Three Recent Events Prove the Alarm Bells Are Ringing Louder Than Ever in Kashmir

We know that events in Jammu and Kashmir have been sliding backwards for some time now. The rising death toll in the Valley, the increased recruitment of Valley inhabitants into the armed militancy and the repeated crackdowns and curfews have been signalling this for a while. But three events in recent weeks are ringing the alarm bells louder than ever.

The first was the custodial death of Rizwan Asad Pandit earlier this month. He was reportedly a Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu & Kashmir (JIJK) activist and school principal, who had been arrested by the National Investigation Agency. The second was the banning of the JIJK itself and the third, the ban on the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front.

These events seem to suggest that the clock is being turned back in Jammu and Kashmir. It almost seems as though we are back in the 1990s with its unrelenting violence, the use of torture and mass repression. And all this is being done as a deliberate act of policy.

The most alarming development was Pandit’s death. A preliminary autopsy submitted by the Government Medical College, Srinagar has said that he died of “excessive bleeding caused by deep wounds on his body”. Though the final report will only be out in two weeks or so, the indications are that he was beaten to death.

Explaining the JIJK and JKLF

As for the JIJK, it has had a chequered history. Popular with the educated middle classes and the young, it has moved from constitutionalism to militant radicalism and back to constitutionalism in the last 50 years. The JIJK is distinct from either the Jamaat-e-Islami-Hind or counterpart organisations in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and, indeed, Pakistan itself.

In the 1970s, it openly advocated participation in elections in the state. Its top leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani was elected as an MLA thrice. It was loss in the rigged elections of 1987 that triggered Mohammed Yusuf Shah aka Syed Salahuddin’s radicalism.

Subsequently, under the leadership of Geelani and Salahuddin, the history of the organisation and the insurgency that broke out in 1990 were intertwined. It was the JIJK which was openly pro-Pakistan, that provided the leadership and the bulk of the cadre for the Hizbul Mujahideen which had worked to turn the JKLF uprising for “azadi” into one for a merger with Pakistan.

But the Indian response, which led to the deaths and arrests of hundreds of its cadre, led to a re-think in the Jamaat under the leadership of Ghulam Mohammed Bhat. It self-consciously distanced itself from the militant group, which meant distancing itself from both Syed Ali Shah Gilani and Hizbul Muhaideen leader Syed Salahuddin who now  lives in Muzaffarabad. Gilani protested, but Bhat’s views prevailed in the organisation and Gilani was sidelined in the JIJK.

Bhat was instrumental in getting the All Parties Hurriyat Conference to adopt a resolution saying that it would not oppose the state assembly elections that were later held in 2002. Subsequently, Geelani was dropped as a political adviser. In 2004, the top-most decision-making body of the organisation, the Majlis-e-Shoora, committed itself to “democratic and constitutional struggle”.  In 2008, the then Amir, Sheikh Mohammed Hassan, officially announced that it would not participate in the boycott of the assembly elections called for by the Hurriyat.

Over the years, Jamaat chiefs had realised that involvement with the militancy was costing them their ability to function as a socio-religious group. The JIJK leadership therefore led the organisation back to the point where it was running educational institutions and organising campaigns against Westernisation of the youth.

As for the JKLF, it initiated the Kashmir insurgency, but they were soon a spent force. With their leaders killed or under arrest – some betrayed by the Hizbul Mujahideen cadre – they officially declared a unilateral ceasefire and their leader Yasin Malik was released from jail in mid 1994. Having burnt their bridges in Pakistan, the JKLF remain a token force in J&K. Indeed, it was soon acceptable enough for Yasin Malik to be presented at a meeting with the new prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in 2005. That nothing came of this is another matter.

Have they moved back to violence?

The government actions now would suggest that both the JIJK and JKLF have backtracked, and are once again committed to violent separatism. If so, the government itself is squarely to blame. A judicious mix of tough policing and political outreach had more or less neutralised these organisations. If the government is now cracking down on them, it must ask itself as to why things have come to this pass.

The government may cite Pulwama as the reason for its action, but the mess in Kashmir predates that. It goes back to 2016 and Operation All Out, aimed at an all-or-nothing approach that has refused to discriminate between political dissidence and armed militancy.

