Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy

Preface: This paper culminates my line of argument since our University of Hawaii Pakistan book in the mid 1980s, through my work on the Kashmir problem in the 1990s, published in The Statesman in 2005/2006 etc and  in my undelivered Lahore lectures of 2011.  https://independentindian.com/2011/10/13/my-seventy-one-notes-at-facebook-etc-on-kashmir-pakistan-and-of-course-india-listed-thanks-to-jd/ The paper has faced resistance from both Indian and Pakistani newspapers for obvious reasons.  I would like to especially thank Beena Sarwar and Gita Sahgal in recent weeks for helpful comments.  (And Frank Hahn, immediately saw when I mentioned it to him in 2004 that my solution was Pareto-improving…etc)

The *Bulletin of Atomic Scientists* recently reported an Urdu book *Taqat ka Sarab* (‘*Illusion of Power*) published in Pakistan in December 2014 edited by the physicist Dr AH Nayyar. The book “aims to educate Pakistanis about the attitudes of their leadership toward nuclear weapons”. It says “Pakistan’s people have come to believe that the successful acquisition of nuclear capability means that their nation’s security is forever ensured”. Pakistani politicians, scientists and officials who created these weapons have used them to justify a “right to unlimited authority for ruling over Pakistan”. “Consequently, free discussion and honest opinion about nuclear weapons have been nearly prohibited, under the premise that any such talk poses a basic threat to national security.”

Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s order to Indian forces to cross the Punjab border towards Lahore in 1965 in response to President Ayub Khan’s attack in Kashmir genuinely shocked Pakistan’s political and military establishment at the time. It may have continued to do so ever since. Everyone in Lahore for those few days in September 1965 was ready to battle the invasion of infidel India considered imminent when Indian forces reached the Ichogil canal.

“Hindu-dominated India wants to occupy us and destroy the Pakistan Principle for which our martyrs died” has been the constantly heard Pakistani refrain. After 1965 it did not take long for Pakistan, via the ignominy of the 1971 surrender in Dhaka, to acquire by any means the technology to develop its own nuclear weapons, even under the noses of its American friends.

Now Pakistan is said to have some 110 nuclear warheads, mostly in a disassembled state but with a few on fighter-jets in hidden air-bases in Balochistan (made by the USA decades ago) always at the ready, waiting for that Indian attack that will never come. It may all have been psychotic delusion.

India has never initiated hostilities against Pakistan. Not once. Not in 1947, 1965, 1971, 1999, 2008.

In 1971 India undoubtedly supported the Mukti Bahini, and I myself, as a schoolboy distributing supplies to refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh, was personally witness to Indian military involvement as of August 1971. Even so, hostilities between the countries formally began on 3 December 1971 with the surprise Pakistani air attack on Indian bases in Punjab and UP.

Though India has never attacked first, the myth continues in Pakistan that wicked Hindu-dominated India wants to attack and suppress their country. What is closer to the truth is that the New Delhi elite is barely able to run New Delhi, and the last place on earth they would want to run is Pakistan.

On our Indian side, the Indian military has been allowed a budgetary carte blanche for decades, especially with foreign exchange resources. (Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on 28 February 2015 has allocated some 2,467 billion INR to the military.)

Despite our vast spending, a band of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terrorists tyrannized Mumbai for days on end while we seem perpetually without strategy against the People’s Republic of China’s recurrent provocations.

The two world powers with traditional interests in India — Russia and Britain — place their long-term agents in Delhi’s high politics and places with impunity, getting done all they need to in particular cases. The USA, France, Israel and others follow suit – all mainly to do with selling India very expensive military weapons, aircraft etc. that they have in excess inventory.  India now has the notorious distinction of being the world’s largest weapons’ importer.

Yet we are hardly a trading or monetary superpower.  We have large current account and budgetary deficits, and we are essentially buying whatever weapons, aircraft, shopping malls etc. that we do on foreign credit that we may or may not have. (Pakistan does the same.)

