wajahat, the play was made famous by iconic Indian theatre director Habib Tanvir when he first directed it in 1989.

The play is based in an old house in Lahore allotted to Muslim migrants from India after Independence and Partition in 1947. After the actual house-owner, an old Hindu woman, emerges and refuses to leave, the initially antagonistic family develops a relationship with her. Tension mounts when local goons try to whip up sentiment against the woman on the basis of her religion.

Tehrik first staged the play in November 2007 in Pakistan where audiences appreciated its relevance in terms of how certain sections of society continue to misuse religion for political purposes, giving rise to an increasing culture of intolerance.

The NSD had invited noted theatre director and actor Salman Shahid from Lahore with two plays, but his group was unable to make the trip "due to logistical and organisational problems rather than Indo-Pak tensions," NSD director Anuradha Kapoor told journalists.

Another woman-headed group from Lahore, Ajoka Theatre, run by the feisty Madeeha Gauhar, filled the gap with "Hotel Mohenjodaro", based on a prescient 1967 short story by the gifted Pakistani short story writer, the late Ghulam Abbas.

Abbas’ futuristic four-decade old story (written before the U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon) opens with a celebration at the fictional Hotel Mohenjodaro as Pakistan becomes the first country to send a man to the moon. Mullahs (Muslim priests) condemn the astronaut as a heretic and whip up a frenzy that topples the government.

They take over power and ban music, art, English, and modern inventions, destroy universities, schools and libraries and impose gender segregation. When their infighting leads to anarchy, a neighboring country invades. Years later, a tour guide points to the spot in a desert "where, before the enemy struck, stood the hotel Mohenjodaro with its 71 storeys."

Pakistani audiences who saw Ajoka’s adaptation of the story last year were struck by its relevance to the current situation, first with the Taliban in Afghanistan and now with such elements overrunning Pakistan’s northern areas and mirroring what the fictional mullahs of Abbas’ short story did in terms of brutalising society.

Reactionary elements here regularly accuse Kermani and Gauhar along with other theatre activists, of being ‘anti-national’ and ‘anti-religion’. In India too, their groups performed under threat from extremist elements there.

Kapoor told journalists that the NSD had received threats for including the Pakistani plays in its repertoire. Both groups decided to take the risk, performing under tight security "reminiscent of a visit by a head of state", as one journalist put it. "…Yet not a complaint could be heard" (‘Harmonies of dissonance at Bharat Rang Mahotsav’, Anjana Rajan, The Hindu, Jan. 16).

"I told her (Kapoor) that we receive many threats here in Pakistan too. We face them, and we are ready to face such threats in India. We cannot be deterred by them," said Gauhar.

"Not going would amount to giving in to the pressure by extremists on both sides," Kermani told IPS. "When there is a fight in the family, you stop talking to each other but then you come back and talk."

"India’s cricket tour of Pakistan may be off, but the presence of the two groups affirms that cultural dialogue has survived despite the current diplomatic freeze," wrote another reporter (‘Across the Border, Dipanita Nath, The Indian Express, Jan. 11').

However, the city government in Lucknow, where the Tehrik play was to be performed as part of the festival repertoire, said it could not guarantee security to the group. "Local elections are coming up, and they were jittery," shrugged Kermani, taking the cancellation in her stride. "But the Delhi experience was so wonderful that it’s okay we could not go to Lucknow."

In Lahore, another committed woman peace-maker is attempting to do her bit to counter hostilities between the South Asian neighbours.

Two days after the Mumbai attacks, Syeda Diep, who heads the Institute for Peace and Secular studies (www.peaceandsecularstudies.org) was among the 25-30 people who gathered in front of the Lahore Press Club to express solidarity with Mumbai.

"We held another slightly larger protest a few days later," says Diep, "and then a third which was better attended with maybe a hundred people."

The group held a meeting on Jan. 2, attended by a cross-section of society – teachers, journalists, activists, students and others – aimed at launching "a bigger front along the lines of the big anti-war groups elsewhere," said Diep. "Yes, they weren’t able to stop war, but they did raise a voice and make an impact on society, and today Obama is President."

The resulting Aman Tehreek (Peace Movement) describes itself as a broad-based citizens' alliance working for the restoration of peace and security in our troubled region. Their first event will be a peace rally on Jan. 31 in Lahore, Diep told IPS over the phone as she headed for an organisational meeting for the rally.

Already an Aman Karwan (Peace Caravan), consisting of leading politicians, civil rights activists and journalists from Pakistan, is in India shoring up ties between the two countries.