With reference to Pulwama, there are still a lot of explanations the government must provide over its intelligence failure that allowed a huge amount of explosives to get through the Line of Control and for Pakistani terrorists to fabricate a sophisticated car bomb and use it with devastating effect against the hapless CRPF convoy. Wrapping themselves with the national flag cannot be an alibi for the failure.

Over the weekend, two sets of explanations appeared for the JIJK and JKLF bans. Both appear to be post-facto explanations.

A reporter known for her excellent sources in the Ministry of Home Affairs said in a report that the ban was an outcome of the Jammu and Kashmir high court’s dismissal of a plea for the transfer of a case relating to the killing of four unarmed IAF personnel in 1990. What the report suggests is that the government plans to revisit the entire outbreak of the militancy in 1988-1990. How much of this will be justiciable 30 years later is the big question, especially when it relates to insurgency and terrorism.

A second report attributed to a “senior official” says that the JIJK was responsible for channelling Kashmiri youth back into the militancy in the last couple of years. They had been using their network of schools to promote an anti-Indian feeling. The report seems to contradict other reportage that suggests that the enhanced recruitment in the Valley had very local factors and were often linked to the emotions aroused by the killing of local militants and their funerals.

But perhaps there is a simpler explanation for all that has been  happening. The Bharatiya Janata Party has seen the Pulwama blasts and the subsequent clash with Pakistan as a golden opportunity to give life to its election campaign. To show to the electorate that it is tough on terror, it is cynically torching the existing Kashmir policy, aimed at bringing reconciliation with the separatists. This was a policy that had achieved a great deal and brought the state back from the brink.

The Wire March 25, 2019

Tactics at work, grand strategy unclear

The steps and missteps of the Modi government’s Pakistan policy are well known. Their general range has been from naivete to realism and petulance. The policy has been all tactics — surgical strikes, airstrikes, diplomatic moves and declarations. What we can’t get a measure of is its grand strategy. What is the endpoint that the government is aiming for when it comes to Pakistan?

Does it want to: (a) Hammer Pakistan militarily to the point of surrender? (b) Use covert instruments to break up the country or economic instruments to make it bankrupt? (c) Make it an international pariah like South Africa (of apartheid infamy)? (d) Persist with the older policy of transforming Pakistan into a mirror image of India?

India and Pakistan’s higher strategy in relation to each other goes back to their troubled birth. So, both aimed at ways and means of making the other a copy of themselves — India sought a secular, democratic Pakistan, while the latter kept pushing policies that would make India into some version of an authoritarian Hindu nation.

The stalwarts of the freedom struggle — Gandhi, Nehru, Patel or, for that matter, Subhas Chandra Bose — envisaged a country where religious identity would be submerged by identification with the nation. They were, however, blindsided by the Pakistan Movement that convinced a section of Indian Muslims that they needed their own State; they would never get political equality in a Hindu-dominated India.

Pakistan’s strategy has worked along the need to create ‘effective parity’ with India through heavy military expenditure, alliances with great powers, developing nuclear weapons, and using covert operations and terrorism to break up its larger neighbour. Its eventual goal was a smaller, more Hindu-oriented India, an entity it could manage, and one that would justify its own existence.

India’s primary goal has been the consolidation of an enormously diverse nation and effecting its economic transformation. Within this larger goal, India has wanted to get Pakistan off its back. It did not want to divert resources to a policy that would dismantle or degrade Pakistan, simply manage it to the lowest level of violence.

India and its leaders, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, believed that since India was much more powerful, it could adopt a strategy of strategic restraint. They believed this could eventually yield a Pakistan that was more like India — tolerant, democratic and liberal. So, New Delhi engaged the Pakistani State, even as it became a military dictatorship, threw tantrums over Kashmir and, after 1980, began to use terrorists and separatists to destabilise India behind a shield of nuclear weapons.

A high point of sorts was reached in the Vajpayee-Manmohan years. In January 2004, Islamabad hosted the SAARC summit; its great achievement was an agreement on creating a South Asian Free Trade Area. Through meetings on the sidelines, Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Pervez Musharraf came up with an agreement for a comprehensive dialogue between the two countries relating to a range of issues, including terrorism and Jammu and Kashmir.

