New Nuclear Cloud Looms Over Old Kashmir Dispute

A day after India stunned the world with nuclear weapons tests earlier this week, archrival Pakistan bombarded an Indian village along the countries’ remote common border.

The shelling on Tuesday, which killed seven people, was regarded as such an ordinary occurrence that it merited only a paragraph in the Indian Express, one of the nation’s largest newspapers.

Now that India has all but declared itself the world’s sixth nuclear-armed state, such tiny skirmishes are likely to take on a more ominous tone.

India and Pakistan have gone to war three times in the past half a century. Twice in the last 11 years they have gone to the brink, only to be talked down at the last moment.

In all but one case, a primary cause of the conflict was the desolate mountain region known as Jammu and Kashmir, which straddles the countries’ common northern border. It is where the Pakistani and Indian armies still face off.

Analysts here and abroad said this week that as tensions between India and Pakistan rise, the issue of Kashmir, still unresolved, will loom larger than ever. With India possessing nuclear-weapons capability--and Pakistan possibly only days away from a new round of tests--any future conflict between the two nations, the analysts said, could be catastrophic.

“Now, any loony in Kashmir could trigger a larger crisis,” said Gerald Segal, director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. “India and Pakistan could be entering an extraordinarily dangerous time.”

On another of India’s borders, the one with China, tensions are also on the rise. The week before the Indian government announced its nuclear tests, New Delhi’s defense minister, George Fernandes, launched into a tirade against China, declaring it “potential threat No. 1.” India also expressed outrage over China’s suspected role in helping Pakistan develop missile technology.

On Thursday, the Chinese government struck back. It criticized the Indian government for its “outrageous contempt” for world opinion and urged other nations to compel New Delhi to abandon its nuclear program. The recent chill could herald a new era of strained relations between the two countries, with combined populations of about 2 billion, now, both armed with nuclear weapons.

“China is our main rival,” said former Indian Chief Air Marshal C.V. Gole. “The things that they are interested in, so are we.”

The conflict between India and Pakistan dates to 1947, when the British Empire dissolved and the two countries split along largely religious lines, with the Hindu-dominated states forming India and the majority-Muslim ones coming together in Pakistan.

The exception was Kashmir, whose Hindu leader, Maharaja Hari Singh, refused to join Pakistan even though his state’s population was majority Muslim. India and Pakistan went to war over the princely state in 1947 and again in 1965.

And in 1971, when war over the newly declared Bangladesh spread, Kashmir was again the site of fighting between the two sides.

India currently holds about two-thirds of Kashmir, with Pakistan occupying the rest. The two armies are separated by a heavily manned border known as the Line of Control, which snakes through the Himalayas. U.N. resolutions calling for a plebiscite in the region have never been carried out, and at least 12,000 people have died in a guerrilla war in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir.

“Our position is, Kashmir is part of Pakistan and the Indian occupation is illegal,” Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, Pakistan’s ambassador to India, said this week.

Analysts here and abroad say that the Indian nuclear tests, coupled with an almost certain Pakistani response, could send the two countries spiraling toward confrontation.

“Now there will be more hostility between us,” said Asghar Ali Engineer, chairman of the Center for the Study of Society and Secularism in Bombay. “With Pakistan in a hurry to explode its own nuclear device, we could have a new arms race. And an arms race will destroy both countries.”

War has nearly broken out between India and Pakistan twice since 1987. That year, Pakistan mobilized its troops during an Indian military exercise involving more than 200,000 troops near the Pakistani border.

“It began to look very alarming,” said Giri Deshingkar, a New Delhi author and defense analyst. “It looked like war.”

No shots were fired, and Indians here said the crisis was defused only with U.S. intervention.