Meeting over Thursday and Friday members of the 20-member delegation emphasised that Pakistan was as much a victim of terrorism as India. ‘’We are seeing the Taliban demolishing schools and preventing our girls from going to school. Who do we turn to?’’ said Haji Muhammed Adeel, a leader of the Awami National Party.

Asma Jahangir, chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, spoke of the difficulties faced by people trying to build peace. ‘’I have been slapped by an army officer and abused for trying to bring about peace between the two nations,’’ she told Ranjit Devraj, IPS correspondent in New Delhi.

Organised by South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) and the South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA), members of the Peace Caravan hope to soothe relations between the neighbours, strained by the Mumbai attacks through increased civil society engagement.

"The peace delegations to India are very positive steps," Diep said. "But we want people from India to come to Pakistan too, and join us to condemn the media for its very negative role in fanning hostilities,’’ she said.

Excerpt:

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, Jan 19 2009 (IPS)

As war clouds hover over India and Pakistan, anxiety levels have risen in Kashmir, often described as the bone of contention between the South Asian neighbours

Anti-war protests in Srinagar. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

”War between India and Pakistan appears to be a possibility given the course the two countries have taken,” Mohammad Sayeed Malik, a well-known, Srinagar-based political commentator told IPS. “If not checked, it may reach a point of no return and actual war would be impossible to avoid.”

The Mumbai attacks, which left 180 people dead, rudely interrupted the ‘composite dialogue,’ begun in February 2004 after the nuclear-armed neighbours restored diplomatic ties – downgraded in reaction to a similar armed attack on India’s parliament in December 2001.

Accusing Pakistan-based militant groups, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), for staging the attack on Indian parliament, India massed troops along the border in the largest military mobilisation since the two countries went to war in 1971.

The LeT, set up to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, has now been implicated in the Mumbai attacks as well by India and by United States officials and analysts who have also linked it to Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attack, war between the neighbours was avoided by intense diplomatic activity led by the United States. But it took until February 2004 before the composite dialogue process – a serious effort aimed at confidence building, normalisation of bilateral relations and dispute resolution – could be put into place.

The peace process brought better diplomatic, trade and people-to-people contact across the 298-km, fenced and fortified Line of Control (LoC) that divides Indian Kashmir from the Pakistan-administered part of the territory and has served for decades as the de facto international border.

Most significantly, for people living along the LoC, the peace talks brought about a cessation of the constant exchange of artillery fire by the Indian and Pakistani armies across the border. Scores of civilians have been reported killed, maimed or displaced by the destructive exchanges.

“After the ceasefire, we had been living in a comfortable manner without any fear, but now we might again have go through the traumatic times before the ceasefire,” Rustum Gelani, a resident of the border town of Tangdar, told IPS over telephone.

Reports from the other towns near the LoC such as Uri and Poonch suggested that people were close to panic. “We would appeal the two countries to maintain the ceasefire,” said Abdul Gafoor, a resident of Poonch.

People living along the road leading to LoC in Tangdar, Uri and Poonch have reported seeing deployment of troops and equipment for several days now. “More military and machines are being stockpiled on the LoC… it looks like war is brewing up,” said Neik Mohammed, a resident.

Army officials have downplayed the activity as part of routine exercises, normally conducted at this time of the year. But one defence source said the moves were ”precautionary measures as our neighbour Pakistan is mobilising troops on its side of the border”.

Malik said that should war break out between India and Pakistan, Kashmiris would be the worst sufferers; socially, economically and politically. “It would wash away all the gains of the five-year-old peace process. The positive mood in the aftermath of the peaceful elections in Kashmir may vanish into thin air,” he said.

“During and after Gen. [Pervez] Musharraf’s rule, Pakistan had made quite a lot of progress in disengaging itself from active involvement in Kashmir… a war could reverse it,” Malik added.

Civil society and NGOs have been busy urging India and Pakistan to work towards de-escalating tension and peace-building. “We call upon India and Pakistan to sign the convention and treaty to ban production, stockpiling and use of cluster munitions and landmines,” said ActionAid’s Arjimand Talib, a peace activist.

”A war would seriously dent efforts at poverty eradication in the region and shift focus from development to further militarisation,” Talib added.

“After India felt that international pressure had started working on Pakistan, it has helped bring down tension levels. This should have been enough, but since India’s elections are just round the corner, one can’t be sure that the war hysteria will come down,” said Malik.

Tapan Bose, secretary general of the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD), told IPS that public anger projected in the media carried the danger of precipitating war, forgetting that ordinary people would suffer the consequences most.

