What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body><sub-article><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">WA</journal-id><journal-title>World Affairs</journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0971-8052</issn><publisher><publisher-name>World Affairs</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="other">wa-10-2-rev001a</article-id><article-categories><subj-group><subject>Review Essay</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>The shade of swords: Jihad and the conflict between Islam and Christianity</article-title></title-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><year>2006</year></pub-date><volume>10</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>146</fpage><lpage>154</lpage><counts><page-count count="9" /></counts></article-meta></front><body><sec><title /><bold>Akbar, MJ, London: Routledge, 2002, p.272</bold>What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body></sub-article><sub-article><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">WA</journal-id><journal-title>World Affairs</journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0971-8052</issn><publisher><publisher-name>World Affairs</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="other">wa-10-2-rev001b</article-id><article-categories><subj-group><subject>Review Essay</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>Towards understanding the Kashmir crisis</article-title></title-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><year>2006</year></pub-date><volume>10</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>146</fpage><lpage>154</lpage><counts><page-count count="9" /></counts></article-meta></front><body><sec><title /><bold>Prakash, Shri, and Ghulam, Mohammad Shah (eds), New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2002, p.278</bold>What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body></sub-article><sub-article><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">WA</journal-id><journal-title>World Affairs</journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0971-8052</issn><publisher><publisher-name>World Affairs</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="other">wa-10-2-rev001c</article-id><article-categories><subj-group><subject>Review Essay</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>In the service of the nation: Reminiscences</article-title></title-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><year>2006</year></pub-date><volume>10</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>146</fpage><lpage>154</lpage><counts><page-count count="9" /></counts></article-meta></front><body><sec><title /><bold>Rao, K V Krishna, New Delhi: Penguin Books (I) Pvt. Ltd, 2002, p.276</bold>What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body></sub-article></article></article></body></html>