India’s grand strategy was now clearer — embed Pakistan in a larger South Asian economic area, resolve issues large and small and gradually ‘normalise’ its conduct through trade, commerce, tourism and educational exchanges. Over the next couple of years, violence began to come down and the two sides came close to resolving the Kashmir issue as well.

Alarmed, the Pakistani deep state unleashed the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008, an action that successfully poisoned relations between the two countries and prevented the Manmohan Singh government from putting its Pakistan policy back on an even keel. The Mumbai attacks succeeded in disrupting the unfolding Indian strategy in relation to Pakistan.

After a year and a half in power, Modi shifted away decisively from the strategy of ‘normalising’ Pakistan. We have seen tactical manifestations of a new Modi doctrine, but are yet to get a measure of the strategy itself. Perhaps there is none since the shift may be occasioned only by electoral considerations.

What we do, alarmingly, notice is that Pakistan’s larger project of dividing the subcontinent into its ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ components has moved ahead several notches in the Modi years. It has been helped, ironically, by the BJP and Sangh Parivar scheme of marginalising domestic Muslims and demonising Pakistan.

The gau raksha movement has seen increased coercion and physical attacks on Indian Muslims. In Kashmir, political dialogue has been abandoned for a policy of relentless military pressure. The Citizenship Amendment Bill is seeking to facilitate the grant of Indian citizenship to religious communities from South Asia, but it pointedly excludes Muslims.

As for Pakistan, the Modi team’s views are hazy, but there is a lot of tactical noise about defeating and degrading the country through a mix of military and diplomatic means. But there is nothing in the military balance to suggest that we can transform Pakistan into the South Asian equivalent of the Palestinian West Bank. Even if Pakistan is broken up and left with only the rump of Punjab, it would still be twice the size of North Korea.

India simply lacks the resources of the US, which has degraded adversaries in Iraq, and is now attempting it in Iran. There are other key differences too — in both instances, nuclear weapons are/were not in play and neither of them is a neighbour of the US.

There is a saying, attributed to Chinese master Sun Tzu, that strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, while tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Just what ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’ could mean in the India-Pakistan contest of grand strategies remains up in the air.

Tribune March 19, 2019

China Saves Masood Azhar: Fighting Terror Needs Action, Not the UN

There should be little surprise that China has blocked the designation of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist once again. It was clear on Monday, when the Chinese official spokesman Lu Kang, read off the usual rigmarole, in response to a question on the listing, “China has all along participated in relevant discussions in a responsible manner and in strict accordance with the rules of procedure and provisions of the (UN’s) 1267 Committee.”

Blocking the move for the fourth time, China sent a note to the UNSC on Wednesday night, saying that it needed more time to examine the request. With this technical hold, the move has been frozen for the next six months.

Why China Blocked Bid to List Masood Azhar as Global Terrorist

China has played a similar role in earlier efforts – in 2009, 2016 and 2017. However, it had gone along with the listing of Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and his deputy Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, in 2009, in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai attack. Those designated by the Committee have their assets frozen and are prohibited from foreign travel.

Beijing claims that there are some technical and procedural issues that need to be resolved before it can support the move. Yet, other prominent permanent members of the UN’s Security Council—US, UK, and France—backed the move, along with a number of non-permanent members. It is obvious that China’s “deeper than the seas and higher than the mountains” friendship with Pakistan has guided its action.

In his Monday statement, spokesman Lu had said that “China will continue to communicate and work with relevant parties in a responsible manner so as to properly resolve this matter.” It was referring, of course, to Pakistan, where Beijing had, on 6 March, sent Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou (to Islamabad).

The Chinese were keen to have Kong visit New Delhi as well, but the latter demurred. India is not keen to allow China’s claim that it is mediating on the issue. It did, however, welcome a junior Saudi Minister Adel al-Jubeir to come to New Delhi on Monday, following his earlier visit to Islamabad. But this was ostensibly a follow-up visit to that of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in February.

