[Assam] Now Try This

[Chan Mahanta]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/opinion/02mishra.html

Pankaj Mishra has put his finger squarely on the real issue.  But 
even he must not have heard of Assam.

cm


Fresh Blood From an Old Wound

By PANKAJ MISHRA
Published: December 1, 2008
MIDWAY through last week's murderous rampage in Mumbai, one of the 
suspected gunmen at the besieged Jewish center called a popular 
Indian TV channel. Speaking in Urdu (the primary language of Pakistan 
and many Indian Muslims), he ranted against the recent visit of an 
Israeli general to the Indian-ruled section of the Kashmir Valley. 
Referring to the Pakistan-backed insurgency in the valley, and the 
Indian military response to it, he asked, "Are you aware how many 
people have been killed in Kashmir?"
In a separate phone call, another gunman invoked the oppression of 
Muslims by Hindu nationalists and the destruction of the Babri Mosque 
in Ayodhya in 1992. Such calls were the only occasions on which the 
militants, whom initial reports have tied to the Pakistani jihadist 
group Lashkar-e-Taiba, offered a likely motive for their 
indiscriminate slaughter. Their rhetoric seems all too familiar. 
Nevertheless, it shows how older political conflicts in South Asia 
have been rendered more noxious by the fallout from the "war on 
terror" and the rise of international jihadism.
Pakistan, a nation-state founded on Islam, has long claimed 
Muslim-majority Kashmir, and has fought three wars with India over it 
since 1947. In the early 1990s, as an anti-India insurgency in 
Kashmir intensified, groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba became the Pakistani 
government's proxies in its war of attrition with its neighbor.
American pressure after 9/11 forced Pakistan's president, Pervez 
Musharraf, to ban Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had developed links with the 
Taliban and Al Qaeda. With General Musharraf's departure from office 
in September, it would be no surprise if this turned out to be the 
Muslim group's first major atrocity since 2001.
Pakistan's new civilian government is too weak to control either the 
extremist groups within the country or the various rogue elements 
within its military and intelligence. The American military was 
reported to have started bombing supposed terrorist hideouts inside 
Pakistan's borders even as General Musharraf stumbled to the exit. As 
its increasingly desperate pleas to the Bush administration to stop 
the attacks go unheeded, Pakistan's government appears pathetically 
helpless to its own citizens.
The sense of humiliation and impotence that this loss of sovereignty 
creates in Pakistan, a country with a strong tradition of populist 
nationalism, cannot be underestimated.
Meanwhile, India's influence in Afghanistan has grown as it pours 
reconstruction money into the country, as have its military ties with 
Israel. Add to this the Bush administration's decision to reward 
India with an extraordinarily generous nuclear deal and to more or 
less ignore Kashmir, where in August Indian security forces brutally 
suppressed the biggest nonviolent demonstrations in the valley's 
history, and recent attacks against the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the 
Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, and now in Mumbai begin to appear to be 
connected by more than chronology.
Meanwhile, Indian intelligence experts and others suspect that 
jihadists and disaffected members of Pakistan's armed forces and 
intelligence agencies have forged closer links and, as the string of 
recent bomb attacks on Indian cities reveals, are rapidly making new 
allies among the 13 percent of Indians who are Muslim.
It is very likely that Barack Obama will take a different tack from 
the Bush administration in antiterrorism efforts in South Asia. In an 
interview with MSNBC last month, he said that his administration 
would encourage India to solve the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, so 
that Islamabad can cooperate with the United States in Afghanistan.
The idea that the road to stability in South Asia goes through 
Kashmir is as persuasive as the notion that the path to peace in the 
Middle East goes through Jerusalem. It is also equally hard to 
realize. Mr. Obama could act quickly to stem growing extremism in 
Pakistan and strengthen civilian authority by ending American missile 
attacks within its borders and shifting the allied strategy in 
Afghanistan away from military force and toward political 
nation-building and economic reconstruction. At the same time, he 
will have to find a solution in Kashmir that endows its Muslims with 
a measure of autonomy while pacifying extremists in both India and 
Pakistan.

The new president's moral and intellectual authority will be vital in 
negotiations with India, which, like China regarding Tibet, adamantly 
rejects third-party mediation in Kashmir. Mr. Obama could point out 
the obvious to Indian leaders: they have paid a huge price for their 
intransigence over Kashmir, with an estimated 80,000 dead in the 
valley in the last two decades and a resultant rise in terrorist 
attacks across India.

Indeed, the outrage in Mumbai is the latest and clearest sign that 
the price of India's uncompromising stance on Kashmir has become too 
high, imperiling its economy as well as its security. Indian anger 
over the fumbling response to the brazen attacks disguises the 
panicky realization that there can be no effective defense against 
terrorists in a country with a long coastline and densely populated 
cities. The best India can hope for is to improve what Ratan Tata - 
the country's leading industrialist and the owner of last week's main 
terrorist target, Mumbai's Taj hotel - calls "crisis management."
As the economy falters (Mumbai's stock market has lost nearly 60 
percent of its value this year), India can barely cope with homegrown 
violent movements like the Maoist insurgency in its central states, 
which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described as the biggest 
internal security threat to India since independence.
Pointing to the Bush administration's vigorous response to 9/11, 
Indian commentators lament that India is a "soft state," unable to 
defend itself from internal and external enemies. But India cannot 
turn into a "hard" state without swiftly undermining its secular, 
multicultural democracy.
The government has already experimented with draconian laws like the 
Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act of 2002, which among other 
measures allowed the police to hold suspects without charge for six 
months. It was repealed in 2004 after many abuses against Muslims 
were revealed. While these attacks may lead to calls for more tough 
measures, Indians cannot lose sight of the peril that 150 million 
Muslims would lose their faith in India's political and legal system. 
And it is obviously dangerous to threaten Pakistan, a nuclear-armed 
state, with war.
As president, Mr. Obama could conceivably persuade India and Pakistan 
to see the virtue of a political solution to Kashmir. But he would 
first have to set an example by rejecting the false assumptions of a 
global war on terrorism based primarily on military force - 
assumptions that the elites of powerful countries with restive 
minorities like India, China and Russia have eagerly embraced since 
9/11.
"The people of India deeply love you," Prime Minister Singh said to 
President Bush in September while thanking him for the nuclear deal. 
Yet it is President-elect Obama who has the opportunity to create 
deeper and more enduring alliances for the United States in South 
Asia - and he should start with Kashmir.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to Be 
Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond."