India’s Failure of Imagination

Rohan Oberoi
Jul 2, 1999

No one in , it seems, has a clue what people across the border in are thinking.

has proclaimed himself mystified, and suggested that it may all be the fault of the "hawks" and the armed forces in who "did not like the climate of friendship" that was building up.

"Every time we extend a hand of friendship, the neighbour has only placed burning cinders on our hands," he declared recently.

Many have accused him of being a fool for taking the bus to . Others have praised his desire for but claim it was doomed by Pakistani hostility.

Indians variously attribute this Pakistani hostility to the Army and the ISI, to "hawks" in the , and to the Pakistani people as a whole. They have devoted much debate to trying to figure out whether the Kargil infiltration was planned by Nawaz Sharif, the Army, or some other shadowy figures in the Pakistani establishment.

Given the clarity and persistence with which Pakistanis have repeated their country's simple one-point position, and given the broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion that supports this position, this level of in is astounding.

It is almost as if we Indians have collectively decided to hold our hands over our ears and shout "La-la-la, I can't hear you" at the top of our voices whenever says anything. Whether from the left or the right, whether devoutly Islamic or staunchly secular, Pakistanis generally agree on two things.

One, they would like with . Two, the dispute stands in the way of .

These two clear and unambiguous points have consistently been reflected in Pakistani statements at all levels, from informal exchanges between journalists to Prime Ministerial dialogue.

Nawaz Sharif has stressed them; so has Najam Sethi, the Pakistani journalist whom Sharif's recently arrested and released for his anti-establishment views.

"The general view here among ordinary people", the Times of reported from the day before arrived in February, "is that they want to improve ties with but not at the cost of ."

"We want good relations with , but only after the problem is solved. Once this is done, we can live like good neighbours," said one Lahori, a taxi-driver, echoing the views of many.

Sharif made exactly these two points to at . Unfortunately, chose to listen to the first point (that wants ) and to put his hands over his ears when made the second point (that the dispute stands in the way of ).

A very large number of Indians did exactly the same at the time. They made pointed references to Sadat's visit to Begin. They talked in dreamy tones of historic turning points.

But they completely failed to listen when Sartaj Aziz noted pointedly that "Pakistani public opinion cannot indefinitely sustain a dialogue process that does not record substantive progress on the core issue of ".

To accuse of deceiving us now is to compound obtuseness with obstinacy. Our was told clearly that hostility between and could not end without some concessions on .

It chose, as previous Indian governments have always done, to make no concessions, to stand on all our 's hardened positions, and tell to "like it or lump it". The "dialogue" that it offered Sharif was: please keep talking to us; you can keep asking for concessions on , and we will keep refusing.

It seems not to have struck that while this kind of "dialogue" may be a pleasant way to pass the time for Indian diplomats, it is frustrating and politically unrewarding for the Pakistani , which faces strong pressure from within to do more about the dispute.

Clarity demands that Indians admit this basic fact to ourselves: Pakistani feelings are so strongly against on the issue that there will not be and friendship between the two countries unless we make concessions on .

We can choose a hard line on , but then we must also accept that we have chosen permanent hostility with . To make this choice and then act surprised when "pours burning cinders on our hands" is disingenuous and serves only to obscure the issue.

A goal doubly flawed


Until the 1990s the choice between obstinacy on the issue and with was a no-brainer. Since was weaker than us, having been defeated repeatedly in , and was incapable of causing us any serious trouble, Indian leaders saw no reason to make any concessions on .

However, they equally saw no reason to try to gain more land in , because the people of "Azad ", far from being eager to be "liberated" by us, were obviously hostile to . Capturing "Azad " would therefore only present with an indigestible and ungovernable security threat.

Therefore, 's successive governments made it their strategic goal simply to stabilise and legitimise the Partition of created by the ceasefire of 1948, which awarded us the bulk of Jammu and .

Unfortunately, this goal suffers from two fatal flaws.

