Kashmir in 2003: Reflections of a River

Muzaffarabad stretched for four kilometres through the basin of the Lesser Himalaya in Kashmir. It was split lengthwise physically by the Neelum River and cut at the waist conversationally by a brilliant yellow Lipton sign.

The Lipton sign was a landmark by day and a beacon by night. Intimidating and large on the landscape, it was floodlit in a glorious display of luminescence that outshone Mother Teresa. The straight white teeth of the smiling Pakistani woman, her shiny, thick black hair, her glowing skin and glinting eyes were the epitome of health and of wealth: an extreme contrast to the people passing underneath. The sunny Lipton woman could have been reciting the words of Sir Thomas Lipton himself: Work hard, deal honestly, be enterprising, exercise careful judgment, and advertise freely but judiciously.

The Neelum River poured through the city, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It was the power and the glory of Kashmir, gathering rain, mud and snowmelt from the north. Neelum, the Urdu word for sapphire, was not a sparkling iridescent blue, but a murky dull-brown flow that bubbled swiftly over the boulders of the shallow riverbed. The Jhelum River from India rushed westward to Muzaffarabad and clashed with Neelum with the full force of two butting rams. They were not large, nor wide; merely narrow rivers that converged rapidly and ruggedly at this famous point.

The two rivers converged in a place of reverence and pride. They coupled to travel in one direction in a united flow to its end. They were the epitome of the land, of the struggle for a free Kashmir. The Kashmiris revered and feared the river’s convergence. They said to fear it for it had taken the lives of many Kashmiris with its rocky bottom and fast flowing rush that could freeze a body, or pound it to its death, in a matter of minutes.

The confluence of the two rivers, the unique occurrence of nature, melded and merged into one entity and continued southward to Islamabad and the plains of Pakistan. The turbulent river marked the turbulent lives of the Kashmiris yet it knew no political bounds. It had a sense of direction and it cut its own path to freedom.

Kashmir had been the key to the dispute between India and Pakistan since their independence from the British in 1947. Each country claimed Kashmir as a part of its territory. As a result of a rebellion during Independence, or ‘partition’, between the two countries, a Line of Control, a cease-fire line, bisected the area. To the east of the line lay the valley of Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh administered by India. To the west lay Azad Kashmir, with its own government but administered by Pakistan.

Twelve million people lived in the conjoined region of Kashmir. The capitals of India-administered Kashmir were Srinagar in the summer and Jammu in the winter where the majority of Sikhs and Hindus lived. The capital of Azad Kashmir was Muzaffarabad. The three million people of Azad Kashmir were predominantly conservative Muslims. To the east was the forgotten Ladakh, adjoining China, the home of Buddhists, most with Tibetan origin.

The mounting tension between India and Pakistan reached a high point in May 1999 when India allegedly launched air strikes against guerrillas trapped in the Kargil region of Kashmir. Coming in the wake of skirmishes along the Line of Control, the military offensive by India had serious implications for peace and frayed relations between the two countries. For three weeks the Indian and Pakistan armies were locked in artillery battle across the Line of Control. Over a hundred people were allegedly killed. The root of the crisis was the unresolved problem of Kashmir that had prompted their struggle against Indian occupation.

The main provocation for the Indians in 1999 was said to be the presence of heavily armed freedom fighters holed up in Kargil. They brought the Indians under tremendous pressure causing them to retaliate against Pakistan. Indo-Pakistan relations took a sudden downward plunge. Against this backdrop, the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call for a halt to the conflict was timely. The two governments, moving to an eyeball-to-eyeball position, were advised to pull back at once in order to avert a war.

Tensions between India and Pakistan again reached ominous proportions after the attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001, three months after September’s day of terror in New York: a date indelibly etched on the collective minds of the entire world. Indian and Pakistani defense forces were at their highest state of alert since their last war in 1971. Press reports indicated that Pakistan’s General Musharraf was enraged over this attack as it contravened his declared doctrine of peace. If true, this suggested that terror elements within Pakistan were not under his complete control. India did not trust Musharraf. As Army Chief during the invasion of the Kargil sector of India in 1999, he had kept the current Pakistan Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, uninformed.

In the immediate aftermath of 13 December, the Indian stock market soon rebounded as the possibility of war was overshadowed by better domestic economic news such as a prospect of an upturn in industry, lower interest rates and record foreign exchange reserves. Credit rating agencies did not downgrade India and the rupee remained relatively stable. In the case of Pakistan, an inflow of funds after 11 September from the United States as well as the International Monetary Fund and other multicultural aid agencies, helped increase finances. The Pakistani rupee did not crash. Thus there was a basic asymmetry in the financial markets’ reading of the tensions as opposed to that of the popular press that had conjured up visions of an impending apocalypse.

General Musharraf’s decision to withdraw state sponsorship of militant Islamists earned him western praise. Musharraf had refused to cultivate a political constituency within Pakistan, although he intended to remain in power after the promised October 2002 elections. He concentrated on administrative reforms such as control of mosques and madrassas and the reduction of corruption. The Pakistani press portrayed Musharraf as a US-backed military leader implementing an agenda defined partly by India. It was the Pakistani’s view that once its importance to the American-led coalition waging war in Afghanistan was over, Pakistan’s international standing would again be tested, having a record regarded by most as dismal.

Pakistan consumed almost eighty per cent of its national revenue on defense spending and debt repayments. The 2001 Economic Survey of the Government of India reported the figure for India to be about forty-two per cent. In a televised address to the Pakistani nation on 12 January 2002, General Musharraf spoke for more than an hour but devoted only five minutes to Kashmir and relations with India, illustrating how sensitive an issue the problem of internal militancy was in Pakistan.

There were no talks of peace, with constant border fighting between India and Pakistan at the Line of Control, twenty kilometers from Muzaffarabad. There were also no reports of full-scale border war. The talk had turned instead to the global war on terror and America’s imminent raid, Operation Anaconda, in Afghanistan. This was to be a brief, intense bombardment to ferret out Taliban groups that were purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the 11 September attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. He was rumored to be sheltering in one of the caves among the mountainous region.

There were two highly volatile conflicts in the region: to the west America fought the Taliban, and to the east India was at loggerheads with Pakistan. In both, there were no winners.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).