With low cunning and little ill-earned cash, the forest guards at Dachigam National Park crafted the plot on which the fate of Kashmir rested. As the avid hunter Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev stared out through the sights of his hunting rifle, a Himalayan black bear was to wander up and martyr itself for India-Soviet relations. Lacking a volunteer, the story goes, the forest guards purchased a bear from a circus in Amritsar. The animal was caged near Khrushchev’s hunting-perch—and let loose at just the right time.
Then the plan went horribly wrong: The bear grabbed a forest guard’s bicycle and began demonstrating his circus-riding skills before the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Earlier this week, as officials from 29 nations and special invitees visited Kashmir for the G20 meeting, a new generation of diplomats was introduced to the yarn, spun from fine scotch, imagination—and a few kernels of bitter truth.
Khrushchev’s visit in December 1955 came at a time of dangerous diplomatic isolation for India on Kashmir—a time hard to imagine today. Although many of the countries which attended the Srinagar G20—including the United States—do not share India’s position on Kashmir, they are clearly friends of the territorial status quo.
Five nation-states choosing to absent themselves from the meeting might not seem a lot—but they warn of dangers ahead. Even though India has made deep investments in its relationship with Saudi Arabia, Riyadh chose not to attend, together with invited states Egypt and Oman. Turkey, another important pole of Middle East power, has lined up with Kashmiri secessionists. This shows that Kashmir is still seen through the prism of religious identity in the Middle East.
And history demonstrates that the support of the superpower—in this case, China, which denounced holding the G20 meeting in Kashmir—can encourage Pakistan to resume nurturing jihadists, even risk war.
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The bear hug
Like imperial potentates, Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin and his colleague Khrushchev were rowed through silk-lined archways on the Jhelum on a specially-built boat crewed by liveried oarsmen. Thousands lined the Srinagar riverbank in the frigid cold to cheer the leaders. Kashmir’s then-Prime-Minister, Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, famously stuffed a gushtaba meatball into Khrushchev’s mouth at a lavish dinner.
“The Kashmir issue has already been settled by the people of Kashmir themselves,” Bulganin recorded in a report to the Soviet government, “and they regard themselves as part of the Republic of India.”
Little attention had, in fact, been paid to the Kashmir issue by Soviet diplomats in the first years of the Cold War. The Soviet delegate to the United Nations did not intervene during the discussions on the conflict in 1948. The country abstained from the Security Council resolution of 1951, which called for the demilitarisation of Kashmir and a plebiscite on its future.
Early in that decade, though, Soviet leaders became increasingly concerned over the emerging relationship between the United States and Pakistan. From 1954, the United States began to pump in weapons for the Pakistan army, seeking to develop it into a network of staging posts against Soviet expansion, together with Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.
In 1957, the Soviet Union vetoed resolutions supported by the United States and the United Kingdom seeking that the Security Council consider the use of military force to conduct a plebiscite.
Through the next decade, though, it became clear to Indian leaders that a bear hug wasn’t enough to protect Kashmir. Fears that Kashmir’s then-Prime Minister, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, was reigniting secessionism had led to his arrest in 1953. Low-grade terrorism backed by Pakistan had been contained by his successor, Bakshi, and Kashmir’s constitutional integration with India was completed.
In 1963, though, the theft of a holy relic from the shrine of Hazratbal led to large-scale violence that swept the administration aside. The crisis was correctly understood as the consequence of simmering political anger, and Abdullah was released from prison in 1964.
Following the war of 1965, historian JA Naik has recorded, the Soviets determined that India and Pakistan should divide Kashmir into the territories over which they already had control. Although neither country was willing to commit to such a deal, it became a de-facto template. Legal scholar AG Noorani notes that Kashmir’s special status was largely gutted of its substance.
The crisis of 1963, though, showed that India needed popular legitimacy for its rule—and for that, it turned to Mecca.
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Turning to Mecca
Following the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had thrown its weight behind fundamentalist movements across the world—and Kashmir was one key theatre. Emulating Tehran’s radicals, the newly-founded Islami Jami’at-i-Tulaba—the student wing of the Jama’at-e-Islami in Kashmir—launched a movement decrying the Westernisation of youth and demanded mandatory religious education at government schools in Kashmir.
Led by Shaikh Tajammul Husain, the Islami Jami’at-i-Tulaba was granted membership of the Riyadh-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth and the International Islamic Federation of Students’ Organisations—both of which would become magnets for anti-Soviet Union jihadists.
Even though the demands made by the Islami Jami’at-i-Tulaba were rejected, the organisation obtained government permission to host an international conference in Srinagar. The delegates included the imam of the holy shrine at Mecca, Shaikh ‘Abdullah bin Sabil—a survivor of the seizure of the grand mosque by Islamist radicals—as well as the muezzein of the Prophet’s mosque in Medina, Shaikh Qari Khalil.
To the Indian government, the message from the conference—a warning to beware conspiracies against Islam, apparently directed at Iran—seemed a small price to pay for the attendance of top officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. The Islamic world seemed, after all, to be recognising Kashmir to be a part of India.
Locally, however, the conference would have unintended consequences. The Jama’at-e-Islami gained recognition as the representative of Islamic orthodoxy, over the custodians of Kashmir’s traditional shrines. Tajammul Husain declared that Indian forces in Kashmir were an “army of occupation” and proclaimed a struggle to create an Islamic State.
Even though this would lead to crisis, it would also nudge India and the US toward the same side on Kashmir.
New alliances
Long before the war of 1965, declassified documents show, top US officials had already begun to reconsider their support for Pakistan. “The longer we nurture Pak illusions,” Robert W Komer told President John F Kennedy, “the more a head of steam is built up in Pakistan…I wonder if we aren’t doing ourselves a disservice by our continued pressure [on India] on Kashmir.” Islamabad’s role in building bridges to China, though, ensured this new thinking remained marginal.
However, following the end of the Cold War, US calculations began to slowly change. The administration of President Bill Clinton, scholar Ershad Mahmud notes, began with intense criticism of India’s human rights record in Kashmir. Within three years, it changed course.
Frank Wisner, the United States ambassador to New Delhi, urged Pakistan’s military to “accept certain fundamental realities that will not be changed.” The United States, like the Soviet Union in 1965, had concluded the only workable solution in Kashmir was the status quo. In Srinagar, Wisner urged Kashmiri secessionists to join in elections held in 1995-1996.
The near war of 2001-2002 led the governments of military ruler General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to begin a peace process intended to head off future crises between the two nuclear-armed powers. Although a final peace agreement eluded the governments—and was eventually imploded amid the Pulwama terrorist attack—both capitals have continued fitful back-channel engagement.
Facing growing pressure on its borders with China, and an increasingly volatile Pakistan, India could find itself facing new challenges in Kashmir. Engaging with allies in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, as well as other G20 countries, is one key element of crafting a proactive defence. Encouraging the resumption of political life, and restoring the institutions of electoral democracy, is the more substantial challenge.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)