The first fatal flaw is that it cannot be explicitly stated. This is because, if our claim to has any legal basis at all, that basis is Maharajah Hari Singh's Instrument of Accession (never mind that we refused to accept the Nawab of Junagadh's Instrument of Accession to as having any legal basis).

But the Instrument of Accession only speaks of the whole State of Jammu and , not of any Line of Control. To admit that we only want two-thirds of would be to admit that our claim is based only on a trial of strength, and has no legal validity of its own. That is a weak position on which to build a claim to .

Therefore, to uphold the "legitimacy" of our claim to any part of at all, the Indian is required to officially (and loudly) keep demanding "Azad " back, even though, privately, they want nothing of the kind.

This imperative prevents them from asking in public for the goal they desperately desire in private, viz. the formalisation of 's partition along the Line of Control.

The schizophrenia that this lends to diplomatic exchanges between and can only be imagined.

The second fatal flaw is that converting the Line of Control into an international border requires 's official assent. Since the Line of Control embodies a profoundly unfavourable situation, 's leaders have absolutely no incentive to confer the legitimacy of an international border on it.

Instead, they have a very good incentive to make every effort to alter the balance so that the Line of Control can eventually be rolled back to a position more favourable to .

Dreaming the impossible dream


After the , Indian leaders thought they could finally achieve the Partition of (and at least a quasi-formalisation of the Line of Control) by using the victory to force 's leaders to sign an agreement to respect the Line of Control and (under some, though not all interpretations) to stop calling for UN intervention.

That Agreement was the Shimla Agreement, which calls for the Line of Control to be respected in section 4(ii).

This solution had the defect of all solutions based solely on superior but not overwhelming force: once the was over, had no leverage to make adhere to it.

's leaders could reasonably point out that the Agreement was signed under duress, when ninety thousand Pakistani soldiers were Indian captives, and that it therefore did not have the force of an Agreement freely entered into by both sides.

While this doomed the Shimla Agreement from the start, 's own failure to adhere to the Agreement, most notably by its invasion of the Siachen Glacier area in 1984, helped bury it.

From the start, refused to implement articles 2, 3(i) and 3(ii) of the Shimla Agreement. These call, respectively, for the suppression of hostile propaganda against in the Indian press, and the resumption of open communications and links.

However, in 1984, by staging a pre-emptive operation to extend the Line of Control into the Siachen area where it was previously undefined, publicly and definitely violated both articles 1(ii) and 4(ii), which are central to our own attempt to legitimise the Line of Control through the Shimla Agreement.

Article 4(ii) declares that "neither side shall seek to alter [the Line of Control] unilaterally" and that "both sides undertake to refrain from the threat or the use of force", while Article 1(ii) states that "neither side shall unilaterally alter the situation" and that "both shall prevent ... any acts detrimental to the maintenance of peaceful and harmonious relations".

Since both sides, as well as , have violated the Shimla Agreement, it is a dead letter. The 's habit of referring repeatedly to the Shimla Agreement every time there is a disagreement with over is merely a desperate attempt to resurrect a dead through incantation.

The power of wishful thinking


Notwithstanding the failure of our long-term strategic goal of legitimising and formalising the Partition of at the Line of Control, the (and many other Indians) have managed to persuade themselves of the exact opposite.

That is, through what Jayaprakash Narayan in 1964 called "the power of auto-suggestion", they have managed to convince themselves that our earnestly desired though unstated goal (the conversion of the Line of Control into an international border) has been achieved, even though it has not.

By constant repetition, these people have so convinced themselves of this that their reaction to the Kargil infiltration was exactly as if had crossed an international border and invaded us. In their minds, the Line of Control has become an international border, and everything on this side of it has become the soil of the sacred motherland.

In actual fact, the Line of Control remains an ad hoc entity and lacks the status of a border in international -- as Bharat Karnad, a member of the National Security Council advisory board, pointed out recently in the press.

Therefore, it cannot serve as the boundary of any sacred motherland. For anyone to cross it is not an invasion, but merely an extension of the state of hostilities that created the Line of Control in the first place.

