Kashmir: Strategic Sense and Nonsense Kashmir Times Op-eds 2010s
ali ahmed2019, Kashmir: Strategic sense and nonsense
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Abstract
Preface and acknowledgement The title needs explaining. I believe a nonsensical strategy has attended India’s Kashmir problem over the past decade. In the United Progressive Alliance government period, the government was afraid of its own shadow. It missed a splendid opportunity to address the Kashmir issue meaningfully. No doubt, it had the shadow of the right wing looming across it staying its hand. As for the right wing, when it came to power, it has willfully messed up the situation further. As the right wing has another lease of life in power, there can only more nonsense up ahead. The assumption is that Kashmiris will bear the brunt and, therefore, it is not of consequence for the rest of us in South Asia. This is untenable. The right wing is perfectly capable of worse and this shall surely come to pass too over the coming five years. This volume of my opinion pieces in the Kashmir Times over the 2010s are proof of India hurtling down hill as a country, taking Kashmir down with it and looking to drag down the rest of South Asia with it too. This understanding is reverse of the popular notion that it is Pakistan as a failing state that is out to drag India down with it. I believe the democratic take over of India by the right wing is an existential danger to the subcontinent. Its conjoined Kashmir and Pakistan policies are not merely potentially explosive, but are an explosion in slow motion. The answer is not to be found in Kashmir. It is to be looked for in the rest of India, where the electorate needs to rethink its self-interest. The apprehension is that this will not happen till the calamity impending is not over and done with. In the main, the commentaries here deal with Kashmir and India’s Pakistan policy as relevant to Kashmir. There are several largely critical pieces covering the counter insurgency campaign. Since a significant proportion of the army is deployed in Jammu and Kashmir, the op-eds covered the meaing of the 'strategy' in Kashmir - of which the army was a major instrument - for the army as an institution. The commentaries link India's Pakistan and Kashmir strategies to internal politics in India, in which the ascendance of the right wing meant preclusion of any peace headway. The constant call is for the passing opportunities to be seized. The needs of the strategy of Othering that brought the right wing to power in India account for the advocacy being ignored. The nonsense in the Kashmir strategy owes to contamination of strategy by ideology. It is no secret that the strategic establishment owes right wing allegiance. The strategic community has had its share of right wingers, who were in the closet till early this decade. Since a major plank of such cultural nationalist thinking is anti-Muslim, any strategy geared to addressing South Asian Muslim issues cannot but be contaminated by ideological baggage. To expect a rational strategy – even one based on realism – is to be wishful. The Pakistan strategy needs no edification. Needless to add, that the strategies will fall flat in good time. The issue is how to survive the deneument. Plainspeaking is the need of the hour. The compilation is to focus minds. Nothing can be done to avert the catastrophe, but seeing off the right wing back to the margins would require to be done once the dust – hopefully not radioactive - has settled. This would require the shoulder of all institutions. In alerting the nation, the collection of op-eds would have served a purpose. The compilation would be of interest to students, academics, practitioners in uniform, policy makers and the attentive public. The issues dealt with are at the interstices of strategic. security and peace studies. It has insights for the military engaged in countering insurgency, for their political masters and the bureaucratic intermediary layer both in Srinagar and the national security establishment in Delhi. The book is dedicated to the people of Kashmir, both within and outside of the Valley. I thank Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal for her unstinting support. Her liberality shines through. Her paper Kashmir Times has ploughed a lonely furrow and done a national service in keeping the liberal torch aloft in trying times. I thank the editorial staff for the support over the past decade of my writing for the paper, the writings put together between these covers: some 100 op-eds comprising 1.25 lakh words. Needless to add, all shortcomings in the language, style and facts are mine. I thank my family for its usual forebearance. Hope their optimism that the essays shall prove useful is proven true.
