Behind
The India-Pak Ceasefire
By Keith Jones
World
Socialist Web
30 December 2003
Recent
weeks have seen a flurry of initiatives aimed at easing tensions between
India and Pakistan, nuclear powers that in 2002 came to the brink of
all-out war.
On Nov. 26, Indian
and Pakistani armed forces ended 14 years of virtually daily artillery
exchanges, when they began a general ceasefire a ceasefire
that covers the international border between India and Pakistan and
the Line of Control (LOC) and Siachen Glacier in the disputed Kashmir
region. Subsequently, India and Pakistan agreed to resume air and rail
links, broken off by India in December 2001, and to various other confidence-building
measures, including joint army patrols of the international border.
The ceasefire and
other steps have been welcomed by all the great powers, including the
European Union, Russia, China and Japan. The Bush administration, which
has embraced Pakistans military regime as a key ally in its war
on terrorism and has identified India as a potential strategic
partner of the US, is a moving force behind the Indian-Pakistani rapprochement.
Yet thus far, Washington has found it politic to downplay its role.
US officials will only admit to encouraging the two sides to talk, although
it is evident that the Bush administration is using the USs growing
economic and military leverage in Central and South Asia to prod the
two sides to the negotiating table.
Much stock is now
being placed on the interaction between top Indian and Pakistani leaders
that is to occur at the summit of the seven-nation South Asian Association
for Regional Conference (SAARC), which will be held in Islamabad for
three days beginning January 4.
Indian prime minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee, who only confirmed his participation in the SAARC
meeting earlier this month, will hold bilateral talks with Pakistani
prime minister Zafarullah Jamali and possibly also with General Pervez
Musharraf. The head of Pakistans armed forces, Musharraf seized
power in a 1999 coup and later made himself the countrys president.
Vajpayee, however,
has played down the significance of the encounters he will have with
Pakistans leaders during the SAARC summit. On December 25, he
reaffirmed the position India has held since December 2001, when New
Delhi ruptured normal relations with Pakistan claiming that it was responsible
for a terrorist attack on Indias Parliament: India will not hold
substantive negotiations with Pakistan until the latter renounces cross-border
terrorism and dismantles bases in the Pakistan-held part of Kashmir
used by anti-Indian insurgents.
Vajpayees
statement and Indias caginess about whether he will meet with
Musharraf underscore the tenuous character of the warming in Indo-Pakistani
relations.
Even in their respective
proposals for normalizing relations there has been an element of one-upmanship,
with India and Pakistan jockeying for Washingtons favor by portraying
itself as the more eager for a relaxation of tensions. Just days after
Vajpayee had mused about the possibility of a South Asia with open borders
and a common currency, Musharraf gave an interview in which he said
Pakistan is willing to be flexible on its decades-old demand for the
implementation of UN resolutions on Kashmir that would allow for its
accession to Pakistan through a plebiscite.
More significantly,
Pakistan has taken strong exception to Indias construction of
a fence that follows the LOC, although several miles back from the demarcation
line between Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir. India began construction
of the fence long ago, but prior to the ceasefire, work on it had been
next to impossible due to artillery exchanges.
Deep-rooted, elite opposition
There is strong
popular support in both India and Pakistan for a de-escalation of tensionsa
fact even Vajpayee had to concede when a few months ago he declared
that the peace camp in India is much larger than that favoring
the perpetuation of enmity with Pakistan. Yet, any Indo-Pakistani rapprochement
will invariably encounter strong opposition from powerful sections of
the countries elites, especially if and when the Kashmir question
is broached.
Since the 1947 communal
partition of the subcontinent, both the Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisies
have made the conflict against the rival state central to their ruling
ideologies. Pakistans elite, above all its politically powerful
military-security establishment, has made the liberation
of Jammu and Kashmir, Indias only Muslim-majority state, a national
if not a holy cause. Indian rulers, meanwhile, have blamed the Pakistani
foreign hand for any number of domestic problems and made
it a touchstone of government policy that any questioning of the borders
laid down in 1947 would be an intolerable threat to the unity of multinational
India.
The current ruling
regimes in both India and Pakistan are themselves both strongly identified
with extreme chauvinism and militarism, meaning that should they pursue
rapprochement they will come into headlong conflict with important parts
of their traditional constituencies.
The dominant force
in Indias ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition
is the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP and its
predecessor, the Jana Sangh, have always opposed even the limited autonomy
granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir under Indias constitution,
frequently attacked their political opponents for being soft
on Pakistan, and repeatedly accused Indias large Muslim minority
of being disloyal and pro-Pakistani. Shortly after coming to power in
1998, the BJP proclaimed India a nuclear power, defying international
condemnation to stage nuclear tests, and embarked on a massive and still
continuing buildup of Indias armed forces. The BJP-led NDA won
re-election in 1999, by portraying the withdrawal of Pakistani forces
from the Kargil region of Kashmir after a half-year long incursion as
a major military and geo-political victory that India won thanks to
its sagacious leadership.
