Hawkish, but mostly weary

Despite efforts by the Government and the media to keep the Kashmir issue uppermost in people's minds, the majority of the people of Pakistan no longer appear to view the issue as an unsolvable one.

RASHEEDA BHAGAT
in Karachi

THERE is only a 30-minute time zone difference between India and Pakistan, but for a person who has read the morning newspapers in India and goes through the Pakistani newspapers available aboard a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Mumbai the same afternoon, the two countries may seem to be worlds apart. While the Indian newspapers blame "our hostile neighbour" and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency for the "unprovoked firing" along the Line of Control in Kashmir and the deaths of scores of people in Jammu and Kashmir and areas of Himachal Pradesh, Pakistani newspapers have reports datelined "Held Kashmir". These talk about the innumerable "martyrs" (shaheed is the word that is commonly used) who have succumbed to the "deliberate zulm" (atrocities) unleashed by the Indian armed forces in the "Indian-held Kashmir region".

However, propaganda is one thing and the actual feelings of the majority of people on both sides of the border are another. In Pakistan, a kind of weariness appears to have crept in vis-a-vis the Kashmir issue although political rhetoric in its shrillest form, beamed into people's homes by the official media, has managed to keep the Kashmir issue uppermost in the people's minds. The depressed state of the economy - Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves are down to $700 million despite help extended by Islamic countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, and the Islamic Development Bank, which have together provided around $2.5 billion - may just prevent it from defaulting on its foreign debt servicing in the next quarter. The average Pakistani has begun to ask questions about the Kashmir issue, a relatively new phenomenon in Pakistan.

An administrative manager in one of Karachi University's institutes (he was once interrogated by the ISI because he greeted warmly an Indian envoy visiting the campus) echoed popular public opinion when he said: "It is high time both the countries settled the Kashmir issue." He was, however, not voicing popular thinking when he asked: "Kya Kashmiri log Pakistan ke saath wafa karenge?" (Will the Kashmiris be loyal to Pakistan?) He said: "Even if a settlement between the two countries, call it plebiscite or by whatever name, results in India letting go of Kashmir, my personal view is that the people of Kashmir will opt to become an independent country." When asked whether Kashmir would survive economically and otherwise in such an event, he said: "If Azad Kashmir and that part of Kashmir that is now with India come together, they can form an independent country. As far as size and survival are concerned, you do have smaller countries like Panama."

However, what was significant was his couldn't-care-less attitude to Kashmir - whether it stayed with Pakistan or opted to become independent was irrelevant to him. With the Kashmir issue put behind it, Pakistan can, he said, "stop squandering millions of rupees on defence expenditure and move towards the path of self-reliance."

AP
Thousands of people congregate in Lahore on August 3 to protest against the policies of the Government.

Hanif Janoo, president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that the two countries "must solve the Kashmir issue because together, we are a big power." He said that even though India and Pakistan have become nuclear powers, they still had to face the economic issues. "So many of our people do not have one proper meal a day," he said and added that "the same is true of your country." "These people live below the poverty line. If the two countries join hands, just think of the things we can do for our people. I don't think a solution to the Kashmir issue is that difficult. It can be solved, provided we are sincere. If the issue is solved according to the U.N. Charter or an agreement between Kashmiris, Pakistan and India, the two countries can march ahead and give our people the future they have been dreaming of."

Janoo said that he was troubled by the fact that while a negligible percentage of people on both sides of the border live in air-conditioned comfort, "in several parts of Mumbai and Karachi there are people who live on footpaths." According to him, the situation will only worsen since the two countries, having become nuclear powers, will be spending a substantial chunk of their meagre resources on defence, thus depriving their people of basic necessities.

Janoo, who said that he was not in a position to speak about the presence or absence of a political will to solve the issue since he was not a politician, however predicted that if the two governments do not show the will to solve the issue, "a day will come when the people will say, 'Go to hell with all your atomic power.. give us bread and butter.' That day they will smash all the governments."

"With Kashmir out of the way," said Janoo, "just imagine the miracles we can achieve on the trade front." India has a very good industrial base and Pakistan has the market. "We have been importing wheat, dyes, chemicals and machinery from all over." According to him, the governments of both the countries owe it to their people to lead their countries into the next century as "dignified, honoured nations".

Anita Ghulam Ali, a well-known educationist and former Education Minister in the Sindh Government, who is currently the managing director of the Sindh Government Educational Foundation in Karachi, blames the British for leaving "a bone of contention" behind them. "As I grow older, I increasingly believe that the British played a very dirty game with both our countries, not only on Kashmir but on other things too... to ensure that we were left fighting each other for a long, long time." Wondering whether this was the British way of ensuring that they would always be remembered, she categorically said that unless the two countries solved the Kashmir issue, there could be no real future for them. Maintaining that circumstances would force them to find a solution, she said: "There are only two ways of looking at it. Either you develop economic relations and this will improve the political relations, or vice versa."

K.M. CHOUDHRY/AP
A mother, with her baby holding a symbolic large milk feeder, participates in a rally in Lahore to protest against inflation.

THE argument that improving bilateral trade and economic cooperation between the two countries will in turn improve political relations is one that the hawks in Pakistan are not willing to buy. Editorials in the Pakistani media are scornful of this argument, which they describe as "Indian". Angry questions are being asked about how India could expect to improve its economic relations with Pakistan until the "central" issue of Kashmir is solved.

Writing in The Washington Post, Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, Editor of the Pakistan daily The News, advances the argument that while "India's nuclearisation is status-driven, Pakistan's is security-driven." Coming down heavily on the "U.S.-led international community", she wrote that the longer it "persists on a course of censure and sanctions, the greater the odds for quicker weaponisation and deployment, which neither country is as yet irrevocably pledged to do." "Isolating a region bristling with tensions, long-standing enmities and nationalist fervour to stand up to Western nuclear discrimination, is a recipe for more steps up the nuclear ladder. With punishment posing as policy, this could encourage a no-holds-barred nuclear competition and act as a disincentive to both Pakistan and India to exercise restraint."

Predictably enough, the Pakistani media are always alert for voices within the Indian media that advance an argument contrary to the official government line. It is therefore not surprising to find an editorial comment in The Statesman stating that India should "announce that the government will exhume the nearly five-decade-old U.N. proposal to hold a referendum on the question of the valley's territorial loyalties" finds an honourable mention in a Pakistani newspaper.

Daily statements from Pakistan's top leadership, especially Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, about Pakistan's ability to defend its sovereignty with its new nuclear identity are only to be expected since political rhetoric is so essential for a Government that is drawing flak from its people for the country's financial crisis.

However, what is worrying is the fact that along with the euphoria over the blasts, which is not lacking on the Indian side either, there seems to be a triumphant feeling that Pakistan has at last succeeded in focussing the international community's attention on the Kashmir issue. There is also a prevalent feeling that more and more nations are veering towards the Pakistani point of view that ties between India and Pakistan can be improved only if the Kashmir issue is solved.

As for the underprivileged and uneducated people of Pakistan, they are consistently being fed a diet of hype that Pakistan is the first Islamic nation to explode a nuclear bomb.

Today, Sharif may be asking the Islamic world's aid to help Pakistan tide over its financial crisis, but tomorrow, if any of the Islamic nations, however rich, require a nuclear bomb, they will have to knock on Pakistan's door. It is this line of argument that scares you more than the reports datelined 'Held Kashmir' that talk about zulm and shaheeds.

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