The Longest August (63 page)

Though Nehru went through the motions in his government's talks with Pakistan on Kashmir, nothing came of it. He had no intention of altering his stance that the current cease-fire line in Kashmir should be turned into an international border. This was unacceptable to Pakistan, which demanded a plebiscite, as Nehru had agreed initially. Nehru considered revising his policy on Kashmir only when massive anti-India demonstrations took place in Srinagar in December 1963.

His release of the Kashmiri leader Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah from jail in the spring of 1964 and Abdullah's flight to Rawalpindi to meet Ayub Khan showed promise. But Nehru died of heart failure in May, while Abdullah was in Pakistan. With that died the prospect of a satisfactory resolution of the Kashmir conundrum during Nehru's lifetime.

Overall Nehru's inflexible stance on Kashmir for seventeen years had stoked frustration among Pakistani leaders. When they could no longer contain it, they tried to change the status quo through force. Given India's military superiority, these attempts would fail. The setbacks in Kashmir altered Pakistan's history radically, with the 1965 war leading to the secession of East Pakistan, and the 1999 Kargil conflict resulting in the termination of democracy. The Pakistani leadership also tried to achieve its aim by using armed infiltrators to destabilize Indian Kashmir. Delhi
reacted with a ferocious response, using torture and extrajudicial killings on an industrial scale. After 9/11, however, as a victim of cross-border terrorism, India gained widespread Western sympathies, which improved its diplomatic clout.

Second Indo-Pakistan War

In the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War, Anglo-American military aid to India started tilting the balance of power in South Asia in India's favor. Ayub Khan used force to expel India from the 48 percent of Jammu and Kashmir it occupied.

The strategy he deployed was a repeat of what Ali Khan had done eighteen years earlier. Under Operation Gibraltar, Pakistan-trained militias infiltrated Indian Kashmir in August 1965, followed by the involvement of regular troops invading Indian Kashmir on September 1. The three-week-long armed conflict, which spread to Pakistani and Indian Punjab, ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire. The fear of China opening a front on India's eastern frontier was an important factor in Delhi accepting the truce.

There were substantial losses in men and military hardware on both sides. By frustrating Pakistan's objective to alter the status quo in Kashmir, India scored a success. The domestic consequences of Ayub Khan's failure were far reaching. During the conflict people in East Pakistan, lightly defended by their troops, were exposed. Their fear and helplessness increased their alienation from West Pakistan and boosted Bengali nationalism, which achieved its aim in the form of the sovereign state of Bangladesh, created out of East Pakistan. The controlled media in Pakistan had made people believe that their armed military was doing wonderfully well. If so, why did Ayub Khan accept the UN cease-fire resolution?, most Pakistanis wondered aloud. The military dictator's credibility plunged, paving the way for his exit in 1969.

But his successor, General Yahya Khan, failed to honor the result of the general election held October through December 1970 in Pakistan under universal suffrage, which entitled the Bengali nationalist Awami League leader Shaikh Mujibur Rahman to premiership. Instead he unleashed a reign of terror in East Pakistan.

The subsequent crisis caused by the flight of millions of East Pakistanis provided the government of Indira Gandhi with an opportunity.
Through adroit moves in diplomacy, training of guerrillas to undermine East Pakistan's government, and superb military tactics, combined with breaking the Pakistani army's code, Gandhi brought about the signing of the surrender document by General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi in Dacca on December 17, 1971.

The predominantly Hindu Indians tapped into their religious mythology to crown their triumph. They conferred the sobriquet of Goddess Durga (Sanskrit: Inaccessible) on Indira Gandhi. According to Hindu lore, Durga is a warrior goddess who decapitates the buffalo-demon Mahisasura. Now Gandhi slew the evil of the two-nation theory on which Jinnah had built Pakistan with its two far-flung wings.

East Pakistan's secession proved that a common religion was not a strong enough glue to hold together two societies with different languages, dress, and cultures. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism was a bitter pill to swallow, not only for West Pakistanis but also for those in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession to Pakistan.

The third Indo-Pakistan War closed a tumultuous period in the postindependence history of South Asia.