World Affairs

0971-8052

World Affairs

wa-10-2-rev001

REVIEW ARTICLE

Jammu and Kashmir as a lifeline of Pakistan

Kamath

2006

102146154

What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body><sub-article><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">WA</journal-id><journal-title>World Affairs</journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0971-8052</issn><publisher><publisher-name>World Affairs</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="other">wa-10-2-rev001a</article-id><article-categories><subj-group><subject>Review Essay</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>The shade of swords: Jihad and the conflict between Islam and Christianity</article-title></title-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><year>2006</year></pub-date><volume>10</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>146</fpage><lpage>154</lpage><counts><page-count count="9" /></counts></article-meta></front><body><sec><title /><bold>Akbar, MJ, London: Routledge, 2002, p.272</bold>What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body></sub-article><sub-article><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">WA</journal-id><journal-title>World Affairs</journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0971-8052</issn><publisher><publisher-name>World Affairs</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="other">wa-10-2-rev001b</article-id><article-categories><subj-group><subject>Review Essay</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>Towards understanding the Kashmir crisis</article-title></title-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><year>2006</year></pub-date><volume>10</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>146</fpage><lpage>154</lpage><counts><page-count count="9" /></counts></article-meta></front><body><sec><title /><bold>Prakash, Shri, and Ghulam, Mohammad Shah (eds), New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2002, p.278</bold>What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body></sub-article><sub-article><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">WA</journal-id><journal-title>World Affairs</journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0971-8052</issn><publisher><publisher-name>World Affairs</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="other">wa-10-2-rev001c</article-id><article-categories><subj-group><subject>Review Essay</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>In the service of the nation: Reminiscences</article-title></title-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><year>2006</year></pub-date><volume>10</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>146</fpage><lpage>154</lpage><counts><page-count count="9" /></counts></article-meta></front><body><sec><title /><bold>Rao, K V Krishna, New Delhi: Penguin Books (I) Pvt. Ltd, 2002, p.276</bold>What is common in the three books reviewed here? Not merely the fact that all three are published in 2002. There are at least five common issues running through these books. First, is one of international terrorism—today’s major global problem. Second, Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic> which largely induces terrorism— domestic and international; rather terrorism is justified in the name of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Third, Pakistan is the epicentre of global terrorism; therefore the root cause behind terrorism in India. Fourth, these two phenomena— terrorism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—operate in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistan’s active promotion of cross-border terrorism; J&K is, as a matter of fact, an international laboratory for Islamic <italic>Jihadi</italic> intellectuals to experiment with. Finally, how have these issues, affecting vital interests of India, been handled by Indian policy-makers? What could be the ultimate solution to the problem of Kashmir, since Pakistan considers it as the root cause of terrorism as well as Islamic <italic>Jihad</italic>?The latest phase of international terrorism began with the birth of Al Qaeda, the most widely discussed terrorist organisation, with Saudi billionaire and now the US-proclaimed number one most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden as its presiding deity. M J Akbar looking at the Indian problems, causes of which lie in the Indian Muslim psyche, in a larger international canvass points out the origins of Al Qaeda with the secular west’s blessings. Bin Laden first came to Peshawar in 1980 with “the gushing support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi Intelligence agency, the <italic>Istakhbarat</italic>”.That was when the US relations with Pakistan had touched an all-time low. A golden opportunity for Pakistan to improve its relations with the US was provided by the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. The US wanted a gateway into the region to aid and assist the <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> in their covert war against the Soviet Union. The stakes were very high for the US. Early in the unfolding of the crisis, President Carter offered $400 million to Pakistan for agreeing to be the frontline state in their war against the Soviet Union. Zia-ul- Haq, second military dictator in Pakistan’s short history, rejected the offer in an insulting manner by calling it ‘peanuts’, obviously a reference to Carter’s background as a peanut farmer. But when his successor, Ronald Reagan turned the peanuts into walnuts by raising the monetary inducement to $4 billion—Zia readily agreed to promote a religious war against the non-believers of Russia.Naturally then, one will be curious to know the purpose for which Bin Laden came to Pakistan. it was for <italic>Jihad</italic>—religious war—obviously, with an army of <italic>Mujahiddeen</italic> or