Conflicts in South Asia! [Quick Read]

ABSTRACT: The daily death toll in Kashmir, India's
only Muslim majority province, is invariably higher
than in the Palestinian intifida, but it rarely merits
more than a brief mention in the foreign news pages.
About 50,000 people - soldiers, militants, civilians -
have died. India has blamed the rebellion on Islamist
jihadis creeping across the border from Pakistan. 
This is only half the story. Repeated human rights
abuses by the 400,000 Indian soldiers stationed in the
Kashmir valley against the civilian population have
ensured the movement is an indigenous one too. 

--------------
Full Article:

War at the top of the world
===========================

Luke Harding
Sunday May 12, 2002
The Observer 

It was, by any standards, an unpleasant form of death
for the few terrified survivors hiding among the ruins
of an army camp in the remote village of Gam. 
The Maoists had emerged from Nepal's scented pine
forests late on Tuesday night. They were not in a mood
to dispense mercy. 'The male Maoists held the officers
down. The women Maoists then slit their necks using
sickles,' Kapil Shrestha, of Nepal's Human Rights
Commission said. 'The women soldiers bear far more
grudges. Most of them have been raped by the police or
their families have been killed by the security
forces.' 

The battle in the remote western area of Nepal was
merely the latest in a series of gruesome encounters
between the kingdom's rampant Maoist guerrillas and
government forces. Over the past week nearly 1,000
people have been killed - a fact eclipsed by the
blanket coverage of the far lesser carnage in the
Middle East. 

The violence now threatens to engulf the entire
Himalayan region, from Afghanistan to Pakistan through
India, Kashmir and Tibet. 

In India, an increasingly aggressive Hindu nationalist
government has done virtually nothing to stop the
slaughter of Muslims by Hindu gangs. More than 2,000
Muslims have died over the past two-and-a-half months
in riots in the prosperous western state of Gujarat.
Intelligence reports circulating in Washington and
London, meanwhile, warn of a summer-long conflict
between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, where Islamic
militants have been fighting a separatist battle for
12 years. 

In Tibet, revolt is stirring too. After a series of
mysterious explosions, the Chinese authorities
recently arrested a senior Tibetan monk, Tenzin Deleg
Rinpoche. Almost unnoticed, the region is sliding into
turmoil. 

In Nepal, the Maoist rebels have been battling the
government for six years. Outsiders dismissed them as
an eccentric throwback to an earlier era, but over the
past four months the Maoists have dramatically
escalated their campaign. They have blown up bridges
and electricity stations, plunging entire districts
into darkness, destroyed water plants and tortured and
executed their opponents - chopping off limbs, slicing
away skin, and severing necks. Tourists, who once
thronged the medieval streets of Kathmandu, drifting
between email kiosks and bagel bars, are staying away
and the country's economy is close to collapse. 

In rural Nepal villagers no longer go out at night.
They sit at home in a state of mute, expectant terror.
The situation has become so desperate that the
Nepalese government last week slashed the minimum fee
for climbing Mount Everest, its main tourist
attraction, from $75,000 to $25,000. The sense of
creeping anarchy has even penetrated the country's
national parks, where illegal logging is rife and
poachers last week shot dead and de-horned one of the
kingdom's last remaining rhinos. 

Nepal's Prime Minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, is seeking
military assistance from Britain and the United
States, and last week President George Bush promised
him $20 million to help to crush the Maoists. American
military advisers have already secretly toured the
Maoist-controlled west of the country, reconnoitring
its dense, lowland jungles, inaccessible mountain
valleys and poverty-stricken villages. 

Tomorrow Deuba meets Tony Blair in Downing Street and
there seems little doubt that Britain will also offer
assistance. 'We have a very long-standing relationship
with the Nepalese army,' a British diplomat in
Kathmandu told The Observer last night. 'That
relationship will continue,' he added. 

Nepal's immense neighbour, India, is also in crisis.
The Hindu nationalist BJP party in power in New Delhi
has given every impression of tacitly supporting the
anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat. India's Prime
Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has refused to sack
Gujarat's unrepentant Chief Minister, Narendra Modi,
despite frequent allegations that he instructed his
officials to allow Hindu mobs to rape, murder and burn
their minority Muslim neighbours. The death toll in
Ahmedabad, Gujarat's shiny commercial centre, rises
every day. Early last week four Hindu youths spotted
M. A. Kothawala, a 35-year-old Muslim lecturer, riding
to work. His beard gave him away. They dragged him off
his motorbike, stabbed him and burnt him alive. So far
none of the Hindus who attacked Muslims has been
punished. Gujarat's Hindu police force has shot dead
more than 100 Muslims. 

