The Indo-Pakistan quagmire

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

While the U.S. focused on Israel-Palestine, Washington becomes increasingly involved in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. Recent assurances from American officials that war has been averted but that grave danger continues are at best an understatement.

For while President-Gen. Musharraf struggles with ethnic quarrels and battles the small but potent radical Islamicists trying to bring down his regime, India is moving in an opposite direction. The appointment of Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani as IndiaÕs deputy prime minister moves toward its Hindu activists. Advani comes out of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS], the paramilitary Hindu revivalists that gave rise to the present Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] which heads a fragile coalition of two dozen parties.

It was Advani who led the destruction of a mosque in the ancient city of Ayodhya, arguing it had been built by IndiaÕs Moslem Moghul emperors on the site of the birthplace of Ram, one of the principle Hindu deities. Thousands died in the resulting bloody Hindu-Moslem riots ø the worst since independence. Another RSS stalwart as governor of relatively prosperous Gujarat presided over a pogrom against Moslems this spring until torrential monsoon rains finally squelched it. It had begun with a barbarous Moslem attack, probably traced to Osama Ben LadinÕs terrorists, on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims who had been in Ayodhya. Advani as Home Minister refused to intervene and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee made compromising statements for which he has apologized. Despite calls from civil rights groups, Vajpayee refused to suspend the state government ø a ÒnormalÓ crisis procedure ø and replace it with PresidentÕs rule.

Ironically, it is IndiaÕs electoral system, which feeds this growth in intolerance and could precipitate even further violence. It was AdvaniÕs Hindutuva [the revivalist Hindu ethos] line which is credited with giving the BJP its first plurality in the 1989 elections, making it a national party managing IndiaÕs volatile coalitions, often composed of diametrically opposed ideological and regional parties. The BJP lost heavily in this springÕs states elections ø including in the Hindi-speaking heartland in the north seen as the RSS/BJP base. Those losses combined with persistent reports Vajpayee, always considered moderate front man for the BJP, is ill. Now Advani appears his successor if the BJP recoups in the national elections bearing down in October, whatever develops with Pakistan.

Musharraf, who has promised a return to parliamentary government albeit his continuance in office as president with power to dismiss the prime minister, appears to be waging a sincere effort to root out Islamic radicalism. But with the possibility that significant numbers of Al Qaeda escaped the U.S. net to settle into the Pakistan tribal areas abutting Afghanistan, he has his hands full. He is not helped by U.S. media publicity of about the derring-do of American military, the FBI and CIA inside Pakistan. There is some hint ø as in the affair of the murdered Wall St. Journal reporter ø that the Islamic .fundamentalists and the old Pakistan Communist-led nationalists arecollaborating. [The later tried to pull PakistanÕs first pro-Moscow coup in 1956.]

India and Pakistan may best be characterized as Siamese twins and the separation has left its scars. It is another irony that both Musaharraf, whose family comes from the old Indian Moslem center of Lucknow], and Advani, a Sindhi who hails from Karachi, were displaced in the cataclysm that followed Partition. Despite the creation of Pakistan, India probably has more than 150 million Moslems, more than Pakistan. And the terrorist attack on Parliament earlier this year, which came close to annihilating the Indian leadership, whoever its direction, had local Moslem collaboraters.

That is why any deterioration of the communal situation in either country plays itself out on the international scene. There are those who project a Nixon-to-China thesis about Advani, that is, that only a Hindu revivalist can make the concessions to Pakistan, particularly on predominantly Moslem Kashmir, necessary for compromise. And it may be significant that the RSS in its annual convention this week adopted a resolution calling for the trifurcation of the present Kashmir state into the Moslem Vale, the Hindu Jammu and the Buddhist Ladkh [where India has a longstanding dispute with neighboring China in Tibet]. The RSS has often set the agenda for the BJP.

Deputy Sec. of State Armitage recently hinted that U.S. efforts to defuse the conflictø and the threat of a nuclear exchange hanging over it ø might go further than exhortation. But India has always steadfastly opposed mediation or arbitration. And all this now as been complicated by the threat of the New Delhi-supported Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, heir to his father, a legendary Moslem leader in pre-independence days, to abandon his pro-India stance.[He wanted to be made vice president.] With the prospect of fair and open elections in Kashmir with international scrutiny if not formal observation, a majority might vote for independence/adherence to Pakistan.

That's why the Israeli-Palestinian problem sometimes looks to Old India hands like a relatively simple problem compared to what the U.S. seems to be taking on in South Asia.