26 May 2002
Kashmir: The scariest show on earth
By Peter Popham
Independent Digital (UK)

"Tamasha"

This week the world was seized by one of those spasms of mass anxiety that have been our occasional lot since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. A million Indian and Pakistani soldiers were massed along the 2,000-mile border. Indian warships sailed from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. Pakistan's Shaheen missiles, capable of delivering nuclear weapons, were ordered to forward positions.

Then on Wednesday at the Line of Control, the de facto border in Indian Kashmir, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told Indian troops, "It's time to wage a decisive battle ... India is forced to fight a war thrust on it, and we will emerge victorious."

His words made it sound as if war was about to break out. And perhaps it was. But on the same day, after a meeting of corps commanders, Pakistan's President Musharraf declared his country would not allow terrorists to operate on its soil or on the soil of territory for which it is responsible - code for the Pakistan-controlled sector of Kashmir.
India has heard such words before, and has had cause to disbelieve them.

But according to sources in Washington, the United States' Secretary of State, Colin Powell, telephoned General Musharraf twice the next day, Thursday, to press him to take the steps that India demanded to avoid war.

Political analysts in Pakistan believe Mr Musharraf may have made private commitments to India via Mr Powell to stop Islamic militants entering Indian Kashmir and attacking security forces there.

If such commitments were made, it would explain why Mr Vajpayee's tone changed so dramatically in 24 hours. On Wednesday, he had conjured up the "decisive battle". On Thursday, in one of his tantalising flights of eloquence, he said, "The sky is clear. But sometimes lightning strikes even in clear skies." The same day, the Unified Headquarters meeting of Indian ministers and generals which he chaired reportedly decided to give Pakistan two months to come good on its promises to stop cross-border terrorism.

So was that nearly a war? Or was it just a "tamasha", as they say in Hindi, a show?
The Indian government has excellent reasons just now to put on such a show.

An embarrassing amount of hostile international attention was focused on the pogroms in Gujarat in March, when Hindu fanatics allied to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) killed around 2,000 Muslims. The war talk has been a useful distraction.

And if India really did go to war, the sceptics demand, what would the goal be? To conduct heliborne raids on terrorist training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir would inflict only symbolic damage, and call down the world's condemnation, while risking fearsome Pakistani retaliation. And any more ambitious strike would be even more risky.

Both Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Musharraf have now gone on holiday in the hills. India has let it be known that Pakistan has a few weeks or a couple of months to fulfil the new promises it has apparently made to the United States.

The flow of high-ranking foreign officials keen to twist Indian and Pakistani arms and bang heads together started this week with Chris Patten, EU Commissioner for External Relations, and continues in the first week of June with the arrival of Richard Armitage, the bull-necked US Deputy Secretary of State ("He certainly frightens us," remarked one US Embassy official.)

So we can all relax and switch over to the World Cup. Or maybe not. There are two reasons why the present stand-off is more dangerous than previous crises between the feuding neighbours.

One is the growing sophistication of the nuclear potential on both sides: yesterday, Pakistan embarked upon a series of missile tests, firing its medium-range Ghauri missile, which can carry either a nuclear or a conventional warhead. It flew 900 miles and, the Pakistani authorities claimed, accurately hit its allotted target. Its nuclear-capable Shaheen-II missile has a range of nearly 1,600 miles that would enable it to hit almost any Indian city.

The other reason is the process of disaffection of Islamic hardliners in Pakistan from President Musharraf, which began soon after he seized power in 1999 and accelerated when he threw his weight behind President Bush's war on terror. It has reached the point where the hardliners would be happy to see Musharraf embroiled in a disastrous war.

"The government and the militants today are standing in different camps," says Dr Rasul Bash Rais, director of Pakistan's Area Studies Centre, an independent think-tank. "The radicals are extremely angry at what President Musharraf has done in Afghanistan, and they are determined to embarrass him. If you look at the attack against the French defence workers this month, or the attacks in Kashmir, their objectives are very clear: to undermine the stability of the present regime, create a rupture between Pakistan and the international community, and finally to provoke a war between Pakistan and India."

It was these radicals who attacked India's parliament in December, a Hindu temple in Kashmir in March and a Kashmir army camp on 14 May: the last attack killed more than 30 people, and precipitated the present crisis. They also killed the moderate Kashmiri separatist leader Abdul Gani Lone on Tuesday. If these people were to stage another spectacular attack in the coming weeks, it is hard to see how India could avoid responding with a punitive strike on Pakistan. All other options would have been exhausted.

After openly testing its nuclear weapons in 1998, India announced a "no-first-use" policy. Pakistan declined to do the same, and, given India's far greater size and strength, has made it clear that if its integrity were threatened it would respond with nuclear weapons.

A study published in Scientific American in 1998 sketched the likely consequences of such an attack. If India crossed some threshold of aggression - by mounting a naval blockade of Karachi, for example, or advancing across the Wagah border on the city of Lahore - Pakistan would either fire a nuclear warning shot; or, if it felt that would not work, attack an Indian city directly.

A modest, 15-kiloton bomb dropped on Bombay, say the authors - both physicists, one Indian and one Pakistani - would cause, over the first few months, between 150,000 and 850,000 people to die.

Another study, by the University of Illinois, is even more alarming. It reckons that a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would result in 17 million deaths in Pakistan, and 30 to 35 million in India. The global environmental impact of such a conflict is the stuff of nightmares. Whether these terrifying prospects can be avoided depends on the leaders' ability to see the reality behind the show.