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Kathmandu Friday March 01, 2002 Falgun 17, 2058.
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South Asia and shadow of
Afghanistan
By MADHAV P KHANAL
For over five decades the political arena of
South Asia has been frequently dominated by India and Pakistan with their occasional
head-on collisions primarily precipitated by the Kashmir dispute. Ever since the political
unity, the main benefit of British colonialism in the subcontinent, was destroyed by
partition in 1947 on the basis of a concept which is so reminiscent of the idea of a
Jewish ‘homeland’ in Palestine, South Asia has remained under a constant fear of
hostilities between a Hindu-dominated India and an Islamic Pakistan, a country created for
those Indian Muslims who chose to opt out of the Indian Union under the two-nation theory
invented by a few Muslim intellectuals around 1930. However, despite Pakistan becoming a
political reality in the summer of 1947, more than hundred million Muslims chose to stay
back in India against all odds.
Declaration of independence from foreign
domination should have been a joyful occasion to celebrate and an appropriate moment for
freedom fighters to reaffirm their pledges for a better life for the people who were
suppressed under the colonial yoke for more than a century. However, the independence of
India and Pakistan was the saddest occasion marked by a ghastly slaughter of more than
half a million people and uprooting of approximately 15 million men, women and children.
The psychological rift created by the macabre communal violence between the Hindus and the
Muslims at the behest of their respective zealots on the eve of their independence has
left a deep scar on their relationship ever since. So much so, the bilateral relations
between India and Pakistan frequently appear imbued with religious prejudice and a sense
of communal hatred.
The controversial accession of the former
princely state of Kashmir to the Indian Union, was in fact, the casus belli for the first
inconclusive war between India and Pakistan in 1948 in which the newly created Islamic
nation tested its mettle and subsequent results emboldened her to carry on unremitting
belligerency against the big brotherly neighbour on its eastern frontier to this date. As
such their first confrontation over disputed Kashmir marks the genesis of the
conflict-laden relationship between the two leading countries of South Asia. The current
military stand off along their disputed but de facto which they prefer to define as a
‘line of control’ may erupt into full scale war any time inviting thereby
unpropitious consequences engulfing possibly the entire region.
Having been heavily preoccupied with the ominous
clouds of the Cold War in the fifties of the last century the Western powers paid scant
attention to the long range geopolitical implications of the Kashmir dispute. Wittingly or
unwittingly they dismissed the issue as a localised dispute of bilateral nature. But now,
well over five decades later, the western world is realising their mistake which might now
cost them a heavy price in the light of both the contenders possessing nuclear weapons as
well as sophisticated vehicles to deliver them with high precision. Therefore, with the
escalating tensions between the two nuclear rivals of South Asia showing no signs of early
remission due to India’s apparent intransigence towards Pakistan’s repeated
overtures and their war of words, the looming dangers of confrontation between them do not
appear to recede yet. Despite the fact their teeming millions are still living a primitive
life due to abject poverty, shocking level of illiteracy and conspicuous absence of basic
health care, the leaders of both India and Pakistan leap with joy at their every marked
achievement in the arms race, nuclear or conventional.
As a natural consequence of the collapse of the
Taliban regime and the overt involvement of the Western powers in forming a coalition
among leaders representing a number of traditionally hostile and ethnically incompatible
tribal segments in Afghanistan, the dynamics of South Asian diplomacy is bound to undergo
a perceptible change sooner or later. Such a policy transformation, if it so happens, will
inevitably end up in crystallizing the extent of strategic alliance of the countries of
the region with their respective allies within or outside the continent without, of
course, affecting their spurious status of being adherents to the sophistic principles of
Non-aligned Movement, a political fad among Third World countries.
In fact owing to the circumstances created by
the ending of the Cold War and the obvious political vacuum following the demise of the
Soviet Union - the foreign policies of several developing countries reflected typical
symptoms of ambivalence towards the Western world. For technological partnership and a
number of other economic compulsions the Third World was left with no choice but to kowtow
to the developed countries; whereas in the wider context of international relations
several policies of the latter were bitterly censured for their double standard in respect
of various issues that the region had been seriously grappled with.
Today, almost the entire bloc of NATO as well as
countries that enjoy Western patronage are determined to reconstruct a country that has
been ravaged by internal war or external aggression for over two decades, the latest being
the US-led action against the barbaric Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his
al-Qaeda fanatics. It was the same group of countries which had marginalised a landlocked
Afghanistan for so long for its natural fault of not having possessed any strategic
attributes, that could have drawn the favourable attention of the Western powers.
As a result, for almost half a century it was
the former Soviet Union that provided the much needed technical skills and economic
assistance to this largely tribal country for developing its modest infrastructure that
has helped it maintain its territorial integrity and identity as a nation state. It is
again an ironical coincidence that Russia, which played the pivotal role during the entire
life of the Soviet Union and extend unsparing assistance to Afghanistan has now been
relegated to the fringes and is made to watch its erstwhile adversaries charting policy
and defining the shape of governance of the new republic which falls well within the ambit
of its strategic concern.
Even after months of relentless attacks on the
possible hideouts of the al-Qaeda terrorists, the US ambition to exterminate them does not
seem to have met with much success. But what has transpired so far is that the presence of
the US and its allied forces in Afghanistan will be for a relatively longer period than
was originally presumed and their mission will not be confined to keeping a vigil on
possible nefarious activities of the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan. They will surely
extend their surveillance beyond the frontiers of Afghanistan which borders on five Muslim
nations and an important province of China which incidentally has a predominant Muslim
population. Under these circumstances South Asia looks a fertile ground for rivalry among
nuclear powers along with the gradual revival of the hibernating Indo-Russian axis further
strengthened by other emerging powers of the region.
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