“We have been so overwhelmed by the war jingoism of the media and sections of the state and upper middle class [because they were hit by the Mumbai attacks] that we forget what the peace process means for thousands of ordinary people,” Bose said. ”Who speaks for them?”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
KARACHI, Jan 13 2009 (IPS)

As tensions between Pakistan and India continue to see-saw, citizens in both countries are stepping up efforts for peace through initiatives ranging from a cross-border signature campaign to seminars and personal efforts.

Such efforts encounter hostility between the nuclear-armed neighbours that has been steadily increasing over the past few weeks.

In mid-December Pakistan scrambled fighter jets, accusing Indian warplanes of violating its air space – which India denied. However, Pakistan cancelled army leave and shifted some troops from its western border with Afghanistan to the eastern border with India.

India, which initially gave the beleaguered Pakistan government some breathing space by being careful to name ‘non-state actors’ as being responsible for the carnage, has continued to demand the extradition of the alleged masterminds.

Pakistan refuses on the grounds that there is no extradition treaty between the two countries. India says conventions under the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) are enough.

In early January, as India handed over a voluminous dossier of evidence about the Mumbai carnage perpetrators to Pakistan, India’s Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced a major diplomatic offensive to maintain international pressure on Islamabad to hand over the suspected masterminds.

Mukherjee also upped the ante by implying the involvement of Pakistani state actors in the Mumbai carnage.

Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram reiterated the charges. On Monday he went a step further, threatening that India would snap business, transport and tourist links with Pakistan unless it cooperated with the investigations and accusing Pakistan of doing "nothing" to help bring the Mumbai attack masterminds to justice.

Pakistan has said that it is looking into the evidence and will get back to India about it, while warning its eastern neighbour that any aggression will meet with a befitting response.

The aggression on both sides causes dismay among youngsters like Asad Qasim, an avid swimmer and rower who is in his final year of ‘A’ levels in Karachi. Qasim told IPS that he would love to return to India, where he participated in two rowing competitions last year.

"We were in Kolkatta in November when the Mumbai attacks happened but everyone was so friendly towards us," he said. "I feel sad not to be going again this year given the situation. We have a regatta planned in Karachi at the end of January that four boys from India were going to come to, but now that is not an option."

Others are more determined. A 20-member troupe from Pakistan's Ajoka Theatre is preparing to perform at the ongoing 'Bharat Rang Maotsav', Asia's largest theatre festival, in New Delhi just as it has for the past five years.

Aptly, Ajoka's presentation this year will be 'Hotel Mohenjodaro', a 75-minute Urdu play which deals with religious fundamentalism taking over the state.

"People on both sides need peace, not war," declares Dr Nisar Ali Shah, a senior medico-legal officer at a government hospital in Karachi who is also the president of the recently launched Pakistan Peace and Solidarity Council, part of a world-wide network. "In no circumstances do the people want war."

"It is only the weapons manufacturers and sellers who want this, because that is the only way they can sell their wares," he told IPS. "That is what is blocking the road to peace. We must call for disarmament and remove these road blocks."

A day before Chidambaram’s statement, the PPSC on Sunday organised a well attended seminar on "Indo Pak relations and Regional Peace" at PMA House, the old stone building that houses the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) in the heart of this bustling metropolis.

The speakers included the retired lawyer Rochi Ram, a former council member of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. He accused the states in India and Pakistan of failing to provide their people with basic needs.

"In addition, both governments have failed to give autonomy to their provinces (Pakistan) or states (India). The writ of the state is weak, which is why others can intrude and attack us, whether it is the U.S.A. with its drone attacks into Pakistani territory, or the Mumbai gunmen in India. It is all linked," he said.

On the same day, prominent activists from Pakistan attended a seminar on "The Challenges of Terrorism and Role of Religion" with Indian colleagues in Amritsar, just 30 km across the border from Lahore in India. They pledged to continue working for peace between the two nations, stressing that war is no solution to the problems both face.

"Whoever had been behind the Mumbai attack wanted India and Pakistan to blow and divert the focus on the north-west region of Pakistan," secretary-general of South Asia Free Media Association (SAFMA), Imtiaz Alam told the seminar, urging India and Pakistan to jointly investigate and find ways to prosecute the culprits.

Asma Jahangir, chairperson, Human Rights Commission, Pakistan, said there was no choice other than democracy in Pakistan to have peace in the region.

