Muslims and Liberals

Chicago Tribune
May 24, 1990

President Bush’s special envoy, Robert M. Gates, was sent to India and Pakistan to try to ease the mounting tension between the two countries over the uprising in the Himalayan valley of Kashmir. The prospect of another India-Pakistan war has increased since late last month when Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers, who met in New York, failed to agree on an approach to the Kashmir dispute. And early this week the assassination of a top religious leader fueled more violence.

India and Pakistan fought three wars when neither had a nuclear weapons capability. Today both can deploy the bomb. U.S. officials are especially worried that the 5-month-old Kashmiri crisis could derail the 15-year-old U.S. effort to prevent a nuclear arms race on the subcontinent.

Islamic Pakistan insists that Moslem majority Jammu and Kashmir state belongs to it, and its invaders seized a third of the state, triggering the first round of India-Pakistan hostilities 43 years ago. The remainder of the state, including the nearly all-Moslem Kashmir, was grabbed by Hindu-majority India after it signed an accession agreement with the state’s Hindu ruler. That agreement provided for limited Indian jurisdiction over Jammu and Kashmir and for a plebiscite in the state to determine its final status. Later, India reneged on its plebiscite pledge and curbed the state’s autonomy, causing resentment among Kashmiris.

The Kashmiris have been enraged further by the high-handed rule of a corrupt New Delhi-backed state government and by a resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism threatening their distinctive culture. Now nearly the entire population of the valley has joined a bloody struggle to secede from India.

While both India and Pakistan claim Jammu and Kashmir, a majority of Kashmiris want their land reunified and made an independent nation-state. “I find danger to my Islamic identity from India,” says Kashmir Liberation Front chief Amanullah Khan, who recently visited the United States, “and I find danger to my Kashmiri identity from Pakistan.”

One solution, proposed by the late Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Kashmiri leader Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, would have the state reunified and linked to both India and Pakistan as a partner in a confederation. Pakistan spurned the proposal, and it would do so now. The subcontinent, however, has been politically unified four times in its history-the last under the British-and four times it disintegrated. One may wonder if Kashmiris will have to wait for the next high tide of subcontinental harmony to have their divided land put back together.

Meanwhile, the threat of a war between the de facto nuclear nations of India and Pakistan endangers the fate of one-fifth of mankind who live in the two countries. The Bush administration, besides trying to end the present confrontation, should step up its efforts to dissuade India and Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons. The time for such a drive was never more opportune than now.

Previous Western non-proliferation initiatives were hampered partly by a lack of active support from the Soviet Union and China. The Soviets needed to cultivate India as a counterweight to what they perceived as the U.S.-Pakistani-Chinese axis. They were reluctant to press New Delhi hard on non-proliferation. In fact, in 1985 India had 6.8 tons of Soviet “heavy water” smuggled on an Aeroflot jet to produce unsafeguarded plutonium. Moscow ignored the incident. Earlier, the Chinese, who share Pakistanis’ enmity with India, gave Pakistan the design for its nuclear device.

Now the onset of a new phase of superpower detente has diminished India’s strategic importance for the Soviets. It is significant that last month the Soviet official newspaper Izvestia criticized India’s refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The Chinese have begun to warm up to both New Delhi and Moscow. For the first time in nearly two decades Beijing has adopted a neutral-instead of pro-Pakistani-stand on the Kashmir issue. Washington should seize upon this thaw in international relations and enlist active Soviet and Chinese cooperation in the U.S.-led drive to ward off a nuclear-arms race in South Asia. As Kashmir has been the main irritant in India-Pakistan relations, a South Asian non-proliferation regime should include a recipe to settle this festering problem. New Delhi should be goaded into a dialogue with the rebels aimed at restoring the wide autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir was ensured when it joined India.