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The mountainous area between India and Pakistan has been a flashpoint between the now nuclear powers for over 50 years. The seriousness of the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir could be illustrated when one notes that according to some CIA accounts, the 1990 Indo-Pakistani crisis over Kashmir was the closest that the world has ever come to an actual nuclear exchange.¹

Richard Kerr, deputy director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the crisis, mentioned that “it was far more frightening than the Cuban Missile Crisis.”² The 1947 Indo-Pakistani war alone left one million people dead and created ten million refugees.³ Thus, along with the Arab-Israeli struggle over Palestine, Kashmir has “occasioned the most protracted and militarized regional dispute in the post-1945 world.”⁴

Given the new geostrategic environment created after the September 11 attacks on the U.S., a million troops have been eyeballing each other across the Kashmir border–the so-called Line of Control – since January, when New Delhi threatened to retaliate for a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament by militants allegedly linked to Pakistan.

Recently, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told troops along the Line of Control to prepare for a “decisive battle.”⁵ Pakistan’s Musharraf, whose military and political credibility is being tested, responded by saying that his country did not want war, but that “it would always support the Kashmiris’ struggle for liberation.”⁶

Even if an Indian strike were purely conventional, Pakistan, with its much smaller military and stockpile of nuclear weapons, might feel compelled to retaliate massively in order to avoid defeat. Such a grave situation is not the product of today, but rather of years of mutual antagonism and conflict.

The term “geopolitics” is in itself a conceptual quagmire. Traditional notions of geopolitics emphasized the “neutral and objective practice of surveying global space” and the simplistic linkage of “geography” with “politics.”⁷ The notion of geopolitics employed in this work is a more encompassing one which involves an interplay between issues of “high politics” such as regional balances of power, territorial disputes and military/security dilemmas with those of “low politics” with their emphasis on “identity,” “culture” and “religion.”⁸

Moreover, this paradigmatic shift has been coupled with the post-Cold War change in focus from global balance of power to local conflict. Local conflict, as exemplified by the Kashmiri conflict, is a function of two factors: regional distributions of power and animosities rooted in ethnic, religious, territorial and irredentist claims⁹ – the former, easy to ameliorate, the latter, more persistent, more difficult to resolve.

The aim of this work is to spell out the geopolitics of the Kashmiri struggle for freedom and to outline the general historical and political reasons for the conflict. Equally interesting are the reasons for the transformation of the conflict from a solely state-to-state confrontation between India and Pakistan into a low-intensity insurgency in 1989.

The Kashmir issue goes back to the partition of India in 1947. It is a disputed territory between India and Pakistan with one-third of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) now with Pakistan and two-thirds with India. Kashmir has twice led India and Pakistan into war, once in 1947-8, the second in 1965. It has also been the scene for the third conflict over East Pakistan in 1971.

Under the partition plan provided by the Indian Independence Act of 1947, Kashmir was free to join either India or Pakistan. However, the Maharaja, Hari Singh, wanted to stay independent, but eventually decided to accede to India in return for military aid and a promised referendum. However, India has refused a referendum and does not want an international debate on the issue.

On the contrary, Pakistan suggests that Kashmir should become part of Pakistan, because Muslims are in the majority of the region. Islam plays an integral part in this conflict since Pakistan’s claim to a state representing Muslims supports its claims to Kashmir. Indeed, the population of the now Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is over 60% Muslim, making it the only state within India where Muslims are in the majority.¹⁰

The so-called “Line of Control” was originally established in January 1949 as a ceasefire line, after the endmuj of the first Kashmir war. It was re-established in July 1972, dividing Kashmir on an almost two-to-one basis: Indian-administered Kashmir to the east and south (approx. 9 million people) which falls into the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and Pakistan administered Kashmir to the north and west (population of about 3 million), which is labeled by Pakistan as “Azad” (Free) Kashmir. China also controls a small portion of Kashmir.¹¹

By 1989, the conflict was transformed into an armed insurgency led by pro-Pakistan Islamist guerillas. This has been the result of Pakistan’s infusion of Islamism into the Kashmir valley through the rapid growth of Islamic schools, Madrassas, where pupils are encouraged to challenge the Indian secularist forces.¹² The growth in the number of Islamic schools in the valley was coupled with a failure of Indian institutions to provide for the needs of the Kashmiris. And general improvement in political awareness among the masses as levels of education and media exposure witnessed a dramatic increase.¹³

In addition, Pakistan was able to mobilize large numbers of battle-hardened mujahideen from the Afghan War against the Soviets to the valley. The mujahideen had “more to offer than direct support; their experience of ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan provided a model of opposition and resistance to a powerful state and its well-organized military.”¹⁴

Moreover, the experience of the first Palestinian Intifada and news of its success, reached the Kashmiri population through a number of Palestinian students attending the Kashmir University in Srinagar.¹⁵ The Palestinian struggle and its Islamist aspects emboldened the Kashmiris to establish their struggle on similar grounds.

