Author: Prem Shankar Jha
Publication: Outlook
Date: February 11, 2002
In his State of the Union message,
US President George W. Bush has once again showered extravagant praise
on Gen Pervez Musharraf for having become a born-again foe of terrorism.
To Indians this praise is passing strange, for it is being showered on
him for what he says he will do and not what he is doing. Musharraf and
his canny advisors have seized upon this to try and put India on the diplomatic
defensive once again. Since his January 12 address to Pakistan, Musharraf
has made two overtures to India to start withdrawing troops and resume
talks on all outstanding issues, including Kashmir. India has spurned both
overtures and test-fired the 750-km-range Agni-II in the bargain.
To the West, these actions have
made India look increasingly unreasonable. But the appearance is deceptive.
India has already responded positively to Musharraf's January 12 speech
and it has done so not in words but through actions. In spite of possessing
credible evidence that the terrorists who killed five policemen outside
the American Center in Calcutta on January 22 were affiliated to the Lashkar-e-Toiba
(LeT), New Delhi has carefully refrained from blaming the Pakistani government
of complicity. Had the outrage occurred a month earlier, it could have
pushed the two countries into open war.
The Vajpayee government remains
unrelenting on the issue of troop withdrawals as it is neither convinced
that Musharraf has any intention of curbing cross-border terrorism in Kashmir
nor that the US will push him to do so as it did in the case of Al Qaeda.
The decline in terrorist attacks in Kashmir is no greater so far this year
than in previous winters. There are indications that fewer of them are
fidayeen attacks but the change is not sufficiently marked for India to
draw any firm conclusions from it. India will therefore have to wait till
April to determine whether terrorism has indeed declined.
This is the main reason why New
Delhi is insisting on the extradition of 14 Indian nationals accused of
terrorist acts, who have been given shelter by Pakistan. If Pakistan were
to comply, this would give New Delhi the signal it is looking for. But
Musharraf has only said that he will examine the case for doing so. In
the meantime, Pakistani newspapers have reported that some, if not all
of the 14, have been sent out of Pakistan to Saudi Arabia and other destinations.
Unlike the US, New Delhi suspects
doublespeak in virtually everything Musharraf says and does. Musharraf
froze the accounts of three organisations declared terrorist by the US,
the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the LeT and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, well
before January 12. But the Pakistani paper, The News, reported on January
1 that two of these contained only $70 and $14. Bin Laden's own account,
maintained by Ayman al Zawahiri, contained only $252.
Musharraf has banned the LeT and
the JeM and placed their leaders under house arrest. But he has spared
the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Al Badr Mujahideen, which have in recent months
confined their terrorism to J&K.
Delhi's scepticism has been reinforced
by the fact that the Pakistani government has banned the LeT and the JeM
only in Pakistan proper and not in the parts of former Kashmir under its
control. Even within Pakistan, the police has only closed down the regional
and subordinate offices of the two organisations and not their headquarters
in Lahore and Karachi. All this has reinforced the suspicion that Musharraf's
main purpose is to herd the jehadis into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK)
and allow them to operate against India from there.
This had been Musharraf's idea even
pre-September 11. He had been urging the JeM and LeT to move their HQ to
Kashmir for over a year. In July, the government arrested several JeM and
LeT men in Sindh and extracted a promise to move to Kashmir before releasing
them.
Preparations for the shift had been
far advanced even in 'Azad' Kashmir, when the terrorists struck the US.
In June last year, the president of the Muzaffarabad-based Kashmir Muslim
Conference, Sardar Qayoom Khan, was forced to withdraw his candidacy for
the presidential elections in PoK. His place was taken by Maj Gen Anwar
Khan, who took premature retirement from the army in order to fight the
elections. Anwar Khan used to be a deputy director of Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate and is a cousin of Gen Muhammad Aziz, Musharraf's
former chief of staff, with whom he supposedly fell out in September 2000.
Aziz was transferred as corps commander to Lahore. Not too many people
know that this supposedly peace-time command was the nervecentre of the
ISI's activities in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
Musharraf's attempt to link withdrawal
of troops from the frontline to a comprehensive dialogue on Kashmir has
further reinforced Delhi's belief that he is only biding his time. By April,
when the snows melt and the passes open, he hopes to have convinced the
West through repeated offers of a dialogue that it is India that is being
totally unreasonable. Thus who can blame 'Kashmiris' if they take up the
gun again?
Although Bush and Tony Blair have
sworn till they are blue in the face that they make no distinction between
terrorism to the west and terrorism to the east of Peshawar, the fact is
that in praising Musharraf and, through their silences, criticising India,
they are doing precisely that. The more they do this the more do they increase
the chance of armed conflict. The threat of war that India unsheathed in
December is the last weapon in its diplomatic armoury. If it fails, there
will be left only the ultimatum and finally war itself. The more uncritical
the West becomes in its support of Musharraf, the more will it encourage
him to travel down the path he was already upon before December 11.
