Episode 3 - Kashmir - THE HISTORY BEHIND THE HEADLINES

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India's continued abrogation of normal human rights in Kashmir - the only Muslim-majority region in India – is compromising the world's biggest democracy's relationship with several other key geopolitical players – including Turkey, China, Malaysia and potentially the European Union. An EU/India summit meeting on India/Europe relations is due to take place in Brussels next month. Above all, the situation in Kashmir continues to heighten tension between South Asia’s two great nuclear-armed rivals – India and Pakistan – and the potential for escalation is substantial. Kashmir – where India, Pakistan and China meet – is one of the most strategically and geopolitically sensitive places on earth. Up until the mid-20th century, it formed the north-west part of British India. Now India rules almost half of it, Pakistan controls just over a third – and China rules the remaining 20%. Kashmir has been the cause of four wars and countless terrorist outrages and human rights violations over the past 72 years – an intermittent conflict which has so far cost at least 90,000 lives. In a note to the UN Security Council last year, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, warned that “India should not mistake our restraint for weakness.” The note stated ominously that “if India chooses to resort again to the use of force, Pakistan will be obliged to respond, in self-defense, with all its capabilities.” The past year has already seen a major terrorist attack in Kashmir (by Pakistan-based Islamists) and subsequent Indian and Pakistani air strikes and cross-border shelling. The Indian-controlled part of Kashmir (the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir) is an anomaly – a majority Muslim territory in a majority Hindu country. It is one of the world’s most dangerous political flashpoints. Over most of the past ten days, parts of the region have been in a state of complete lock-down. Curfews have been imposed and more than 1300 Kashmiris - politicians, activists and others - have been arrested. But why has Kashmir become such a fraught and geopolitically volatile place? The story started at least 250 years ago when the great Muslim empires of south Asia – first, India’s Mughal Empire and then the Durrani (Afghan) Empire – went into decline. Up till then, Kashmir had been a predominantly Muslim territory under continuous Muslim rule for more than four centuries. But, in the late 18th century, in lands immediately to the south of Kashmir, the Sikhs (a religious group in Punjab) broke free from the Durrani Empire, created their own imperial state and, early in the next century, conquered both Jammu and Kashmir. The newly acquired territories (including Muslim-majority Kashmir) were now subject to non-Muslim (ie., Sikh) control. But, to the south and east, the British East India Company (which ruled much of India) was deeply unhappy about the political instability within the Sikh empire, and decided to take it over. The Sikhs were defeated in 1846 at the great battle of Sobraon (just 50 kilometres south of Sikhism’s holiest place – the Golden Temple in Amritsar) – and Kashmir consequently fell into British hands. The British then proceeded to sell Kashmir – for 7.5 million rupees – to the very ruler that the Sikhs had previously installed in neighbouring Jammu, a Hindu prince by the name of Gulab Singh, who had sensibly stayed neutral in the Anglo-Sikh war. However under the sale agreement, the prince (now with the title of Maharaja) was to hold Kashmir (and Jammu) as a British vassal. Kashmir therefore became the only major Himalayan state to form part of the British Empire (other key Himalayan kingdoms – Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan – were never part of the British Raj). The British were keen to maintain overlordship of Kashmir for two reasons – firstly because the British Imperial government in far away Calcutta (the other side of India) and in London itself became convinced that the Russians were interested (as part of the so-called ‘Great Game’ rivalry) in gaining influence in Kashmir. Secondly, the East India Company was keen to secure control over the lucrative Kashmir wool and shawl market. Kashmir (or ‘Cashmere’) shawls had, after all, become ultra-fashionable in European high society – especially in France where Napoleon Bonaparte had, earlier in the century, presented one to his wife, Josephine. Despite its subjects’ Muslim faith, the British-backed Hindu Maharaja’s administration in Kashmir did not wear its Hinduism lightly. On the contrary, it saw itself as the inheritor of a pre-Islamic Hindu ‘Aryan’ tradition that had flourished in Kashmir prior to the Muslim conquests of the 13th century. Culturally and linguistically, it was encouraged and supported in this ethno-religious cultural revivalism by British upper-class orientalist scholars, administrators and soldiers. Reared on the Greek classics, these UK colonialists saw ancient Hindu Sanskrit ‘Indo-European’ culture as the long-lost linguistic/ethnic cousin of that of Homer and Aristotle. In 1947 the British-ruled Indian subcontinent was partitioned into two independent states Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Muslim-majority (but Hindu-ruled) Kashmir was contested between the two newly independent nations. Muslim tribal irregulars invaded Kashmir