Despite the carnage, America has maintained a discreet
silence on the matter. India, its crucial ally in the
region, is pro-American and pro-Israeli (and likens
its tough stand against Pakistan to Israel's approach
to the Palestinians). The communal riots began after a
Muslim mob incinerated 58 Hindu extremists on a train
in the town of Godhra. A team of British diplomats
recently concluded that the massive anti-Muslim
backlash was 'pre-planned'. 

There are few signs, meanwhile, that the 12-year
insurgency by Muslim Kashmiris against the Indian
state is coming to an end. The daily death toll in
Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority province, is
invariably higher than in the Palestinian intifida,
but it rarely merits more than a brief mention in the
foreign news pages. About 50,000 people - soldiers,
militants, civilians - have died. India has blamed the
rebellion on Islamist jihadis creeping across the
border from Pakistan. 

This is only half the story. Repeated human rights
abuses by the 400,000 Indian soldiers stationed in the
Kashmir valley against the civilian population have
ensured the movement is an indigenous one too. India's
Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, last week rejected
the suggestion made by the Foreign Secretary, Jack
Straw, that monitors should supervise Kashmir's
election later this year. His comments suggest New
Delhi will, as on previous occasions, rig the ballot
to ensure victory for the National Conference, part of
the ruling BJP coalition. There is little sign of
fresh thinking on Kashmir from the Indian
establishment, which sees the solution to its
difficulties as military rather than political. 

The revolt in Kashmir, as in Nepal, however, is the
result of political disaffection and economic misery.
Some 80 per cent of Nepal's 23 million inhabitants are
subsistence farmers. They lead medieval-style lives of
appalling hardship and have seen no benefit from
either the country's tourist industry or the arrival
of democracy a decade ago. The Maoists are strongest
in the poorest parts of the country. In their
stronghold of Rolpa, the scene of last week's gruesome
battles, per capita income is $100 a year and life
expectancy is 52. 

The message of revolutionary justice espoused by the
Maoists' shadowy leader, Comrade Prachanda, has won
its most enthusiastic response from a rural underclass
with nothing to lose: women, peasants at the bottom of
the caste heap, and the unemployed. Successive
governments in Kathmandu have been more concerned with
lining their own pockets than dealing with a far-away
rural revolt. They hoped it would go away. It has not.
Deuba, who declared a state of emergency in November
and sent in the army, has now turned to the outside
world for help. 

There is nothing new about communal unrest or
insurrection in South Asia, but what differs about the
most recent violence in Gujarat is that it has taken
place in the heart of India with the unambiguous
evidence of state involvement. India, as envisaged by
Mahatma Gandhi and its first Prime Minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, was supposed to be a secular
country, open to people of all faiths. 

But Hindu fundamentalists who pushed aside Nehru's
fading Congress Party in the mid-1990s have replaced
his vision with something darker, fascist even. They
give the impression of wanting India's 120 million
Muslims to disappear or decamp to Muslim Pakistan. As
Sunny Grewal, one of many BJP supporters living in
Britain, put it: 'Muslims of India should pack their
bags and head off to Pakistan. There is no room for
the Satanic evil forces of Islam in India. They don't
belong on this earth. They are evil.' 

'I think the forebodings are very grim,' Ramachandra
Guha, one of India's leading writers and
environmentalists, added last night. 'Radical Hindus
are trying to turn India into a kind of Hindu
Pakistan, along theological lines, and with Hindus in
charge rather than Muslims.' 

Pakistan, meanwhile, has fared little better since
independence. Its army has repeatedly toppled the
country's frequently venal and short-lived civilian
governments. And, with the Bangladesh war of 1971, the
idea that being a Muslim was enough to hold a state
together was catastrophically disproved when the
country split in half. Like India, Pakistan, under
military dictator General Pervez Musharraf, has signed
up to the US war on terrorism (though not its support
for Israel). He even won a spurious referendum in
which he was the only candidate. But Islamist
extremists and sectarian violence now threaten him
with perpetual embarrassment. 

Both India and Pakistan are facing crises of
post-colonial identity - but their predicament has
scarcely been noticed because of the West's continuing
preoccupation with the troubles in the Middle East. 

In Nepal, meanwhile, things get worse. As well as
destroying the infrastructure, the Maoists are
infiltrating the Kathmandu valley, blowing up
politicians' homes and enforcing strikes. They may
have only 7-12,000 fighters. But they have so far
proved more than a match for Nepal's 45,000-strong,
badly equipped army. 'The Maoists are a very
intelligent organisation. Their leaders are well
educated. They are fired up with a vision and sense of
dynamism,' one Western diplomat in Kathmandu admitted
last night. It is only a matter of time before the
rebels launch their next ambush, scythes raised. 

Posted from THE GUARDIAN
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,714067,00.html

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