EDITORIAL
At the stroke of midnight August 14-15 in 1947, the last Viceroy of the British Raj Lord Louis Mountbatten vivisected the Indian sub-continent to father India and Pakistan. While siring a new nation, little did Mountbatten know that his “political child” would attack its sibling within 67 days of Independence by sending armed Muslim insurgents to Kashmir. That was the beginning of an unending era of Islamabad’s hostility towards its more well-endowed neighbour. A new inkling about Pakistan’s attitude to India came the other day from former military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, when he said Pakistan caught India (Hindustan) by its neck in the Kargil war of 1999.
As a matter of fact, over the decades, the fight between Pakistan and India continues in different forms – either as repeated military engagements or by way of a shadow war by deployment of terrorists and militants. It is widely known that provocations came generally from the Pakistani side. The bone of contention is control over Kashmir, a part of which Pakistan is already occupying, while another part remains as an integral and inseparable part of India. With repeated elections in Kashmir being participated by the local populations in ever-increasing numbers, the people are by and large demonstrating their faith and commitment to India and its established governance systems. Still, holding aloft the sentiments reflected in a UN resolution passed several decades ago, Pakistan continues to hold its claim over the Indian territory.
Pakistan has turned 68. So has India. But the age has not given any maturity to Islamabad as is evident from the way its leaders speak, as in the case of Musharraf, or in the direct support it extends to terrorists and militants, who mostly operated from Pakistani soil to unleash anarchy and violence in India.
Musharraf’s latest bragging, that “Islamabad caught Hindustan by its neck” during the Kargil War of 1999, came during an address of members of the All Pakistan Muslim League. Well-known assessments are that the plan for the Kargil offensive by Pakistan, hatched soon after Musharraf took over as chief of army staff, was essentially his own, which proved to be a misadventure. Pakistan gained little from it, and it is believed casualties were heavy on its side. Clearly, Musharraf is keen on making a hero out of himself – if only to justify his role in a misadventure of major proportions. Fact is also that all the dramas that he was enacting inside or outside Pakistan these days were not proving to be of any help to him.
Juxtapose this with American author Christine Fair’s observation that the large stocks of US hardware supplied to Islamabad would be used against India. She has also noted that the military hardware that Washington gave to Islamabad would have “little utility” to fight insurgents – a purpose for which the US gave this to Pakistan — and are likely to be used against India in a full-scale war. This was precisely what Hussain Haqqani, ex-Pakistan envoy to the US, said the other day – that these arms would be used against India in the on and off border skirmishes. Haqqani also went on to say that the American government has, thus, committed a mistake.
Lord Mountbatten died August 27, 1979. During Mountbatten’s lifetime, he saw Pakistan making four major military misadventures against India besides the countless numbers of border skirmishes and unprovoked firings, at times even to facilitate the infiltration of terrorists to this country. A full-scale war in 1965 led to the signing of the Tashkent Declaration in 1996 by then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistan president Ayub Khan. In 1971, another provocation came from Pakistan. After a 14-day full-scale war, Islamabad saw its eastern part separated and took birth as Bangladesh.
In 1984, Pakistan intruded in Jammu and Kashmir once again. As a result, the Siachen Conflict took place. When Pakistani troops surfaced in Kargil, in 1999, they were driven out both by use of military fight-back and diplomacy. Not all facts about this high altitude warfare have been revealed. India reported deaths of 527 of its soldiers – after which, Musharraf came up with a figure of 453 Pakistani deaths. He cleverly put the figure a little below the Indian number. However, as per unofficial assessments from Nawas Sharif and his PML(N), the Pakistani death toll was of the order of a few thousands. Independent estimates, as also the US military intelligence figures did overshoot Musharraf’s casualty figures.
Pakistan was closely behind India in becoming a nuclear power, though it took many more years for conducting a successful test after India did it for the first time. It keeps spending heavily on buying weapons and military equipment. With more weapons coming to Pakistan from Barack Obama, it is possibly only a matter of time before Pakistan sought to test its newly acquired might and weapons on India.