"Yes, our democracy is weak, but we have to run it,'' Jahangir said. ''We should be given time to run the democratic government in Pakistan, which has been ruled by the military for six decades. When we talk about friendship between the two countries that friendship includes people from grassroots level and not the elite class.''

Meanwhile, several organisations in India and Pakistan together launched a month-long ‘Joint Signature Campaign Against Terrorism, War Posturing and To Promote Cooperation and Peace’ (http://www.indopakcampaignagainstwarnterror.org/) on Jan 9, that they plan to submit to the Prime Minister of India and the President of Pakistan.

"Nearly five years of the revived peace process between India and Pakistan was producing good results for all. Unfortunately, the terror attack in Mumbai suddenly changed the entire scenario and the tensions between Pakistan and India have once again reached dangerous levels that are detrimental to the interests of both the countries," reads the petition.

"It is clear that a dependence on the political- bureaucratic- military establishments in both the countries may not lead to reduction in tensions but on the contrary, this nexus could possibly land us in a war. Role of the media of both the countries in the ongoing crisis has also not been very heartening.

"In such a situation, assertion by the people and civil society groups of both the countries in favour of resolving the present crises through dialogue, cooperation and appropriate actions by both the governments to address terrorism and all other outstanding issues could certainly compel the establishments to eschew belligerence and adopt peaceful and appropriate processes to address all the issues and bring back normalcy."

The petition demands "zero tolerance for religious extremism and terrorism in the interest of the very sustenance and prosperity of both the countries". It sees the problem of terrorism in both countries as "qualitatively different" and urges both governments to "contain and root out the activities of all fanatic and terrorist groups" and punish the perpetrators.

India and Pakistan, the petition suggests, should set up a "Joint Action and Investigative Agency for total cooperation and mutual assistance to address and overcome the problem of terrorism effectively".

"War can never be a solution but the beginning of insurmountable problems for both the countries. Hence both the governments should desist from war posturing and immediately engage in meaningful and effective dialogue and actions to address the issue of terrorism and to resolve all other outstanding problems."

The petition urges the two governments to follow in letter and spirit all the Conventions and Resolutions of the SAARC against terrorism and cooperate to secure an atmosphere of mutual trust and holistic cooperation.

SAARC includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

Finally, it appeals to the media of both counties "to play a constructive role in this hour of crisis to propagate and strengthen positive attitudes for the resolution of all the outstanding problems and discourage escalation of conflict and adventurism that could jeopardize peace and prosperity of both the countries’’.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
NEW DELHI, Dec 6 2008 (IPS)

After United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to New Delhi and Islamabad, in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, India has added a new rationale for stepping up pressure on Pakistan for taking decisive action against jehadi extremists operating from its soil.

However, India has still not determined what approach to adopt to achieve its objective, and is wary of using means which might escalate hostility with Pakistan in ways which would "play into the hands" of those responsible for acts of terrorism against its citizens.

In a special background briefing for the media, a senior Indian official only identifiable under briefing rules as "authoritative source" said India has proof of the involvement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in the Mumbai attacks, which left nearly 200 people dead.

But India will not make this accusation publicly for fear that that would escalate tensions and weaken the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari, which it regards as favourably disposed towards the peace process with India.

This is the first time since last week's attacks that India has named the ISI for its role in them. By implication, the unnamed official also suggested that the Pakistan army was aware of the ISI's links with the attackers, because "it would be surprising" if the agency were able to operate independently and without the military leadership's knowledge.

The official did not share specific details of the evidence that Indian investigators claim to have found of the ISI's role in the attacks, but said they had "the names of the handlers and trainers [of the attackers], the locations where the training was held, and some of their communication[s]".

The messages he referred to were sent using Voice-over-Internet-Protocol to "addresses that have been used by known ISI people before’’.

The attackers are believed to belong to an extremist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the military wing of a fundamentalist organisation, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, headed by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed. LeT is formally banned, but continues to be active under a different guise.

U.S. intelligence agencies too claim to have intercepts of the attackers' conversations on satellite and mobile telephones during the 60 hour-long operation launched by Indian security and police agencies to overpower them. But it is not known if they have compared this information with the details gathered by Indian agencies.

A U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation team is currently in India, as are British and Israeli agencies. They are sharing intelligence and coordinating their investigations with Indian agencies.

As New Delhi formulates its strategy amidst domestic public and political pressure to show that it "means business", it makes a sharp distinction between Pakistan's elected civilian government and the army.

