Few short-fought wars have evoked so much of heat, debate and self-criticism (read, justified criticism of the party/parties at the helm of affairs) as the Kargil War did this summer. That too in the very country that ostensibly won the war. The facts are there for all to acknowledge: Pakistan-backed fundamentalist-terrorists had indeed intruded into Indian territory; many of these intruders were Pakistan army regulars in the guise of plain-clothed militants; the Indian authorities had been forewarned about such an eventuality; the Indian government sat twiddling its thumbs; when the latter finally woke up from its slumber it was quite late in the day: a great many lives would not have been lost trying to evict the Pakistani infiltrators; after denying all along that it was in any way involved in the Kargil conflict, Pakistan had to end up with an egg on its face -- it had to beat a retreat, thereby losing to India on the battlefront for the fourth time in a row.
This ephemeral conflict has been discussed threadbare in virtually all fora -- print, television, radio. The points of view and assessments of both the government as well as its critics, particularly the latter, has varied. Every other day, this publication or the other is out with an expose of how the Neroesque Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led ragtag coalition government disregarded initial warnings about an impending Pakistan-backed intrusion. and how the jingoistic brigade has gone about chopping the necks of scapegoats in order to stave off the same kind of egg that splattered the Pakistani face.
Political parties and their lackeys in power in both countries whipped up pseudo-nationalistic passions. Without mindless nationalistic frenzy obviously you cannot drive young men to the battlefront to get themselves killed all in the name of the country and its god. Nuclear power or not, Pakistan could not get away with it because it had been wrong on the first count -- it was guilty. The moment it realised that international opinion was not working in its favour, much as it would have liked to on the Kashmir count, it only needed a formal push into go scurrying back. So when Bill Clinton asked the Nawaz Sharif government to behave itself, its army left Indian territory with its tail between its legs. The ultra-nationalist coalition in New Delhi cried "victory!" and burst out in a frenetic exposition of jingoistic celebrations. And lost in the rubble-rousing was the real issue -- that of Kashmir.
Pakistan has never been reconcile itself to the fact that it did not get Kashmir after the British partitioned and left India. The former may have lost one battle and war after another, but the Kashmir issue has always remained internationalised. In fact, the very first of the skirmishes in 1947-48 ended with the United Nations Security Council brokered a ceasefire agreement. As per the resolution of the council (passed on August 13, 1948), once the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan had certified that Pakistani tribesmen and troops had withdrawn, India would withdraw all troops from the state, save a minimum force needed to maintain law and order. The last clause of the resolution mandated that the future of Jammu and Kashmir would be decided "in accordance with the will of the people."
Somewhere down the line in ochlocratic democracies the people always get forgotten. Just as Pakistan never withdrew all its troops, India too never gave the people a chance to voice their choice. While Pakistan remained more obsessed with possessing Kashmir than the development of its own people and successfully and successively failing to coerce the international community into poking its nose in Indo-Pak bilateral issues (meaning, Kashmir), the Indian establishment led by Jawaharlal Nehru seemed content on letting Sheikh Abdullah take a vice-like grip on the Muslim-majority state headed till the other day by a Hindu king. Pakistan's diplomatic adventures drew blanks, while the paradise-on-earth Kashmir raked in millions every year for the Indian tourism industry. Everything was fine. So what went wrong in the Eighties that saw the birth of insurgency and the unabated rise of terrorism?
Interpretations offered are many. The reasons why it did too are many. But one explanation that has more to do with the state of the Indian polity than with the pernicious machinations of Pakistan in making militancy work in its own favour, is the one that Praveen Swami makes in his relatively-brief, lucid and sufficiently dialectical appraisal of the changing socio-political scenario in India and its immediate and inevitable effect on the Kashmir tangle. Not so much internationally, but more on its cascading effect on a secessionist tendency that had more to do with religion than with nationalism.
Swami covered the Kargil conflict for his magazine, Frontline. His 100-page analysis of the summer war is not one made by a new-to-Kashmir journalist who made hay while the Kargil heights raged. True, this shortlived encounter has spawned many a just-born Kashmir expert, but Swami, like these neophytes, does not get trapped into debating the Kashmir issue from the "larger" plane and end up talking about diplomacy, party politics and blah blah. As Swami observes, while setting the tenor for the remaining pages in his introduction, "It is not coincidental that the secessionist ascendancy in Jammu and Kashmir came about at a time of sharpening communal fissures throughout India, a time of growing anti-Muslim violence." (p 5)
The communalising of politics and society in Jammu and Kashmir did not happen perchance. While Pakistan's interference and intervention did play its bit, the accentuating of the situation could not have taken place had it not been for the rise and rise of the Hindu Right elsewhere in India. Just as the growth of the Hindu Right was a fallout of the vacillating secularism practised by the Congress till the Eighties, the alienation of the Indian Muslim too was a result of the communal ardour generated by the Hindus. It set the stage for future sporadic and orchestrated Hindu-Muslim riots in India in general. It did more than that in Jammu and Kashmir -- it sowed the seeds of hatred in a secessionist tendency that increasingly found more justification in religion than in nationalism. The dividing line vanished sometime as well.
After drilling holes in the Kargil theories and justifications of the Indian government, Swami probes deeper. He says though empirical evidence is hard to come by, the transformation of Muslim identity in Kashmir offers a rich terrain for study. The systematic displacement from the school education system of the state's languages by Urdu, a project ironically sponsored by the state government itself, has led to a creation of two generations of Muslims who cannot read their own language. Jammu and Kashmir has no newspapers in Kashmiri, and a declining body of new literature.
The rise of Hindutva has made Kashmir's Muslims more sensitive to developments in the rest of India than at any time in the past. Swami says if terrorists have taken to shooting girls clad in jeans or to banning cable television broadcasts, it is not because of some mindless opposition to modernity, but because the far right believes such actions, carried out in the context of current all-India Hindu chauvinist mobilisations, will give them legitimacy among their core constituency.
Review: The Kargil War