Our deteriorating advantage


In , enjoyed overwhelming superiority over . Since that was the last time and were in serious conflict, people have come to take this superiority as a of nature, rather than as simply the balance of advantage at a specific point in time.

That is a serious miscalculation.

Several things have happened since to eat into that advantage, but the three most important are the disastrous Siachen operation since 1984, the popular uprising in since 1990, and the conversion of and into declared nuclear powers in 1998.

The costs of Siachen.


has had to commit two divisions to the Siachen glacier since our forces occupied heights on the Saltoro ridge there in 1984. Two Indian divisions are committed to fighting there at positions up to 23,000 feet high (Mount Everest itself is 28,028 feet high) and occupying passes up to 19,000 feet high.

Hundreds of them die or are incapacitated every year by accidents and high altitude sicknesses. The of the Siachen glacier is now considered by analysts to have been 's worst adventure in recent decades.

's losses are much less, as has lower-altitude positions to hold (the Indian army having occupied most of the heights in 1984), and much better supply routes to the area.

An article in the International Defense Review in 1997 pointed out that, in Siachen, "'s losses (both in terms of men and equipment) are substantially less because its forces occupy the lower heights", and that "although the ever-growing Indian troop strength along Saltoro ridge has not been dislodged by any tactical assault, appears to be winning the Siachen as Indian troops suffer heavy casualties due to severe weather conditions".

The cost to of waging under these difficult conditions in Siachen is measured in money as well as lives. Analysts estimate that has to spend somewhere between $700,000 and one million dollars per day in Siachen operations, or close to 350 million dollars per year.

This may not be unrelated to the 's funding crunch, which has become so severe in recent years that Army troops in Kargil are reported to lack basic equipment, like Kevlar vests, night vision equipment, proper helmets and modern rifles, while their counterparts in the Air Force lack even inexpensive naphtha flares to confuse heat-seeking missiles.

The cost of disaffection


When Indian security forces under the orders of Governor Jagmohan massacred over a hundred unarmed Kashmiri protestors in the streets of Srinagar in January 1990, shooting at them from both sides of the Gawakadal bridge, disaffection that had been simmering since the blatantly rigged of 1987 turned into a massive uprising that demonstrated the total alienation of Kashmiris from .

"The alienation is now so deep and so pervasive", journalist Tavleen Singh wrote in her 1995 book on , "that it is hard to think of a single section of Kashmiri society that does not, in its way, support the freedom movement, except perhaps the one per cent that depended on tourism as their only source of livelihood."

Singh explains that this came about because of the indiscriminate repression that Indian security forces used to try to crush the uprising.

She writes of "the detention centres and the torture cells, the crackdowns that often result in youths being shot even before they are interrogated because 'informants' point them out from behind the tinted windows of police vans".

When three aircraft went down in Kargil, "it was literally like a celebration" in , according to another Indian journalist quoted by the New York Times, Surinder Oberoi, who has lived in Srinagar for almost a decade. People in , he said, "feel very happy when Indian soldiers are dead".

The result of this Kashmiri alienation (despite the further channeling of wishful thinking by the Indian into annual declarations that "the people are tired of militancy" and "the end of militancy is in sight) is that hundreds of thousands of soldiers and paramilitaries have to be deployed in the valley to control its .

Estimates of the total number of regular Army troops engaged in anti-insurgency duty in range as high as one-quarter of the entire Indian Army.

This is a huge commitment, which decreases the Army's ability to respond to other security threats and thereby severely undermines 's advantage vis-a-vis .

Since the Kargil crisis broke in May, the Army has become so short of troops on the border that it was forced to withdraw entirely from internal operations in the Valley, leaving the field to paramilitary forces like the Rashtriya Rifles, the CRPF, the BSF and other paramilitary forces.

Since these forces are less capable and less disciplined than the Army, they will be both more vulnerable to militant attack and more prone to engage in acts of indiscriminate brutality against civilians which in turn will further alienate the populace.

Less than two days after the Army was withdrawn, there are indications that both these dangers are already materialising. The BBC has reported that Indian security forces set fire to a market in Srinagar, burning fifty stalls, in retaliation for the shooting of one of their colleagues by a militant.

