Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on January 29

Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on January 29, 2002:

Prof. Stanley Wolpert
Professor of Asian History

India-Pakistan - What Next?

A month ago today I was in Karachi and at that time the situation seemed much more perilous than it does today. India had just moved its heavy tanks and missiles closer to the line of control in Kashmir. There are now close to a million troops facing each other eyeball-to-eyeball in what is the most dangerous and perilous part of the world, because both powers that control these troops, as you know, have nuclear arsenals. Though we hope and pray they will never unleash them, it is always possible that a mistake can be made when so much force has come so perilously close to a border that has never really been finalized, but has gone from a cease-fire line to a line of control.

Remember, the struggle that India and Pakistan are now locked in is one that started fifty-four years ago. The tragedy is that, when South Asia was partitioned at the end of the British Raj, there was some hundred and sixty-two princely states that were given the option of deciding which of the dominions they would join, the largest being the state of Jammu and Kashmir, about the size of our state of Minnesota, with a population then of a little over 4 million, 77 per cent Muslim. According to the rules of the division of South Asia, by all logic it would have seemed that the state of Kashmir would have gone to Muslim Pakistan.

The ruler, however, of the state of Kashmir was a Hindu, and Maharaja Hari Singh wanted initially to have his state of Kashmir become the Switzerland of South Asia and, hopefully, to attain and remain independent. He, therefore, refused to join either dominion, but a few months later was tempted by Nehru and fear of tribals who were coming across from Pakistan to join the Indian dominion, though the deed of accession has somehow been lost in the archives of India. The acceptance of that accession by Nehru was made conditional because of Governor-General Mountbatten’s insistence that it be validated by the people of Kashmir through their plebiscite or through their vote. That has never occurred, despite the fact that we are more than half a century away, and despite the fact that the United Nations appointed three commissions on India and Pakistan, two of which were remarkably persistent in trying to get agreement to hold a plebiscite. Sir Rowan Dickson, who wrote the best description of the situation and the problem in 1950, was an eminent juror of Australia, and his solutions were not validated because Nehru, who was Prime Minister of India, had no intention of allowing a plebiscite to be held despite the fact that he promised that one would be held.

I think what happened with Nehru was similar to what happened with Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. Nehru became obsessed with Kashmir. He did some remarkably good things for India internally, just as Johnson did in this country with civil rights, war on poverty and other things of that kind, but when it came to Vietnam he was obsessed with the enormity of what he saw as America’s investment in victory. [He] insisted that he could not accept the idea of losing to people who were so much smaller than he was, a tragedy, as we know, which cost more than 50,000 American lives. In Kashmir more than 50,000 lives have been paid and that, too, is a situation, which has not come close to resolution.

The real tragedy is that the people of Kashmir themselves might very well choose not to join either Pakistan or India but they have not had the opportunity to make that decision and their feeling known. There are those in this room, Rafiq Khan, of course, among them who know much more about the problem than I do but let me just say this, that until and unless the people of Kashmir are given an opportunity to express their desires, their feelings and their wishes, there will not be a peaceful resolution to this problem. The real problem is one that will not go away despite the fact that India likes to repeat, time and again, that Kashmir is an integral part of the Indian union, and despite the fact that more than a half million Indian troops are now on permanent duty in a state that has little more than 10 million people, and that half a million Indian troops cannot pacify a country whose people are in many ways very docile and very peaceful. What India will say, of course, is that the reason that Kashmir continues to explode is that Pakistan sends terrorists across the line to destabilize the country.

What has happened in the last month, however, is that Pakistan’s President who was, as you know, a general before he became a president, and was born 58 years ago in Delhi, has had the remarkable good sense and judgment and ability to recognize that the only way to prevent what could turn into a dreadful atomic war between two countries whose capitals are seven minutes from the ballistic missiles of each other is by insisting that there is zero tolerance for terror in Pakistan today. By doing that, by putting some 2,500 suspected terrorists behind bars in the last month and by retaining a remarkable degree of cool -- in the face of what I think has been an extraordinary provocation by the swiftness with which India has mobilized and moved not only its arms but its most potent missiles to the front line -- President Musharraf has done something which I think very few generals in modern times can be expected to do: he has shown extraordinary statesmanship. He has, I believe, the toughest job of any leader of any nation in Asia today.

When he joined our global alliance against terror after September 11^th, many Pakistanis along the frontier -- and they are 15 percent of the 140 million people of Pakistan who are Pushtun-speaking Pathans -- consider him a traitor to Islam, certainly a traitor to the Taliban, and called him that and many of the rags that are thrown away in the streets of Karachi and that are written in Urdu or in Pushtun said that he has sacrificed Muslim blood for American money. In fact, what he did was a very courageous thing because he saved Pakistan, both from disintegration from the Taliban and from bankruptcy, and he has brought Pakistan now back from the brink of destruction to a position of extraordinary viability and potential prosperity.

