South Asia in World Politics

South Asia in World Politics

Edited by Devin T. Hagerty

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viii
Acknowledgments

As with many books, it took longer than expected to bring this one from conception to fruition.
During a crucial stretch in its preparation, I lost thirty pounds and grew increasingly lethargic. I
was ultimately diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes, not a happy outcome, but one that
can be managed. Between the onset of my illness and its stabilization, I was neither fun to be
around nor easy to work with. Still, human nature being what it is, most of my friends,
colleagues, and family members feigned obliviousness to my crankiness and treated me with
unstinting love.

For their support and fellowship over many months, I would like to thank Mary Ann Bradley,
Herb and Ann Hagerty, David and Katherine Bradley, Gene and Nancy Bradley, Rich Hagerty,
Sean Hagerty, Shirley Hagerty, Vivian Grace Hagerty, Lou Cantori, Helen Curtice, Andy Flynn
Sequeira, Sumit Ganguly and Traci Nagle, Danielle Hamberger, Abul Hassan, Jim and Michele
Hentz, Cindy Hody, Brad Moore, Wendy Patriquin, Emma Sellers, and Geoffrey and Jennifer
Vaughan. Susan McEachern at Rowman & Littlefield is not only a terrific editor, but she was
graciously understanding of my medical problems and has my enduring gratitude.

Of course, only one person bore the full brunt of my fear, anxiety, anger, and puzzlement about
my health. Probably only one person could have because my wife, Barbara Bradley Hagerty,
possesses what may be a unique combination of qualities: raw kindness, a probing intellect,
unflinching integrity, real humility, and the kind of tenacious loyalty usually found only in
foxholes. Perhaps the greatest of all Barb's qualities is that she accepts no credit for any of the
other ones. I am exceptionally fortunate that she loves me so much, and I lovingly thank her for
being by my side every step of the way.

IX
Xll
NOTE

1. Sources consulted include BBC News ([Link] W. Norman Brown, The United
States and India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1972); The Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press,

1993); Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. and Stanley A. Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a
Developing Nation, 5th ed. (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993); Imperial
Gazetteer of India: Afghanistan and Nepal (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1979 [1908]); Charles H.
Kennedy and Craig Baxter, eds., Pakistan 2000 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2000); Charles H.
Kennedy and Rasul Baksh Rais, eds., Pakistan: 1995 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995); R. C.
Majumdar, H. C. Raychaudhuri, and Kalikinkar Datta, An Advanced History of India, 2nd ed.
(London: Macmillan, 1953); Francis Robinson, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989); Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).

Introduction: South Asia in World Politics

Devin T. Hagerty

This book is a comprehensive, analytically diverse introduction to the international relations of

South Asia, a region encompassing the states of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the
Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These countries together comprise 23 percent of the
world's population. Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis alone account for 21 percent of all
human beings alive today and for 95 percent of all South Asians. The region is geopolitically
centered on India, whose territory constitutes 64 percent of South Asia's land area. At least two
out of every five Muslims in the world live in South Asia.

SOUTH ASIA AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

For much of the last half-century, South Asia has been relegated to the backburner of U.S.
foreign policy interests. While official U.S. attention toward Europe, East Asia, and other areas
defined as strategically important has been sustained and proactive, U.S. interest in South Asia
has tended to be sporadic and reactive. By and large, the region has gained Washington's
steady, highlevel notice only during moments of serious international tension:

• In the early 1950s, when the Cold War turned hot in Asia and global bipolarity began to
congeal

• From 1962 to 1965, when first China and India, then India and Pakistan, fought major wars

• Throughout 1971, when Pakistani forces engaged in a devastating civil war, and India
intervened, defeated Pakistan, and helped to create the new state of Bangladesh
Devin T. Hagerty

• After December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan

• Between 1998 and 1999, when India and Pakistan tested their nuclear explosive capabilities
and then fought a limited war in Kashmir

• After September 11, 2001, when al Qaeda terrorists, directed by their leaders in Afghanistan,
attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside of Washington, B.C.

In between these moments of international drama, senior U.S. policymakers have often de-
emphasized a region that seems somehow destined to suffer deadly conflict after deadly
conflict, irrespective of how intensely and sincerely external actors try to temper regional
hostilities. The 1990s witnessed the latest and most serious manifestation of this ostrichlike
posture, when, after helping the Afghan mujahideen ("holy warriors") chase Soviet forces from
their country, the United States essentially turned its back on a part of South Asia-the region's
northwestern frontier-that had been wracked by warfare for more than a decade.

Viewed in proportion to Afghanistan's 1978 population of some 15 million people, the carnage
of the 1978-1989 phase of the country's long war is staggering: more than 1.5 million Afghans
had perished, some 5 million languished in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, and millions
more had been "internally displaced," that is, driven from their homes and villages by the
relentless pounding of Soviet air power. Despite the fact that half of Afghanistan's population
had suffered grievously in this last great "battle" of the Cold War, seniorlevel U.S. policy
attention in 1989-1991 shifted precipitously to other "more important" regions: Europe, where
the Berlin Wall fell, communism imploded, and the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Middle
East, where Iraq invaded Kuwait, menaced Saudi Arabia, and threatened the free flow of oil on
which the United States and its allies depend so heavily.

Tragically, it took a direct, massive attack on the United States in September 2001 to alert
Washington to the notion that paying only fitful, desultory attention to one of the world's most
volatile regions is a recipe for everyday regional instability, repeated international crises, major
and minor wars, and, ultimately, conditions so chronically unsettled that they continue to
provide the breeding ground for the greatest threat to American national security in the early
twenty-first century: transnational, radicalized Islamic terrorism.

THE VIEW FROM THE ACADEMY

A country's higher-educational priorities, at least in policy-relevant disciplines, tend to reflect its

perceived national security interests. In the United
Introduction 3

States, the Cold War expansion of U.S. interests around the globe gave rise to "area studies,"
including "South Asian studies," as interdisciplinary concentrations in American colleges and
universities. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government funded scores of area studies
programs that were intended to train future scholars and policy professionals in the politics,
economics, cultures, and languages of regions being newly "discovered" by the United States.
Like other area interdisciplines, South Asian studies thrived for a time.

However, in the 1970s and 1980s, financial support for the study of areas viewed as relatively
less important, including South Asia, declined considerably. University departments in the social
sciences hired fewer area studies experts, and graduate students aspiring to study Africa, South
Asia, and other "peripheral" areas of the Third World were encouraged to focus instead on
more strategically important parts of the globe. Aspiring scholars who ignored that advice faced
an academic job market that in the 1990s was heavily skewed toward candidates with strong
"disciplinary" skills, which tended to mean expertise in quantitative methods, formal modeling,
game theory, and other ostensibly more "rigorous" methodologies than those employed by
area specialists. Partly as a result of this decline in area studies, America awoke on September
12,2001, to the fact that it was woefully unprepared to understand the very parts of the world
that would henceforth generate its chief foreign policy and national security challenges. The
news media abounded with stories about how the U.S. intelligence community, with all of its
state-of-the-art "national technical means," could eavesdrop on conversations anywhere in the
world, but sorely lacked the human capabilities to interpret and analyze the resultant
mountains of data that flowed into Washington.

Judging by trends since September 2001, the U.S. foreign policy community has belatedly
begun to realize the enormity of its deficiencies in area studies, including South Asian studies.
Out of necessities driven by the "global war on terrorism" and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan
(2001) and Iraq (2003), senior U.S. policymakers are now paying more sustained attention to
South Asia and other previously neglected regions. Alas, academic priorities turn around as
slowly as the proverbial aircraft carrier. While today's professional help-wanted ads are filled
with vacant positions for experts in toe cultures, languages, politics, and economics of countries
from the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, the pre-2001 decline of area studies has
rendered the qualified candidate pool quite thin.

University departments have again responded to national priorities and begun to reorient their
course offerings toward underemphasized regions like °uth Asia, but there will be an inevitable
time lag before a new generation south Asianists can move into positions of policy and scholarly
influence. is book is a modest effort to ensure that, as increasing numbers of students
•

4 Devin T. Hagerty

gravitate toward the study of South Asia, they and their professors will have at hand an
introductory overview of the region's international relations and its role in world politics. That
there is no such book already available illustrates how neglected South Asia has been in
American academia.

WHAT IS SOUTH ASIA?

The concept of a region in international affairs is inherently ambiguous. Numerous

characteristics can be invoked to assess the "regionness" of a particular geographical area.
These might include strategic dynamics, political alignments, economic interactions, cultural
affinities, and language patterns. What appears to be a region in strategic terms may not be
one in economic terms. Furthermore, individual scholars will give varying weights to each
characteristic of regionness, depending on their own research interests and underlying
assumptions about world politics. Adding to this conceptual fluidity is the fact that, although
journalists, policymakers, and scholars alike treat regions as if they were static and permanent
("in Western Europe today"), our construction and deconstruction of regions is in reality a
much more volatile affair. In sum, regions are ephemeral, intellectual constructs: they wax and
wane with changing technological developments, geopolitical events, demographic flows,
scholarly fads, and the numerous other dynamics that, taken together, constitute human
history.

Conventionally, South Asia has been understood to include, at a minimum, India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. These states are the seven members of
the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the only significant, formal, regionwide
international institution. The logic of this conception rests mainly on the fact that India shares
civilizational ties with all six of the other countries, as well as borders with all but the island
states of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Hence, analysts often use "the Indian subcontinent"-or,
simply, "the subcontinent"-as a synonym for South Asia. Afghanistan is sometimes included in
the roster of South Asian states but is often omitted. The justification for excluding Afghanistan
is that it shares neither a border nor strong ethnic and cultural ties with India; indeed, the
Khyber Pass has historically been viewed as the major land gateway into South Asia.

This book departs from that logic and treats Afghanistan as an integral part of the region.
Although it may once have made sense to treat Afghanistan as lying outside South Asia, the
advancing technology of warfare and geopolitical developments over the last twenty-five years
have made it impossible to understand South Asian international relations without reference to
Pakistan's northwestern neighbor. Not only does Afghanistan share a long border with
Introduction 5

Pakistan, but its Pashtun community-40 percent of the population-is closely connected with its
ethnic brethren in Pakistan. Always an important foreign policy concern for Pakistani officials,
Afghanistan in the late 1970s began to share center stage with India as a top priority for
Islamabad. In 1978 a Soviet-supported coup d'etat implanted a communist regime in Kabul for
the first time. Resistance to the new government developed immediately, as traditionalist
Islamic fighters took up arms against what they viewed as an infidel regime. With the country
teetering on the brink of all-out civil war in late

1979, the Soviet Union's military forces occupied Afghanistan in an attempt to bring order to
Moscow's southern flank. When the United States decided to help the Islamist Afghan
resistance battle the Soviets, Washington found a ready strategic partner in Pakistan, which
became the conduit for billions of dollars in U.S. training and military assistance for the Afghan
mujahideen. That, in turn, had a profound impact on Pakistan's relations with India, which
charged throughout the 1980s that Islamabad was using the Afghan conflagration as a
rationalization for building up its military capabilities vis-a-vis

India.

Since then, Afghanistan has been yet another point of contestation in the Indo-Pakistani rivalry
that is at the core of South Asia's international politics. After the Soviet defeat in 1989,
Afghanistan reverted to civil war as the fractious resistance groups proved unable to turn
victory into peace. Two developments in the mid-1990s brought Afghanistan even more firmly
into South. Asia's orbit. First, many of the non-Afghan Islamic warriors who had helped their
Afghan coreligionists to oust the Soviets ended up drifting eastward to join the ongoing Islamic
insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir. Second, in 1996, Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda
terrorist network made common cause with the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan, trading
military and financial assistance for sanctuary from Western security and intelligence agencies.

Even prior to 2001, India and Pakistan actively supported opposing sides in the simmering
Afghan civil conflict, with Islamabad backing the Pashtunmajority Taliban and New Delhi
favoring the various Turkic-speaking factions that were loosely cobbled into the so-called
Northern Alliance. The subsequent U.S. war in Afghanistan crippled, but did not kill, the Taliban-
al Qaeda condominium, whose bloodied remnants are trying to regroup and to reconstitute the
northwestern subcontinent as the epicenter of transnational Islamic radicalism.

WHY IS SOUTH ASIA AN IMPORTANT REGION?

South Asia is one of the world's most dynamic regions. Its biggest country, India, is the world's
largest democracy, an aspiring great power, and the globe's
6 Devin T. Hagerty

second most populous state with 1.1 billion people. India's economy is rapidly growing and
modernizing, and its scientific and technological prowess is world-class. India is also a nuclear-
weapon state with ballistic-missile capabilities and a growing capacity to project its power
around the Indian Ocean littoral. Pakistan and Bangladesh, united as one country until 1971,
are the world's sixth and seventh most populous countries, with 151 million and 139 million
people, respectively. Among other reasons, Bangladesh and Pakistan are especially significant
because they are two of only a handful of Islamic states around the globe with track records as
democracies.

South Asia provides the regional context for one of the world's most intractable international
disputes, the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir. The two countries fought major wars over
Kashmir in 1947-1948 and 1965, as well as a limited war there in 1999; the disputed territory
was also a battlefield in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, which resulted in the creation of
Bangladesh out of what had previously been East Pakistan. Furthermore, Kashmir has been the
locus of several serious crises between India and Pakistan, crises that have caused increasing
international concern as the two countries have emerged as full-fledged nuclear-weapon
states. The festering Kashmir dispute fuels an intense conventional and nuclear military
competition between India and Pakistan that diverts scarce resources from socioeconomic
development, perpetuates human suffering-sixty thousand Kashmiris have been killed since
1989 - and all too often threatens to erupt in yet another major war.

As noted above, South Asia's significance in world politics has grown considerably since the al
Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. The subsequent U.S. war in
Afghanistan severely damaged the Taliban movement and seems, for the moment, to have
limited al Qaeda's ability to use Afghanistan as a sanctuary and base of operations. But after
twenty-five years of warfare, the huge task of reconstructing Afghan society and reconstituting
the Afghan polity lies ahead. Not only that, India and Pakistan-both allies in Washington's global
war on terrorism-are battling their own internal terrorist threats, struggles made exceedingly
complex by the politically charged issue of differentiating between terrorists and legitimate
seekers of self-determination.

South Asia also provides the context for a wide variety of important political, social, and cultural
issues. Politically, India and Sri Lanka have established the region's most stable democracies,
but even their experience with democracy has been marked by the occasional lapse into more
authoritarian rule. All of the region's other countries have either struggled to institutionalize
democracy or failed even to make the effort. South Asia has also witnessed a number of deadly
ethnic conflicts. In addition to Kashmir, these include India's counterinsurgency in the far
northeast of
Introduction 7

the country, Afghanistan's internecine civil war, Pakistan's struggle to contain civil unrest in
Karachi's ethnic cauldron, Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts violence, and Sri Lanka's Tamil
insurgency. Most of South Asia's ethnic conflicts have international causes and effects, owing to
the postcolonial phenomenon of distinct ethnic groups being artificially divided by international
borders. Similarly, the region's uneasy mix of religion and politics has important international
dimensions. For example, no account of India-Pakistan relations can afford to ignore the
domestic political influence of Pakistan's radical Islamists and India's Hindu-right extremists.

South Asia is also home to a number of pressing international economic dilemmas. Since
independence, the region's states have pursued a variety of economic development paths;
some have been relatively successful and others less so. More recently, since the Cold War's
end, all of South Asia's major states have embraced ambitious economic liberalization programs
so as to harness the growth potential of rapid globalization. As elsewhere, the interaction of
domestic economies and global markets has created both winners and losers, along with a
backlash that seeks to protect traditional cultures against the putatively homogenizing effects
of globalization.

SCOPE, METHOD, AND ORGANIZATION

Although South Asia in World Politics sits squarely within the political science subfield of
international relations, it necessarily strays at times into the cornpanion subfield of
comparative politics. Political scientists have long noted that the divide between international
relations and comparative politics is an intrinsically artificial one, with causes and effects
mingling freely at each level of analysis. The increasing pace of globalization intensifies this
erosion of the conceptual wall between international relations and comparative politics,
resisting all attempts to explain international outcomes without reference to domestic politics,
and vice versa. That having been said, this is a book about South Asia's international relations
and its role in world politics, and lines do have to be drawn. Generally speaking, domestic issues
are included in this volume if they have a significant bearing on the region's international
dynamics. Issue areas included in this category are democratization, economic liberalization,
ethnicity and politics, and religion and politics. It also bears reiterating that the book is meant
as an introduction to the region-as the first rather than the last word-and as a complement to
other, more advanced, readings. Each chapter author has included a brief list of further
readings, which may be viewed as something of a starter bibliography on the chapter's subject.

The methodological orientation of South Asia in World Politics is purposefully eclectic. While
most of the chapters fit easily into the mainstream of
8 Devin T. Hagerty

what might be termed area-studies social science, a few have a narrative drive more common
to the humanities than the social sciences. With each step in the volume's long march from
concept to idea, it became increasingly clear that imposing some sort of one-size-fits-all
analytical framework would render the analysis in each chapter stilted, rather than enrich it.
There is, moreover, a considerable amount of substantive overlap between the chapters. This,
too, has been intended on the grounds that students beginning their study of South Asia can
profit from an appreciation of the different takes individual scholars can have on the same
subject areas. Much as we might like to apply a greater degree of conceptual precision to the
way we organize the world intellectually, the world is a messy place that often*rebels against
neat analytical categories.

South Asia in World Politics can be read straight through or consumed more deliberately as a
series of stand-alone pieces. The remainder of the book cornbines actor-specific and thematic
chapters, divided into two parts. Part I consists of individual chapters on the foreign relations of
the region's three largest states, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; a chapter on the international
relations and security perspectives of four South Asian "small states," Bhutan, the Maldives,
Nepal, and Sri Lanka; a chapter on the reconstitution and reconstruction of Afghanistan; and a
chapter on the South Asian interests of the three most important external players in regional
affairs, China, Russia, and the United States.

Part II is thematic, covering six broad topics in contemporary South Asia's international
relations: (1) the interrelated issues of Kashmir and the IndoPakistani nuclear-arms
competition; (2) the international dimensions of the region's various ethnic conflicts; (3) the
interplay of religion and politics in the subcontinent's international affairs; (4) the regional
relationships between democratization and development; (5) the interlocking processes of
globalization and South Asian economic liberalization; and (6) the South Asian dimensions of
the global U.S. war on terrorism.
_____________________________
THE ACTORS AND THEIR INTERESTS
___________________________________________________________________________ 1_

India's Foreign Relations

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

On the eve of India's independence day, August 15,1947, the country's first prime minister said
to his compatriots, "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes
when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially."
Jawaharlal Nehru's soaring oratory reflected the bittersweet quality of India's liberation from
the British Empire. The Indian nationalist struggle had achieved a monumental victory for the
Indian people, but the partitioning of the erstwhile British India into two new states, India and
Pakistan, would mar their "tryst with destiny." Violence between Hindus and Muslims had
escalated to such horrific proportions in the months leading up to independence that the
British government had seen no alternative but to accede to the demand for a separate political
homeland for India's Muslims. Nehru noted that "before the birth of freedom we have endured
all the pains of labour, and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of the
pains continue even now." Indeed, as Nehru's words rang out across India, Muslims to India's
east and west were celebrating their first day as Pakistanis.1

Despite being denied the Muslim-majority areas that became part of Pakistan in August 1947,
independent India would be far and away the largest and most powerful country in South Asia.
Equally significant was postindependence Indian leaders' firm conviction that they had
inherited from the British not only their newfound sovereignty, but also Great Britain's now
relinquished role as the manager of regional political affairs. The fundamental goal of New
Delhi's grand strategy2 since 1947 has been to maintain India's hegemony3 over the aptly
named Indian subcontinent. From India's perspective, its size, population, and relative power
give it a natural position of regional predominance that conceivably could be undermined only
by the intervention of external actors. Thus, the key to India's preferred position in
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

world politics has been to prevent outsiders from establishing a foothold in its region, either
directly or indirectly at the behest of India's neighbors. Initially, the chief policy expression of
India's grand strategy was the nonaligned stance devised by Nehru in the late 1940s, a posture
of siding with neither superpower bloc during the Cold War and instead charting an
independent foreign policy course. In Nehru's conception, nonalignment gave India a moral
voice in international politics, as well as maximum leverage in its relations with the East and the
West. As we shall see below, it was also flexible enough to be modified when security threats
arose.

This chapter provides an introductory overview of Indian foreign relations from 1947 to the
present. The next four sections discuss the most significant formative influences on India's
foreign policy outlook: its anti-imperial ideology, the wrenching experience of Partition, the
outbreak of the Cold War and emergence of a bipolar international political system, and New
Delhi's desire to establish hegemony over the entire subcontinent, excluding areas that had
become part of Pakistan. Subsequent sections trace the evolution of Indian foreign relations in
a roughly chronological fashion, paying particular attention to India's relations with Pakistan; its
policies toward the main external actors in South Asian affairs, China, the United States, and
the Soviet Union/Russia; its development of nuclear-weapons capabilities; and its role in South
Asian regional affairs. The chapter concludes with a brief analysis of India's contemporary
position in world politics. Although no chapter of this length can be considered comprehensive,
every attempt has been made to provide the reader with a historical introduction to the range
of issues that will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

INDEPENDENCE

India's emergence as an independent, sovereign state in the late 1940s was the last phase in a
decades-long struggle for freedom against the British Empire. Quite naturally, the
preindependence, anti-imperial attitudes of India's nationalist leaders carried over after 1947
into the foreign policy perspective of the new Indian state. The struggle against British rule had
inspired within India's political elites a profound commitment to controlling their own-that is,
India's-national destiny. During more than six decades of agitation for selfrule, they had created
an effective mass movement committed to gaining independence from Britain; and, they had
accomplished this largely by nonviolent means. The "new" India, led by the extraordinarily
popular Jawaharlal Nehru, was resolved to establish a democratic and secular state, based on
the rule of law and universal suffrage, and governed under British-type parliamentary
institutions. In 1947 Nehru and other Indian leaders saw their corn-
India's Foreign Relations

ing to power as an important part of a wider anticolonialist revolution against foreign rule. They
were determined that their exercise of that power should henceforth always be determined by
what they, not outsiders, defined as being in India's interest.

India's experience of nearly three hundred years under British rule affected several aspects of
postindependence Indian foreign relations. For India, the imperial era was brought to a
culmination in 1947 by the Indian National Congress, which had been founded in 1885 as little
more than a polite debating society peopled by well-connected Indians and nonofficial
Europeans resident in India. Its purpose was to share ideas and promote reforms, including
measures aimed at broadening Indian participation in the British administration. Though
unheralded, the birth of the Congress, as it came to be called, occurred amidst a wider
awakening of Indian, and especially Hindu, culture and values among Europeans and (what the
British described as) India's middle classes. This period also saw the rise of other new
organizations in urban Hindu society committed to advancing and improving awareness of
traditional Indian values and, in some instances, to reconciling them with European thought. In
the world beyond, knowledge about Indian culture was spreading, following linguistic
breakthroughs into ancient Indie languages and literature and Indians' own travel abroad. In
turn, this growing awareness of India's rich cultural tradition laid the groundwork for increasing
political consciousness among Indian elites. Simultaneously, these same Indians were learning
about the conventions and institutions of England and Europe through their exposure to the
evolving British-Indian institutions, to the English language, and to communications advances.

As the twentieth century dawned, the Congress lobbied for and supported a series of reform
acts of the British Parliament aimed at reorganizing the Indian polity, instituting British legal
practices, reforming the powers of the (British) Government of India at the local and provincial
levels, and granting Indians wider opportunities to play a role in civil administration. Acts of
Parliament in 1908, 1919, 1929, and 1935 significantly expanded the role of Indians in many
aspects of British Indian administration. Although each of these reforms temporarily calmed
Indian discontent with British rule, each one also served to whet the political appetite of new
generations of Indians. Thus, London's successive concessions' inevitably seemed to fall one
step short of what politically active Indians had sought; periodically, too, they were undone by
acts of repression. However, there is no doubt that this gradual Indianization of the
administration gave Indians valuable experience of governance that enabled them quickly and
confidently to assume control of their own state in 1947.

The formation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906 reflected a somewhat later political
awakening among Indian Muslims that in the early years
Devin T. Hagerly and Herbert G. Hagerty

India's Foreign Relations

of the twentieth century frequently put them at loggerheads with the Congress. A case in point
was the aftermath of Britain's 1905 decision to divide Bengal Province, which was strongly
supported by the Muslim League and vigorously opposed by the Congress. The partition plan
would have been to the advantage of Muslims in the eastern half of Bengal, the part of British
India that would become East Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971. In

1916, under Muslim pressure but with the opposition of the Congress, the British fatefully
acknowledged this sense of a separate Muslim political interest by agreeing to establish
separate electorates for Muslims contending for office under reforms already enacted. During
World War I, both the Congress and the League supported the British war effort but were
disappointed that this support paid so few dividends in easing the often-heavy British hand.

In economic affairs, Indian nationalists of every stripe had long recognized that British imperial
policies served British, not Indian, interests by emphasizing the export of raw materials for a
broad spectrum of British industries. They also appreciated the importance of Indian manpower
to Britain's overall military capabilities and were justly proud of the accomplishments of the
British-officered Indian army on foreign soil in World War I. But they also knew, because of the
army's frequent role in support of civil authority in British India, that British imperial
imperatives often dictated the deployment of Indians to suppress, even kill, other Indians.
Rankling still more was a growing awareness as the war dragged on far from India's borders
that this use of Indian manpower, whether in India or abroad, had been undertaken by the
British without having sought the approval of any then existing Indian assembly or the consent
of a single Indian national.

The war's immediate aftermath saw the emergence of Mohandas Gandhi and his philosophy of
nonviolent resistance. Under Gandhi, the Congress stepped up its evolution into a secular,
mass-based movement. Also during this period, Congress and Muslim League leaders began to
pay more attention to events outside of India, especially to anti-imperialist movements in other
dependencies, to the plight of Indians in eastern and southern Africa, and to the progress of the
Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In 1920, led by Gandhi, the Congress supported the Muslim
League in its condemnation of successful British efforts to prevent the restoration of the Islamic
caliphate in Constantinople. But Congress-League cooperation would diminish as the aims of
both organizations evolved from advocating selected reforms and expanding the participation
of Indians in government toward a demand for independence.

The anticipation of self-rule created a new arena of competition-and ultimately bloodshed-

between Hindu and Muslim Indian nationalists. In the
1930s, relations between the Congress and the League considerably worsened. The Congress
was heavily Hindu in composition, and the Hindu holy image projected by Gandhi began to
undercut his and his movement's jected secular image among Muslim leaders. This was
especially the e as Muslims began to think about the form of an eventual, independent I dian
polity in which Muslims would be a permanent electoral minority idst a much greater Hindu
population. The results of provincial elections

• 1937 reaffirmed this concern. As Indians moved inexorably toward selfdetermination, India's
Muslim minority grew increasingly anxious about its political prospects in an independent,
democratic India. In 1940 these Muslim fears led the League to split with the Congress and to
call for an independent nation, Pakistan, to be carved from the Muslim majority areas of British
India.

The Congress-Muslim League split continued into World War II and beyond. While the League
supported India's role in Britain's war against Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Congress opposed
the war effort, even with Japanese troops from Burma threatening northeastern India. In 1942
Congress leaders launched a movement to pressure the British to "Quit India," orchestrating
large-scale, but peaceful, noncooperation with the government to dramatize their demand for
independence and their denial of Indian support for the war. The "Quit India" campaign
resulted in the imprisonment of most senior Congress leaders, which subsequently became a
badge of honor when they came to power.