India Needn’t Fret Over China Blocking Anti-Masood Azhar Bid

The Chinese view is that not only should India “exercise restraint”, it should help create an “enabling atmosphere” so that Pakistan can cooperate with others on this issue. China simply ignores Islamabad’s mendacity, if not criminality, in supporting terrorist groups as instruments on foreign policy. But in international relations, it’s interests that matter, not aesthetics.

In line with this, New Delhi has taken the setback on its chin. Expressing disappointment over the development, it has been careful to avoid naming China in its official statement, following the Chinese hold. All it has said is that “a member” of the 1267 Committee had placed the proposal on hold.

India had hoped that this time around, Beijing would cooperate. It had, after all, made a major shift in its posture towards China through the Wuhan Summit. This shift involved an informal Indian commitment to abjure from using the “Tibet card” with China. Incidentally, in 2016, when Beijing had put a hold, New Delhi had named Beijing and excoriated it for not showing greater “understanding of the danger posed to all by terrorism.”

It would be foolish for New Delhi to get worked up about the Chinese hold. The listing by itself does little to restrain either Islamabad or the terrorists. After all it has meant little that Hafiz Saeed has been on the list since 2009, or that the Jaish as an organisation has been on the list since 2001. Terrorism and terrorists are not fought by paper listings, but through kinetic actions.

There is certain value to the listing, but only if it is taken in conjunction with other actions, which include wider diplomacy, covert action, air strikes and ground attacks on terrorist facilities.

Getting China Around to Pressurise Pakistan Isn’t Impossible

New Delhi has now learnt that it cannot work its international relations or counter-terrorist policy along with its election cycle. The project of getting China around to pressure Pakistan needs to be pursued along its own time-line, just as the goal of persuading Pakistan to abandon the instrumentality of terrorist proxies.

There are enough indications that this is not an impossible task. India was able to bring around Beijing to placing Pakistan on the FATF ‘grey list’ in this manner. And, after all, Beijing did act against Hafiz Saeed and Lakhvi.

In an interview with The Hindu the former Indian Ambassador to China, Gautam Bambawale had noted that India’s only option to a Chinese barracking was to keep trying. He suggested that India needed to be more transactional, and perhaps look for things Beijing would like in exchange for the Azhar listing.

The global community’s response to the Pulwama attack and the Indian response was generally sympathetic. There are enough indications that countries like the US, Saudi Arabia and China, all friendly to Islamabad, are nudging Pakistan in the right direction. India needs to keep working with them, just as it does need to keep sharpening its more kinetic instruments to deal with terrorists.

Quint March 14, 2019

Death of ‘War’ Journalism: Controlling Govt, Suicidal Media Groups

Field reporting of conflict is dying in India—assaulted by a government which seeks to control the narrative tightly. But there is also a suicidal impulse in media groups who no longer want to challenge the government’s version of events. The result is that in our era, “war” reporters are jokers who act out their scenes dressed in faux bullet proof vests and combat jackets—but inside “war rooms” constructed in a TV studio.

Indian journalism has not produced great war reportage of the caliber of Ernie Ple, Wilfred Burchett, Dickey Chapelle, Marie Colvin, Robert Fisk,  Ryszard Kapuscinski, John Simpson, Peter Arnett, and scores of others, mainly from the west. But there have been journalists who have done the profession proud.

War Reporting During India’s Intervention in Sri Lanka

Without doubt, the highest point in the war journalism of independent India was during our ill-fated Sri Lankan venture in 1987.  Sumir Lal, a young reporter for The Telegraph of Kolkata went from Colombo and reached the LTTE positions facing the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Equally intrepid was Anita Pratap who, with photographer Shyam Tekwani, also managed to reach LTTE lines. Her searing reportage and Tekwani’s photographs in India Today showing Indian troops lying dead after an LTTE ambush, are forgotten now, just as the India’s Sri Lanka venture is.

But their reportage would have led to a riot in today’s hyper patriotic atmosphere.

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From the outset, courageous reporting of the Sri Lankan adventure was able to inform the country of the somewhat questionable assumptions behind India’s decision to commit the so-called peace force in our neighbouring country. This brand of journalism provided a forewarning to the Generals who had assumed that dealing with the LTTE would be a two-week affair.

