PS: A lot of people on Twitter seemed distraught that the government didn’t symbolically do anything to observe the 26/11 anniversary. Well maybe this is it!

I think we have a fun telco ministry here in India. They make decisions rather quickly (when they do i.e.), and some of them are probably less desirable to a lot of firms, or consumers even. In the case that I speak of, it affects a mere (!) 3.8 million consumers who have been left bereft of any mobile services, since they live in the 370-ishly (in)secure  land.

I was in Jammu on a short trip a week back, and most relatives seemed concerned with the fact that their mobiles don’t ring anymore. While they were still receiving calls, recharge was banned, and outgoing calls  stopped. My (very) educated older relatives had accepted it as a response from the heavens- abandonment is almost a natural phenomena in the state, and almost everyone has nothing to say when “security concerns” are raised as an issue.

Personally, I don’t think I am against security orders etc. and I am a great believer in getting the user verification done properly before the connection is given out. In fact, not one person I know cribbed when it took us a week to get a prepaid Orange connection in the U.K. I am sure if the expectations are set right, the consumer in India also will be fine with verification as opposed to no connection (of course this doesn’t need to take a week!). However, with the complete disconnect here are my issues:

1. I personally know people who’re moving to “post”paid by giving the ID and photograph to people they “know” in BSNL / other service providers. Could the photo and ID collection spree not be done for prepaid also?
2. A lot of people are simply getting other “known” people to shift connections for them. Some families with multi-postpaid-SIMs are just allowing someone else to use the SIM. Are they being traced for security?
3. The service providers have done “nothing” to educate customers. How do you leave 3.8 mn in a limbo without any help and just cut them off?

Incidentally, I got views of two people – one rural (a cook) and my grandmother who I think never bother the operators, probably because they don’t generate much ARPU. And both of them were clueless about the what had happened- which is such a pity!

Kale (the cook) decided I was the person to speak to for mobiles (he had seen me throw a fit after my phone cracked as my mom decided to step on it happily). Stealthily escaping the discerning eye of my aunt, he asked me pointed questions on why his mobile could no longer recharge. I explained saying, now it wouldn’t recharge and he will need to go to the “provider” to change it to postpaid. The blank look I got was, well, not helpful. So, I began again. I asked him if he understood “Airtel”, had a “Ration Card” and a “Photo”. All that done, then I told him to go to Airtel and give them all these things, and tell them he will pay a “bill” like the electricity bill every month. This didn’t go well with him either. He immediately asked how much it would cost, and to that I had to tell him he could choose the same call rates- as Airtel (God!) guys would show him. The only difference was he would not “recharge” but just pay at the end of the month. He asked if he could see “how much is left” (talktime). And I went into further explanation. At the end of it, I wondered why on earth had Airtel not held an awareness camp or something. I had clearly done what they HAD to do!

My grandmother had an easier explanation. I overheard her talking to another old lady whose mobile had stopped working. My grandmother’s logic was (which she proudly boasted of) that her phone was “special” since my uncle (who works in BSNL) had given her the connection, hence it was working. Simple. Lucid. (One of the many reason why I like my grandmother so much).

Point is, WTH are the service providers and the government officials doing?!?

©Upasna Kakroo, 2009

Introduction

Sixty-two years is a long time for learning lessons and to cease being indulgent towards the fallacies and faults of the Indian state in obfuscating the issue of people’s right to self-determination in Jammu & Kashmir. There is a tendency in India to read wars being carried out inside the country as phenomena that are less than a war. And that is because it takes place within the borders of the ‘nation-state’, where deployment of ‘armed forces of the Union’ is somehow considered legitimate even when it is engaged in brutal suppression of the people. The most ardent supporters of non-violence have had no qualms in acquiescing to this venture in the name of the “nation”, “secularism”, fighting “Islamicist” forces, averting another partition…. And it has been accompanied by a reluctance to grasp the real nature of such wars where casualties occur in the form of ‘encounter’ killings, custodial deaths, enforced disappearances, rapes, search-and-cordon operations, arbitrary detentions, torture. The list is really endless. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that in Jammu and Kashmir the staggering scale of these crimes over nearly two decades have failed to arouse popular revulsion. However, when a non-violent mass agitation took place last year, it shook the Indian state and society to its very core because it pulverised every lie that had been fed to us and it became evident that people wanted to opt out of India. Then the elections to the J&K legislative assembly took place, and a largely malleable Indian media jumped to the conclusion that people had rejected ‘azaadi’. But they were once again left wondering when the voter turnout for the 15th Lok Sabha elections plummeted. (If elections are to be regarded as a barometer for deciphering the people’s mood then it is the turnout in parliamentary elections that should be held as the most important marker of shift in that mood.) And then came the widespread protests against the rape and murder of Nelofer and Asiya in Shopian on May 29, 2009. Once again it became evident that whatever lies Indian spinmeisters have tried to weave, anger against the Indian state continues to simmer. Therefore, it will not do to ignore and devalue aspirations of a people. But, the issue of people wanting to opt out of India is not just an emotional issue. Or, a mere matter of human rights violations. It has an objective basis in the political-economic and environmental dimension, which must inform any search for solution. What are its main contours?

1. 1. According to a statement issued on the floor of the Assembly by the former Deputy Chief Minister on August 1, 2006, there were more than 667,000 security forces in J&K. This is an incredibly high concentration of troops for an area whose total population is less than 12 million. More than half belong to the Indian army. In a meeting with the press on June 17, 2007, the GOC in C of the Northern Command of the India army, Lt. General H S Panang let out that there are 337,000 army personnel in J&K. In other words the ratio of deployment of security force personnel to people is 1 for 18 persons! This deployment is not only incredibly high but also way out of proportion to the threat posed by armed resistance. India’s army chief is on record saying that only 600 militants operated in entire J&K. But news reports from time to time refer to the threat posed by infiltration. Although, in actual fact, the number of infiltration bids have fallen sharply; in 2001 it was said to be 2,417 but dropped to 537 in 2004, 597 in 2005, 573 in 2006, 535 by 2007. In 2008, according to the army chief, there has been a 65% decline up to July 31, 2008, to 150, as compared to the same period in 2007 (The Times of India, August 23, 2008). The Indian government also claimed more than 75 per cent decline in militancy-related incidents between 1990 and 2008, from 3,500 to 709 incidents, which is officially supposed to mean that the situation is no longer considered critical (1,000+ is the criterion for terming the situation critical). Firing incidents came down from 671 to 183. Bomb explosions declined from 1,000 to just 50. Killings of civilians declined from 914 to 69. (The Times of India, January 25, 2009). Significantly, almost all the civilians killed in 2008 were at the hands of the Indian security forces. For instance, during the agitation last year, 57 persons were killed by the Indian security forces in the Kashmir Valley alone. All this means that fighting armed resistance cannot be an over-riding motive for deployment of troops.

1.2. In counter insurgency warfare there is a blurring of distinction between “(f)ront and rear; strategic and tactical; combatants and non-combatants”. The Doctrine on sub-conventional warfare of the Indian Army says that “…the military operations should aim firstly, at neutralizing all hostile elements…and secondly, at transforming the will and attitudes of the people…. However, the manifestation of such a realization can take from a couple of years to decades as attitudes take time to form and to change”. (Pp21-22)

1.3. In plain English this means that people have to be made to give up their aspirations and reconcile themselves to living under an Indian dispensation. But since people are not so easily reconciled, security forces are needed to be deployed in a manner that they can monitor public and private lives of people. And a whole system of informers, gunmen, reward and punishment…instituted. There are reportedly 671 security forces camps in J&K (excluding those in Jammu, Kargil, Leh, Akhnoor and Udhampur). These occupy 100,000 acres. Besides, it is in the nature of things that when a hostile armed force occupies land, then land adjacent to what is legally transferred also gets annexed. Thus actual land in possession of the Indian security forces is much higher than shown in official records.

1.4. Now the largest source of employment in J&K is agriculture and horticulture. According to the Economic Survey of 2008-09, more than 49 per cent of the people depend on land, one way or another. The biggest source of earning is from horticulture, followed by tourism. But J&K’s dependence on food imports have risen because per capita yields have fallen. For instance, rice yields per hectare fell by 2.78 per cent in 2008-09. In a situation where existing yields are falling, although agriculture forms the main source of livelihood, the question of land becomes critical. For, it concerns both food production and livelihood needs of the people. If the security forces occupy land, which would otherwise be available for cultivation, then, for an economy so dependent on agriculture and horticulture, it amounts to a net loss. Remove this land from cultivation, and one sees a significant decline in earnings and a dwindling in the number of jobs available. What is also eroded, inter-alia, is the opportunity for increasing food output.

1.5. Therefore, involuntary alienation of land, especially cultivable land, will always be a sensitive issue for people. But when land is acquired for armed security personnel who maintain an obtrusive presence among civilians designed to control their public and private lives and, indeed, even “transform their will and attitude”, as is the case in J&K, it compounds the problem. This contributes to increasing J&K’s dependence on New Delhi for its survival. It is worth recalling that in 2008, the Jammu-based agitation had imposed an economic blockade against the Valley, which meant that imports of foodstuffs to the Valley were curtailed. This clearly highlighted the vulnerability of a people who are dependent on the Jammu-Srinagar highway passing through the Banihal pass for their daily needs. For several weeks Indian security forces failed to clear the highway. It was this that compelled the leadership of the movement to call for the “Muzzafarabad chalo” (Let us March to Muzzafarabad) agitation. This lesson ought not to be forgotten.

2.1. Faced with burgeoning public demand for Indian troop reduction in Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian Government constituted three committees in March 2007. An expert committee headed by the defence secretary to look into the question of troop reduction; a review committee headed by M A Ansari to study the Armed Forces (Special) Powers Act as well as the Disturbed Area Act; and a high powered committee headed by the Union minister of defence to study the recommendations of the two panels.

2.2. It was evident that the most important committee was the ‘expert’ committee, headed by the defence secretary. On December 5, 2007, in response to an ‘unstarred’ question #1672 in the Rajya Sabha, which asked the defence minister to state “whether the committee headed by the defence Secretary…to look into demand of troops reduction in J&K has submitted any report and if so the salient features thereof,” the answer was:

“The main recommendations pertain to reconciling of the details of the properties occupied by the Security Forces and the rentals paid as also to resolve old cases that have remained unsettled for many years; vacation of public utility services by the security forces such as school buildings, hospitals; the timings of the convoys of the security forces maybe reworked so as to cause least inconvenience to the local population; Dos and Don’ts issued by the Security Forces need to be strictly followed. Implementation of the recommendations is an ongoing process….”

2.3. The conspicuous absence of any reference to ‘troop reduction’ speaks for itself. But also missing were terms such as ‘relocation’ (moving forces from one place to another) and/or ‘restructuring’ (increasing the presence of police and reduce in particular army’s deployment) or reconfiguration (replacing one force with another i.e. the Army with the Border Security Force, the BSF with the Central Reserve Police Force, and the CRPF with the India Reserve Battalion). Instead, no more than cosmetic changes were recommended by way of resolving old cases, vacating some buildings and reworking of convoy timings. This amounts to trivialising a popular demand and raises serious doubts about the Indian government’s sincerity to address real issues.

3.1. When Omar Abdullah took over as the new CM, and in fact even during the election campaign, he had made many a promises. Once he came to power the language changed. One of the election promises was ending impunity provided to Indian armed forces under Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Now he claims that impunity will be revoked if the situation “improves”. What is the measure of improvement? And who decides whether it has improved or not? Fact is this decision is not in his hand. It requires New Delhi’s approval. It was left to the Indian home minister to declare on March 18, 2009, that the revocation of the AFSPA is an “old demand” but a “final decision” will be taken after the elections to Indian Parliament. Elections have come and gone and there is little to show for any movement.

3.2. Indian home ministry officials told reporters that it would take two years for the CRPF to hand over control to the local administration. Although it was said that five battalions (bns) of the CRPF will be withdrawn once the Amarnath Yatra (pilgrimage to Amarnath) was over and another five bns, it was said would be pulled out later, the reduction of all of 10 bns or approximately 11,000 personnel out of 667,000 is not a significantly large reduction. [Altogether 16 bns of CRPF (10 from J&K and 6 from NE) 5 bns of BSF and 2 of ITBP will be moved to fight left-wing extremists.] Besides, even if this was accompanied it would be only by replacing the CRPF personnel with a new force, which is called the India Reserve Battalion, from the Indian state of Haryana. [IRB’s are armed police personnel that each Indian state is helped to raise with financial help extended by the central government and used by the Indian government for deployment wherever it deems necessary.]

3.3. The minister of state for defence also categorically ruled out “thinning” of troops in J&K. In fact, the army opposed dilution or withdrawal of the AFSPA for its personnel in J&K. In response to the MHA’s “phased withdrawal of AFSPA” from districts such as Srinagar, Budgam, Jammu and Kathua, senior army officer told The Times of India (July 8, 2009) that “they (the government) should not rush to assume normalcy has returned, although situation has been brought under control”. The CM also discovered that “we (i.e. J&K state) have over 70 bns of the CRPF and the strength of the state police is not even one-third of it…. So, any rushed decision in this respect can be detrimental to state’s security” (The Asian Age, July 8, 2009). Thus, after promising reduction, including withdrawal of the AFSPA, what is the real situation? Very little has changed.

3.4. Take another example. After the Baramulla firing incident on June 29, 2009, in which four persons were killed in firing by the security forces, The district commissioner of Baramulla, Lateef ur Zama Deva, wrote a letter to Baramulla based GOC of 19 Infantry Division and GOC of Kilo Force (RR), wherein he wrote that “(t)he J&K police on the basis of deployment shall remain at the forefront at all respective locations brought under curfew with the back up of army, in standby mode for flag marches and patrolling under the supervision of respective executive magistrates”. The army took strong exception and a senior army officer told Indian Express (2 July, 2009) that “(l)ike in any other place the civil administration makes requisition for Army column. But once the Army comes in it does not work under the magistrate and the problem area is handed over to the Army for a particular task”. Since the task is suppression of a movement, and because this is something which remains incomplete and can take decades to achieve, so long as Indian army remains it will not act under the civilian administration. His seniors did not come to his aid or endorse his stance.

3.5. What about the release of political prisoners? On the issue of releasing detainees New Delhi’s consent is required. (Even the transfer of senior police officers needs New Delhi’s approval. This became apparent to the CM when he wanted to get rid of some senior police officers who, he claimed, had misled him over the Shopian rape and murder incident.) On taking over as CM he had said that those detained under the PSA during elections would be released. He could not do this. Why? Because he said, on January 15, that, while the list of prisoners was before a committee “but (this) committee now includes a member from central government who is yet to visit Kashmir”. As a matter of fact, Indian home ministry has always been a part of this committee and enjoys veto power over every proposal. In any case, in the past seven months the number of those detained under the dreadful PSA has jumped to 253. Going by the proceedings in the state assembly on August 7, 2009, where a PDP MLA had moved an amendment to section 10 A of the PSA, thereby calling for declaring invalid an order of detention if the grounds mentioned were vague, irrelevant or non-existent, the state law minister found even this mild demand unacceptable. Why? Because, he said, the preventive detention law was needed “for running the state”. He was at least being honest that without arbitrary powers, the hallmark of undemocratic rule, J&K cannot be governed.

3.6. The simple point is that J&K is not just like any other state in the Union of India enjoying additional powers of autonomy under Article 370. It is a “disturbed area” dominated by a hostile military force, which feels it is sufficient to invoke “national security” for every principle of constitutional nicety to be cast aside. Indeed, Article 370, which instead of becoming a mark of internal sovereignty, has became a conduit through which an appointed governor (nominated by the central government) could dismiss even an elected state government and then rule through ordinances and amend the J&K Constitution in such a way that it became legally possible for New Delhi to legislate on matters, which under autonomy were reserved for J&K. For example, between March 7 to September 6, 1986, i.e., in just six months of governor’s rule in J&K, 29 laws were enacted all of which extended to New Delhi powers to enact laws for J&K. A high-powered committee, set up by the pro-India National Conference government of J&K in 1996 to look into the subversion of autonomy, also pointed to several “incongruities”. Such as the fact that the constitutional provision for establishing governor’s rule on a state had been undermined in the case of J&K. For, while under the Indian Constitution, the central government can take over powers from the elected state government the term of such can be extended beyond six months only by the upper house of the Indian Parliament. Thus a degree of parliamentary oversight is provided for. But in the case of J&K, central rule requires no such parliamentary approval. As a result, between1990-96 J&K remained under direct central rule without a break. Furthermore, by giving the central government nominee the power to amend the state constitution through ordinances, the legitimacy of the state Constitution, the basis for J&K’s autonomy, was eroded. Lest we forget, democratic practice reserves this right of amendment of Constitution for the people’s representatives. And ordinances/decrees issued by non-elected executives are considered a distinguishing feature of arbitrary, i.e. repressive rule.

4.1. We need to, therefore, appreciate the gamut of dependency relationship that exists between J&K and India to understand how the Indian state perpetuates its control over Kashmir. For instance, the budget for 2009-10 reveals that out of a total non-plan revenue expenditure of Rs 14,949 crore, a sum of Rs 8,126 crore (Rs 6,594 crore for salary and Rs 1,532 crore towards pension) is set aside for salary and pension for the state employees. However, the state’s own revenue generation is only Rs 4,330 crore, i.e., lower than even its salary and pension bill! And yet, the budget proposes to increase recruitment of state employees by 23,000 ( out of which 7,035 will be in the police), fill 7,000 vacancies of Class IV employees and also create 15,000 jobs for returning Kashmiri Pandits.