Indian officials believe the Pakistan army would want a military crisis on its eastern border, so that it could have a reason for redeploying the 100,000 thousand troops that are currently on the western border with Afghanistan, where they are engaged in a highly unpopular war supporting U.S.-led troops of the International Security Assistance Force.

But India does not want to "play their game" and wants the Pakistan army "to continue being engaged in the fight against terrorism" along the Afghan border, "because that's also our war’’.

This is the closest that India has come to in endorsing and associating itself with the ISAF operation in Afghanistan and along its extremely volatile areas bordering Pakistan.

"In some ways, this is a subtle departure from India's earlier position, which did not vocally declare the U.S.-led anti-al-Qaeda Taleban operation as 'our war'," says Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global politics at Delhi University.

"This shift seems to be related both to Indian leaders' discussions with Rice, and their desire to keep open the option of persuading U.S.-led forces to undertake military operations against the strongholds of jehadi militants operating against India from within Pakistan,’’ Vanaik said.

In her talks here during what may be one of her last forays into South Asia before she demits office, Condoleezza Rice promised all "cooperation, support and solidarity" to India in its fight against terrorists originating in Pakistan, but said it was primarily Pakistan's responsibility to act against them.

Reacting to President Zardari's statement that the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack were "non-state actors", Rice also said: "Non-state actors sometimes act in the confines of the state and there has to be strong action against them… it's a matter of responsibility."

However, Rice made it clear that U.S. support for India is premised upon the assumption that India will not escalate tensions with Pakistan and offer it an excuse to divert its troops from the Afghanistan border. Their deployment at that border, and their cooperation with ISAF, are top priorities for the U.S. in a war that it is not winning.

Rice emphasised this in response to Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement and their joint press conference. Mukherjee said New Delhi is determined to take whatever action is necessary "to protect India's territorial integrity". She responded: "Any response [by India] has to be judged in terms of prevention and not by creating unintended consequences or difficulties."

In Islamabad, Rice extracted from Zardari a promise of "strong action" against any Pakistani elements found involved in the Mumbai attacks. She underlined the "urgency" of such action and emphasised the American nationals were killed in Mumbai.

The unnamed Indian official's briefing made clear that India's response to the Mumbai attacks would not replicate the strategy it adopted in December 2001 after India's Parliament House was attacked, allegedly by Pakistani terrorists.

India broke off or downgraded diplomatic and transportation links with Pakistan, and mobilised 700,000 troops at the border in an attempt to compel Pakistan to surrender "20 wanted fugitives" living on its soil, including the chief of the terrorist group Jaish-i-Mohammed, Massod Azhar, who had been exchanged for hostages in a 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane.

Pakistan responded by mobilising 300,000 troops. The eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation continued for 10 long months, during which India and Pakistan at least twice came close to actual combat with a real potential for escalation to the nuclear level.

At his briefing, the anonymous Indian official said today's situation in Pakistan, with a divided or fragmented power structure, is not comparable to 2001: "Then, we were dealing with one Pakistan. There was Musharraf (the former president and army chief), and that was it. Today, the situation is different."

Some Indian officials are worried at the possible consequences of coercive diplomacy and any strategy of ratcheting up pressure on Pakistan to act against groups like LeT.

A senior diplomat who insisted on anonymity said: "We are acutely aware that the Pakistan situation is extremely fragile, and the state could disintegrate or unravel. The army could stage a coup citing a national crisis."

Vanaik argues that "excessive pressure from India, and especially any move towards deploying the military option, would impel the pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in the border areas near Afghanistan to offer to join hands with the Pakistan army to unitedly fight India, which they now regard as a major ally of the U.S. and part of what they describe as the Christian-Zionist-Hindu global axis".

Former Pakistan foreign minister Gauhar Ayub Khan confirmed this assessment during a television debate on an Indian channel. He said: "These elements are strongly anti-India and joined wars against India in 1947-48, 1965 and 1971. They will do it again if India exercises the military option."

Some of these groups have already offered a ceasefire if Pakistan allows them to fight India on the eastern border.

As they try to fashion a coherent strategy to deal with the fallout of the Mumbai attacks, Indian officials are balancing different factors, including pressure from the domestic rightwing for tough action, their concern to keep the Western powers, especially the U.S., on board, and their anxiety not to further weaken the Zardari government.

As the unnamed "authoritative source" says: "The perpetrators have to be fixed", but we face a "dilemma".

Excerpt:

The pattern is all too familiar. Every time India and Pakistan head towards dialogue and detente, something explosive happens that pushes peace to the backburner and drags them back to the familiar old tense relationship, worsened by sabre-rattling war cries from both sides.