After decades of reluctance to consider full independence for India, interspersed with periodic
reforms meeting some minimal Indian desires, a warweary and weakened Great Britain
committed itself in 1946 to Indian independence. Then, having initially announced a target date
in 1948, the British suddenly moved the date up to August 1947. This was in large measure
because of mounting concern about the likelihood of massive bloodshed in a roiling
subcontinent whose leaders were increasingly impatient to assume power. As independence
neared, widespread rioting broke out between Hindus and Muslims (and between Sikhs and
Muslims). hi retrospect, the Indian independence movement boiled down to a
strugglefrequently concerted, but often not-by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and others for control of
their own communities' political destinies in consonance with their interpretations of their, and
India's, interests. This experience lay behind the postindependence Indian leadership's
continuing concerns about foreign influence in India, its embrace of anticolonialist causes in
Asia and Africa, and its commitment to a posture of nonalignment in foreign affairs, to be
discussed at greater length below. As Prime Minister Nehru phrased India's position, e Wlu
accept any help that comes from outside. But ... [w]e cannot tolerate terference in our internal
affairs or our freedom.... We have friendly relations both the blocs [the Soviet-led East and the
U.S.-led West] and yet maintain
6Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

our freedom. . .. [TJhis is the policy best suited for our country arid also ... the only one by
which we can serve the cause of world peace.4

PARTITION

A second formative influence on India's foreign relations was the messy partitioning of British
India into the new states of India and Pakistan. Partition left in its wake an Indo-Pakistani
dispute over the political status of the area known as Jammu and Kashmir, today often referred
to simply as "Kashmir," a territory roughly the size of Kansas. Kashmir has been the scene of
two major wars (1947-1948 and 1965), one limited war (1999), and numerous sen- i ous crises
between India and Pakistan. * 1

The Kashmir conflict dates back to the months leading up to independence.1 As the
independence date of August 15, 1947, neared, Congress and Muslim League leaders remained
divided in their political aims, with the Congress committed to a united, secular, democratic
India and the League demanding the creation of a separate, democratic, Islamic nation based
on a grouping of provinces where Muslims were a majority. As talks between the Congress, the
Muslim League, and the British dragged on with no solution in sight, large Indian cities like
Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta were convulsed in Hindu-Muslim violence. When
negotiations ultimately failed to produce a compromise and the violence escalated, the British,
fearing a bloody, all-out civil war, chose to partition the subcontinent. Parliament passed the
Indian Independence Act of 1947, calling for the division of British India into the independent
states of India and Pakistan, one avowedly secular, but mainly ! Hindu, and the other
determinedly Islamic.

At independence, the provinces of Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east were partitioned,
with territory awarded to Pakistan on the basis of the conti- j guity of Muslim-majority districts.
Pakistan's portion of Bengal was named East Pakistan and was separated by one thousand
miles of territory from the Pakistani portion of the Punjab, which was joined with the
overwhelmingly Muslim provinces of Baluchistan, the Northwest Frontier Province, and Sindh,
plus associated tribal areas adjacent to Afghanistan, to become West Pakistan. In the aftermath
of Partition and the British withdrawal in 1947, communal unrest mounted. As an estimated
fifteen million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs moved east and west across the new borders (Hindus
and Sikhs into India, and Muslims into Pakistan), many engaged in a vengeful bloodletting.
Estimates of Partition's death toll usually start at one million, and reliable calculations of people
wounded and property damaged are impossible to make.

The new governments' agendas were overloaded. Extreme urgency attached to every issue. For
leaders on both sides, there was an immediate re-
India 's Foreign Relations

• ment to assert control over their new domain by affirming borders and qU1f ring domestic
order. Efforts at cooperation between the two new domin- 16 in which civil service and military
officers of British nationality still 'important posts, failed to stem the tide of violence. Among
India's most ssins concerns was the need to stabilize its new eastern and western borders
abutting the two "wings" of the new Pakistan. Neither geography nor economic interests
sustained these new lines on the map, which were, rather, the product of enmity between
Hindus and Muslims, and the communal division was meant to deal with their now national,
conflicting ambitions. Along these borders, Partition had left behind a deep-seated residue of
anger and distrust, as well as fear on the Pakistani side that India remained unreconciled to
Partition and harbored revanchist ambitions. Moreover, the new borders cut across major river
and irrigation systems, parts of the five-river complex in the Indus basin, upon which the richest
agricultural lands in both dominions depended for water.

In attempting to gain control of its new domain, India's task was larger than Pakistan's because
of its greater area and population and its more cornplex mix of communities. However, India's
task was facilitated by the contiguity of its territory, the greater development of its economy,
the established administrative divisions within its polity, and the continuing presence of
seasoned officials in place. Pakistan lacked much of this but benefited, at least in its western
wing, from its smaller size and the greater, homogeneity of its population. Even after the
massive communal shifts imposed by Partition, tens of millions of Muslims remained in India,
and millions of Hindus were left in East Pakistan. Within India, historic schisms rooted in
culture, community, and language remained even after the separation of the mostly Muslim
areas that became Pakistan. Refugees required comprehensive and immediate assistance, while
the legacy of antagonism and mistrust between Muslims and non-Muslims that had
characterized the later years of the independence struggle continued to thwart Indian leaders'
efforts to consolidate their domestic authority and establish a relationship with the new
Pakistan.

Even more daunting was the fact that the territorial award took no account of the status or
communal complexion of some 565 princely states that during the colonial period had been
governed separately by autocratic Indian monarchs. These states had remained nominally
independent, but their rulers had formally acknowledged fealty to the British Crown and were
usually kept under watch by a British resident. That link was severed in August 1947 under the
terms of the Indian Independence Act. Left to individual monarchs was the crucial decision
concerning which of the new countries to join. In the vast majority of cases, accession to either
India or Pakistan unfolded smoothly. By early 1948, all but three of the princely states' rulers
had come
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

to terms with the inevitable demands of geography, signed accession agreements, and
gradually accepted a role in the larger polity. The smallest of the three recalcitrant princely
states was Junagadh, located on the coast of the Arabian Sea and on the new international
boundary between the Pakistani province of Sindh and the Indian province of Bombay.
Junagadh was governed by a Muslim ruler who initially preferred accession to Pakistan despite
his state's longstanding links with the area to the east that had now become India. Finding
himself at odds with his mostly Hindu subjects, he signed an instrument of accession with
Pakistan. India protested, demanding that he hold a plebiscite to determine his people's will.
But the state's Hindu subjects rioted, and the issue was quickly resolved by the Indian army's
entry into Junagadh. A 1948 plebiscite confirmed Junagadh's accession to India (where it
became part of Saurashtra, which was later absorbed into what is now the state of Gujarat).

More vexed were India's dealings with the other two princes, the Hindu maharajah of Jammu
and Kashmir and the Muslim nizam of Hyderabad, a state the size of Minnesota that was deeply
embedded within what had become India. Hyderabad was a large and prosperous state with a
Muslim ruler and a Hindu-majority population. In January 1947, with Partition still many
months off, the nizam had publicly indicated that he would not join India. He reaffirmed this
position in July, expressing a preference to remain separate from both India and Pakistan. Days
after the end of British rule, the nizam proclaimed the "resumption" of his state's
independence. The Indian government objected to the nizam's decision and quickly forced him
to desist in his effort. Negotiations on a final settlement continued into 1948 with mounting
acrimony, including allegations that the nizam, then one of the richest people in the world, had
loaned a substantial sum of money to Pakistan. Fearful of an Indian takeover, the nizam
appealed for United Nations intervention, but before the United Nations could act, widespread
Hindu-Muslim violence throughout Hyderabad led New Delhi to intervene with its still British-
officered army in a widely criticized September 1949 police action. The state was put under
Indian military administration, leaving the nizam essentially powerless, but in place. He
withdrew his complaint to the United Nations and thereafter acceded to India. Pakistan
protested India's actions, but to no avail. The state of Hyderabad was initially kept intact but
was eventually dismembered, its territory becoming part of the neighboring Indian states of
Andhra Pradesh, Mysore, and what later became Maharashtra in reorganizations of state
boundaries in the 1950s.

The status of a third princely state, Kashmir, has not been resolved to this day.5 In the late
summer of 1947, the communal rioting accompanying the independence and partition of India
and Pakistan began to spread from Punjab into Kashmir. While Kashmir's Hindu maharaja, Hari
Singh, hesitated on the
India's Foreign Relations

question of accession to either new state, a Muslim revolt erupted in Poonch, . western
Kashmir. The Poonch rebels established a provisional government •n what they called "Azad
Kashmir" ("Free Kashmir"). In October, some two to three thousand armed raiders, mainly
Pashtuns from Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, crossed the border between West
Pakistan and Kashmir, rallying behind the rebels. The government of Pakistan provided material
support for the Poonch rebels and their Pashtun allies, who together made fast progress
toward the state capital of Srinagar. With his domain on the verge of collapse, and with the
support of his popular Muslim prime minister, Sheikh Abdullah, Hari Singh signed Kashmir's
accession to India on October 26, 1947. The next day, the Indian government began airlifting
troops and supplies to Srinagar, and the Indian army soon drove the insurgents out of the
capital.

In January 1948, with a political-military stalemate at hand, India referred the Kashmir dispute
to the United Nations. India charged that the invasion by military forces from outside the state
had been illegal given Kashmir's accession to India in October 1947. In turn, Pakistani diplomats
alleged that India had fraudulently achieved Kashmir's accession. In April 1948 the UN Security
Council adopted a resolution calling for the removal of all outside military forces from Kashmir,
except for such Indian forces as would constitute the minimum necessary to uphold law and
order, and for the subsequent holding of a plebiscite to decide the state's political future. In
July, a UN Commission on India and Pakistan (UNCIP) traveled to Kashmir to begin laying the
groundwork for a plebiscite. Upon UNCIP's arrival, Pakistan admitted that Pakistan army troops
were fighting in Kashmir and that the socalled Azad Kashmiri forces also fought under the
operational command of the Pakistan army. The direct involvement of the Pakistan army in
Kashmir, suspected but not previously confirmed, represented for UNCIP a material change in
the situation. The Kashmir dispute was now understood to be a fullfledged international
political conflict, a more serious and potentially much more dangerous affair. In August 1948
UNCIP adopted a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire and reaffirming the need for a
plebiscite. After a period of further negotiations and continued fighting during the autumn, a
cease-fire finally went into effect on January 1, 1949.6

THE COLD WAR

A third formative influence on India's foreign relations was the cold war political-military
confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, which rapidly intensified just as
India was emerging as a newly independent state. The superpower competition imposed a
bipolar structure on international
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

affairs from 1945 until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Bipolarity forced virtually
every country in the world to make one of three choices: to ally with Washington, to ally with
Moscow, or to attempt to remain aloof from the superpower conflict by forging amicable
relations with both sides. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, India strove to maintain a position
of equidistance between East and West. With a governing elite committed to democracy in
political affairs and socialism in economic affairs, India had commonalities with both the United
States and the Soviet Union. Some Indian nationalist leaders, including Nehru, had studied in
Britain and were steeped in the secular, liberal political traditions of the West. At the same
time, most were attracted to the socialist, anti-imperialist policies of the East. Under Nehru,
who led India until his death in 1964, New Delhi attempted to chart a "third way" in
international affairs, a democratic, socialist path that would, it was hoped, give all Indians a
voice in their political system while ensuring that gains from economic development would be
distributed equitably across the impoverished population.

As part and parcel of the dramatically escalating global competition between East and West,
Moscow and Washington began in the early 1950s to compete for influence among newly
emergent, so-called Third World states. Simultaneously, in the colonial domains of several
Western European powers, such as the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), French
Indochina (now the states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), and British Malaya (now Malaysia
and Singapore), colonial authorities that had been displaced by Japanese forces during World
War II tried forcefully to reassert their imperial rule against the armed resistance of indigenous
nationalist movements. While Cold War imperatives generally spurred the United States to
support its Western European allies, if not colonialism per se, the Soviet Union and its ally as of
1950, the new Chinese Communist regime on India's northern border, sought to embrace and
exploit anticolonial independence struggles to their own advantage.

As a recently liberated country, India strongly supported its fellow Third World nationalists, and
anti-imperialism became a primary thrust of Indian diplomacy. New Delhi assumed a
particularly prominent role at the United Nations in support of self-determination for colonial
peoples. India's diplomacy often gave the appearance of siding with the Soviet Union,
notwithstanding India's claims of nonalignment. However, this was more the result of India's
own experience as a nation recently freed from European rule than any strong sense of affinity
with Moscow. Indeed, until Soviet leader Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the Kremlin heaped scorn
on India, taking it "as a given that India and other moderate states emerging from colonialism
were hopelessly bourgeois and reactionary . . . disparaging] Nehru's vaunted nonaligned stance
as meaningless and . . . dismissing] Nehru himself as little
more than an Anglo-American stooge."7 Ironically, the U.S. view of India during the early
independence years was equally suspicious, especially after New Delhi extended diplomatic
recognition to the Communist People's Republic of China in 1949 and subsequently pushed for
China's UN seat to be filled by the Beijing regime instead of the Chinese nationalist government
on Taiwan. India's leadership role in the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) in the mid-1950s did
nothing to quell U.S. doubts about Indian loyalties, especially during the Eisenhower years,
when U.S. policymakers adopted the stance that every country was either "with us or against
us" in the Cold War.

India's neutral posture during the early Cold War period stood in stark contrast to Pakistan's
strategic choices. As the much weaker of South Asia's two largest countries, Pakistan
assiduously courted support from outside the region. Postindependence Pakistani leaders
believed that many Indian elites were not reconciled to Partition and the creation of Pakistan,
and they feared that New Delhi might one day aggressively seek to reincorporate Pakistan into
India. In order to prevent that turn of events, Pakistan soon turned to the United States for
assistance in narrowing the gap between Indian and Pakistani capabilities. For two reasons U.S.
officials were initially reluctant to bring Pakistan into the American strategic embrace. First,
they viewed India as a more significant piece in the Cold War chess game with the Soviet Union
and worried that close ties with Pakistan would sour relations with New Delhi. Second, during
the 1947-1948 Kashmir war, Washington was loath to provide security assistance to either India
or Pakistan for fear of it simply being used against the other side.

Gradually, however, Washington yielded to Pakistani blandishments. By

1950 the Kashmir war was over, and it had become unequivocally clear to U.S. decision makers
that India would under no circumstances compromise its cherished freedom of action by
making a Cold War commitment to the U.S.-led Western bloc. Also, India's accommodating
policies with respect to China suggested to American strategists that New Delhi was soft on
communism and could not be trusted. To the contrary, Pakistan was willing, even enthusiastic,
about siding with the United States and astutely portrayed itself as a strategic asset not only in
South Asia but in the Middle East as well. In a successful, groundbreaking visit to America in the
summer of 1950, Pakistani prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan maintained that Pakistan "borders
on Iran and Afghanistan and has an important situation in relation to the communications to
and from the oil-bearing areas of the Middle East." He further stressed that his country's
"Islamic ideology" provided religious and cultural links to the Middle East that would "prove a
stabilizing factor in Asia." In a calculated contrast with Nehru's rhetoric, Liaquat emphasized
both the incompatibility of communism and Islam and the "fighting qualities" of Pakistan's
"anti-communist Muslim warriors."8
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

Pakistan's diplomatic efforts finally bore fruit with the advent of the Eisenhower administration,
whose secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, championed his vision of a "northern tier" of
Middle Eastern states collaborating to contain the spread of Soviet influence. Dulles viewed the
northern tier countries-Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan-as vital links in a chain of U.S. allies
committed to opposing communism. In February 1954 Washington approved Pakistan's latest
request for military assistance. Three months later, the United States and Pakistan signed a
Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement, according to which Washington would provide military
equipment and training to Pakistan's armed forces. Pakistan also joined the Southeast Asia
Treaty Organization in 1954 and the Baghdad Pact (later renamed the Central Treaty
Organization) in 1955. While India's continuing anticolonial sentiment had dictated that it
remain neutral in the* Cold War, Pakistan had become America's "most allied ally."

Indian leaders were incensed by the strategic partnership between the \ United States and
Pakistan. Prime Minister Nehru was convinced that one of Washington's motives in enlisting
Pakistan into its evolving alliance system was to "check India's power within the region." As he
wrote to one of his ministers, "The United States imagine that by this policy they have
cornpletely outflanked India's so-called neutralism and will thus bring India to her 1 knees.
Whatever the future may hold, this is not going to happen. The first re- \ suit of all this will be
an extreme dislike of the United States in India." Of ] most long-term significance, the extension
of Cold War politics into South ! Asia militated against the Kashmir settlement envisioned in
the relevant UN resolutions. The new U.S. security relationship with Pakistan gave Indian .
leaders ample justification for their already waning interest in a Kashmir plebiscite. As one
historian puts it, "since India was already in possession of the most desirable portion of
Kashmir, and since the overwhelming Muslim majority in the state made a vote to join Pakistan
the most likely outcome of a fair referendum, a postponement of the plebiscite clearly served
India's interests." India's position was bolstered by a warming of relations between New Delhi
and Moscow following Stalin's death; in 1955, the Soviet Union endorsed the Indian position on
Kashmir, thereby ensuring that Moscow's UN Security Council veto would henceforth prevent
the international cornmunity from imposing a Kashmir solution contrary to India's interests.9

SECURING INDIA'S FRONTIERS

A fourth shaper of India's foreign relations was its dogged insistence on gaining influence over
those portions of the subcontinent's landmass that had not been hived off during Partition.
Most of India's periphery consists of natural

h undaries: the Himalayan mountain range, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of R ngal. Partition
had settled India's eastern and western borders with Pakistan. Still to be resolved were the
nature of India's relations with three neighboring polities south of the Himalayas, the status of
two European outposts on the subcontinent, and a dispute with China over competing claims to
territory.

With the glaring exception of the China issue, all of these matters were resolved relatively
easily. Soon after independence, New Delhi tried to persuade France and Portugal to give up
their centuries-old possessions in India. Diplomacy worked with the French, who ceded
Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanaon, Mahe, and Chandernagor to India without incident. Portugal,
however, resisted giving up its colonial possessions, Goa, Daman, and Diu, and India ultimately
resolved the standoff through military action in 1961. To the north, India and Bhutan signed a
1949 treaty by which India assumed what had previously been Britain's control of Bhutanese
foreign affairs in exchange for New Delhi's explicit recognition of Bhutan's sovereignty.10 In
Nepal, India assisted in the 1950 overthrow of a hereditary oligarchy and the

1951 restoration of the monarchy by the Nepalese Congress Party, which was allied
ideologically with the Indian Congress. Although Nepal was nominally nonaligned during the
Cold War, India strongly influenced Nepalese affairs, especially foreign policy. In 1951 India and
Sikkim signed a treaty defining Sikkim as a protectorate in which India would exercise "full
rights over defense, foreign affairs, and communication," making Sikkim little more than a
vassal state.11

India's most serious territorial and border challenges have concerned China. India and China
have been natural competitors in Asia since they emerged as large, modern, postcolonial states
in the late 1940s. Both are ancient civilizations with extraordinarily rich cultures. Both were
compelled to submit to foreign masters during the age of imperialism. Both were then reborn in
the first half of the twentieth century as the culmination of nationalist movements that inspired
millions of people around the developing world. Once free of foreign domination, India and
China pursued starkly different political-economic development paths, which in turn provided
competing models for scores of newly independent Third World countries. China's Mao Zedong
touted his brand of revolutionary communism as the one true path for new states. In contrast,
Nehru promoted his third way to socioeconomic development, which earned him Chinese
propagandists' scorn as the "running dog" of Western imperialism. When assessing their
country's status in the hierarchy of nations, postindependence Indian decision makers have for
more than half a century reflexively cast their gaze at China for purposes of comparison.

In the late 1940s, both the Chinese and Indian governments faced the challenge of securing the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of their sprawling,
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

heterogeneous countries. The "new" India and China found that they had an immediate
disagreement about the contours of their border in two main areas: the Aksai Chin Plateau,
bordering Tibet, Xinjiang, and Ladakh (part of Indian-controlled Kashmir), and along the
Himalayan frontier in the northeastern subcontinent. Taken together, the total area of these
disputed territories is roughly the size of Alabama. India's postindependence policies with
respect to Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim, described above, were aimed primarily at shoring up
India's dominance in regions bordering China. Meanwhile, Beijing pursued a characteristically
more forceful solution to the problem of Tibet's political future by invading and occupying the
territory in October 1950. In May 1951 Tibet became a "national autonomous region" of China,
nominally under the traditional authority of the Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, but
actually ruled by Beijing. In response, New Delhi lodged a formal protest against China's
"aggression" but also realized that, as a practical matter, India could do little to overturn
Chinese control of Tibet. In sum, the 1949-1951 period saw both India and China asserting their
authority over the parts of their shared Himalayan frontier that they now viewed as lying within
their respective spheres of influence.

Once that had been accomplished, the two Asian giants, preoccupied with internal
development and wider Cold War priorities, engaged one another in a mutual peace offensive.
The two countries' leaders exchanged repeated visits, during which they proclaimed a new era
of pan-Asian cooperation. In 1954 Beijing and New Delhi signed a treaty in which India formally
recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. More expansively, the treaty's preamble contained
the Panch Sheel ("five principles"): (1) respect for each other's sovereignty and territorial
integrity, (2) nonaggression, (3) noninterference in each other's internal affairs, (4) equality and
mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence. On paper, if not in practice, the Panch Sheel
became a template for peaceful cooperation among developing countries, celebrated, for
example, at the 1955 Bandung (Indonesia) Conference of twenty-nine African and Asian states.
Out of Bandung grew the Nonaligned Movement, formed to promote economic development,
oppose colonialism, and resist bipolarity's incursion into every part of the globe, which held its
first official meeting in Belgrade in 1961.

Despite these expressions of neighborly solidarity, Sino-Indian relations soured in the late
1950s. Although the 1954 treaty was supposed to settle the issue, Beijing and New Delhi
continued to bicker over Tibet. Ignoring the principle of noninterference, Nehru allowed
Tibetan nationalists to wage an anti-Chinese independence struggle from India. In 1956 the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began a covert operation in support of the Tibetan resistance.
The CIA operation, run from Indian territory and assisted by Taiwanese agents, posed a direct
challenge to China. In March 1959 a revolt
India's Foreign Relations

erupted in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, and Beijing violently suppressed the insurgents. The
Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers fled to India, where New Delhi granted them political
asylum. From 1959 to 1962, SinoIndian relations chilled. Border probes and skirmishes
increased; negotiations failed. In October to November 1962, China launched stinging attacks
across the disputed border, soundly defeating the ill-equipped and outmanned Indian
defenders. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the Sino-Indian war ended. Having conclusively
demonstrated its military superiority, China unilaterally withdrew its forces.

Events in the late 1950s and early 1960s dramatically reshuffled the South Asian geostrategic
cards. Toward the end of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's second term in office, his
administration had already begun to take a more even-handed approach to South Asian affairs.
India had emerged as a leader of the fledgling Nonaligned Movement and as a noncommunist
Asian power whose diplomatic influence, especially in the Third World, outweighed its material
capabilities. Washington was coming to the gradual realization that it had tilted too far toward
Pakistan in the early 1950s. Simultaneously, Pakistan itself had begun to chafe at its
dependence on the United States and started to diversify its diplomatic ties, courting both the
Soviet Union and China. Meanwhile, a significant, although still not public, rift was developing
between Moscow and Beijing, with the Soviets increasingly warming toward India. This
reinforced the increasing overlap of interests-mutual enmity toward India-between China and
Pakistan, which had previously had lukewarm relations.

In the immediate aftermath of China's 1962 military offensive, the United States and Great
Britain rushed transport aircraft, antitank weapons, and small arms to a stunned and desperate
India. Meanwhile, Pakistani leaders provocatively stoked Indian fears of a two-front war against
China and Pakistan. After the war was over, China mounted a diplomatic campaign to isolate
India. As if to highlight Indian intransigence on the border issue, Beijing rapidly concluded
territorial settlement agreements with Burma, Nepal, and Pakistan. With India's security
vulnerabilities having been painfully exposed by the Chinese attack, Washington and London
managed to persuade a reluctant, but weakened, Nehru to enter into bilateral discussions with
Pakistan over Kashmir. Five rounds of desultory talks produced no progress on Kashmir, in part
because Pakistan and China in March 1963 "settled" their own territorial dispute in an
agreement that "gave" China some two thousand square miles of Kashmir. Indian leaders were
furious, maintaining that Pakistan had, in effect, illegally negotiated away Indian territory. Sino-
Pakistani relations grew increasingly close in the early 1960s as China provided its new ally with
tanks, fighter aircraft, and other military equipment. The two countries also aligned their
diplomatic
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

postures, with China adopting Pakistan's position on Kashmir and Pakistan adopting China's on
Taiwan.12

TWO MORE WARS WITH PAKISTAN

In 1965 India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir for the second time. India's 1962
humiliation, its rapidly increasing military power (thanks in part to aid from the United States
and Great Britain, as well as to a tripling of India's defense spending), and political discontent in
Indian-controlled Kashmir itself combined to convince Pakistani leaders that they had only a
brief window of opportunity to strike preventively and wrest the territory away from New
Delhi. At the very least, an aggressive Pakistani policy could keep Kashmir on the boil by forcing
India back to the negotiating table. In the summer of 1965, Pakistan infiltrated thousands of
armed guerrillas across the 1949 cease-fire line in a clumsy attempt to spark a rebellion among
Kashmiri Muslims. New Delhi responded with its own invasion of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir,
capturing several key mountain passes. On September 1, Pakistani armor crossed the cease-fire
line in southern Kashmir and inflicted heavy losses on Indian forces. Faced with the possible loss
of a vital road connecting the state capital, Srinagar, with India proper, New Delhi responded
with a dramatic offensive across the India-Pakistan border in Punjab. The invading Indian forces
outfought their Pakistani counterparts and halted their attack on the outskirts of Lahore,
Pakistan's second-largest city. By the time the United Nations intervened on September 22,
Pakistan had suffered a clear defeat.

Disgusted with this latest turn of events in South Asia and preoccupied with the escalating U.S.
war in Vietnam, the Johnson administration had, on September 8, imposed an arms embargo
against both India and Pakistan. Also, in the war's aftermath, President Johnson "directed that
the United States adopt a lowered profile in the subcontinent and pursue more limited policy
objectives there."13 In the first manifestation of this new orientation, Washington stepped
aside and allowed the Soviet Union to convene a successful peace conference at Tashkent in
January 1966.

Six years later, India and Pakistan fought another war. The 1971 conflict grew out of a Pakistani
civil war that had erupted in March of that year. The root cause of Pakistan's civil strife was the
severe polarization that had emerged between the eastern and western wings of the country
since independence, which in the late 1960s led to increasingly aggressive Bengali separatism
and a correspondingly repressive response by the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani state. As the
fighting in East Pakistan escalated in the spring of

1971, the Pakistan army resorted to extreme brutality, causing millions of Bengali refugees to
seek safety in India. By May, the refugees were arriving
India's Foreign Relations

in India at a rate of sixty thousand per day.14 Faced with severe pressures from the Bengali
refugees and tempted by the prospect of permanently erasing a two-front security threat from
Pakistan, New Delhi decided to support the secessionists' aspirations for their own state of
Bangladesh ("land of the Bengalis").

In April, the separatists issued a declaration of independence and formed a government-in-exile

on Indian soil. New Delhi also set up training camps for the Bengali guerrillas on Indian territory
near the East Pakistan border and assisted the insurgents in their operations across the border.
In July the Indian government decided on a war to liberate Bangladesh. By the fall, New Delhi
was deploying artillery, tanks, and air power in support of guerrilla operations in East Pakistan.
In late November India "launched simultaneous military actions on all of the key border regions
of East Pakistan, and from all directions, with both armored and air support." Having planned a
December 6 offensive to capture the East Pakistani capital of Dhaka, Indian leaders were
"greatly relieved and pleasantly surprised" when Pakistan initiated preemptive air strikes
against Indian air installations on December 3. When the Indian army finally did invade on
December 5, it made rapid progress. Dhaka fell on December 16, and Bangladesh was born.15

By 1972 South Asia's strategic landscape had again been fundamentally altered. India's victories
over Pakistan in two wars had to a great extent overcome the lingering humiliation of India's
1962 defeat at the hands of China. Indeed, the limits to Sino-Pakistani cooperation were laid
bare in both the

1965 and 1971 wars. In both cases, Beijing dutifully condemned Indian "aggression," gave
Pakistan diplomatic, military, and economic support, and vaguely promised to intervene if India
threatened Pakistan's very survival. However, the Chinese also made it clear to Pakistan that
they would not shed blood on its behalf. Beijing's assistance was useful but limited; although
China was resolved that Pakistan would survive as a state that could help to contain Indian
influence, China would not invest enough of its scarce resources to turn the South Asian tide in
Pakistan's favor.

One reason for Chinese restraint in 1971 was that the Nixon administration was quietly
pursuing an initiative to jump start official U.S. relations with China. In July, National Security
Advisor Henry Kissinger secretly visited Beijing for talks that would pave the way for President
Nixon's dramatic opening to China. Kissinger had flown to China from Pakistan, where
government had assisted his clandestine travels. When the trip became, the Indian
government, along with many others, was shocked. New elhi clearly could not expect support
from Washington if a war with Pak-mduced Chinese intervention against India. In their own
dramatic coun- rs roke, New Delhi and Moscow announced in August 1971 that they had gned a
limited security pact, thereby formalizing the strategic partnership

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

that had developed between them in the late 1950s and 1960s. By 1972, then, two broad
coalitions had emerged in South Asian international affairs, with Pakistan, China, and the
United States on one side and India and the Soviet Union on the other.