4.2. The Economic Survey, 2006-07, had earlier noted that “the weakness of J&K state finances arises not from lower revenues but higher expenditures”. The ratio of revenue expenditure to GSDP (Gross State Domestic Product) of J&K at 39.2 per cent is more than twice that for all states average of 17.4 per cent, although only marginally higher than Northeastern states at 38.8 per cent, as computed by the Twelfth Finance Commission. And J&K’s revenue covers only 25 per cent of its expenditure. Which means that J&K’s revenue base is incapable of meeting its own expenditure incurred for maintaining a huge government apparatus? “Consequently, the index of self-reliance of J&K…is 0.45” (p 230). The ratio of central transfers to total revenues which, at 78.6 per cent for J&K, is twice that for all states at 38.5 per cent, compares with the 67.6 per cent for the NE. But J&K’s debt to GSDP ratio is higher than others and has been 50 per cent to start with. Thus, more than 50 per cent of J&K’s own revenue goes towards servicing debt.

4.3. However, despite “low own revenues, the public expenditure level of J&K, at 51.4 per cent, in contrast to 20.2 per cent for all (Indian) states is higher than that for all states as percentage of GSDP and on a per capita basis per capita capital expenditure in J&K of Rs 2,285 is more than three times of all state average of Rs 626, albeit marginally higher than for NE which is Rs 1,924. If revenue expenditure is included then J&K’s total expenditure of Rs 9,661 is not very different from that for NE at Rs 8,637. But it is nearly three times that of all India average of Rs 3,969. And yet, these higher public expenditures in J&K “have not translated into growth mainly for two reasons. The first reason is the higher unit cost of service delivery – the cost of providing schooling to a child or the cost of providing healthcare to a person are typically higher than the all India average because of sparse population density, difficult terrain, poor connectivity and a host of other causes. The second reason is that the beneficial impact of public expenditure spills over beyond J&K as much of the contractors payments are transferred to and purchases are made beyond the state – a phenomenon referred to as ‘missing multiplier’.” (p 232). This is as clear an admission as one will get not only about the limited benefit of public expenditure in J&K but skewed nature of the relationship between India and J&K.

4.4. The Economic Survey, 2006-07, had also noted that “Centre (i.e., Indian government) has fiscal room available to reduce taxes or increase programme spending – and satisfy its inter-temporal constraint – while the J&K’s only option are to increase taxes or reduce spending in order to achieve fiscal sustainability”. (pp 5) The authors of the Economic Survey advocated a “moratorium on filling vacant posts” (pp 171). But the government went ahead with “employment intensity growth” in its budget 2007-08, and began to fill vacancies running at 23,000. In addition to that, it began recruitment for 15 battalions of IRB and five battalions of J&K police. This defeated the very objective of fiscal policy, to reduce government expenditure and thereby reduce financial dependence on grants from India. And this process continues under the budget provisions for 2009-10.

4.5. An argument in favour of such government job creation is that one of the major causes of unrest in J&K is due to a very high incidence of unemployment. Since disputed nature of J&K inhibits private investments in general and industries in particular, there is no option but for the government to create employment. Thus irresolution of the dispute creates a logic that keeps increasing the financial outgo for J&K and pushes up its dependence on New Delhi. This, in turn, creates financial dependence on New Delhi for meeting J&K’s salary bill.

4.6. It is worth recalling that when Ghulam Nabi Azad took over as CM in November 2005, he had claimed that 50 per cent of the 2,73,508 government employees “had no work to do”. If he was speaking the truth then to enlarge government employment, particularly in the unproductive area of recruitment to armed battalions, makes little sense. A bigger and larger government apparatus will continue to dominate the economy, and dependence on New Delhi to cover revenue deficit is likely to go up. Even more disturbing, the size of armed battalions being raised in J&K will continue to raise the scale of unproductive expenditure. How does all this profit the people of J&K?

4.7. Another mark of dependence is in the field of capital expenditure. In 2004, the UPA government had with much fanfare unveiled a Rs 24,000-crore plan. This plan envisaged investing Rs 18,000 crore in the central sector. This included investments in Uri II and Kishanganga Project, Srinagar-Leh road upgradation by Indian army’s BECON and 1,000 micro hydropower stations to be built and managed by the Indian army as part of its ‘Operation Sadbhavna’. The balance Rs 6,000 crore were given to the state to meet costs of various projects, including salary support for new government jobs created. The strength of government employees, which was less than three in 2004, has risen to 4.5 lakh with 50,000 daily-wage earners. As a result, not only has non-plan expenditure increased but so has the dependence on “handouts”. Let me illustrate how dependence gets augmented.

4.8. Economic Survey, 2008-09 shows that J&K’s power requirement is 2,120 MW. It generates only 2,318.70 MW out of a 16,200 MW estimated hydel power potential. Of this 2,318.70 MW, only 758.70 MW was generated by state owned utilities. Even this figure of 758 MW was reached when 450 MW Phase I Baglihar project was recently completed. The balance 1,518 MW is in the central sector. In other words, most projects that exist here do not feed J&K’s own needs. And J&K imports power for which it pays about Rs 2,000 crore. Significantly, the National Hydel Power Corporation which controls Uri I, Salal and Dul Hasti project earned Rs 300 crore as profit for the year ended March 31, 2009. Its coffers will swell once eight more NHPC projects – which includes Kishanganga, Sewa, Nimu Bazgo, Chutak, Uri II and three others that are joint ventures with the state government – are commissioned.

4.9. The J&K government has been lobbying for a long time with New Delhi to transfer 390 MW Salal project, which is free of any encumbrance as it has paid for its cost. That would have enabled J&K to not just reduce its outlay for power purchase, which is running between Rs 1,500-2,000 crore annually but also earn additional revenue. This would have reduced deficit in the power sector, running at Rs 2,000 crore. This deficit is met from special grant from New Delhi.

4.10. On December 22, 2006, a high-powered committee headed by Dr C Rangarajan (chairperson of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council) recommended that 390 MW Dul Hasti hydro project should be transferred to the state instead of the 390 MW Salal project. Dul Hasti in Doda district has been plagued by cost and time over-runs. The project began in 1985. Work was started in 1989 by a French consortium. The project cost then was Rs 1,290 crore. In 1992, when some of their people were abducted, they pulled out. Four years later Jai Prakash Industries was roped in to complete the project by October 2003. The project cost ran to Rs 3,900 crore. Then it was supposed to be completed by end of 2007 but the cost had gone up to Rs 5,200 crore (of which Rs 1,500 crore was interest). It is this project which the panel wanted transferred. The panel had, however, said that this transfer would be at “accessible tariff” and it is for the Centre to compensate the NHPC. One reason for this switch from Salal to Dul Hasti, reportedly, was opposition of some Indian states. Salal project charges Rs 0.52 per unit sold to UP, Delhi, Haryana and so on. These states did not want the project to be given to J&K because they expected the unit cost charged to them to rise. As of now, Dul Hasti remains with New Delhi.

5.1. Related to this is the issue of water. The Indus Water Treaty (IWT) has been a sore point because over the heads of people of J&K, India and Pakistan came to an agreement whereby Indus, Jhelum and Chenab waters were virtually handed over to Pakistan whereas Sutlej, Ravi and Beas rivers water remained with India. There is no doubt that the interests of the lower riparian state must be protected. Pakistan depends for its drinking water and irrigation needs up to 77 per cent on the Indus water basin. However, as the upper riparian region, J&K’s rights can also not be ignored. Such is the nature of the agreement that both use of water for irrigation and for harnessing power get restricted because flow of water cannot be interrupted by building reservoir or controlled through placing any impediment in the path of water flow. For instance, because IWT prevents water storage projects, hydel power is generated through run-off-the-river projects that result in reduction of power generation to less than one-third of installed capacity, particularly during winter months. Many political parties in Indian-held J&K have pitched for compensating J&K for the loss, estimated to be over Rs 6,000, incurred by it due to the IWT. It is worth noting that the IWT was signed in 1960 when in neither part of J&K there was even a semblance of ‘representative’ government.

5.2 .How can J&K protect its interests as an upper riparian party if it is to remain excluded from the IWT? Can a people argue their case unless they enjoy sovereignty?

5.3. The issue of water sharing has been impacted by another factor. That of melting glaciers and receding snowline, which threatens to expose J&K to environmental catastrophe. The Siachen glacier is threatened by heavy militarisation of what is described as the third pole and forms part of the Indus Water basin. Melting of Kolhai glacier at a rapid pace may turn J&K into a desert. Prof Syed Iqbal Hasnain conducted an on-the-spot assessment of Kolhai last year and told Greater Kashmir (August 10, 2009) that “(t)he glacier has developed several crevasses and cracks over the years. Human interference, including the Amarnath pilgrimage, is one of the reasons for the glacier’s recession. Gujjars who are putting up in the glacier’s core area are one of the major contributors for its meltdown.” The news report said that a study on Kolhai glacier conducted by remote sensing by the National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, revealed that its spatial extent has changed from 19.34 sq km in 1992 to 17.23 sq km in 2001, a net decrease of 2.11 sq km in 10 years. The long-term impact would be availability of water for drinking and irrigation. Thus Lidder and Sind basins of Jhelum are under threat. And this in turn may further create tensions for enforcement of IWT.

5.4. While experts do refer to increased militarisation or pilgrimage as factor in the melting of glaciers, the main reason behind rapid depletion of those glaciers is downplayed. Both Siachen and Kolhai are exposed to unprecedented human activity in its core as well as its vicinity. For instance, the presence of a brigade-strength military force in Siachen and the supply line to keep them fed, garbage disposed, use of helicopters for moving men and material is warming the environment at Saltoro ridge. In the case of Kolhai, the phenomenal increase in the number of pilgrims rising from less than 12,000 in 1989 to four lakh this year (which came down from 5.25 lakh in 2008), the huge presence of security forces (no less than 26,000), movement of people, trucks, and helicopters have become the biggest source of glacial meltdown. While soldiers and pilgrims, particularly in such large numbers, are detrimental to the environment, it is the population in the Valley which suffers its consequence since they depend on Sind and Lidder (which feeds Jhelum) for their drinking water and irrigation requirement. And yet, the local population has little influence or control over its fate. It is dependent on the benevolence of the Indian state, which is busier consolidating its military hold over Siachen and promoting Amarnath pilgrimage.

6.1. In 2000-01, Indian commentators discovered that percentage of population living “below poverty line” in J&K was 3.48 per cent as against the all-India average of 26.10 per cent. It became an occasion for jingoists in India to claim how Indian largess had brought prosperity to J&K at the expense of rest of India. However, this underestimation of incidence of poverty generated different explanations among more sober analysts. One recent claim was that “the (Indian) state had in place a system of ‘development’ practices aimed at buying the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people, what it ended up doing was to make militants richer while at the same time entrenching the institution of corruption deeper and deeper into the culture of the state”. And then goes on to say that “the fall in poverty rates…pointed to open and surreptitious transfers, which while mitigating poverty, entrenched the already existing system of corruption even deeper”.[Dipankar Sengupta; ‘Policy Making in a Terrorist Economy, Epilogue, July 2009]. Another was provided by Swaminathan A Aiyar who wrote in The Times of India, July 15, 2001, that one “explanation is the huge expansion of armed forces in the state in the 1990s. India now has over 600,000 military and paramilitary personnel in Kashmir. Their purchasing power is pretty formidable in a small state of 10 million people. Tourism in the Valley may have shrunk, but the armed forces represent tourists of another kind. Most tourists spend only a week in Kashmir, but men in uniform spend the whole year in the state. So, in some ways, every jawan is the equivalent of 52 tourists. They may buy fewer silk carpets and shawls than normal tourists, but are steady buyers of agricultural produce. And that probably has a major impact on local incomes, especially of small farmers…. The irony is that if peace returns, so too might poverty. The armed forces will go away.”

6.2. In the Economic Survey for J&K, 2006-07, it was reported that the decline in poverty ratio between 1993-94 to 1999-2000, from 25.17 per cent to 3.48 per cent in 1999-2000, had been “extremely steep” (p 224) and noted that there was “no authentic and reliable data on BPL population…available for the state of J&K.” It pointed out that for the year 1993-94 no survey was conducted by the NSSO. Instead, the poverty ratio for Himachal Pradesh was “adjusted for J&K by the Planning Commission”. It is important to note that internal war was at its peak during this period. Now all these explanations were put to rest by a fresh survey that was undertaken by the authorities and brought out in a report: ‘Below Poverty Line Survey 2008’ [Jammu and Kashmir State; Directorate of Economics and Statistics, J&K, Planning & Development Department, Jammu and Kashmir Government]. According to the report of the survey, “the total BPL Estimated Population Ratio of J&K State has been arrived at 21.63 per cent (24.21 lakh persons) with a dispersion of 26.14 per cent (22.00 lakh persons) from rural areas and 7.96 per cent (2.21 lakh persons) living in urban areas”. In other words, the decline in poverty was far less than estimated and explanations offered were, therefore, way off the mark. [At a workshop on the ‘Role of ICDS’, experts questioned the figure of BPL population at 3.5 per cent when 29 per cent of children were under-nourished, 52 per cent women anaemic, 41 per cent vitamin-A deficient and 68 per cent suffer from iron deficiency as per the National Family State Health Zone. (Etalaat May 10, 2008). In fact, with per capita income remaining lower than the all-India average this drop was illusory.]

6.3. I cite this for a reason. There is no doubt that Indian military forces make large-scale purchases and government and other sources transfer funds to buy acquiescence of the people. But this does not spread beyond a narrow circle and certainly does not reach the ordinary people whose lives are mired in poverty. Secondly, such transfers, while resulting in the expansion of economy, are of a kind which accentuates inequalities. This distortion where poverty has declined much less than previously estimated is quite remarkable for an economy which saw radical land reforms in the 1950s, and which boasted of a fairly equitable land holding implying low asset inequality. In other words, it means that in the past 20 years, if not more, the socio-economic profile of J&K has undergone a change for the worse. Thus, despite funds to buy hearts and minds of people pouring in and in spite of the presence of military forces, considered as “permanent tourists”, the economy has registered no sign of being benefited. If anything, such ‘assistance’ has only further distorted the economy and entrenched corruption.

7.1. Keeping this real nature of dependency, and distortions that have been institutionalised, in mind, sovereignty becomes of utmost importance for any meaningful solution to emerge. To argue for autonomy, self-rule and so forth makes little sense when J&K faces this level of control.

7.2. It has been claimed that a deal, which will enable the border/line of control to become irrelevant, has been reached between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and that all that is needed is to fine-tune and sign it. Without going into the justness of such an approach, i.e., to decide people’s fate over their heads, from what is known in the public domain about some of the key areas of agreement two things stand out. First, it is said that the current constitutional system in operation on both sides will be frozen, with some modification, for the next 15-20 years. Second, some subjects such as water will be jointly managed by India and Pakistan.

7.3. What the above means is that existing relationship of dependence will be frozen barring some adjustments. Now how does this amount to a solution? Is it not necessary to argue that unless the relationship of dependence is ended self-rule/self-governance/autonomy would become a worthless exercise? When Indian civilian and military entities own, manage and control policies over land and water, and J&K continues to be dependent on New Delhi for meeting even its salary bill under the existing dispensation (in which the war and requirements of war are prioritised) then not just psychology of dependence and its corrupting influence, but the actual fact of dependence will make “self-rule” ring hollow. Just the same way as the much-vaunted autonomy under Article 370 was made hollow. Indeed, the overall structure of dependence will be like a noose around the neck of the state throttling the realisation of its full potential.

For this state of affairs to end, a radical movement away from the present is required. What that means in short is that people must become masters and mistress of their own destiny.

All this only underlines the significance of a democratic closure for the J&K dispute after 62 years of its non-resolution. Democratic closure in the case of J&K means ascertaining the wishes of the people, once they are freed of encumbrance, before everything else.

-By Gautam Navlakha

J&K: Time for radical self-determination

——TOP

I was always jealous of my friends who, after returning back from their tours to Kashmir, share the marvelous experiences of staying in houseboats. The reason behind my jealousy was that I have been to Kashmir a couple of years back and couldn’t explore the divine beauty of the place at its fullest, as it was a corporate trip. I spent several nights thinking about the incomparable feel when you relax under the vast open sky during your stay in luxurious houseboats. Lucky was how I felt when I got a marriage invitation from a friend of mine who resides in Kashmir only. Without even giving a second thought, I applied for a week’s leave in my office and booked my air tickets.

As I arrived at this paradise on earth, I came to know that my friend had arranged for a bachelor’s party with very limited friends of him on a luxurious Firdous houseboat. Firdous is basically a huge houseboat with three double bedrooms. That was a sophisticated bachelor’s party with a few imported drinks. Facing the impressive Himalayas and offering the amusing sounds of rolling waters, the houseboat offered us a sail to the entire Dal Lake. This was the first time when I had such a closer view of the stunning beauty of enchanting flora at Kashmir amidst high peaks. Our houseboat had well decorated bedrooms with attached bathrooms, common eating-place and a balcony. The interiors were decorated in typical Kashmiri style with vibrant colors and art. The wooden furniture, carpets and everything was simply out of the mark.

It was similar to a fully furnished house with proper living rooms, drawing and dining rooms, carved wooden furniture, and beautifully decorated interiors. We were provided with an assistant and a cook, who prepared a variety in Chinese, Continental and authentic Kashmiri dishes for us. The assistant told me that tourists have a wide variety of houseboats in Kashmir that range from Firdous to Kushal & Clermont Too (two double bedrooms), and Nishat & Kushdil (one double bedroom, especially for honeymooners).

