TIME FOR A KILL!

WWith a lingering suspicion that India had never reconciled to the Sub-continent’s partition, we have been living since independence in the shadow of India’s hostility and belligerence. This fear was not exaggerated when Pakistan saw Sikkim, Goa, Hyderabad, Junagadh, and Kashmir falling to Indian avarice. This fear is not exaggerated even today as Pakistan faces India’s continued hostility and cold-blooded realpolitik. The two countries still remain locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation on the Line of Control in Kashmir as well as on the frozen landscapes of the Siachen Glacier. To make things even worse, India continues to assert itself as a regional hegemon, asserting itself as no less than a ‘primus inter pares’ (a first among the equals). This reality, by itself, is a poignant reminder of this region’s emergence as a most dangerous place on earth.

As we fulfilled our obligations in the post 9/11 US-led war on terror, we saw the US developing a new ominous equation with India at the cost of Pakistan’s legitimate security interests. This is how India-Pakistan conflict found surreptitious induction into the murky Afghan theatre. India did not understand that Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic importance to Pakistan, and India’s subversive presence in its backyard was a serious threat to Pakistan’s legitimate security interests. India thought it could take advantage of the global anti-terror sentiment to transform Kashmir into an issue of terrorism. After the engineered attacks on the Kashmir State Assembly building on October 1, 2001, and Indian parliament building in Delhi on December 13, 2001, Pakistan was blamed for both incidents without any investigations or evidence.

In a blatant show of brinkmanship, India moved all its armed forces to Pakistan's borders as well as the Line of Control in Kashmir. In mounting an unprecedented war hysteria, the Indian leadership ignored the gravity of its implications. South Asia was dragged into a confrontational mode that served no one's interests, not even India's. Intense diplomatic pressure by the US and G-8 countries averted what could have been a catastrophic clash between the two nuclear states. A ceasefire at the LoC in November 2003 led to the resumption of the stalled composite dialogue in January 2004. The January 6, 2004, “Islamabad Agreement” between President General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee became the basis for a new bilateral approach. Whether we meant it or not, we gave a solemn undertaking not to allow our territory for any cross-border terrorist activity in the future.

India exploited it as our acceptance of India’s allegations of Pakistan’s involvement in alleged cross-border activities. Since then, India has spared no opportunity to implicate Pakistan in every act of terrorism on its soil, including the Samjhota Express assault in 2007 and Mumbai attacks in November 2008, and has kept the dialogue process hostage to its policy of keeping Pakistan under pressure. This was also when US President Barack Hussein Obama publicly acknowledged the need for a Kashmir settlement. But after the Mumbai attacks, the ‘K’ word abruptly disappeared from Obama’s dictionary. As it got a sympathetic ear in the US and elsewhere in the world on the issue of what it alleged Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, India smelled blood, thinking that now was the time for a "kill." In its calculation, it could bring Pakistan to a point where it would surrender on the Kashmir cause.

India was mistaken. The Kashmir issue is not merely a territorial dispute. It represents the unfinished agenda of the June 3, 1947, Partition Plan of India. It is about the inalienable right of self-determination of the people of Jammu & Kashmir pledged to them through UN Security Council resolutions. If the turbulent history of this region had any lessons, world powers' engagement in this region should have been aimed at promoting peace and stability. They should have been taking steps to encourage India-Pakistan dialogue to settle their outstanding disputes peacefully. The policymakers in the world’s major capitals should also have been eschewing discriminatory policies in their dealings with the India-Pakistan nuclear equation, the only one in the world that grew up in history totally unrelated to the Cold War. But this never happened.

The US not only signed a multi-billion-dollar military pact with India in 2006 but also entered into a preferential nuclear deal with it in 2008, introducing an ominous dimension to the already unstable region. The situation was rapidly aggravated by nuclear and military disparities in the region due to global double standards. The situation was further complicated by a complex new regional configuration of power with a growing Indo-US nexus that gave India a strategic ascendancy in the region with an unprecedented nuisance potential in Afghanistan against Pakistan’s legitimate strategic interests. After Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, the overall security complex in South Asia suddenly exacerbated with increasing India-Pakistan warlike conflictual standoffs. His sole objective was to destabilize Pakistan and ‘weaken’ its armed forces.