All of that came shortly before the 13^th of December when, as you know, a carload with five terrorists approached the beautiful Parliament of India in New Delhi with weapons and guns at the ready. There were inside some 300 of India’s elected representatives, including many members of Prime Minister Vajpayee’s Cabinet. Luckily, all five of those terrorists were killed, though it took nine deaths of the police and soldiers who fought them as well. What India said immediately, of course, was [that] this is another act of terror by Pakistan. India, of course, had a feeling of tremendous indignation and anger. You must understand that in Pakistan many people, and many of the young people that I met, including students and faculty of the Aga Khan University and other places that I spoke, including a number of reporters, said that they believed that it was not a terrorist attack from the outside, but one that was staged by India itself, similar to the Reichstag fire of 1931. I don’t believe for a moment that that is true, or that that was the case, but there were many Pakistanis who did, because the Indian false hijacking of one plane, I think a few months before, and then several years before, led them to feel that India would do anything to call sufficient world attention to Pakistan’s opprobrious actions so that India could act with impunity in taking Kashmir, the Azad Kashmir quarter, that is, under Pakistani control.

You must understand that there is a feeling on the part of people on both sides of this battle line, this most volatile battle line in the world, of mistrust, of fear, of hatred. This feeling has been compounded by more than a half-century of conflict. Though the cease-fire line was originally drawn by the United Nations and with the Security Council’s help in January 1949, it has never really served to stop the actual firing across it. We have at this point many villages who have evacuated on the Pakistani side, especially for fear that India would move. Happily, however, India has had the good sense to hold off and has not taken the action that it seemed perilously ready to take at the end of last year. I think in great measure it is thanks to President Musharraf’s restraint that India has acted with restraint and thanks to the fact that he has banned no less than five of the more extreme groups and has ceased funding or allowing the funding of any of those groups to continue in their nefarious actions.

Let us remember, my friends, that Pakistan did not start the arming of these Taliban terrorists who are now part of the group that we have defeated in Afghanistan and part of the Al Qaeda. It was our own country who gave the arms when we started the destabilization of the Soviet Union in the first Afghan war, it was our own country that trained and armed Osama bin Laden and those who worked with him, and we sent in the Stinger missiles. When the great satanic Soviet Empire was finally brought to its knees, we could not wait to get out fast enough. We left so quickly that we didn’t even offer to buy the missiles back, rather than just to stay and try to make sure that the Afghanistan that was liberated from the Soviet invaders would have a chance to become a stable country as I hope and trust we are going to do this time.

It seems as if we are, as you all know, and so probably before coming here the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan is now in Washington and will be at the United Nations tomorrow. There seems every prospect that there is sufficient mobilization of resources to allow Afghanistan to recover from the horrendous beating that it has taken in the last months. The tragedy, however, is that so many of the people who have lived in Afghanistan are now either homeless or orphaned and many of them, of course, are still suffering from land mines, millions of which were laid and left behind after the great Soviet Union was brought to its knees.

We have to adopt a much more patient and long-range view of all of the problems of south Asia, and we have to take a more proactive role in helping to resolve the conflict in Kashmir. It is a conflict. The Indians, though they like to say that there is no Kashmir problem, there is only a problem of Pakistani terrorism, are saying that for their own consumption and their own people. Anyone who knows the region understands that the Indian army is viewed by most of the Kashmiris in the Vale as an army of occupation, not as an army of protection.

Two things, I think, have become clear since September 11^th. One is that there can be no tolerance in the world for terror; that we have reached the point where we understand that violence is not going to solve any problems. You know, one of the wisest men I ever knew, and I think one of the greatest who ever came to UCLA, taught me about problem solving. He was Dean Harvey Perloff, who founded our School of Architecture and Urban Planning (his wife, Mimi Perloff is with us here). It was Harvey who taught me that, if you are going to solve a problem, the first thing you have to do is talk about it to those who are on the other side of the table.

That was something that I think was understood by the great leader and founding father of Pakistan, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah because Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah was first and foremost a great barrister. He was a man who understood the law and who lived by the law. His guiding principles were justice and fair play, and it was the lack of justice and fair play that he felt when dealing with the Hindu leadership of Congress that made him insist that the Muslims of India are not a minority but required their own nation if they are going to live in freedom and have an opportunity to grow.

Unfortunately, Quaid-e–Azam Jinnah died within the year after Pakistan was born, but I think that one of the great and noble actions that Pakistan’s present president has taken is that he declared and proclaimed last year, the 125^th anniversary year of the birth of Muhammad Ali-Jinnah, as the year of the Quaid. He did that, remember before September 11^th, because he had the remarkable foresight and wisdom to appreciate that, if Pakistan is going to improve and if Pakistan is going to prosper, it must escape the narrow-minded and harsh Islamic tenets that have driven the Taliban and the madrassa education system to the point where it has now been destroyed or is in a state of disarray thanks to its losing credibility and losing support.