India’s illusions of power have to do with boasting a very large military that can take on the imperialists. We do not realize the New Imperialism that may control Delhi is not of a Clive or Dupleix but of clandestine or open foreign lobbyists and agents who get done what their masters need to have done on a case-by-case basis. The result is a corrosion of Indian power, sovereignty, and credit, little by little, and may lead to a collapse or grave crisis in the future. Even the BJP/RSS Government of Mr Modi (let aside the Sonia-Manmohan Congress and official Communists) may not realize how it all came about.

The way forward for both Pakistan and India is to seek to break the impasse between ourselves.

And there is no doubt the root problem remains Kashmir, and the hysteria and terrorism it has spawned over the years.  A resolution of these fundamental issues calls for some hard scholarship, political vision and guts. The vapid gassing of stray bureaucrats, journalists, diplomats or generals has gotten everyone precisely nowhere thus far.

I have argued at length in previous publications that the *de facto* boundary that was the Ceasefire Line in 1949, and was later renamed the Line of Control in 1972, is indeed also the *de jure* boundary between India and Pakistan.

Jammu & Kashmir came into existence as a legal entity on 16 March 1846 under the Dogra Gulab Singh, friend of the British during the Sikh wars, and a protégé earlier of the great Sikh Ranjit Singh.

Dogra J&K ended its existence as an entity recognized in international law on 15 August 1947. (Hari Singh, the fourth and last Dogra ruler where Gulab Singh had been the first, desperately sought Clement Attlee’s recognition but did not get it.)  Thanks to British legal confusion, negligence or cunning, the territory of what had been known as Dogra Jammu & Kashmir became sovereign-less or ownerless territory in international law on that date, with the creation of the new Pakistan and new India.

The new Pakistan as of August-September 1947 immediately started to plan to take the territory by force, and sought to implement that plan as of 22 October. Had the Pakistani attackers not stopped to indulge in the Rape of Baramullah, they would have taken Srinagar airport by 26 October, and there would have been no Indian defence of the territory possible. As matters turned out, the ownerless territory of what had been Dogra Jammu & Kashmir came to be divided by “military decision” (to use the UN’s term) between the new Pakistan and new India. Kargil and Drass were taken by Pakistan and then lost. Skardu was held by India and later lost. Neither military ever since is going to permit the other to take an inch from itself either by war or by diplomacy.

The *de facto* boundary over ownerless territory divided by military force is the *de jure* boundary in the Roman law that underlies all international law. Once both sides recognize that properly, we may proceed to the next stages. 

On the Pakistani side, recognizing Indian sovereignty over Indian territory in what had been J&K requires stamping out the LeT etc – perhaps not so much by force as by explaining to them that the fight is over, permanently. There is no jihad against India now or ever. Indian territory is not dar-ul-harb but dar-ul-aman: where more than one hundred million Muslim citizens of India freely and peacefully practice their faith.

On the Indian side, if, say, SAS Geelani and friends, under conditions of individual privacy, security and full information, wish to renounce Indian nationality, become stateless, and apply for some other nationality (like Pakistani or Afghan or Iranian) while continuing to live lawfully and law-abidingly on Indian territory, do we have a problem with that? We can’t really. The expatriate children of the Indian elite have renounced Indian nationality in America, Britain, Australia etc upon far weaker principles or beliefs. India has many foreign nationals living permanently on its territory peacefully and law-abidingly (Sir Mark Tully perhaps the most notable) and can add a few more.

The road would be gradually opened for an exchange of consulates between India and Pakistan in Srinagar and Muzaffarabad (leave aside vice-consulates or tourist offices in Jammu, Gilgit, Skardu, Leh). And the remaining Hurriyat, as new Pakistani nationals living in India, can visit the Pakistani consul in Srinagar for tea every day if they wish, to discuss Pakistani matters like Afridi’s cricket or Bilawal’s politics or whatever. 

The militaries and potentially powerful economies on both sides could then proceed towards real strength and cooperation, having dispelled their current illusions of power.

Viz  https://independentindian.com/2011/10/13/my-seventy-one-notes-at-facebook-etc-on-kashmir-pakistan-and-of-course-india-listed-thanks-to-jd/