The most serious recent confrontation came in 1990, when tensions rose again over Kashmir. Both sides mobilized their armies, and U.S. intelligence picked up what it believed were unmistakable signals that each side was preparing to use nuclear weapons. Pakistan was hastily assembling atomic bombs from components it had produced and stockpiled as part of a clandestine weapons program launched in the early 1970s. Pakistan’s fear was that India’s overwhelming superiority in conventional weaponry would leave Pakistan with no choice but to resort to nuclear weapons.

At the same time, India appeared to be readying its own nuclear weapons for delivery by aircraft against Pakistani cities. Then-President Bush dispatched Robert M. Gates, his deputy national security advisor, to Islamabad and New Delhi to try to pull the nations back from the edge. Gates succeeded, in part by showing leaders of the two countries estimates of how a large-scale war would leave their already impoverished countries devastated.

“Our worry was that the two countries would blunder into a conflict, and that if a conventional war did start, the losing side might resort to nuclear weapons,” Gates said in an interview this week.

Some analysts worry that such a confrontation could happen again, with nuclear weapons looming larger than ever. One crucial difference between the Indo-Pakistani conflict and the U.S.-Soviet one, analysts point out, is that in the Cold War, the conflict was often carried out by proxy, in places like Cuba and the Korean peninsula.

Some people in the region believe that the Indians and Pakistanis learned their lessons from the close calls of 1987 and 1990. If anything, they say, the fear of nuclear holocaust will force the nations’ leaders to act responsibly.

“Our relationship could actually become more stable,” said P.R. Chari, director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi. “In Europe, nuclear weapons helped keep the peace for 50 years.”

Some analysts are buoyed by recent evidence of sobriety on the part of both Pakistani and Indian leaders. When shelling between both sides grew particularly intense last fall, India’s then-prime minister, Inder Kumar Gujral, and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif spoke to each other on the hotline set up between the two countries. Things calmed down.

The recent rise in tensions between India and China appears mild by comparison.

India and China have long bumped shoulders as military and economic rivals. The two countries have the world’s largest populations and similar aspirations to speed their economic development and claim their place at the table of the world’s powers.

When Fernandes, India’s defense minister, criticized Beijing last week, he suggested that China’s military capabilities--even more than Pakistan’s--were the reasons behind India’s clandestine nuclear program.

Indeed, India portrayed its newly displayed nuclear capability as its debut as a power to be reckoned with--like China. Beijing has a seat on the U.N. Security Council, which India covets. China has a huge military--with nuclear capability--which India has watched carefully since the two countries went to war in 1962. China has had double-digit economic growth for the last decade, which India envies.

Since the 1962 war, China has occupied two stretches of disputed territory seized from India in Kashmir and the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. Soldiers have periodically skirmished over the state’s border, and China has built a helipad on disputed land.

But those issues are “routine” and the border’s Line of Control is “stable,” said Eric Arnett, the author of a report on nuclear arms in Asia from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “China just does not care about India as much as India would like to think,” Arnett said. “China cares most about Taiwan, U.S. hegemonic tendencies and being accepted in the international community.”

Filkins reported from New Delhi and Farley from Shanghai. Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus contributed to this report.

* PRESSURE ON PAKISTAN: The U.S. stepped up efforts to persuade Pakistan not to begin new nuclear arms tests. A16

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History fo Conflicts

1947: Britain withdraws from Indian subcontinent. Jammu and Kashmir’s Hindu ruler unites with India for protection in face of Pakistani-supported Muslim revolt.

1947-49: Pakistan and India fight for control of the region. U.N. sets up a truce line that leaves northern portion and western strip of Kashmir under Pakistan.

April 1965: Second war breaks out between Pakistan and India over Kashmir.

September 1965: A U.N.-arranged cease-fire halts the conflict.

1971-72: India intervenes in Pakistani civil war; Pakistan and India fight in Kashmir. Conflict ends with independence for East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

January 1990: Pakistan-based guerrillas begin fighting Indian forces for Kashmir’s independence.

May 1998: India conducts five nuclear tests, and Pakistan threatens to detonate its own device.

Compiled by JACQUELYN CENACVEIRA / Los Angeles Times