Pakistani assistance for the anti-Government of India activities
of alienated sections of the Indian society was not due only to its revanchist spirit
following its loss of the then East Pakistan in December 1971, as is often presumed by
many analysts.
It was initially the outcome of an assessment made by the
Pakistani intelligence community in the early 1950s that keeping India destabilised and
its military preoccupied with internal security duties would be one way of neutralising,
at little cost, the superiority of the Indian armed forces over their Pakistani
counterpart.
This assessment and the political implications of Pakistani
support to Indian insurgent and terrorist groups had been repeatedly questioned by the
Pakistani political leaders whenever they came to power--- by the late Zulfiquar Ali
Bhutto in 1971,by Mrs.Benazir Bhutto in 1988 when she feared that Pakistan's playing
"the Sikh card" against India might force the latter to retaliate with the
"Sindh card", and again in 1993, when the US started pressurising Islamabad to
discontinue this policy, and by Mr.Nawaz Sharif during his two tenures as Prime Minister .
On each occasion, the ISI and the military leadership managed to
convince the political leadership that keeping India destabilised and the Indian military
preoccupied with internal security duties would be equivalent to the "Pakistan army
having two extra divisions at no cost" as Lt.Gen.Hamid Gul, the ISI Director-General
in the 1980s, once put it to Mrs. Bhutto and that giving up this policy would entail a
further increase in their defence budget.
The post-1971 revanchist spirit provided further justification to
this policy, which was projected thereafter as also a means of repairing Pakistan's
injured pride due to the humiliation of December 1971, pre-empting any Indian move to
further break up Pakistan and frustrating what Islamabad regards as India's hegemonistic
ambitions.
Even after Pakistan achieved, in its mind, a psychological parity
with India following its acquisition of the military nuclear and missile capabilities, the
need to prevent India from emerging as the paramount military and economic power of the
region by keeping its army bleeding in internal security duties has become the obsessive
preoccupation of its military leadership.
Before seizing political power on October 12,1999, Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, its Chief Executive, had himself underlined on many occasions the need to keep
the Indian army continuously bleeding just as the Afghan Mujahideen, with US and Pakistani
assistance, had kept the Soviet troops bleeding. It is apparently his calculation that
such a policy could ultimately weaken the unity and integrity of India just as the
bleeding of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan contributed to the USSR break-up.
He told the Karachi branch of Pakistan's English-speaking Union
on April 12,1999, ("Nation" of April 14) that even a bilaterally-negotiated
solution to the Kashmir issue might not normalise relations with India since Pakistan
would continue to be a thorn on India's side by frustrating its hegemonistic ambitions and
this would make India continue with its policy of weakening Pakistan.
Public memory in India---that includes media memory-- tends to be
even shorter than elsewhere in the world. How many of us recall the training of four gangs
of the Naga hostiles by the ISI in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of the then East
Pakistan in the 1950s and the early 1960s, the post-1962 disruption of the Naga traffic to
the CHT by the Ne Win Government of Myanmar after many violent clashes, the location of
the headquarters of the Mizo National Front in the CHT and the role of the ISI as the
facilitator of contacts of the Naga and Mizo hostiles with the Chinese intelligence, which
led to Yunnan replacing the CHT as their main training ground till the late Deng Xiao-ping
discontinued China's assistance to foreign insurgent groups in 1979?
How many of us remember that the Sikh Homeland Movement of
Charanjit Singh Paanchi, the precursor of the so-called Khalistan movement, was born not
in India, but in the UK and not after the Pakistani army's humiliation in the 1971 war,
but long before, at a meeting of some Sikhs of the UK convened by the ISI?
Can anyone forget the visits of Dr.Jagjit Singh Chauhan, of the
Khalistan Movement, to Pakistan for meeting Yahya Khan before the 1971 war and his
lionisation by the ISI and the Pakistan army as the "Father of the Sikh Nation"?
Many authentic reports were available in the past on the contacts
of the Sikh extremist leaders with the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Pentagon,
initially through the DIA's representative in the US Embassy in New Delhi and,
subsequently, through its officer in the US Embassy in Paris, and on the close
co-ordination by the DIA and the ISI of their support to Dr.Chauhan under the supervision
of the US National Security Council, then headed by Dr.Henry Kissinger, before the war of
December,1971.