Jinnah was himself a moderate and modern-minded man. He was a Muslim who did not by any means close down his view about minorities, but rather embraced and welcomed the support and the help of all minorities in building Pakistan. He said in his most famous speech to the Constituent Assembly on the 11^th of August 1947, “You are free, you are free to go to your mosques, you are free to go to your temples. You can believe in any religion. It does not matter as long as you are all citizens and good citizens of this state of Pakistan. If we are going to make it a great state, we have got, first and foremost, to think about the masses and the poor and to help them emerge and to attain their goals. The best way to do that is through education, education of a modern kind, and developing the economy effectively, more effectively than it has been in the past, and reaching out so that the world will become friends of Pakistan rather than enemies.”

That was his goal, that was his dream, that was his vision of Pakistan, and it has been revived now by President Musharraf who I think in many ways, like General Eisenhower, had the good sense -- remember when Eisenhower inveighed against the military industrial complex that was destroying our country, and many people said, “Well, how does a general know about military industrial complex and why is he inveighing against it?” -- and yet he was, of course, as we know, right and wise.

I think even more wise was George Marshall. George Marshall was a general, remember, who was a true statesman. He had the genius to recognize through his Marshall Plan that the best way to deal with those who are vanquished is to help build them up. The Marshall Plan, of course, revived those who were defeated by him in the war, by us. And I think that President Musharraf has the good sense to understand not only that he must be a loyal ally of those of us who are committed to eliminating terror from this world if Pakistan is going to grow, if Pakistan is going to improve, if Pakistan is going to become all that it should be and all that it’s Quaid it’s great leader, hoped and dreamed for it and aspired for it.

The problem, of course, is that after the 13^th of December, India, which had felt neglected by us in the immediate aftermath of September 11^th and had been disappointed that we turned to Pakistan -- although geographically we had to turn to Pakistan if we wanted to have better access to Afghanistan -- offering itself instead, and finding that we didn’t respond, thought that perhaps the best way to get our attention and to remind us, as if reminder were needed -- it wasn’t -- that India is a much larger nation, a much wealthier nation, a much more powerful nation, than Pakistan. India, after all, has a population of a billion; Pakistan only 140 million. Therefore, India responded as dramatically, as radically, and as terrifyingly as it did in the immediate aftermath of December 13^th .

I hope that India will recognize now that it was an excessive escalation. I hope that India will appreciate that Pakistan is not trying to destabilize or destroy India’s elected government; that Pakistan respects and recognizes India’s elected government, and most of all I hope it will recognize that it cannot have a better leader in Pakistan at the moment, for India’s own sake, than President Musharraf, because if he is removed Pakistan could either go back to the kind of Islamic narrowness of rule that it had before with General Zia Al-Haq or Pakistan can become more militant in defying India since there are a number of generals who have been removed by President Musharraf who are still waiting in the wings and would like very much to take more vigorous action.

I believe that India should recognize and will recognize that President Musharraf is in their best interests as well as in Pakistan’s, and I would hope that both countries will pull back from the borders that they are now confronting one another at, that neither will ever launch any of the fatal missiles that they now have in their arsenals, and that we will take a more active role in helping to resolve the problem that more than fifty years has plagued the subcontinent.

Now, my wife, who is a lawyer and, like Mr. Jinnah, a barrister -- except we don’t call them barristers, we call them litigators -- who happens to be here and who usually tells me what I should do said before I came that I mustn’t just speak in generalities tonight, but I must tell you my solution to the problem. If any of you want to hear my solution to the problem I will be happy to tell it to you, but let me first of all say this: the name Pakistan means “land of the pure,” but it is also an acrostic and the P stands for Punjab, the A for Afghania, which is the northwest frontier province next to Afghanistan, and the K stands for, guess what? Kashmir, exactly. You win the $64,000.

Kashmir is at the center or at the heart of Pakistan. It is not going to go away from the feelings of Pakistanis, because Pakistanis believe that Kashmir was taken from them by India, by fraud and violence, and they believe that India’s reluctance and resistance to U.N. resolutions, several of which have been passed in ’48 – ’49, two commissioners sent out like Sir Owen Dickson and Dr. Frank Graham, that those actions that were ignored by the world were done so because India has no intention of allowing Kashmir to come of its own free will to Pakistan.