In July 1972 India and a weakened Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement, which turned the
Kashmir cease-fire line into a line of control (LOG) and stipulated that New Delhi and Islamabad
would settle their political differences peacefully through bilateral negotiations or any other
mutually acceptable means. Simla essentially froze the international dimension of the Kashmir
conflict; moreover, the power asymmetry between India and the rump Pakistan after 1971 was
such that Islamabad was in no position to challenge the status quo. Indian Kashmir was also
relatively quiet. Tranquilly in Kashmir coincided with what one scholar calls "the logic of the
American approach to South Asia in the mid-1970s-that is, the desire not to be bothered with a
region that had consistently proved more troublesome than profitable."16 ,

NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Events in the 1970s and early 1980s injected a new issue into the war-scarred Indo-Pakistani
relationship: nuclear weapons. By this time, India had long been pursuing nuclear-weapons
capabilities, primarily through indigenous research and development, but with substantial
infusions of foreign technology. In doing so, New Delhi's fundamental strategic aim was to give
itself the option of building nuclear weapons in short order should India's security predicament
eventually warrant such a move.

India's gradual nuclearization from the 1940s to the 1970s was motivated by a number of
factors. Domestically, what one analyst has called a "strategic enclave" of "research
establishments and production facilities"17 pushed Indian political leaders along the nuclear
path for both national security and prestige purposes. Scientists and engineers within this
strategic enclave created the vital technological foundation for Indian nuclear prowess,
providing India's nuclear program with inexorable momentum even as successive political
leaders demonstrated a profound ambivalence about India's becoming a nuclear-weapon state.

Internationally, Indian leaders' main concern for most of this period was with China, India's
chief competitor for power and prestige in Asia. As discussed above, China trounced India in a
1962 border war. Soon thereafter (1964), China tested its first nuclear explosive device and
thereby joined what would become the exclusive nuclear-weapon club established by the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970. The NPT effectively conferred legitimacy on a
small group of nuclear-weapon states whose membership was

India's Foreign Relations 29

frozen at five: the United States, the Soviet Union the United KinoHn France and China. When
the door to this club .l^^TlJ& found itself on the [Link], consigned to remaining a nuclear
have-not or b coming an illegitimate nuclear-weapon state. By the early 1970s nener sta tus
was acceptable to Indian leaders, who had taken close note of th e men acmg developments in
the eventful year of 1971- President Niv. to China in July, the October seating' of Chma m
ES^J^S and Security Council, and the December movement of a U.S. aircrafcarti r task force
toward the Bay of Bengal during the third Indo-Pakistan w^In

1972 Indian prune minister Indira Gandhi authorized the building of a nuclei

AFGHANISTAN

The December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed difficult challenges for Indian foreign
policymakers. On one hand, the Soviet Union was by then India's main ally, providing much of
the Indian armed forces' advanced weaponry on concessionary terms. On the other hand, New
Delhi deplored any direct extension of Cold War conflict into South Asia because it threatened
India's dominant regional position, both by injecting superpower military forces into regional
affairs and by augmenting Pakistan's military capabilities, as in the 1950s. In 1981 Indian
defense planners' worst fears were realized with the resurrection of the U.S.-Pakistani strategic
partnership, which had been dormant since the early 1960s. Soon after the Soviets occupied
Afghanistan, President Carter ordered a clandestine CIA operation to supply U.S. aid to the anti-
Soviet resistance that would become the agency's largest covert operation since the Vietnam
War. Pakistan became the vital conduit for that assistance. When the Reagan administration
arrived on the scene in 1981, it promptly agreed to a $3.2 billion military and economic
assistance package for Islamabad that suddenly vaulted Pakistan into the highest reaches of
U.S. aid recipients-in league with Egypt, Israel, and Turkey. Although Indian leaders protested
that the new infusion of U.S. military assistance would set off an arms race and destabilize the
region, their arguments were undercut by the fact that India itself had in May 1980 procured
$1.631 ion of top-of-the-line Soviet weaponry on exceedingly generous terms. retrospect,
Pakistan's reemergence as a frontline state in the Cold Warad a surprisingly limited impact on
Indo-U.S. relations. Although the Indian government refused publicly to condemn Moscow's
brutalization of al]g, anist£m, Indian leaders were privately and acutely distressed by their v s
behavior, and they quietly conveyed their discontent to the Kremlin.
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

How could New Delhi sustain its position as a champion of Third World interests while its
superpower patron was systematically devastating a small neighboring country? Also, as the
information-technology revolution gathered steam, Indian leaders had begun to perceive that
their economic relations with the stagnating Soviet Union were of limited utility. New Delhi
wanted to "grow" its economy in electronics, computers, and telecommunications, areas where
Washington could be much more useful than Moscow.

India began to explore new cooperation with the United States in the early

1980s. Momentum accelerated when Rajiv Gandhi succeeded his mother, Indira Gandhi, as
prime minister in 1984. The younger Gandhi was a former airline pilot, enamored of high
technology and responsive to the developmental possibilities of economic liberalization. With
the Reagan administration eager to isolate the Soviet Union, U.S. officials had their own
incentives to pursue a warming of relations with New Delhi. The first significant breakthrough in
Indo-U.S. affairs was a May 1985 memorandum of understanding in science and technology
that removed India from the U.S. list of "diversion-risk" countries, paving the way for increased
investment and technology transfer.

RELATIONS WITH PAKISTAN

The 1970s was a decade of relatively peaceful relations between New Delhi and Islamabad. The
Simla Agreement had essentially frozen the Kashmir dispute, at least for the time being.
Moreover, the asymmetry in power between India and Pakistan after 1971 was so great that
Islamabad was in no position to challenge the regional status quo. This changed in the 1980s.
The primary bone of contention was each side's claim that the other was meddling in its
internal ethnic disputes. Particularly important early in the 1980s was Pakistan's support for the
Sikh insurgency that was raging in the Indian border state of Punjab.19 In 1981 the Akali Dal,
the main Sikh political party, launched a sustained agitation against the Indian state. Sikh
leaders hoped to resolve certain longstanding disputes, including the status of Chandigarh,
which had been the capital of both Punjab and the neighboring state of Haryana since the old
state of Punjab was linguistically reorganized in 1966. As negotiations between Sikh leaders and
Indira Gandhi's government failed to bear fruit, the Sikh political movement descended into
militancy. With the violence escalating, Sikh insurgents turned the Golden Temple in Amritsar,
Sikhism's holiest shrine, into a sanctuary and base of operations. Some called for the creation of
Khalistan, an independent Sikh state. In June 1984 the Indian army launched Operation
Bluestar, an assault on the Golden Temple and other Sikh temples where militant leaders had
taken refuge. Perhaps a thousand people were killed in the three-day siege. The
Indian Home Ministry claimed that the Sikh insurgency had been a prelude to the creation of
Khalistan, supported by "neighboring and foreign powers," which would have "crippled the
armed forces in any future confrontation across the borders." In October 1984 Indira Gandhi
was murdered by two Sikh members of her personal security detail. In the assassination's
aftermath, some twenty-seven hundred Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi's worst violence since
Partition.20

In the meantime, Pakistan had its own concerns about Indian cross-border meddling. Islamabad
accused New Delhi of fomenting violence in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh, which
had seen a huge influx of migrants since independence. The first wave of settlers consisted of
muhajirs ("refugees") from India, who fueled the growth of Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. Later
settlers included Punjabis and, especially during the Afghanistan war, Pakistani Pashtuns and
Afghans of various ethnicities. Sindhi nationalism had grown in the 1970s as a response to what
ethnic Sindhis felt was their increasing subordination to outsiders. In 1983 a coalition called the
Movement for the Restoration of Democracy launched violent protests against the military
regime of Gen. Zia ul-Haq. This agitation took on a sharp regionalist tone, with Sindhis
demanding greater provincial autonomy, reduced disparities in economic development, a more
equitable distribution of federal government funds, and increased representation in the military
and civil services. In the summer of 1983, thousands of Sindhis engaged in a "rural mass
movement," the first of its kind in the country's short history.21 When the insurgents began to
carry out armed attacks against property, infrastructure, and Pakistan army forces, the Zia
government smashed the rebellion with thousands of troops and helicopter gunships.22
Throughout the early 1980s, Islamabad vociferously accused Indian operatives of aiding and
abetting the violence in Sindh.

Another element of Indo-Pakistani conflict emerged in April 1984, when Indian military forces
were deployed on the Siachen Glacier in northern Kashmir, just south of China's Xinjiang
Province. Pakistani forces soon followed suit, and sporadic battles have been fought between
the two sides from June 1984 to the present. The glacier measures some one thousand square
miles of territory in the Karakoram mountain range, much of which lies at elevations above
twenty thousand feet. Because both India and Pakistan claim all of Kashmir as their own, each
country also claims complete control over the glacier, which makes the Siachen Glacier dispute
a subset of the larger Kashmir dispute. Competing claims over the glacier itself have their roots
in the vagueness of the 1949 agreement demarcating the cease-fire line between hdia and
Pakistan after the first Kashmir war. When the line was drawn, roughly forty miles of the
boundary leading up to the Chinese border was left undelineated because the area "was
considered an inaccessible no-man's
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

land." The issue remained unresolved by the Simla Agreement of 1972, which had replaced the
cease-fire line with the new LOG without addressing the matter of the undrawn boundary. On
the Siachen Glacier, more casualties have been inflicted by fierce weather conditions than by
enemy fire.

The 1980s also witnessed the steady maturation of Indian and Pakistani nuclear-weapons
capabilities.24 In 1981 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi "claimed that India and 'the rest of the
world' knew that Pakistan was developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons and would
soon explode a nuclear device. She said this might prompt India ... to explode another nuclear
device of its own."25 Although press reports throughout the early 1980s speculated that both
countries were making preparations for a nuclear test, one prescient analyst raised the
possibility that Pakistan had "given up the idea of aping India by actually detonating an
underground nuclear device and has instead opted for the Israeli strategy of reaching, or letting
the world believe it has reached, a high level of nuclear technology without actually staging a
nuclear test."26 This analysis proved to be correct. By 1984 it was clear that even if Pakistan did
not test a nuclear explosive device, it would still hedge its bets by quietly developing all of the
capabilities necessary to keep its options open. Predictably, Pakistan's evident nuclear strides
sparked a renewed Indian debate about how to respond. Just before her death in October
1984, Indira Gandhi called Islamabad's recent progress in developing nuclear weapons a
"qualitatively new phenomenon in our security environment," one which added a "new
dimension" to Indian defense planning.27 By the middle of 1985, Mrs. Gandhi's son and
successor, Rajiv, admitted that in light of Pakistan's nuclear progress, India was reconsidering its
own commitment not to build nuclear weapons.28 In June 1985 Rajiv Gandhi was quoted as
saying that Pakistan was "very close" to building a bomb; as for India, he said, "In principle we
are opposed to the idea of becoming a nuclear power. We could have done so for the past 10
or 11 years, but we have not. If we decided to become a nuclear power, it would take a few
weeks or a few months."29 Four months later, Rajiv Gandhi said, "Pakistan has either already
got the bomb or will get one in a matter of months and may not even need to test it."30 In
October 1985 a high-level U.S. delegation failed to convince the Indian government that
Islamabad's nuclear program was not as far along as New Delhi feared. As Rajiv said, "The U.S.
seems to believe that Pakistan has not got the enriched uranium yet. We believe they have."31
The next month, the Indian foreign minister charged that Islamabad had enough weapons-
grade uranium for three to five atomic bombs.32 This was the strategic backdrop for the first
major crisis of South Asia's nuclear era. In autumn 1986 a series of Indian military exercises
called "Brasstacks" began a spiral of competitive mobilization between India and Pakistan. The
final phase of the maneuvers was South Asia's largest-ever mil-
India 's Foreign Relations

itary exercise, comparable in scale to North Atlantic Treaty Organization maneuvers in Europe
during the Cold War. The hypothetical scenario underlying Brasstacks was a Pakistani invasion
of India to bring about the separation from India of the troubled states of Kashmir and Punjab.
By January 1987, both countries' military forces were on alert, with Indian and Pakistani
armored formations poised near sensitive areas along the international frontier, including the
very tense Indian state of Punjab. Just as quickly as it began, though, the crisis abated. By the
end of January, Islamabad and New Delhi began negotiating over the withdrawal of troops from
border areas, and in early February the two sides agreed to a phased demobilization of forces
that was implemented over the next few months.33

REGIONAL AFFAIRS

In the meantime, there were important developments in India's relations with the region's
smaller countries. In 1980 Bangladesh's president proposed that the South Asian states (except
Afghanistan) establish a forum for multilateral cooperation. India had historically resisted such
efforts, fearing that New Delhi's neighbors might use a regional organization collectively to
oppose Indian interests. Indian leaders preferred to deal with individual-and weaker-South
Asian states on a bilateral basis, so that India's advantages in power could ensure outcomes
consistent with New Delhi's interests. However, by the 1980s, India had grown secure hi its
position of regional predominance; Indian foreign policymakers had come to view the prospect
of multilateral cooperation as a means by which India could more effectively influence regional
affairs, as well as gain diplomatic credit for adopting a more conciliatory posture. New Delhi's
willingness to participate paved the way for the creation of the South Asian Association for
Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 1985. SAARC's main goals are "to promote the welfare of the
peoples of South Asia and to improve their quality of life," as well as "to accelerate economic
growth, social progress and cultural development in the region." Importantly, from India's
perspective, the SAARC charter declares that "decisions at all levels shah1 be taken on the basis
of unanimity" and that "bilateral and contentious issues shall be excluded from the
deliberations." The SAARC countries have met at twelve summits since

1985. Dramatic achievements have been few, but SAARC has provided a useful forum for
informal interaction.34 India also acted decisively in the late 1980s to reaffirm its commitment
to excluding external actors from encroaching on its regional management role. n tne most
robust example of this policy, India took the lead in trying to put an end to the escalating Sri
Lankan civil war, which was sparked in July 1"83 by the eruption of violence between Sri Lanka's
Sinhalese-dominated
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

government and Tamil insurgents. Under the terms of a 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan peace accord, the
Indian army was charged with enforcing a "cessation of hostilities" between Tamil militants and
the Sri Lankan army. In exchange, the Colombo government agreed to respect New Delhi's
regional management role and to refrain from allowing extraregional powers to intervene in
the conflict. Unfortunately for New Delhi, its fifty thousand peacekeepers soon found
themselves involved in heavy fighting against battle-hardened Tamil guerrillas in the dense
jungles of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. By the time the Indian army left Sri Lanka in 1990 at
the request of the Colombo government, eleven hundred Indians had died in their country's
longest war.35

THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

The international system was fundamentally transformed between 1989 and

1991. The toppling of the Berlin Wall, the "velvet revolutions" in Eastern Europe, the
reunification of Germany, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union were successive political
earthquakes whose global aftershocks rumble even today. Every state in the world has faced
the necessity of adapting to the sudden end of bipolarity and the emergence of a new, unipolar
international order. This transition has been all the more challenging for New Delhi because it
has come at a time when India itself has been undergoing its own social, economic, and political
revolutions.36 Historians will likely remember the 1990s as the decade when the so-called
Nehruvian consensus, based on secularism, socialism, and nonalignment, breathed its last.

As the twenty-first century began, India's economy and political system looked much different
from what they had a decade earlier. Politically, the most dramatic developments have been
the decline of the Congress Party and the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or Indian
People's Party. The BJP rose to prominence on a wave of Hindu nationalist sentiment loosely
referred to as Hindutva, a concept with no literal translation into English, but which connotes
an enhanced sense of "Hinduness" or "Hindu-consciousness."37 The growth of Hindutva in
Indian political life has increasingly filled the political vacuum left by the Congress system's
decline (see note 19). Under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, a weakening Congress morphed into a
party less staunch in its commitment to secularism and more willing to exploit intensifying
Hindu nationalism for political gain. Thus, it was the Congress itself that legitimized the resort
to religious sentiments and symbolism that previously characterized the tactics of only marginal
opposition parties. Unable to remain above the communal fray, India's once-dominant party
effectively abdicated its role as the watchdog of secularism.
India's Foreign Relations

Meanwhile, developments such as the burgeoning Sikh movement for Khalistan, the Indian
army's 1984 intervention in Punjab, Indira Gandhi's subsequent assassination, and the
reemergence in the mid-1980s of Muslim political discontent in Kashmir created something of a
siege mentality in the so-called Hindi heartland; one commentator noted, "Hindus throughout
north India are wallowing in ... a 'majority's minority complex.' Militant Hindu groups are
invoking a conspiracy of anti-Hindu forces at home and abroad, which are posed as threats to
the Indian nation but are actually excuses for reasserting upper-caste Hindu dominance over
uppity Sikhs, Muslims, and lower castes."38

These trends led for the first time in the 1980s to an emotionally charged competition for the
allegiance of India's Hindu majority. Starting with the election of 1989, the BJP has tapped into
Hindu angst with increasing effectiveness. In the 1984 national elections, the BJP won only two
seats in the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of parliament. That number increased to eighty-six
in the BJP's breakthrough election of 1989. Ten years later, the BJP won 182 seats and its
National Democratic Alliance a total of 299-respectively, 33 percent and 55 percent of the 545
Lok Sabha seats. BJP-led governments ruled India from 1998 until May 2004, when the BJP's
electoral coalition was defeated and a Congress-led coalition took power.

The 1990s also witnessed the beginnings of a profound Indian economic transformation, which
is discussed at greater length in chapter 11. For the first four decades after independence, the
Indian economy had been organized along socialist lines, with the government favoring policies
intended to distribute India's scarce wealth evenly over policies that might achieve higher
growth rates but result in widening economic disparities. For Nehru and his economic
policymakers, this meant that the Indian economy would require strong centralized planning, a
large public sector in most basic industries, and tight government control over the private
sector. Indian industry was protected by high tariff walls that over the years prevented Indian
manufactured goods from reaching sufficient quality to be competitive on world markets.
Foreign investment in and ownership of Indian companies was strictly controlled. So tight was
the government's control of private economic activity that it earned the disparaging moniker
"license raj" or "permit raj" (raj means "rule" in Hindi). With equal measures of sadness and
derision, many economists prior to the 1990s came to refer to the "Hindu rate of growth," an
appreciable but plodding-by developing country standards-3 percent per year.

Although the Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi began to make some liberalizing reforms in
the 1980s, it took a severe balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 to convince New Delhi that the
Indian economy required drastic restructuring. Since then, successive governments headed by
both major parties, the Congress and the BJP, have liberalized foreign investment and
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

foreign exchange rules, substantially lowered tariffs and nontariff barriers to trade, overhauled
India's fiscal and monetary policies, and significantly reformed the country's financial sector.
India's overall economic performance has distinctly improved in the last decade, with average
growth rates roughly double those of the prereform era. Inflation has been lowered, and
foreign investment has skyrocketed, albeit from a very low baseline. India's foreign currency
reserves are now substantial, and the country enjoys a small current account surplus.

RELATIONS WITH PAKISTAN

As the 1990s began, the end of the Cold War had serious repercussions for South Asian
international relations. The 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan had erased the rationale
for a U.S.-Pakistani strategic partnership, which quickly gave way to Islamabad's continued
development of nuclear weapons as the issue of foremost concern for U.S. policymakers. India's
relationship with the Soviet Union also suffered. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's
liberalizing reforms plunged the Soviet economy into depression, the Kremlin was compelled to
alter the concessionary terms under which it had pursued its economic and military ties with
allies during most of the Cold War. India's trade with the Soviet Union, previously conducted in
rupees, was shifted to a more conventional commercial footing, and the terms of Soviet
military sales also grew less attractive. More broadly, the emergence of a unipolar international
system rendered the notion of nonalignment, the chief pillar of Indian foreign relations for
decades, a relic of the past.

Regionally, the late 1980s saw the reemergence of Muslim discontent in Kashmir, which soon
sent Indo-Pakistani relations into another tailspin. In the late 1980s, agitation against the
central government in New Delhi had grown among Kashmiri Muslims. After the 1972 Simla
Agreement, discussed above, the Indo-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir was dormant, although
both sides continued to press their claims to the territory. New Delhi maintained that Kashmir
was an integral part of the Indian Union, its status as such legitimized by both its incorporation
into the Indian constitution and decades of democratic Kashmiri political activity within the
Indian federation. Islamabad disagreed: sovereignty over Kashmir remained contested, its
status unresolved according to either the operative UN formula or the more direct Indo-
Pakistani talks envisioned by the Simla signatories.39

The decline of India's Congress system had disastrous consequences for political stability in
Kashmir. In 1983 state assembly elections, the predominantly Muslim National Conference
Party had won a convincing victory by sweeping the heavily Muslim Vale of Kashmir, while the
Congress fared well
only in predominantly Hindu Jammu. The next year, the Congress ousted the National
Conference chief minister (the state's head of government, analogous to the prime minister at
the national level), Farooq Abdullah, Sheikh Abdullah's son. This bloodless coup ignited a cycle
of political degeneration that further alienated Kashmiri Muslims from the Indian Union. In
anticipation of new state elections in 1987, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi insisted that the
National Conference join the Congress in an electoral alliance and subsequent governing
coalition. Farooq Abdullah accepted and was elected chief minister once again. The 1987
elections were demonstrably rigged,40 and the new government proved to be corrupt and
inefficient. By 1988 political estrangement blended with economic angst to produce a critical
mass of alienated Kashmiri Muslims. Antigovernment agitation erupted in the form of sporadic
violence and organized strikes. Militants set off bombs in Srinagar, and security forces, judges,
and other government officials became murder targets. By

1989 Islamic militants in the Vale of Kashmir were in open rebellion, heralding a secessionist
insurgency that continues today.41 The escalating subconventional war between Indian
security forces and the Kashmiri insurgents, who were increasingly supported by Pakistan,
radically worsened Indo-Pakistani relations. With the Afghanistan war winding down, the newly
invigorated Pakistan army rechanneled its energies and military muscle toward the so-called
freedom fighters struggling against Indian rule in Kashmir. The escalating war between Indian
security forces on one side, and Pakistan-supported insurgents on the other, gave the two
governments their first compelling reason to shed blood since the Bangladesh war two decades
earlier. Early in 1990 the Kashmir fighting evolved from a primarily civil conflict into an
international crisis that brought India and Pakistan dangerously close to major war. New Delhi
and Islamabad placed their military forces on high alert and issued bellicose threats suggesting
that war was imminent. Some analysts believe that during the 1990 crisis Pakistan readied its
nuclear weapons for deployment; others discount that view. Either way, the first Bush
administration was sufficiently alarmed that it dispatched Deputy National Security Advisor
Robert Gates to the region for talks with both governments. The Gates intervention helped to
calm tempers on both sides of the border.42

NUCLEAR TESTS

For most of the 1990s, New Delhi and Islamabad avoided crossing any nuclear Rubicons,
preferring instead to refine their nuclear-weapons and delivery capabilities quietly. The
prevailing perception in both capitals seemed to be that even these nonweaponized capabilities
would deter the
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

other side from aggression. However, India turned out to be less content than Pakistan with
this adolescent nuclear standoff. While Islamabad's nuclear program is purely the product of
strategic concerns about India, New Delhi, as always, plays on a larger field. As one scholar
wrote in 1999, the Cold War's end had for India "resulted in the loss of a critical counterweight
to the Chinese threat: the security guarantee implied in the 1971 treaty with the Soviet Union
disintegrated with the Soviet collapse."43 Moreover, as another analyst argued, the structural
"shift from bipolarity to unipolarity has only been complemented by a second external reality:
discomforting changes in the regional environment centered on, among other things, the rise of
a new great power, China." This author captured the essence of New Delhi's thinking in the late
1990s: "The growth of China's economic power, its continued nuclear and conventional military
modernization, and its increasing influence in various areas of strategic relevance to South Asia,
all combine to forebode serious Indo-Chinese military-strategic competition down the line."44

National security imperatives and the strategic enclave's lobbying ultimately bore fruit when
India stunned the world by conducting a series of nuclear explosive tests on May 11 and 13,
1998. A few weeks later, and despite considerable external pressure, Islamabad followed suit.
Long after they had become de facto nuclear-weapon states, India and Pakistan came out of
the closet and declared themselves to be full-fledged, de jure nuclear-weapon states. India's
foreign minister described his government's thinking: "Nuclear weapons remain a key indicator
of state power. Since this currency is operational in large parts of the globe, India was left with
no choice but to update and validate the capability that had been demonstrated 24 years ago in
the nuclear test of 1974."45

But why in 1998, after twenty-four years of restraint? Here, domestic politics enter the
equation. Indian leaders had considered nuclear tests at several points from 1974 to 1998. Each
time, decision makers decided that the costs of such a course would outweigh the benefits. But
no previous government had staked its political life on restoring India to greatness, at least not
to the extent that the BJP had in campaigning during the 1998 national election. As party
president L. K. Advani said on the stump, "the BJP rejects the notion of nuclear apartheid and
will actively oppose attempts to impose a hegemonistic nuclear regime. We will not be dictated
to by anybody in matters of security and in the exercise of the nuclear option."46 If, once in
office, the BJP-led government had decided against nuclear tests, Indian voters would have
viewed it as another in a succession of vacillating coalition governments that had come to
characterize the national political scene in the mid-1990s. In post-Nehruvian India, few votes
are to be found in a posture of nuclear dovishness.
India's Foreign Relations

THE KARGIL WAR47

Within a year of the 1998 nuclear tests, India and Pakistan fought their most violent military
clashes since 1971. In the late 1990s, it had seemed as if the insurgency against the Indian state
was waning. Indian officials estimated that the number of committed separatists had declined
in a few years from between five and ten thousand to roughly twenty-five hundred.48 Alas,
peace was fleeting. One important factor was the transnationalization of the Islamic insurgency.
As a U.S. analyst wrote in 1999,

For five years now, the rebels with clout have been cut from the same cloth: based in Pakistan,
trained in Afghanistan, and motivated by pan-Islamic fundamentalism rather than Kashmiri
nationalism. Their ranks filled with Punjabis and Pashtuns, Afghans and Arabs, many of the
fighters wage war on behalf of a people whose language they do not even speak.49

Unbeknownst to the Indian government, by the spring of 1999 hundreds of well-armed

infiltrators had dug in along a 140-kilometer stretch of Himalayan ridges, some 5 to 15
kilometers on the Indian side of Kashmir's LOG. The intruders' positions overlooked National
Highway 1A, the only decent road between Srinagar and Leh, and thus the only ground supply
route to Indian military forces manning the border between Ladakh and China. The Pakistan
army supported the invaders, who in May destroyed an Indian ammunition dump outside
Kargil.50 Outraged, the Indian government responded decisively. Special forces personnel were
dropped onto high ridges by helicopter. Army soldiers equipped with howitzers, rocket
launchers, and heavy mortars launched attacks supported by helicopter gunships.51 Soon
thereafter, Indian ground-attack aircraft began to pound the intruders' positions.52 Indian
leaders also ordered their armed forces to prepare for war all along the Indo-Pakistani border.
According to one account, "elements of the Indian army's main offensive 'strike force' were
loading tanks, artillery, and other heavy equipment onto flatbed rail cars." In addition, U.S.
officials say retrospectively, "armored units intended for offensive use were leaving their
garrisons in Rajasthan .... and preparing to move."53 By the end of June, Indian "mechanized
and artillery divisions [had] advanced to forward positions all along the border in Gujarat,
Rajasthan, Punjab, and Jammu and Kashmir." The Pakistan army was making similar
preparations along the Punjab frontier.54

As the crisis escalated, the diplomatic maneuvering intensified. In lateMay talks between senior
U.S. and Indian officials, the United States reportedly agreed to deal firmly with Pakistan; in
return, India pledged not to cross the LOC or otherwise escalate the fighting.55 President
Clinton called the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers on June 14-15, urging both sides to resist
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

widening the conflict.56 As casualties mounted, though, New Delhi's patience wore thin, and a
senior Indian official informed Washington that India might be compelled to escalate its
operations.57 Deeply concerned about this prospect, Clinton sent the commander in chief of
the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, to Islamabad. Zinni pressured Pakistani leaders
to end the Kargil operation58; in response, he received assurances that the insurgents would be
withdrawn from the Indian side of the LOG.59 New Delhi's resolve to eject the infiltrators from
its side of the LOG, Indian military successes on the ridges of Kargil, and pressure from the
United States ultimately convinced Islamabad to call off its misadventure. Some eleven to
twelve hundred Indians and Pakistanis died in the 1999 Kargil war.60

SEPTEMBER 11, DECEMBER 13, AND THE 2001-2002 INDIA-PAKISTAN CRISIS

After a brief period of relative peace, large-scale carnage returned to Kashmir on October 1,
2001, less than three weeks after the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Terrorists from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad ("Muhammad's Troops")
attacked the Kashmir Legislative Assembly in Srinagar, killing thirty-eight people.61 Then, on
December

13, Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba ("Army of the Pure"), another Pakistan-based

terrorist group, attacked the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, leaving fourteen dead.62 The
audacious strike at the heart of India's government, far from Kashmir's peaks and valleys, dealt
a blow to Indian society not unlike that of September 11 in the United States. New Delhi
responded by deploying the Indian army to border positions; putting its combined military
forces, including those in Kashmir, on high alert; severing road, rail, and air links with Pakistan;
and recalling its high commissioner from Islamabad. Ultimately, India moved roughly half a
million soldiers, including three armored strike corps, to the parts of Punjab, Rajasthan, and
Gujarat bordering Pakistan.63 Islamabad responded by mobilizing its own armor and three
hundred thousand Pakistan army troops to the adjacent border areas of Punjab and Sindh.64

India's strategy was partly aimed at inducing Washington to urge Islamabad to stop supporting
cross-border terrorism, a posture bolstered by President Bush's post-September 11 doctrine of
targeting terrorists and the states that support them. In response to U.S. pressure, Pakistan's
leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, pledged that Pakistan would crack down on terrorism in
Kashmir.65 Alas, Musharraf proved unwilling or unable to clamp down cornpletely on Pakistan's
terrorists, who in May 2002 attacked an Indian military base in Jammu, killing thirty-four people
and setting off a full-blown crisis.
India's Foreign Relations

While Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee warned the Indian army to "prepare for a
'decisive battle,'" Musharraf strongly implied that "if India insists on launching all-out war to
attack Pakistan's support for Kashmiri militants, Pakistan is prepared to go nuclear."66

Once again, Washington scrambled to prevent war in South Asia. In June

2002 Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Islamabad, where he elicited a
promise from Musharraf to "end cross-border infiltration permanently."67 All in all, India's
army chief estimated that militant crossings declined by about half from 2001 to 2002,68
Although the immediate crisis faded in June, the Indo-Pakistani troop buildup lasted until
October, when India announced that it would withdraw its forces from the border with
Pakistan. Despite the fact that India and Pakistan nearly fought a major war in the summer of
2002, the conflict grinds on.