Next morning, the assistant took us for shikara rides, i.e. wandering in the lake, during which we all enjoyed sunbathing on the top-deck. I admit the fact that houseboats in Jammu & Kashmir serve as the best medium to offer you a holiday in the lap of nature. Along with the traditional living of the local villagers, I also saw houseboats as old as 50 years in Dal Lake. My friend told me that the credit for introducing houseboat cruises to Kashmir goes to the British residents.

During my last trip to Kashmir, I visited natural landscapes, exotic mountain valleys, picturesque villages and many other attractions. But I admit that my trip was not worth without enjoying my stay in Kashmir houseboat. Call it the ‘Venice of the east’ or the ‘houseboat capital of India’ – Kashmir provided me with an opportunity to rediscover myself and enjoy the royal treats that made my visit a lifetime experience.

On my trip to Jammu & Kashmir, I visited all the gem destinations like Srinagar, Gulmarg, Pahalgam, Sonmarg, Patnitop etc. And when I was planning for my next trip while going through Jammu Kashmir travel guide, I got a birthday party invitation from one of my friends. The guy, Saqib, is addicted to travel and is a true wanderer in every perspective. He told me that he was leaving for Nubra Valley (150 km north of Leh) the next day with his 2-3 friends from Delhi. Now my responsibility was to arrange for a cottage in Nubra Valley. Crazy!! Isn’t it? But as I arrived the place, I appreciated Saqib’s idea.

It was the first week of August and luckily the Nubra Valley crossing was open to tourists. The entire valley lies at a lower elevation than Leh, and this makes it very fertile so that kinds of grains and fruits can be cultivated there. Our cottage was at Diskit, the administrative center of the Nubra Valley that lies on the other side of the Khardong La. We carried plenty of water along with us to be on a safer side in case of headache or nausea.

Huge prayer-flag topped peaks in the backdrop and snow all around together form a breathtaking experience. On the eve of Saqib’s birthday, we enjoyed authentic Ladakhi meal served sitting around the massive black stove in the kitchen of our cottage, which is the most important room in any Ladakhi house.

Next day, after a small celebration, we started our exploration with Panamik, the last settlement before the Tibetan border. The hot springs on the outskirts of Panamik add to the beauty of the place. Though this sensitive border area is completely controlled by the Indian Army, but offers the best natural beauty in the entire region. While getting back to the cottage in the evening, we visited the 250 year old Ensa Gompa. The monastery, nestling on top of a rock, is accessible after a six-hour walk involving the river at Hargam. It was quite tiring but the architectural beauty, antique collections, extraordinary Buddhist murals and rock engravings at the monastery refreshed our senses.

We also enjoyed the true joy of camping near the Nubra River in night while having our dinner. That short one day trip was undoubtedly one of the best tours of my life.

Source: IANS on Yahoo

Washington, Oct 28 (IANS) Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), blamed for the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack, was planning to use an American national to carry out another major attack in India, the FBI said Tuesday.

The man, identified as David Coleman Headley, was arrested early this month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Force at O’Hare International Airport before boarding a flight to Philadelphia, intending to travel on to Pakistan.

Headley, 49, along with a Canadian citizen of Pakistani origin, have been arrested on charges of plotting a terror attack against the facilities and employees of a Danish newspaper which had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, federal law enforcement officials announced Tuesday.

The Pakistani-Canadian Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, also known as Tahawar Rana, was also a resident of Chicago and was arrested by the FBI Oct 18.

Rana is the owner of several businesses, including First World Immigration Services, which has offices on Devon Avenue in Chicago, as well as in New York and Toronto.

According to the FBI affidavit filed in a Chicago court, Headley was in close contact with Ilyas Kashmiri and several unidentified leaders of LeT.

Kashmiri is the operational chief of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir section of Harakat-ul Jihad Islami (HUJI), a Pakistani-based terrorist organisation with links to Al Qaeda. Kashmiri, who is presently believed to be in Pakistan’s restive Waziristan tribal region, issued a statement this month that he was alive and working with Al Qaeda.

The identities of other LeT leaders, who are associated with Kashmiri, have not been revealed and are mentioned as ‘LeT member A’ and ‘LeT member B’ in the affidavit.

‘In July and August 2009, Headley exchanged a series of e-mails with LeT Member A, including an exchange in which Headley asked if the Denmark project was on hold, and whether a visit to India that LeT Member A had asked him to undertake was for the purpose of surveillance of targets for a new terrorist attack,’ the FBI said in its affidavit.

‘These e-mails reflect that LeT Member A was placing a higher priority on using Headley to assist in planning a new attack in India than on completing the planned attack in Denmark,’ it said.

After this time, Headley and LeT Member A allegedly continued focusing on the plan with Kashmiri to attack the newspaper, rather than working with LeT, the complaint alleges.

According to the affidavit, Headley stated in conversations last month that he intended to travel to Pakistan in October to meet with Individual A and Kashmiri, and he was arrested Oct 3 as he prepared to board a flight from Chicago to Philadelphia for onward travel on to Pakistan.

Arun Kumar

By: Daily.Pk

Kashmiris have passed through the longest suffering and ordeal in the history and faced repression, death and destruction, which had started even before the partition. The British had played an ignominious role in bringing Kashmiris to the present pass for having sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh, former governor of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh, for 7.5 million rupees.

Once again at the time of partition when people of Kashmir had dreamt of freedom from oppression, India accepted Lord Mountbaten as the first Governor General of India with a view to implementing its insidious plan of annexing Kashmir, which was contrived and implemented by Lord Mountbaten and Nehru. Raja Hari Singh was coerced into signing the controversial document on 26th July 1947 and it was on the basis of this document that Indian forces entered the Valley on 27th October 1947, and endless dark night for Kashmiris started.

It is too well known the cardinal principal for the partition of India was that majority Muslim regions would become part of Pakistan and majority Hindu regions become part of India. But a different formula was contrived for the princely states to benefit India. The Kashmiris had rejected the formula for the states insisting that there should be one standard for entire India and the princely states. In fact, the representative body of Muslims of Kashmir – Muslim Conference – had held a convention on 19th July 1947 and passed a resolution to merge Kashmir with Pakistan, which stated: “This convention of Muslim Conference has reached the conclusion that geographical conditions, 80 per cent Muslim population, important rivers of Punjab passing through the state, language, cultural, ethnic and economic relations and contiguity of the state with Pakistan make it imperative to merge with Pakistan”.

Anyhow, since 27th October 1947, the day is observed by Kashmiris as black day and Muslims all over the world to express solidarity with the people of Kashmir. The suffering and misery of the Kashmiri people continue, every day a peaceful resolution is deferred, and international community is not at all moved by the plight of the Kashmiris. Nevertheless, the resolution of Kashmir dispute lies in tripartite negotiations between India, Pakistan and the accredited leadership of the people of Jammu & Kashmir from both sides of the Cease-fire Line. Disappointed and disillusioned by protracted bilateral negotiations between India and Pakistan that did not prove fructuous, Kashmiri youth had taken up arms in 1989. About one hundred thousand Kashmiris have been martyred during the last ten years.

Before 9/11, almost all Muslim countries supported the struggle and the right of self-determination of Kashmiris in accordance with the relevant UN resolutions. But after 9/11, those waging struggle for independence have been dubbed by the US and the West as terrorists. And now even Muslim countries suggest that India and Pakistan should resolve their disputes through negotiations, not realizing that many rounds of talks have been held during the last six decades but no progress could be made on the core issue of Kashmir. Had Muslim countries gone beyond condemnation and criticism of India and made trade relations conditional to the resolution of the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, India would have been obliged to resolve the Kashmir dispute. India’s illegal occupation of Kashmir is indeed a dark chapter in the history of human rights. However, continued to deny the right of self-determination to the Kashmiri people is morally unacceptable, economically unsustainable and politically inadmissible with regard to any scheme aimed at ensuring global and regional peace, stability and security. The repression, oppression and atrocities by Indian forces have turned Kashmir into a hell that would stretch Dante’s imagination reflected in his famous poem Divine Comedy. However, these acts could not break the will of Kashmiris. The heroic struggle waged by the people of Kashmir is unparalleled in the history who are committed to continue their struggle till their objective is achieved. It has to be said that no solution can be found without the participation and consensus of the people of Kashmir.

In June 2008, Kashmiri Muslims had protested against allotment of land to Delhi-based Amarnath Shrine Trust, which was violation of the law. Later, there was strike in Muslims’ areas of Indian Held Kashmir against anti-Muslim riots, vandalism, looting of Muslim properties, economic blockade of the Valley and inter-regional ex-communication by the Hindu fanatics and extremists of occupied Jammu region. In fact, Congress-led government had earlier allotted a piece of land near the shrine apparently to facilitate Hindu pilgrims that throng the shrine in hundreds of thousands, but Kashmiris were suspicious of the government’s intentions, as efforts were being made to encourage migration of Hindus to the state with a view to diluting Kashmiri Muslims’ 98 per cent majority in IHK.

Anyhow, all assessments of India have been proven wrong by last year’s struggle of the people of Kashmir. This is the first time that there are voices in India as well in Europe demanding that Kashmir issue should be resolved. In case, India continues to balk at resolving the Kashmir dispute, and does not reciprocate with Pakistan to reach a solution acceptable to India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir, the only way out for Pakistan would be to invoke the UN Security Council resolutions. The international community has to understand that Tashkant and Simla agreements were signed by Pakistan under duress. Article 103 of Chapter XVI of the UN Charter clearly states: “In the event of a conflict between the obligations of the members of the United Nations under the present Charter and any other international agreement, their obligation under the present charter shall prevail”.

The composite dialogue that started in 2004 has not so far resolved any of the festering issues like Kashmir, Siachen and Sir Creek. However, confidence building measures with regard to people to people contact across the Line of Control had given a faint hope that this could prove to be a stepping stone towards resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. In 2007, addressing a public gathering in the holy Sikh city of Amritsar, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had reminded voters in the Indian state of Punjab that their welfare and development was linked to improved relations with Pakistan. This showed that economic considerations could outweigh the considerations of false ego and other factors. But India used terrorists’ attack in Mumbai on 3rd November 2008 to stall the dialogue.

Nevertheless, the threat of war between two nuclear states also works as an incentive for peace between the belligerent countries. In May 1999, after about a year when India and Pakistan had come out of the nuclear closet, “The Economist” in its survey/analysis of India and Pakistan had rightly stated: “Neither country has a big enough conventional edge over the other to win a reasonably short war.

There is, therefore, little temptation for Pakistan to make a grab for Kashmir, or India to invade Pakistan. The fear of nuclear attack makes adventurism less appealing.” In this backdrop, war does not seem to be an option any more for both the countries. And of course maintaining the status quo will not make this region a safe place to live in.

The Dragon —Elephant confrontation seems inevitable. Here is the latest trick of china.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20091019/876/twl-china-projects-kashmir-as-a-separate.html

They issued separate visas to Kashmir’s, now they took it a step forward and are now distributing maps where Kashmir is being represented as a separate territory.

This Hate India attitude is not new to Chinese; they were the only permanent member of Security Council who opposed the Indo –US nuclear deal. When they could not stop it, they immediately signed a nuclear deal with Pakistan.  After the 26/11 attack on Mumbai, when there was a speculation that India might attack Pakistan they were the first to declare support to Pakistan(unofficially). Few months back there was an article from a Chinese diplomat saying that china should break India into 30 different countries. Recently china was protesting Indian prime ministers visit to Arunachal Pradesh. Now they print maps where India does not have Kashmir .

Their intentions are becoming clearer …they see us as their rivals and want to create a problem in one way or the  other and destabilise this country … time our diplomats in Delhi counter these Games of the Chinese…….

The Honourable P. Chidambaram
Home Minister of India

Respected Sir,

You may recall our brief interaction at the residence of the late Shri Rajiv Gandhi in September-October 1990, and also my visit to you in July 1995 when you were a member of the late Shri Narasimha Rao’s Government.

I am delighted to read in today’s paper that you believe a “unique solution” exists to the grave mortal problem of Jammu & Kashmir.   I write to say that almost four years ago, I published in The Statesman my discovery of the existence of precisely such a  unique solution in the three-part article “Solving Kashmir”.

This came to be followed by “Law, Justice and J&K”, “History of Jammu & Kashmir”, “Pakistan’s Allies”, “What to tell Musharraf” and a few others.  The purpose of this open letter is to describe that solution which provides, I believe, the only just and lawful  path available to the resolution of what has been known universally as the Kashmir problem.

Very briefly, it involves recognizing that the question of lawful territorial sovereignty in J&K is logically distinct from the question of the choice of nationality by individual inhabitants.   The solution requires

(a) acknowledging that the original legal entity in the world system  of nations known as Jammu & Kashmir arose on March 16 1846 and ceased to exist on or about October 22 1947; that the military contest that commenced on the latter date has in fact resulted, given all particular circumstances of history, in the lawful and just outcome in international law;

(b) offering all who may be Indian nationals or stateless and who presently live under Article 370, a formal choice of nationality between the Republics of India, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan: citizen-by-citizen, without fear or favour, under conditions of full information, individual privacy and security; any persons who voluntarily choose to renounce Indian nationality in such private individual decisions would be nevertheless granted lawful permanent residence in the Indian Republic and J&K in particular.

In other words, the dismemberment of the original J&K State and annexation of its territories by the entities known today as the Republic of Pakistan and Republic of India that occurred since October 22 1947, as represented first by the 1949 Ceasefire Line and then by the 1972 Line of Control, is indeed the just and lawful outcome prevailing in respect of the question of territorial sovereignty and jurisdiction. The remaining democratic question has to do with free individual choice of nationality by inhabitants, under conditions of full information and privacy, citizen-by-citizen, with the grant of permanent residency rights by the Indian Republic to persons under its jurisdiction in J&K who might wish to choose, for deeply personal individual reasons, not to remain Indian nationals but become Afghan, Iranian or Pakistani nationals instead (or remain stateless).  Pakistan has said frequently its sole concern has been the freedom of Muslims of J&K under Indian rule, and any such genuine concern shall have been thereby fully met by India. Indeed if Pakistan agreed to act similarly this entire complex mortal problem of decades shall have begun to be resolved most appropriately. Pakistan and India are both wracked by corruption, poverty and bad governance, and would be able to mutually draw down military forces pit against one another everywhere, so as to begin to repair the grave damage to their fiscal health caused over decades by the deleterious draining away of vast public resources.

The full reasoning underlying this, which I believe to be the only lawful, just, efficient and stable solution that exists, is thoroughly explained in the following six articles. The first five, “Solving Kashmir”, “Law, Justice & J&K”, “History of J&K”, and “Pakistan’s Allies”, “What to Tell Musharraf” were published in The Statesman in 2005-2006 and are marked ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR and FIVE below, and are also available elsewhere here. The sixth “An Indian Reply to President Zardari”, marked SIX, was published for the first time here following the Mumbai massacres.

I believe careful reflection upon this entire body of reasoning may lead all reasonable men and women to a practically unanimous consensus about this as the appropriate course of action; if such a consensus happened to arise, the implementation of the solution shall only be a matter of (relatively) uncomplicated procedural detail.

Cordially yours

Subroto Roy, PhD (Cantab.), BScEcon (London)
Kolkata, October 15 2009

“ONE
SOLVING KASHMIR: ON AN APPLICATION OF REASON by Subroto Roy First published in three parts in The Statesman, Editorial Page Special Article, December 1,2,3 2005, www.thestatesman.net

(This article has its origins in a paper “Towards an Economic Solution for Kashmir” which circulated in Washington DC in 1992-1995, including at the Indian and Pakistani embassies and the Carnegie Endowment, and was given as an invited lecture at the Heritage Foundation on June 23 1998. It should be read along with other articles also republished here, especially “History of J&K”, “Law, Justice and J&K” , “Understanding Pakistan”, “Pakistan’s Allies” and “What to Tell Musharraf”. The Washington paper and lecture itself originated from my ideas in the Introduction to Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy, edited by WE James and myself in the University of Hawaii project on Pakistan 1986-1992.)

I. Give Indian `Green Cards’ to the Hurriyat et al

India, being a liberal democracy in its constitutional law, cannot do in Jammu & Kashmir what Czechoslovakia did to the “Sudeten Germans” after World War II. On June 18 1945 the new Czechoslovakia announced those Germans and Magyars within their borders who could not prove they had been actively anti-fascist before or during the War would be expelled — the burden of proof was placed on the individual, not the State. Czechoslovakia “transferring” this population was approved by the Heads of the USA, UK and USSR Governments at Potsdam on August 2 1945. By the end of 1946, upto two million Sudeten Germans were forced to flee their homes; thousands may have died by massacre or otherwise; 165,000 remained who were absorbed as Czechoslovak citizens. Among those expelled were doubtless many who had supported Germany and many others who had not — the latter to this day seek justice or even an apology in vain. Czechoslovakia punished none of its nationals for atrocities, saying it had been revenge for Hitler’s evil (”badla” in Bollywood terms) and the post Cold War Czech Government too has declined to render an apology. Revenge is a wild kind of justice (while justice may be a civilised kind of revenge).

India cannot follow this savage precedent in international law. Yet we must recognise there are several hundred and up to several hundred thousand persons on our side of the boundary in the State of Jammu & Kashmir who do not wish to be Indian nationals. These people are presently our nationals ius soli, having been born in territory of the Indian Republic, and/or ius sanguinis, having been born of parents who are Indian nationals; or they may be “stateless” whom we must treat in accordance with the 1954 Convention on Stateless Persons. The fact is they may not wish to carry Indian passports or be Indian nationals.

