The Indo-Pak vortex speeds up

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

An old cliché says nothing much ever happens in the Indian Subcontinent and when it does it moves ever so slowly. [A 1960s strike of all government employees including the police in India’s teeming Uttar Pradesh lasted for six weeks. Nothing much happened.] But while Washington‘s attention is on the Israel crisis, the situation in the Indian Subcontinent becomes more critical.

In Pakistan, Gen. Musharraf engages in a complex balancing act, trying to move one of the most important Moslem states toward moderation and stability. Intimately tied to this is Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee balancing between Hindu orthodoxy politics and its rightwing extremists.

Musharraf moved quickly by Subcontinental standards after 9/11 to pull Pakistan back from its extended flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism allied to the Taliban regime it had helped construct in Afghanistan. He has imprisoned radical Islamacist elements, including leadership of anti-Indian Kashmir terrorists operating from Pakistan. And he has twice purged elements of Pakistan’s security forces closely allied with the Taliban and Al Qaida. He has permitted the FBI to pursue remnants of Al Qaida in Pakistan, excluding his own security forces infiltrated by the Islamacists from the action. [Unfortunately, he admitted publicly ineptitude of his police in these actions.] And he has okayed “hot pursuit” by US forces in Afghanistan against Al Qaida remnants that use remote and inaccessible Pakistan [and Iranian and Central Asian] borders to escape. These are all concessions – even though they strengthen the campaign against his and the US’ common enemies – extremely difficult because they lend credence to radicals’ charges of foreign domination.

But at the same time, he refused to extradite the alleged leader of the butchers of Wall St. Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, choosing to try him in Pakistan. Musharraf also refuses to turn over to the Indians 20 alleged terrorists. While he has reinstituted some local government and promised elections for a national assembly in October, he has suggested a referendum may be held in May in an effort to legitimize [and lengthen] his presidency. These concessions are to Pakistani critics [some he has banned from holding future office] and the human rights advocates around the world.

Musharraf has not been able to stem domestic terrorism – exploiting pro-Osama sentiment among a small, vociferous Pakistan minority, but also ethnic and religious feuds that for a decade have taken a heavy toll. And terrorism like the massacre in a Christian church within sight of the US embassy, forced Washington to take new security precautions. The fact that the whole gang who butchered Pearl has not been captured is an indictment of both the extent of infiltration of Pakistan government and the perniciousness of the terrorist threat everywhere.

While all this has been going on in Pakistan, events in India have taken a downturn. Prime Minister Vajpayee, long seen as a moderate in his own BJP party, lost a series if provincial elections, the latest in New Delhi itself, long a stronghold of the Hindu revivalism on which the Party came to power. Vajpayee’s coalition of more than 30 parties is shakier than ever.

For more than a month, Gujarat, considered one of India’s most stable provinces [home of Mahatma Gandhi], has had bloody Hindu- Moslems rioting. The central government has been paralyzed, critical of the lack of effort of the chief minister to get the rioting under control, but reluctant to intervene since the state’s chief executive comes from the RSS. The RSS is a radical Hindu paramilitary organization – only recently it said India’s 150 million Moslems’ security depended on the goodwill of the Hindu majority – which founded Vajpayee’s BJP as its political arm. Ten years ago its militants destroyed a mosque said to be built on the site of a former Hindu temple at the birthplace of an Indian god. That led to the worst Hindu-Moslem conflict since partition in 1948 when Pakistan was carved out of old British India and tens of thousands died in communal slaughter. Now the Hindu radicals threaten to rebuild the Hindu temple that could set off a new round of nationwide violence.

Vajpayee, the moderate vote getter for his Party, is ill, waffles on all the issues. And Defense Minister Fernandes, something of a loose cannon, implicated in a corruption scandal, feuding with some of his top generals, refuses to stand down the Indian army deployed on the Pakistan border. In Kashmir, the center of Indo-Pakistan conflict, the daily killing continues, the latest an attack on a Hindu temple. Just as Kashmir remains the focal point for India-Pakistan conflict, but the links are so strong that any domestic event in one country ha an immediate impact on the other. As events speed up, the possibility of a new, fourth Indo-Pak war, and an accidental nuclear exchange, does not recede.