Flashpoint in the North

Partition. In 1948, as the British government believed that a unified Muslim and Hindu India represented an unsustainable nation, Muslims were given their own country – splitting into East and West Pakistan (East Pakistan eventually split off and became Bangladesh) in the north. While many Muslims elected to remain in what was to become modern India, the vast majority left homes, businesses and belongings and took a terrifying and often violent journey to their new homeland in the north. A large number of Hindus made the same troubled trip from their homes in the north to the new country of India. In the decades that followed, wars, border skirmishes, terrorist attacks and stockpiling nuclear weapons on both sides – India versus Pakistan – defined the future relationship of these two hostile nations, who were twins from birth. To this day, India is Pakistan’s most hated enemy, despised even more than the dreaded America or Israel.

Nothing has kept salt in old wounds more fervently that the northern India border state of Kashmir, that little pointy part at the top of a map of India. There is a continuation of Kashmir into Pakistan as well, and where the actual border rests has always been a bone of contention. To the average Pakistani, partition’s biggest mistake was leaving any part of this still-primarily-Muslim state as a part of India. And most of the military and terrorist violence between these nations is directly linked to bringing Kashmir into Pakistan, where every Pakistani school child is taught it should be.

The large Muslim population of Kashmir lives in a state of virtual siege. Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops – “security forces” – have crushed local rebellion and struggled to root out insurgents and “foreign” terrorists sent on missions of insurrection and sabotage. This summer, tensions have boiled over again, as locals have turned this season into another “summer of rage,” marked by violent protests and harsh retaliatory repression. Fifty fatalities and 900 separate protests mark this latest time of violence; it is the third such summer reaction, and the signs of growing discontent magnify every day.

The August 12^th New York Times simplifies the conundrum; Indian occupying forces “face a threat potentially more dangerous to the world’s largest democracy: an intifada-like popular revolt against the Indian military presence that includes not just stone-throwing young men but their sisters, mothers, uncles and grandparents… The protests, which have erupted for a third straight summer, have led India to one of its most serious internal crises in recent memory. Not just because of their ferocity and persistence, but because they signal the failure of decades of efforts to win the assent of Kashmiris using just about any tool available: money, elections and overwhelming force .

“‘We need a complete revisit of what our policies in Kashmir have been,’ said Amitabh Mattoo, a professor of strategic affairs at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Kashmiri Hindu. ‘It is not about money — you have spent huge amounts of money. It is not about fair elections. It is about reaching out to a generation of Kashmiris who think India is a huge monster represented by bunkers and security forces.’… Indeed, Kashmir’s demand for self-determination is sharper today than it has been at perhaps any other time in the region’s troubled history.”

Why is any of this remotely relevant for American policy-makers? Doesn’t this help our Central Asian/Afghan policy with a touch of “divide, conquer and distract”? Perhaps, but we are in a constant and untenable balancing act – trying to enlist formal Pakistani efforts against the Taliban and al Qaeda (which, though Pakistan is a purported “ally,” many of their branches of government covertly or even overtly support) against the reality of India’s clear global economic supremacy and massive Diaspora, particularly within the United States at the highest levels of entrepreneurial success. India challenges the Islamic militants who seek partition of Kashmir, but who are also the clear enemies of the United States. There is something in these most recent protests, however, bordering on the greatest desperation that Kashmir has ever known; it’s almost as if a fuse has been lit.

So is it clear that the U.S. must side with anti-Islamist India at all costs? Even if the mass of Kashmiris seems to want the very partition that India is unwilling to consider? There was a time – even recently – where diplomatic entreaties looked like they might take root, but that time seems to have passed: “Secret negotiations in 2007, which came close to creating an autonomous region shared by the two countries, foundered as Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, lost his grip on power. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, by Pakistani militants in 2008 derailed any hope for further talks.

“Not least, India has consistently rebuffed any attempt at outside mediation or diplomatic entreaties, including efforts by the United States. The intransigence has left Kashmiris empty-handed and American officials with little to offer Pakistan on its central preoccupation — India and Kashmir — as they struggle to encourage Pakistan’s help in cracking down on the Taliban and other militants in the country… With no apparent avenue to progress, many Kashmiris are despairing that their struggle is taking place in a vacuum, and they are taking matters into their own hands…

“Indian officials have tried to portray Kashmir’s stone-throwing youths as illiterate pawns of jihadist forces across the Pakistan border and have suggested that economic development and jobs are the key to getting young people off the streets… But many of the stone throwers are hardly illiterate. They organize on Facebook, creating groups with names like ‘Im a Kashmiri Stone Pelter.’ One young man who regularly joins protests and goes by the nom de guerre Khalid Khan has an M.B.A. and a well-paying job.” The Times. Two countries with nuclear weapons who hate each other embroiled in a large dispute involving millions of unhappy Muslims seeking separation from India in a disputed border region that has sparked wars, violent protests and terrorism for decades; what could possibly go wrong?

I’m Peter Dekom, keeping an eye on sparks that could easily get out of hand.