Firing on LoC: Pakistan’s grand design

Arun Joshi

What are the Pakistan Army’s generals up to?  Why have they converted the Line of Control (LoC) that divides Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan into a war zone?  The conventional argument would be that the generals want to derail the National Security Adviser-level talks scheduled for August 23. 

Pakistan Army generals are into  a long-term game. They need to provoke India so that they can talk of threats from its neighbours, propagating and perpetuating a thesis — their divine right  to defend the nation. Pakistan was looking for a reaction to its  action on the LoC and that it has achieved to some extent. When India responds robustly, all sections of Kashmiri leaders, mainstream, semi-mainstream and  recognised separatists,  call in one voice for cessation of hostilities on borders, holding both India and Pakistan equally responsible for the killing of the civilians — women, children included, along the LoC. No such voices were or are heard from many of them, when Pakistani mortar shells target the areas around the international border in  the Jammu plains. There is a difference  and this needs to be told.   The nearly  200-km-long international border, which Pakistan calls as “working boundary.”  as it propagates that even this  border in Jammu and Kashmir is to be settled, runs through the  plains of Jammu.   Approximately, 225 km out of the 744 km of LoC rises from the Chicken’s neck area — the confluence  of  rivers Chenab  and  Tawi  in Jammu to the heights of Pir Panjal in south of Kashmir. The remianing is in the Valley  and Ladakh division is in the hills. The demography is different. As most of the population  living along the LoC  is Muslim,  Pakistan guns are targeting their houses and fields to unsettle them. This is a larger design that Pakistan   has reinvoked  and made separatists talk loudly about it. This will make the people living  in the south of Pir Panjal to  look toward these secessionist groups. For them, the ISI's former and current generals are “friends of Kashmir.”  Syed Ali Shah Geelani paid a tribute to the former ISI chief   Lt- Gen. Hamid Gul  as “a true  friend of  oppressed Kashmiris".  Hamid Gul was the architect of the armed rebellion in Kashmir in the late 1980s. The real challenge on the LoC today is not only how to save the  border population from the mortar shelling  from across the LoC but also to keep their nationalist psyche intact. Pakistan  has been able to make a point that it can target the civilian areas and no amount of heavy response by the Indian army to its  mortar shelling and heavy machinegun fire can silence its guns.  This military  language has  ominous portents. Walter C Ladwig  of the Department  of War Studies, King's College London, UK,  has  added a note of caution about the strength of the two armies.  He has underlined that, “a host of factors, including terrain, the favourable deployment of Pakistani forces, and a lack of strategic surprise in the most likely conflict scenarios, will mitigate whatever advantages  India may be gaining through  military modernisation. Despite a growing technological edge  in some areas, Indian policy makers cannot be confident  that even a limited  resort to military force would achieve a rapid result , which is  an essential pre-condition for deterrence failure.” 

The Pakistani army  seems to be taking advantage of this.  It is killing Indian Muslims, their women and children on this side of the LoC  to instill fear among them. One of the fundamental strategies  of  terrorism is the infusion  of fear  in the life of the border residents. The firing from across the LoC is  doing that to the men and women in the border areas.  This is the big picture, but we are looking at the  small steps that Pakistan is taking in this direction. 

Now, the immediate context, Kashmir is not in the joint statement of India and Pakistan issued after the meeting of Prime  Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif  at Ufa, Russia.  But Pakistan's Army and the ISI have taken small but deadly steps since then to rectify the balance. Pakistan's  NSA Sartaj Aziz, a veteran in diplomacy and security affairs, tried to address the constituency of the  disgruntled elements, saying that Kashmir issue would be “discussed through back channels.” What he meant was that the  route of  quiet  politics and diplomacy — the phrase coined by former Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram  in resolving the K issue — should  be taken first . That is what All Parties Hurriyat Conference Chairman  Mirwaiz Umar Farooq also agreed to. It was  immediately after  Sartaj Aziz's  press conference  on July 13 that “no bilateral talks would be held without Kashmir being on the agenda of talks.” The Mirwaiz  told this columnist, “The Prime Minister-level summits or, for that matter, the  meetings of foreign ministers  or senior functionaries, raise expectations and when those expectations fail to materialise,  disappointment breeds  anger and the whole process explodes. There should be a process before straightway running toward the goalpost.”  That sounded   sensible. But the hawks in Kashmir and those who were in direct contact with Pakistan's ISI, made a lot of hue and cry  and joined the Pakistani military’s chorus, “Kashmir first.”

 Looking at the events chronologically, what happened is  very clear. It is how Islamabad used its state and non-state actors — there is really no  difference between the two despite the fact that Pakistan itself is becoming a victim of its home-grown terror groups — to bring “K” into the agenda. Before India offered August 23 and 24  as dates for talks at the NSA-level on August 1, a major terror strike  breaking a lull of almost 15 years, took place in Dinanagar, Gurdaspur district. What followed was the August 5 attack in Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir. 

When India talks of terror attacks, Kashmir will  automatically figure on the agenda. A similar thing would happen  when ceasefire violations and the resultant  civilian casualties are discussed. Intensity of the gunfire, mortar shelling and the  number of the casualties would  make India discuss Kashmir because the LoC is the  dividing line running through Jammu and Kashmir. By doing so, Pakistan is simultaneously proving another point that its larger plans are underway to spread disaffection  from north to south of Pir Panjal in the Himalayan state. 

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