There have been several reports of members of the security forces being killed by militants in heavy fighting in the Valley in recent days. It is too early to predict how significant this factor will become.

The last and final point to consider on the costs of disaffection are that local people, alienated from , are ready to help not just local and foreign militants, but also , in fighting .

In the border area of Turtuk, 24 local people were arrested recently for conspiring with to infiltrate the area.

The authorities reacted by ordering every in the area to supply one for civil defence or pay a fine of 3,000 rupees.

That reinstituting the hated Dogra practice of "begar" might only further alienate the people, and make them more likely to help , does not seem to concern them.

The cost of nuclear arms


Immediately after exploded at Pokhran last year, hawks in the BJP like Home Minister L.K. Advani began making bellicose statements about "pursuing militants into -held ", and talking about how would now have to realise that it could not push around any more.

The reality, after responded with tests of its own, was exactly the opposite. Since both countries were nuclear armed, for either to mount conventional operations against the other would almost certainly risk a nuclear .

Even worse, from 's point of view (for the Jana Sanghis, to judge by the RSS mouthpiece Panchajanya's call to drop a bomb on , do not greatly fear the prospect of nuclear ) it would result in intervention by Western powers or the UN.

This would effectively "internationalise" the dispute, and turn the conflict from a bilateral face-off (in which has the advantage of being able to deploy superior forces against at least on the Punjab border) to a mediated dispute (where 's advantages would be nullified).

's options are now, therefore, so tightly constrained that it cannot cross the Line of Control even to cut off supply lines to intruders who are already on this side of the Line.

An intolerable situation


The Kargil infiltration has brought into sharp relief the deteriorating situation that the combination of these three factors (Siachen, the Kashmiri uprising, and the nuclear tests) have created for the Indian Army. In the last month, it has proved to be short of troops, short of equipment, short of training, and short of options.

It is reduced to publicly begging the to let it cross the Line of Control to deal with the intruders, which the has so far been unable to let it do.

While the infiltrators kill Indian attackers "like dogs" from the Kargil heights they have occupied, their missiles limit the effectiveness of the Air Force.

From statements the Army has made, it seems they have little confidence that they will be able to "throw the infiltrators out" by winter (let alone in 48 hours, as the initially promised).

If they do manage to, it will come as a welcome boost to the ; but this would by no means be the last problem for in , since the basic problem of 's hostility (and therefore willingness to keep testing our defences) will remain unsolved.

"Even if manages to drive out all the Mujahideen from that area", ran an editorial in The Nation, , "it will be a pyrrhic victory and will remain a bleeding wound for . Any that such a victory, if won at all, will make forget , will be in vain. Militancy will continue to grow and other Kargils will keep coming."

And, whether or not Operation Vijay is successful, will be condemned to another ruinously costly year-round security operation in Kargil which analysts have warned could be "a Siachen multiplied by eight times". Already, the operation is estimated to cost around 4 million dollars per day, which is over four times the cost of
Siachen.

An abject failure of


Faced with the situation getting worse and worse, 's , instead of recognising the deficiencies of their policies, have only retreated further into them.

Thus we are faced with the such paralysis of action that the refuses to talk to at all -- because wants to talk about all , while our are prepared to talk only about Kargil.

We are faced with such comical sights as the looking to the United States and the G-8 to pressure to end the Kargil infiltration, while at the same time declaring that the situation will not be "internationalised".

If all this were not bad enough, Home Minister Advani has just warned Indians that they should "be prepared to face" the prospect of a nuclear with .

What sort of preparations we should make he did not specify. Presumably he means we should prepare to meet our Maker.

When our Home Minister sees fit to warn his constituents that they are in serious danger of extermination by mushroom cloud, it becomes clear that the country's basic security strategy is not merely flawed, but stands discredited as a total, complete, utter and abject failure.