The relationship between the two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours has been marked by tentative ups and plunging downs, particularly over the past decade. This decade is also marked by increasingly vocal voices for peace on both sides of the border who openly criticise their countries’ political and security establishments.

The fallout from the Mumbai mayhem is no different, if all the more ominous for having taken place in the midst of the global ‘war on terror’ with its ‘us versus them’ rhetoric that has contributed to escalated violence around the world and pushed fence-sitters onto one or other side.

On Wednesday a ten-man squad of Islamist warriors armed with assault rifles and hand grenades landed in the port city Mumbai and, after going on shooting spree, seized control of two of its finest luxury hotels and a Jewish centre. By the time commandos neutralised the attackers and lifted the sieges Friday, 200 people lay dead -including 22 foreign hostages.

Pakistan and India are part of the Indian sub-continent. They share a landmass, mountain ranges, rivers and seas, ancient cultures, history, languages and religions. Yet they have fought three wars since gaining independence from the British in 1947, after the bloody partition of the sub-continent into two countries – largely Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan.

The fourth major conflict between the two countries was the Kargil conflict of 1999 that the political leadership on both sides referred to as a ‘war-like situation’. The nuclear threat that underlined this situation drew the world’s attention to India-Pakistan relations, and the festering issue of the disputed state of Kashmir, as never before.

A year earlier, India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests of May 1998 had plunged the region into an unprecedented state of tension. The governments celebrated their nuclear capability, feeding rivalry, jingoism and nationalism on both sides that the media played up. There was far less coverage of those who condemned the tests and the governments’ encouragement of reactionary forces that equated religion with nationhood.

Those who protested were swimming against the tide, labelled as traitors and anti-nationals, and ‘agents’ of the other country, like Islamabad-based physicist A.H. Nayyar who has been active in the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy since the organisation was launched in 1995.

As Nayyar and pro-peace activists addressed a press conference condemning the nuclearisation of the region, charged-up young men who supported Pakistan’s nuclear tests physically attacked them with chairs.

Now, expressing his shock at the “mindless, horrible event” in Mumbai, he told IPS: “There are people in both countries who don’t like efforts towards rapprochement. They take the first opportunity to start blowing the bugles of war and instigate hostility.”

The nuclear tests were followed by the historic Lahore Declaration of Feb. 1999, when Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif invited his Indian counterpart A. B. Vajpayee to Lahore.

Two months later, the Kargil conflict dashed all hopes for rapprochement as it transpired that while the governments talked peace, infiltrators from Pakistan were busy grabbing positions in Kargil on the Indian-administered side of the disputed state of Kashmir.

Sharif denied knowledge of the operation, but his army chief Pervez Musharraf insisted that Sharif had been briefed. It took the intervention of then U.S. president Bill Clinton to de-escalate the tension and comple the Pakistani army into making the infiltrators withdraw by July 1999, pulling the countries back from the brink of a nuclear war.

In October, Musharraf ousted Sharif in a military coup. The present composite dialogue process began in 2004 during the Musharraf regime, but India is now dealing with a democratically elected government for the first time in a decade, note observers. They also point out that it is for the first time that a Pakistani government appears to be genuinely attempting to undo the damage done by past policies.

These policies, linked to Washington’s need to pull down the former Soviet Union and drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, nurtured religious extremism and armed militancy. Later, these armed, indoctrinated forces, supported by the Pakistani establishment, fuelled the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir and led to the worst sectarian violence in Pakistan.

The third phase came after ‘9/11’ when Pakistan officially rejected these ‘Islamic warriors’.

As the Pakistan government now tries to formulate new security paradigms while also combating the terror menace at home, it needs support, say observers. “For the first time, it feels like we are at war,” says a Karachi-based analyst asking not to be named. “Under Musharraf, it was a game to show the Americans that we are taking action but actually continuing to nurture some militant elements against India.”

“With the threat of global communism gone, and the need for Middle East energy primary, America suddenly recognises India as an ally against Islamism, and Pakistan becomes a buffer to be squeezed relentlessly,” commented Vithal Rajan in Hyderabad, India who works with several civil society organizations. “The Indian government in relief at winning American friendship has fallen in with this ploy, further distancing itself from the fledgling democracy of Pakistan, and leaving no real solution in sight.”

Mumbai was still burning when Rajan wrote to civil society activists in Pakistan and India on Nov. 28 urging them not to “just be reactive like the popular press” but take a more thoughtful view of the situation.