freedom fighters to take on Russians who had militarily invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan had become the frontline state for the US who saw in Afghanistan a great opportunity to pay back the Russians for their role in the American defeat in the Vietnam War. <italic>Jihad</italic> to Americans “was an eminently respectable word in the West at the time….” Akbar says “Pakistani leaders like the dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq would laugh that American politicians would put one toe across the border into Afghanistan, get themselves photographed, and rush off to their constituencies to pose as war veterans”. The fight against the Russians in Afghanistan was as much a <italic>Jihad</italic> as it was an American (covert) War.This raises the question now, even five years after the 9/11 attacks on the US economic and military targets— World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington—have nations learnt a lesson to treat terrorism as an unmitigated evil in a civil society which cannot be used by any state to advance its national interests? This unfortunately, cannot be answered in the positive. President George Bush won a second term in 2004 by presenting himself as the candidate vastly more capable of handling the threat of terrorism than his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. By keeping the issue alive, the Republicans can continue to retain their hold over the White House in the next elections in 2008! Pakistan—another state perpetually in a flux—has effectively used terrorism as an instrument to keep the growing military and economic strength of India in check, despite its repeated diplomatic and political assurances not to permit use of its territories by terrorists against India.Abetting terrorism is also a sound economic proposition for Pakistan. The continued presence of Bin Laden in and around Pakistan is one easy way to get billions of US dollars in aid. This ought to be a matter of interest to research scholars of South Asian politics: How is it that crises in Afghanistan occur whenever Pakistani relations with the US are at the lowest? In 1979 there were riots in Islamabad against the US and Washington had to embrace Pakistan as a frontline state after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Again, soon after Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, there were cases of arson against the US interests in the country only to force Bush to accept Pakistan as a frontline state in his global war against terrorism in the wake of 9/11.Apologists of terrorists in J&K often equate them with freedomfighters. Can there be any freedomfighters within a unit of a federal state? It can then only be like a civil war. Those Kashmiris who live a comfortable life in the West call Indian troops fighting to preserve India’s territorial integrity foreign occupation forces. As such, these scholars say that indigenous people have an inalienable right to fight against the occupation forces! What more is needed to justify terrorism? But whom do we consider as indigenous people? Kashmiri Pandits? Muslim invaders? Or Muslim converts from amongst indigenous Kashmiris?But what is surprising is the fact that the Indian federal governments— first, the National Front government by V P Singh and the defectors’ “six month wonder” headed by Chandra Shekhar, followed by the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao (1991–96)—dealing with the terrorist threat from across the borders, which began in 1989, behaved as though they were in sympathy with the terrorists. Krishna Rao in his book calls them ‘militants’, a term which came to him from the above-referred governments. The term terrorists or terrorism is not even listed in the index of the book!Terrorism <italic>per se</italic> is anti-democratic and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Hence any terrorist activity, especially when there is enough evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, should have been nipped in the bud, if necessary by using force. In the case of terrorism in J&K, V P Singh’s government showed its weakness in December 1989. It yielded to the terrorists’ demand by releasing five terrorists from Kashmiri jails to secure the release of the then Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Krishna Rao, then the governor of J&K, describes how the terrorists who were members of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba</italic>, a Pakistani organisation claimed to belong to <italic>Al Faran</italic> a ‘native’ Kashmiri group. Terrorist groups are like amoeba—they change their name, locale, chain of command and control as frequently as necessary. Later in 1995, despite knowing that those who kidnapped foreign tourists were Pakistanis, they were referred to as militants. Then Home Minister, Shankar Rao Chavan used to call them our ‘misguided boys.’In a democracy, every group has a right to contest and air its grievances, but no group can seek independence by violent means. Can a group of people consider the accession of J&K revocable? Is accession to be reaffirmed by every generation of Kashmiris? Their participation in the electoral process ought to be enough of a testimony of their acceptance of history. The fact that a small percentage of people participates in the electoral process is not reason enough to question the legitimacy of elections. In the American Presidential elections a fifty per cent participation is regarded as highly satisfactory. Terrorists, on the other hand, do not trust any electoral process, deter candidates from contesting and threaten voters with dire consequences. As Shri Prakash points out, “Low voter turnouts can in fact be explained by the fear of terrorist attacks…” .