Post-1971 Pakistan

India now had to deal with a Pakistan that had lost more than half of its population but was more cohesive racially and religiously, with its Hindu minority reduced to less than 2 percent. It was ruled by the popularly elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had built up the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) from scratch.

At the summit in Shimla in June 1972, he faced the victorious Gandhi, whose leading aim was to bring the Kashmir dispute to an official close. Bhutto was opposed to this. When their respective delegations reached a deadlock, he had a one-on-one meeting with Gandhi. He convinced her that after the loss of East Pakistan, if he were to abandon his country's claims to Kashmir, he would be thrown out by the military. Having agreed earlier to convert the 1949 UN cease-fire line into the LoC, Bhutto seemed willing to let it morph into an international frontier without a written declaration. On Gandhi's insistence the final draft committed both sides to settle all their differences “by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means mutually agreed upon,” thus ruling out third-party mediation. And it listed a final settlement of
Jammu and Kashmir “as one of the outstanding questions awaiting settlement.”
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In the subsequent decades, the 1972 Shimla Accord continued to be the basis of all Indo-Pakistan talks.

But progress on normalizing relations and resuming trade and economic cooperation got sidetracked by turmoil in India's and Pakistan's domestic scenes. Bhutto faced insurgency by nationalists in Baluchistan. In June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhi's parliamentary seat won on the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources during her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she imposed an emergency and ruled by decree.

In Pakistan, the rigged March 1977 general election gave the PPP a large majority. The opposition, rallying behind the Pakistan National Alliance, resorted to massive demonstrations. Army Chief General Muhammad Zia ul Haq intervened by mounting Operation Fair Play on July 5, arrested Bhutto, and promised fair elections within ninety days. That never happened.

An Islamist to the core, Zia ul Haq clung to power until August 1988, when he was killed, along with twenty-seven others, by an explosion in the transport plane ferrying them near the Bahawalpur airport. During his rule Pakistani state and society had undergone Islamization and drifted further away from secular, democratic India.

Any ill will that Zia ul Haq had generated for his military dictatorship in the United States evaporated when Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 to bolster the twenty-month-old Marxist regime in Kabul. Whereas India had recognized the leftist regime in Afghanistan, Pakistan had not. When President Jimmy Carter offered $400 million in aid to Islamabad to shore up armed Islamist resistance to the Afghan government, Zia ul Haq called it “peanuts”
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and rejected it.

His prospect brightened when Ronald Reagan became US president in 1981. Washington poured funds and weapons for the Afghan mujahedin through Pakistani army's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate. Reagan persuaded Congress to sanction $3.2 billion aid to Islamabad over the next six years, arguing that arming Pakistan with modern US weaponry would reduce the chance of its pursuing the nuclear option. In practice, Pakistan forged ahead on both armament fronts, conventional and nuclear.

Shaken by India's detonation of a “nuclear device” in May 1974, Pakistan had initiated a clandestine program to catch up with its arch rival in this regard. Given Beijing's overarching aim to deprive India of becoming the hegemonic power in South Asia, it surreptitiously aided Islamabad in
its nuclear arms program. To this quadrilateral linkage was added another actor: Israel. Committed to thwarting the nuclear weapons ambition of any Muslim country, Israel offered to work with Delhi to bomb the Kahuta nuclear facility, located twenty miles from Islamabad and run by Abdul Qadeer Khan. By late 1982, a joint Indo-Israeli plan to raid Kahuta was hatched. During their clandestine trip to Tel Aviv in early 1983, Indian military officers purchased electronic equipment to jam Kahuta's air defenses.

On the surface, Gandhi and Zia ul Haq maintained cordial relations. On the margins of the seventh Non-Aligned Movement summit in Delhi in March 1983, they agreed to set up the Joint Indo-Pakistan Commission, with subcommissions for trade, economics, information, and travel. This double-dealing became an abiding feature of Delhi-Islamabad relations.