INDIA IN CONTEMPORARY WORLD POLITICS

Since 1947 India has consistently pursued a grand strategy of preventing extraregional powers
from unduly influencing South Asia's international politics. Indian foreign policy has had two
fundamental goals: to ensure what India regards as its natural hegemony in the region and to
safeguard the integrity of the Indian Union. During the first phase of independent India's
foreign relations, from 1947 to 1962, New Delhi pursued what might be termed true
nonalignment; that is, it attempted to have friendly relations with all three of the most
important external powers, China, the United States, and the Soviet Union. True nonalignment
was shattered by the 1962 Chinese attack, which laid bare India's weaknesses and the perils of
going it alone in world politics.

From 1962 to 1991, India followed a policy of what we might term tilted nonalignment. For
several years immediately after the China war, India relied on the United States and Great
Britain in attempting to enhance its defense capabilities. Then, as Washington drew back from
South Asia with the onset of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, India allowed itself to become more
dependent on the Soviet Union to meet its security needs. In 1971 with another India-Pakistan
war looming, New Delhi gained an extra measure of reassurance by formalizing its security
relationship with Moscow.

With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the notion of
nonalignment lost its meaning. As during the 1947-1962 period, India has tried in recent years
to navigate the shoals of world politics by maintaining amicable ties with the same three
external powers: a rapidly strengthening China, a weakened Russia, and a globally hegemonic
United States. What has changed relative to forty years ago is that India is a significantly
Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

more powerful actor in international relations. As table 1.1 shows, India's economy today is the
world's fourth largest, accounting for nearly 5 percent of global economic output. Although
India's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $2,600 places it only 156th out of 231 entries
in the CIA's The World Factbook,69 its continuing economic liberalization and fast-growing
consumer market have attracted a great deal of international interest, especially compared
with the early postindependence years, when imports and foreign investment were tightly
restricted.

In terms of its defense capabilities, India today is an established nuclearweapon state. Although
the 1999 Kargil war demonstrated that nuclear weapons may not deter Pakistan from
continuing to stoke the insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir, it also showed that neither
side is willing to escalate the conflict beyond Kashmir into India and Pakistan proper. Indian
nuclear weapons also make a Chinese invasion of India exceedingly unlikely. In conventional
terms, New Delhi deploys a large, well-trained army, a capable, relatively modern air force, and
a growing, but modest, navy. More specifically, Indian military forces along the frontier with
China are considered to be among the world's best mountain divisions, with little resemblance
to the Indian army that was routed in 1962. As table 1.2 shows, Indian military spending ranks
eleventh in the world.

As always, India's most pressing challenges concern socioeconomic development. According to

the UN Human Development Index (HDI), which combines life expectancy at birth, adult
literacy, school attendance, and per capita GDP, India ranks 127th out of 175 entries. On the
positive side, India's HDI has steadily increased over the last three decades: it was 0.416 in
1975, In more qualitative terms, India's foreign policy has, as one scholar notes, "grown up."71
In previous decades, New Delhi's protests against external influence in South Asia were often so
shrill as to belie its claims to be the regional hegemon. As India's power has grown, its
diplomacy has matured, and its rhetoric has moderated. New Delhi's responses to the issues of
the day exhibit a confident, measured tone that was missing even ten years ago. Nowhere is
this more evident than in India's relations with the United States, which have improved
considerably since the mid-1990s. The BJP's 1998 gamble that India's long-term prestige would
grow after New Delhi declared itself a nuclearweapon state seems to have paid off. The Indian
nuclear tests caused only a brief furor, and Indo-American relations today are as strong as they
have ever been. In this context, it is instructive to compare India's relatively calm reaction to
the post-September 11 renewal of the United States-Pakistan security partnership with Nehru's
outrage at the first U.S.-Pakistani strategic embrace fifty years ago.

India's relations with China and Russia are also on a relatively even keel today. Sino-Indian ties
had been gradually warming since 1988, until senior Indian officials justified their 1998 nuclear
tests by claiming that Chinese nuclear weapons posed a serious threat to India. Despite the
short-term harshness of China's response to that charge, Sino-Indian relations continue their
slow, upward trajectory, even though conflicting boundary lines remain formally unreconciled.
New Delhi and Moscow have their typically solid relationship, with Russia helping to meet
Indian defense needs and Indian military purchases providing Russia with a scarce source of
hard currency.
44

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

India's relations with Pakistan are rockier, but even here one can discern a glimmer of hope.
Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Musharraf met in January 2004 and agreed to start a
negotiating process over the issues dividing New Delhi and Islamabad, including Kashmir. High-
level talks resumed in June after the Congress-led coalition took office under Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh. Although little progress has been made on the Kashmir dispute, the two
sides have agreed to a number of diplomatic and confidencebuilding measures, including the
planned reopening of consulates in Karachi and Mumbai. The obstacles to Indo-Pakistani
rapprochement are daunting, but bilateral dialogue and revitalized diplomatic relations are
improvements over the sorry state of India-Pakistan affairs as recently as 2002.

India's improved relations with China, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States are interrelated in
a way that reflects well on Indian diplomatic prowess. Unlike in previous decades, all of the
major extraregional actors in South Asian affairs support India's position on Kashmir, that the
conflict should be resolved bilaterally on the basis of the Simla formula. Russia has always been
solidly on India's side concerning Kashmir, but the same cannot be said for the United States
and China. Both Washington and Beijing have made it much clearer in recent years that they
will not support in any way Pakistani efforts to alter the status quo unilaterally. This can be
counted as a substantial success for Indian diplomacy, as well as further testament to the
emergence of India as a leading middle power in world affairs.

NOTES

1. The quotations are from Nehru's speech to India's Constituent Assembly, New Delhi, August
14, 1947. For the complete text, see the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Norton Topics
Online, available at [Link]/nael. Independence and Partition are discussed at
length below.

2. If military strategy is the "art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of
policy" (B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd rev. ed. [New York: Praeger, 1967], 335), then grand
strategy is the art of using all of a state's means-military, diplomatic, covert, economic, and so
forth-for this purpose. Grand strategy is the "modern equivalent of what was, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, called ragione di stato or raison d'etat. It is the rational
determination of a nation's vital interests, the things that are essential to its security, its
fundamental purposes in its relations with other nations, and its priorities with respect to
goals." (Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert, "Reflections on Strategy in the Present and Future,"
in Makers of Modern Strategy: from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret [Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986], 869.) Grand strategy is as much a peacetime as a
wartime preoccupation, which makes it an ideal conceptual lens through which to view India's
foreign relations over time. The essence of grand strategy is its long-term nature and its
imperviousness to the everyday events of international politics and even changes in
government. Grand strategies evolve only in response to fundamental transformations in the
context of international politics, such as the world wars or the end of the Cold War.
India's Foreign Relations

45

3. Hegemony has become something of a loaded term in the academic study of international
relations. Our usage here conforms to the more neutral, literal definition of hegemony as
"leadership or predominant influence exercised by one state over others." The American
College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1970), 561.

4. From a 1949 speech, quoted in Stanley Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 448.

5. This section draws from a longer discussion of the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir: Devin
T. Hagerty, "U.S. Policy and the Kashmir Dispute: Prospects for Resolution," in The Kashmir
Question: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Sumit Ganguly (London: Frank Cass, 2003),

89-116.

6. In the portion of Kashmir that remained in Indian hands, a 1956 vote in the constituent
assembly endorsed the state's integration into India.

7. Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 46.

8. Devin T. Hagerty, "The Development of American Defense Policy toward Pakistan,

1947-1954," Fletcher Forum 10, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 217^2.

9. McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery, 172, 34, 219-20.

10. Bhutan was admitted to the United Nations in 1971.

11. Francis Robinson, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 239. Sikkim
has since been incorporated into the Indian Union.

12. This paragraph draws on Hagerty, "U.S. Policy and the Kashmir Dispute," 96, and Devin T.
Hagerty, "China and Pakistan: Strains in the Relationship," Current History 101, no. 656
(September 2002): 286.

13. McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery, 334.

14. Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of
Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press), 152.
15. Rose and Sisson, War and Secession, 142-44, 210-15.

16. Thomas P. Thornton, "U .S .-Indian Relations in the Nixon and Ford Years," in Harold A.
Gould and Sumit Ganguly, The Hope and the Reality: U.S.-Indian Relations from Roosevelt to
Reagan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), 104.

17. Itty Abraham, "India's 'Strategic Enclave': Civilian Scientists and Military Technologies,"
Armed Forces and Society 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 233.

18. For details, see George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 161-89.

19. Both the Punjab crisis and the subsequent Kashmir crisis (discussed below) had their roots
in a structural transformation of Indian politics during Indira Gandhi's rule (1966-1977 and
1980-1984). The most salient changes included the increasing centralization of power in New
Delhi, the decline of political, judicial, and administrative institutions at every level of
government, and the consequent evolution of an institutional vacuum increasingly filled by
populist and religious demagoguery of a decidedly unsecular tone. Collectively, these
developments have become known as the decline of the Congress system. For more detailed
analysis, see Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,

1990), and Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

20. Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. and Stanley Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a
Developing Nation, 5th ed. (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 152-60; Paul R.
Brass, "The Punjab Crisis and the Unity of India," in India's Democracy: An Analysis of Changing
State-Society Relations, ed. Atul Kohli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988),

169-213; Salamat Ali, "The 'Hidden Hand,'" Far Eastern Economic Review, June 28,1984, 14.
46

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert C. Hagerty

21. Mary Anne Weaver, Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2002), 71-3.

22. Owen Bennett Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2002), 120.

23. This paragraph draws heavily on Robert G. Wirsing, Pakistan's Security under Zia: The Policy
Imperatives of a Peripheral Asian State (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), 143-94.

24. Pakistan's nuclear program dates back to the 1950s, when the country's leaders began to
explore the idea of using nuclear energy for civilian purposes. Within a decade, however,
military priorities had supplanted civilian ones in the nuclear thinking of Pakistani leaders. The
chief proponent of a Pakistani nuclear bomb was then foreign minister ZulfikarAli Bhutto, who
argued in the wake of the 1965 humiliation by India that Pakistan needed a nuclear equalizer.
The 1965 war had revived serious concerns about Pakistan's long-term security, especially given
the country's lack of strategic depth. Moreover, as Bhutto began to mount his own challenge to
President Ayub Khan's rule, he perceived that nuclear nationalism would be an effective way to
rally Pakistan's masses behind him. Pakistan's nuclear aspirations were further fueled by the
1971 Bangladesh war; in 1972, given the huge asymmetry that had emerged in Indian and
Pakistani military capabilities, now President Bhutto ordered Pakistan's own strategic enclave
to begin developing nuclear arms. Pakistani leaders apparently believed that "a small nuclear
program would enable the Pakistanis to do in nuclear terms what their ground and air forces
could not do in conventional terms: threaten to punish any Indian attack so severely that
consideration of such an attack would be deterred from the outset." U.S. Defense Intelligence
Agency, "Operational and Logistical Considerations in the Event of an India-Pakistan Conflict."
Report DDB-2660-104-84, December 1984, 2.

25. Michael Richardson, "Arms and the Woman," Far Eastern Economic Review, September 25,
1981, 20.

26. Dilip Bobb, "Sinister Nuclear Strategy," India Today, November 15, 1981, 119.

27. Leonard S. Spector, Going Nuclear (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987), 78.

28. Richard P. Cronin, The United States, Pakistan and the Soviet Threat to Southern Asia:
Options for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 1985), 28.
29. Maynard Parker, "Rajiv Gandhi's Bipolar World," Newsweek, June 3,1985; and Spector,
Going Nuclear, 78.

30. Spector, Going Nuclear, 270n21. Gandhi's remark about testing was a reference to credible
reports that China had given Pakistan vital nuclear-weapon-design information.

31. Patricia J. Sethi and John Walcott, "The South Asia Two-Step," Newsweek, November 4,

1985, 42; William Stewart and Ross H. Munro, "An Interview with Rajiv Gandhi," Time, October
21, 1985,50.

32. "Foreign Minister Speaks in Parliament on Pak Nuclear Bomb," confidential cable from the
U.S. Embassy in New Delhi to the Secretary of State, no. 28599, November 1985.

33. For a longer discussion, see Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation:
Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 91-116.

34. SAARC can be accessed through its website at [Link].

35. Devin T. Hagerty, "India's Regional Security Doctrine," Asian Survey 31, no. 4 (April

1991): 351-63.

36. Space constraints prohibit a comprehensive discussion of these upheavals in Indian society.
Recent political and economic changes, which have had a greater impact on India's foreign
relations than the social convulsions permeating Indian society, will be discussed below. For a
brief, introductory overview of India's social revolution-the rise of the Backward castes, the
increasing assertiveness of Dalits and tribals, the disaffection and consequent activism of
Muslims -see Achin Vanaik, "Hostile Intentions," Red Pepper (London), October 1997 (available
[Link] [Link]). For an in-depth treatment, see Francine R. Frankel, Zoya Hasan,
India's Foreign Relations

47

Raieev Bhargava, and Balveer Arora, eds., Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics
OfDemocracy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).

37 This notion has been described by one scholar as the belief that "India is composed of an
essentially Hindu society. Therefore the state should reflect the values and ambitions of the
Hindus just as Western states reflect the values and ambitions of their Christian population, the
Muslim states reflect Islam, and Israel embodies the values and aspirations of Jews. The Hindu
revitalists argue that India must act in the world as a Hindu civilization-state. Non-Hindus are
welcome to live in India, but only if they accept the fundamentally Hindu nature of the
country." Stephen Philip Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2001),

119-20.

38. Emily MacFarquhar, "Push Comes to Shove: A Survey of India," The Economist, May

9,1987, p. 6 of the survey.

39. In point of fact, many Pakistanis question the very legitimacy of the Simla Agreement. A top-
level Pakistani official, by then out of government, told one of the authors in 1998 that Simla
had for all practical purposes been dictated to Pakistan at gunpoint and was therefore
irrelevant to resolution of the Kashmir conflict.

40. Inderjit Badhwar, "A Tarnished Triumph," India Today, April 15, 1987, 76-78; Inderjit
Badhwar, "Farooq under Fire," India Today, September 15, 1987, 42-47.

41. Most estimates put the number of deaths in Kashmir at more than 60,000 since 1989.

42. Devin T. Hagerty, "Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia: The 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis,"
International Security 20, no. 3 (Winter 1995/1996): 79-114.

43. Sumit Ganguly, "India's Pathway to Pokhran II: The Prospects and Sources of New Delhi's
Nuclear Weapons Program," International Security 23, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 167.

44. Ashley Tellis, quoted in Neil Joeck, "Nuclear Developments in India and Pakistan," Access
Asia Review 2, no. 2 (July 1999): 20.

45. Jaswant Singh, "Against Nuclear Apartheid," Foreign Affairs 77, no. 5 (SeptemberOctober
1998): 44.
46. John Zubrzycki, "Hindu Nationalists Aim for Nuclear Arsenal," The Australian, February 4,
1998.

47. This account of the Kargil conflict draws on Devin T. Hagerty, "Kashmir and the Nuclear
Question Revisited," in Pakistan 2000, ed. Charles H. Kennedy and Craig Baxter (Lanham, Md.:
Lexington, 2000), 90-4.

48. John F. Burns, "In Brinkmanship's Wake, All Quiet on the Kashmir Front," International
Herald Tribune, June 16, 1998.

49. Jonah Blank, "Kashmir: Fundamentalism Takes Root," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 6 (November-
December 1999): 42.

50. John Lancaster, "US Defused Kashmir Crisis on Brink of War," Washington Post, July

26,1999.

51. Harinder Baweja and Ramesh Vinayak," Peak by Peak," India Today International, June

14,1999,17-21.

52. Michael Fathers, "On the Brink," Time, June 7, 1999, 48-49.

53. Lancaster, "US Defused Kashmir Crisis."

54. Raj Chengappa, "Will the War Spread?" India Today International, July 5, 1999,14-17.

55. Raj Chengappa, "Face-Saving Retreat," India Today International, July 19, 1999,16.

56. Raj Chengappa, "On High Ground," India Today International, June 28, 1999, 25.

57. Chengappa, "Face-Saving Retreat," 17.

58. Chengappa, "Will the War Spread?" 14.

59. Lancaster, "US Defused Kashmir Crisis."

60. Christopher Kremmer, "Outsiders Stoke the Flames of War," Sydney Morning Herald, June
26, 1999; "Pakistan Urges Fresh Peace Talks with India," Reuters, July 12, 1999.
48

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

61. K. Alan Kronstadt, "Pakistan-US Relations," Issue Brief, Congressional Research Service,
Washington, D.C., October 28, 2002, 9.

62. For background on these groups, see Jessica Stern, "Pakistan's Jihad Culture," Foreign
Affairs 79, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 115-26.

63. John Lancaster, "Pakistan to Follow India in Removing Troops from Border," Washington
Post, October 18, 2002.

64. John Lancaster, "India to Remove Some Forces from Border with Pakistan," Washington
Post, October 17,2002. The oft-quoted figure of one million Indian and Pakistani soldiers facing
off against one another included troops in Kashmir.

65. President Pervez Musharraf's Address to the Nation, January 12, 2002, available at
[Link]/President_Addresses.

66. Steve Coll, "Between India and Pakistan, A Changing Role for the US," Washington Post,
May 26, 2002.

67. Rahul Bedi and Anton La Guardia, "Pakistan Steps Back from Brink," Daily Telegraph, June 8,
2002.

68. "Infiltration of Terrorists into J&K Down by Half: Army Chief," Hindustan Times, November
8, 2002.

69. At [Link]/cia/publications/factbook (accessed April 22, 2004).

70. See "Human Development Indicators 2003," available at [Link]

(accessed April 22, 2004).

71. Sumit Ganguly, "India's Foreign Policy Grows Up," World Policy Journal 20, no. 4 (Winter
2003/04).

FURTHER READING

de Bary, William Theodore, ed. Sources of Indian Tradition. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998.

Cohen, Stephen Philip. India: Emerging Power. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,

2001.
Frankel, Francine R., et al., eds. Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Ganguly, Sumit. Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001.

Garver, John. Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2001.

Hagerty, Devin T. The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.

Hodson, H. V. The Great Divide: Britain, India, Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

McMahon, Robert J. The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Mohan, C. Raja. Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Perkovich, George. India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999.

Watson, Francis, and Dilip Hiro. India: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

Wirsing, Robert G. Kashmir in the Shadow of Nuclear War: Regional Rivalries in a Nuclear Age.
Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003.

Wolpert, Stanley. Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

Peter R. Lavoy1

Pakistan is sometimes accused of not having a complete, multidimensional foreign policy. All of
Pakistan's relationships with foreign governments and international bodies are believed to
revolve around its competition with one state: its immediate neighbor and long-time foe, India.
This rivalry is said to hinge on a single dispute over the former princely state of Kashmir, the
political status of which India and Pakistan have argued and fought over since their emergence
as independent states in 1947. This accusation is only partially correct. Political and military
competition with India is the centerpiece of Pakistan's foreign policy, and the Kashmir dispute
lies near the heart of Pakistan's raison d'etre and its competition with secular, but
predominantly Hindu, India. But Pakistan's foreign policy is much more complex. Pakistan's
unique history and its diverse population also influence its conduct of relations abroad.

Pakistan came into being as a democratic homeland for the Muslims of South Asia in August
1947, when the British ended their imperial rule of the Indian subcontinent. It was the first
state in the world created in the name of Islam. Because of this founding ideology, and also
because Islam is an international political interest, as well as a domestic, religious-communal
matter for Pakistan, which has one of the world's largest Muslim populations, the promotion of
Islamic values and ties abroad has been a key element of Pakistan's foreign policy. Believing
that Pakistan's pro-Western policies and its nonradical outlook on Islam would have a
moderating influence on other Islamic nations, the United States has encouraged Pakistan in its
cultivation of strong foreign relationships throughout the Islamic world.

Although Pakistan's population is almost entirely Muslim, it is divided into five main
ethnic/linguistic groups: Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns, Baluchis, and muhajirs (the Indian Muslims
who migrated to Pakistan when the Indian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947), all of whom
share some
Peter R. Lavoy

identity and allegiance with groups in neighboring countries. The British created Pakistan's
borders without regard to the traditional boundaries of local ethnic or tribal groups. Thus,
Pakistan seeks in its foreign relations to prevent foreign states and social movements from
stimulating or supporting separatist tendencies within its ethnically and tribally divided
population. This chapter describes how Islamic nationalism, ethnic fragmentation, and the
competition with India all shape Pakistan's approach to foreign policy and its most important
international relationships.

COMPETITION WITH INDIA

As discussed in chapter 1, antipathy between Pakistan and India dates back to August 1947,
when Britain partitioned its empire in India into two independent states. Partition had its roots
in the political competition that marked the Indian independence struggle prior to 1947. As the
likelihood of independence drew near, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League
concluded that only a separate, democratic state in which Muslims would be a majority could
protect Muslim interests in South Asia. Although predominantly Hindu, the leadership of the
Indian National Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru (a secular-minded Hindu) sought the creation
of a single state committed to a secular, democratic approach to government and opposed the
creation of Pakistan. Faced with the prospect of increasingly bloody conflict between Hindus
and Muslims, the British decided to form two independent states out of their former imperial
domain.

More than one million migrants died during Partition, and many of the religious minorities
remaining behind were treated poorly.2 This poignant experience and the associated feelings of
victimization remain a powerful influence on Pakistan's identity and its approach to the outside
world to this day. Bitter memories of Partition are still etched in the minds of older Pakistanis,
and even the young hold strong views because of jingoistic accounts passed down through
state-controlled educational texts and the popular media. Many Pakistanis fear that Indians still
reject the two-nation theory that led to Partition and ultimately will seek to undo Partition by
reabsorbing Pakistan into India. New Delhi's support for the creation of Bangladesh, which had
been the east wing of Pakistan, in 19713 reinforced the perception that elements of the Indian
government, especially right-wing Hindu nationalists, want to reunify the Indian Empire under
Indian control, or at least to turn Pakistan into a subservient protectorate.

By contrast, many Indians believe that Pakistan justifies its existence by vilifying India and
therefore cannot live in peace with its stronger and more populous and prosperous neighbor.
Partition's bitter legacy thus makes the

Pakistan's Foreign Relations

51

Indo-Pakistani relationship one of the world's most intractable rivalries. Moreover, because
both India and Pakistan are vulnerable to communal and linguistic/ethnic fragmentation, each
side lives in fear that the other will exploit its social cleavages to undermine the legitimacy of
the state. This is the larger context in which bilateral disputes play out.

The specific dispute that has caused three out of four India-Pakistan wars and is a continuing
source of tension was also a product of Partition, described in chapter 1. At independence in
1947, the princely states were not covered by the communal award of Partition. Kashmir, which
had a Muslimmajority population but a Hindu ruler (or maharajah), shared borders with the
two new nations. The Pakistani government coveted Kashmir to complete its identity as a
homeland for the region's Islamic population, so when tribal Muslim militants from Pakistan's
Northwest Frontier Province sought to "liberate" Kashmir from the maharajah's control, the
Pakistan army rushed in to assist them. Coming under intense pressure from the invaders, the
maharajah signed an instrument of accession with India. Unwilling to lose Kashmir, lest other
religious and ethnic groups inside India press for their own autonomy, India sent in its armed
forces to crush the tribal rebellion. War then broke out between India and Pakistan. When the
fighting ended in 1948, Kashmir was divided, leaving India with the larger share of the state,
including the picturesque Vale of Kashmir. Since then, Pakistan has tried various methods, from
diplomacy to the direct use of force, to wrest the remainder of Kashmir from Indian control, but
to no avail.

For the past fifteen years, a violent insurgency has ravaged Kashmir with Pakistan's support.
Pakistan portrays it as a freedom movement, and India calls it state-sponsored terrorism by
Pakistan. The truth probably lies somewhere in between these perspectives. Having claimed the
lives of tens of thousands of Kashmiris, and more than once bringing India and Pakistan to the
battlefield, the Kashmir issue has become an unstable, emotionally charged source of nuclear
danger, now that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.4

The Kashmir dispute is perilous because no matter how dangerous the threat of nuclear war
has become, India and Pakistan appear unable to resolve the issue. Pakistan has welcomed
either direct negotiations with India or third-party mediation, but New Delhi has refused to go
along with what it sees as a Pakistani ploy to embarrass India and politicize what India deems to
be a domestic or, at best, a bilateral issue. Concerned outsiders have over the years proposed
several promising frameworks to bring India and Pakistan to the negotiating table, but neither
country has been sincerely willing to abandon its hard-line position. The threat and actual use
of force have been the dominant forms of "dialogue" between India and Pakistan on the
Kashmir dispute, at least until very recently, when India and Pakistan agreed to reopen
52

Peter R. Lavoy

discussions. Historically, in order to compete politically and militarily with its stronger neighbor,
Pakistan has turned to various sources of external support, most notably, the United States,
China, Saudi Arabia, and, most recently, North Korea.

PAKISTAN'S ON-AGA1N, OFF-AGAIN FRIENDSHIP WITH THE UNITED STATES

Pakistan's need for outside assistance to offset the perceived threat posed by India has made
the United States Pakistan's most important foreign partner from the time of Partition to the
present. During the Cold War, the U.S. government was eager to bring Pakistan into its network
f>f regional security alliances. In 1954, for example, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower
considered South Asia to be "a major battleground in the cold war" and viewed Pakistan's
membership in a regional anticommunist defense pact as "most desirable."5

Pakistani leaders had slightly different motivations for allying with the United States. They
needed economic and military assistance, as well as political support in their competition with
India. Although their security interests were not identical, they were compatible enough for the
United States and Pakistan to sign a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement in May 1954. A year
later, Pakistan joined two of Washington's three most important regional defense alliances, the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Baghdad Pact, which in 1958 evolved into
the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO).6 Between 1955 and 1965, Washington provided
Pakistan with more than $700 million in military grant aid. U.S. economic assistance to Pakistan
between 1947 and 2000 reached nearly $11.8 billion.7

Pakistan would have preferred to be the main focus of U.S. attention in South Asia, but the
United States has always sought to have as close, or even closer, ties with India. In fact,
balancing relations with India and Pakistan always has been an acute policy challenge for the
United States. During the Cold War, the United States treated Pakistan as an important ally in
the struggle against cornmunism and supported it with plentiful military and economic aid,
which India considered as a threat to its own security. During his visit to the White House in
December 1956, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru privately told President Eisenhower
that the very creation of Pakistan presented real problems for India and that he "never
accepted the theory of the organization of states along religious lines."8 He said that Pakistan's
receipt of U.S. military assistance and its entry into SEATO and the Baghdad Pact compounded
India's security problems by strengthening Pakistan's military capabilities, as well as its hard-
line approach on Kashmir and other bilateral disputes.
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

53

Today, India opposes U.S. support to Pakistan on similar grounds. New Delhi believes that close
U.S. ties to Pakistan, and especially U.S. security assistance to the Pakistan army, indirectly
encourage Pakistan's strategy of "state-sponsored terrorism" against India.9 Nevertheless, then
as now, the United States pursued a relatively even-handed approach to relations with the two
major powers of South Asia.