Many of us, who lived through the dramatic 1971, were personal
witnesses to the visits of Dr.Chauhan to New York, at the instance of the ISI and the
aides of Dr.Kissinger, to divert attention from India's diplomatic campaign against
Pakistan on the violation of the human rights of the Bengalis of East Pakistan.
The DIA's involvement with the ISI in instigating the Khalistan
movement against New Delhi was scaled down under President Jimmy Carter and discontinued
after the ISI gave shelter in Lahore to the late Talwinder Singh Parmar, of the Babber
Khalsa, Vancouver, who was allegedly involved in the explosion of the Kanishka aircraft of
Air India in 1985.
The involvement of the Chinese intelligence with the ISI in the
North-East was stopped under Deng's policy of avoiding overseas covert actions.
Since 1985, the ISI has continued, on its own, with its policy of
destabilisation and details of its post-1985 activities in India are well known and need
no repetition.
It would not thus be an exaggeration to talk of a Pakistani
involvement--not necessarily the ISI in every case-- behind most of the acts of terrorism
in India.
There are many Pakistani dramatis personae involved in terrorism
in India--serving and retired officers of the Punjab police, officials of
Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK), retired officers of the army who had served in East
Pakistan, the Islamic jihadi organisations, the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the
ISI. Sometimes, they act in concert and, sometimes, one is not aware of the activities of
another.
Each has its own agenda. The ISI's has already been explained
above. Punjab police officers have nostalgic memories of their past friendships with the
overseas-based Sikh extremist leaders and, similarly, the retired army officers with the
Naga hostiles. They do not hesitate to help their old friends, when needed. The POK
officers' agenda is self-explanatory. The jihadi groups want to "liberate" not
only Kashmir, but also the Muslims in the rest of India from Hindu control. The IB just
wants to prove to their political leadership that it also exists.
To the Rajiv Gandhi Government goes the credit of initiating a
well thought-out two-pronged response to Pakistan in the form of a minimum counter-covert
warfare deterrence to convince the Pakistani military, on the ground, of the futility of
its confrontationist policy and, simultaneously, an exercise to dilute, through bilateral
interactions at various levels, Pakistan's unjustified paranoia about India.
Thus were born the hot line contacts between the two army hqs,
which still continue, regular meetings of the border commanders, which also continue,
bi-annual meetings of the narcotics control officials (one is not certain whether they
still take place), bi-annual open meetings of internal security officials headed by the
Home Secretary, which were discontinued in 1989, and periodic covert back-channel contacts
between the two security bureaucracies, which were discontinued in 1991.
The covert back-channel contacts, started in 1988 at the instance
of a good friend of India and Pakistan in West Asia, served as a forum not only for
letting out steam at each other away from media glare, but also for testing out new ideas
of the political leaderships without any prior commitment and without giving rise to any
public controversy.
When the bilateral atmosphere worsened after the Mumbai blasts of
1993, the US and China, independently of each other, without each apparently aware of the
other's move and both possibly unaware of the pre-1991 covert back-channel, offered their
good offices for setting up a covert back-channel for the same purposes, but New Delhi
reacted negatively.
The present state of bilateral relations is unhealthy and
uncomfortable, without any coherent policy response from us. Such a response has to be
operational, diplomatic and para-diplomatic. The operational aspect relates to making it
clear to Pakistan, through appropriate counter covert warfare strategy, that it will be
the long-term loser in its present covert war against India.
The diplomatic refers to the need to reinvigorate professional
diplomatic interactions, which have dried up after the coup of October 12, and to
reactivate the network of contacts of official agencies set up in the 1980s
The para-diplomatic is about the need to re-start the covert
back-channel, which will have a useful role to play. Such covert back-channel contacts
were maintained with Beijing even in the very tense days of the bilateral relations, with
the then Yugoslavia acting as the facilitator, and this channel was used by Indira Gandhi
to test the Chinese waters for a possible visit by her, which did not materialise, and by
Rajiv Gandhi for paving the way for normalisation and his 1988 visit.
B.RAMAN
(13-2-00)