In this respect their juridical persons resemble the few million “elite” Indians who have in the last few decades freely placed their hands on their hearts and solemnly renounced their Indian nationality, declaring instead their individual fidelity to other nation-states — becoming American, Canadian or Australian citizens, or British subjects or nationals of other countries. Such people include tens of thousands of the adult children of India’s metropolitan “elite”, who are annually visited abroad in the hot summer months by their Indian parents and relatives. They are daughters and sons of New Delhi’s Government and Opposition, of retired generals, air marshals, admirals, ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, public sector bureaucrats, private sector businessmen, university professors, journalists, doctors and many others. India’s most popular film-actress exemplified this “elite” capital-flight when, after a tireless search, she chose a foreign husband and moved to California.

The difference in Jammu & Kashmir would be that those wishing to renounce Indian nationality do not wish to move to any other place but to stay as and where they are, which is in Kashmir Valley or Jammu. Furthermore, they may wish, for whatever reason, to adopt, if they are eligible to do so, the nationality of e.g. the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

They may believe themselves descended from Ahmad Shah Abdali whose Afghans ruled or mis-ruled Kashmir Valley before being defeated by Ranjit Singh’s Sikhs in 1819. Or they may believe themselves of Iranian descent as, for example, are the Kashmiri cousins of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Or they may simply have wished to be, or are descended from persons who had wished to be on October 26 1947, citizens of the then-new British Dominion of Pakistan — but who came to be prevented from properly expressing such a desire because of the war-like conditions that have prevailed ever since between India and Pakistan. There may be even a few persons in Laddakh who are today Indian nationals but who wish to be considered Tibetans instead; there is, however, no Tibetan Republic and it does not appear there is going to be one.

India, being a free and self-confident country, should allow, in a systematic lawful manner, all such persons to fulfil their desires, and furthermore, should ensure they are not penalised for having expressed such “anti-national” desires or for having acted upon them. Sir Mark Tully, the British journalist, is an example of someone who has been a foreign national who has chosen to reside permanently in the Republic of India — indeed he has been an exemplary permanent resident of our country. There are many others like him. There is no logical reason why all those persons in Jammu & Kashmir who do wish not to be Indians by nationality cannot receive the same legal status from the Indian Republic as has been granted to Sir Mark Tully. There are already thousands of Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Nepalese nationals who are lawful permanent residents in the Indian Republic, and who travel back and forth between India and their home countries. There is no logical reason why the same could not be extended to several hundred or numerous thousand people in Jammu & Kashmir who may wish to not accept or to renounce their Indian nationality (for whatever personal reason) and instead become nationals, if they are so eligible, of the Islamic Republics of Afghanistan, Iran or Pakistan, or, for that matter, to remain stateless. On the one hand, their renunciation of Indian nationality is logically equivalent to the renunciation of Indian nationality by the adult children of India’s “elite” settled in North America and Western Europe. On the other hand, their wish to adopt, if they are eligible, a foreign nationality, such as that of Afghanistan, Iran or Pakistan, and yet remain domiciled in Indian territory is logically equivalent to that of many foreign nationals domiciled in India already like Sir Mark Tully.

Now if you are a permanent resident of some country, you may legally have many, perhaps most, but certainly not all the rights and duties of nationals of that country. e.g., though you will have to pay all the same taxes, you may not be allowed to (or be required to) vote in national or provincial elections but you may in local municipal elections. At the same time, permanently residing foreign nationals are supposed to be equal under the law and have equal access to all processes of civil and criminal justice. (As may be expected though from human frailty, even the federal courts of the USA can be notorious in their injustice and racism towards “Green Card” holders relative to “full” American citizens.) Then again, as a permanently resident foreigner, while you will be free to work in any lawful trade or profession, you may not be allowed to work in some or perhaps any Government agencies, certainly not the armed forces or the police. Many Indians in the USA were engineering graduates, and because many engineering jobs or contracts in the USA are related to the US armed forces and require US citizens only, it is commonplace for Indian engineers to renounce their Indian nationality and become Americans because of this. Many Indian-American families have one member who is American, another Indian, a third maybe Canadian, a fourth Fijian or British etc.

The same can happen in the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir if it evolves peacefully and correctly in the future. It is quite possible to imagine a productive family in a peaceful Kashmir Valley of the future where one brother is an officer in the Indian Armed Forces, another brother a civil servant and a sister a police officer of the J&K State Government, another sister being a Pakistani doctor, while cousins are Afghan or Iranian or “stateless” businessmen. Each family-member would have made his/her choice of nationality as an individual given the circumstances of his/her life, his/her personal comprehension of the facts of history, his/her personal political and/or religious persuasions, and similar deeply private considerations. All would have their children going to Indian schools and being Indian citizens ius soli and/or ius sanguinis. When the children grow up, they would be free to join, if they wished, the existing capital flight of other Indian adult children abroad and there renounce their Indian nationality as many have come to do.

II Revealing Choices Privately with Full Information
For India to implement such a proposal would be to provide an opportunity for all those domiciled in Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Laddakh to express freely and privately as individuals their deepest wishes about their own identities, in a confidential manner, citizen by citizen, case by case. This would thereby solve the fundamental democratic problem that has been faced ever since the Pakistani attack on the original State of Jammu & Kashmir commenced on October 22 1947, which came to be followed by the Rape of Baramulla — causing the formal accession of the State to the then-new Dominion of India on October 26 1947.

A period of, say, 30 months may be announced by the Government of India during which full information would be provided to all citizens affected by this change, i.e. all those presently governed by Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The condition of full information may include, for example, easy access to Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani newspapers in addition to access to Indian media. Each such person wishing to either remain with Indian nationality (by explicitly requesting an Indian passport if he/she does not have one already — and such passports can be printed in Kashmiri and Urdu too), or to renounce Indian nationality and either remain stateless or adopt, if he/she is so eligible, the nationality of e.g. Afghanistan, Iran, or Pakistan, should be administratively assisted by the Government of India to make that choice.

In particular, he/she should be individually, confidentially, and without fear or favour assured and informed of his/her new rights and responsibilities. For example, a resident of Kashmir Valley who chooses to become a Pakistani citizen, such as Mr Geelani, would now enjoy the same rights and responsibilities in the Indian Republic that Mr Tully enjoys, and at the same time no longer require a visa to visit Pakistan just as Mr Tully needs no visa to enter Britain. In case individual participants in the Hurriyat choose to renounce Indian nationality and adopt some other, they would no longer be able to legally participate in Indian national elections or J&K’s State elections. That is something which they say they do not wish to do in any case. Those members of the Hurriyat who chose e.g. Pakistani nationality while still residing in Jammu & Kashmir, would be free to send postal ballots or cross the border and vote in Pakistan’s elections if and when these occur. There are many Canadians who live permanently in the USA who cross home to Canada in order to cast a ballot.

After the period of 30 months, every person presently under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution would have received a full and fair opportunity to privately and confidentially reveal his/her preference or choice under conditions of full information. “Partition”, “Plebiscite”, and “Military Decision” have been the three alternatives under discussion ever since the National Conference of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his then-loyal Deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, helped the Indian Army and Air Force in 1947-1948 fight off the savage attack against Jammu & Kashmir State that had commenced from Pakistan on October 22 1947. When, during the Pakistani attack, the Sheikh and Bakshi agreed to the Muslim Conference’s demand for a plebiscite among the people, the Pakistanis balked — the Sheikh and Bakshi then withdrew their offer and decisively and irrevocably chose to accede to the Indian Union. The people of Jammu & Kashmir, like any other, are now bound by the sovereign political commitments made by their forebears. Even so, given the painful mortal facts of the several decades since, the solution here proposed if properly implemented would be an incomparably more thorough democratic exercise than any conceivable plebiscite could ever have been.

Furthermore, regardless of the outcome, it would not entail any further “Partition” or population “transfer” which inevitably would degenerate into a savage balkanization, and has been ruled out as an unacceptable “deal-breaker” by the Indian Republic. Instead, every individual person would have been required, in a private and confidential decision-making process, to have chosen a nationality or to remain stateless — resulting in a multitude of cosmopolitan families in Jammu & Kashmir. But that is something commonplace in the modern world. Properly understood and properly implemented, we shall have resolved the great mortal problem we have faced for more than half a century, and Jammu & Kashmir can finally settle into a period of peace and prosperity. The boundary between India and Pakistan would have been settled by the third alternative mentioned at the time, namely, “Military Decision”.

III. Of Flags and Consulates in Srinagar and Gilgit
Pakistan has demanded its flag fly in Srinagar. This too can happen though not in the way Pakistan has been wishing to see it happen. A Pakistan flag might fly in the Valley just as might an Afghan and Iranian flag as well. Pakistan has wished its flag to fly as the sovereign over Jammu & Kashmir. That is not possible. The best and most just outcome is for the Pakistani flag to fly over a recognised Pakistani consular or visa office in Srinagar, Jammu and Leh. In diplomatic exchange, the Indian tricolour would have to fly over a recognised Indian consular or visa office in Muzaffarabad, Gilgit and Skardu.

Pakistan also may have to act equivalently with respect to the original inhabitants of the territory of Jammu & Kashmir that it has been controlling — allowing those people to become Indian nationals if they so chose to do in free private decisions under conditions of full information. In other words, the “Military Decision” that defines the present boundary between sovereign states must be recognised by Pakistan sincerely and permanently in a Treaty relationship with India — and all of Pakistan’s official and unofficial protégés like the Hurriyat and the “United Jehad Council” would have to do the same. Without such a sovereign commitment from the Government of Pakistan, as shown by decisive actions of lack of aggressive intent (e.g. as came to be implemented between the USA and USSR), the Government of India has no need to involve the Government of Pakistan in implementing the solution of enhancing free individual choice of nationality with regard to all persons on our side of the boundary.

The “Military Decision” regarding the sovereign boundary in Jammu & Kashmir will be so recognised by all only if it is the universally just outcome in international law. And that in fact is what it is.

The original Jammu & Kashmir State began its existence as an entity in international law long before the present Republics of India and Pakistan ever did. Pakistan commences as an entity on August 14 1947; India commences as an entity of international law with its signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 20 1918. Jammu & Kashmir began as an entity on March 16 1846 — when the Treaty of Amritsar was signed between Gulab Singh Dogra and the British, one week after the Treaty of Lahore between the British and the defeated Sikh regency of the child Daleep Singh.

Liaquat Ali Khan and Zafrullah Khan both formally challenged on Pakistan’s behalf the legitimacy of Dogra rule in Jammu & Kashmir since the Treaty of Amritsar. The Pakistani Mission to the UN does so even today. The Pakistanis were following Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru himself, who too had at one point challenged Dogra legitimacy in the past. But though the form of words of the Pakistan Government and the Nehru-Abdullah position were similar in their attacks on the Treaty of Amritsar, their underlying substantive reasons were as different as chalk from cheese. The Pakistanis attacked the Dogra dynasty for being Dogra — i.e. because they were Hindus and not Muslims governing a Muslim majority. Nehru and Abdullah denounced monarchic autocracy in favour of mass democracy, and so attacked the Dogra dynasty for being a dynasty. All were wrong to think the Treaty of Amritsar anything but a lawful treaty in international law.

Furthermore, in this sombre political game of great mortal consequence, there were also two other parties who were, or appeared to be, in favour of the dynasty: one because the dynasty was non-Muslim, the other, despite it being so. Non-Muslim minorities like many Hindus and Sikhs in the business and governmental classes, saw the Dogra dynasty as their protector against a feared communalist tyranny arising from the Sunni Muslim masses of Srinagar Valley, whom Abdullah’s rhetoric at Friday prayer-meetings had been inciting or at least awakening from slumber. At the same time, the communalists of the Muslim Conference who had broken away from Abdullah’s secular National Conference, sought political advantage over Abdullah by declaring themselves in favour of keeping the dynasty — even elevating it to become an international sovereign, thus flattering the already pretentious potentate that he would be called “His Majesty” instead of merely “His Highness”. The ancestry of today’s Hurriyat’s demands for an independent Jammu & Kashmir may be traced precisely to those May 21-22 1947 declarations of the Muslim Conference leader, Hamidullah Khan.

Into this game stumbled the British with all the mix of cunning, indifference, good will, impatience, arrogance and pomposity that marked their rule in India. At the behest of the so-called “Native Princes”, the 1929 Butler Commission had hinted that the relationship of “Indian India” to the British sovereign was conceptually different from that of “British India” to the British sovereign. This view was adopted in the Cabinet Mission’s 12 May 1946 Memorandum which in turn came to be applied by Attlee and Mountbatten in their unseemly rush to “Divide and Quit” India in the summer of 1947.

It created the pure legal illusion that there was such a thing as “Lapse of Paramountcy” at which Jammu & Kashmir or any other “Native State” of “Indian India” could conceivably, even for a moment, become a sovereign enjoying the comity of nations — contradicting Britain’s own position that only two Dominions, India and Pakistan, could ever be members of the British Commonwealth and hence members of the newly created UN. British pusillanimity towards Jammu & Kashmir’s Ruler had even extended to making him a nominal member of Churchill’s War Cabinet because he had sent troops to fight in Burma. But the legal illusion had come about because of a catastrophic misunderstanding on the part of the British of their own constitutional law.

The only legal scholar who saw this was B R Ambedkar in a lonely and brilliant technical analysis released to the press on June 17 1947. No “Lapse of Paramountcy” over the “Native Princes” of Indian India could occur in constitutional law. Paramountcy over Indian India would be automatically inherited by the successor state of British India at the Transfer of Power. That successor state was the new British Dominion of India as well as (when it came to be finalised by Partition from India) the new British Dominion of Pakistan (Postscript: the deleted words represent a mistake made in the original paper, corrected in “Law, Justice & J&K” in view of the fact the UN in 1947 deemed India alone the successor state of British India and Pakistan a new state in the world system). A former “Native Prince” could only choose to which Dominion he would go. No other alternative existed even for a single logical moment. Because the British had catastrophically failed to comprehend this aspect of their own constitutional law, they created a legal vacuum whereby between August 15 and October 22-26 1947, Jammu & Kashmir became a local and temporary sovereign recognised only by the Dominion of Pakistan (until October 22) and the Dominion of India (until October 26). But it was not a globally recognised sovereign and was never going to be such in international law. This was further proved by Attlee refusing to answer the J&K Prime Minister’s October 18 1947 telegram.

All ambiguity came to end with the Pakistani attack of October 22 1947, the Rape of Baramulla, the secession of an “Azad Kashmir”declared by Sardar Ibrahim, and the Pakistani coup détat in Gilgit on October 31 1947 followed by the massacre of Sikh soldiers of the J&K Army at Bunji. With those Pakistani actions, Gulab Singh’s Jammu & Kashmir State, founded on March 16 1846 by the Treaty of Amritsar, ceased to logically exist as an entity in international law and fell into a state of ownerless anarchy. The conflict between Ibrahim’s Muslim communalists backed by the new Dominion of Pakistan and Abdullah’s secularists backed by the new Dominion of India had become a civil war within a larger intra-Commonwealth war that itself was almost a civil war between forces of the same military.

Jammu & Kashmir territory had become ownerless. The Roman Law which is at the root of all municipal and international law in the world today would declare that in the ownership of such an ownerless entity, a “Military Decision” was indeed the just outcome. Sovereignty over the land, waters, forests and other actual and potential resources of the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir has become divided by “Military Decision” between the modern Republics of India and Pakistan. By the proposal made herein, the people and their descendants shall have chosen their nationality and their domicile freely across the sovereign boundary that has come to result.

TWO
LAW, JUSTICE AND J&K by Subroto Roy First published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman, July 2 2006 and The Statesman July 3 2006 www.thestatesman.net Editorial Page Special Article

I.
For a solution to J&K to be universally acceptable it must be seen by all as being lawful and just. Political opinion in Pakistan and India as well as all people and parties in J&K ~ those loyal to India, those loyal to Pakistan, and any others ~ will have to agree that, all things considered, such is the right course of action for everyone today in the 21st Century, which means too that the solution must be consistent with the facts of history as well as account reasonably for all moral considerations.

On August 14, 1947, the legal entity known as “British India”, as one of its final acts, and based on a sovereign British decision made only two months earlier, created out of some of its territory a new State defined in international law as the “Dominion of Pakistan”. British India extinguished itself the very next day, and the newly independent “Dominion of India” succeeded to all its rights and obligations in international law. As the legal successor of the “India” which had signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the San Francisco Declaration of 1945, the Dominion of India was already a member of the new UN as well as a signatory to many international treaties. By contrast, the Dominion of Pakistan had to apply afresh to sign treaties and become a member of international organisations. The theory put forward by Argentina that two new States, India and Pakistan, had been created ab initio, came to be rejected and was withdrawn by Argentina. Instead, Pakistan with the wholehearted backing of India was made a member of the UN, with all except Afghanistan voting in favour. (Afghanistan’s exceptional vote signalled presence of conflict over the Durand Line and idea of a Pashtunistan; Dr Khan Sahib and Abdul Ghaffar Khan were imprisoned by the Muslim League regime of NWFP which later supported the tribesmen who attacked J&K starting October 22, 1947; that conflict remains unresolved to this day, even after the American attack on the Taliban, the restart of a constitutional process in Afghanistan, and the purported mediation of US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.)

Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s distinguished first ambassador to the UN, claimed in September 1947: “Pakistan is not a new member of UNO but a successor to a member State which was one of the founders of the Organisation.” He noted that he himself had led India to the final session of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1939, and he wished to say that Pakistan had been present “as part of India… under the latter name” as a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles. This was, however, logically impossible. The Treaty of Versailles long predated (1) Mohammad Iqbal’s Allahabad Address which conceptualised for the first time in the 20th Century a Muslim State in Northwest India; (2) Rahmat Ali’s invention of the word “PAKSTAN” on the top floor of a London omnibus; (3) M. A. Jinnah and Fazlul Haq’s Lahore Resolution; and (4) the final British decision of June 3, 1947 to create by Partition out of “British India” a Dominion named Pakistan. Pakistan could not have acted in international law prior to having come into being or been created or even conceived itself. Zafrullah Khan would have been more accurate to say that the history of Pakistanis until August 14, 1947 had been one in common with that of their Indian cousins ~ or indeed their Indian brothers, since innumerable North Indian Muslim families came to be literally partitioned, with some brothers remaining Indians while other brothers became Pakistanis.

Pakistan was created at the behest of Jinnah’s Muslim League though with eventual agreement of the Indian National Congress (a distant ancestor of the political party going by the same name today). Pakistan arose not because Jinnah said Hindus and Muslims were “two nations” but because he and his League wished for a State where Muslims would find themselves ruled by fellow-Muslims and feel themselves part of a pan-Islamic culture. Yet Pakistan was intended to be a secular polity with Muslim-majority governance, not an Islamic theocracy. That Pakistan failed to become secular was exemplified most poignantly in the persecution Zafrullah himself later faced in his personal life as an Ahmadiya, even while he was Pakistan’s Foreign Minister. (The same happened later to Pakistan’s Nobel-winning physicist Abdus Salaam.) Pakistan was supposed to allow the genius of Indo-Muslim culture to flourish, transplanted from places like Lucknow and Aligarh which would never be part of it. In fact, the areas that are Pakistan today had in the 1937 provincial elections shown scant popular Muslim support for Jinnah’s League. The NWFP had a Congress Government in the 1946 elections, and its supporters boycotted the pro-Pakistan referendum in 1947. The imposition of Urdu culture as Pakistan’s dominant ethos might have come to be accepted later in West Punjab, Sindh and NWFP but it was not acceptable in East Bengal, and led inevitably to the Pakistani civil war and creation of Bangladesh by Sheikh Mujib in 1971.

In August 1947, the new Dominions of India and Pakistan were each supposed to protect their respective minority populations as their first political duty. Yet both palpably failed in this, and were reduced to making joint declarations pleading for peace and an end to communal killings and the abduction of women. The Karachi Government, lacking the wherewithal and administrative machinery of being a nation-state at all, and with only Liaquat and an ailing Jinnah as noted leaders, may have failed more conspicuously, and West Punjab, the Frontier and Sindh were soon emptied of almost all their many Sikhs and Hindus. Instead, the first act of the new Pakistan Government in the weeks after August 14, 1947 was to arrange for the speedy and safe transfer of the North Indian Muslim elite by air from Delhi using chartered British aeroplanes. The ordinary Muslim masses of UP, Delhi and East Punjab were left in danger from or were subjected to Sikh and Hindu mob attacks, especially as news and rumours spread of similar outrages against Pakistan’s departing minorities.

In this spiral of revenge attacks and counter-attacks, bloodshed inevitably spilled over from West and East Punjab into the northern Punjabi plains of Jammu, though Kashmir Valley remained conspicuously peaceful. Zafrullah and Liaquat would later claim it was this communal civil war which had caused thousands of newly decommissioned Mirpuri soldiers of the British Army, and thousands of Afridi and other Frontier tribesmen, to spontaneously act to “liberate” J&K’s Muslims from alleged tyranny under the Hindu Ruler or an allegedly illegal Indian occupation.

But the main attack on J&K State that began from Pakistan along the Manshera-Muzaffarabad road on October 22, 1947 was admittedly far too well-organised, well-armed, well-planned and well-executed to have been merely a spontaneous uprising of tribesmen and former soldiers. In all but name, it was an act of undeclared war of the new Dominion of Pakistan first upon the State of J&K and then upon the Indian Dominion. This became obvious to Field Marshall Auchinlek, who, as Supreme Commander of the armed forces of both India and Pakistan, promptly resigned and abolished the Supreme Command in face of the fact that two parts of his own forces were now at war with one another.

The invaders failed to take Srinagar solely because they lost their military purpose while indulging in the Rape of Baramula. Thousands of Kashmiri women of all communities ~ Muslim, Sikh and Hindu ~ were violated and transported back to be sold in markets in Peshawar and elsewhere. Such was standard practice in Central Asian tribal wars from long before the advent of Islam, and the invading tribesmen shared that culture. India’s Army and Air Force along with the militias of the secular democratic movement led by Sheikh Abdullah and those remaining loyal units of J&K forces, fought off the invasion, and liberated Baramula, Naushera, Uri, Poonch etc. Gilgit had a British-led coup détat against it bringing it under Pakistan’s control. Kargil was initially taken by the Pakistanis and then lost by them. Leh could have been but was not taken by Pakistani forces. But in seeking to protect Leh and to retake Kargil, the Indian Army lost the siege of Skardu ~ which ended reputedly with the infamous communication from the Pakistani commander to his HQ: “All Sikhs killed; all women raped.”

Legal theory
Now, in this grave mortal conflict, the legal theory to which both the Indian and Pakistani Governments have been wedded for sixty years is one that had been endorsed by the British Cabinet Mission in 1946 and originated with the Butler Commission of 1929. Namely, that “Lapse of Paramountcy” over the “Indian India” of the “Native States” could and did occur with the extinction of British India on August 15, 1947. By this theory, Hyderabad, J&K, Junagadh and the several other States which had not acceded to either Dominion were no longer subject to the Crown’s suzerainty as of that date. Both Dominions drew up “Instruments of Accession” for Rulers to sign upon the supposed “Lapse” of Paramountcy that was to occur with the end of British India.

Ever since, the Pakistan Government has argued that Junagadh’s Ruler acceded to Pakistan and Hyderabad’s had wished to do so but both were forcibly prevented by India. Pakistan has also argued the accession to India by J&K’s Ruler was “fraudulent” and unacceptable, and Sheikh Abdullah was a “Quisling” of India and it was not his National Conference but the Muslim Conference of Ibrahim, Abbas and the Mirwaiz (precursor of the Hurriyat) which represented J&K’s Muslims.

India argued that Junagadh’s accession to Pakistan or Hyderabad’s independence were legal and practical impossibilities contradicting the wills of their peoples, and that their integration into the Indian Dominion was carried out in an entirely legitimate manner in the circumstances prevailing.

On J&K, India has argued that not only had the Ruler requested Indian forces to fight off the Pakistani attack, and he acceded formally before Indian forces were sent, but also that democratic principles were fully adhered to in the unequivocal endorsement of the accession by Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference and further by a duly called and elected J&K Constituent Assembly, as well as generations of Kashmiris since. In the Indian view, it is Pakistan which has been in illegal occupation of Indian territory from Mirpur, Muzaffarabad and Gilgit to Skardu all the way to the Khunjerab Pass, Siachen Glacier and K2, some of which it illegally ceded to its Communist Chinese ally, and furthermore that it has denied the peoples of these areas any democratic voice.

Roman law
In June 1947, it was uniquely and brilliantly argued by BR Ambedkar in a statement to the Press that the British had made a catastrophic error in comprehending their own constitutional law, that no such thing as “Lapse” of Paramountcy existed, and that suzerainty over the “Native States” of “Indian India” would be automatically transferred in international law to the successor State of British India. It was a legal illusion to think any Native State could be sovereign even for a single logical moment. On this theory, if the Dominion of India was the sole successor State in international law while Pakistan was a new legal entity, then a Native State which acceded to Pakistan after August 15, 1947 would have had to do so with the consent of the suzerain power, namely, India, as may be said to have happened implicitly in case of Chitral and a few others. Equally, India’s behaviour in integrating (or annexing) Junagadh and Hyderabad, would become fully explicable ~ as would the statements of Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel before October 1947 that they would accept J&K going to Pakistan if that was what the Ruler and his people desired. Pakistan unilaterally and by surprise went to war against J&K on October 22, declared the accession to India “fraudulent”, and to this day has claimed the territory of the original State of J&K is “disputed”. Certainly, even if the Ambedkar doctrine is applied that no “Lapse” was possible under British law, Pakistan did not recognise India’s jurisdiction there as the suzerain power as of August 15, 1947. Altogether, Pakistan’s sovereign actions from October 22 onwards amounted to acting to annex J&K to itself by military force ~ acts which came to be militarily resisted (with partial success) by India allied with Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference and the remaining forces of J&K. By these military actions, Pakistan revealed that it considered J&K territory to have descended into a legal state of anarchy as of October 22, 1947, and hence open to resolution by “Military Decision” ~ as is indeed the just outcome under Roman Law, the root of all municipal and international law today, when there is a contest between claimants over an ownerless entity.

Choice of nationality
Hence, the present author concluded (“Solving Kashmir”, The Statesman December 1-3, 2005) that the dismemberment of the original J&K State and annexation of its territories by India and Pakistan that has occurred since 1947, as represented first by the 1949 Ceasefire Line and then by the 1972 Line of Control, is indeed the just and lawful outcome prevailing in respect of the question of territorial sovereignty and jurisdiction. The remaining “democratic” question described has to do with free individual choice of nationality by the inhabitants, under conditions of full information and privacy, citizen-by-citizen, with the grant of permanent residency rights by the Indian Republic to persons under its jurisdiction in J&K who may choose not to remain Indian nationals but become Afghan, Iranian or Pakistani nationals instead. Pakistan has said frequently its sole concern has been the freedom of the Muslims of J&K under Indian rule, and any such genuine concern shall have been thereby fully met by India. Indeed, if Pakistan agreed to act similarly, this entire complex mortal problem of decades shall have begun to be peacefully resolved. Both countries are wracked by corruption, poverty and bad governance, and would be able to mutually draw down military forces pit against one another everywhere, so as to begin to repair the grave damage to their fiscal health caused by the deleterious draining away of vast public resources.

THREE
HISTORY OF JAMMU & KASHMIR by Subroto Roy First published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman, Oct 29 2006 and The Statesman Oct 30 2006, Editorial Page Special Article, www.thestatesman.net

At the advent of Islam in distant Arabia, India and Kashmir in particular were being visited by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims during Harsha’s reign. The great “Master of Law” Hiuen Tsiang visited between 629-645 and spent 631-633 in Kashmir (”Kia-chi-mi-lo”), describing it to include Punjab, Kabul and Kandahar. Over the next dozen centuries, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and again Hindu monarchs came to rule the 85 mile long 40 mile wide territory on the River Jhelum’s upper course known as Srinagar Valley, as well as its adjoining Jammu in the upper plains of the Punjab and “Little Tibet” consisting of Laddakh, Baltistan and Gilgit.

In 1344, a Persian adventurer from Swat or Khorasan by name of Amir or Mirza, who had “found his way into the Valley and in time gained great influence at the Raja’s court”, proclaimed himself Sultan Shamsuddin after the death of the last Hindu monarchs of medieval Kashmir. Twelve of his descendants formed the Shamiri dynasty including the notorious Sikander and the just and tolerant Zainulabidin. Sikander who ruled 1386-1410 “submitted himself” to the Uzbek Taimur the Lame when he approached Kashmir in 1398 “and thus saved the country from invasion”. Otherwise, “Sikander was a gloomy ferocious bigot, and his zeal in destroying temples and idols was so intense that he is remembered as the Idol-Breaker. He freely used the sword to propagate Islam and succeeded in forcing the bulk of the population to conform outwardly to the Muslim religion. Most of the Brahmins refused to apostatise, and many of them paid with their lives the penalty for their steadfastness. Many others were exiled, and only a few conformed.”

Zainulabidin who ruled 1417-1467 “was a man of very different type”. “He adopted the policy of universal toleration, recalled the exiled Brahmins, repealed the jizya or poll-tax on Hindus, and even permitted new temples to be built. He abstained from eating flesh, prohibited the slaughter of kine, and was justly venerated as a saint. He encouraged literature, painting and music, and caused many translations to be made of works composed in Sanskrit, Arabic and other languages.” During his “long and prosperous reign”, he “constructed canals and built many mosques; he was just and tolerant”.

The Shamiri dynasty ended in 1541 when “some fugitive chiefs of the two local factions of the Makri and the Chakk invited Mirza Haidar Dughlat, a relation of Babar, to invade Kashmir. The country was conquered and the Mirza held it (nominally in name of Humayan) till 1551, when he was killed in a skirmish. The line… was restored for a few years, until in 1559 a Chakk leader, Ghazi Shah, usurped the throne; and in the possession of his descendants it remained for nearly thirty years.” This dynasty marks the origins of Shia Islam in Srinagar though Shia influence in Gilgit, Baltistan and Laddakh was of longer standing. Constant dissensions weakened the Chakks, and in 1586, Akbar, then at Attock on the Indus, sent an army under Raja Bhagwan Das into Srinagar Valley and easily made it part of his Empire.

Shivaism and Islam both flourished, and Hindu ascetics and Sufi saints were revered by all. Far from Muslims and Hindus forming distinct nations, here they were genetically related kinsmen living in proximity in a small isolated area for centuries. Indeed Zainulabidin may have had a vast unspoken influence on the history of all India insofar as Akbar sought to attempt in his empire what Zainulabidin achieved in the Valley. Like Zainulabidin, Akbar’s governance of India had as its “constant aim” “to conciliate the Hindus and to repress Muslim bigotry” which in modern political parlance may be seen as the principle of secular governance ~ of conciliating the powerless (whether majority or minority) and repressing the bigotry of the powerful (whether minority or majority). Akbar had made the Valley the summer residence of the Mughals, and it was Jahangir, seeing the Valley for the first time, who apparently said the words agar behest baushad, hamee in hast, hamee in hast, hamee in hast: “if Heaven exists, it is here, it is here, it is here”. Yet like other isolated paradises (such as the idyllic islands of the Pacific Ocean) an accursed mental ether can accompany the magnificent beauty of people’s surroundings. As the historian put it: “The Kashmiris remained secure in their inaccessible Valley; but they were given up to internal weakness and discord, their political importance was gone…”

After the Mughals collapsed, Iran’s Turkish ruler Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739 but the Iranian court fell in disarray upon his death. In 1747 a jirga of Pashtun tribes at Kandahar “broke normal tradition” and asked an old Punjabi holy man and shrine-keeper to choose between two leaders; this man placed young wheat in the hand of the 25 year old Ahmed Shah Saddozai of the Abdali tribe, and titled him “Durrani”. Five years later, Durrani took Kashmir and for the next 67 years the Valley was under Pashtun rule, a time of “unmitigated brutality and widespread distress”. Durrani himself “was wise, prudent and simple”, never declared himself king and wore no crown, instead keeping a stick of young wheat in his turban. Leaving India, he famously recited: “The Delhi throne is beautiful indeed, but does it compare with the mountains of Kandahar?”

Kashmir’s modern history begins with Ranjit Singh of the Sikhs who became a soldier at 12, and in 1799 at age 19 was made Lahore’s Governor by Kabul’s Zaman Shah. Three years later “he made himself master of Amritsar”, and in 1806 crossed the River Sutlej and took Ludhiana. He created a fine Sikh infantry and cavalry under former officers of Napoleon, and with 80,000 trained men and 500 guns took Multan and Peshawar, defeated the Pashtuns and overran Kashmir in 1819. The “cruel rule” of the Pashtuns ended “to the great relief of Kashmir’s inhabitants”.

The British Governor-General Minto (ancestor of the later Viceroy), seeing advantage in the Sikhs staying north of the Sutlej, sent Charles Metcalfe, “a clever young civilian”, to persuade the Khalsa; in 1809, Ranjit Singh and the British in the first Treaty of Amritsar agreed to establish “perpetual amity”: the British would “have no concern” north of the Sutlej and Ranjit Singh would keep only minor personnel south of it. In 1834 and 1838 Ranjit Singh was struck by paralysis and died in 1839, leaving no competent heir. The Sikh polity collapsed, “their power exploded, disappearing in fierce but fast flames”. It was “a period of storm and anarchy in which assassination was the rule” and the legitimate line of his son and grandson, Kharak Singh and Nao Nihal Singh was quickly extinguished. In 1845 the Queen Regent, mother of the five-year old Dalip Singh, agreed to the Khalsa ending the 1809 Treaty. After bitter battles that might have gone either way, the Khalsa lost at Sobraon on 10 February 1846, and accepted terms of surrender in the 9 March 1846 Treaty of Lahore. The kingdom had not long survived its founder: “created by the military and administrative genius of one man, it crumbled into powder when the spirit which gave it life was withdrawn; and the inheritance of the Khalsa passed into the hands of the English.”

Ranjit Singh’s influence on modern J&K was even greater through his having mentored the Rajput Gulab Singh Dogra (1792-1857) and his brothers Dhyan Singh and Suchet Singh. Jammu had been ruled by Ranjit Deo until 1780 when the Sikhs made it tributary to the Lahore Court. Gulab Singh, a great grand nephew of Ranjit Deo, had left home at age 17 in search of a soldierly fortune, and ended up in 1809 in Ranjit Singh’s army, just when Ranjit Singh had acquired for himself a free hand to expand his domains north of the River Sutlej.