The Indo-Israeli plot against Pakistan did not remain secret from the ISI for long. In the autumn of 1983 its chief sent a message to its counterparts in India's Research and Analysis Wing foreign intelligence agency. This brought about a meeting between Munir Ahmad Khan, head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Raja Ramanna, head of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, in a Vienna hotel. Khan warned Ramanna that if India alone, or in collusion with Israel, attacked Kahuta, Pakistan would hit India's nuclear facility in Trombay on the outskirts of Mumbai.
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This compelled Gandhi to hesitate. In addition, Pakistan's ambassador in Delhi conveyed the same message to India's Ministry of External Affairs.
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This maneuver helped Zia ul Haq achieve his twin objectives of signaling that Islamabad's nuclear program was unstoppable, thus gaining international acceptance by stealth, and issuing a stern warning to Gandhi. She revoked her earlier go-ahead to Israel's hawkish defense minister Ariel Sharon.

Militant Sikhs' violent agitation for an independent homeland, called Khalistan, appealed to Zia ul Haq since it was based on religious grounds. At his behest, the ISI aided the extremist Sikhs with training and weapons. The activists of the Khalistan movement turned the Sikhs' holiest complex, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, into an armed fortress. To destroy this base, Gandhi ordered the storming of the Golden Temple by the army in June 1984. The military succeeded at the cost of shedding much blood and alienating the Sikh community nationwide. In retaliation, two of Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in October.

She thus became the second Indian leader to fall victim to violence stemming from religious fanaticism, the earlier example being that of Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, who was assassinated by a Hindu supremacist for urging the Indian government to meet its financial obligations to Pakistan.

The Race for Nuclear Arms

Rajiv Gandhi, the only surviving son of Indira, who succeeded her as prime minister, was untutored in politics or administration. Nonetheless, after his meeting with Zia ul Haq in December 1985 in Delhi, they agreed not to attack each other's nuclear facilities as a confidence-building measure. Crucially, though, they disagreed on the nature of their nuclear programs, both of them professing a peaceful use, a facade that would crack in 1987.

In December 1986 Gandhi gave a green light to the Indian Army chief, Lieutenant General Krishnaswamy Sundararajan, to stage the war game code-named Brasstacks to test his innovative concept of combining mechanization, mobility, and air support. The operation involved mobilizing nearly three-quarters of the Indian army in Rajasthan and putting them on high alert. As a model for a full-scale invasion, it revived Pakistani leaders' long-held nightmare that their country would be annihilated by India.

In retaliation, Zia ul Haq, as army chief, extended the military's winter exercises in Punjab, mobilized the army in Karachi and the Southern Air Command, and deployed armored and artillery divisions as part of a pincer to squeeze Indian Punjab, where the Sikh insurgency had revived.

In an astutely planned maneuver, Qadeer Khan gave an interview to Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar on January 28, 1987, in Islamabad. If India pushed Pakistan into a corner, “we will use the bomb,” he told Nayar. “We won't waste time with conventional weapons.”
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While Nayar's scoop was held up by the London-based
Observer
, a Sunday newspaper, awaiting authentication by different sources, the story leaked.

To defuse the festering crisis, Gandhi invited Zia ul Haq to witness the second day's play in the five-day cricket match in Jaipur on February 22. He accepted the invitation. Sitting next to Gandhi, he reportedly whispered that if India's forces crossed the border, Indian cities would be “annihilated.” A pro forma denial of the statement by Islamabad followed.
All the same, from then on the media in India routinely said that Pakistan was “within a few turns of a screwdriver” of assembling an atom bomb.

In short, after four decades of living in fear of India's overwhelming military superiority, Pakistan achieved parity with its rival in nuclear deterrence. Nevertheless, it did not lay to rest Pakistani leaders' fears of India becoming the unchallenged regional power in South Asia.

Initially, Gandhi and the democratically elected Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto got along well. On the sidelines of the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Islamabad in late December 1988, Bhutto had a meeting with Gandhi. She pledged to choke off Pakistan's aid to Sikh separatists. In return, Gandhi promised to withdraw Indian troops from the contested Siachen Glacier in Kashmir, which he failed to do because of his party's defeat in the 1989 general election.