Salman Rushdie on Kashmir

[Guest guest]

The New York Times, May 30, 2002

 

"The Most Dangerous Place in the World

By SALMAN RUSHDIE

 

The present Kashmir crisis feels like a déjà vu replay of the last

one. Three years ago a weak Indian coalition government led by the

Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party had just lost a confidence

vote in India's Parliament and was nervously awaiting a general

election. At once it began to beat the war drums over Kashmir. Now

another coalition government, still led by the B.J.P. and deeply

tainted by B.J.P. supporters' involvement in the massacre of hundreds

of Muslims in Gujarat State, may be about to lose another general

election. So here goes the government again, talking up a Kashmiri

war and asking India to stand firm behind its leadership.

 

Three years ago in Pakistan, the equally weak government of Prime

Minister Nawaz Sharif had bankrupted the national economy and was

facing well-documented corruption charges. Mr. Sharif, too, had much

to gain from war fever — fed by the various Muslim terrorist groups

operating in Kashmir. The hawkish Pakistani general then responsible

for communicating with and training those terrorist groups was one

Pervez Musharraf. (By the way — just so we're clear on who Mr.

Musharraf, now Pakistan's president, really is — some of these groups

were almost certainly sent by Pakistan's intelligence service to

Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.) When Nawaz Sharif succumbed to

American pressure and promised to rein in the terrorists, General

Musharraf was furious. A few months later he overthrew Mr. Sharif in

a coup and seized power.

 

Will the outcome also be a replay of three years ago? Will the

conflict be contained again?

 

This time President Musharraf is the one being pressed by the United

States to stamp out Kashmiri terrorism. He has been playing a double

game, arresting hundreds of members of the groups he once fostered

but quietly freeing most of them soon afterward. Caught between two

necessities — placating his major international sponsor and playing

to the home audience — he may well in the end follow his deepest

political instincts: to support (overtly or covertly) the Islamist

radicals who have terrorized the once idyllic valley of Kashmir for

well over a decade.

 

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India, with his talk of

a "decisive battle," clearly feels that direct military action,

resulting in the reconquest of some if not all of the Kashmiri

territory now under Pakistani control, is the only way of preventing

attacks like the atrocity this month in which women and children were

slaughtered at an Indian army base. Mr. Vajpayee knows that Indian

rule is unpopular in the valley, that the Indian army looks to many

Kashmiris like an army of occupation. But he will also have

calculated that in the opinion of the international community, and

also of many fearful, near-destitute Kashmiris, Pakistan's protracted

sponsorship of terrorism has damaged its claims to moral legitimacy.

 

Would a war between India and Pakistan, if it came, go nuclear?

 

Pakistan, with its suggestively timed missile tests, its refusal to

adopt a policy of not being the first to use nuclear arms and its

hawkish talk, is trying to give the impression that it would have no

compunction about using its nuclear arsenal. India's military

leadership has said that if attacked with nuclear bombs it would

respond with maximum force and that in such a conflict India would

sustain heavy damage but survive, whereas Pakistan would be destroyed

utterly.

 

Is it really likely, however, that Pakistan would, so to speak, strap

a nuclear weapon to its belly, walk into the crowded bazaar that is

India and turn itself into the biggest suicide bomber in history?

 

Mr. Musharraf doesn't look like martyr material. Ah, but if he were

losing a conventional war? If India's overwhelming numerical

superiority on land, at sea and in the air won the day and Pakistan

lost its prized Kashmiri land, would reason be swept aside? Worst of

all, if Pakistani fury at a military defeat by India were to result

in Mr. Musharraf's overthrow by Islamist hard-liners, Pakistan's

nuclear warheads could fall into the hands of people for whom

martyrdom is a higher goal than peace, people who value death more

highly than life.

 

Pakistan is calling on the international community to intervene, but

this call must be heard with caution. For half a century Pakistan has

sought to internationalize the Kashmiri dispute while India has

consistently described that effort as interference in its internal

affairs. Both sides are locked into old language, old strategies and

an old game of chicken that's currently playing itself out across the

Line of Control. Like two aged wrestlers fighting on a cliff, India

and Pakistan are locked together, rolling ever closer to the edge.

 

But their ancient hatred is no longer a matter only for them. The

risk of a nuclear battle, however improbable, makes Kashmir

everybody's problem. Right now it's the most dangerous place in the

world. These pathetic old fighters must be pulled apart, and soon.

Yes, that probably does mean intervention by the West, though Russia

seems eager to help as well, which is useful.

 

This should not, however, be the intervention that Pakistan wants.

The point is not to restrain Indian "aggression," but to make the

world safer for us all. The situation can only be stabilized if India

and Pakistan are both forced to back away, preferably to outside of

Kashmir's historic, unpartitioned borders. This "hands off Kashmir"

solution will have to be externally imposed on the reluctant

principals and will require that a large peacekeeping force be sent

to the region to support Kashmir as an autonomous area. But who in

the West wants that — it's just the old colonialist-imperialist power

trip, isn't it? And who's supposed to pay for all this peacekeeping,

anyway?

 

The answers to those questions are also questions: What's the

alternative? Do you have a better idea? Or shall we just stand back

and keep our postcolonial, nonimperialist fingers crossed? Will it

take mushroom clouds over Delhi and Islamabad to make us give up our

ingrained prejudices and try something that might actually work? In

the immortal words of the Spice Girls, "Will this déjà vu never end?"

 

(Salman Rushdie is the author of "Fury: A Novel" and the forthcoming

essay collection "Step Across This Line.")

 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/opinion/30RUSH.html

 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company