[ Reproduced from: The New York Times, 30 May 2002]
The Most Dangerous Place in the World
by Salman Rushdie
The present Kashmir crisis feels like a déjà vu replay of the last
one. Three years ago a weak Indian coalition government led by the
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party had just lost a confidence
vote in India's Parliament and was nervously awaiting a general
election. At once it began to beat the war drums over Kashmir. Now
another coalition government, still led by the B.J.P. and deeply
tainted by B.J.P. supporters' involvement in the massacre of hundreds
of Muslims in Gujarat State, may be about to lose another general
election. So here goes the government again, talking up a Kashmiri
war and asking India to stand firm behind its leadership.
Three years ago in Pakistan, the equally weak government of Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif had bankrupted the national economy and was
facing well-documented corruption charges. Mr. Sharif, too, had much
to gain from war fever - fed by the various Muslim terrorist groups
operating in Kashmir. The hawkish Pakistani general then responsible
for communicating with and training those terrorist groups was one
Pervez Musharraf. (By the way - just so we're clear on who Mr.
Musharraf, now Pakistan's president, really is - some of these groups
were almost certainly sent by Pakistan's intelligence service to
Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.) When Nawaz Sharif succumbed to
American pressure and promised to rein in the terrorists, General
Musharraf was furious. A few months later he overthrew Mr. Sharif in
a coup and seized power.
Will the outcome also be a replay of three years ago? Will the
conflict be contained again?
This time President Musharraf is the one being pressed by the United
States to stamp out Kashmiri terrorism. He has been playing a double
game, arresting hundreds of members of the groups he once fostered
but quietly freeing most of them soon afterward. Caught between two
necessities - placating his major international sponsor and playing
to the home audience - he may well in the end follow his deepest
political instincts: to support (overtly or covertly) the Islamist
radicals who have terrorized the once idyllic valley of Kashmir for
well over a decade.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India, with his talk of a
"decisive battle," clearly feels that direct military action,
resulting in the reconquest of some if not all of the Kashmiri
territory now under Pakistani control, is the only way of preventing
attacks like the atrocity this month in which women and children were
slaughtered at an Indian army base. Mr. Vajpayee knows that Indian
rule is unpopular in the valley, that the Indian army looks to many
Kashmiris like an army of occupation. But he will also have
calculated that in the opinion of the international community, and
also of many fearful, near-destitute Kashmiris, Pakistan's protracted
sponsorship of terrorism has damaged its claims to moral legitimacy.
Would a war between India and Pakistan, if it came, go nuclear?
Pakistan, with its suggestively timed missile tests, its refusal to
adopt a policy of not being the first to use nuclear arms and its
hawkish talk, is trying to give the impression that it would have no
compunction about using its nuclear arsenal. India's military
leadership has said that if attacked with nuclear bombs it would
respond with maximum force and that in such a conflict India would
sustain heavy damage but survive, whereas Pakistan would be destroyed
utterly.
Is it really likely, however, that Pakistan would, so to speak, strap
a nuclear weapon to its belly, walk into the crowded bazaar that is
India and turn itself into the biggest suicide bomber in history?
Mr. Musharraf doesn't look like martyr material. Ah, but if he were
losing a conventional war? If India's overwhelming numerical
superiority on land, at sea and in the air won the day and Pakistan
lost its prized Kashmiri land, would reason be swept aside? Worst of
all, if Pakistani fury at a military defeat by India were to result
in Mr. Musharraf's overthrow by Islamist hard-liners, Pakistan's
nuclear warheads could fall into the hands of people for whom
martyrdom is a higher goal than peace, people who value death more
highly than life.
Pakistan is calling on the international community to intervene, but
this call must be heard with caution. For half a century Pakistan has
sought to internationalize the Kashmiri dispute while India has
consistently described that effort as interference in its internal
affairs. Both sides are locked into old language, old strategies and
an old game of chicken that's currently playing itself out across the
Line of Control. Like two aged wrestlers fighting on a cliff, India
and Pakistan are locked together, rolling ever closer to the edge.
But their ancient hatred is no longer a matter only for them. The
risk of a nuclear battle, however improbable, makes Kashmir
everybody's problem. Right now it's the most dangerous place in the
world. These pathetic old fighters must be pulled apart, and soon.
Yes, that probably does mean intervention by the West, though Russia
seems eager to help as well, which is useful.
This should not, however, be the intervention that Pakistan wants.
The point is not to restrain Indian "aggression," but to make the
world safer for us all. The situation can only be stabilized if India
and Pakistan are both forced to back away, preferably to outside of
Kashmir's historic, unpartitioned borders. This "hands off Kashmir"
solution will have to be externally imposed on the reluctant
principals and will require that a large peacekeeping force be sent
to the region to support Kashmir as an autonomous area. But who in
the West wants that - it's just the old colonialist-imperialist power
trip, isn't it? And who's supposed to pay for all this peacekeeping,
anyway?
The answers to those questions are also questions: What's the
alternative? Do you have a better idea? Or shall we just stand back
and keep our postcolonial, nonimperialist fingers crossed? Will it
take mushroom clouds over Delhi and Islamabad to make us give up our
ingrained prejudices and try something that might actually work? In
the immortal words of the Spice Girls, "Will this déjà vu never end?"
Salman Rushdie is the author of "Fury: A Novel" and the forthcoming
essay collection "Step Across This Line."
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