Gulab Singh, an intrepid soldier, by 1820 had Jammu conferred upon him by Ranjit Singh with the title of Raja, while Bhimber, Chibal, Poonch and Ramnagar went to his brothers. Gulab Singh, “often unscrupulous and cruel, was a man of considerable ability and efficiency”; he “found his small kingdom a troublesome charge but after ten years of constant struggles he and his two brothers became masters of most of the country between Kashmir and the Punjab”, though Srinagar Valley itself remained under a separate Governor appointed by the Lahore Court. Gulab Singh extended Jammu’s rule from Rawalpindi, Bhimber, Rajouri, Bhadarwah and Kishtwar, across Laddakh and into Tibet. His General Zorawar Singh led six expeditions into Laddakh between 1834 and 1841 through Kishtwar, Padar and Zanskar. In May 1841, Zorawar left Leh with an army of 5000 Dogras and Laddakhis and advanced on Tibet. Defeating the Tibetans at Rudok and Tashigong, he reached Minsar near Lake Mansarovar from where he advanced to Taklakot (Purang), 15 miles from the borders of Nepal and Kumaon, and built a fort stopping for the winter. Lhasa sent large re-inforcements to meet him. Zorawar, deciding to take the offensive, was killed in the Battle of Toyu, on 11-12 December 1841 at 16,000 feet.

A Laddakhi rebellion resulted against Jammu, aided now by the advancing Tibetans. A new army was sent under Hari Chand suppressing the rebellion and throwing back the Tibetans, leading to a peace treaty between Lhasa and Jammu signed on 17 September 1842: “We have agreed that we have no ill-feelings because of the past war. The two kings will henceforth remain friends forever. The relationship between Maharajah Gulab Singh of Kashmir and the Lama Guru of Lhasa (Dalai Lama) is now established. The Maharajah Sahib, with God (Kunchok) as his witness, promises to recognise ancient boundaries, which should be looked after by each side without resorting to warfare. When the descendants of the early kings, who fled from Laddakh to Tibet, now return they will not be stopped by Shri Maharajah. Trade between Laddakh and Tibet will continue as usual. Tibetan government traders coming into Laddakh will receive free transport and accommodations as before, and the Laddakhi envoy will, in turn, receive the same facilities in Lhasa. The Laddakhis take an oath before God (Kunchok) that they will not intrigue or create new troubles in Tibetan territory. We have agreed, with God as witness, that Shri Maharajah Sahib and the Lama Guru of Lhasa will live together as members of the same household.” The traditional boundary between Laddakh and Tibet “as recognised by both sides since olden times” was accepted by the envoys of Gulab Singh and the Dalai Lama.

An earlier 1684 treaty between Laddakh and Lhasa had said that while Laddakh would send tribute to Lhasa every three years, “the king of Laddakh reserves to himself the village of Minsar in Ngarees-khor-sum, that he may be independent there; and he sets aside its revenue for the purpose of meeting the expense involved in keeping up the sacrificial lights at Kangree (Kailas), and the Holy Lakes of Mansarovar and Rakas Tal”. The area around Minsar village near Lake Mansarovar, held by the rulers of Laddakh since 1583, was retained by Jammu in the 1842 peace-treaty, and its revenue was received by J&K State until 1948.

After Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, Gulab Singh was alienated from the Lahore Court where the rise of his brothers and a nephew aroused enough Khalsa jealousy to see them assassinated in palace intrigues. While the Sikhs imploded, Gulab Singh had expanded his own dominion from Rawalpindi to Minsar ~ everywhere except Srinagar Valley itself. He had apparently advised the Sikhs not to attack the British in breach of the 1809 Treaty, and when they did so he had not joined them, though had he done so British power in North India might have been broken. The British were grateful for his neutrality and also his help in their first misbegotten adventure in Afghanistan. It was Gulab Singh who was now encouraged by both the British and the Sikhs to mediate between them, indeed “to take a leading part in arranging conditions of peace”, and he formally represented the Sikh regency in the negotiations. The 9 March 1846 Treaty of Lahore “set forth that the British Government having demanded in addition to a certain assignment of territory, a payment of a crore and a half of rupees, and the Sikh Government being unable to pay the whole”, Dalip Singh “should cede as equivalent to one crore the hill country belonging to the Punjab between the Beas and the Indus including Kashmir and the Hazara”.

For the British to occupy the whole of this mountainous territory was judged unwise on economic and military grounds; it was not feasible to occupy from a military standpoint and the area “with the exception of the small Valley of Kashmir” was “for the most part unproductive”. “On the other hand, the ceded tracts comprised the whole of the hereditary possessions of Gulab Singh, who, being eager to obtain an indefeasible title to them, came forward and offered to pay the war indemnity on condition that he was made the independent ruler of Jammu & Kashmir.

A separate treaty embodying this arrangement was thus concluded between the British and Gulab Singh at Amritsar on 16 March 1846.” Gulab Singh acknowledged the British Government’s supremacy, and in token of it agreed to present annually to the British Government “one horse, twelve shawl goats of approved breed and three pairs of Kashmir shawls. This arrangement was later altered; the annual presentation made by the Kashmir State was confined to two Kashmir shawls and three romals (handkerchiefs).” The Treaty of Amritsar “put Gulab Singh, as Maharaja, in possession of all the hill country between the Indus and the Ravi, including Kashmir, Jammu, Laddakh and Gilgit; but excluding Lahoul, Kulu and some areas including Chamba which for strategic purposes, it was considered advisable (by the British) to retain and for which a remission of Rs 25 lakhs was made from the crore demanded, leaving Rs 75 lakhs as the final amount to be paid by Gulab Singh.” The British retained Hazara which in 1918 was included into NWFP. Through an intrigue emanating from Prime Minister Lal Singh in Lahore, Imamuddin, the last Sikh-appointed Governor of Kashmir, sought to prevent Gulab Singh taking possession of the Valley in accordance with the Treaty’s terms. By December 1846 Gulab Singh had done so, though only with help of a British force which included 17,000 Sikh troops “who had been fighting in the campaign just concluded”. (Contemporary British opinion even predicted Sikhism like Buddhism “would become extinct in a short time if it were not kept alive by the esprit de corps of the Sikh regiments”.)

The British in 1846 may have been glad enough to allow Gulab Singh take independent charge of the new entity that came to be now known as the “State of Jammu & Kashmir”. Later, however. they and their American allies would grow keen to control or influence the region vis-à-vis their new interests against the Russian and Soviet Empires.

FOUR
PAKISTAN’S ALLIES by Subroto Roy First published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman, June 4 2006, The Statesman June 5 2006, Editorial Page Special Article, www.thestatesman.net

From the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar creating the State of Jammu & Kashmir until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Britain and later the USA became increasingly interested in the subcontinent’s Northwest. The British came to India by sea to trade. Barren, splendid, landlocked Afghanistan held no interest except as a home of fierce tribes; but it was the source of invasions into the Indian plains and prompted a British misadventure to install Shah Shuja in place of Dost Mohammad Khan leading to ignominious defeat. Later, Afghanistan was seen as the underbelly of the Russian and Soviet empires, and hence a location of interest to British and American strategic causes.

In November 1954, US President Dwight Eisenhower authorized 30 U-2 spy aircraft to be produced for deployment against America’s perceived enemies, especially to investigate Soviet nuclear missiles which could reach the USA. Reconnaissance balloons had been unsuccessful, and numerous Western pilots had been shot down taking photographs from ordinary military aircraft. By June 1956, U-2 were making clandestine flights over the USSR and China. But on May 1 1960, one was shot or forced down over Sverdlovsk, 1,000 miles within Soviet territory. The Americans prevaricated that it had taken off from Turkey on a weather-mission, and been lost due to oxygen problems. Nikita Kruschev then produced the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who was convicted of spying, though was exchanged later for a Soviet spy. Powers had been headed towards Norway, his task to photograph Soviet missiles from 70,000 ft, his point of origin had been an American base 20 miles from Peshawar.

America needed clandestine “forward bases” from which to fly U-2 aircraft, and Pakistan’s ingratiating military and diplomatic establishment was more than willing to offer such cooperation, fervently wishing to be seen as a “frontline state” against the USSR. “We will help you defeat the USSR and we are hopeful you will help us defeat India” became their constant refrain. By 1986, the Americans had been permitted to build air-bases in Balochistan and also use Mauripur air-base near Karachi.

Jammu & Kashmir and especially Gilgit-Baltistan adjoins the Pashtun regions whose capital has been Peshawar. In August-November 1947, a British coup d’etat against J&K State secured Gilgit-Baltistan for the new British Dominion of Pakistan.

The Treaty of Amritsar had nowhere required Gulab Singh’s dynasty to accept British political control in J&K as came to be exercised by British “Residents” in all other Indian “Native States”. Despite this, Delhi throughout the late 19th Century relentlessly pressed Gulab Singh’s successors Ranbir Singh and Partab Singh to accept political control. The Dogras acquiesced eventually. Delhi’s desire for control had less to do with the welfare of J&K’s people than with protection of increasing British interests in the area, like European migration to Srinagar Valley and guarding against Russian or German moves in Afghanistan. “Sargin” or “Sargin Gilit”, later corrupted by the Sikhs and Dogras into “Gilgit”, had an ancient people who spoke an archaic Dardic language “intermediate between the Iranian and the Sanskritic”. “The Dards were located by Ptolemy with surprising accuracy on the West of the Upper Indus, beyond the headwaters of the Swat River (Greek: Soastus) and north of the Gandarae (i.e. Kandahar), who occupied Peshawar and the country north of it. This region was traversed by two Chinese pilgrims, Fa-Hsien, coming from the north about AD 400 and Hsuan Tsiang, ascending from Swat in AD 629, and both left records of their journeys.”

Gilgit had been historically ruled by a Hindu dynasty called Trakane; when they became extinct, Gilgit Valley “was desolated by successive invasions of neighbouring rulers, and in the 20 or 30 years ending with 1842 there had been five dynastic revolutions. The Sikhs entered Gilgit about 1842 and kept a garrison there.” When J&K came under Gulab Singh, “the Gilgit claims were transferred with it, and a boundary commission was sent” by the British. In 1852 the Dogras were driven out with 2,000 dead. In 1860 under Ranbir Singh, the Dogras “returned to Gilgit and took Yasin twice, but did not hold it. They also in 1866 invaded Darel, one of the most secluded Dard states, to the south of the Gilgit basin but withdrew again.”

The British appointed a Political Agent in Gilgit in 1877 but he was withdrawn in 1881. “In 1889, in order to guard against the advance of Russia, the British Government, acting as the suzerain power of Kashmir, established the Gilgit Agency”. The Agency was re-established under control of the British Resident in Jammu & Kashmir. “It comprised the Gilgit Wazarat; the State of Hunza and Nagar; the Punial Jagir; the Governorships of Yasin, Kuh-Ghizr and Ishkoman, and Chilas”. In 1935, the British demanded J&K lease to them for 60 years Gilgit town plus most of the Gilgit Agency and the hill-states Hunza, Nagar, Yasin and Ishkuman. Hari Singh had no choice but to acquiesce. The leased region was then treated as part of British India, administered by a Political Agent at Gilgit responsible to Delhi, first through the Resident in J& K and later a British Agent in Peshawar. J& K State no longer kept troops in Gilgit and a mercenary force, the Gilgit Scouts, was recruited with British officers and paid for by Delhi. In April 1947, Delhi decided to formally retrocede the leased areas to Hari Singh’s J& K State as of 15 August 1947. The transfer was to formally take place on 1 August.

On 31 July, Hari Singh’s Governor arrived to find “all the officers of the British Government had opted for service in Pakistan”. The Gilgit Scouts’ commander, a Major William Brown aged 25, and his adjutant, a Captain Mathieson, planned openly to engineer a coup détat against Hari Singh’s Government. Between August and October, Gilgit was in uneasy calm. At midnight on 31 October 1947, the Governor was surrounded by the Scouts and the next day he was “arrested” and a provisional government declared.

Hari Singh’s nearest forces were at Bunji, 34 miles from Gilgit, a few miles downstream from where the Indus is joined by Gilgit River. The 6th J& K Infantry Battalion there was a mixed Sikh-Muslim unit, typical of the State’s Army, commanded by a Lt Col. Majid Khan. Bunji controlled the road to Srinagar. Further upstream was Skardu, capital of Baltistan, part of Laddakh District where there was a small garrison. Following Brown’s coup in Gilgit, Muslim soldiers of the 6th Infantry massacred their Sikh brothers-at-arms at Bunji. The few Sikhs who survived escaped to the hills and from there found their way to the garrison at Skardu.

On 4 November 1947, Brown raised the new Pakistani flag in the Scouts’ lines, and by the third week of November a Political Agent from Pakistan had established himself at Gilgit. Brown had engineered Gilgit and its adjoining states to first secede from J&K, and, after some talk of being independent, had promptly acceded to Pakistan. His commander in Peshawar, a Col. Bacon, as well as Col. Iskander Mirza, Defence Secretary in the new Pakistan and later to lead the first military coup détat and become President of Pakistan, were pleased enough. In July 1948, Brown was awarded an MBE (Military) and the British Governor of the NWFP got him a civilian job with ICI~ which however sent him to Calcutta, where he came to be attacked and left for dead on the streets by Sikhs avenging the Bunji massacre. Brown survived, returned to England, started a riding school, and died in 1984. In March 1994, Pakistan awarded his widow the Sitara-I-Pakistan in recognition of his coup détat.

Gilgit’s ordinary people had not participated in Brown’s coup which carried their fortunes into the new Pakistan, and to this day appear to remain without legislative representation. It was merely assumed that since they were mostly Muslim in number they would wish to be part of Pakistan ~ which also became Liaquat Ali Khan’s assumption about J&K State as a whole in his 1950 statements in North America. What the Gilgit case demonstrates is that J&K State’s descent into a legal condition of ownerless anarchy open to “Military Decision” had begun even before the Pakistani invasion of 22 October 1947 (viz. “Solving Kashmir”, The Statesman, 1-3 December 2005). Also, whatever else the British said or did with respect to J & K, they were closely allied to the new Pakistan on the matter of Gilgit.

The peak of Pakistan’s Anglo-American alliance came with the enormous support in the 1980s to guerrilla forces created and headquartered in Peshawar, to battle the USSR and Afghan communists directly across the Durand Line. It was this guerrilla war which became a proximate cause of the collapse of the USSR as a political entity in 1991. President Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief William J. Casey sent vast sums in 1985-1988 to supply and train these guerrillas. The Washington Post and New Yorker reported the CIA training guerrillas “in the use of mortars, rocket grenades, ground-to-air missiles”. 200 hand-held Stinger missiles were supplied for the first time in 1986 and the New Yorker reported Gulbudin Hikmatyar’s “Hizbe Islami” guerrillas being trained to bring down Soviet aircraft. “Mujahideen had been promised two Stingers for every Soviet aircraft brought down. Operators who failed to aim correctly were given additional training… By 1986, the United States was so deeply involved in the Afghan war that Soviet aircraft were being brought down under the supervision of American experts”. (Raja Anwar, The Tragedy of Afghanistan, 1988, p. 234).

The budding US-China détente brokered by Pakistan came into full bloom here. NBC News on 7 January 1980 said “for the first time in history (a senior State Department official) publicly admitted the possibility of concluding a military alliance between the United States and China”. London’s Daily Telegraph reported on 5 January 1980 “China is flying large supplies of arms and ammunition to the insurgents in Afghanistan. According to diplomatic reports, supplies have arrived in Pakistan from China via the Karakoram Highway…. A major build-up of Chinese involvement is underway ~ in the past few days. Scores of Chinese instructors have arrived at the Shola-e-Javed camps.”

Afghan reports in 1983-1985 said “there were eight training camps near the Afghan border operated by the Chinese in Sinkiang province” and that China had supplied the guerrillas “with a variety of weapons including 40,000 RPG-7 and 20,000 RPG-II anti tank rocket launchers.” Like Pakistan, “China did not publicly admit its involvement in the Afghan conflict: in 1985 the Chinese Mission at the UN distributed a letter denying that China was extending any kind of help to the Afghan rebels” (Anwar, ibid. p. 234). Support extended deep and wide across the Arab world. “The Saudi and Gulf rulers … became the financial patrons of the Afghan rebels from the very start of the conflict”. Anwar Sadat, having won the Nobel Peace Prize, was “keen to claim credit for his role in Afghanistan…. by joining the Afghanistan jihad, Sadat could re-establish his Islamic credentials, or so he believed. He could thus not only please the Muslim nations but also place the USA and Israel in his debt.” Sadat’s Defence Minister said in January 1980: “Army camps have been opened for the training of Afghan rebels; they are being supplied with weapons from Egypt” and Sadat told NBC News on 22 September 1981 “that for the last twenty-one months, the USA had been buying arms from Egypt for the Afghan rebels. He said he had been approached by the USA in December 1979 and he had decided to `open my stores’. He further disclosed that these arms were being flown to Pakistan from Egypt by American aircraft. Egypt had vast supplies of SAM-7 and RPG-7 anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons which Sadat agreed to supply to Afghanistan in exchange for new American arms. The Soviet weapons, being light, were ideally suited to guerrilla warfare. … the Mujahideen could easily claim to have captured them from Soviet and Afghan troops in battle.… Khomeini’s Iran got embroiled in war (against Iraq) otherwise Kabul would also have had to contend with the full might of the Islamic revolutionaries.” (Anwar ibid. p. 235).

Afghanistan had been occupied on 26-27 December 1979 by Soviet forces sent by the decrepit Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov to carry out a putsch replacing one communist, Hafizullah Amin, with a rival communist and Soviet protégé, Babrak Karmal. By 1985 Brezhnev and Andropov were dead and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev had begun his attempts to reform the Soviet system, usher in openness, end the Cold War and in particular withdraw from Afghanistan, which by 1986 he had termed “a bleeding wound”. Gorbachev replaced Karmal with a new protégé Najibullah Khan, who was assigned the impossible task of bringing about national reconciliation with the Pakistan-based guerrillas and form a national government. Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989 having lost 14,500 dead, while more than a million Afghans had been killed since the invasion a decade earlier.