The Defence Ministry has always insisted in maintaining total control on information relating to a conflict. As a result, in Sri Lanka, soldiers died, were cremated on the island, and forgotten. Great acts of sacrifice and bravery remained unreported, except when the government chose to provide the information.

Accidental and Independent Conflict Reporting

Even today, the Ministry has this attitude to information, guarding it tightly in an era when commercially available satellite imagery can challenge their narrative. Time and again it has been shown that accurate reporting, howsoever painful it is for the armed forces, is a bigger battle-winning and morale-raising factor than inept news management that lacks integrity.

The first Indian war correspondent, as it were, was inadvertent. Journalist G K Reddy was stranded on the wrong side of the lines when the Pakistani-led tribal raiders attacked Kashmir in October 1947. He escaped from “Azad Kashmir” and wrote a series of reports that made his name across the country.

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In India in the 1980s, the commercially successful newsmagazines like India Todayand Sunday began to change things by sending journalists to conflict zones, independent of government support. This was  a major factor in encouraging a climate of professionalism and objectivity. Emulating the trend, soon TV news channels, too, began to spend considerable sums of money to send teams of journalists to cover the second Gulf War or the Afghan conflict.

Kargil Reporting Changed the Game

Many others may argue that the coming of age of Indian war reporting was during the Kargil war. It is true that there was some graphic reportage from that event, but it was from the relative safety of the National Highway 1D linking Srinagar with Leh. We say “relative” because the reporters there were in danger of being hit by Pakistani shelling and some were injured. The frontline was 4 or 5 kilometres as a crow flies from the highway.

The Kargil war changed the dynamics of the relationship between the government and the media.

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Since the usual route to Kargil was via Srinagar, it was easy to prevent journalists going up. But the reporters soon took flights to Leh and motored down to Kargil and began reporting before the Army press organization got its act together.

However, the government soon realized that conflict reporting was a huge bonus. Private TV channels, who were relatively new, brought the impact of the war to the average Indian home. Emotions were heightened by the footage of funerals of the soldiers, who had died in the front. The government of the day, facing a General Election soon, decided to use the reportage to whip up nationalistic fervor and hoped to cash in on it at the ballot box. Never mind the fact that it was intelligence failure of the instruments of the same government that were responsible for the war that eventually saw the deaths of over 500 soldiers and officers.

Truth Vs Propaganda in Conflict Reporting

Reporters in the west have often covered war from the adversaries’ side as well and many have died and continue to die in the process. There has never been a question of any Indian reporter being able to report from the adversaries’ side in the wars with Pakistan and China It is unusual for combatants to allow reporters from adversary countries to report from their territory. But skillful insurgent groups use it to further their aims.

This is, however, a matter of the geographical location of the battlefield and the intensity of operations. So, even as a Peter Arnett or Rageh Omar could report from Baghdad under the American aerial attack in 1991 and 2003, those who went in with the US forces into Iraq and Afghanistan were often “embedded” with military units.

Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty is a useful work to understand the nature of war reporting. The book’s title refers to the fact that truth is often the first casualty in a war. The subtitle, The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker speaks for itself.

‘Patriotic’ Journalists

Total war like World War II saw journalists, too,  conscripted into the war effort. Patriotic reporting was the norm and reporting was of the embedded  variety. The brush wars of the 1950s and 1960s enabled journalists, especially from countries neutral in a conflict to cover both sides.

In times of open war, media almost everywhere sheds even-handedness to become “patriotic”. War is a situation when national feelings are heightened and most newspapers won’t go against the grain, if for purely commercial considerations. However, what marks out great reporting from what we see in India today is the effort made by journalists to seek and report the truth, and for great editors to publish or broadcast it without fear of consequences.

Quint March 9, 2019

Dealing with Pakistan

Through history, it has been evident that walls and forts do not really stop invaders and that the best defence is the one that prevents the destruction of your own home territory. It is for this reason that the chosen strategy of powerful countries is to fight the battles for their homeland security away from home, preferably in the adversary’s territory.  

Translated into our relationship with Pakistan, it does tell us that neither military strikes, deployments along the LoC, nor the fence along the International Border will keep out Pakistani terrorists from this country. They need to be dealt with in their own home territory through a mix of means.