Angry condemnations “lead us nowhere; political demands (may) make vote-catching politicians rethink strategies, but these might remain ineffectual. (We) should create space… to think things out in the long term…

“…[Lal Krishna] Advani has called this attack in Mumbai by a few terrorists as ‘a war.’ This is dangerous stuff and nonsense. A war is fought between sovereign countries, not between the police and criminals. It is in India’s interest and in Pakistan’s interest to have stable, progressive governments.”

Advani, who is opposition leader in Indian parliament and represents the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has repeatedly accused the ruling Congress party, which professes to be secular, of allowing India to turn into a ‘soft state’ in the face of a series of deadly bombings in Indian cities, this year, that have been attributed to Islamist groups.

Pakistan’s new civilian government has, however, been making attempts to step out of the familiar well-worn grooves, note observers. President Asif Ali Zardari, for example, has signalled major policy shifts by terming the militants in Kashmir as “terrorists”, stating that India is not Pakistan’s enemy, and then declaring that Pakistan had adopted a “no first use” policy on nuclear weapons.

Participating via satellite link in the prestigious ‘Leadership Summit’ conducted by India’s prestigious ‘Hindustan Times’ newspaper, on Nov. 22, four days before the attack on Mumbai, Zardari quoted his late wife Benazir Bhutto to say that there is a ‘’little bit of India in every Pakistani and a little bit of Pakistan in every Indian’’. Bhutto was assassinated by suicide bombers, last year, while on election campaign.

The religious right in Pakistan – and its supporters within the establishment – is clearly unhappy at Zardari’s peace overtures towards India. Militants involved in fighting the state on Pakistan’s north-west border have announced a stepping up of efforts to assassinate Pakistan’s political leadership.

Pakistan and India’s fights against extremism “will founder if fought alone,” noted the young Britain-based Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid in a recent op-ed in the Guardian, London, warning that India’s rush to implicate Pakistan is a “dangerous mistake”. “The impulse to implicate Pakistan is of course understandable: the past is replete with examples of Pakistani and Indian intelligence agencies working to destabilise the historical enemy across the border.”

Many analysts believe it is too soon to pin the blame on anyone. “To take on the government of a country of 1.2 billion just like that is unbelievably stupid,” says Nayyar in Islamabad, referring to the handful of youngsters who held Mumbai hostage for three days. “If it is the work of a fringe group then it is very alarming that the states are getting worked up to this extent.

“But if the perpetrators were part of an organised group, then it is also very alarming. We need to sit down and do our homework all over again and see how such groups can be contained, or we will all perish.”

Beyond India and Pakistan, the global activist group Avaaz.org is launching a message calling for unity following the attacks in Mumbai, to be published in newspapers across India and Pakistan and delivered to political leaders within one week.

“The message is that these tactics have failed and we are more united than ever. And we are determined to work together to stop violent extremism, and call on our political and religious leaders to so the same. If these attacks cause us to turn on each other in hatred and conflict, the terrorists will have won.”

The terrorist attacks unleashed in the Indian port city and financial hub of Mumbai continue to reverberate through Pakistan at a personal level and on the media.

The crisis, that began Wednesday night and lasted through Friday, dominates conversation, newspaper headlines, television coverage and Internet chatter on indigenous websites and e-mail lists run by Pakistanis at home and abroad.

As a frontline state in United States’ global ‘war on terror’ Pakistan is only too well acquainted with the effects of terrorism, with such attacks in the country having more than doubled and the number of deaths quadrupling from 2006 to 2007, according to a report released in May by the U.S. State Department.

However, even the most high profile attack in Pakistan which destroyed the Marriott Hotel in the capital Islamabad on Sep. 20, that some analysts termed Pakistan’s ‘9/11’, pales in comparison to the events in Mumbai that have claimed over 155 lives already, that many are now calling India’s ‘9/11’.

A group of at least 25 men armed with assault rifles and handgrenades attacked 10 sites in Mumbai and then barricaded themselves inside two of the city’s finest luxury hotels, the heritage Taj Mahal and the Oberoi Trident, as well as a building housing a Jewish centre.

By the time commando squads flushed out the buildings, 155 people lay dead, among them eight foreigners. The final death toll may well reach 200, according to officials.

There has been widespread condemnation in Pakistan against the violence in Mumbai, from ordinary people and non-government organisations as well as from the Pakistan government which has offered “complete cooperation” and support to India to fight the menace.

The Mumbai attacks, hitting in the midst of the fifth round of the ongoing composite dialogue between India and Pakistan, are likely to have wide-ranging repercussions for India and Pakistan relations and for the international community at large.