Not long after Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, Gregory Zinoviev had said that international communism “turns today to the peoples of the East and says to them, `Brothers, we summon you to a Holy War first of all against British imperialism!’ At this there were cries of Jehad! Jehad! And much brandishing of picturesque Oriental weapons.” (Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia, 1990, p. 213). Now instead, the Afghan misadventure had contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Empire itself, the USSR ceasing to be a political entity by 1991, and even Gorbachev being displaced by Boris Yeltsin and later Vladimir Putin in a new Russia.

What resulted for the people of the USA and Britain and the West in general was that they no longer had to live under threat of hostile Soviet tanks and missiles, while the people of Russia, Ukraine and the other erstwhile Soviet republics as well as Eastern Europe were able to throw off the yoke of communism that had oppressed them since the Bolshevik Revolution and instead to breathe the air of freedom.

What happened to the people of Afghanistan, however, was that they were plunged into further ghastly civil war for more than ten years. And what happened to the people of Pakistan was that their country was left resembling a gigantic Islamist military camp, awash with airfields, arms, ammunition and trained guerrillas, as well as a military establishment enlivened as always by perpetual hope that these supplies, provisions and personnel of war might find alternative use in attacks against India over J& K. “We helped you when you wished to see the Soviet Union defeated and withdrawing in Afghanistan”, Pakistan’s generals and diplomats pleaded with the Americans and British, “now you must help us in our wish to see India defeated and withdrawing in Kashmir”. Pakistan’s leaders even believed that just as the Soviet Union had disintegrated afterwards, the Indian Union perhaps might be made to do the same. Not only were the two cases as different as chalk from cheese, Palmerstone’s dictum there are no permanent allies in the politics of nations could not have found more apt use than in what actually came to take place next.

Pakistan’s generals and diplomats felt betrayed by the loss of Anglo-American paternalism towards them after 1989.

Modern Pakistanis had never felt they subscribed to the Indian nationalist movement culminating in independence in August 1947. The Pakistani state now finally declared its independence in the world by exploding bombs in a nuclear arsenal secretly created with help purchased from China and North Korea. Pakistan’s leaders thus came to feel in some control of Pakistan’s destiny as a nation-state for the first time, more than fifty years after Pakistan’s formal creation in 1947. If nothing else, at least they had the Bomb.

Secondly, America and its allies would not be safe for long since the civil war they had left behind in Afghanistan while trying to defeat the USSR now became a brew from which arose a new threat of violent Islamism. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, whom Pakistan’s military and the USA had promoted, now encouraged unprecedented attacks on the American mainland on September 11 2001 ~ causing physical and psychological damage which no Soviet, Chinese or Cuban missiles ever had been allowed to do. In response, America attacked and removed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, once again receiving the cooperative use of Pakistani manpower and real estate ~ except now there was no longer any truck with the Pakistani establishment’s wish for a quid pro quo of Anglo-American support against India on J&K. Pakistan’s generals and diplomats soon realised their Anglo-American alliance of more than a half-century ended on September 11 2001. Their new cooperation was in killing or arresting and handing over fellow-Muslims and necessarily lacked their earlier feelings of subservience and ingratiation towards the Americans and British, and came to be done instead under at least some duress. No benefit could be reaped any more in the fight against India over Jammu & Kashmir. An era had ended in the subcontinent.

FIVE

WHAT TO TELL MUSHARRAF: PEACE IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT NON-AGGRESSIVE PAKISTANI INTENTIONS by Subroto Roy, First published in The Statesman December 15 2006 Editorial Page Special Article, www.thestatesman.net

SIX

“AN INDIAN REPLY TO PRESIDENT ZARDARI: REWARDING PAKISTAN FOR BAD BEHAVIOUR LEADS TO SCHIZOPHRENIC RELATIONSHIPS”

by Subroto Roy, December 17 2008

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s recent argument in the New York Times resembles closely the well-known publications of his ambassador to the United States, Mr Husain Haqqani. Unfortunately, this Zardari-Haqqani thesis about Pakistan’s current predicament in the world and the world’s predicament with Pakistan is shot through with clear factual and logical errors. These need to be aired because true or useful conclusions cannot be reached from mistaken premises or faulty reasoning.

1. Origins of Pakistan, India, J&K, and their mutual problems

Mr Zardari makes the following seemingly innocuous statement:

“…. the two great nations of Pakistan and India, born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947, must continue to move forward with the peace process.”

Now as a matter of simple historical fact, the current entities in the world system known as India and Pakistan were not “born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947”. It is palpably false to suppose they were and Pakistanis indulge in wishful thinking and self-deception about their own political history if they suppose this.

India’s Republic arose out of the British Dominion known as “India” which was the legal successor of the entity known previously in international law as “British India”. British India had had secular governance and so has had the Indian Republic.

By contrast, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan arose out of a newly created state in international law known as the British Dominion of Pakistan, consisting of designated territory carved out of British India by a British decision and coming into existence one day before British India extinguished itself. (Another new state, Bangladesh, later seceded from Pakistan.)

The British decision to create territory designated “Pakistan” had nothing to do with any anti-British “revolution” or “mandate” supported by any Pakistani nationalism because there was none. (Rahmat Ali’s anti-Hindu pamphleteering in London could be hardly considered Pakistani nationalism against British rule. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Pashtun patriots saw themselves as Indian, not Pakistani.)

To the contrary, the British decision had to do with a small number of elite Pakistanis — MA Jinnah foremost among them — demanding not to be part of the general Indian nationalist movement that had been demanding a British departure from power in the subcontinent. Jinnah’s separatist party, the Muslim League, was trounced in the 1937 provincial elections in all the Muslim-majority areas of British India that would eventually become Pakistan. Despite this, in September 1939, Britain, at war with Nazi Germany, chose to elevate the political power of Jinnah and his League to parity with the general Indian nationalist movement led by MK Gandhi. (See, Francis Robinson, in William James and Subroto Roy (eds), Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s.) Britain needed India’s mostly Muslim infantry-divisions — the progenitors of the present-day Pakistan Army — and if that meant tilting towards a risky political idea of “Pakistan” in due course, so it would be. The thesis that Pakistan arose from any kind of “revolution” or “mandate” in 1947 is fantasy — the Muslim super-elite that invented and endorsed the Pakistan idea flew from Delhi to Karachi in chartered BOAC Dakotas, caring not a hoot about the vulnerability of ordinary Muslim masses to Sikh and Hindu majority wrath and retaliation on the ground.

Modern India succeeded to the rights and obligations of British India in international law, and has had a recognized existence as a state since at least the signing of the Armistice and Treaty of Versailles in 1918-1919. India was a founding member of the United Nations, being a signatory of the 1945 San Francisco Declaration, and an original member of the Bretton Woods institutions. An idea put forward by Argentina that as of 1947 India and Pakistan were both successor states of British India was rejected by the UN (Argentina withdrew its own suggestion), and it was universally acknowledged India was already a member of the UN while Pakistan would have to (and did) apply afresh for membership as a newly created state in the UN. Pakistan’s entry into the UN had the enthusiastic backing of India and was opposed by only one existing UN member, Afghanistan, due to a conflict that continues to this day over the legitimacy of the Durand Line that bifurcated the Pashtun areas.

Such a review of elementary historical facts and the position in law of Pakistan and India is far from being of merely pedantic interest today. Rather, it goes directly to the logical roots of the conflict over the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) — a state that itself originated as an entity in the world system a full century before Pakistan was to do so and more than half a century before British India did, but which would collapse into anarchy and civil war in 1947-1949.

Britain (or England) had been a major nation-state in the world system recognized since Grotius first outlined modern international law. On March 16 1846, Britain entered into a treaty, the Treaty of Amritsar, with one Gulab Singh, and the “State of Jammu & Kashmir” came to arise as a recognizable entity in international law for the first time. (See my “History of Jammu and Kashmir” published in The Statesman, Oct 29-30 2006, available elsewhere here.)

Jammu & Kashmir continued in orderly existence as a state until it crashed into legal and political anarchy and civil war a century later. The new Pakistan had entered into a “Standstill Agreement” with the State of Jammu & Kashmir as of August 15 1947. On or about October 22 1947, Pakistan unilaterally ended that Standstill Agreement and instead caused military forces from its territory to attack the State of Jammu & Kashmir along the Mansehra Road towards Baramula and Srinagar, coinciding too with an Anglo-Pakistani coup d’etat in Gilgit and Baltistan (see my “Solving Kashmir”; “Law, Justice & J&K”; “Pakistan’s Allies”, all published in The Statesman in 2005-2006 and available elsewhere here).

The new Pakistan had chosen, in all deliberation, to forswear law, politics and diplomacy and to resort to force of arms instead in trying to acquire J&K for itself via a military decision. It succeeded only partially. Its forces took and then lost both Baramula and Kargil; they may have threatened Leh but did not attempt to take it; they did take and retain Muzaffarabad and Skardu; they were never near taking the summer capital, Srinagar, though might have threatened the winter capital, Jammu.

All in all, a Ceasefire Line came to be demarcated on the military positions as of February 1 1949. After a war in 1971 that accompanied the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, that Ceasefire Line came to be renamed the “Line of Control” between Pakistan and India. An ownerless entity may be acquired by force of arms — the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir in 1947-1949 had become an ownerless entity that had been dismembered and divided according to military decision following an armed conflict between Pakistan and India. The entity in the world system known as the “State of Jammu & Kashmir” created on March 16 1846 by Gulab Singh’s treaty with the British ceased to exist as of October 22 1947. Pakistan had started the fight over J&K but there is a general rule of conflicts that he who starts a fight does not get to finish it.

Such is the simplest and most practical statement of the history of the current problem. The British, through their own compulsions and imperial pretensions, raised all the talk about a “Lapse of Paramountcy” of the British Crown over the “Native Princes” of “Indian India”, and of how, the “Native Princes” were required to “accede” to either India or Pakistan. This ignored Britain’s own constitutional law. BR Ambedkar pointed out with unsurpassed clarity that no “Lapse of Paramountcy” was possible even for a single logical moment since “Paramountcy” over any “Native Princes” who had not joined India or Pakistan as of August 15 1947, automatically passed from British India to its legal successor, namely, the Dominion of India. It followed that India’s acquiescence was required for any subsequent accession to Pakistan – an acquiescence granted in case of Chitral and denied in case of Junagadh.

What the Republic of India means by saying today that boundaries cannot be redrawn nor any populations forcibly transferred is quite simply that the division of erstwhile J&K territory is permanent, and that sovereignty over it is indivisible. What Pakistan has claimed is that India has been an occupier and that there are many people inhabiting the Indian area who may not wish to be Indian nationals and who are being compelled against their will to remain so ~ forgetting to add that precisely the same could be said likewise of the Pakistani-held area. The lawful solution I proposed in “Solving Kashmir, “Law, Justice and J&K” and other works has been that the Republic of India invite every person covered under its Article 370, citizen-by-citizen, under a condition of full information, to privately and without fear decide, if he/she has not done so already, between possible Indian, Iranian, Afghan or Pakistani nationalities ~ granting rights and obligations of permanent residents to any of those persons who may choose for whatever private reason not to remain Indian nationals. If Pakistan acted likewise, the problem of J&K would indeed come to be resolved. The Americans, as self-appointed mediators, have said they wish “the people of the region to have a voice” in a solution: there can be no better expression of such voice than allowing individuals to privately choose their own nationalities and their rights and responsibilities accordingly. The issue of territorial sovereignty is logically distinct from that of the choice of nationality by individual inhabitants.

2. Benazir’s assassination falsely compared to the Mumbai massacres
Secondly, President Zardari draws a mistaken comparison between the assassination last year of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and the Mumbai massacres a few weeks ago. Ms Bhutto’s assassination may resemble more closely the assassinations in India of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Indira Gandhi died in “blowback” from the unrest she and her younger son and others in their party had opportunistically fomented among Sikh fundamentalists and sectarians since the late 1970s. Rajiv Gandhi died in “blowback” from an erroneous imperialistic foreign policy that he, as Prime Minister, had been induced to make by jingoistic Indian diplomats, a move that got India’s military needlessly involved in the then-nascent Sri Lankan civil war. Benazir Bhutto similarly may be seen to have died in “blowback” from her own political activity as prime minister and opposition leader since the late 1980s, including her own encouragement of Muslim fundamentalist forces. Certainly in all three cases, as in all assassinations, there were lapses of security too and imprudent political judgments made that contributed to the tragic outcomes.

Ms Bhutto’s assassination has next to nothing to do with the Mumbai massacres, besides the fact the perpetrators in both cases were Pakistani terrorists. President Zardari saying he himself has lost his wife to terrorism is true but not relevant to the proper diagnosis of the Mumbai massacres or to Pakistan-India relations in general. Rather, it serves to deflect criticism and condemnation of the Pakistani state’s pampered handing of Pakistan’s terrorist masterminds, as well as the gross irresponsibility of Pakistan’s military scientists (not AQ Khan) who have been recently advocating a nuclear first strike against India in the event of war.

3. Can any religious nation-state be viable in the modern world?

President Zardari’s article says:

“The world worked to exploit religion against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by empowering the most fanatic extremists as an instrument of destruction of a superpower. The strategy worked, but its legacy was the creation of an extremist militia with its own dynamic.”

This may be overly simplistic. As pointed out in my article “Pakistan’s Allies”, Gregory Zinoviev himself after the Bolshevik Revolution had declared that international communism “turns today to the peoples of the East and says to them, ‘Brothers, we summon you to a Holy War first of all against British imperialism!’ At this there were cries of Jehad! Jehad! And much brandishing of picturesque Oriental weapons.” (Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia, 1990, p. 213). For more than half of the 20th century, orthodox Muslims had been used by Soviet communists against British imperialism, then by the British and Americans (through Pakistan) against Soviet communism. Touché! Blowback and counter-blowback! The real question that arises from this today may be why orthodox Muslims have allowed themselves to be used either way by outside forces and have failed in developing a modern nation-state and political culture of their own. Europe and America only settled down politically after their religious wars were over. Perhaps no religious nation-state is viable in the modern world.

4. Pakistan’s behaviour leads to schizophrenia in international relations

President Zardari pleads for, or perhaps demands, resources from the world:

“the best response to the Mumbai carnage is to coordinate in counteracting the scourge of terrorism. The world must act to strengthen Pakistan’s economy and democracy, help us build civil society and provide us with the law enforcement and counterterrorism capacities that will enable us to fight the terrorists effectively.”

Six million pounds from Mr Gordon Brown, so much from here or there etc – President Zardari has apparently demanded 100 billion dollars from America and that is the price being talked about for Pakistan to dismantle its nuclear weapons and be brought under an American “nuclear umbrella” instead.

I have pointed out elsewhere that what Pakistan seems to have been doing in international relations for decades is send out “mixed messages” – i.e. contradictory signals, whether in thought, word or deed. Clinical psychologists following the work of Gregory Bateson would say this leads to confusion among Pakistan’s interlocutors (a “double bind”) and the symptoms arise of what may be found in schizophrenic relationships. (See my article “Do President-elect Obama’s Pakistan specialists believe…”; on the “double bind” theory, an article I chanced to publish in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1986, may be of interest).

Here are a typical set of “mixed messages” emanating from Pakistan’s government and opinion-makers:

“We have nuclear weapons
“We keep our nuclear weapons safe from any misuse or unauthorized use
“We are willing to use nuclear weapons in a first strike against India
“We do not comprehend the lessons of Hiroshima-Nagasaki
“We do not comprehend the destruction India will visit upon us if we strike them
“We are dangerous so we must not be threatened in any way
“We are peace-loving and want to live in peace with India and Afghanistan
“We love to play cricket with India and watch Bollywood movies
“We love our Pakistan Army as it is one public institution that works
“We know the Pakistan Army has backed armed militias against India in the past
“We know these militias have caused terrorist attacks
“We are not responsible for any terrorist attacks
“We do not harbour any terrorists
“We believe the world should pay us to not use or sell our nuclear weapons
“We believe the world should pay us to not encourage the terrorists in our country
“We believe the world should pay us to prevent terrorists from using our nuclear weapons
“We hate India and do not want to become like India
“We love India and want to become like India
“We are India and we are not India…”

Etc.

A mature rational responsible and self-confident Pakistan would have said instead:

“We apologise to India and other countries for the outrageous murders our nationals have committed in Mumbai and elsewhere
“We ask the world to watch how our professional army is deployed to disarm civilian and all “non-state” actors of unauthorized firearms and explosives
“We do not need and will not demand or accept a dollar in any sort of foreign aid, military or civilian, to solve our problems
“We realize our economic and political institutions are a mess and we must clean them up
“We will strive to build a society imbued with what Iqbal described as the spirit of modern times..”

As someone who created at great personal cost at an American university twenty years ago the book Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, I have a special interest in hoping that Pakistan shall find the path of wisdom.”

Ehsan Fazili, Tribune News Service

Srinagar, October 14. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram said here today that the Centre was ready to hold a dialogue with Kashmir separatists to find out a “unique solution to the unique Kashmir problem” through “quite talks and quite diplomacy”.

The Home Minister was addressing mediapersons at an interactive session during the All India Editors’ Conference on Social and Infrastructure Issues here this morning. He, however, did not elaborate on whether a formal invitation would be extended to the separatists.

