Kashmir Violence Reignites India-Pakistan Tensions : Ethnic strife: Relations between New Delhi and Islamabad plummet to the level of ’65 warfare because of Muslim calls for independence.

Unrest in the valley of Kashmir is serious news for India. Losing Kashmir would threaten India’s security vis-a-vis Pakistan. Most important, India’s internal order would be imperiled. The union of predominantly Muslim Kashmir with India is regarded by Indians as symbolizing the unity of their multireligious and multiethnic country.

The eight-week-old National Front government under Vishwanath Pratap Singh has responded to the upsurge of violence in Kashmir much as did the previous governments, with one notable difference. There has been none of the hysteria and war scares of the past. New Delhi has dispatched a new governor, with a reputation for sternness, to the valley to restore law and order. Although stern “administrative measures” often include repression, most Indians, for security reasons, would tolerate a level of repression in Kashmir that they would protest if it occurred elsewhere in the country.

For once, the government has got its priorities in the right order. It knows that the strife in Kashmir is abetted by Pakistan but that Islamabad is not its sole cause. For the past five years, the hapless Kashmiris have sullenly endured the rule of an unrepresentative political leadership and corrupt local administration. So complete is the Kashmiris’ revulsion of politics that in the parliamentary elections held last November, voter turnout there was about 2%. Alienated by politics, people have taken to arms, which are readily available.

The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front is perhaps the best organized of the resistance groups. On India’s republic day, it had planned to declare the valley an Islamic republic. There are many other groups distinguishable by the intensity of their hatred for the rulers in Srinagar and New Delhi. Singh realizes that New Delhi can better face Pakistan by first restoring democratic processes in Srinagar.

Verbal belligerence punctuated by cautious actions characterizes Pakistan’s policy toward India. Pakistan’s rulers, particularly a group within the military leadership, must think that severing Kashmir from India would be appropriate compensation for their loss of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the 1971 civil war and Indian intervention. But its immediate goal is to ensnarl India in a prolonged, costly and bloody operation in Kashmir. To bleed India in two front-line states--Punjab and Kashmir--is Pakistan’s objective, which it advances by supplying arms and insurgents.

It is a low-cost strategy, but not entirely free of risks. Should the flow of arms and men across the cease-fire line in Kashmir reach unacceptable levels, India would retaliate. Neither side wants a fight, but the situation is volatile enough to give rise to miscalculation. Possibly mindful of that, the two countries have signed a hot-line agreement to avoid deadly mistakes.

As well they should have. India-Pakistan relations have deteriorated to what they were in 1965, when the two countries went to war over Kashmir. Today, India’s superior military forces should deter Pakistan from returning to the battlefield. Nor would India--bogged down in Punjab and Kashmir and futilely engaged in Sri Lanka--have anything to gain from a war.

The National Front government, however, wants cooperation with Pakistan, not simply an armed peace. This is not a pious wish. It is a serious policy decision born of the realization in New Delhi that India does not have the means to be a regional gendarme. Singh and his foreign minister are keen to reverse India’s policy of regional domination, begun in 1971. Withdrawal from Sri Lanka, restoration of ties with Nepal, reductions in defense expenditures--all are on the government’s agenda. But worsening India-Pakistan relations has compelled Singh to rule out any immediate cut in defense spending.

Pakistani leaders have deliberately intensified the Kashmir problem by giving it an Islamic slant. The Kashmiris’ struggle for independence is likened to that of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. Some have even called it a jihad that the Islamic faithful must support. This mostly hyperbolic talk can only alarm the Hindus, still shamed by a “thousand-year Muslim rule.” Indians and Pakistanis live in the past; this is what aggravates the current conflict.

Indeed, the countries in South Asia seem incapable of humanely resolving their ethnic conflicts, with the consequences affecting the entire region. Denying Tamils autonomy sharply divides India and Sri Lanka; Kashmir locks India and Pakistan into perpetual enmity; expulsion of Hindus from Bangladesh sours its relations with India.

Beyond the Indian subcontinent are the ethnic problems in Iran and the Soviet Union that have echoes in India-Pakistan relations. The unrest in Azerbaijan and Kashmir, roughly occurring at the same time, brought New Delhi and Moscow closer together as a result of the policy of each of containing the disturbances within the framework of an established state. Common religious links pushed Iran into Pakistan’s corner.

Democracy imposes serious restraints on the use of force in resolving ethnic strife. Punjab shows that force will never work. It is the Kashmiris’ powerful urge to preserve their identity that impels them to take up arms against New Delhi. As Amanullah Khan, leader of the Pakistan-based Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front says, “I find danger to my Islamic identity from India and I find danger to my Kashmiri identity from Pakistan.”

Multiethnic, multireligious India is drawn to the American “melting pot” model of a federation. In the melting pot, there is room for all. But for a number of reasons, India, during that last 20 years, has built a highly centralized, coercive state. The new government knows that the price for this is Punjab and Kashmir. But lacking huge resources and a “expanding frontier,” it can only admire the American model from afar.