The Fuse is Lit

Kashmir is India’s Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all rolled into one. It is a northern state that shares the religious commonality of Islam with bordering Pakistan and has little religiously in common with its own country, mostly Hindu India. Kashmir has served as a rogue community from which Pakistan-supported, anti-Indian terrorists have been trained and nurtured. It is an armed camp, with special laws pretty much exempting Indian national police and military from sufficient accountability in their virtual “shoot to kill” orders to control the rolling series of popular resistance movements and insurrection. Entire sections of cities and towns have had water and power shut off in retaliation for people from those communities who engaged the Indian authorities in stone-throwing and other acts of protest.

For a large number of political heavyweights in the Indian government and a very significant segment of the people, looking at Kashmir has almost always been through the eyes of the exceptionally troubled and often violent relationship between Pakistan and India. Any move to make a concession in Kashmir has been viewed as surrendering or yielding to Pakistan herself; compromise has often been viewed as a sign of weakness, a failure of Indian resolve against a Pakistan that has made war on India, and as recently as late November 2008, seemingly supported a terrorist attack all across India’s largest city, Mumbai, killing scores of people in a series of attacks on buildings throughout the city. Pakistan has openly fomented unrest in Kashmir, going so far as to claim that state as properly her own.

Being a pawn in the battle between these two nuclear nations has put the local people of Kashmir in a horrible position. However, legitimate their protests might be, as long as the central government in Delhi viewed answering those grievances as concessions to their enemy Pakistan, the people have been ignored and remain powerless, angry, bitter and increasingly anti-Indian. The state is crawling with large numbers of Indian troops garrisoned everywhere. Checkpoints abound. Police brutality is the rule; chaos reigns supreme.

Bullets fly all over Kashmir, and the last eighteen months of local unrest have underscored that this is not a Pakistani-Indian issue; it is an almost unstoppable indigenous movement for autonomy. This little excerpt from the September 2^nd New York Times shows exactly how bloody this street war has become for the locals (this in Srinagar): “Protesters swarmed into the emergency room with them, struggling with doctors in surgical aprons and masks to force their way into the operating room. Some slipped past, took over [one seemingly neglected patient’s] hospital bed and wheeled it to the X-ray room as they chanted the same slogans that have filled the streets, angry words echoing off the walls and drowning out the wails of grieving friends and relatives… ‘The Kashmir which we have irrigated with our blood — that Kashmir is ours!’ they chanted… The melee was common enough at the hospital, the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, where more than 500 patients have come in with bullet wounds, lacerations and bruises in the past three months.” 107 fatalities have been officially recorded over the last 100 days.

In January of 2009, Omar Abdullah of the National Conference Party was elected Chief Minister (like a U.S. governor) of Jammu and Kashmir. A coalition leader, U.K-born Abdullah was the hope for compromise, but his government was ineffective, and he was often berated for spending too much time in New Delhi (where his wife and family live – safely) and not enough time in Kashmir itself. His popularity plummeted to “meaningless.” The Indian government has been forced to turn to an unlikely source – leader of the Liberation Front, a former guerrilla fighter named Yasin Malik – for guidance as Parliament has finally come to the conclusion that the situation in the north i s no longer tenable, for the locals or for India herself.

The September 22^nd New York Times: “Unable to quiet the unrest, or even fully understand it, Indian leaders … sent the equivalent of a peace delegation to Kashmir. Members visited a hospital and met with politicians, business leaders and even separatists like Mr. Malik before returning to New Delhi on Tuesday night to confer with the prime minister… [While in Kashmir, the] Indian members of Parliament left their shoes on the floor beneath a wall covered in photographs of slain Kashmiris. The five men sat cross-legged on the floor of the headquarters of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, staring into a throng of television cameras as they delivered a carefully scripted message of reconciliation… ‘We have come to get your counsel,’ said Ram Vilas Paswan, a member of Parliament, turning to … Malik. ‘What is the way out? What is the way to stop the bloodshed?’…

“If the delegation’s two-day visit proved anything, it was that the way out of the crisis would be very uncertain, complicated by historic distrust, a rising Kashmiri demand for political independence and seething anger within the younger generation toward the heavy security presence on the ground… Indeed, the delegation, led by India’s home minister and comprising members of Parliament from major political parties, got a firsthand look at the suffocating government curfew that has choked the entire region since the latest cycle of protests and police shootings broke out more than a week ago. When delegation members visited the hospital, they were jeered, according the news reports.”

Hardliners in Delhi do not want to limit the freedom with which police and military are allowed to operate in Kashmir; to them this is still very much a battle with Pakistan. They don’t want any concessions smacking of autonomy to be accorded to this rebellious northern region, but without serious concessions, it appears that the bloodshed can only escalate. This is no longer an issue between Pakistan and India; it is now a matter that must address the needs of the local Kashmiris. The United States, fighting its own wars against terrorism, is caught in this uncomfortable position in the middle, but all of our efforts towards stabilization in the Islamic world depend on a confluence of events, and settling the dispute in Kashmir is one of them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and American interests are constantly subject to events far away over which we have very limited influence.