The Eisenhower administration tried to resolve this dilemma by pursuing one course of action
for Pakistan and a separate track for India. Viewing Pakistan as a linchpin in its collective-
security strategy and as a "moderating influence on the extreme nationalism and anti-Western
attitudes of the Arab states," Washington continued the policy of military assistance and
regional security planning with Pakistani leader Ayub Khan, who had engineered a bloodless
military coup in 1958.10 Nehru, an "utterly impractical statesman" in the view of U.S. secretary
of state John Foster Dulles,11 adamantly refused to enter into any U.S. collective-security
scheme. Thus, the American strategy for India focused on strengthening that nation's
democratic government and its mixed economy as counterweights to Chinese communism and
as models for other developing nations in Asia. The key instruments in this strategy were
economic and technical assistance, with an emphasis on projects and programs having the
maximum potential to help India achieve its second five-year economic plan. From 1960
through the late 1980s, the United States had on-again, offagain relations with Pakistan, even
though the Pakistani military remained a strong bulwark against communism in South Asia.
President John F. Kennedy favored a closer relationship with India and also sought to reduce
Pakistan's military dependence on the United States. When Pakistan and India went to war in
1965, the United States suspended military assistance to both sides, a move that hurt Pakistan
more because of its much greater dependence on U .S. support. When civil war erupted in East
Pakistan in 1971 and soon triggered another India-Pakistan war, the United States again
suspended aid to each country. But this time, Washington applied tremendous pressure to
discourage New Delhi from attacking West Pakistan after its armed forces had prevailed in the
east. U.S. president Richard Nixon not only wanted to protect his anti-Communist ally, he also
valued the role Pakistan had played in the secret efforts of his National Security Advisor, Henry
Kissinger, to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China. It was through the prism of
this opening to Beijing, and simultaneous American maneuverings against Moscow, that Nixon
and Kissinger viewed developments in South Asia in the early 1970s.12

In the mid-1970s, Pakistan sought to respond to India's 1974 "peaceful nuclear explosion" by
seeking its own nuclear-weapons capability. This created a serious new challenge in its relations
with the United States, which still has
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

55

not been overcome. Washington resumed limited military assistance to Pakistan in 1975, but
President Jimmy Carter suspended aid again in April 1979 because of Islamabad's construction
of a covert uranium-enrichment facility at Kahuta. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan
in December 1979, the United States once again viewed Pakistan as a frontline state in the
struggle to block Soviet expansionism and thus de-emphasized the nuclear factor in bilateral
relations. In September 1981 President Ronald Reagan provided Pakistan with a $3.2 billion,
five-year economic and military aid package. Pakistan became the primary conduit for U,S. arms
supplies and covert support to the Afghan mujahideen.13

Despite the restoration of U.S. military aid and close security ties, many in Washington,
especially in Congress, remained concerned about Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program.
Because of mounting evidence that Pakistan had embarked upon a crash program to develop
nuclear weapons, in 1985, the Pressler Amendment was added to the U.S. Foreign Assistance
Act, requiring the president to certify to Congress that Pakistan does not possess a nuclear
explosive device during the fiscal year for which aid is to be provided. This amendment
represented a compromise between those in Congress who wanted to terminate aid to
Pakistan because of evidence that it was continuing to develop its nuclear program and those
who wished to reward Pakistan for its vital role in resisting the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan.14

After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, Pakistan's continued nuclear progress again
became the focus of U.S. policy attention. In October

1990 President Bush declined to certify that Pakistan was not in possession of a nuclear device;
in other words, the United States cut off most economic and all military assistance to
Islamabad. Also mandated under the Pressler Amendment was the suspension of all deliveries
of major military equipment. Most notably, this resulted in the cancellation of some seventy-
one F-16 fighter aircraft ordered by Pakistan in 1989.15 As a consequence, Islamabad refocused
its efforts toward nuclear-capable missile-delivery systems and promptly set out to conclude
missile-assistance deals with China and North Korea.

PAKISTAN'S SUPPORT FOR OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM

Al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States fundamentally altered
Pakistan's relations with the United States. The second Bush administration's campaign to
destroy the Taliban as a haven for terrorist networks with global reach and to eliminate the al
Qaeda network had a particularly dramatic impact on Pakistan, which had been the Taliban's
strongest ally. Pakistan had helped the Taliban consolidate power in

Afghanistan in the mid to late 1990s. Viewing the Taliban as a friendly, if fanatical, regime that
could stabilize Pakistan's often unruly Pashtun population and also provide much-needed
"strategic depth" in Pakistan's military cornpetition with India, Pakistani leaders were loath to
see the return of instability, and possibly hostility, to their western flank. But faced with intense
pressure from the United States, President Pervez Musharraf agreed to break relations with the
Taliban, provide basing and overflight permission for U.S. and coalition forces, deploy a large
number of troops along the Afghanistan border in support of Operation Enduring Freedom
(OEF), and provide intelligence support to the international antiterrorism coalition. When he
announced this controversial policy reversal on Afghanistan in a September

2001 speech to the nation, President Musharraf indicated that any other decision could have
caused "unbearable losses" to the security of the country, the health of the economy, the
Kashmir cause, and to Pakistan's strategic nuclear and missile assets.

While Pakistan's mainstream political parties generally supported the government's decision to
join the international coalition against terrorism, the country's Islamist groups and parties were
outraged. About two dozen religious parties, including the powerful Jamaat-e-Islami, which
earlier had cooperated with the Musharraf government, came together under the umbrella of
the Pak-Afghan Defense Council and launched a nationwide campaign to oust Musharraf.
Strikes and street demonstrations occurred throughout the country, American flags were
burned, several people were killed, and much property was destroyed. Truckloads of Pakistani
extremists also traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against the antiterrorism
coalition. However, none of these actions managed to incite the Pakistani population against
the government or persuade President Musharraf either to reverse his policies or to step down.

The Bush administration has provided strong support for President Musharraf and his
government's efforts to maintain internal stability and implement much-needed political and
economic reforms while assisting coalition forces in the war on terrorism. At the same time,
Washington has been criticized for not providing the kind of economic and military assistance
required to help Pakistan shore up its crippled economy and modernize its oftsanctioned armed
forces, which are about half the size of India's.16 In reality, the economic benefits Washington
already has provided to Pakistan are substantial: the United States waived all the sanctions
imposed against Pakistan after its May 1998 nuclear tests and General Musharraf's October
1999 coup, rescheduled some of Pakistan's $38 billion external debt, and provided over $2
billion in economic support and security assistance, including a $600 million Economic Support
Funds grant, over $30 million in agriculture support, and $75 million in foreign military
financing.
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Peter R. Lavoy

Washington has not yet offered the kind of military-assistance package that many observers
had expected (including renewed F-16 fighter aircraft sales) because it has not wanted to
aggravate the Indo-Pakistani military standoff that seethed for most of 2002 and also because it
wished to work out mutually agreeable requirements for the forthcoming arms transfers.
However, U.S. under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, who led a fortyfour-member
U.S. Defense Cooperation Group (DCG) team to Pakistan in late September 2002, affirmed that
the Bush administration would soon restore military assistance and arms sales "to boost
Islamabad's military capabilities."17 The DCG, which met for the first time since 1997, also
agreed on other important steps to enhance bilateral defense ties, including new military
education and training exchanges, military exercises, and enhanced cooperation in countering
terrorism.18 In June 2003 President George W. Bush pledged to seek a five-year, $3 billion aid
package for Pakistan to begin in

2005.19

CHINA: A RELIABLE ALLY

China and Pakistan forged a close relationship in 1960, a remarkable feat considering that
Pakistan was an active participant in the U.S.-led system of anticommunist alliances. The United
States had put strong pressure on Pakistan to oppose Communist China on all fronts, but when
Washington moved closer to India in the late 1950s, Pakistani leaders reached out to Beijing
(and, to a lesser extent, Moscow), in part to reduce their dependence on the United States.
Beijing responded favorably to these overtures. "After the formation of SEATO in 1954,"
Chinese prime minister Zhao Enlai revealed several years later, "the Pakistan Government often
declared to the Chinese Government that its participation in that organization was not for the
purpose of being hostile to China and would not prejudice Pakistan's friendship for China."20
The Chinese understood that Pakistan's main interest in aligning with the West was to gain
support for its military competition with India. Thus, Pakistan and China established a stable
friendship around a common concern about India. Although the Chinese refused Pakistan's
request for direct support on the Kashmir dispute, Zhao did affirm that "China accepted the
existence of the Kashmir dispute and hoped that it would be settled peacefully."21

After boundary tensions intensified between India and China in 1960, Pakistani leader Ayub
Khan became concerned about the threat Communist China posed to Pakistan's northern areas.
But he also saw this as a golden opportunity to settle Pakistan's own border issues with Beijing
and to enlist Chinese support to help it induce Indian concessions on Kashmir.22 In early 1961
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

57

Pakistani and Chinese diplomats began negotiations over the demarcation of the border in
Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In May 1962 they announced a provisional boundary agreement.
Although this pact was not supposed to prejudice the eventual settlement of the Kashmir
dispute, the Indian government protested China's recognition of Pakistan's control of Gilgit,
Hunza, and Baltistan districts in northern Kashmir.23 Indian officials became even more upset
when Chinese and Pakistani officials finalized a boundary agreement in March 1963. Pakistan
ceded more than two thousand square miles of Kashmir's territory to China in this pact. Foreign
Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto declared to Pakistan's National Assembly in 1963 that Pakistan
could now rely on Chinese assistance in the event of another India-Pakistan war. "If India were
in her frustration to turn her guns against Pakistan," Bhutto stated, "the international situation
is such that Pakistan would not be alone in the conflict."24 From this point onward, Indian
defense planners would have to take Chinese political support and even the possibility of
Chinese military intervention into consideration in their efforts to deal with Pakistan.

China has been a major arms supplier to Pakistan since the 1960s. It has helped Pakistan
establish several factories for manufacturing arms and provided aircraft and other weapons
systems. In the 1980s and 1990s, Pakistan turned to China for assistance in developing nuclear
weapons and ballistic missiles. It is now known that in the early 1990s China secretly delivered
thirty-four M-ll short-range ballistic missiles to Pakistan, an act that led the United States to
impose sanctions on Chinese entities. In 1993 the Clinton administration determined that China
again had transferred to Pakistan prohibited M-ll missile technology (not complete missiles) and
imposed trade sanctions on one Pakistani and eleven Chinese entities (including government
ministries and aerospace companies). Although China is not a member of the Missile
Technology Control Regime (MTCR), Beijing has indicated that it will abide by the export
restrictions of that regime. Nonetheless, numerous reports in the Western media concern
China's continued support for Pakistan's missile program, including for Pakistan's new Shaheen-
1 short-range ballistic missile and its Shaheen-2 medium-range ballistic missile.25China's
support for Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program appears to have been just as substantial.
Although media reports of Chinese assistance to Pakistan in the design and testing of nuclear
explosive devices have not been confirmed, U.S. government officials have indicated that
Beijing has transferred critical technologies and industrial components for Pakistan's
uraniumenrichment program. In particular, leaked U.S. intelligence reports alleged that in the
mid-1990s China sold ring magnets, a special industrial furnace, and high-tech diagnostic
equipment to Pakistan, all of which Islamabad required to produce weapons-grade uranium
and to convert this material into
58

Peter R. Lavoy

nuclear explosives. Pakistan and China have denied these reports, and the U.S. government
decided not to levy sanctions after it reached a 1996 understanding with China about future
nuclear-export controls. Even after China pledged in 1996 not to "provide assistance to
unsafeguarded nuclear facilities," new allegations surfaced of Chinese help in the construction
of an unsafeguarded plutonium-production reactor at Khushab. Although China has acted as a
moderating force on Pakistan's foreign policy-for example, urging Pakistan to withdraw its
forces from Indian-held Kashmir after Pakistani soldiers occupied dozens of mountain posts on
India's side of the Kashmir line of control in the 1999 Kargil conflict-its support for Pakistan's
strategic-weapons programs cannot be denied.26

NORTH KOREA: A FRIEND IN NEED

Apart from Saudi Arabia, discussed below, North Korea is the other country that Pakistan has
turned to for limited support in its military competition with India. Although Pakistan and North
Korea have no meaningful political or ideological ties, their relations date back over thirty years
to the period when then prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto sought to reduce Pakistan's reliance
on the United States and improve its relations with the socialist world. In the past, Islamabad
and Pyongyang engaged in a very limited conventional arms trade and then worked together
closely during the Iran-Iraq war, when they both provided assistance to Iran. Their recent
strategic cooperation appears to have been initiated by Pakistan in the early 1990s as part of its
effort to build a missile force after the termination of U.S. aircraft deliveries under the Pressler
Amendment.

With the short-range M-ll missiles already in its inventory, Pakistan sought a longer-range
missile capable of delivering nuclear warheads to major India cities, such as New Delhi and
Mumbai. The North Korean No Dong, flighttested in 1993, was well suited to Pakistan's needs.
Western analysts assess that Pyongyang transferred components or possibly even complete
missile-assembly sets for one to two dozen of the liquid-propellant, fifteen-hundred-kilometer
range, nuclear-capable missiles.27 After allegations appeared in the Western media in October
2002 that Pakistan had paid for these missile deliveries with assistance to North Korea's then
secret uranium-enrichment program, Pakistani officials insisted that they paid cash for
whatever missile aid they received from Pyongyang. Islamabad also has denied providing any
nuclear assistance to North Korea, a claim that subsequently has been disproved as a result of
the late 2003 and early 2004 revelations about illicit nuclear-technology transfers to Iran, Libya,
and North Korea by the notorious Pakistani nuclear official, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Pakistan's Foreign Relations 59

MUSLIM NATIONALISM

The unique circumstances that brought Pakistan into being continue to play an important role
in shaping its national identity and foreign relations. Preindependence Indian Muslims sought
self-determination and an end to European rule. Whereas this expression took the familiar form
of territorial, linguistic, and racial nationalism seen among other Islamic peoples, Indian
Muslims were just as eager to prevent the more numerous Hindus from replacing the British as
their political masters. So Pakistan was established as an independent nation-state for South
Asian Muslims to govern themselves. Muslim nationalism became much more than a nationalist
ideology; over time, it became a rallying cry for Islamic solidarity and Muslim causes all

over the world. In the years following Pakistani independence, the government earned
international respect for its promotion of Islamic causes, such as the nationalliberation
struggles of Algeria, Indonesia, Libya, Morocco, and other Muslim nationalist groups in Africa
and Southeast Asia. However, Pakistan's sometimes amateurish efforts to be seen as a leader of
the Islamic world upset some countries that saw themselves as more fitting international
leaders or that did not place as much political emphasis on Islam as a political force. For
example, King Farouq of Egypt, who generally had emphasized Arab nationalism over political
Islam, made fun of Pakistan's tendency to equate Islam with its own national independence.
Even though Pakistan lobbied aggressively in the United Nations for Indonesian independence,
Indonesia's first president, Soekarno, turned out to be more supportive of Jawaharlal Nehru's
India because of their common attachment to secularism and nonalignment. After Nehru died
in 1964, though, Soekarno moved away from India and supported Pakistan in the 1965 India-
Pakistan war. Just seven days after that war ended, Soekarno was removed from power, and his
successor, Suharto, broke ties with Communist China and distanced Indonesia from Pakistan.

Pakistan enjoyed good relations with Iran and Turkey, and at U.S. urging joined together with
these countries and with Iraq to form the Baghdad Pact, a security grouping that became
CENTO after Iraq's withdrawal. While Pakistan benefited from this alliance, especially in the
form of military assistance from the United States, the Baghdad Pact created serious tension in
Pakistani relations with Saudi Arabia, which had a dynastic feud with Iraq and a separate rivalry
with non-Arab Iran. In an important sense, this period witnessed the failure of Pakistan's
idealistic policy of Islamic internationalism. Competing national interests among Muslim nations
were too intense for the common bond of religion to resolve them or render them
meaningless. Nevertheless, in 1964 Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey strengthened their political and
economic collaboration in a regional arrangement called the Regional Cooperation for
Development (RCD),
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Peter R. Lavoy

an organization that was renamed the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) in 1984 after
the RCD was disbanded in 1979 with the overthrow of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi's
government in Iran. Today, there are new strains in Pakistan's relationships with Turkey, Iran,
and Saudi Arabia.

TURKEY

Pakistan has no serious dispute with Turkey, but the latter's self-identification as a secular,
European country and its close relations with Israel have increased the distance between the
two countries, especially in recent years. As the dominant political institutions in their
respective nations, the Turkish and Pakistani armed forces have much in common and
cooperate closely in military training and education. However, while the Turkish army takes a
dim view of all manifestations of Islamic orthodoxy, Pakistani army leaders have been willing to
cooperate with, and sometimes eager to cultivate, domestic Islamic political parties and social
movements. With the gradual rise in violence committed by political activists and terrorist
organizations in the name of Islam, this tension between Pakistan and Turkey has grown. In the
realm of foreign relations, the fall of the Soviet Union has turned Turkey and Pakistan into
respectful competitors for influence in Central Asia. Because it shares ethnic origins with the six
new Islamic states of Central Asia, Turkey has sought to play a leading role in this region.
However, Pakistan, too, has tried to increase its influence in this region, which historically has
been the source of significant security threats to South Asia.28

Pakistan and Turkey have had even more disagreement over the fate of Afghanistan. Turkey,
like the states of Central Asia, was troubled by the rise of the Taliban and the potential for
Islamic fundamentalism to spread throughout the area. Because of its own security
compulsions, the Pakistan government helped bring the Taliban to power and was their
greatest supporter before turning against them under heavy American pressure after the
terrorist attacks of September 2001. Today, Pakistan and Turkey, along with Iran, India, the
United States, and several other countries, are jockeying for influence in the ongoing struggle to
shape Afghanistan's political future.

IRAN

Iran has played a very important role in Pakistan's foreign policy, not only because it is a
neighbor but also because of its close historical, ethnic, religious, and political ties with the
people of Pakistan. In addition, a stable PakistanIran relationship is crucial for Islamabad
because of its military competition
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

61

with India. In the event of another India-Pakistan war, a hostile Iran could require Islamabad to
draw its troops from the Indian front to defend the western border with Iran, a development
that could spell disaster for Pakistan's defense planners. Iran also has valued defense
cooperation with Pakistan, which during the 1950s and 1960s had a larger military and a slightly
more advanced defense industry. Pakistan also served as a valuable non-Arab Muslim ally in
Iran's age-old rivalry with the Arab world. As Iran amassed tremendous wealth in the oil boom
of the 1970s, the power balance shifted decidedly in favor of Iran. The shah treated Pakistan as
a junior partner. Although the shah's condescending attitude ruffled the feathers of Pakistani
political leaders and diplomats, relations remained relatively stable while the shah was in
power, in part because the Pakistani government needed all the support it could get in its
intense rivalry with India.

The Iranian revolution had a major impact on Pakistani-Iranian relations. Iran's new
revolutionary leaders placed Islam at the forefront of their internal as well as international
behavior. This approach had a certain appeal in Pakistan, which became the first country to
recognize the new Iranian revolutionary government. However, Tehran generally did not return
Pakistan's many expressions of friendship. The revolutionary regime distrusted Pakistan
because of its former ties to the shah and its ongoing relationship with Iran's nemesis, the
United States. Iran, which is predominantly a Shia Muslim nation, also objected to the manner
in which Pakistan treated its Shia minority population and began playing an active role in
support of the Shia cause inside Pakistan. In order to counter Iran's growing regional power,
Saudi Arabia, a conservative Sunni nation, increased its own support to Pakistan's majority
Sunni population. The result has been a dramatic increase in sectarian tensions inside Pakistan,
which often have erupted in violence. Today, Pakistan seeks to reduce Iranian interference in its
internal affairs and also inside Afghanistan, where the two countries support opposing powers,
all while trying to maintain correct and cooperative relations with Tehran for diplomatic and
strategic reasons.

SAUDI ARABIA

Along with the United States and China, Saudi Arabia is Pakistan's closest and oldest friend.
Relations with the Saudi monarchy have not always been smooth, but they extend deeply into
the religious, political, economic, and defense spheres. As the custodian of Islam's two holiest
cities, a generous provider of many of Pakistan's mosques and religious schools, and a source of
income for tens of thousands of visiting Pakistani workers, Saudi Arabia has won the
appreciation and respect of the Pakistani people. However,
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Peter R. Lavoy

government-to-government relations have been less stable, especially in the early years.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations welcomed Pakistan's formation in

1947, but the idea of partition along religious lines was anathema in most other Muslim lands
where nationalism, not Islam, was the salient political issue and unifying force. Muslim nations
in the Middle East, which had their own divisions and rivalries, also resented Pakistan's
attempts to unify the world's Islamic population. As noted above, Pakistan's entry into the
Baghdad Pact aggravated Saudi Arabia because of the Riyadh government's enduring rivalries
with Iraq and Iran. In a 1955 broadcast, the Saudi government-operated Radio Mecca called
Pakistan's act "a stab in the heart of the Arab and Muslim states."29 Pakistan's decision to join
the U.S.-backed security grouping also upset more radical Arab states, such as Egypt, which
opposed any relationship with Israel's protector, the United States.

When Pakistan experienced a downturn in relations with the United States in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, it moved to diversity its foreign relations, cultivating a friendship with China
and restoring ties with the Arab world. These efforts paid off. Saudi Arabia lent Pakistan
seventy-five military aircraft in the 1971 war with India, and Jordan sent another ten planes.
Pakistan placed even greater emphasis on relations with the Muslim world under the leadership
of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Although Bhutto's socialist leanings (and extravagant lifestyle) initially
disturbed the conservative Saudis, relations improved after he hosted the second Islamic
Summit in February 1974, visited Saudi Arabia four times, and in 1976 lavishly hosted a visit of
Saudi Arabia's King Khalid, who subsequently financed the King Faisal Mosque and Islamic
Center in Islamabad.30 Bhutto also established a strong economic relationship with the Saudi
kingdom. Since the early 1970s, more than two million Pakistanis have gone to work as doctors,
pilots, soldiers, and policemen, as well as in other occupations, in Saudi Arabia and the other
Persian Gulf monarchies. Saudi Arabia and neighboring Muslim countries have become the
largest market for Pakistani exports. Oil remittances exceeded $2 million annually from Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and other Middle Eastern countries at the end of
Bhutto's reign. With the stabilization of oil prices, much of the Saudi aid has dried up, but
thousands of Pakistanis still work in the gulf and send their earnings home to their families in
Pakistan. The loss of remittances caused by the 1991 Persian Gulf War was a serious problem
for Pakistan, but the situation improved after the war.

In the past, Pakistan assisted in the defense of several Arab states, supplying both officers and
enlisted troops. When Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was Pakistan's leader, ten thousand Pakistani soldiers
were deployed to Saudi Arabia
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

63

alone; many more were sent to Kuwait, Iraq, Oman, the UAE, and Libya. Under Bhutto's
successor, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the number of Pakistani troops sent to the Middle East was
doubled. In exchange, these wealthy Arab countries financed many of Pakistan's arms
purchases from the United States and Europe. Pakistan's relations with Saudi Arabia and the
Persian Gulf states became strained during the 1990-1991 crisis in the gulf. Although a member
of the U.S.-led international coalition, Pakistan played only a limited role, sending a force of
eleven thousand troops to "protect" religious sites in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, during the
conflict a vocal segment of public opinion in Pakistan called for the ouster of the Kuwaiti
monarch and approved of Saddam Hussein's resistance against the United States. To make
matters worse, Pakistan's army chief, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, also expressed support for Iraq,
resulting in further embarrassment for the government of Benazir Bhutto. Following the first
Gulf war, Pakistan undertook diplomatic efforts to restore its relationships in the region. In
addition, many Pakistani expatriate workers returned to their jobs, and cooperative defense
training activities resumed. As a result, Pakistan largely restored its position as an influential
player in the Middle East.

Today Saudi Arabia no longer depends on Pakistan to counter the threats posed by Israel, Iran,
and Iraq, but Saudi-Pakistani defense ties have grown in new areas. Pakistan continues to train
and conduct joint exercises with the Saudi, UAE, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, and Qatari militaries. In 2001
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan initiated a joint project to manufacture light arms and ammunition.
In 2002 Saudi Arabia provided nearly $400,000 to support Pakistan's military research and
development. Beyond this conventional military cooperation, there have been unconfirmed
media reports that Saudi Arabia (together with Libya) financed a large part of Pakistan's
nuclear-weapons and missile programs.31

There are also unconfirmed reports that Pakistan at some time might cooperate to help Saudi
Arabia replace its aging arsenal of Chinese-supplied CSS-2 ballistic missiles and possibly provide
nuclear warheads to go along with a new generation of missiles.32 However, as long as the
United States maintains close ties with both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, these countries are not
likely to engage in any military behavior that would seriously jeopardize their friendship with
Washington. But if the United States were to pull away from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia,
cooperation on strategic weaponry between the two cannot be ruled out. President Pervez
Musharraf stated in June 2002, "When Pakistan faces any problem, Saudi Arabia is the first
shelter to which Pakistan turns." If the United States is no longer willing to support Pakistan in
its perennial competition with India, Saudi Arabia might attempt to play such a role.
64 Peter R. Lavoy

ETHNIC FRAGMENTATION

Apart from seeking support for its abiding competition with India and trying to gain influence in
the Islamic world, the other major factor that has shaped Pakistan's international relationships
over the years has been the need to discourage outside parties from exacerbating Pakistan's
deep internal divisions. Already noted above is Islamabad's heightened interest in reducing
Saudi and Iranian support for the country's Sunni and Shia Muslim populations, which in the
past has triggered widespread sectarian unrest and violence.

Of even greater concern to the Pakistani government is maintenance of the unity of Pakistan's
diverse ethnic groups. After all, ethnic fragmentation played a major part in the
dismemberment of the country in 1971. Probably the greatest fear of Pakistan's current
leadership is a repeat of the centrifugal process that led to the loss of East Pakistan. Three
major ethnic groups exist under the domination of the Punjabi government and military elite:
Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns.33 Each of these groups has pressed for increased autonomy at
one time or another in Pakistan's history. As a result, much of Pakistan's current foreign policy
is oriented toward preventing the revival of these separatist impulses.

SINDHUDESH AND INDIA

Ethnic tensions in the province of Sindh first appeared at the time of Partition, when thousands
of Indian Muslims moved to the city of Karachi and surrounding urban areas. These muhajirs,
most of whom spoke Urdu, a language not spoken in the part of British India that became
Pakistan, maintained their own customs and refused to learn the Sindhi language. Because the
migrants were often better educated and wealthier than the local population, ethnic tensions
flared over the competition for jobs and other precious resources. Sindhi resentment and
discontent intensified when Urdu was made the national language of Pakistan, the federal
capital was relocated from Karachi to the new city of Islamabad, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Sindh's
most famous politician, was ousted in a bloodless coup, then tried and executed by his
handpicked army chief, Gen. Zia ul-Haq. Separatist sentiments peaked in the early 1980s when
the Sindhi Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, chafing under Zia's dictatorship,
demanded greater provincial autonomy and more equitable distribution of federal funds, jobs,
and other resources. In the 1990s, the rivalry between Sindhi and muhajir groups turned violent
and claimed over five thousand lives.34
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

65

Islamabad generally has handled Sindhi separatist demands and Sindhiuhajir violence as
domestic law-and-order matters. However, Pakistani defense planners are aware that India
could fan ethnic tensions in Sindh as part of an overall military campaign to destabilize the
country and possibly to separate Sindh from the rest of Pakistan. It was with this threat in mind
that Gen. Khalid Kidwai, director of Pakistan's Strategic Plans Division, the military organization
created in 1999 to oversee the development and employment of nuclear weapons, told a pair
of Italian researchers that Pakistan might resort to the use of nuclear weapons "if the very
existence of Pakistan as a state is at stake." General Kidwai identified four conditions in which
nuclear use might be contemplated, one of which was if "India pushes Pakistan into political
destabilization or creates a large-scale internal subversion in Pakistan."35 The Pakistan
leadership's sensitivity to the reemergence of Sindhi separatism is a subtle, but important,
military consideration in its relationship with India.