Now, I don’t know if the Kashmiri poll were taken today what the results would be, and though my wife may say that I am equivocating and again dodging the issue of my responsibility, I really don’t know that a poll can or should be taken in the entire state. Many years ago, very early in this struggle, Sheikh Abdullah whose son is now the Chief Minister of Jammu in Kashmir, the Indian Jammu in Kashmir, and who is, like Dr. Shah, a doctor, though not as good a doctor, I’m sure, Sheikh Abdullah said to Nehru, “Why don’t we let Kashmir be divided? Jammu in the south being majority Hindu to India, and Kashmir being majority, overwhelming majority, Muslim to Pakistan?” Nehru, of course, insisted, after he stopped sweating and turning red and yelling, that this was never to be mentioned and though he called, until the end of Sheikh Abdullah’s life, the sheikh his good friend, kept him in jail for eleven years because the idea of dividing Kashmir in that way was anathema to India. What India would accept and what the sheikh’s son, Dr. Farouk, has suggested is turning the present line of control into an international border. India would be happy with that. That is the status quo. India has a half million troops in the Vale, all of the best hotels are barracks by Indian soldiers and officers. Those of you who wanted to go to Kashmir to get into those hotels or live on a houseboat will find it very difficult because the Indian troops have them.

The fact of the matter is that there are several natural geographical and cultural units in the state of Jammu and Kashmir that really can easily be divided up. One of them in the south is Jammu, which is mostly Hindu and, of course, without the region of Poonch which came over to Azad Kashmir that could easily go to India. The other is Ladakh which is, of course, next to Tibet in the north, very sparsely populated, mostly by Buddhists, Tibetans, and which could, again, either go to India or somehow or other be allowed to integrate with China. But the most important of the regions is the Vale, and the Vale, which is the most beautiful part, the part that was rhapsodically described, of course, by Mogol emperors and poets as paradise on earth. It is no longer that, of course, but it has the Shalimar Gardens. That part is predominately Muslim, and probably would have gone easily to Pakistan had there been an early plebiscite. Now it might very well still go to Pakistan, but, in any event, should be polled. That could be arranged with U.N. help. It could be arranged if we offered our good offices, and I am sure that Pakistan would agree to any opportunity to have a mediator in this particular problem, but India never has.

Let me just mention, however, that there was one Indian who wanted to be the mediator of this terrible, volatile problem. He is called the Father of the Indian Nation as well as Mahatma, which is Great Souled One, and in the last months of his life tried very hard to get those who spoke of themselves as his disciples, namely the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and his deputy, Sirdar Patel, to listen to him in this matter of the horrendous behavior of the Indian army in Kashmir. It wasn’t half a million troops at the time. It started with the first Sikh battalion that was sent up to save the Vale from the raiders. My friend, Husman Singh, I remember, in 1965, said the Indians are always ready to fight to the last Sikh. But be that as it may, Mahatma Gandhi said “if we wish to bring about the rule of God in India I would suggest that our first task is to magnify our own faults and find no fault with the Muslims. Today I am helpless. I have no say with my people. I am ashamed of what is happening today in India. Kashmir is in the cauldron. Those who join the Congress are scrambling for power.”

Nehru, of course, though he would eulogize the Mahatma after his assassination a month later, saying “the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere,” said that this time Kashmir is of the most vital significance to India, Kashmir is going to be a drain on our resources, but a greater drain on Pakistan.

Mahatma Gandhi’s Kashmir solution was simple: “One should always admit one’s mistakes. I shall advise Pakistan and India to sit together and decide the matter. If they want an arbitrator they can appoint one. Kashmir cannot be saved by military might alone. India and Pakistan must come together and decide the issue with the help of impartial mediation. Is there no one in India who is impartial?” In the last weeks of this man’s, this mahatma’s, life, and he moaned [that] only the good and the noble can be brave; stupid people can never be brave. Today the poison is only increasing. Kashmir has added more poison. If I had my way I would have invited Pakistan’s representative to India and we could have met, discussed the matter and worked out a settlement. We should at least try.” Then he said, “Today, mine is a cry in the wilderness.”

Ten days later he started his last fast unto death and two weeks after that he was assassinated by a Hindu who said that “the old man was nothing but a Muslim lover and a traitor to India.” That Hindu was part of the RSS, part of the right-wing extremist Hindu group that has among its more recent members many of the leaders of India’s current BJP government, including its prime minister who was once a member of that group. Happily, however, the most powerful man in India’s government today, Home Minister L.K. Advani, was himself born in Karachi, first capital of Pakistan, and Home Minister Advani when he was here in Washington last month said, among other things, that there is no military solution to the problem between India and Pakistan. It must be negotiated politically and diplomatically. The same thing that the ruler or leader of Pakistan, who was born in Delhi, has said many times.

So, my solution, if my dear wife is still interested, would be to lock L.K. Advani and President Musharraf in a room until smoke, either white or black, comes out of the roof, but I think that would probably solve it or help it. I don’t like to be flippant about these things but I guess if I don’t add a note of lightness we may all just end up worrying about the horrors of the war that could engulf 1.2 billion people.

I’m going to stop here because I think there is some time for questions, I hope.

Thank you.