Moses Manoharan
NEW DELHI, Jan 29 (1990) Revolt against Indian rule in Kashmir has turned the spotlight on the country’s 100 million Moslems and put new Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh under conflicting diplomatic and electoral pressure.
Singh is under pressure at home from both Moslem and Hindu hardliners to defend his handling of Kashmir, where more than 60 people died last week in a campaign by Moslem militants who want independence or to become part of neighbouring Pakistan.
“The Moslems in India are keeping an ominous silence over Kashmir. It is V.P. Singh’s greatest crisis,” A.P. Venkateswaran, a former Indian foreign secretary, said on Monday.
Venkateswaran, who now works for Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research, said Singh was being challenged by both external and internal forces over Kashmir.
The prime minister, facing his government’s first popularity test in eight state assembly elections next month, must balance Hindu demands to stamp out the revolt with the needs to appease Moslem voters and cool tempers in Islamic countries.
India has the world’s third largest Islamic community after Indonesia and Bangladesh.
Moslems proved their voting power in a November general election when they withdrew their traditional support from Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress party and helped Singh to power.
“Their anger was induced by communal violence (between Hindus and Moslems) that has risen to the horrendous proportions,” said analyst Ashis Nandi of Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
But Singh’s minority government depends on support from right-wing Hindus in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who flourished in the polls.
They want him to end special rights given to Kashmir as the only Moslem-majority state in Hindu-majority India. A major Hindu complaint is that Indians born elsewhere in the country are barred from owning land there.
Kashmir was peaceful on Monday after Delhi poured thousands of security forces into the state to quell protest.
But the crackdown has raised India-Pakistan tensions to dangerously high levels. The neighbours have fought two wars over Kashmir and Pakistan controls a third of the territory.
Singh was forced to launch a diplomatic offensive against Pakistan after Iran cancelled an invitation to his foreign minister Inder Gujral in protest over Kashmir, diplomatic sources said. Gujral had been due in Tehran on Monday.
Venkateswaran said Pakistan had gained the edge over India in representing itself as trying to bring peace to Kashmir.
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has sent two envoys to New Delhi to express concern over the violence and to deny Indian charges that Islamabad is aiding the militants.
“Pakistan got the edge by sending two envoys to India, while we haven’t even sent one to Islamabad. The impression is that we are riding the high horse,” Venkateswaran said.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s problems with ethnic unrest in the Soviet Union give Pakistan another advantage.
Delhi has come to depend on the Soviet Union – its main arms supplier – to veto any Kashmir resolution against it in the U.N. Security Council, diplomatic sources said.
But the Soviet Union’s problems with its own Moslem minority may lead Moscow to abstain from exercising its veto if the United Nations raises the Kashmir issue again.
Kashmir has been on the U.N. agenda for 40 years, with a U.N. resolution urging a referendum there still pending.
India argues that under the resolution, Pakistan must first withdraw its troops from northern Kashmir. India adds that the resolution was in any case superseded by a 1972 accord in which Pakistan agreed to resolve the Kashmir issue by bilateral negotiation.
Nandi said Kashmir had brought into focus the worst aspects of India’s communal tensions.
He said a generation of Kashmiris were growing up without faith in the democratic process because of the rigging of state elections by successive governments.
The state’s slow economic development offered youth little except seasonal employment in the tourist trade. Many have opted to pursue the militant movement instead.