BALUCHISTAN AND IRAN

Baluchistan, Pakistan's poorest and most rugged province, was the scene of a violent separatist
struggle in the 1970s. Baluchistan occupies more than half of Pakistan's land area, but it has the
smallest population of any province. Tensions were sparked by Prime Minister Bhutto's attempt
to wrest power from local tribal leaders, who for ages had exercised authority in the very
traditional region regardless of who held power to the east, the Mughals, the British, or the
Pakistanis. Although Bhutto sent in one hundred thousand Pakistani soldiers to subdue the
secessionists, stability did not return to Baluchistan until Bhutto's successor, Gen. Zia ul-Haq,
restored the authority of the region's tribal leaders.

Complicating matters during the Baluch separatist struggle was the attempt by local tribal
leaders to link up with neighboring Baluch tribes in Iran to form an autonomous region cutting
across the Iran-Pakistan border. Although the Shah of Iran refused to grant the Baluch tribes
autonomy inside his own country, he did threaten Bhutto that unless Pakistan cooperated on
other bilateral matters, he would provide assistance to Baluch separatists inside Pakistan,
Perhaps even more disconcerting to Islamabad was the covert campaign initiated by the Soviet
Union to support the Baluch secessionist movement.36 Although Pakistani forces have gained
greater control over Baluchistan as part of their cooperation with the U.S. military to track
down elusive Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in this area, the possibility that the Tehran
government might again try to incite Baluch separatist feelings cannot be ruled out and remains
a key concern in Pakistan's foreign relations with Iran.
PASHTUNISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN

The movement for an independent nation of Pashtunistan has been by far the most difficult
ethnic challenge for Pakistani authorities to control. It predates Pakistan's independence and is
intimately related to the tribal loyalties of the Pashtun people, who are scattered across
Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and in the southern and western regions of Afghanistan.
Pashtun nationalist sentiments were kindled in 1893, when the British drew the Durand Line,
arbitrarily dividing the Pashtun tribes between Afghanistan and what was then British India. The
rulers of Afghanistan, who were predominantly Pashtun, objected to what they considered to
be a confiscation of a vital part of their domain. Consequently, successive Afghan governments
have sought to stir up tribal loyalties and press for Pashtun autonomy across the Durand Line,
which now demarcates the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.37

Pashtun separatism died down during the 1980s when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and
Pakistan assisted the mujahideen effort to oust them. It remained quiet in subsequent years
when tribal warlords fought each other for control over Afghanistan. Viewing the chaos across
the border as an opportunity to exert its influence and prevent the Pashtun issue from
reemerging, the Pakistani government, through the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
directorate, helped bring the Taliban to power in the mid-1990s and backed their struggle to
assert control over the entire fragmented country. Although the Taliban were becoming
increasingly difficult to manage, Pakistan continued to support them until September 11, 2001,
and the subsequent U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Today Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan is considerably diminished. Although Pakistan's

leadership supports the American-led effort to restore unity and stability to Afghanistan, it
fears that if that country again disintegrates, it will have to deal not only with renewed calls for
the creation of a Pashtun homeland but also with the reality of Iranian and Indian intervention
to bring anti-Pakistan elements to power in Afghanistan. Such a development would pose grave
political problems for Islamabad. It also could present Pakistan's defense planners with the
unenviable challenge of having to fight a two-front war in the event of another military conflict
with India. For these reasons, Pakistan's foreign relations with Afghanistan are perhaps every
bit as important to Islamabad as those with India, the United States, China, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia.

CONCLUSION

Pakistan's political and military competition with India is the centerpiece of its foreign policy,
but it is by no means the only concern that influences Is-

1 mabad's relations with the outside world. Pakistan's unique history as a homeland for the
Muslims of South Asia and its diverse ethnic and sectarian pulation aiso ]jave shaped its
conduct abroad. Because Pakistan has always felt vulnerable to its much larger neighbor to the
east, a country that never fully accepted the two-nation theory that led to the creation of
Pakistan, Pakistani political and military leaders have looked to the West, and the United States
in particular, for support in their strategic rivalry with India. However, when Western support
was not forthcoming, or when it failed to meet the expectations of Pakistan's leadership,
Islamabad has turned to other countries for diplomatic and military assistance, most notably,
China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. These relationships in turn have complicated Pakistan's
ties with the West. Although Pakistan's foreign relations are sometimes perceived in the West
as troublesome, and occasionally even dangerous, it is clearly in the political and military
interest of the United States and other Western powers to maintain strong bilateral ties with
Pakistan.

NOTES

1. The author alone is responsible for the information and views contained in this chapter. They
do not represent the positions of the Naval Postgraduate School or the U.S. Department of
Defense.

2. Stanley A. Wolpert, A New History of India, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,

1999), 348.

3. For a comprehensive history of the Bangladesh conflict, see Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose,
War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990).

4. For a longer, more detailed treatment of the Kashmir conflict, see Victoria Schofield, Kashmir
in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).

5. U.S. National Security Council (NSC), "U.S. Policy toward South Asia," NSC 5409, February 19,
1954, 1,5. Digital National Security Archives (DNSA), no. PD0039.

6. SEATO and CENTO are now defunct; but Washington's other regional security alliance, the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continues to modernize and expand.

7.. K. Alan Kronstadt, "Pakistan-U.S. Relations," Issue Brief, Congressional Research Service,
September 3, 2003, 1.

8. Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Memorandum of Conversations with Prime Minister Nehru of India,"

December 17-18, 1956, 8, Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS), no.
CK3100184553.
9. Peter R. Lavoy, "Fighting Terrorism and Avoiding War in South Asia: The Indo-Pakistani
Situation," Joint Forces Quarterly no. 32 (Autumn 2002): 27-34.

10. NSC, "U.S. Policy toward South Asia," NSC 5701, January 10, 1957, 5. DNSA, no. PD00492.
See also Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 51-85.

11. Minutes of June 1, 1953, NSC meeting, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1952-54, vol. 9, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986),
147.
68

Peter R. Lavoy

12. President Nixon told Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, that he was deeply
troubled by the prospect of an Indian-Pakistani war "not only for its intrinsic tragedy and
danger but also because it could disrupt our steady course in our policy toward China." Henry
Kissinger, "President's Meeting with Ambassador Joseph Farland," memorandum for the
President's file, July 28,1971, document no. 18, contained in The Tilt: The U.S. and the South
Asian Crisis of 1971, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 79, ed. Sajit Gandhi,
December 16, 2002, available at [Link]/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79.

13. Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 256-57.

14. Kronstadt, "Pakistan-U.S. Relations," 2.

15. In December 1998, the United States finally put the F-16 dispute to rest by agreeing to pay
Pakistan $324.6 million from the U.S. Treasury Judgment Fund and to supply Pakistan with $140
million in goods, including agricultural commodities. Kronstadt, "Pakistan-U.S. Relations," 2.

16. India has a 2:1 advantage in manpower, armor, artillery, and combat aircraft; it has an even
greater advantage in naval vessels and aircraft. See Anthony H. Cordesman, "The Asian
Conventional Military Balance in 2002: South Asia," Center for Strategic and International
Studies, February 26, 2002, available at [Link]/burke/mb/[Link].

17. "U.S. to Restore Military Aid Soon," The News International (Islamabad), September 28,

2002.

18. The DCG met again in September 2003 and agreed to a new series of military-to-military
exercises and training activities to "broaden and deepen existing bilateral military cooperation,
and provide new opportunities to gain greater interoperability and familiarization." Joint
Statement on U.S.-Pakistan Defense Consultative Group, September 24, 2003, available at www
.[Link]/releases.

19. White House Office of the Press Secretary, "Bilateral Multi-Year Assistance: U.S. and ;
Pakistan," June 24, 2003, available at [Link]/p/sa/rls. i

20. Pakistan Times, April 11, 1963. j

21. Cited in Rosemary Foot, "Sources of Conflict between China and India as Seen from j
Beijing," in Mending Fences: Confidence and Security-Building Measures in South Asia, ed. j
Sumit Ganguly and Ted Greenwood (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996), 61. ;
22. Roger Hilsman, director, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, to
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "The Five-Fold Dilemma: The Implications of the Sino-Indian Con-
,: flict," memorandum, November 17, 1962, 23, DDRS, no. CK3100373873.

23. For background, see W. M. Dobell, "Ramification of the China-Pakistan Border Treaty,"
Pacific Affairs 37, no. 3 (Autumn 1964): 283-95, and Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, Pakistan's Defence
Policy, 1947-58 (New York: St. Martin's, 1990), 54-57.

24. Cited in Dobell, "Ramification of the China-Pakistan Border Treaty," 291.

25. Shirley A. Kan, "China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles: Policy
Issues," Congressional Research Service Report, August 8,2003.

26. Kan, "China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles."

27. Sharon A. Squassoni, "Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade between North Korea and
Pakistan," Congressional Research Service Report, May 7, 2003.

28. Shahid M. Amin, Pakistan's Foreign Policy: A Reappraisal (Karachi: Oxford University Press,
2000), 130-1.

29. S. M. Burke, Pakistan's Foreign Policy: An Historical Analysis, 2nd. ed. (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 204.

30. See Stanley Wolpert, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

31. According to documents produced in 1994 by a prominent defector from the Saudi
government, Riyadh had financed much of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program up to that
point. In return, Pakistan reportedly agreed to come to Saudi Arabia's aid with nuclear weapons
if the
Pakistan's Foreign Relations

69

If kingdom were ever attacked with nuclear weapons. See [Link], "Saudi Arabia c
ecial Weapons," available at [Link]/wmd/world/saudi.

32 Richard L. Russell, "A Saudi Nuclear Option?" Survival 43, no. 2 (Summer 2001):

69-79.

33 The muhajirs, the Urdu-speaking Indian Muslims who migrated to Pakistan at the time

f Partition, are the country's fifth major ethnic group; but they are not discussed here because
they have never sought to separate from Pakistan and form their own nation.

34. For background, see Craig Baxter, Yogendra K. Malik, Charles H. Kennedy, and Robert C
Oberst, Government and Politics in South Asia, 5th ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2002),

216-19, and Charles Kennedy, "The Politics of Ethnicity in Sindh," Asian Survey 31, no. 10
(October 1991): 938-55.

35. See Paolo Cotta-Ramusino and Maurizio Martellini, "Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Stability and
Nuclear Strategy in Pakistan," Concise Report of a Visit by Landau Network- Centra Volta,
January 21, 2002, available at http:/[Link]/~landnet.

36. For background, see Selig S. Harrison, In Afghanistan's Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and
Soviet Temptations (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1980).

37. For background, see Leon B. Poullada, "Pushtunistan: Afghan Domestic Politics and
Relations with Pakistan," in Pakistan's 'Western Borderlands, ed. Ainslee T. Embree (Delhi:
Vikas,

1977, 1985), 126-51.

FURTHER READING

Amin, Shahid M. Pakistan's Foreign Policy: A Reappraisal. Karachi: Oxford University Press,

2000. Baxter, Craig, Yogendra K. Malik, Charles H. Kennedy, and Robert C. Oberst. Government
and

Politics in South Asia. 5th ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2002. Bennett Jones, Owen. Pakistan:
Eye of the Storm. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2002. bin Sayeed, Khalid. Pakistan: The Formative Phase, 1947-1948. Karachi: Oxford University

Press, 1992.

Burke, S. M. Pakistan's Foreign Policy: An Historical Analysis. 2nd ed. Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 1990.

Cheema, Pervaiz Iqbal. Pakistan's Defence Policy, 1947-1958. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Cohen, Stephen P. The Pakistan Army. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984,1998.

Kux, Dennis. The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Schofield, Victoria. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War. London: I. B.

Tauris,2003. Sisson, Richard, and Leo E. Rose. War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the
Creation of

Bangladesh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Wolpert, Stanley. Zulfi Bhutto of
Pakistan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Bangladesh's Foreign Relations

Craig Baxter

Professor Muhammad Shamsul Huq, a former foreign minister of Bangladesh, has used as a
subtitle to his book Bangladesh in International Politics1 the phrase "The Dilemmas of the Weak
States." Bangladesh is indeed weak by any measure, be it economic, military, or political
development. Further, this weakness is accentuated by its location next to India, a country that
is often unfriendly and at odds with its weaker neighbor, whose land boundary is almost
entirely with India. Shamsul Huq has also contributed a general statement of the goals of
Bangladeshi foreign policy.

The cornerstone of Bangladesh foreign policy lies in three basic objectives: (1) consolidation of
our hard won independence and national spirit; (2) safeguarding our sovereignty and territorial
integrity; and (3) securing the much needed international cooperation in the task of national
reconstruction and development. To reduce these basic policy objectives, we endeavoured to
seek friendship of all countries including our neighbouring countries. Our efforts in this
direction were governed by these principles: (1) recognition of the sovereign equality of all
states; (2) respect for territorial integrity; and (3) non-interference in the internal affairs of
other states.2

Any country, newly independent or not, might well put forward these sentiments. The question
here is how well these were followed and, if followed, what the outcomes have been.

INDEPENDENCE

Bangladesh became independent on December 16, 1971, when the occupying Pakistan army
surrendered to the Indian army (see chapter 1 for background on

71
72

Craig Baxter

the war). Interestingly, the surrender was taken by the Indian local commander and not by the
Bangladeshi liberation force, the Mukti Bahini. This has led to speculation that India's goal when
it entered the conflict at the end of November3 was primarily the defeat of Pakistan and only
secondarily the liberation of Bangladesh. A defeat of its historic enemy would presumably
weaken Pakistan, although this is also questionable, as, except for the Bangladesh case, conflict
between India and Pakistan has been almost entirely in the west. When the Pakistan army
began its crackdown on March 25, 1971, the political leader of East Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman of the Awami League, was arrested, along with others, and the army assaulted the
faculty residences and dormitories of the University of Dhaka and other educational
institutions, causing many deaths and, at the same time, spurring the resistance of East
Pakistanis.4 A group of political leaders from the Awami League escaped to Mujibnagar, a
border town, and later to Calcutta to set up a provisional government of Bangladesh. Although
India permitted the group to function, it did not grant formal recognition. Maj. Ziaur Rahman
(later general and president) proclaimed the independence of Bangladesh on March 26 as he
spoke from a radio station in Chittagong, claiming the authority of Mujib. Supporters of
Bangladesh were not inactive in the international scene. Most prominent of those visiting
abroad and trying to gain support for Bangladesh was Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury.5 He had
been in Geneva attending a session of the UN Commission on Human Rights and could say
clearly that the rights of East Pakistanis had been violated by the refusal of the leaders of
Pakistan to recognize the victory of the Awami League in the national election held in
December 1970 and January 1971. He visited a number of countries and won the sympathy of
the public, if not always of the governments involved.

He was not alone. I have had personal experience, with the Bengali staff of , the Pakistan
embassy in Washington and the mission to the United Nations in | New York. The Pakistani
ambassador in Washington, Agha Hilaly, eventually :j relieved three senior Bengali officers
and replaced them with transfers from I West Pakistan. One of the Bengali officers involved,
A. M. A. Muhith, later a finance minister, has written on the American position.6 It was not
only in • Washington and New York that defections took place; they occurred in many ;
other diplomatic missions. Defections also took place from the army. Ziaur Rahman would
become the most noted of these, but many joined the Mukti Bahini from the military, as did
others from paramilitary and police forces. Many civilians rallied as well.

AFTER THE SURRENDER

Recognition. Relief. Rehabilitation. Reconstruction. These key words governed the immediate
needs of the newly formed government under the lead-

Bangladesh's Foreign Relations

73

ership of Mujibur Rahman, who was released by Pakistan and allowed to return to Dhaka. He
arrived there on January 10, 1972, to an enormous reception. The provisional government had
named him president, but he expressed his preference for a parliamentary system and became
prime minister, with Abu Sayeed Chowdhury becoming the ceremonial head of state.

India had recognized the Bangladesh government on December 12,1971, as the Indian army
began its campaign against the Pakistan army in East Pakistan.7 This was significant as it made
it clear to the emerging Bangladeshis and to the world that India had entered the conflict to
help Bangladesh gain independence from Pakistan. Bhutan, following as it must the foreign
policy actions of India, gave its recognition the following day. A number of smaller countries,
most of them within the Soviet bloc, followed suit during the month of January. The Soviet
Union, which had signed a security treaty with India in

1971, recognized Bangladesh on January 25. As Bangladesh desired to enter the

Commonwealth of Nations, recognition by the United Kingdom on February 2 set that process
in motion; however, Pakistan, at that time a Commonwealth member, would greatly delay
Bangladesh's recognition. Muslim states, as Pakistan's fellow members of the Organization of
the Islamic Conference (OIC), delayed recognition. The ranks were broken when both Malaysia
and Indonesia granted recognition on February 25, but the Arab states acted much more
slowly. Iraq was the first to act on July 8,1972.

Pakistan was to host the second summit meeting of the OIC in February

1974. The second largest Muslim state, Bangladesh, was not invited to attend. As the group
gathered in Lahore, several heads of state from the Arab world, especially King Hussain of
Jordan, put pressure on the Pakistani prime minister, Zulfiqar AH Bhutto, to invite Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman to attend. Bhutto yielded, and Bangladesh was invited. In fact, Mujib was
flown by a special aircraft from Dhaka to Lahore. Pakistan recognized the independence of
Bangladesh on February 22, 1974. Iran and Turkey, which had held back, along with Pakistan,
recognized Bangladesh on the same day.

The United States delayed, although it maintained an office in Dhaka and was very active in
relief supplies. The Awami League and Bangladeshis at large saw the United States as an ally of
Pakistan. Nixon was not favorably disposed toward India and especially not toward Indira
Gandhi.8 The incident that was (and to an extent still is) in the Bangladeshi mind is the
movement of an American aircraft carrier from the area of the Strait of Malacca into the Bay of
Bengal during the 1971 war. Henry Kissinger has explained this movement as "ostensibly for the
evacuation of Americans but in reality to give emphasis to our warnings [to India] against an
attack on West Pakistan." He added, "we recognized the Indian occupation of East Pakistan as
an accomplished fact."9 Needless to say, many Bangladeshis did not buy this explanation when
it was published eight years later. The United States ultimately recognized Bangladesh on April
4, 1972.
74

Craig Baxter

Bangladesh was heavily damaged during the conflict and, among other things, suffered from a
lack of food and medicine. Many countries immediately began relief efforts both bilaterally and
in cooperation with international organizations. Rehabilitation and reconstruction, most often
with international assistance, often took the form of grants and later, frequently, that of loans,
usually at concessionary rates. This will be discussed further below.

RELATIONS WITH NEIGHBORS

Bangladesh has but two neighbors whose territories abut its own: India and Burma (Myanmar).
It is almost surrounded by India, with which it shares a

4,053-kilometer (2,518-mile) border. The remainder of the boundary is with Burma, with which
it shares a 193-kilometer (120-mile) border, and the Bay of Bengal, which forms 580 kilometers
(360 miles) of its border. While there have been contentious issues with Burma that will be
noted below, relations with India have been most troublesome and seemingly irresolvable.
Matters of concern with India include the division of the waters of the Ganges River, the land
boundary, the sea boundary, Indian allegations of the use of Bangladeshi territory by Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (LSI) and rebellious groups from the northeastern states of India, and
the presence, according to Indian government statements, of some sixteen million illegal
Bangladeshi immigrants in India. It has been said that Mujib took a fawning approach toward
India, looking to be the thankful person for the help of India and of Mrs. Gandhi. This attitude,
according to some Bangladeshis, was evident in the IndoBangladeshi Treaty of 1972, a
twenty-five-year agreement on friendship and cooperation.10 The treaty has been defined as a
quid pro quo exacted by India in return for the withdrawal of Indian troops from the Chittagong
Hill Tracts. Indeed, after the assassination of Mujib on August 15,1975, relations deteriorated as
Bangladesh began to raise the issues discussed below. The treaty of 1972 was not renewed in
1997, a step on which both the government and the opposition agreed. If it is not
contradictory, relations can now be described as correct but strained.

GANGES WATERS, FARAKKA BARRAGE

In a 1983 discussion of the foreign relations of Bangladesh, I suggested facetiously that

the best solution for the foreign policy problems for Bangladesh . . . would be to take a gigantic
saw and cut the nation loose from the subcontinent floating it
75

Bangladesh's Foreign Relations

into a safe position somewhere in the Indian Ocean. However well this might meet the difficulty
Bangladesh faces in being a small country almost completely surrounded on its land sides by a
very much larger country, it would, were it possible to do so, leave the nation surrounded
instead by unusable water. And it is water, a blessing and a curse for Bangladesh, that is its
single most important foreign policy issue." Obviously, this is not a viable solution. But solutions
that might seem viable to outside observers and that have been proposed by Bangladesh have
been denied by an obstructionist, indeed bullying, India. Bangladesh has the misfortune to live
next to an elephant and one that is cantankerous. India's position on the Ganges appears to be
that it is the upper riparian, and it will do with the water whatever it pleases. The Indians
decided to erect a barrage on the Ganges just upstream from the East Pakistan-India border at
a place called Farakka. The purpose was to divert water down a canal to the Bhagirathi River
and the Hooghly River to reduce salinity in the Hooghly and to augment the river's flow to
reduce the buildup of silt that was endangering the use of Calcutta as a seaport. Bangladesh
maintains that it needs the water withdrawn during the low-flow season (April and May
especially) to irrigate land in the Khulna division and to reduce salinity in that area. It should be
noted that during the high-flow period the waters of the Ganges exceed the needs of either
country and in some years cause floods in both. The concept of a barrage is not a new one. In
the first decade of the twentieth century, British engineers proposed such a diversion of the
Ganges as the reduction of the flow of the Bhagirathi was measurable. Historically, the principal
distributary of the Ganges was the route of the Bhagirathi and Hooghly and their channels. In
the later part of the sixteenth century, siltation diverted the flow eastward to the present
distributaries of the river in what is now Bangladesh and which are often labeled on maps as
"the mouths of the Ganges." Bangladesh has proposed that a plan be drawn that would take in
the waters of the entire Ganges basin (less the southern tributaries) rather than simply the flow
of the river at the border. The Bangladeshi concept is that there are three, not simply two,
states involved, as a number of major tributaries of the Ganges arise in Nepal. The proposal is
simply that dams be built on some or all of the tributaries rising in Nepal that could both store
and regulate the flow of the Ganges and generate hydroelectric power, much of which could be
sold to power-short India (and perhaps Bangladesh), earning Nepal foreign exchange. India, in
response to this seemingly practical, if initially costly, proposal, maintains that a third party
should not be involved in what it deems a bilateral issue. Nepal has expressed cautious interest,
recognizing that a considerable amount of land would be taken as reservoirs.

India proposes that water be drawn from the Brahmaputra and conveyed by a link canal to the
Ganges just below Farakka. The model for this was the
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highly successful Indus Basin Project that followed the 1960 treaty between India and Pakistan
on the division of the waters of the Indus basin. Two things make this model impractical for
Bangladesh. First, much of the land traversed by the link canals in Pakistan was sparsely
inhabited, so the question of resettlement was minimal. The link canal contemplated by India
would displace several million people in a country in which resettlement is difficult, if not
impossible, as there is no "empty" land. Second, all of the link canals in Pakistan began and
ended in Pakistani territory. This would not be the case in a Brahmaputra-Ganges link canal. It
would start in Indian territory and end in Indian territory. Bangladesh would not be prepared to
place the faucets at each end in the hands of another country. Engineers have said that the
project is possible from their point of view, but this does not consider the political and
resettlement issues. On May 16, 1974, the two prime ministers, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and
Indira Gandhi, declared that the Farakka Barrage would not be commissioned until the two
sides arrived "at a mutually acceptable allocation of the water available during the periods of
minimum flow in the Ganges."12 Nonetheless, without an agreement with Bangladesh, India
began the operation of the barrage in 1975. When the Indira Gandhi government was replaced
by one headed by Morarji Desai, negotiations between the two governments began in earnest,
and an agreement on the sharing of the water came into effect in 1978.13 It was a five-year
agreement and was renewed once in 1983 to run until 1988. It then took another eight years
before a new agreement was made in 1996. This treaty specifies maximum withdrawals by
India and minimum availability to Bangladesh in ten-day segments from January 1 to May 31
each year.14 However, the Bangladeshis still feel they have been shortchanged as projects that
require more water, such as the Ganga-Kobadak project benefiting primarily Khulna division,
cannot be carried out. Also, the decreased flow of the Ganges in Bangladesh also harms the
Sundarbans, an international environmental site shared with India.

A recent proposal by India, however unlikely its costly implementation may be, is to divert
water throughout much of the country to transfer water from surplus areas to deficit areas
through an enormous series of link canals. Among the diversions would be "a fourth of the
water of the Brahmaputra River through a 12,500 km maze of canals to irrigate 34 million
hectares of land."15 To say that this plan, if ever undertaken, would starve Bangladesh is
putting it mildly.

LAND BOUNDARY

There are two aspects of the land boundary problem. The first is the demarcation of the
boundary in general, a task that should not be difficult consider-
Bangladesh's Foreign Relations

77

• „ tne extensive surveying done by the British. The Radcliffe Commission, which delimited the
boundaries in the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan, gave thorough
directions as to how the land was to be divided. Interestingly, there have been no significant
complaints between India and West Pakistan. There were, of course, complaints about the
borders for political reasons, but not about demarcation. The border with East Pakistan/
Bangladesh was and is a matter for disagreement, despite the signing by Bangladesh and India
of an agreement on May 16,1974, that details the procedure for a settlement.16

In an article entitled "A Neighbourhood of Trouble," India Today discusses the problem along
with those of other neighbors.17 In an interview with Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, the
article raises the issue of sanctuary to opponents of India (see below). The author concludes,
"Sort out the border delineation in favour of Bangladesh and make trade concessions; deal
firmly with illegal immigrants and carry [out] covert strikes on militant bases." It is doubtful if
the Indian government would carry out the suggestions in the first clause, but action on the
second clause might conceivably be taken.

The second aspect of the land boundary is the matter of exclaves and enclaves in each country's
territory. This results partly from the divided territory ruled by the then princely state of Cooch
Behar (Indian princely states are discussed in chapter 1), now incorporated into West Bengal as
a district, as well as from realignment of land from shifts in stream channels. The Economist
states that there are 161 parcels whose status has not been resolved.18 The more important,
although not at all large, segment is the Berubari Enclave, which is Bangladeshi but cut off from
Bangladesh proper. In 1992 an area known as Tin Bigha (literally, "one acre," as three bighas are
equal to one acre) was transferred by India to Bangladesh to permit access to Berubari. Indian
officials have not always honored the transfer, and disputes have arisen. Other specks on the
map also exist.

SEA BOUNDARY

There also are two facets of the dispute with India over the sea boundary. The first results from
the provisions of the international agreement on the law of the sea. States that are at the head
of sea indentations, such as the Bay of Bengal, are awarded but small areas of the adjacent sea.
Bangladesh claims a territorial zone of twelve nautical miles, the standard for all states with sea
coasts.19 Within this zone the state controlling the zone may regulate all economic and
transportation activity. The difficulty, as Bangladesh sees it, comes in the category of the
exclusive economic zone. Bangladesh claims the normal two hundred nautical
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miles, but this conflicts with the exclusive economic zones of India and Burma. The question is
additionally complicated by Indian ownership of the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Bay of
Bengal. The Law of the Sea Treaty, signed in 1982, is quite clear on what is to be done when
states are separated by less than four hundred nautical miles of sea: there must be a separate
agreement between or among the concerned states. The exclusive economic zone provision
gives the states having such a zone rights to the resources of the continental shelf in the zone,
such as oil, gas, and minerals. If the continental shelf extends beyond two hundred nautical
miles, the rights to the resources end at the two-hundred-nautical-mile limit. With the
discovery of extensive natural gas resources, some of them off shore, Bangladesh wishes to
have an "equitable" settlement with India and Burma. The recent discovery of gas off the shore
of Andhra Pradesh in fcdia has heightened Bangladeshi interest.

The second issue concerns the emergence of a new island in the Bay of Bengal on the border of
India and Bangladesh. The coast of the Bay of Bengal is dotted with islands that have been
formed, in many cases over the centuries, by the silt carried in the distributaries of the Ganges-
Brahmaputra-Meghna river system. Known as chars, many of these islands are inhabited
although they are often devastated by the cyclonic storms that arise in the bay. The island in
question is known as South Talpatty Island to Bangladesh and New Moore Island to India. It lies
at the mouth of the Hariganga River, a distributary of the Ganges, and is uninhabited.
Bangladesh has proposed that the flow of the Hariganga be analyzed to determine whether the
flow into the bay is primarily on the east or west side of the island. If it is on the west, the island
should belong to Bangladesh; if on the east, it should go to India. While this would appear to be
a rational solution, India has refused to accept it. If the island were recognized as Bangladeshi,
it would make a slight difference in the calculating of the territorial waters.20

INDIAN CHARGE THAT BANGLADESH IS HARBORING TERRORISTS

India has charged that Bangladesh has become a safe haven for rebel groups in many of the
northeastern states of India including Tripura, Nagaland, and Assam.21 Those from Assam
include the Bodo tribals, who also have training areas in southern Bhutan. Not surprisingly,
Bangladesh denies the charge. The borders between these Indian states, especially Tripura, and
Bangladesh are mountainous and forested so that patrolling the boundaries is difficult. Further,
in some cases people have affinities on each side of the border, notably in the Chittagong Hill
Tracts, a district in which Bangladesh has faced rebellion that it claimed India was abetting.22

India has also accused Bangladesh of harboring fugitive members of al Oaeda and the Taliban
and of permitting the use of its territory by Pakistan's TCI In an interview with Raj Chengappa of
India Today, Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha said, "We would like to continue our friendship
and cooperation with Bangladesh.... We have been assured by Bangladesh that it would not
permit its territory to be used for activities against India." Sinha went on to say that India has
shared information with Bangladesh on this subject.23 It seems that Bangladesh does not
knowingly permit anti-Indian activities, but as already noted, the border is so porous that full
control of passage is all but impossible to achieve.

