More on India's grand design

Express Tribune

03-04-2025

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The cat and mouse game which began in Kashmir in 1965 travelled all the way to East Pakistan was now taking a full circle back to Kashmir. In 1984 India exercised its largest ever wargames on the Pakistani borders with wholesale deployment of its army with a potential to turn into an actual invasion. Only some suave diplomacy by Zia Ul Haq checkmated anything insidious in the plan.
He flew into India ostensibly to watch an ongoing Cricket match where he remarked to Rajiv Gandhi, 'playing cricket than warring between two nuclear neighbours' was a far better option. I paraphrase. Pakistan till then was only suspected to have a 'Bomb' in the basement. The two decided to begin a 'Composite Dialogue' seeking sustainable peace. The Dialogue began in 1987 and continued intermittently under Nawaz Sharif, Musharraf, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh in their respective turns at the helm.
When it seemed that India and Pakistan had finally matured to the point of peaceful coexistence - draft proposals were doing the rounds in Delhi and Islamabad on low-hanging fruits, Siachen and Sir Creek - despite Kargil et al in the baggage, another made-for-TV drama played itself out to Live audiences across the world. Mumbai 2008 struck as a bolt from a clear blue sky. Jury is out on who enacted it and why? Even if the players on the stage were purportedly from Pakistan, who used them and how remains moot.
But they served a grand purpose in the Indian design. All contact with Pakistan was ceased by India; Composite Dialogue which seemed to be reluctantly moving forward was shelved and terrorism was reinforced as the currency in play in matters between the two countries. The damage to peace process was permanent which India would use to great effect.
This one had been difficult to break out of. In an earlier incident when Indian Parliament was attacked - soon after 9/11 in the same year - Musharraf had foiled inherent pressure around Pakistani groups alleged to have been behind the attack by declaring a unilateral ceasefire on the LOC with a promise that Pakistan will not permit its soil for use in cross-LOC violations in Kashmir.
The admission by Pakistani leadership was India's first victory in another kind of war from the new age. Sadly, another dastardly event of butchering nearly 150 people, including 132 young children, in Peshawar in 2014 by terrorists sourced from Afghanistan reincarnated 16/12 - the date Pakistan lost its eastern wing - in its most debased reflection of human perversity. Sadly too, the event was celebrated by some in India. The linkages are obvious.
Several terror events followed in India and Kashmir which were pinned on Pakistan with impunity. Uri, Pathankot, Gurdaspur, Surgical Strikes, Pulwama and Balakot were meant to reinforce the notion that Pakistan was behind each of those. Pakistan contested those as false flag and sponsored events meant to malign Pakistan and create space for India's nefarious motives. It gave cause to India to induct more forces in the valley, tighten its noose around Kashmir through regressive oppression, and kill every effort to kindle the freedom struggle even if it now existed only in hearts under the overbearing presence of the Indian military.
Kashmir lost its right to have a government — it was ruled directly from Delhi and denied rights ordained in the Indian Constitution. Alongside Muslims in India were castigated, lynched and murdered on minutest pretexts. The entire environment was thus loaded against Muslims and Muslim identity aimed at linking Pakistan perceptively to the muddle. The mayhem may have been contrived but it wasn't without method.
Narendra Modi used the opportunity to further his own political cause. Despite the ceasefire on the LOC, Indian forces routinely violated the arrangement starting 2013 under fabricated pretexts. It helped reinforce the image of BJP and Modi as a more formidable alternate to a softer and kinder Manmohan Singh to address the need of the moment. Come 2019, Pulwama was enacted to give reason to Balakot which was followed by the shooting war between the two air forces resulting in the downing of Abhinandan. Abhinandan was paraded as a hero for walking out of a Pakistani jail having lost his dignity. Modi used the occasion to build his tough-guy image, earning him another electoral victory for a second term.
The ultimate benefit that Modi derived from this entire script was to abrogate Kashmir's special status as a disputed territory in the Indian Constitution and the division of the state into three parts leaving the more contested Muslim-majority valley as a narrow, separate entity under huge presence of the Indian army. Pundits were brought back to Jammu to change demographics of this separately demarcated region and Ladakh was taken over by the Centre as a Union territory to saturate with military presence against the bogey of China. India thus diluted Kashmir, at least administratively and legally, and reduced the area of dispute which it now aims to flood with economic and tourist-related spur of activity with money and perpetual presence of Indian capital in mirror image of Pakistan's CPEC. If this isn't grand strategy, what is?
Pakistan is fighting a rear-guard battle on Kashmir if that, its focus forced on KP and Balochistan instead. The Modi-Doval duo rewrote the script on Kashmir while Pakistan was engaged elsewhere. Today, Pakistan is struggling to keep Balochistan in control while fighting an intense upfront battle in KP against terror emanating from Afghanistan. Both are Indian supported, sponsored and funded. Of this there is ample proof. An active-duty Indian Naval Commander on an espionage mission in Balochistan sits in Pakistani jails as a proof of what Ajit Doval, the Indian RAW Chief, had declared in public and private as his and India's assault on Pakistan. Afghanistan once again acts as a convenient proxy and a staging post.
Objectively, Kashmir is quieter, has a government apparently of its own, even if bifurcated, truncated, suppressed and possibly heavily monitored. Kashmiris keep getting killed at the hand of the Indian occupation forces but Modi government through its network promises to bring in the fruits of Indian economic progress to ameliorate their sense of deprivation and entice them to material gain.
Resultantly, Kashmir as a dispute has taken a back seat internationally, its annexation now legal and politically formalised per Indian laws, while Pakistan remains engrossed with reenergised threats on its western border. It may be some time before Pakistan can bring Kashmir back front and center. And Modi is only in his eleventh year of ruling India. It is not without reason Doval continues to be his henchman on Pakistan.
Are there lessons to learn? And derive — to apply and extricate from the bind that Pakistan has become? It is never too late to learn, even if from an enemy. What those might be? Next.