The first thing to do is to recognise that our strategic goal of partitioning along the Line of Control has failed. It is no closer to achievement than it was when the ceasefire was called in 1948. Fifty years is a long enough chance to give a before declaring it failed.

The only alternative which is discussed at all in the is "to reclaim" Azad . This is even less palatable now than it was before 1990. With a huge security problem in the Valley, we are in even poorer shape to deal with the huge security problem that "pacifying" Azad would represent than we were before 1990.

About face


When rethinking our from first principles, it is worth considering that "good" security policies involve clearly defined and universally accepted borders, good relations with neighbouring countries, and a calm internal situation.

Our in has gone out of its way to violate all three of these rules. It has been based on an officially unrecognised and mutually disputed border (the Line of Control); it has invited unremitting Pakistani hostility by refusing to compromise; and it has created a huge internal security problem by using heavy-handed tactics against Kashmiri political protests.

That we need with is not a radical or theoretical statement: the euphoria over 's trip to showed that many people feel it viscerally.

"There is by and large a consensus in ", an editorial in the Deccan Herald pointed out at the time, "that animosity with is not in the country's best interests and should be avoided".

The problem is that 's political leadership has based our in on , schizophrenia and arrogance, and has utterly failed to explain to the public that there will be no with without compromise on .

Fortunately, has had men of vision and courage who have pointed the way to a less confrontationist . Chief among them was our freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan, who in 1964 took up the cause of a peaceful and honourable settlement of the dispute in two articles in the Hindustan Times that generated a fierce controversy.

A settlement of the problem, Jayaprakash pointed out, would require to take a principled and moral position, and not a hardened or legalistic one.

"In human affairs no has an important role to play, but it has its limits. Morality and human transcend the limits of and take precedence over it. Nor is it a question of any 'one's personal views of what is moral.' It is not at all difficult to identify what civilisation in this age considers moral. It was Mahatma who devoted his whole life to spiritualise politics.

It is sad to find that in a decade and a half leaders (one hopes their number is limited) of the organisation which he built up have come to sneer openly at morality and humanism."

He noted that from a human perspective the problem had never really been resolved.

"[I]t has always seemed to me to be a lie to say that the people of had already decided to integrate themselves with . They might do so, but they have not done so yet. Apart from the quality of the , the future of the State of Jammu and was never made an electoral issue at any of them."

Decades before Kargil showed us how unsettled and dangerous it has proved, Jayaprakash criticised 's unspoken "Line of Control Partition" for .

"The last and final slogan raised in the ballyhoo is that there is no question at all and that if there was one at any time, it has now been settled once and for all. is a part of and that is a fact of history, they say. That, I think, is the worst form of auto-suggestion. The slogan-raisers forget that less than half of the State of Jammu and is under the of .

Has that been accepted as settled fact? If so, when, and where? If not, how is the issue of settled, except in the private thoughts of those who believe that 'we shall keep what we have' and 'they shall keep what they have.'"

He criticised the convenient assumption, used to this day to stifle rational debate about , that opening 's status to any negotation

"...would start the process of disintegration of the country. Few things have been said in the course of this controversy more silly than this one. The assumption behind the argument is that the States of are held together by force and not by the sentiment of a common nationality. It is an assumption that makes a mockery of the Indian nation and a tyrant of the Indian state."

Finally, Jayaprakash never forgot how important it was to 's security to have friendly relations with , and to be prepared to do what it takes to achieve that.

"The question whether settlement of the problem would establish friendship between and may be debated, but it cannot be denied that it would go a long way towards that goal, as also create international conditions that will necessarily promote that friendship. I do fervently that our leaders would have the vision and the statesmanship that this historic moment demands."

Nobody in 1964 had that vision or statesmanship. We don't have any leaders with vision or statesmanship in 1999 either, but we do have something else: the threat of nuclear annihilation, or at least of nuclear .

If a healthy fear of that kind of destruction can make us take Jayaprakash's advice and turn away from the path of vainglorious and truculent acquisitiveness in , it will have achieved much.

But, if it cannot, then we had better take Mr. Advani's advice and prepare ourselves for incineration.