B. Vivekanandan
K.M Seethi, Enduring Dilemma: Flashpoints in Kashmir and India-Pakistan Relations, New Delhi: Knowledge World Publishers, 2021, pp. xv + 274.
Facts reveal that Kashmir was made a contentious issue in India–Pakistan bilateral relations by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Nehru took the crucial personal decision in May 1948, after the unconditional accession of Jammu and Kashmir, on 26 October 1947, with India, when the Indian Army was successfully driving out the Pakistani intruders from the whole of Kashmir. Before the completion of that task, Nehru ordered the Indian army to stop its operation and unilaterally created a cease-fire line inside the Indian territory of Kashmir. Significantly, Nehru insisted on stopping the army operations, when Major General Kalwant Singh, Commander of the Indian Army in Kashmir, was pleading with Nehru to allow him to advance and to give him five more days to complete the task, and to bring the entire Kashmir under India’s possession and control. He told Nehru: “There is no resistance anywhere but the terrain is difficult. We have to climb it up to reach the Pakistan borders”, for which he requested five more days of operations. But Nehru said ‘No,’ and asked Kalwant Singh to stop operations, and “stay where you are.” As per Nehru’s orders, the Indian Army lined up at the point where they reached at that time inside Kashmir. When the Pakistani intruders and the Pakistan Army saw the Indian Army voluntarily stopped its operation and lined up inside Kashmir, the Pakistan Army personnel, who ran out from Kashmir to the other side of Pakistan earlier, re-entered Kashmir and formed a parallel line inside Kashmir. That is the present cease–fire Line, or Line of Control, in Kashmir. Thus, an unnecessary Kashmir problem was created by voluntarily allowing the Pakistan Army to peacefully re-enter and occupy part of Kashmir, and to make it a disputed territory, for which Pakistan has no legitimate claim to make under international law.
K.M. Seethi’s scholarly book, Enduring Dilemma: Flashpoints in Kashmir and India-Pakistan Relations, has analyzed the trajectory of how the ramifications of the Kashmir issue have bedevilled India-Pakistan relations since independence, how it acquired an international dimension, and how it adversely affected the security environment in South Asia. This core element, flagged in the sub-title of this book, has been analyzed in the last chapter, (Chapter 6) of the book.
Seethi is a specialist in India-Pakistan relations. Indeed, a substantial portion of this book deals with developments in the bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan since 1947, preceded by the description of prolonged nurturing of the communal divide by the British colonists, as part of their strategy of divide and rule, expressed, through the partition of Bengal in 1905, the introduction of the separate electorate in 1909, support for the establishment of the Muslim League in 1906, the Communal Award Britain announced in 1930, and so on. The British patronage, embedded in all these divisive measures, culminated in the partition of India at the time of independence. A new nation, Pakistan, with two parts — West and East –separated by 1000 miles in between, was created.
The book explains the social and economic consequences of partition for India and Pakistan and underlines that partition was unscientific and did not solve even the Hindu-Muslim question, since millions of Muslims continued to live in India in harmony. It created more new problems for both nations. Their threat perceptions and bilateral relations were conditioned by suspicion and mistrust. Their relationship soon fell into the track of deterrence doctrine.
What happened to their bilateral relationship since then has been vividly explained in the first five chapters of this book. Episodes explained in this context, encompassed various wars and skirmishes, including the 1965 India-Pakistan War, the Indo-Pak War on Bangladesh in 1971, the Kargil War in 1999, and the peace declaration made at Tashkent in 1966, and the Shimla agreement signed in 1972. But, commitments made in them for peaceful settlement of all disputes, remained neglected.
Similarly, the book explains various measures which were taken to normalize the relationship between India and Pakistan. Apart from Tashkent Declaration and Shimla Agreement, positive measures were taken by Indian Prime Ministers like Morarji Desai and Atal Behari Vajpayee, who reached out to Pakistan leadership, to build up trust and cooperation between India and Pakistan. The trust established between Prime Minister Morarji Desai and President General Zia-Ul-Haq remained short-lived, as Morarji Government fell in 1979, before the completion of its 5-year term, and Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, and adopted an unhelpful attitude to Pakistan, in the wake of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1980. The fact that General Zia-Ul-Haq conferred “Nishan-e-Pakistan,” the highest civilian award of Pakistan equal to Bharat Ratna in India, to Morarji Desai, showed the spirit of trust and confidence the Pakistan President reposed on the Indian Prime Minister. Similarly, a decade later, the goodwill generated by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s bus journey from Wagah Border to Lahore, and the Lahore Declaration of 1998 that entailed, when Nawas Shariff was the Prime Minister, was torpedoed by the Kargil War of 1999, planned and executed by the Pakistan army chief, Parvez Musharraf, without the knowledge of Prime Minister Nawas Shariff.