Mimicking the Bush
administrations response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attack, the BJP-led government seized on the December 2001 terrorist
attack on Indias parliament to mount a 10-month-long mobilization
of Indias armed forces along the Pakistani border, demanding that
Pakistan in effect admit to being a terrorist-sponsoring state or face
invasion.
Musharraf, meanwhile,
owes his rule to the military-security forces, the section of the Pakistani
elite most associated with anti-Indian chauvinism and the patronage
of Islamic fundamentalism. Musharraf was the mastermind of Pakistans
1999 Kargil incursion. His belief that Nawaz Sharif caved into US pressure
and prematurely ended the Kargil operation was a major factor in his
decision to oust the Pakistani prime minister and seize the reins of
government. While under intense US pressure, Musharraf was forced to
withdraw Pakistani patronage of the Taliban regime and has announced
repeated crackdowns on armed Islamic groups in Pakistan. He recently
signed a political pact with the parliamentary Islamic opposition, the
Muthadia Majlis-I-Amal or United Action Front. During the 2001-02 war
crisis, Musharraf was more than ready to brandish the threat of Pakistan
resorting to nuclear weapons to repel an Indian attack.
That said, the ceasefirethe
first in 14 yearshas thus far held, and talks on increased economic
ties including a natural gas pipeline linking Iran and India via Pakistan
are said to be advancing. Musharraf is clearly courting personal danger
in taking steps, such as the ceasefire, that strengthen India in its
battle with the Kashmir insurgents, yet thus far he has persisted with
the rapprochement.
Washingtons role
A number of factors
account for the ceasefire and the prospect of hard-bargaining between
Indias and Pakistans elites over their inter-state relations,
but Washington clearly has played a pivotal role.
During the Cold
War, Washington was closely allied with Pakistan. But over the past
decade it has increasingly come to identify India as a state with which
it wants to partner in the twenty-first century. According to a recent
report issued by a task force on South Asia that was co-sponsored by
the Council on Foreign Relations, a highly influential Washington think
tank, and staffed with several former US ambassadors to India and Pakistan,
The turnaround in US-India relations has been remarkable when
viewed against the background of the previous half century of estrangement.
If New Delhi and Washington continue to broaden and deepen official
and non-official ties, the prospects are good that by 2010 the worlds
two largest democracies will succeed in consolidating a genuine partnership.
Washingtons
new tilt toward India was manifest in the 1999 Kargil dispute, when
US president Bill Clinton personally intervened to press Sharif to order
a unilateral withdrawal of Pakistani and Pakistani-supported forces.
Yet there are definite limits to the USs willingness to support
Indian belligerence against Pakistan. If India ultimately failed to
act on its war threats in 2001-02, it was largely because the US and
its allies made clear that an invasion of Pakistan that risked triggering
a nuclear exchange and that at the very least would jeopardize the US
occupation of Afghanistan would be viewed by the US as inimical to its
interests.
PakistanUS
dissatisfaction over the vigor of its crackdown on Islamic extremists
notwithstandingremains critical to the USs campaign against
Al-Qaeda, the US occupation of Afghanistan and more generally the expansion
of US influence in the oil-rich Central Asian region. Moreover, in respect
to the Indo-Pakistani conflict, Washington is sufficiently at a distance
to recognize, unlike many in the Hindu chauvinist BJP, that Indias
unrelenting military pressure could help cause Pakistana country
riven by numerous ethnic-religious conflicts and hobbled by foreign
debtto implode, spreading instability across Central, West and
South Asia.
According to the
previously cited task force on South Asia, The United States has
a major stake in a stable Pakistan at peace with itself and its neighbors...
However, aid to Pakistan, the task force argues, should be pegged to
Islamabads progress in implementing IMF-dictated privatization
plans and public spending cuts and in barring the use of its territory
to sustain insurgencies against its neighbors and fulfilling [nuclear]
non-proliferation responsibilities.
In the past, the
US largely ignored the Indo-Pakistani conflict. Indeed, insofar as it
helped bind Pakistan to the US, Washington had a Cold War interest in
perpetuating it. Now Washington has switched gears. It deems it important
to US strategic interests to bring the Pakistani-supported insurgency
in Kashmir to an end and to find a long-term solution to the Indo-Pakistani
conflict, including their competing claims in Kashmir, and this for
several reasons. Washington believes that Kashmir has become a cause
and recruiting ground for anti-American Islamic extremists. Secondly
and more fundamentally, the Indo-Pakistani conflict cuts across the
USs ambitions for the region.
US big business
has identified India as a crucial area for future expansion. Now that
India has abandoned virtually all its restrictions on foreign capital,
US transnationals are eager to gain access to its consumer market and
natural resources, and above all to tap into its vast supply of cheap
labor, both unskilled and university-trained. Over the past decade,
the US has emerged as far and away Indias largest trading partner,
and much of that trade is in so-called information services, which includes
everything from call-centers to the writing of computer software.
No less significantly,
US strategists have identified India as a crucial economic and military
counterweight to China. Not only is India commensurate in size to China,
it shares a border with itincluding in the strategically situated
Kashmir regionand China and India have a decades-long border dispute,
which in 1962 erupted in war. Already, the US has established significant
military ties with India, including the regular staging of joint naval
and army exercises.