<italic>Jihad</italic> is the slogan to encourage youngsters to join the Islamic terrorist movement against India. At a conference of <italic>Lashkar-e-Taiba,</italic> in 1998, there were competitive admissions about their <italic>Jihadi</italic> performance by speakers. One admitted to slaughtering five members of his own family, “Because they were informers for the Indian army.” Another <italic>Jihadi</italic> boasted: “I was a Hindu, yet I joined the path of <italic>Jihad</italic>. What keeps you away from it?” Such killings do not attract charges of violation of human rights, but killing of terrorists attract condemnation from their foreign mentors.Moderate Muslim scholars, repeatedly sing the song that Islam is a peace-loving religion and affirm that it does not preach violence. Thus Asghar Ali Engineer, in his paper ‘Kashmir: Is Peace Possible?’ in Prakash’s book under review, says: “Quran does not use the term <italic>Jihad</italic> for war or violence or killing … <italic>Jihad</italic> in Quran means utmost efforts to promote justice, goodness, benevolence and controlling base desires.” This is the farthest from the current popular and practical usage of the term <italic>Jihad</italic>. Engineer himself says: “However, what we witness in Kashmir is a mockery of <italic>Jihad</italic>. There it has degenerated into wanton and selfish killing.”Such voices are few and far between; what is loud and clear is the propagation of <italic>Jihad</italic>. Nayana Bose, a contributor to the edited volume by Shri Prakash speaks of a “sprawling campus of 190 acres of land, thirty miles north of Lahore; <italic>Markaz Dawa wal Irshad</italic> is a centre for education, preaching and <italic>Jihad.</italic> The <italic>Lashkar-e Taiba</italic>—ironically translated ‘the army of peace’—is its militant wing of highly trained mercenaries”. Since these <italic>Jihadis</italic> are mercenaries trained in Afghanistan they need continuous employment and make new recruits.Akbar writes in detail about the historic conflict between Islam and Christianity. For India this conflict is mostly of academic interest but what is reality is the way Islamic <italic>Jihadis</italic> are aiming at destroying liberal Hinduism and whatever traces of liberalism remain in Islam particularly <italic>Kashmiriyat</italic>, which is highly influenced by the teachings of Sufi saints.There appears to be no unanimity among contributors to Prakash’s volume. R M Pal goes to the extent of giving a secular colour to Islamic terrorism in J&K. “The militants killed people irrespective of community—in fact, more Muslims have been killed than Hindus.” In the initial stage of the crisis the minuscule Hindu minority fled from the valley leaving behind only those who were unable to leave or those who were very reluctant to move out. Hence, in a Muslim majority state more Muslims being killed for the cause of Kashmiriyat is no wonder.But do terrorists really regret the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits? Do they really want the Pandits to come back, as Pal wants us to believe? Even in 2005 when the former Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an effort to rehabilitate the Pandits, there were terrorist threats against their return.Third, at the root of all these problems is Pakistan which was carved out from undivided India as a separate state for the Muslims of India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, acting as a spokesman for the British policy of divide and rule, proclaimed that Muslims would be insecure in a Hindu dominated state after the British decided to quit. Akbar asks: “How did a homeland for Muslims become a homeland for Muslim terrorists?” Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism is not limited to India; it extends to terrorists fighting the Russians in Chechnya as well. It was directly involved in promoting terrorists as state managers in Afghanistan when it became the prime mover for the Taliban in that country.As already made clear, Pakistan is the epicentre of international terrorism, at least from the 1980s and terms like ‘terrorism’ or <italic>Jihad</italic> came into popular parlance only then. Pakistan had pursued a policy of mixing <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism with conventional warfare since its independent. Soon after Indian independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir was toying with the idea of independence for his princely state, in pursuit of which he had entered into a ‘standstill agreement’ with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan however had already prepared for a <italic>Jihad</italic> by putting together 6000 raiders who began their infiltration into Srinagar on October 21, 1947. Pakistan’s interference, in violation of the ‘standstill agreement’, made Hari Singh seek India’s help to throw out the invaders. Pakistan having captured one-third of J&K in its maiden effort, tried a mix of terrorism and conventional warfare in 1965 as well.The battlefield for <italic>Jihad</italic> is, thus Jammu & Kashmir. The problem of the state was kept on the boil by the folly of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted the advice of the then Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, to seek a ceasefire. It was trap laid by the British to keep India in check. Had Nehru decided to throw out the invading troops from J&K, subsequent Indian governments would have been saved from the efforts of Pakistan to internationalise the Kashmiri dispute without fulfilling its obligation under the UN Resolution by withdrawing its troops. Nowhere did the adverse effect of the unresolved dispute over J&K appear more clearly than at the time of the Kargil Crisis in June 1999. Indian armed forces had to fight a war against Pakistan where terrorism was mixed with conventional fighting within India’s territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in internationalising the J&K