He said the Kashmir issue was to be addressed politically, saying the trouble-torn state with a unique geography and history would require a unique solution. Any solution in some other part of the country could not be copied in this state, he said. “Because Jammu and Kashmir has a unique geography and history it has to have a unique solution,” he commented. “We are working on it and hope that there will be a success,” he said. “A solution for the Kashmir problem must recognise the state’s unique geography and history,” Chidambaram commented.

Chidambaram held that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made it clear that the government’s policy was to hold a dialogue with Kashmir leaders of different shades. “We are not afraid of a dialogue and are not shying away from talks,” Chidambaram asserted. He added that a dialogue would be held with the mainstream political parties and mainly the section of others who had been staying away from elections. “They (separatists) have a point and we will hold a dialogue with them,” the Home Minister pointed out.

“There is no place or zero tolerance for violence in the state even as there are different shades of political opinion,” the Home Minister said. The main problem behind violence was not the youth of the state, who had realised the futility of the gun, the Home Minister said, adding that the infiltration of armed militants was the main cause of concern. Youths were being recruited and trained in Pakistan before their infiltration into the state, he said. “Infiltration is the cause behind violence in the state though the level of infiltration has come down,” the Home Minister said.

The system to check infiltration had been improved with a significant success during the last few months, Chidambaram said and added that infiltration could be reduced but not stopped.

Hurriyat chief Mirwaiz Umer Farooq reacted : ‘A realisation to find an amicable solution to the issue is definitely welcome. Hurriyat is committed to having a meaningful dialogue with India and Pakistan’.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20091015/main1.htm

When it comes to the perfect refreshment, I vote for snow clad peaks, enchanting valleys, the best of thrilling adventures and the divine beauty of mother nature. While looking for all these fascinating elements, I decided to plan a trip to Sonmarg in the picturesque state of Kashmir. As I arrived the beautiful land of ‘Golden Meadow’ at an altitude of 2740 m in the first week of December, I was welcomed by snow-covered mountains, dense forests full of sycamore and alpine flowers, silver birch, fir and pine, and the Sindh River.

As I started my sightseeing trip, Kailash, my driver told me that the hill station is known as ‘Gateway to Ladakh’. I first visited the Thajiwas range and found it covered with pine, fir and birch trees. I could see a number of tourists enjoying in their camps. A Spanish group invited me for a short trip to the nearby waterfalls and the superb Thajiwas glacier. That is what I call ‘refreshing’. I enjoyed like never before.

Nilagrad River, 6 km from Sonamarg, is frequented for its reddish water. Kailash told me that the river has curative power of many diseases. But we could not reach there as the route gets risky in winters. While enjoying a cup of tea at a roadside dhaba, some local people told me that Sonmarg witnesses heavy crowd in July – August, as countless devotees undertake the holy yatra to Amarnath cave from here only. My next destination was the Nichnai Pass where I enjoyed spectacular views of the Kishensar, Vishensar and Gangabal lakes. These were simply amazing. I captured their divine beauty in my camera. It was getting dark in the evening, therefore I returned back to my hotel.

Next morning, Kailash took me to Yushmarg (on the slopes of the Pir Panjal range), Tulmul (for the shrine of Khir Bhawani), Krishnasar Lake, and Zojila Pass. After the sightseeing of all such nearby places, I got back to Sonmarg to enjoy some adventure sports. Kailash asked me if I wanted to go for trekking to Thajiwas Glacier or Pahalgam. But I did not have enough time for that. Therefore, he provided me with assistance for sledging (at frozen glaciers), angling and alpine skiing. A few places are frequented for white water rafting as well, but due to bad weather nobody was going for rafting. In short, the trip was awesome. It was the best refreshment of my life.

M Saleem Pandit, TNN 7 October 2009, 03:07am IST

SRINAGAR: At least four people, including two troopers, were injured when militants hurled a grenade at a BSF vehicle at Lal Chowk in Srinagar on

Tuesday.

Kashmir range IG Farooq Ahmed said the vehicle was partially damaged in the blast. He identified the four injured as BSF troopers Shambu Singh and Om Prakash and pedestrians Mushtaq Ahmad Jan and Showkat Ahmad Chattabal.

A little known militant outfit Jamiat-ul-Mujhideen claimed responsibility for the blast, a local news agency reported.

Farooq said the police have identified the militants responsible for recent grenade attacks in the city. “We’re hopeful that we’ll arrest militants responsible for the Tuesday’s attack as well,” he said.

This was the second attack on security forces in a week. Three CRPF men were killed when terrorists fired at a patrol near a bus stop in north Kashmir town of Sopore on Tuesday last.

Meanwhile, one army jawan was injured in a gunbattle with terrorists at Pampore in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district. “The encounter started after troops laid a siege around a terrorist hideout,” a police officer said.

Source said security forces have launched a massive manhunt to track down around 10 militants who fled the encounter scene. “They are believed to be hiding in a forested area near Pampore, famous for its saffron production,” a source said. The security forces started the operation following a tip off on the terrorist presence in the area.

Source: PTI

STAFF WRITER 19:20 HRS IST

Srinagar, Sep 29 (PTI) Militants struck at a crowded bus stand in Jammu and Kashmir’s Sopore town this evening, killing three CRPF jawans, including a head constable, and seriously wounding a woman bystander.

The attackers, whose number could not be ascertained, fired at the para-military troopers, on duty at the bus stand, from point-blank range at around 1725 hours, CRPF spokesman P Tripathi told PTI.

Two jawans died instantly while one succumbed to gunshot wounds on way to hospital, he said adding the pistol-wielding militants fled after staging the attack in the apple-rich town, some 55-km from here.

The dead were Head Constable Des Raj and Constables D Pratab and Ramesh Kumar who were deployed at the crowded bus stand when the ultras struck.

A woman, waiting for a bus, was hit by a bullet and was admitted to hospital where her condition was described as critical.

By: Daily.Pk

Under the new puppet regime in the occupied Kashmir, atrocities on the innocent Kashmiris by the Indian security forces continue unabated. Perennial tactics of state terrorism such as curfew, firing, killings, rape and arrests could not reduce the strong determination of the people of the Valley, calling for freedom of their land. In the recent past, Indian police, military and paramilitary troops massacred a number of people protesting against the death of three Kashmiri women who were raped and murdered.

In another event, Indian military troops kidnapped some freedom fighters and assassinated them near the Line of Control in order to show that they died during an encounter with the forces.

More than 300 innocent people in the Indian occupied Kashmir have been killed by the Indian forces since the current phase of Kashmir struggle began on August 12, 2008 when Indian security forces killed Hurriyat Conference leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz and five other persons who were protesting against the government decision to give land to the trust that runs Amarnath, a shrine of Hindus. On the same day, more than 200000 Kashmiris marched towards the Martyrs Graveyard to participate in the funeral of Sheikh Abdul Aziz. The police killed 18 innocent Muslims by firing while extremist Hindus started violent protests and economic blockade of the Muslims, emulating the Israeli siege of Gaza which had resulted in starvation of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

In 1989 when Kashmiri people lost faith in the international community, which persisted in ignoring their liberation and when it became obvious that the Indian occupation forces would not vacate the controlled areas through political means by implementing the UN resolutions, the people had no choice but to resort to armed struggle. Since then, India has intermittently been using all possible techniques of state terrorism to maintain its alien rule. Indian atrocities could be judged from the fact that last year, more than 1000 graves of the unmarked Muslims in the 18 villages of Indian occupied Kashmir were discovered. Recently, a human rights group has discovered several unmarked graves containing about 1,500 unidentified bodies in held Kashmir Valley. The All Parties Hurriyet Conference (APHC) and other organizations, while expressing serious concern over the discovery of unnamed graves in the occupied Kashmir, have demanded international probe into the matter. Reports suggest that these are the dead bodies of those Kashmiris who were tortured to death by the Indian security agencies, especially RAW.

The silence of the West broke when in 2008; European Parliament while taking cognizance of the unmarked graves passed a resolution condemning Indian atrocities in the held Kashmir. Contrary to the past, this time Indian occupied Kashmir has become a special focus of world’s attention including India itself. For example, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband who visited New Delhi and Islamabad in the aftermath of Mumbai-terror attacks pointed out that complete de-escalation of situation between Pakistan and India was fully linked to resolution of Kashmir issue saying that New Delhi should cooperate with Islamabad in this respect. Even Indians have started realizing that, there should be an end to the sufferings of Kashmiris. Its gravity is evident from the fact that even Indian intellectuals have favored the independence of occupied Kashmir. On 17 August 2008 in its editorial, the editor of The Times of India wrote “On August 15, India celebrated independence from the British Raj.

A day symbolizing the end of colonialism in India became a day symbolizing Indian colonialism in the Valley”. The editor further elaborated, “We promised Kashmiris a plebiscite six decades ago. Let us hold one now, and let Kashmiris decide the outcome, not the politicians and armies of India”. It was admitted that state elections were also rigged in support of leaders nominated by New Delhi. On August 16, 2008, Hindustan Times wrote: “Nothing has really changed since 1990s. A single spark such as the dispute over Amarnath land can set the whole valley on fire—Indian forces are treated as subjugators. New Delhi is seen as the oppressor”. The paper further indicated, “The current crisis in Kashmir is a consequence of Indian establishment raising the confrontation to a new level”. The world looks at us with dismay”. This Indian newspaper clearly suggested a referendum in the Valley, writing, “Let the Kashmiris determine their own destiny—whatever happens, how can India lose? If you believe in democracy, then giving Kashmiris the right of self-determination is the correct thing to do”.

It is of particular attention that demanding immediate withdrawal of Indian Army from the Indian controlled Kashmir, a renowned Indian author and book prize winner, Arundhati Roy, while criticizing the Indian media had already pointed out that New Delhi has failed to highlight the plight of Kashmiris who are exposed to brutalities perpetrated by the Indian Security Forces. As regards Indian delaying tactics in the solution of Kashmir dispute, it has become fashion to blame Pakistan and its intelligence agency ISI for infiltration, using it as a pretext to crush the Kashmiri’s war of liberation which is indigenous as now recognized even by Indian media. Under the cover of ISI, New Delhi wants to distract the attention of the West from her atrocities on the Kashmiris. Various sources have accused Indian RAW of the custodial killings of the Kashmiri people through brutal methods.

Since 1989, India has deployed more than 500000 troops to quell the freedom movement of Kashmiris, but it cannot eliminate it at present as it could not do so through many years of oppression. Instead, a study report, prepared by Indian Government revealed that Kashmir violence has affected the psyche of Indian forces. In this connection, the report has disclosed that disturbances in Jammu and Kashmir have had adverse psychological problems found especially among the officers and Jawans such as short tempers, quarrelsome attitude, mental disorders and abnormal behavior. Sometimes, the situation leads to suicide attempts or attacks on their seniors and colleagues.

Nevertheless, setting aside all internal and external implications, Indian military troops are using inhuman tactics of ethnic cleansing to disturb the majority population of the Kashmiris, which had been practiced by the Serb forces on Bosnian Muslims in the past and recently by Israel on the Palestinians. New Delhi must understand that if in the last five decades, it could not reduce the strong determination of the people of the Valley, calling for freedom of their land, how could it do so now? Meanwhile, in the past, ‘composite dialogue’ between India and Pakistan took place on a number of occasions, but produced no results, prolonging the agony of the subjugated people of the occupied valley due to Indian intransigence. At present, India is acting on a deliberate policy of delaying tactics in relation to the solution of Kashmir and implementing similar strategy under the pretext of Mumbai carnage. Despite Islamabad’s insistence, New Delhi wants to talk on the issue of terrorism alone and refuses to discuss any other issue. While the world is rapidly advancing towards modern trends such as renunciation of war as a state policy, peaceful settlement of disputes and economic development, India continues its suppressive policies in Kashmir.

Waqar Ahmed

After enjoying the best of skiing and trekking tour in Gulmarg,

Lidder River, Pehalgam

As I arrived Pahalgam, I booked a spacious and warm room in a budget hotel. The staff there told me that the best part with Pahalgam is that it is also associated with the holy yatra of the Amarnath cave. Chandanwari, located 16 km from this town, serves as the starting point of the yatra, which is organized every year in the month of Sawan (July to August). Being an adventure enthusiast, I planned to start with recreational activities.

Due to heavy flow of Lidder River, I could not enjoy white water rafting. But the weather was pleasant for horse riding, sledging at the frozen glaciers, alpine skiing and fishing at Lidder River. It was now time to go for trekking. The popular Pahalgam-Sonamarg Trek seems to be a bit difficult, therefore I decided to go for Chandanwari and Kolahoi Glacier. Another popular trek route is Sheshnag Lake but it was blocked for last one week due to heavy snowfall. My driver told me that Sheshnag Lake, located at a distance of 27 km from Pahalgam, is a greenish blue lake that is covered with ice till June.

Post lunch I decided to explore the natural attractions of the entire Anantnag District. I was about 96 km from Srinagar. I had already visited the famous snow bridge of Chandanwari during my trekking course. I started with Baisaran (5 km) and enjoyed the picturesque view of the snow clad mountains and pine forests that surround the entire meadow. My driver insisted me to visit Aru (11 km) and Lidderwat (22km) also. But as I was running short of time, I decided to get back to my hotel. In the meanwhile, we stopped for a while at the market area from where I bought a few good quality woolen clothes at reasonable prices.

Pakistani Rangers have however denied firing across the border. The denial came at a flag meeting between officers of the BSF and the Rangers after the firing on Friday.

“Early on Friday morning at about 6.45 am, Pak Rangers fired fresh rounds out an observation party. We also fired some rounds. The firing continued for a couple of minutes,” BSF Inspector General A.K. Saroolia told HT.

There was no cutting or breaching of the fence. There were no ground signs suggesting possible infiltration. But it can’t be ruled out,” Saroolia said.Jammu IGP Ashok Kumar Gupta did not rule out the possibility of terrorists having sneaked in. “There is a possibility of successful infiltration after firing on the BSF personnel,” he said.

Additional police parties have been deployed at various places in and around Jammu city. Special checkposts have been set up all along the 35-km Jammu-Akhnoor road.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Pak-rangers-BSF-meet-after-firing-incident/H1-Article1-455533.aspx

Dan Qayyum | PakistanKaKhudaHafiz.com

In an attempt to make the most of Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram’s visit to the US, India has alleged being attacked by Pakistani rangers in the Wagah sector using ’several rockets’.

Staging false flag attacks is nothing new for Indians when trying to paint Pakistanis as terrorists while in high-profile talks with American leaders.

Lets rewind to year 2000: Chattisinghpora, Occuped Kashmir – On the eve of then US President Bill Clinton’s visit to India, 35 Kashmiri Sikhs were massacred in cold blood by Indian security forces posing as Kashmiri Freedom Fighters. The usual ‘Lashkar-e-Tayba militants’ were rounded up and executed in fake-encounters, the ‘Pakistani National’ was produced, ensuring Clinton’s entire visit focused on what India calls ‘Pakistan-backed terrorism’. It was only much later when the damage was done that the truth of the massacre came out, implicating Indian soldiers and intelligence agencies in this heinous crime.

The Indians security forces went a step ahead in their brutality back then. Kashmiris protesting the deaths of five innocent muslims in fake encounters right after the massacre, were fired upon murdering a further eight, and bringing the total toll of this massacre closer to fifty.

P Chidambaram has ensured his entire trip to the United States was focused on Pakistan’s alleged lack of seriuosness in dealing with the ‘Mumbai attackers’, and the recent allegations of rocket attacks provides the perfect backdrop to India’s persecution complex.

Pakistan calls India’s bluff.

Pakistan has officially offered to hold an open debate with the Indian home minister over the probing of Mumbai attacks.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said, “I am ready for the debate anywhere in India, Pakistan or wherever his Indian counterpart likes.”

Talking to journalists in Islamabad, Malik started off by pointing out that the first formal response to Pakistan’s February 9 request for information came on June 20th and that too was in Marathi language. Besides citing other Indian lapses, he pointed out that India refused to share the Samjotha Express dossier which was of critical importance as “a friendly country, which is also close to India, had told us that one of the Mumbai terrorists was also involved in the Mumbai incident”.

Malik said he had received the latest Indian dossier in which the Indians have provided us with a statement from Ajmal Kasab, who claims now speaking to Hafiz Saeed when he was in Mumbai.

‘Initially the Indians said Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi was the mastermind and we arrested him… now they have started saying that Hafiz Saeed is the mastermind,’ Malik said.

Pakistan to take up Kashmir and Afghanistan before the UN

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has decided to take up the issue of Kashmir and Afghanistan effectively at a session of the United Nations General Assembly this year.

Pakistan will inform the international community about reservations with regard to Indian’s tactics not to resolve the Kashmir issue as well as the war against terrorism in Afghanistan.

The decision to this effect was taken during two separate meetings held at the foreign office, a private TV channel reported. Relevant authorities briefed the Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi about Kashmir and Afghanistan.

During the meeting it was decided that Pakistan would ask the United Nations to ensure a resolution of the long-lingering issue of Kashmir on a priority basis for durable peace in the region.

The international community would also be informed about the human rights violations committed by Indian forces in held Kashmir, sources said.

Besides officers of relevant authorities, officers of intelligence agencies including Director General Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujja Pasha attended the meeting.

Pakistan will also take up the issue of Afghanistan during the session and would inform the largest world body about problems being faced by Pakistan due to action of Afghanistan based allied forces in neighboring country, channel reported.

Dan Qayyum works as a consultant and analyst for Bridgehead Institute and PKKH, and can be reached on dan.qayyum@gmail.com