Until the rains come …

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

The barbarous murder of Daniel Pearl was aimed at the regime of President Gen. Musharraf, a critical if sometimes compromised ally in the war on terrorism, as much as at the U.S. The whole episode dramatizes the struggle in Pakistan between [religious and ethnic] fanaticism and modernity.

Events in Karachi obscured unsettling developments in Pakistan’s Siamese twin, India, and its smaller neighbors, Nepal and Sri Lanka, which point toward other aspects of the ethnic and religious instability in the Subcontinent. And given the intimate history of these societies these developments will ricochet back and forth.

Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee’s BJP party which presides over an unstable 23-party coalition in New Delhi has just lost a series of state elections. Most importantly, it has done badly in Uttar Pradesh, the heartland of the north India Hindi-speaking belt where its Hindu revivalism roots sink deepest. Vajpayee’s party lost on the right to a more bellicose local party – pushing construction of a Hindu temple where fanatics destroyed a Moslem temple resulting in theworst clashes between Moslems and Hindus since the Partition riots at independence. Vajpayee’s party lost on the left as the 20 percent Moslem vote deserted to a “secular” regional party.. But with no majority in the legislature, the likelihood of musical chairs cabinets – or even “president’s rule” imposed by the central government – seems certain for the UP’s 120 million people.

More important, it puts into question Vajpayee’s unique role as a vote-getter, generally perceived as being more moderate than the mainstream of his party. And it will be argued that the party’s campaign which put forward the issues of terrorism and national security failed– notwithstanding the massive standoff of Indian and Pakistani armies with the threat of nuclear holocaust. Crucial was that the UP remains the heart of India’s poverty. The BJP’s promised liberalization of the Indian economy and massive foreign investment with growing prosperity [to match the remarkable development of the niche IT industry] has been slow coming. [Ironically, one of the first indicators of Enron’s troubles came with the collapse of its record-breaking investment in an Indian electrical generating project, overtaken by scandal and conflicting governmental jurisdictions, in a traditional Subcontinental farce.]

If Vajpayee hadn’t enough to worry about, a new wave of violence has swept India’s northern neighbor, Nepal. There self-proclaimed Maoists who have waged a decade-long campaign of grass roots reform and terrorism against the police and the royal government even successfully waged an intimidating strike in the capital, Katmandu. Nepalese affairs become almost domestic with an India-Nepalese border almost nonexistent. And although the Nepalese Maoist’s official line is contempt for China’s revisionist Communists, the competition between New Delhi and Beijing for influence in the Himalayan kingdom has been a constant since it came out of isolation in the 1950s. And it does not take too much imagination to see China trying to play a greater role in any new regime that might come about as a result of the largely – until now -- indigenous revolt. It could well be a Chinese counter to the warming U.S.-India military ties. [Chief of the joint chiefs Gen. Meyers just paid a New Delhi visit.]

To the south, there is ostensibly good news: the Sri Lankan government has made substantial concessions to the ITTE Tamil Tiger leadership, bowing to the effort of the Norwegians to find a negotiated settlement for the country’s ethnic divide that has seen 20 years of bitter warfare. But the ITTE leadership’s long record of ferocious violence – it virtually invented the personalized human suicide weapon – will not be easily overcome. [A Sri Lankan Tamil woman acting as a self-detonating bomb assassinated former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.] Just as the Norwegians’ brokered th now infamous Oslo Accords in the Israeli-PLO embroglio failed , their present attempts to find peace and justice in South Asia could, eventually, unleash even more violence. For at the heart of the ITTE revolt, is their effort to seduce the 65 million Tamils in India’s southern state of Tamilnadu, where their main logistics and financial lines already lead, to create a new, independent Greater Tamilnadu. As the Stalinists used to say, it is no accident that the ITTE’s demand that the negotiations take place in Tamilnadu has already put New Delhi in a quandary.

None of this should come as too much of a surprise for policymakers in Washington. The Indo-Pakistan subcontinent with its almost 1.5 billion people is the background against which events in Afghanistan have played out. It is going to be one of the Subcontinent’s longest, hotest springs. One can only hope that the traditional relief from tension that comes with the monsoon in early summer will this year bring at least some clearing of the political air as well.