By Sudha Ramachandran
In a week’s time, President Barack Obama will begin his five-day visit to India. He is keenly awaited in cities like Delhi and Bangalore, where people are looking to see whether Obama will endorse India’s permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council or what he will say about outsourcing of business.
To those in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, however, the visit of an American president ignites fear and foreboding.
During the trip to India 10 years ago of another US president, Bill Clinton, Kashmir witnessed one of its worst massacres and among its most controversial. There is concern that a similar tragedy will mark Obama’s visit.
"The visit of the US president to India is ... from the publicity point of view, large enough [for terrorists] to try and create something, even if it is not in any place near where President Obama would be," Home Secretary G K Pillai told CNN-IBN news channel. "We fear that innocent civilians will be killed and then the blame would be put, like the last time, on the Indian army. All indications are that the propaganda machinery would be out to do the same. Therefore, we are being careful," he added.
"The last time" that Pillai is referring to is the horrific killing of Sikhs in Kashmir on March 20, 2000. Hours before Clinton's arrival in Delhi, "unidentified gunmen" sneaked into the village of Chittisinghpura in Kashmir's Anantnag district and shot dead 36 men. The assailants were reportedly dressed in army fatigues. While some media reports claimed that the assailants spoke in Urdu, thus hinting they were Muslims, others noted that they had raised Hindu slogans after the massacre.
India blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. It claimed that the killings were aimed at drawing international attention to the Kashmir issue to get the Americans to mediate between India and Pakistan. Early that month, Clinton had described Kashmir as "the most dangerous place on Earth", in the context of the long-standing dispute of the two nuclear armed neighbours over Kashmir. The Chittisinghpura massacre was aimed at "underscoring that perception of Kashmir", Indian officials said then.
Pakistan and the Kashmiri separatist groups accused Indian security forces of carrying out the attack in order to "malign the Kashmiris' struggle for independence from Indian occupation" in the eyes of the world. The "mujahideen have nothing against the Sikh community, which sympathises with our struggle", Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin clarified.
Indeed, Sikhs had not been targeted ever by the militants in the decade-long insurgency.
Kashmiris themselves have been bitterly divided on the matter with some blaming Indian authorities and others pointing in Pakistan's direction. Some accused the Ikhwanis ie, surrendered militants, for the killings.
On a visit to Chittisinghpura a few months after the killings, this writer found that its residents were unsure of the identity of their assailants and lived in mortal fear of "them" returning to take revenge if the villagers said too much. Adding fuel to the fire was the discovery some years later that the five youths killed by Indian security forces a few days after the Chittisinghpura incident on suspicion of being involved in the killings were in fact innocent.
Further muddying the waters was Clinton's observations. While his immediate response to the massacre was cautious - he was careful to attribute it to "unknown groups" - that changed in his introduction to former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright's book The Mighty and the Almighty, where he wrote that "Hindu militants" had murdered the Sikhs in cold blood. The publisher Harper Collins subsequently removed the reference to Hindu militants, describing it as an "error ... due to a failure in the fact-checking process".
Some months ago, it was reported that David Headley, the Pakistani-American Lashkar operative linked to the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, had admitted to Indian and American officials that the Chittisinghpura massacre was the work of the Lashkar, vindicating India's position.
Allegations and counter-allegations, rumours and conspiracy theories have swirled around discussions of the Chittisinghpura incident, keeping this massacre a mystery for the past decade. Whoever carried it out and whatever their message, the impact of the killings remains alive to date.
"One visit of a US President brought misery in the form of the killings," Nanak Singh, a survivor of the massacre told The Tribune. Karamjeet Singh, another survivor said that in the run-up to Obama's visit "there are similar fears of militant attacks".
"We fear they [Indian agencies] can do something similar [to the Chittisinghpura killings]" during the Obama visit," pro-Pakistan Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani said a few days ago in Srinagar.
Echoing that view from his home in Pakistan controlled Kashmir, Salahuddin warned that "minority communities can be massacred, another drama like Mumbai attacks can be staged, an attack on parliament or important government offices or a foreign mission may be carried out" during the US president's visit and "Hurriyat [an umbrella group of separatist organisations] leaders will be blamed".
Indian officials say the separatists are planning attacks, hence these statements to prepare the ground to deflect blame from themselves. The Indian government is not taking any chances and has stepped up security, especially in Kashmir.
But meanwhile, a "threat" far less horrific but more damaging to India's image is troubling the Indian government.
Booker prize winning novelist and activist Arundhati Roy's said at a conference in Delhi that "Kashmir has never been an integral part of India". The statement has triggered angry calls for her arrest on charges of sedition. The government is under pressure from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to arrest her. But Obama is coming next week and Roy's arrest would sully Delhi's democratic image in the eyes of the international media.
What Roy has said has been said by many before her. This is a position of many in the Kashmir Valley and some in India have articulated before. But Roy, while a lightning rod for criticism in India, has many supporters in the West. Her arrest on the eve of Obama's visit would keep international attention riveted on Kashmir and India's many failings there.
That is a prospect that India would like to avoid.
Officials in the Home Ministry told Asia Times Online that Roy's arrest on charges of sedition was ruled out, "at least for now".
India has been opposed to "external meddling in the Kashmir problem". It does not want to give reason "for Obama to refer to the 'K word' in any context other than that of Pakistan's continuing support to terrorism there," the official said.
Indeed, Obama will have to tread carefully if he does not want to annoy his Indian hosts.
The British learnt their lessons the hard way. During Queen Elizabeth's visit to India and Pakistan in 1997, foreign secretary Robin Cook told a group of journalists in Pakistan that “he would take up the Kashmir issue with India". "We realise it is our responsibility to resolve this dispute in view of its historical perspective. The Labour Party wishes to solve this problem according to the aspirations of the people of Kashmir, and, therefore, the two parties should accept her role in this regard," Cook was quoted as saying.
India's response was swift. Prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral shot back by describing Britain as "a third-rate power nursing illusions of grandeur of its colonial past". "It created Kashmir when it divided India [in 1947]. Now it wants to give us a solution," he said.
The damage was done. The queen's visit to India was declared a disaster even before she set foot in India.
Ahead of his visit to India in 2009, foreign secretary David Miliband wrote an article in The Guardian linking the terror attacks in Mumbai with Kashmir. Although he did not say so explicitly, he suggested that the Mumbai attacks would not have happened if India settled the Kashmir dispute. India's Foreign Office responded by dismissing Miliband's views as "unsolicited advice".
Ahead of British Prime Minster David Cameron's visit this year, columnist Alex Barker wrote in his blog that Cameron should refrain from mentioning "Kashmir" or "poverty" while in India, avoid a "patronising tone" or "coming over too fresh" (The 43-year-old Miliband repeatedly addressed the 73-year-old Pranab Mukherjee, India's then foreign minister, by his first name). "It's time to learn some manners. Indian politicians are, as a rule, double his age and four times as grand," Barker wrote.
Cameron seemed to have heeded that advice and avoided the "elephant traps". His trip to India went off well. Not so the Pakistan leg.
Wisely, Obama is visiting only India this time. He will have to tread carefully to avoid tripping over India's red-line issues.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.
کوئی تبصرے نہیں:
ایک تبصرہ شائع کریں