ILLEGAL BANGLADESHIS IN INDIA

India claims that there are more than sixteen million Bangladeshis living in India and that
Bangladesh should take them back. An India Today map24 gives the number to the last digit of
such persons living in each state, from

14 in Kerala to 7,650,123 in West Bengal. The source given for the map is the Home Ministry.
This raises a question: if numbers can be given with such precision, why cannot the persons
allegedly represented by the numbers be found and deported? A case that made international
news in early February 2003 involved 213 persons who were described as itinerant snake
charmers from Bangladesh attempting to cross into India. Apparently, they were planning to
perform in the West Bengal towns of the Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri districts, thereby earning
money in India, a practice forbidden to undocumented foreigners. India determined that they
were Bangladeshis as they were said to be carrying Bangladeshi electricity bills and receipts.
This prompted The Economist to ask, "what use have itinerant snake-charmers for electricity,
let alone bills?" The group, Muslims who in their profession also worship the Hindu snake
goddess, were denied entry.25

Indian deputy prime minister and home minister L. K. Advani stated at the time of the snake
charmers' being turned back, "Bangladesh should recognize illegal immigration from her soil
and take the people back."26 There is no doubt that a substantial number of people from
Bangladesh have illegally entered India. Many have established businesses and professions. It is
not at all strange that people will cross borders, legally or illegally, if there is opportunity for
economic improvement or to join family members already in the targeted country. This is
demonstrated by immigration to the United States, both legal and illegal, as well as to most
European countries. It seems to be a fact of life, and the process of rounding up illegals is
difficult. India will find it no different.
80 Craig Baxter

GAS EXPORTS TO INDIA

Bangladesh has an enormous stock of natural gas that far exceeds its own requirements for
many years. There is also a strong likelihood that additional gas fields will be developed both on
land and offshore. The latter, of course, heightens the issue of the sea boundary discussed
above. A report prepared by Petrobangla and the U.S. Geological Survey in 2001 estimated the
recoverable reserves of gas to be 32.1 trillion cubit feet (TCP), of which 23.3 TCP were onshore
and 8.8 TCP were offshore.27 Further discoveries have presumably raised that figure. Principal
domestic uses of natural gas are the manufacture of ammonia-urea fertilizers, domestic uses in
major cities, and electricity generation. With the increasing availability of gas, the total usage
within the country will clearly increase. This obvious assumption led to opposition to exports to
India during the government headed by Sheikh Hasina Wajid (1996-2001). Although the
Khaleda Zia government has been in office since 2001, that government's views are not yet
clear. In the opinion of many involved in gas production and of those who study the economics
of the industry, Bangladesh should export gas to energy-short West Bengal and beyond in
India.28 There are two methods for export. The means India is likely to prefer would be to
pipeline it to a terminal in West Bengal. The other possibility is to generate electricity in
Bangladesh using gas, then to transmit the power to India. A combination of the two might also
be used. Employment opportunities would be generated during the construction of either a
pipeline or an electrical transmission line, but the latter would be more likely to maintain
employment opportunities.

It must, however, be noted that India and Iran have explored gas transmission from Iran. The
two have agreed to look into bypassing Pakistan via an under sea route. Turkmenistan,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan have an agreement to transmit gas from Turkmenistan through
Afghanistan to Pakistan. Pakistan has offered to extend the line to India and has said that such
extension would help make the system profitable. Burma also has an interest in transmitting
gas to India for which a route across Bangladesh would be more practical than a difficult
northern route that would go direct from Burma to India. India has also been looking into
transmission of gas from Tripura across Bangladesh to West Bengal. One can be certain that
negotiations on one or more of the possible means for India to obtain more gas will be ongoing.

BURMA (MYANMAR)

The border between India and Burma has been delineated, although it is in territory difficult to
patrol. As already noted, the question of the sea bound-

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ary remains on the agenda of Bangladesh. The most pressing issue between Burma and
Bangladesh has to do with the Muslims in Arakan (now Rakhine) Province in Burma. The
Muslims are known as Rohingyas, a term derived from an ancient name of Arakan, Rohang.
About 40 percent of the population of the province is Muslim.29 The historical connections
between Arakan and adjacent Chittagong are many. The Chittagong area was first ruled by a
Buddhist king of Arakan in the ninth century, passed to Muslim rulers, returned to the
Arakanese in the sixteenth century, became Mughal territory a century later, and became part
of the British Empire in 1760. A few years later, in 1784, Arakanese independence ended when
Arakan was conquered by the Burmese. Many Buddhist Arakanese fled to Chittagong, where
they are known as Maghs. The Muslim Rohingyas claim descent from Arab and Persian traders
who navigated to the Arakanese coast as early as A.D. 900.30

Oppression, as seen by the Rohingyas, caused about two hundred thousand of them to flee
Burma and go to Bangladesh as refugees principally in the Cox's Bazaar District of the
Chittagong region in early 1978. They came across the border that is the Naaf River at the
southern tip of Bangladesh. With the assistance of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) and other international organizations, most of this group was repatriated, beginning
later in 1978. However, conditions in Burma depreciated in the eyes of the Rohingyas in 1992,
and perhaps 270,000 fled to Cox's Bazaar. Again UNHCR assisted, and most of the Rohingyas
have been repatriated.

OTHER SOUTH ASIAN COUNTRIES

In discussing relations with other South Asian countries, obviously those with Pakistan are most
important, those with Nepal and Bhutan are of importance, and those with Sri Lanka and the
Maldives are of minimal importance. The binding of the South Asian states together is seen in
the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a concept first posed by
President Ziaur Rahman.

Pakistan withheld recognition of Bangladesh until February 22, 1974, and, as has been noted,
extended it then only under pressure from other Islamic states attending a meeting of the OIC
in Lahore. Pakistan used the veto of China to keep Bangladesh from membership in the United
Nations until the new state was admitted in September 1974. To Pakistan, Bangladesh
remained a rebellious province. Initially, Pakistan stated that it would break diplomatic relations
with any state that recognized Bangladesh. This policy soon became impractical as state after
state did so anyway. High commissioners were exchanged in 1976, and relations have become
what can
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be called normal. Heads of state and of government have exchanged visits and such practical
matters as air routes and trade have been regularized.

Two issues remain important and seemingly intractable. The first of these is a Bangladeshi
demand that the financial assets of Pakistan be divided through a mutual agreement. The result
is hardly unexpected: what assets were in East Pakistan are now Bangladeshi and what assets
were in West Pakistan are Pakistani. On the other hand, there was an agreement in 1975 on the
division of the external debt of Pakistan. Bangladesh nationalized the assets held by private
citizens of Pakistan, most notably the now closed Adamjee Jute Mill in Narayanganj, the then
largest jute mill in the world. Pakistani banks were nationalized. It can be said that the loss of
West Pakistani managers meant that many enterprises were run less well.

The second issue is that of Urdu speakers living in Bangladesh, who are generally known as
Biharis because at Partition in 1947 many fled Hindu India, mostly from Bihar, to East Pakistan
rather than to West Pakistan like the vast majority of refugees. The loss of West Pakistani
employers affected many Biharis as they were often employed by these enterprises. A program
by UNHCR to transport Biharis to Pakistan has only been minimally successful. As Urdu speakers
the Biharis would prefer to go to Karachi where there is a large community of Urdu speakers,
but the potential growth of the Urdu cornmunity there and in Hyderabad is opposed by the
Sindhi population in the province named after them (see chapter 2 for a discussion of
immigrationrelated political violence in Sindh). As a result many of the Biharis remain in camps
and in separate areas in and near Dhaka, often living in squalid conditions with few sources of
income. They have also been the subject of antiBihari actions by both government forces and
private groups. In February 2003 a large number of Biharis were evicted from the Mirpur relief
camp and their dwellings burned.31 Questions remained about Bangladeshis who were
detained in Pakistan, non-Bengalis in Bangladesh who opted for repatriation to Pakistan, and
prisoners of war held by India. Many in the first two categories were government officials who
were, in effect, stranded; some were Bengali military personnel who had been relieved of duty
in Pakistan and were detained. Among the prisoners, Bangladesh wanted to try 195 for war
crimes. Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and Pakistani president Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto met in
Simla and signed an agreement on July 2,1972, intended to restore relations between the two
countries to the status quo prior to the arising of the Bangladesh issue and to provide a means
for the peaceful settlement of disputes.32 India and Bangladesh decided to separate the
question of prisoners of war from the question of Pakistan's recognition of Bangladesh's
independence. Following the Simla Agreement, further talks between Bangladesh, India, and
Pakistan led to an agreement on August 9, 1974, to implement the return of Bangladeshis
Bangladesh's Foreign Relations

83

from Pakistan, Pakistanis from Bangladesh, and prisoners of war from India to Pakistan.
Bangladesh agreed that the 195 accused war criminals would also be returned to Pakistan and
the charges dropped.33

Nepal and Bhutan, as upper riparians of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin, are important
to Bangladesh and its proposals for the augmentation of the flow in the basins during low-flow
periods. Bhutan, taking foreign policy direction from India, was the second state to recognize
Bangladeshi independence, and Nepal followed very quickly.

SAARC

SAARC was a concept initiated by Ziaur Rahman in 1980. So long as there existed tensions
between Bangladesh and Pakistan, especially over the question of recognition, as well as
distrust between India and Pakistan, the idea of regional cooperation was distant at best. The
Simla Agreement put at least some light on relations between India and Pakistan, and Pakistani
recognition of Bangladesh opened the door for Ziaur Rahman. He discussed his idea during
official visits to India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka and put his plan forward in letters to the
heads of government of each of these countries as well as the Maldives and Bhutan. The
assassination of Ziaur Rahman on May 30, 1981, ended his pursuit of the concept, but it was
carried forward by his successor, Abdus Sattar.

Meetings began at the level of foreign secretaries in 1981 and 1982 and were raised to the level
of foreign ministers in 1983. These meetings delineated the areas in which cooperation among
the member states could be expected. India insisted that bilateral matters not be discussed in
the framework of SAARC. Areas for cooperation, it was agreed, would include agriculture, rural
development, telecommunications, meteorology, and health and population activities, that is,
those areas in which serious bilateral disagreement was not likely to arise. Meanwhile in
Bangladesh a military coup had deposed Sattar and Hussain Muhammad Ershad became
president on March 24, 1982. With Ershad as host, the heads of government met in Dhaka on
December 7-8, 1985, to sign the agreement forming SAARC.34 The organization has held
regular meetings, but it is difficult to say it has accomplished much. SAARC is not the European
Union or even the Organization of American States. Some steps have been taken to form a
South Asian Preferential Trade Association (SAPTA) as the road to an eventual South Asian Free
Trade Association (SAFTA), but little has been accomplished toward either of these goals. The
2002 meeting held in Kathmandu was marred by hostility between India and Pakistan, although
Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf moved at least to shake hands with Indian prime
minister Atal
Behari Vajpayee. The 2003 session was scheduled for Islamabad in January but Vajpayee
refused to attend, and the meeting was postponed. It was finally held in Islamabad in January
2004.

OTHER COUNTRIES

Bangladesh has diplomatic relations, resident and nonresident, with a large number of
countries, but its most important relations outside the South Asia region are with the United
States, the European Union, the Islamic states, Japan, China, and Russia.

Relations with the United States got off to a rocky start as a result of the movement of the
carrier Enterprise into the Bay trf Bengal and the delay in granting Bangladesh formal
recognition, which came finally on April 4,1972.35 Despite the lack of formal recognition, the
United States began very quickly to send assistance to the ravaged country. American economic
assistance, both in grants and loans, has been very large, although in recent years it has been
exceeded by assistance from Japan. There are no significant issues outstanding between the
two countries. There has been some investment by American firms, especially in banking and in
gas and oil exploration. The United States is also a major market for the burgeoning
Bangladeshi garment industry.

Substantial assistance has also been forthcoming from the states of the European Union and
from bodies directly connected to it. As with the United States, the relationships are primarily
in the field of economic development. The European Union has also been a major export
market for the garment industry. Japan has been particularly generous with its assistance to
Bangladesh. A number of Japanese commercial and industrial companies have invested in
Bangladesh, taking advantage of the lower wage costs there. With the Western states and
Japan, relations have been based most heavily on economic issues, primarily economic
assistance and secondarily on trade. Bangladesh has been one of the major recipients of
economic development and food assistance since it gained independence, not only from states
but also from international agencies. Some of this takes the form of grants, but most is in loans.
This has created an external debt problem that could become unmanageable. The external debt
in 1998 was more than $16 billion, or 22 percent of the country's gross domestic product.36

Relations between Bangladesh and China began with difficulty as a result of the close relations
between China and Pakistan. At the request of Pakistan, China regularly used its veto power on
the UN Security Council to block the membership of Bangladesh in the United Nations. With the
recognition of Bangladesh by Pakistan, the Chinese dropped the use of its veto and Bangladesh
was admitted to the United Nations on September 17,

074 Shamsul Huq speculates that in addition to the close China-Pakistan elationship, China was
concerned about the separation of Bangladesh for "domestic compulsions stemming from the
'Taiwan factor' and the problems in Tibet."37 Relations have since been cordial and based
principally on trade and cultural matters.

The Soviet Union, which had signed a security treaty with India in 1971 as the conflict in East
Pakistan was underway, followed the lead of its ally and recognized Bangladesh on January
25,1972; the other members of the Soviet bloc in turn followed suit (except for Bulgaria, which
had done so thirteen days earlier). The perceived leftist leaning of the Mujib regime caused
some to think that the Soviet Union exercised considerable influence over Bangladesh. The
Soviet Union offered a large number of scholarships to Bangladeshi students, and one writer
notes that the "pro-Moscow parties . . . became stronger during this period of the early 1970s,"
but adds that "there was a suspicion that Russia was engaged in destabilising the country."38
Bangladesh did expel some Soviet diplomats for exceeding their mission. The Soviet Union
supplied a squadron of MiG aircraft in 1972, and Russia sold another squadron in 2001,
although it is unclear what use Bangladesh has for them. Russia has supplied technical
assistance, but its own economy is weak, and it is not now able to send significant economic
assistance.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Bangladesh is a member of a host of international organizations. Some of these are truly

international in that membership is drawn from the world at large. Others are regional, such as
SAARC, discussed above. Others in this category include the Economic and Social Commission
for Asia and the Pacific and the Asian Development Bank. Others require specific qualifications,
such as the (British) Commonwealth of Nations.

One organization that has specific requirements is the QIC. Based in Jeddah, it was organized in
1971. Bangladesh was denied membership until after it was recognized by Pakistan at the
insistence of a majority of the members of the OIC. The organization operates loosely to put
forward causes that have an Islamic bearing. It does not differentiate between Sunni and Shia
Muslims. Conferences are held regularly that not only discuss matters of importance but also
give leaders of Islamic countries an opportunity to become better acquainted. It also sponsors
the Islamic Development Bank, which provides loans for economic development in less
developed Islamic states including Bangladesh.

In the broader international scene, membership in what might be described as the parent
organization, the United Nations, is a basis for membership in
86

Craig Baxter

the organizations associated with the United Nations. Bangladesh was admitted to the United
Nations on September 17, 1974, after the ending of the Chinese veto. It has twice been elected
a member of the Security Council, and in 1986 the then foreign minister of Bangladesh,
Humayun Rashid Chowdhury, was elected president of the General Assembly. Bangladesh is a
member of all of the organizations associated with the United Nations, including the specifically
financial bodies such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the
International Development Association. In addition, it belongs to bodies that are programmatic,
such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the
International Labor Organization, and the UNHCR. Bangladesh is an active member of the
Nonaligned Movement (NAM) and attended the 2003 session held in Kuala Lumpur. On what
might be described as the economic side of NAM, it is a member of the Group of 77. As such, it
supports the idea of a new international economic order.

CONCLUSION

In international relations, the root of Bangladeshi activity is primarily economic. Political issues
have generally been settled with diplomatic recognition and with the opening up of the
opportunity for membership in international organizations following the withdrawal of the
Chinese veto on UN membership. Even the problems with India are often economic, such as the
disputes over the division of the Ganges waters and the demarcation of the sea boundary.
Perhaps even the question of illegal residents in India who are Bangladesh nationals can be
seen as economic as Bangladesh would be overwhelmed by the forced return of sixteen million
(to use India's enumeration) people. Possible negotiation with India on the export of natural gas
is an economic issue, as it would earn a substantial amount of foreign exchange if it were
carried out. Bangladesh, to echo Shamsul Huq's subtitle, is a weak state. It is no longer, in the
phrase attributed to Henry Kissinger, an "international basket case," but it is a state that needs,
even requires, continued economic assistance. Hence its relations with the world will be based
on that premise.

NOTES

1. Muhammad Shamsul Huq, Bangladesh in International Politics: The Dilemmas of the Weak
States (New Delhi: Sterling, 1993).

2. Quoted in Fakhruddin Ahmed, Critical Times: Memoirs of a South Asian Diplomat (Dhaka:
University Press, 1994), 207.
Bangladesh's Foreign Relations

87

3 There has never been stated an official date for the entry of Indian forces into the conflict,
although India had been training and equipping Mukti Bahini forces for several months before
its forces entered what was then formally East Pakistan.

4. This chapter is not intended to enter into a description of the conflict. For an interesting
study of the effect of the conflict on a citizen, see Jahanara Iman, Of Blood and Fire, trans, from
the Bengali by Mustafizur Rahman (Dhaka: Academic Publishers, 1990).

5. Chowdhury had also been vice chancellor of the University of Dhaka and would be president
of Bangladesh from January 1972 to December 1973 and foreign minister briefly in 1975.

6. A. M. A. Muhith, American Response to Bangladesh Liberation War (Dhaka: University

Press, 1996).

7. There was also limited conflict between India and Pakistan on the western front begun by an
air attack by Pakistan.

8. During the time that I served as acting consul general in Lahore, Nixon stopped in Lahore en
route to Islamabad from New Delhi. In a private conversation he described Mrs. Gandhi as a
"most difficult woman."

9. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), 905.

10. The text is contained in Harun ur Rashid, Indo-Bangladesh Relations: An Insider's View (New
Delhi: Har-Anand, 2002), appendix 1.

11. Craig Baxter, "Bangladesh: Problems without Powers," paper given at the Twelfth Annual
Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, November 5, 1983.

12. Quoted in Harun ur Rashid, Foreign Relations of Bangladesh (Varanasi, India: Rishi,

2001), 69.

13. Text is in ur Rashid, Indo-Bangladesh Relations, appendix 5.

14. Text is in ur Rashid, Indo-Bangladesh Relations, appendix 6.

15. See India Today, January 20, 2003,20-24.

16. Text is in ur Rashid, Indo-Bangladesh Relations, appendix 4.

17. Raj Chengappa, India Today, February 10, 2003, 38^5.

18. The Economist, February 8,2003,42.

19. The Bangladesh position on the sea boundary is contained in an act of Parliament dated
April 13, 1974. The text of the act is in ur Rashid, Indo-Bangladesh Relations, appendix 3.

20. The text of a white paper on the South Talpatty Island, prepared by the Bangladesh Ministry
of Foreign Affairs on May 26, 1981, is contained in Shamsul Huq, Bangladesh in International
Politics, 341-53.

21. In early British times, the district of Comilla was known as Tippera, while the princely state
was known as Hill Tippera. The area that is now Comilla was incorporated into the Mughal
province of Bengal in 1733 and then into British territory as British control expanded in the
early nineteenth century. One of the tribes resident in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is known as the
Tripura.

22. See Mizanur Rahman Shelley, ed., The Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh: The Untold
Story (Dhaka: Centre for Development Studies, Bangladesh, 1992), and Ameena Mohsin,
Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: On the Difficult Road to Peace (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 2003).

23. India Today, February 10, 2003,40.

24. India Today, February 17,2003, 19.

25. See The Economist, February 8,2002, 42, and India Today, February 17,2003, 18-20.

26. India Today, February 17, 2003,20.

27. National Bureau of Asian Research at [Link]/regionaLstudies/Bangladesh/ (accessed

February 25, 2003).

28. A report prepared in October 1999 by the Centre for Policy Dialogue that supports
exportation can be found at [Link]/[Link] (accessed February 25,
2003).
29. ur Rashid, Foreign Relations of Bangladesh, 114-15,285.

30. Shamsul Huq, Bangladesh in International Politics, 131.

31. Dawn, February 27, 2002.

32. For a study of the Simla Conference, see Imtiaz H. Bokhari and Thomas Perry Thornton The
1972 Simla Agreement: An Asymmetrical Negotiation (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Policy
Institute, The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, 1988).

33. The text of the memorandum recording the meeting and signed by the three foreign
ministers (Kamal Hossain for Bangladesh, Swaran Singh for India, and Aziz Ahmed for Pakistan)
is contained in ur Rashid, Indo-Bangladesh Relations, appendix 2. The release of the 195
prisoners is referred to in paragraph 15.

34. A brief history and documents relating to SAARC up to the time of publication are contained
in Abul Ahsan, SAARC: A Perspective (Dhaka: University Press, 1992). Ahsan, a Bangladeshi
diplomat, was the first secretary general of SAARC and opened the secretariat in Kathmandu.

35. According to a chart in Shamsul Huq, Bangladesh in International Politics, 358-60, the
United States was the fifty-fifth state to recognize Bangladesh, following almost all of the
European Union members and most of the Commonwealth.

36. World Bank, World Development Report, 2000/2001, Table 21, 314.

37. Shamsul Huq, Bangladesh in International Politics, 166.

38. ur Rashid, Foreign Relations of Bangladesh, 180.

FURTHER READING

Ahmed, Fakhruddin. Critical Times: Memoirs of a South Asian Diplomat. Dhaka: University
Press, 1994.

Baxter, Craig. Bangladesh: From a Nation to a State. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997. Baxter,
Craig, and Syedur Rahman. Historical Dictionary of Bangladesh. 3rd ed. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow
Press, 2003.

Bhardwaj, Sanjay. Bangladesh-U.S. Relations: From Cooperation to Partnership. Delhi: Kalinga,

2002.

Crow, Ben, and Alan Lindquist. Sharing the Ganges: The Politics and Technology of River
Development. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994.
Dixit, J. N. Liberation and Beyond: Indo-Bangladesh Relations. Delhi: Konark, 1999. Hazarika,
Sanjoy. Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India's East and

Bangladesh. New Delhi: Penguin, 2000.

Khan, Zillur Rahman, ed., SAARC and the Superpowers. Dhaka: University Press, 1991.
Maniruzzaman, Talukder. Politics and Security of Bangladesh. Dhaka: University Press, 1994.
Momen, Nurul. Bangladesh in the United Nations: A Study in Diplomacy. Dhaka: University
Press, 1987.

Rashid, Harun ur. Foreign Relations of Bangladesh. Varanasi, India: Rishi, 2001.

. Indo-Bangladesh Relations: An Insider's View. New Delhi: Har-Anand, 2002.

Shamsul Huq, Muhammad. Bangladesh in International Politics: The Dilemmas of the Weak

States. New Delhi: Sterling, 1993. Shamsul Huq, Muhammad, and Chowdhury Rafiqul Abrar.
Aid, Development and Diplomacy:

Need for an Aid Policy. Dhaka: University Press, 1999.

Sharma, Sarbjit. U.S.-Bangladesh Relations: A Critique. New Delhi: UBS Publications, 2001.
Tajuddin, Muhammad. Foreign Policy of Bangladesh: Liberation War to Sheikh Hasina. New
Delhi: National Books, 2001.
South Asia's Small States in World Politics

Swam a Rajagopalan

There is more to South Asia than India, Pakistan, Kashmir and nuclear weapons, poverty in
Bangladesh, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.1 This chapter considers the international relations
and security perspectives of each of South Asia's four smaller states and highlights the points of
their engagement with India, the region's preeminent state, with other South Asian states, and
with the rest of the world. While the first is the best-known context, each of these countries
has its own view of what matters and has sought to engage and further those interests on its
own terms.

WHAT IS SMALL? IDENTIFYING SOUTH ASIA'S SMALL STATES

In a region where states are of continental size and house hefty proportions of the global
population, the term small state begs definition. Next to India, there are only a handful of
states in the world that do not seem small in terms of population and size. By convention, the
term small state is used to describe a state with a population of one million or less.2 However,
smallness is relative. South Asian states vary widely on those dimensions, but India's
proportions exacerbate that variation. So let us remove India from our consideration of the
question, what is small? With populations of over one hundred million, both Pakistan and
Bangladesh qualify as large states, and so we may designate the remaining states-Sri Lanka,
Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives-as small states by virtue of having populations under one
hundred million, and in the case of two of them, under one million (see the appendix to this
chapter). It should be noted that one of them, Nepal, is slightly larger geographically than
Bangladesh, which houses around six times Nepal's population! The differences between the
four countries designated here as "small" are
Swarna Rajagopalan

significant, both in physical and political terms. Sri Lanka, for instance, has been a significant
player in the global arena as a founding member of the Nonaligned Movement in the same way
as India has. However, it is possible to find points of comparison between the four [Link]
provides the first source of comparison. It is one of the inescapable realities of life in South Asia
that India lies at its center in every way imaginable. Its massive landmass lies at the physical
center of the subcontinent. Every South Asian state, except Afghanistan and the island nations,
borders India, and practically none of the others share borders. Indians have ethnic kin (or
some ethnic ties) in every other state, and the lines between the states have remained just
porous enough to maintain those ties. In turn, each South Asian state (other than the Maldives)
views India through the lens of these shared relationships, with all their attendant common
pride and their histories of troubled interactions.3 In the worldview and security calculus of
each of these states, India casts a long and often unpleasant shadow. On the positive side, India
has helped each of the smaller states of South Asia with development projects, as well as when
they have needed security assistance. The Chukha hydroelectric project in Bhutan and India's
quick response at the time of the Maldives 1988 coup are examples of this positive role. What
lingers, however, is the image of India as a hegemon with a sanctimonious streak. India's
assistance to secessionist movements in Pakistan and Sri Lankadiscussions of its motivation
apart-and its military intervention in both cases, its part in domestic Nepali politics and its
willingness to cut off Nepal's transit rights, and its annexation of Sikkim in 1976 are the best-
known examples of its will and ability to intervene in the affairs of its neighbors. Geographical
circumstances further allow us to make paired comparisons. Sri Lanka and the Maldives are the
two island states of South Asia. Bhutan and Nepal are its landlocked, mountain states, both
sandwiched between India and China (through Tibet). Although the issue is beyond the scope of
this chapter, the Maldives and Bangladesh also share concerns about global warming and rising
ocean levels.

Finally, in the last decade, no part of the region has been exempt from the globalizing trend
that has facilitated the flow of weapons, drugs, money, and militancy across frontiers.4 That the
situation in Afghanistan allowed the rise of training camps that exported terror and arms
bazaars along the Pakistani , border, we all now know. The Afghanistan-Pakistan-Kashmir
connection is | also well-known. Links between militant groups there and those in India's
\ northeast have also been reported. The Tamil Tigers are said to have been : training some
of the northeastern groups and the Maoists in Nepal. Sri Lankan Tamil militants seeking a safe
haven for their activities engineered the 1988 coup in the Maldives. If the larger states of South
Asia have provoked, assisted, and paid for such political activities, the smaller states have been
un- South Asia's Small States in World Politics
91

able to remain immune. Nepal's Maoists and others in South Asia formed the Coordination
Committee of Maoist Parties and Organizations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA) in July 2001.
Bhutan's southern reaches have been a safe haven for several of the militant groups operating
in Assam. The Maldives' distant atolls remain vulnerable to militant and mercenary attacks. In
short, the vulnerability of the small states is exacerbated in this situation.