After General Parvez Musharraf captured power in Pakistan, through a military coup, in October 1999, there was a spurt in terrorist activities across the Line of Control in Kashmir. The Pakistani terrorist attack on the Jammu Kashmir Legislative Assembly in Srinagar in 2001, killing more than 3 dozen people, was one. The terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, on 13 December 2003, by Lashkar-e-Thaiba and Jaishe Mohammad, was another. The terrorist attack in Bombay on 26 November 2008, killing more than 160 people, etc; had put India-Pakistan relations in an unfavourable setting. India wanted Pakistan to take firm action against the terrorist groups in Pakistan. But that has not been done. As a result, the terrorist attacks on the selected targets in Jammu and Kashmir, and India continue unabated. Indeed, today the Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK)is a safe haven for all militant groups, which wage terrorist attacks against India across the Line of Control.
In the last Chapter of the book, “Flashpoints in Kashmir,” the author characterized India’s partition as a tragedy since the partition did not produce any positive results. Though their common civilizational past demands an organic relationship between India and Pakistan, power elites, especially the military in Pakistan, did not allow such a relationship to grow. They used the Kashmir issue as their trump card to appropriate political power in Pakistan, from time to time. All it brought about was to put India – Pakistan relations in a frame of perpetual hostility, which entailed a huge, rather wasteful, annual military expenditure for both countries, at the expense of peace, tranquillity, and welfare of their people.
The chapter gives details of various futile discussions between India and Pakistan on the Kashmir issue in the 1950s and 1960s. It gives also details of accords signed by the Government in New Delhi regarding the governance of Jammu and Kashmir, including the details of the 6-point accord signed, in February 1975, between Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Abdullah, confirming the continued governance of Jammu and Kashmir, under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.
This Chapter surveys also the Kashmir issue in the context of India-Pakistan relations under different regimes in both countries, and after both countries acquired nuclear weapon capabilities. It also explains how outside powers like China, the United States, and the Soviet Union, exploited the situation and used the opportunity to meddle in the affairs of the Indian subcontinent. The Chapter gives a detailed analysis of the human security situation in Jammu and Kashmir.
The author of this book, K .M. Seethi, is an accomplished academic, with a forward-looking positive mind, who has undertaken this study after consulting a lot of authentic sources on the subject, not only to present India –Pakistan relations, and the Kashmir issues as a factor of it, in perspective but also to explore a durable solution to it. He has an objective approach and presents his ideas candidly. According to the author, a durable, democratic, and peaceful solution to the Kashmir problem can be found on the basis of human security, in the wider sense of the term, in Jammu and Kashmir. He says:
The fundamental solution…lies not in finding out the best possible military strategy vis-a-vis Pakistan and Pakistan-backed terrorists, but in developing a mature, people-centric democratic option that will deliver good to the people of Kashmir who have been driven from pillar to post during the last seven decades. Unless India is able to do this, it will have to face more conflicts, wars, intrusions, more cross-border tensions, and, perhaps, the worst scenario of human rights violations and abuses in Kashmir (p.220).
A notable drawback in this well-intentioned proposal is the absence of a modus operandi of how to achieve it, in the present context, when India and Pakistan follow a deterrent strategy in their security relations.
The larger issue the book raises is, whether the rivalry-based relationship between India and Pakistan, on narrowly based religious considerations, has done any good to the people of India and Pakistan, and especially to the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The answer is, ‘No’. Then how to move ahead is the question posed. While reading, I noticed a couple of mistakes in this book. On page 123, there is a reference to US President Kennedy’s advice to Pakistan president General Ayub Khan, during the 1962 India-China war, not to create any problem for India in the Western Sector during India’s war with China, and that “ Ayub Khan expressed his inability to accept Kennedy’s suggestion”. This observation is incorrect. My studies show that President Ayub Khan accepted Kennedy’s advice on the matter and gave a verbal assurance, to that effect, to him, and kept his word throughout India’s war with China in 1962.
Similarly, on page 124, there is a reference to Jawaharlal Nehru’s writing to Kennedy requesting him to send twelve squadrons of supersonic fighters to India during the Sino-Indian conflict in 1962. In his letter to John F Kennedy and Harold Macmillan, sent on 19 November 1962, Nehru’s request to them was not for “twelve” but for “fifteen” squadrons of the airforce. Another significant drawback of this book is that it has no ‘Index’. These drawbacks apart, this is an excellent book on India-Pakistan relations and the Kashmir question. It is worth discussing the contents of this book at various levels.
The review article first appeared in ‘India Forward.’
B. Vivekanandan is a former Professor and Chairperson of the Centre for American and West European Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has also been Visiting Professor at Carleton University and the University of Helsinki, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His latest works include ‘The Welfare State System and Common Security: A Global Vision for a Common Future.’