from Pakistan, and the British and Indians made it clear that military help would only be sent if Kashmir joined India. The territory’s Hindu ruler was therefore faced with a difficult decision: should he throw in his lot with India or Pakistan. In the end, and despite the fact that he would probably have preferred Kashmir to become independent, he opted to side with India – a decision that was eased by the fact that the leading Muslim-majority political party in Kashmir was actually pro-Indian. At partition in 1947, Pakistan and India fought each other over Kashmir – and Pakistan succeeded in seizing the western, more sparsely populated, half of the territory. It did so with the help of tribal warriors – mainly Pathans from Pakistani territory near the Afghan border – and regular forces it subsequently sent to Kashmir to confront the Indians. India’s response was to complain to the United Nations and propose that a plebiscite should be held in the state. The UN agreed and asked Pakistan to withdraw all its forces from the area of Kashmir which it had occupied. Pakistan supported the plebiscite proposal – but refused to pull out its troops. As a result, India refused to go ahead with the plebiscite while Pakistani forces remained on Kashmiri territory. Nobody had really seen the Kashmir problem coming. Just a few years earlier, partition itself had not even been on the agenda. The British (and indeed most Indians) had thought that the Raj would become a single independent state – rather than two. But for decades, the British had felt unable to initiate any democratic reform in India’s princely states (including Kashmir) – and so when Muslim/Hindu communal violence erupted in the subcontinent in 1946, there was neither the time nor the democratic institutions to credibly determine what the people of Kashmir (or indeed other princely states) really wanted. However, despite the de facto 1947 division of Kashmir between India and Pakistan (and another war over Kashmir in 1965), the situation had become reasonably stable by the 1970s. But then two new elements entered the equation. Firstly, India started to increasingly interfere in Kashmir’s internal politics in a way which fatally undermined the electoral credibility of the leading majority Muslim political party. By 1987 there were accusations of Indian government-backed electoral gerrymandering. With traditional politics discredited, anti-Indian protests erupted in Kashmir – and were violently suppressed by the authorities. Soon, the violence was spiralling out of control. Secondly the armed insurgency by Islamic militants (partly funded by the American CIA) against the Soviet-backed Afghan government in the 1980s, just a few hundred miles to the west of Kashmir, created a new Islamist jihadi momentum in the region which soon started to affect Kashmir. What’s more, when the Soviets (and their Afghan protégées) were defeated, many of the Islamist combatants merely transferred their attention to Kashmir. Some of them joined Lashkar e Toiba (the ‘Army of the Righteous’), one of the most active ‘Kashmir issue’ Islamist organisations. Founded in Afghanistan in 1991, Lashkar e Toiba has killed literally hundreds of civilians in terror attacks in Kashmir and elsewhere in India. So far, since 1989, more than 70,000 people have died as a result of the Kashmir conflict – the great majority in Kashmir itself. Many have been killed by Islamist and separatist terrorists. The rest – Muslim insurgents, anti-government demonstrators and others – have been killed by Indian security forces. Indeed, India now has an estimated 600,000 troops and paramilitary personnel in the troubled state. Just as significantly, the conflict continuously undermines the prospects for any rapprochement between India and Pakistan, both of which possess nuclear weapons, and has helped provide substantial opportunities for Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups to operate in the region. The current tension in the area follows India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s decision just over six months ago to strip the state of Jammu and Kashmir of the special status it has enjoyed since 1954. Up till last year, Jammu and Kashmir had had its own state constitution (quite separately from the Indian national constitution) and residents of other Indian states had not been allowed to buy land there, thus protecting the area’s Muslim demographic status quo. The Indian government’s decision earlier this month to revoke Kashmir’s special status, to scrap its existence as a state, and to impose virtual direct rule from New Delhi has infuriated the area’s Muslim majority. All telephone and internet connections were temporarily cut by the Indian authorities, a curfew imposed and hundreds of Kashmiris arrested. Some communications are still curtailed. The Indian move has delighted many Hindu nationalists throughout the subcontinent - but has also provided extreme Islamists worldwide with another cause to more aggressively exploit. What’s more, Asia’s superpower, China, has tended to take Pakistan’s side. For the time being there is no immediate likelihood of war again breaking out between India and Pakistan – but the extreme Islamist forces which India’s action has bolstered could well step up their often Pakistan-based terrorist activities against India and that could ultimately lead to conflict between South Asia’s two nuclear armed neighbours.