T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Punjab, if not Kashmir?

LINE & LENGTH

The ISI needs to graze. With Kashmir having lost some flavour, Punjab is coming back on the menu.

Is it not interesting that just as Kashmir is cooling down""seemingly at least""that the Khalistan issue is warming up with fresh demands for Khalistan being made from within the Golden Temple and some people being arrested in Delhi on Thursday for having terrorist intent?

Or, conversely, is it not interesting that just as the Khalistan issue started to cool down in the early 1990s, the Kashmir issue suddenly warmed up and resulted in a full-scale terrorist onslaught in the 1990s, just as the Punjab one had done in the 1980s?

I have written about this before but it bears repetition because Indians, other than a few in the ministry of external affairs and the intelligence community, don't have long memories.

So it is worth reminding ourselves of some basic facts about the Punjab insurgency in the 1980s. The starting and ending dates of that story hold the key.

It all began in real earnest in about 1981 and ended in 1992. These dates coincide almost exactly with the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and the resulting indulgences shown by the US of Pakistan.

The US had needed Pakistani help then just as it does now. Zia ul-Haq had seen the main chance, and extracted what appears to have been a promise from the US that he should be allowed to stir things up in Punjab.

The idea was to carry out the first lab test of Pakistan's new India policy. This consisted of taking revenge for the defeat in East Pakistan in 1971 by carrying on a low-intensity war against India. Punjab was chosen because Kashmir would have been too obvious.

The policy worked, not least because of the machinations of the Congress party in the state. That story has been well and often told and need not be repeated. Suffice it to say that Indira Gandhi was an important player.

The deal that Zia made with the Americans was straightforward. The US would turn a blind eye to Pakistan's latest export""terrorism""being carried out by its leading Export House, the ISI. But it would intervene if things went too far, such as a real threat to India's unity and integrity.

Things went according to plan. India was thrown completely off-balance by the Punjab insurgency.

After a decade of bleeding, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1990 and the US lost interest in Pakistan. Zia, meanwhile, in the usual and favoured Pakistani way of dealing with its presidents, had been bumped off in 1988.

But the ISI, thanks to the 2 billion or so dollars that the US had routed through it to Afghan insurgents, had become a parallel centre of power to the Army.

Sometimes it worked in harmony with the Army and sometimes against it. But it always worked against elected governments. Pakistan had become a dyarchy in a manner that the Lords Montagu and Chelmsford would never have thought possible (the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 introduced dyarchy in India).

Be that as it may, the first serious trouble began in Kashmir in the winter of 1989. It picked up steam as Punjab cooled. The head of steam built up by the ISI in Punjab and Afghanistan had to be used up somewhere. Kashmir was an obvious place.

Once again the US looked away but this time because it just could not be bothered. It had other important things to attend to in its new role as the world's pre-eminent power. South Asia, since it had not gone nuclear, was lowest on its worry list.

The result, which we in India tend to overlook or miss, is that the ISI became even more powerful. That power culminated in the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, which was an ISI creation and four-fifths of which consisted of Pakistani regulars.

Whence the point of this narrative: when you deal with Pakistan, it is not just the formal part of its power apparatus that you deal with. You also have deal with the invisible enemy, the ISI. And enemy it is, have no doubts on that score.

No Pakistani civilian head of government has been able to control it. Indeed, if anything it has been the other way round. And even when there is a military head, as at present, he has had to allow the ISI space, lest it turn around and bite him.

The fact that Musharraf's man heads the ISI now only makes it a bit more amenable to his needs. But there is a point beyond which even he cannot go.

The short point is that the ISI needs to graze. With Kashmir having lost some flavour, Punjab is coming back on to its menu. It will be interesting to see how the US responds""assuming it is not an accomplice in the enterprise.

If Musharraf convinces it that, in order to render his favours to it, he needs to give the ISI a bone to chew on, it will adopt a laid-back approach.

That is what I would bet on. It is a no-loss option for it. Besides, it is a way of telling India that if it doesn't fully comply with US wishes, such as regarding the gas pipeline from Iran, it has ways of making things uncomfortable.

India's responses will be of great interest. Here liberalism is defined by how friendly you appear to be with Pakistan even though the Pakistani State is fully committed to revenge and because we dismembered Pakistan in 1971. Our liberals also forget that the Pakistani State is not normal in any sense of the word.

It is, as I said, a peculiarly vicious mutant that even exports nuclear technology. Only North Korea comes anywhere close to it. And the more the West condones its deviant behaviour, the more vicious it becomes.

The real question for India, therefore, is not merely how it deals with Pakistan. It is, even more importantly, whether it can succeed in changing the character of the Pakistani State. But the auguries are not good.

With its unrepresentative character and feudal norms, the Pakistani State continues to serve the US well, as it has always done. Indeed, with it having gone openly nuclear, it would not make much sense for the US to allow Pakistan to become democratic. That would reduce its control.

In short, this monkey is not about to get off India's back. The sooner this is understood, the better we will be able to deal with it.