Analysts note that such attacks tend to take place whenever the South Asian neighbours are engaged in talks and peace initiatives. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had barely started his four-day visit to New Delhi to review the dialogue process when the attacks took place.

Pakistan and India tend to blame each other for terrorist activities within their borders, although over the past year they have been less quick to point fingers. This time too, New Delhi did not immediately blame Pakistan, but later claimed to have arrested a militant with Pakistani links. The Pakistan government has strongly denied involvement.

Commentators in Pakistan point to the huge intelligence failure in India to detect the amassing of arms and training that have enabled such a large number of militants to hold Mumbai hostage for over two days now. They also criticise New Delhi’s apparent reluctance to look within India’s own borders at its various indigenous insurgencies.

“All of India’s intelligence agencies have failed,” comments Farrukh Saleem, who heads the Centre for Research and Security Studies, an independent think tank in Islamabad, “The most critical element in their collective failure is their overwhelming focus on Pakistan-based militant groups.”

He believes that the intensity of this focus has allowed India’s home-grown militant entities “to spread like wildfire” that, according to South Asia Terrorism Portal, afflicts at least 231 of India’s 608 districts.

These insurgent and terrorist movements include three distinct types, “left-wing extremist, separatist and religious”, wrote Saleem in a front page analysis in daily The News on Nov. 28. “In 2006, a total of 2,765 Indians died in terrorism-related violence (that same year, 1,471 Pakistanis died similarly).”

Another analyst, who declining to be named, suggests that South Asian countries band together for joint military operations in the areas known to be breeding grounds for militancy against the guerrilla groups operating in different areas in the region.

In New Delhi, Qureshi stressed that India and Pakistan are both victims of terrorism. He said there was a need to strengthen the Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism and “revisit our strategies for peace and security of the region.”

“Terrorism is a global phenomenon. We in Pakistan deal with it on a daily basis,” Qureshi said. “We will have to join all our resources to fight the menace.”

In an unprecedented gesture, Islamabad agreed to send its intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, the new director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to India at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s request.

Pakistan’s civilian government in another groundbreaking move has recently disbanded the political wing of the ISI, often blamed for fomenting political trouble in the country and abroad.

“I feel a great fear that (the Mumbai violence) will adversely affect Pakistan and India relations,” prominent Karachi-based feminist poet and writer Attiya Dawood told IPS. “I can’t say whether Pakistan is involved or not, but whoever is involved, it is not the ordinary people of Pakistan, like myself, or my daughters. We are with our Indian brothers and sisters in their pain and sorrow.”

Dawood said she is still in shock from the events in Mumbai, a city she has often visited. “Such a beautiful city, so many people’s livelihoods and so much art and culture associated with it… It is so painful to see what is happening there. I watch the television coverage and remember standing at one of those spots watching street theatre…”

Others, like Karachi-based businessman Tahir Siddiqui, believe that events in Mumbai will force greater cooperation not only between India and Pakistan but also between other countries engaged in combating terrorism.

“Pakistan can’t afford to open any more fronts,” Siddiqui told IPS. “We have to cooperate in this fight. I think any support within Pakistan to militants will decrease significantly now, including in Kashmir.”

He added that the situation in Mumbai is “basically the symptom of a larger problem – the imperialist world’s continuing support to dictatorial regimes across the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Morocco. This lack of democracy marginalises people and holds back development. This is a wake-up call to address these issues.”

On a personal level, what can citizens do? ‘Resist fear!’ advocated Islamabad-based peace activist Shahid Fiaz in an email to friends in India and Pakistan. “I know how it feels when your cities are attacked. After the Marriot Hotel bombing and continued suicide bombings around the country, people go out less – markets and restaurants have a deserted look.”

Fiaz, who is on the National Council of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD), the largest people-to-people initiative between the two countries, told IPS that fear is what the terrorists want to achieve. “We need to come out and resist and tell terrorists that these are our cities, we own our cities and we are not scared!”

“We in Pakistan understand and share the pain, anger and grief of the people of India, as we are also victims of terrorism including daily suicide bombings in one part of the country or the other,” said Iqbal Haider, co-chairman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and a former federal minister for law and human rights.

“Instead of accusing each other, which will only help the real terrorists, the need of the hour is unity and understanding among the people of our region. We need to make concerted efforts to defeat the nefarious aims of these terrorists and eradicate these extremist religious militants or mafias from every nook and corner of South Asia.”

In the final analysis, what is certain is that there will be no progress towards peace without determined political will.