Kashmir became a pawn in Cold War chess games, with 13 UN resolutions supporting Pakistan in the decade after our mistaken 1948 reference. (Illustration by C R Sasikumar)
Osama Bin Laden was killed 54 kilometres, as the crow flies, from the J&K Police post in Teethwal, exactly 23 years after the first Kalashnikov exported by Pakistan was recovered in Kupwara by J&K Police counterintelligence officer Hameed Iqbal. The poet Muzaffar Razmi’s lament, “Yeh waqt bhi dekha hai tareekh ke safahon ne/ Lamhon ne khata ki thi sadiyon ne saza payee”(history has witnessed many tragedies when mistakes made in moments bring suffering for years) seems written for Bin Laden’s location, ideology and terrorism. The pain, tears and blood in J&K have been caused by Pakistan’s terror factory, radical Islam, Cold War geopolitics, fraught federalism, and separatist politics. But this pain was also helped by the khata (mistake) of Article 370, which was abrogated exactly five years ago today. The decline in violence since validates why it had to go. Let’s remember the five interconnected forces that created terrorism in the Valley.
Troubled Pakistan: No Pakistani Prime Minister has completed a full term because its “garrison state’’ uses the false threat of India to establish its supremacy over the state and society. But the military’s incompetence — losing every war it has fought and destroying its economy — is now fuelled by its partnership with religion. The military peddled propaganda about a conspiracy to destroy the Pakistani Quom by Hanud-Yahud-Nasara (Hindus, Jews and Christians) is military self-interest masquerading as national interest. The narrative of Pakistan Islam ka qila hai (Pakistan is the fortress of Islam) attracted financing for its “Islamic” nuclear bomb that supposedly deterred India from conventional warfare and justified their terror factory.
Cold War Geopolitics: Kashmir became a pawn in Cold War chess games, with 13 UN resolutions supporting Pakistan in the decade after our mistaken 1948 reference. India didn’t compromise its sovereignty, but Pakistan embraced America: It joined the Baghdad Pact in 1955, the U-2 spy aircraft shot down by Russia took off from Rawalpindi in 1960, and Henry Kissinger used a Pakistan Air Force plane for the secret meeting for the US rapprochement with China arranged by Yahya Khan in 1971. It is hard to imagine terrorism in J&K without Americans abandoning the Afghan Mujahideen they had armed through Pakistan with weapons to fight against the USSR.
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Radical Islam: India has more Muslims than Pakistan, many Hindus and Buddhists live in Jammu and Ladakh, and the practically Sufi Ahle-et-Quad Islam sect of Kashmir has nothing in common with Wahhabis. Kashmiri practices of veneration of ziarats, shrines and relics are considered parasti (idol worship) by Wahhabis. Sheikh Abdullah — whose grandfather was a Hindu — suggested Kashmiri Muslims’ religion was a mixture of Rishi worship, Buddhism, Shaivism, and Sufism with a veneer of Orthodox Islam. Yet, Pakistan’s claims on Kashmir are religiously rooted in the eternal conflict between Dar-ul-Islam (house of Islam) and Dar-ul-Harb (house of infidels). Kashmiri syncretism has deep roots in literary works like Rajatarangini and historical figures like Nooruddin Noorani, Lal Ded, and Habba Khatun. We were sad that Kashmiriyat didn’t prevent the attacks on Valley Hindus, but radical Islam’s tools of terror, guns and religious conservatism don’t have deep Valley roots.
Fraught Federalism: Many of Delhi’s most powerful — Prime Ministers, governors, the Home, Defence, Foreign and Finance Ministries — have had intense engagements with J&K since independence because of Pakistan attacking Kashmir in 1947, our United Nations reference in 1948, Article 370 in 1950, three wars with Pakistan, and three Delhi Accords (1952, 1975 and 1987). Most other state governments only deal with Delhi obliquely, remotely, and infrequently. J&K, however, has found it more challenging to find the madhyam marg (middle path) between centrifugal and centripetal power. Every Indian Prime Minister had been a constant political and administrative presence in J&K, but nobody made the two decisions — abrogating Article 370 and cross-border military strikes — that only Delhi could make till recently.
Separatist Politics: Before he died in Srinagar jail, Syama Prasad Mookerjee wrote to Sheikh Abdullah, “There cannot be a republic within a republic. India has been torn into two by the two-nation theory. You are now developing a three-nation theory… this cannot be good for your state or India’’. He was right. Article 370 made soft separatism a profitable local political strategy. State Home Minister Ali Mohammad Sagar described the legal Rajatarangini cooperative society set up by All India Service officers as “the East India Company” in the state assembly. Politicians in the rest of India were not less corrupt, self-centred, or myopic, but they changed the status quo of power, caste, and class because of competitive politics breeding ideas, realism and compromise. In contrast, J&K suffered “elite capture” and became a closed society, economy, and polity.
Pakistan’s two-instalment strategy for Kashmir — independence followed by annexation — has failed. This strategy was financed by over-invoicing America for their 1980s proxy war in Afghanistan. America refused to believe that radical Islam would turn their attention to them until 9/11, even though the ideologies of Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Masood Azhar and Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Hafiz Sayeed echoed Osama Bin Laden. The FBI and American embassy officers deputed to Kashmir in 1995 to help find Americans kidnapped by Pakistan-based Al Faran dismissed our intelligence that Western countries were the next target of radical Islam, saying, “Don’t try to internationalise an India-Pakistan conflict”. But terrorism has no religion and knows no boundaries.
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Recent attacks on the army in the Jammu region show desperation and remind us that the job of ending terror in J&K is far from finished. Risk-taking to restore peace must continue by making J&K Police the frontline of fighting terror, shutting down the UN office in Srinagar, encouraging new politicians, restoring statehood starting with the Delhi Model, isolating Pakistan geopolitically, and creating jobs. Abrogating Article 370 was always a necessary, but not sufficient condition for ending terrorism. But as every practitioner of strategy knows, necessary comes before sufficient.
M N Sabharwal is former Director General of J&K Police and CRPF and Manish Sabharwal is an entrepreneur. Their latest book is Kashmir Under 370