Pakistans narrowing options
Threatened by a
bellicose India, its two decades-long Afghanistan policy in ruins, and
with about half of its state budget devoted to military spending and
debt-servicing, Pakistan is extremely vulnerable to US pressure. But
US pressure alone does not account for Musharrafs newfound conciliatory
attitude toward India. There are signs that the Islamic fundamentalist
leadership Islamabad helped foist on the Kashmir insurgency has caused
it to lose a fair measure of popular support. Islamic fundamentalist
terrorism has also exacerbated religious and national-ethnic strife
within Pakistan. Thus, increasing sections of the Pakistani elite are
questioning the viability and wisdom of open-ended support to the Kashmir
insurgency.
Last but not least,
the gap between the sizes of Indias and Pakistans economies
continues to grow, making the task of trying to match Indias military
build-up ever-more burdensome.
Musharraf would
appear to have concluded that given Pakistans weakness, the wisest
course is to accommodate Washington in its desire for a defusing of
tensions with India. By so doing, not only does he ensure the Bush administrations
continued support, but he can explore the prospects of cutting a bargain
with New Delhi before the power gap between the two states widens and
under conditions where the US still deems Pakistan vital to the war
on terrorism.
Traditionally, Pakistan
has held that all of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir,
as a territory with a Muslim-majority population, rightfully belongs
to Pakistan. But by saying Pakistan would be willing to accept something
less than stipulated in the UN resolutions, he is raising the possibility
of alternate solutions, including one said to be favored by Islamabad
that would see Kashmir partitioned on communal lines, with the Muslim-majority
Kashmir Valley ceded to Pakistan, while most of the Jammu region is
consigned to India. There is no reason, however, to believe the Indian
elite will accept such a compromise. It continues to lay
claim to the Pakistani-province of Azad Kashmir, although it has signalled
in the past that it might be willing to settle for the current LOC being
made into an international border.
Indias quest for recognition as South Asias dominant
power
The Indian governments
December 2001 war mobilizationOperation Parakamis now widely
viewed in Indian political and state security circles as a failure.
A vocal minority of military leaders and strategists attack the NDA
government for losing its nerve and not making good on its war threats.
But most see the 10-month, million-man war mobilization to have been
a colossal waste of money and resources, which ultimately only served
to underline that the relationship of forces between Indian and Pakistan
is such that India cannot bully and threaten Islamabad the way the Bush
administration has done with states it has declared to be sponsoring
terrorism.
In the wake of Operation
Parakam, the NDA government has taken steps to acquire a host of new
weapons systems, thus indicating its aim is to seek military-strategic
superiority, with at least the hope that an arms race will further weaken
Pakistan.
But given the failure
of its preferred strategy of military confrontation, at least in the
short-term, the NDA government has been forced to explore other options,
including possible negotiations with Kashmiri separatists. Whilst historically
New Delhi has been dead set against any outside intervention in the
Kashmir conflict, the Times of India and other establishment voices
have suggested, given Washingtons eagerness for a strategic partnership
with India, that it would be wise to accept US offers of assistance
in bringing Pakistan to the bargaining table and even de facto US mediation.
Not least among
those pressing for such a change of course is Indian big business. While
the Indian bourgeoisies newfound confidence in its prospects are
no doubt overblownIndias share of world trade remains less
than 1 percent, and its growth rates continue to trail far behind those
of Chinaits emergence as a global player and the experience of
a free trade agreement with Sri Lanka have led Indian capital to conclude
that through increased trade ties it will be able to anchor its dominant
role across South Asia. Indian economic dominance would complement New
Delhis quest for winning for India the status of regional super-power
through the development of its military might.
Last Septemberlong
before the current ceasefirethe Confederation of Indian Industry
(CII) established an India-Pakistan CEOs Forum to
promote freer trader between the two countries, and the CII is working
to breathe life into the objective of creating a South Asian trade zone
by 2006. At the same time, India has sought to place further pressure
on Islamabad, by threatening to pursue bilateral trade deals with the
other SAARC members, should Pakistan balk at reviving SAARCs proposals
for a subcontinental trade bloc.
Thus, behind the
talk of reconciliation and peace, all three major players in the Indo-Pakistan
rapprochementWashington, Islamabad and New Delhiare pursuing
their predatory national interests.
The 1947 partition
of the Indian subcontinent was one of the great tragedies of the twentieth
centurya tragedy that resulted in the deaths of 2 million people,
rendered 14 million homeless and has led to a decades-long rivalry that
has caused three wars and now threatens South Asia with nuclear conflagration.
British imperialism, with its strategy of divide and rule, bears great
responsibility for inciting communal animosity in South Asia. But the
partition was proposed and implemented by the Indian National Congress
and Muslim League leadersthe political representatives of the
South Asian bourgeoisiewho combined to abort the anti-imperialist
struggle. Six decades later, a genuine and progressive solution to the
problems posed by the sharing of the resources of the subcontinent by
its myriad national-ethnic and religious groups will only be forged
through a common struggle against imperialism and the rival national
bourgeoisies, a struggle led by the working class and with the aim of
establishing a Socialist United States of South Asia.