Last week, India took one step in the direction by carrying out the air strike on Balakot. Whether or not the Indian bombs hit their targets is not as important as the fact that for the first time since 1971, in a no-war situation, India used air power to hit targets in Pakistan proper.

Unfortunately, the ruling party’s electoral agenda has sharply distorted  the strategic landscape, and this includes the Balakot episode. Looking at the evidence currently available, an Indian strike did take place on Balakot. It did not damage the main JeM seminary, but may have taken out a number of subsidiary structures and killed an unspecified number of militants (evidence for this is awaited). In the meantime, there was an air clash in which an Indian aircraft was shot down and a pilot captured. The Indian side says an F-16 has been shot down, again evidence is still awaited.

But if you look at the narrative playing out in India, the whole thing is being projected as an unvarnished triumph for India.  Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman did display heroism, but it was heroism in adversity, maybe greater than the one that is often required in victory. But the fact we lost a pilot, and had to face the ignominy of having him in Pakistani custody was a setback, and it is delusional to show it as some sort of a victory. You can attribute some of the over-the-top response to the ruling party’s ability to control the narrative and to the hyper-nationalist attitudes where common sense and caution are discarded.

All military action comes with the possibility of failures and casualties. If New Delhi is to adopt cross-border strikes as policy, it must be ready for such eventualities. On balance, though, the Indian strikes on Pakistan are a major shift, whose significance we will have to assess in the coming years.

The  problem with Indian policy lies at two levels. First, it has not decided what its grand strategy vis-à-vis Pakistan is. Should it seek the break-up of Pakistan, or military dominance over it, or, should it move on another track, seek to incorporate it in a larger geoeconomic and geopolitical area? All options must be weighed against the price that comes with its chosen strategy. Whatever endpoint it has in mind, it must be able to effectively meld the military, covert, economic and informational aspects of its policy in an effective manner, something it has not been able to do till now.

Our policies towards Pakistan have zig-zagged from the Lahore Declaration of 1999 to Kargil, from the January 2004 joint statement to Balakot and from Modi’s embrace of Nawaz Sharif on December 25, 2015, to the campaign to isolate Pakistan in 2016-17.

In this we also need to factor in the failed policy of the BJP government in Kashmir. The relentless hardline, minus any political outreach, has led not just to an intensification of the insurgency, but enabled Pakistani groups to recruit locals. It was such a person who, after all, carried out the Pulwama attack.

War always looks like an easy option — use your legions, defeat the enemy, impose your terms on the other side and all is well, at least for a while. But in today’s world, it is so much more difficult to defeat an ethno-religious insurgency or a nuclear-armed adversary and neither Pakistan nor the insurgent Kashmiris are a pushover.

In my previous article, I had referred to Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of policy with other means. Writing in The Diplomat, James R Holmes says that most translations have mis-stated it to say ‘by other means’. In fact, he insists, Clausewitz meant ‘with’ and this is significant since it says along with the kinetic aspects of war, the contest also includes other means — diplomatic, covert, informational and economic. This is particularly important for the current era where an all-out war between states, especially those armed with nuclear weapons, is unlikely.

An ideal, and possibly the only, strategy we have under a nuclear overhang is to have Pakistan collaborate in the process of defeating the monsters it has nurtured within. Modi has not got Islamabad on the backfoot by his military instrumentality, but by his successful West Asia policy that has got the principal powers there — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran and Israel — accept India as the preeminent power in South Asia. The battle to subdue Pakistani jihadists must be fought not only in the Kashmir Valley or Pakistan, but also in the capitals of West Asia, United States, China and Russia. As for the Valley, the most important battle is the one we are not even fighting any longer, that for the hearts and minds of its people.

Tribune March 5, 2019 

India’s OIC Moment Wasn’t a Triumph But It Wasn’t a Failure Either

How are we to judge the invitation to be the guest of honour at the recent plenary of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) summit, held in Abu Dhabi on 1-2 March?