The conflict in Kashmir is clearly rooted in the founding principles and legacy of both India and Pakistan. In fact, “Indian and Pakistani leaders have tied their respective nation’s identity to not relinquish Kashmir to the other. India ’s essence as a secular state has ‘required’ the integration of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir to prove that Muslims could fare well in India. Pakistan’s identity as an Islamic state ‘required’ that all major conglomerations of Muslims in South Asia live within it, a contention India rejected from the beginning.”¹⁶

In this light, the problem of Kashmir could be perceived as “a symbol of the clash between the secular self-perception of much of the Indian elite and communal/religious self-perception of their counterparts in Pakistan. The Kashmir issue, therefore, is not just a bilateral territorial dispute between two neighbors. It is intimately linked to the self-definition of the Indian and Pakistani states.”¹⁷

Pakistan’s leaders have argued that Pakistan remains “incomplete” without Kashmir because of its predominantly Muslim population and its territorial contiguity. On the other hand, India sought to demonstrate Kashmir’s secular status and claimed to hold Kashmir for purposes of “nation-building and national cohesion.”¹⁸

The conflict over Kashmir involves a broad interplay of regional rivalries and struggles for power. In fact, Kashmir lies exactly at the middle of the Sino-Indian-Pakistani arc and hence could be seen as a manifestation of larger regional leadership ambitions between the three countries. Hence, conflicts involving those three major states tend to define and structure the regional distribution of power.

In fact, there is a major lack of congruence between regional states’ perception of their own legitimate political role in a region and the role they attribute to other regional powers.¹⁹ This is exemplified in the case of India and its desire to become the regional hegemon and Pakistan’s refusal to accord it that regional role and its attempt to thwart its regional aspirations. This equally applies to China as the regional hegemon and India’s attempts to limit China’s growing role in South Asian and world affairs.

The structure and distribution of power in South Asia is difficult to precisely define. On the one hand, Ashok Kapur and Jeyaratnam Wilson argue that the distribution of power (broadly defined in terms of a country’s economic strength; its scientific and technological growth; its capacity to solve internal and external problems; its political unity and capacity to accommodate conflicting pressures and so on) has always favored India. They explain that this has lead to the development of an asymmetrical distribution of military power that has resulted in a unipolar regional order lead by India – a hegemon that seemingly cannot be challenged neither by Pakistan nor by a combination of South Asian states.²⁰

On the other hand, Barry Buzan sees the South Asian system as a bipolar one dominated by both India and Pakistan, which are “two large states whose insecurities are deeply intertwined that their national securities, particularly in terms of political and military security, cannot be separated.”²¹ He maintains that a number of much less powerful states are bound into the security equation for geographical reasons – those are Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. However, he suggests that China, although an important actor in the South Asian regional system, is not part of this security complex “because South Asia is relatively peripheral to its primary security concerns.”²²

The notion of a bipolar system centered around India and Pakistan with the underestimation of the China factor reflects simplicity and an inability to understand more complex interactions among regional adversaries. It is true that in the case of Kashmir, India and Pakistan are the main protagonists, yet China is also an essential part of the strategic geopolitical makeup of the South Asian system.²³

In this sense, one could see a tripolar regional system centered around China, India and Pakistan and their corresponding Indo-Pakistani and Indo-Chinese conflicts. This perception of the regional framework stands in stark contrast to the perception of a unipolar system led by a strong, hegemonic India that can deal easily with its regional adversaries.²⁴

Sino-Indian rivalries are set around several issues: nuclear competition between the regional giants, the territorial dispute over Tibet, and China’s long-term support for Pakistan during the Cold War. China has sought to constrain Indian power and ambitions and confine it to South Asia by supporting its arch-rival Pakistan through arms exports.²⁵

However, after the Cold War, and especially after the September 11 attacks on the U.S., China has been a silent third-partner over Kashmir. It does not want to antagonize the U.S. at its moment of leadership, but at the same time, would not allow Pakistan to be defeated in the event of a war with India.²⁶

The struggle over Kashmir is a multidimensional one involving a myriad of interconnected dynamics at work. First, one must note the link between high politics and low politics and the lack of a line of demarcation between them. The “security dilemma” and balance of power politics are closely connected to the politics of identity, culture and religion. Conflicts exhibiting those characteristics tend to be endemic, persistent and very difficult to resolve.

Second, despite the change in the geostrategic environment following the September 11 attacks on the U.S. and the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic resistance movements, it is obvious that insurgencies and struggles for freedom involving Islamism will not wither away, but will continue as long as the root causes of those conflicts have not been resolved – we must learn from the illuminating experiences of the Palestinian and Kashmiri freedom-fighting peoples…