problem by making the US intervene to prevent a possible nuclear conflict between them. The J&K dispute remains, in Washington’s perception, a flash point for a nuclear war and that enables Pakistan to put pressure on the US to bring India to the negotiating table.Undoubtedly, the motivation to experiment with <italic>Jihadi</italic> terrorism in J&K came from a bruised Pakistan after it lost East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh sounded the death knell of Pakistan as a “pure” nation where all erstwhile Indians speaking different languages, could live together as a nation, bound by Islam. The vivisection of the original Pakistan into two has not only proved the twonation theory wrong, but has also given rise to fissiparous tendencies within Pakistan. The World Sindhi Conference meetings in Washington, DC, for instance, have demanded, more than once, the instoration of a secular state in Pakistan and respect for all languages and religious sects.The issue of Kashmir keeps the state of Pakistan together, particularly when military dictators rule it. It has been a unifying factor for Pakistan. It was consciously cultivated by Zia-ul- Haq in the 1980s when he came to power by the judicial murder of the then ruling President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his first televised speech after the <italic>coup</italic> he said that Pakistan “had been created in the name of Islam, and would survive only if it stuck to Islam”. However not Islam but Kashmir, presented as a constant external threat to Pakistan, has helped Musharraf to keep his uniform as well as absolute control over the state.Finally, what is the solution to the Kashmir crisis? To understand this it is essential to first understand the operationalisation of <italic>Jihad</italic> in the South Asian region. Were the Indian policymakers aware of the design of Islamic terrorists? These books provide a multiplicity of views, often contradictory, on the manner in which our successive governments have attempted to resolve the crisis. It is interesting to note that General Krishna Rao says that even after the accession of J&K to India “there was no clear– cut long-term aim or policy which should have been to consolidate the merger and strive for closer integration with the willing cooperation of the people … There was also a feeling that whenever the Kashmir issue came up politically, India adopted a defensive stand, as if some mistake had been committed by it on the accession issue, or as if it felt a sense of guilt.”Successive Indian governments have faced political problems derived from the above situation. It culminated in the blatant rigging of elections in 1987 by the coalition of the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah and the Congress, although only four years earlier, Abdullah had won a landslide victory alone without the burden of the Congress. This gave Pakistan an opportunity to stir up an anti-Indian insurgency with the politico-military aim of annexing J&K.On the one hand there is the legal position and politically well-articulated statement that the J&K state is an integral part of India. Hence, twentyfive seats are left vacant in the J&K assembly for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir …. This logically means that liberation of POK is an option. On the other hand, R. M. Pal accuses successive governments in Delhi of having no policy on J&K other than responding to “militant’s terrorism by…state terrorism.” This has created a sizeable support for an independent J&K. But neither India nor Pakistan is likely to accept such an outcome.Between these two extremely unlikely options, there are many intermediate ones. Many suggestions emerge from these books. One solution is the autonomy plan put forward by the National Conference that has long ruled the state. G. M. Wani in his contribution ‘Kashmir Autonomy: National Conference Perspective’ states that the provision of autonomy through article 370 is not a temporary provision but a permanent one. He argues that it can be ended only with the consent of a state constituent assembly. The Indian Parliament, without the consent of such a constituent assembly, cannot abrogate it. The former Prime Minister of India, Narasimha Rao had said that the Indian government was willing to extend autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to any extent, “short of independence.”But what seems to be a favoured proposition between the two governments is the internationalisation of the present LOC (Line Of Control) as the border between the two countries to resolve the dispute. This was the option chosen between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Simla in 1972. This was acceptable to Zia-ul- Haq if the proposal came from India. The NDA government, in fact, made it to the then Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before he was deposed. His successor Pervez Musharraf wants anything but the turning of the LOC into an international border.The objection is that it divides Kashmir into two artificial segments and is therefore unacceptable to the people of J&K. But if the option is ruled out because it turns a cease-fire line into a permanent divide across Kashmiri society, it can be argued that similar problems were created in Punjab and as a result of the partition of India in 1947 and it reopens a debate on the very principle behind the existence of Pakistan. Hence, there is a strong suspicion in the Indian intellectual circles that Musharraf does not really want a solution to the problem of J&K by putting an end to terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and <italic>Jihad</italic>—after all it is a matter of survival for him. Can he dismount the tiger of dictatorship and terrorism on which he rode to power in the first place?</sec></body></sub-article></article></article></body></html>