India, Pakistan And The Old Dilemma Over Kashmir

Modi faces the same dilemma as his predecessors — How does he extract the poison from the Pakistani establishment?

The two-month-long conflagration within Kashmir has now been matched with a cross-border attack from Pakistan, with four terrorists allegedly belonging to the Jaish-e-Mohammed outfit scaling the wall of the Indian army base in Uri near the Line of Control and killing 17 soldiers.

Many of the soldiers died in the fire that engulfed their makeshift tents, while the 18th soldier passed away from injuries in a Delhi hospital on Monday. The terror attack has brought yet another Indian prime minister face-to-face with the most problematic aspect of his otherwise powerful position.

Indira Gandhi dealt with it in 1971 by helping the former East Pakistan rebel army, the Mukti Bahini, break up Pakistan and create a brand new state of Bangladesh. More recently, in 1999, Atal Bihari Vajpayee persuaded the international community to force Pakistan to walk back across the Line of Control after it had invaded India at Kargil. Manmohan Singh launched a back-channel conversation with Pakistan, around 2006-07, which threw up a four-point formula to resolve the Kashmir dispute.

Responding To Uri

• Eighteen soldiers die after four terrorists allegedly from Jaish-e-Mohammed attack the Indian army base in Uri.
  
• Forty-eight hours into the attack, Modi is responding to the international community’s request to exercise restraint.
  
• At the same time, India is ramping up its diplomatic drill to isolate Pakistan.
  
• Pakistan rejected the Indian army’s early verdict of Jaish-e-Mohammed’s involvement in Uri.
  
• India expected to raise the matter at the United Nations General Assembly later this month.
  
• Kashmir valley already in turmoil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Wani.
  

Confronting Pakistan

Narendra Modi is now confronted with the same dilemma. How does he extract the poison from the Pakistani establishment – its intelligence agency ISI, and the Pakistan Army which India believes are helping terror groups infiltrate across the Line of Control and carry out attacks like the one in Uri, or even across the international boundary like the one in Pathankot?

Moreover, can the prime minister hold the poison in his throat – in imitation of the Hindu god Shiva – even as he sets about a cold and calculated containment of his western neighbour?

Over the last 48 hours, since the attack took place in the wee hours of Sunday, 18 September, television media, for the most part, has been raging about the need to inflict material damage on Pakistan. Modi has kept his cool, allowing his subordinates to do the talking.

So Home Minister Rajnath Singh has described Pakistan as a “terrorist state”, while the Director-General of Military Operations (DGMO), Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh, announced that the Indian army is battle-ready to respond, but at a date and time “of its choosing.”

This is smart strategy. When he was chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had infamously fulminated about the weak and timid reaction of his predecessor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to a terror attack from Pakistan’s soil.

Now that he is prime minister, Modi is changing the rules of the game so that he can at least try and control both its tenor and outcome. For the time being, at least, Modi has refused to respond to the instigation of TV warriors to carry out a retaliatory strike inside Pakistani territory, for example, against a terror-training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed or the Lashkar-e-Taiba. To be sure, the lines must have burnt between New Delhi and Washington DC these past 48 hours.

Modi and US President Barack Obama are said to share a certain comfort zone and it wouldn’t be unusual for Obama to call Modi and persuade him to exercise restraint. The Americans must be terrified at the possibility of Indian Air Force planes carrying nuclear-tipped missiles, flying over Pakistan.

What if there were an accident? What if Pakistan, again accidentally, responded? The thought of a nuclear war in South Asia is too awful to even consider.

A Diplomatic Retaliation?

For the time being, then, Modi is responding to the international community’s request to exercise restraint, even as India is ramping up its diplomatic drill to isolate Pakistan. The United Nations General Assembly session is certainly one stomping ground for Indian diplomats to make their mark.

Elsewhere, all five permanent members of the Security Council – including China, a self-confessed “all-weather” friend and ally of Pakistan – have issued statements, condemning the attacks.

Only Beijing has suggested that India and Pakistan return to the dialogue table, perhaps a concession to the same special relationship with Islamabad. What else could India do to punish Pakistan, anyway? Certainly, a spectrum of options have been discussed by Modi and his Cabinet, in the wake of the Uri attacks as well as earlier.