What the OIC says and does, matters little. But in today’s information age, its positions shape perceptions, which, in turn, influence policy. So, we got an invite that we have thirsted for since we were ignominiously from the OIC’s Rabat Summit in 1969, there were no critical references to India in the Abu Dhabi Declaration, but it passed a separate resolution criticising India. And Pakistan boycotted the meet because of the Indian invite.

It’s not quite the unalloyed triumph for India as is being made out in official circles, but it is an important development with portents for the future.

OIC Invite Result of Modi-Prince Bonhomie

Our invite to the OIC CFM meet was probably courtesy the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, (the de facto ruler of UAE) who drives his country’s foreign policy. Prime Minister Modi has established a special rapport with the Crown Prince following his visit to UAE in August 2015 and then again in 2018.

In turn, there have been two visits by the Crown Prince to India in the tenure of the Modi government, the second as Chief Guest of the Republic Day parade in January 2017.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has put $ 1 billion into HDFC’s affordable housing scheme and another $ 1 billion in India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and the Saudi giant ARAMCO have agreed to take a 50 percent stake in a $ 44 billion refinery being built in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. All this in the last year or so.

No doubt the Sheikh would have had the issue cleared with Saudi Arabia, the headquarters country of the OIC. Here again, Modi’s diplomacy has done good work as was evidenced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) visit to New Delhi last month.

So, it was no surprise that the Abu Dhabi Declaration adopted at the end of the meeting failed to mention Jammu & Kashmir, though, for the record, it did mention the other hot-button Islamic issue, Palestine, was critical of that Islamist outsider, Iran and was supportive of Syria and the UAE-Saudi policy in Yemen and critical of the Houthi militia.

It indirectly commented on Islamic State radicalism calling for “the necessity to stabilise the situation” stabilisation of Southeast Asia and Central Asia, and in the Middle-East and North Africa as well as other areas of the Africa continent. And for good measure it emphasised the need to restore permanent peace and stability in Afghanistan.

But while Imran Khan was praised for returning the Indian pilot “as a gesture of goodwill to de-escalate tensions in the region,” there was no condemnation of India’s actions in Kashmir in the Declaration. There were two objections to the final document of the Declaration—Iran and Pakistan.

 Subsequently, a resolution was passed expressing “unwavering support for the Kashmiri people in their just cause” and condemning the recent waves of Indian “terrorism”. The resolution criticised the human rights excesses of the Indian forces and called for the implementation of the UNSC resolutions on Kashmir.

Another resolution on regional peace and security in South Asia welcomes Imran Khan’s renewed offer of dialogue with India and his gesture in handing over the Indian pilot. It expressed concern over air strikes by India on the terror camps in Pakistan.

Acceptance of Invite a Compulsion of Statecraft

For a party that has little concern or sympathy or concern for the Indian Muslims, it is indeed somewhat ironic that the BJP-led government even accepted an invite at the CFM meet of an organisation that calls itself the “collective voice of the Muslim world.” The reason is, of course, the compulsions of statecraft.

The 57-nation strong Organisation of Islamic Cooperation are too large a bloc of countries to ignore.

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Further, by refusing the invite, Islamabad would have got a free pass that it has had since the Rabat fiasco when an Indian delegation led by Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, later President of the country led an official Indian delegation to the Moroccan city, only to be kept out of the meetings at the insistence of Pakistan.

As a result, Islamabad has routinely used the summit as a platform for anti-Indian propaganda. Almost every summit has a de rigeur criticism of Indian actions in Jammu & Kashmir. There is an OIC Contact Group on Jammu & Kashmir which regularly passes resolutions criticising India.

Immediately after the Balakot strike on 26 February, for example, the OIC Contract group met in Jeddah and called for immediate de-escalation. India was roundly condemned at the meeting for “the recent wave of repression, brutal killing of innocent Kashmiri civilians by the Indian occupied forces, frequent incidents of rapes especially of minor girls.” The OIC also formally condemned “India’s violation of the Line of Control” with Pakistan, an OIC founding member state.

Like the cross-border air strike, the OIC invite has portents for the future. It marks a successful breaching of the OIC solidarity by New Delhi. Whether or not it remains a one-off affair depends as much on South Block’s diplomacy, as India’s ability to convince the world of its case in Kashmir.

Quint March 4, 2019