Besides a retaliatory strike inside Pakistani territory, India has considered the embargo of the Karachi port, the unilateral withdrawal from the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (under which both countries share waters of the Indus river, with India agreeing not to obstruct the flow of water to the lower riparian state, in this case, Pakistan), ending all trade and travel, using the newly-minted friendship with Afghanistan to launch covert strikes against Pakistan, including in Balochistan, through which the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) passes.

Just like Vajpayee, who won the 1999 Kargil conflict when he was caretaker prime minister – and then went on to resoundingly win the elections held in October that year – the current crisis is certainly Modi’s moment of truth.

Certainly, too, the prime minister would have emerged with much cleaner hands if he and the BJP had tried harder to end the crisis that has engulfed the Kashmir valley since the killing of the charismatic commander of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Burhan Wani, on 8 July. In the ensuing weeks, more than 80 Kashmiris have been killed by security forces and thousands blinded by the use of pellet guns.

Moment Of Truth

Unfortunately, neither Modi nor the BJP showed any compassion towards the victims in Kashmir.

Unlike his predecessors, Congress Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao who believed that the “sky was the limit” or Vajpayee who said he was ready to talk outside the Constitution with Kashmiri separatists, the Modi government has blamed the crisis almost entirely on Pakistan stoking the crisis from without. India’s refusal to tackle the conflagration inside Kashmir gave Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif the perfect opportunity to return to the popularity charts.

The irony is that Sharif staked a large part of his re-election in 2013 to better relations with India. He understood that South Asia’s largest neighbours needed to open normal trading relations with each other and end the ban on investing in each other’s countries.

The world was a very different place from 1971 when India and Pakistan fought their last war. It was time to move on. But in the roller-coaster relationship that has evolved these past two years, Modi and Nawaz Sharif have either moodily turned away from each other like recent divorcees – India cancelled Foreign Secretary-level talks when the Pakistan high commissioner to India sought to meet Hurriyat leaders – or kissed and made up like recovering lovers.

Modi dropped into Nawaz Sharif’s granddaughter’s wedding, unannounced, at his family home in Raiwind, outside Lahore, last December.

Pathankot Versus Uri

The big difference between the Pathankot attack in January 2016 and the one in Uri last week is that the Pakistani government condemned the attacks as soon as they ended on 4 January.

Nawaz Sharif even called Modi a day later, pointing out that the job of terrorists was to derail any effort at peace between the two countries. He promised to investigate the attacks.

By the end of March, a team from Pakistan, which unusually included an ISI officer, had visited the Pathankot airbase to help in a joint investigation. In contrast, hours after the Uri attacks, the Pakistan foreign office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria rejected the Indian army’s early verdict of Jaish-e-Mohammed’s involvement, saying,

“India has a history of blaming Pakistan immediately after a terror attack, which always proved wrong in investigations.” And as DGMO Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh announced India’s intention to retaliate at a time and date of its choosing, the Pakistan army chief summoned a conference of his corps commanders and called the Indian statement a “hostile narrative.”

He said Pakistan was ready to respond to the “entire spectrum of direct and indirect threat.” India and Pakistan were back on cussedly familiar ground.

War Of Narratives

But more was to come. Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told Pakistani news channel Geo News, that he would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if he felt Pakistan was threatened by India.

Sharif wrote to all five permanent members of the Security Council citing grave human rights violations in Kashmir. As the relationship plunges down the roller-coaster again, it is worthwhile to consider who benefits from an attack in Kashmir on the eve of the UN General Assembly.

As always, the narrative is poles apart. While Indian observers believe that the Jaish attack was intended to anger Modi into responding, thereby setting off a chain of events that would result in a grave loss of reputation for the prime minister as well as internationalise the Kashmir issue, Pakistanis say that India wants to detract attention from its determination to take the abysmal situation inside Kashmir to the UN General Assembly.

Question is, where will both countries go from here?

One view is that Modi will call off his attendance at the bi-annual summit of South Asian nations, scheduled to be held in Islamabad in November.

If India steps up the campaign to isolate Pakistan, the SAARC summit is as good as dead, anyway.

But if both prime ministers Modi and Sharif can take a step back and think about the harm they are jointly doing to 1.4 billion people, most of them desperately poor, they might inform their decisions with that knowledge.

Truth is, war-mongering is cheap. It is war that kills people. And at the risk of being anti-national, would you like to die before your time, for a cause that many remain uncertain about?

(Jyoti Malhotra is a senior journalist who writes on foreign policy and domestic Indian politics. The views expressed here are those of the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of The Quint or its editorial team.)