Roberto Espindola states that small developing states have three alternative courses of action
in international relations: neutrality and nonalignment, regional security arrangements, and
Finlandization (or relying on larger powers to protect them).5 The South Asian states analyzed
here have adopted each of these tactics to some extent. All four states are nonaligned, and
Nepal specifically speaks of neutrality and of being a zone of peace. All are members of the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which, in spite of not having explicit
collective-security arrangements, does seek to create a secure regional environment through
frequent contact and confidence building. Finally, through treaty arrangements or by request at
times of crisis, all four states have called on India's support in political, diplomatic, economic,
and military terms. Espindola's three alternatives are not mutually exclusive but mutually
reinforcing and balancing. The next part of this chapter is devoted to a country-by-country
survey of each one's worldview, security perceptions, and key international relationships and
initiatives.

LANDLOCKED STATES: NEPAL AND BHUTAN

Bhutan and Nepal are South Asia's landlocked Himalayan states, with mountains and foothills
making up their terrain. Both of these attributes have certain implications for their worldview
and their security perceptions, and they certainly constrain their choices. The UN Office of the
High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and
Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS), which advocates the interests of states with special
needs, identifies "lack of territorial access to the sea, remoteness and isolation from world
markets and high transit costs"6 as the major constraints faced by landlocked states. Another
problem faced by landlocked states is that of access to the resources of the sea and seabed.7
However, in the case of developing countries, that is not as pressing an issue as that of transit.

Landlocked states are heavily dependent on the states that can provide them with access to the
sea, and they respond to this dependence in two ways. The first is by accommodating the
transit state, and the second is by placing transit states in a competitive position.8 For both
Nepal and Bhutan, India is the only feasible transit state. India surrounds them on three sides,
and to the
92

Swama Rajagopalan

north of both lies Tibet. Furthermore, since in both cases, population, production, and market
centers are located on the southern foothills of the Himalayas, transit access through China
would entail traversing very difficult terrain. The OHRLLS website points out that unlike the
landlocked countries of Europe, most developing countries are very far from the sea and are
not surrounded by developed markets. They tend to be commodity exporters whose products
are expensive due to high cost and sometimes unreliable transportation and communication
links through the transit state.

Mahnaz Ispahan! uses the term tyranny of terrain to capture the extent to which geography
limits a state's choices.9 Historically, landlocked states have either been neutral like Switzerland
or buffer states like Afghanistan during the imperial age. Defined as the outer frontier of
neighboring coastal states, their foreign policy autonomy is considerably limited. Indian prime
minister Nehru described Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan in exactly such terms. The relationship
between these countries is asymmetrical, and in 1976 Sikkim was absorbed into the Indian
Union following political upheavals within the state.

Kautilya's rdjamandala ("circle of kings"), depicted most often as concentric circles of polities,
might well illustrate a landlocked state's relationship with its neighbors.10 The natural
animosity between a polity and those on its frontiers compels it to seek alliances with those
whose relationships with its antagonists are equally (and similarly) hostile. In the case of both
Nepal and Bhutan, the relationships with India and China are fraught. By virtue of its relative
size, Nepal's foreign policy conforms more closely to the Kautilya model than does Bhutan's.
While Nepal is constrained by its transit dependence on India, it has tried to leverage its
relationship with each of its neighbors in its relationship with the other. Making common cause
with India's other South Asian neighbors, most of whom have grievances against India, has
been easier. Bhutan's relationship with China is haunted by the Chinese annexation of Tibet. In
the aftermath of that event, Bhutan's relationship with India has been very close, but in
Bhutan's gradual opening to the region and the world, we can discern the rdjamandala at work.

Dick Hodder, writing about landlocked developing states, describes their situation as "double
dependency."11 First, they depend on others by virtue of location. Second, they are in
dependent relationships by virtue of being peripheral states in the global political economy. To
this, in the context of mountain states, we may add a third source of dependency. The "triple
dependency" of Nepal and Bhutan is a function of their terrain, which limits the land available
for cultivation, clusters population in certain areas, and, as mentioned earlier, limits their
choice of transit state. It also makes some border areas impossible to monitor and exacerbates
regional differences within the state. Both of these have important political and security
consequences for the two states discussed in this section.

South Asia's Small States in World Politics

93

For all its smallness and remoteness, Bhutan has a well-defined sense of identity and,
consequently, a well-considered worldview. The Bhutanese polity-Druk-Yul to give it its
Bhutanese name-was founded in the early

1600s when Tibetan dissidents broke away and asserted their independence from Tibet's
prevalent Buddhist hierarchy and secular authorities. The first element of Bhutanese identity
comes from the Mahayana Buddhist sect that came to dominate its cultural, spiritual, and
political landscape, even fashioning the last: the Drukpa sect. The second comes from the
distinctive political institutions that evolved in Bhutan in subsequent decades-distinct from the
other Himalayan kingdoms. Since the late 1980s, this national identity has been articulated in
very specific ethnolinguistic terms. The dialect, diet, and dress of the western and central parts
of Bhutan are taken as the national standard, and to be Bhutanese, according to the driglam
namzha, or traditional code, is to speak Dzongkha and to wear the gho and kira on formal
occasions. This has been enforced as law since the late 1980s, along with laws that deny
citizenship to foreigners marrying Bhutanese.12

The external interests of the Bhutanese elite were oriented at first to warding off Tibetan
campaigns in the north and west and to creating and maintaining tributary relationships with
the kingdoms of the plains areas along their southern borders, like Cooch-Behar and the Assam
Duars.13 Accepting Bhutan's suzerainty, these areas offered a steady source of revenue to the
Bhutanese, funding military efforts in the north. In the late eighteenth century, transformations
on both fronts began to alter Bhutan's foreign policy approach. In the north, China-Tibet
alliances, then greater Chinese influence in Lhasa, made Bhutan wary. In the south, the British
expansion into northern Bihar and Assam posed a direct challenge in this Bhutanese sphere of
influence. Bhutan and Britain went to war twice, first in 1772-1773 over CoochBehar and then
in 1865 over the Assam Duars. The net result of these two encounters was a shrinking of both
Bhutanese influence in and revenues from the area and minimal concessions from the India-
Tibet trade in which Bhutan had a long-time interest. Faced with the reality of being
sandwiched between two much larger forces, the Bhutanese elite chose isolation as a means of
ensuring their survival. To the British, whose Indian holdings now verged on Bhutan, this was
perfectly acceptable. Indeed, it was consistent with what they sought in buffer states. Their
1910 treaty with the new druk-gyalpo, Ugyen Wangchuk, recognized him as such in return for
his accepting their guidance in matters relating to foreign policy. When India became
independent, it entered first into a standstill agreement whereby all the old treaty obligations
would continue, and then in 1949 a new treaty was negotiated on terms more favorable to
Bhutan. The treaty recognized Bhutan's independence and conceded its territorial claims in
return for its acceptance of India's guidance in matters of foreign policy.
94

Swarna Rajagopalan

When the Chinese occupied Tibet in 1950, isolation and neutrality seemed less than realistic.
While sympathetic, Bhutan had to face two new realities: the prospect of hundreds of Tibetan
refugees flooding Bhutan and changing its delicate demographic balance and the prospect of
China's territory extending along its northern and western borders. Its response was to seal the
Tibet border, allowing refugees to use Bhutan only as transit to India. The first consequence of
this was to rapture old trading contacts between Bhutan and Tibet. Second, it drew Bhutan
closer to India, diplomatically and economically. Finally, it increased Bhutan's strategic
importance. The special relationship between Bhutan and India has diplomatic and economic
dimensions. As previous paragraphs indicate, it is underpinned by, first, the historical legacy of
the Anglo-Bhutanese wars and the 1910 treaty with British India and, second, the 1949 Indo-
Bhutenese Treaty. India sponsored Bhutan's entry into the United Nations system, and since
then, Bhutan has joined several international organizations and movements, including the
Nonaligned Movement. Perhaps the most important dimension of the economic relationship
between the two states is the provision of trade and transit access to landlocked Bhutan. In
addition to its ports, India has built a road across the narrow strip of its territory that separates
Bhutan and Bangladesh, thus providing an alternative access route to the state. India has also
played a key role in Bhutan's development plans, providing generous funding and technical
expertise. Cooperation between the states has included joint projects like the hydroelectric
plant at Chukha, the setting up of basic infrastructure such as roads and postal services, and the
training of Bhutanese civil and military officials in India.14 The hydroelectric projects have
underscored the interdependence of the two economies since India is the major purchaser of
surplus energy produced by Bhutan's plants. For the most part, Bhutan's foreign policy is
consistent with India's, although they are not necessarily identical.

A new issue has emerged in Bhutan's relationship with India, that of the United Liberation Front
of Assam and National Democratic Front of Bodoland militants who have used the porous
border to escape from the Indian army and to establish bases and training camps in Bhutan's
southern reaches. This is intrinsically problematic; however, when you consider the presence of
refugee camps in the same part of Bhutan, the problem becomes much more troubling. The
late 1980s marriage, citizenship, and national-identity policies have made refugees of
thousands of Nepalese living in Bhutan. Bhutanese authorities claim that not everyone in the
camps actually lived in Bhutan-UNHCR camps have a higher standard of living than areas
around them and draw attention. Moreover, reminiscent of the Afghan camps in Pakistan, over
the years children are born into refugee households that do not know other realities. Finally,
the camps have become a base for prodemocracy dissident activity against the present
Bhutanese establishment. In these circumstances, the

South Asia's Small States in World Politics

95

close proximity of militant bases and camps poses a fundamental security threat. In a path-
breaking monograph, Aruni John identifies several prevailing factors that make it possible and
appealing for Lhotshampa youth to take up militancy.15 Bhutan does not have the military
capability to take on the militants and fears reprisals. It sees joint operations with India as
pointless and has tried to negotiate with the militants to shut down their camps. While it is
possible that as India and the present rebels themselves come to terms, the militants will shut
down the camps and move out, Bhutan's innate vulnerability to future territorial incursions by
other militant groups fighting in India stands revealed.

The refugee crisis precipitated by Bhutan's national-identity and citizenship policies has
strained Bhutan's relationship with Nepal. Nepal has had to contend with the arrival of several
thousand refugees by way of India. India has its own Gorkha community that in the 1980s
fought for and won its own district in West Bengal. Some Lhotshampa leaders express their
protest in terms of seeking help from fellow Nepalese and also in antimonarchical and anti-
Drukpa terms. This underscores the notion that land-hungry Nepal could develop expansionist
tendencies, whether or not this is realistic. Nepal also retains an interest in the welfare of its
emigre community. Negotiations between Bhutan and Nepal for over a decade have yielded no
resolution. The stumbling block appears to be the question of how to categorize the people in
the refugee camps, with Bhutan insisting on identifying those with criminal records and those it
says emigrated voluntarily, facing Nepalese opposition.16 Never close, Nepal-Bhutan relations
have been greatly strained by this crisis.

Bhutan has close relationships with other South Asian countries. It was a founding member of
SAARC and has been an active participant in the organization's meetings and projects. SAARC
has played an important part in reducing Bhutan's isolation further (with the establishment of
air and telecommunication links, for instance) and also hi diversifying its external relationships.
Bhutan was the second country, after India, to recognize Bangladesh, and growing trade ties
have brought them closer. It maintains a neutral stance on all India-Pakistan disputes,
abstaining where it cannot vote with India at the United Nations on these matters.17 Bhutan
hosted the India-mediated 1985 talks between the Sri Lankan government and the leaders of
Tamil militant groups. Rajesh Kharat quotes the Bhutanese weekly, Kuensel: "Bhutan is
emerging as an 'Eastern Geneva,' a venue for peace-making efforts in South Asia."18
Bhabani Sen Gupta identifies development as the first aim of Bhutan's foreign policy.19 Moving
from an early dependence exclusively on India, Bhutan has been diversifying its sources of
development assistance. In keeping with the decades-old commitment to development
balanced with cultural and ecological conservation, Bhutan has expanded its engagement with
the world

96

Swarna Rajagopalan

through participation in the United Nations system and other multilateral groupings. Bhutan
now receives assistance from Denmark, Japan, and the Asian Development Bank, among other
sources, even though it does not maintain residential representation in most countries. SAARC,
too, helps Bhutan meet this objective. It gives Bhutan access to the region's food reserves, to
technical assistance, to collaborative exploration of its mineral resources, and to the region's
burgeoning middle-class tourist market.20 The terms and manner of Bhutan's engagement with
the world reflect its will to preserve its national identity, both politically as a sovereign state
and culturally as a reflection of its religion and customs, even as it develops its resources,
human and natural.

The history of Nepal's interactions with the outside world suggests a dialectic between a
national self-image that accords to Nepal the rightful domination of the Himalayan region and
the state's geographical reality of being sandwiched between India and China. The two threads
converged to reinforce Nepal's determination to remain independent and sovereign; however,
in acting on its expansionist impulse, Nepal had to literally walk a fine line between the rulers of
the Indian plains and the Chinese or Tibetans, all of whom laid claim to the same regions. In the
years after its unification by Prithvi Narayan Shah, Nepal's ambitions brought it into conflict
with China and Tibet between 1788 and 1792, with the Sikhs in 1809, with the British between

1814 and 1816, and with the Tibetans between 1854 and 1856. A treaty with China called upon
Nepal to send gifts to the Chinese emperor every five years, a practice that continued for
several decades.21

However, Nepal's other reality is that India and China are not equidistant from it physically,
economically, or culturally. Its main population centers lie in the Terai, which is an extension of
the Gangetic plains. Therefore, it is easier to get goods and supplies to and from India than
Tibet, and it would be irrational to seek maritime access through Chinese rather than Indian
ports. Therefore, notwithstanding the theoretical idea of being sandwiched between two
powers with the option of leveraging one relationship against the other, Nepal is much more
dependent on India.

The establishment of British paramountcy in the plains checked Nepal's southward ambitions.
The Treaty of Sugauli was signed in 1816 between the British East India Company and Nepal.22
Nepal had to cede some of its territories, including newer acquisitions, to the British and to
Indian princes like those in Awadh and Sikkim; this strengthened British India's northern
frontier. Disputes between Nepal and Sikkim were particularly to be referred to British
arbitration, which would be binding on Nepal. Nepal could no longer hire Europeans or
Americans in its service. Diplomatic relations were established, although the British were not to
interfere in court affairs. The British resident would report back on matters of security concern.
The treaty also re-

South Asia's Small States in World Politics

97

^jri^^j^--1--*"---"

latine to defense and foreign affairs All oppor.

^depart- of the British ^^^^^.^^^ tunity to redefine the India-Nepal ^^ choose to support the
new Werner India's new democratic leaders wou ^ ^ k ^

Spar! Congress and mtervene in^ Nepah poiti ^^ .^^

however, inherited British ^ohi^^Me of defense is quoted often [ng the Himalayan kingdoms as
an [Link] ^ and

frustrate that.- A r^S^^^"1^"*6^ Nepal, stating that relations; between^the ^ ^ The departmg

sis Of the 1923 treaty, pending toe negot renegotiated the terms on

colonial power, Us successor state, a^eP forth be recruited. This rewhich Nepalese (Gurkha)
soldiers^ wouM ^ ^ e

mains an important tie ^^ 1947, the majority of the Gurkha regMemorandum of Agreement
signed* W-, ^ ^ Bntish re.

r^^£Sr=is;--.-r

In 1950 China annexed Tibet Wittm , ^ ^ Friendshlp be-

became mutually interdependent 11be ^ > dia needed to ensure

tween the two countries °^£%£ regime did not wish to anNepal's neutrality vis-a-vis Chma and
the £ toward democrati-

tagonize the Indian l"^'"1^**communication, and security zation. The treaty "*»° ^^£2* free
market between the two between the two states. It also «T ds. This treaty is criticized

states to assure the movement of peopUang Government (the Ranas) both because it was
signed with an £^ 8 L at a disadvantage in and also because, in the long '*^%L were overthrown
and the economic and political terms. In.^*mblmce of derfl0cratic institumonarchy was
restored along witosome sem ^^

tions. In 1959 King Mahendra dismissed^an underscored the resent-

ernment and drew criticism from^h for 1 ^ [Link] treaty.

ment felt by many Nepalese after ^ allowing its activities to

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^^^^^^' ThUS' n0tWUb

98

Swama Rajagopalan

India's own intentions and actions, it was always implicated in Nepalese politics. During this
phase, the king moved away from the close relationship with India to seek ties also with China
and Pakistan.27

In this most complicated relationship, certain issues are particularly difficult. The first is the
question of trade and transit. As Nepal has sought to diversify its contact with the world, India
has used the negotiations and renewal of mutual trade and transit agreements to show its
disapproval. It has done so by failing to renew the treaty and by granting less access than the
Nepalese ask for but more than is required by international law.28 In 1988, to India's
consternation, Nepal bought a large number of defensive and offensive weapons from China. In
1976 three trade and transit agreements were signed between India and Nepal that expired, in
March 1989. India responded to the Nepalese arms purchase by sealing thirteen out of fifteen
transit points between the two countries. Failure to renew the treaty served as an effective
economic blockade of Nepal. Nepal's attempt to appeal to other powers for help yielded little
fruit, and popular frustration with the regime that had allowed this crisis to develop facilitated
the second democratic transition in Nepalese history. The trade and transit treaty was finally
renewed with new provisions that gave primacy to India's security concerns. Nepal assured
India that it would not use its policy of equidistance to the detriment of India's security.
Consultations would precede important defense agreements made by either side. The status
quo ante April 1, 1990, was restored, removing the work-permit requirement placed on Indian
citizens in Nepal and opening all fifteen transit points. Since then, renewal has been fairly
routine, but the memory of the 1989-1990 crisis remains fresh.

India's technical and economic assistance to Nepal has also come under criticism. The projects
funded, their design, and the choice of technologies are all criticized by some Nepalese as
better suited to India's interests and needs than the needs and local conditions in Nepal.29
Further, the free access of Indians to work and property in Nepal is seen as unfair. Although
Nepalese enjoy the same access in India, Indians are seen as pressing their existing advantages
further. In all, if arrogance marks Indian attitudes to Nepal, then petulance characterizes the
Nepalese response to India.

How does Nepal get along with the rest of South Asia? The only other South Asian state with
which Nepal's relations are strained is Bhutan. Bhutan's summary disenfranchisement of
Bhutanese of Nepali origin, or Lhotshampas, is the primary cause of this strain, although the
two states have never been as close as their common circumstances might suggest. Thousands
of refugees live in camps in the south of Bhutan, and still others have fled to Nepal via India,
which is unwilling to host them in light of its own northeastern problems. Nepal has sought ties
with Pakistan as a means of balancing India. Bangladesh shares Nepal's concerns about water
man-

South Asia's Small States in World Politics

99

agement, and two transit routes through India actually lead Nepali goods to Bangladeshi ports.

Today SAARC is high on the agenda of Nepal's foreign policy, the parallel of which is King
Birendra's proposal for declaring Nepal a Zone of Peace. Both can be called twin strategies-one
for the consolidation of Nepal's political in. dependence from both China and India, and the
other (SAARC) aims at reducing Nepal's economic dependence on India.30

In the last two decades, SAARC has become Nepal's safest option when it comes to adding
ballast to its dealings with India. SAARC headquarters, along with the attendant regional
nongovernmental organizations, are located in Kathmandu. If Thimphu can claim to be the
region's Geneva, then Kathmandu is its Brussels. SAARC holds for Nepal the hope of increased
interdependence with the rest of the region to offset its dependence on India. Nepal sees
several of the issues important to it, trade and water for instance, as better addressed in a
regional, multilateral setting because these in fact involve more than two states. Water
management in the Gangetic basin, for instance, involves Nepal, India, and Bangladesh.

King Birendra mooted the zone-of-peace idea in his coronation speech in

1975. It was an idea that found easy support among many countries, but conspicuously absent
from their number has been India. Bhutan also has not endorsed this idea. What does Nepal
mean by asking to be recognized as a "zone of peace"?31 Its seven-point action plan (1982) tells
us, as follows:

1. Nepal will adhere to peace, nonalignment, and peaceful coexistence with all.

2. It will not use force in any way threatening to other countries.

3. It will seek peaceful settlement of all disputes.

4. Nepal will not interfere in the internal affairs of other states.

5. It will not permit activities on its soil that are hostile to other states supporting this proposal
and seeks reciprocity in this matter.

6. It will continue to honor its treaty obligations.

7. It will not enter into military alliance or allow foreign bases and seeks reciprocity in this
matter.

These are the basic principles enshrined in the UN Charter and the founding principles of the
Nonaligned Movement, of which Nepal is a member. India's lack of support, which renders the
proposal meaningless, is attributed to many factors. India does not like to reassess its security-
threat perception unduly.32 It does not think it feasible, given an open border, to promise not
to permit activities on its soil that are hostile to Nepalese regimes. Once in India, Nepalese
enjoy the same constitutional rights as Indians.33 India states that it
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Swarna Rajagopalan

is not clear whom Nepal considers a threat in this proposal, and it will not entertain a
redefinition of the special relationship between the two countries.34 In conclusion, India looms
large in Nepal's attempt to find itself a place in the world. In some ways friendship with India is
a guarantor of that place, and in others India is its most real threat. The truth lies between
those two perspectives. As a major tourist center and through its participation in SAARC, Nepal
has made itself much less peripheral than its size and location might determine. While it does
not seem likely that Nepal will revert to its earlier expansionist agenda, given its internal
conflicts and external constraints, the memory of its ambitions lingers in the Himalayan region.
Nepal's quest depends now on the success of SAARC and SAARC's ability to rekindle old regional
flows and interdependence in new ways.

ISLAND STATES: THE MALDIVES AND SRI LANKA

Island states vary greatly in terms of geology, size, distance covered, and population. Sri Lanka
and the Maldives, both in this category, exemplify this. Indian Ocean states both, the first is
much larger than the second, and it is only in the context of South Asia that it would be
considered a small state. The island of Sri Lanka is close to and a fragment of the Indian
continental plate system. The Maldives are an archipelago of atolls (raised coral reefs)
cornprising more than twelve hundred islands that spread out over 800 kilometers north to
south and 130 kilometers east to west. Only two hundred of the islands are inhabited.

Small island states, especially archipelagic states like the Maldives, face special constraints to
development and security.35 We might summarize these as economic constraints stemming
from size and a limited resource base, ecological vulnerabilities, and a tendency to depend on
outside help. Writing of small island developing states, Farah Faizal states, "the remoteness of
these islands in many cases, their maritime features, their insularity and their environmental
fragility add to the wider concept of security problems faced by developing countries."36 While
these are more evident in the case of the Maldives, Sri Lanka demonstrates another quality
David Lowenthal ascribes to insular states, the critical importance of maintaining intergroup
cooperation. Absence of such cooperation opens the door to outside intervention, which is
something that small states particularly fear.37 In this age of globalization, small island states
are susceptible on new fronts. Global trade in oil and the transportation of hazardous waste for
disposal in other countries leaves them open to the consequences of shipping accidents that
might pollute their waters and disrupt the marine life they depend on. Their dependence on
tourism opens other gaps in their security. First, as travel modes and routes become South
Asia's Small States in World Politics
101

more vulnerable as targets in conflict, tourism is bound to suffer. Second, the experience of the
Caribbean islands in the age of European explorations can more easily be replicated in this age
of fast-spreading diseases. Fluctuations in global commodities markets (like that for tuna) and
close-knit financial networks drag hitherto isolated states into the rough and tumble of the
world economy. Finally, for archipelagic states, it is even harder to monitor the cornings and
goings of nontraditional actors like terrorists and drug traders, who might use outlying islands.

Historically, the Maldives have had regular contact with the outside world: they feature in
South Asian folklore; they are mentioned by outside travelers and writers like Ptolemy,
Alfeeruni, and Ibn-Batuta; Islam found its way to the Maldives as had Buddhism before it; and
the migration of Indians, Sri Lankans, Southeast Asians, Arabs, and Persians created the
Maldivian nation.38 The Maldives had trading relations with India and Sri Lanka, exporting
cowrie shells, coir, coconuts, amber gris, and tortoise shell, and importing rice from Sri Lanka in
exchange for dried fish.39 In fact, it was an important staging post on sea routes from Pacific
Asia to Africa. Insofar as the Maldives have a traditional adversary, it would be the Mapillas
from the southwest (Malabar) coast of India.40 Further, the Maldives for a while paid tribute to
the ruler of Cannanore on India's Malabar coast, and this transferred somewhat to Sri Lanka's
colonial rulers as they took their turn: the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. The Portuguese
occupied the northern part of the Maldives for fifteen years. On occasion, the European rulers
of Sri Lanka, which was called Ceylon until the name was changed to Sri Lanka in 1972, provided
the Maldives with protection against the Mapillas. The Maldives formally became a British
protectorate in 1887, ceding to the British the right to control defense and foreign relations as
well as the right to install and recognize the sultan of the Maldives. (The British, however, did
not maintain an official presence in the Maldives until the 1960s.) During this period, trade
contacts between the Maldives and the South Asian mainland rose steadily.

The Maldives formally gained independence in 1965, and the nation adopted its current
republican constitution in 1968. However, the continued presence of a British base at Gan
compromised Maldivian independence until 1976. With the independence of Ceylon in 1948
and the British military presence in Trincomalee and Colombo's Katunayake airport being
terminated in 1956, an agreement was signed in the same year that allowed them to use Gan
Island as an air force base for a hundred years. The Gan base issue highlights five important
security concerns.

1. First, as an island state and also as a developing country emerging from protectorate status,
credible assertions of autonomy and independence are important to the Maldives.
Swama Rajagopalan

2. In a regional environment where the hegemonic power (India) frowns on extraregional

military presences in its sphere of interest, and other states have proposed a nuclear-wjapon-
free zone (Pakistan), a zone of peace (Nepal), and making the Indian Ocean a zone of peace (Sri
Lanka), allowing the British base to remain at Gan would have been impolitic. The Maldives, as
South Asia's smallest state, must temper its assertions of independence with some
understanding of the regional ch'-nate.

3. As is common in atoll states, remoteness within the state fostered separatist sentiments in
three southern atolls, including Addu, where the Gan base was located.41 The British military
presence fueled these sentiments and led the Maldivian government to suppose that the
British were encouraging the separatists. It is no less important for the Maldives than it is for
any other state to preserve its territorial integrity, and the Addu problem was resolved in the
state's favor ultimately.

4. The Gan base underscored a common problem created by foreign employers in the context
of any developing state. Salary disparities between what the British base would pay and what
the residents of the southern atolls might otherwise earn in their traditional occupations
further alienated them from the Maldives economy and polity. Measures to deal with this only
made matters worse.42

5. The strategic importance of the Maldives has only grown since the second half of the
twentieth century. The superpowers vied for bases in the Indian Ocean that would give them
access to the littoral states of Asia, Africa, and Australia. The location of the Maldives, and of
Gan specifically, is ideal as a base from which to conduct both surveillance and military
operations. Even with the end of the Cold War, the war on terror and the centrality of the
Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia to that effort underscore the potential of the Maldives.
While this provides the state with some international leverage, it also increases its vulnerability
to the pressure of really large states. While the issue of allowing military bases allowed us to
identify five important concerns, this is hardly an exhaustive consideration of the foreign policy
imperatives of the Maldives. Foremost on that nation's agenda is that the international
community should acknowledge the special security needs of small states and guarantee their
protection. This stems from the Maldives' many experiences with coups d'etat. Since the state
attained independence in 1968, there have been attempted coups in 1980, 1983, and 1988.43
The 1980 coup was the first time mercenaries were hired to stage a coup.44 The 1988 coup was
by far the most ominous attempt to overthrow the Maldivian government, in which two
Colombo-based Maldivian dissidents joined forces with about eighty mercenaries from the
Tamil militant group, the People's South Asia's Small States in World Politics
103

Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). Indian intervention foiled me attempted coup,
giving chase to fleeing mercenaries and their hostages. One of the captured Maldivian
dissidents stated that the coup had been funded by PLOTE in order to gain a secure base for
their struggle against the Sri Lankan state.45 It is possible, however, that that was merely a quid
pro quo for PLOTE assistance to the dissidents. After the 1988 coup, the Maldives raised the
issue of the protection of small states at the UN General Assembly. A resolution was adopted
recognizing their vulnerability and advising that they should be assisted as needed. Since that
1989 resolution, the Maldives has organized workshops and initiated debates on the question
at each international forum of which it is a member.

The 1988 coup is portentous beyond the Maldives. In the present international situation, where
weak state control has time and again permitted violent nonstate actors to avail themselves of
the power vacuum to establish safe havens, bases, and training camps, the vulnerability of an
archipelagic state like the Maldives to conflicts waged elsewhere increases many fold. Although
landlocked, Afghanistan is very much a hinterland state of the Arabian Sea, lying just to the
north of the Maldives. By the government's own admission, it is not possible to secure all the
islands of the state equally. What precludes a repetition of the 1988 scenario, this time from
the north? This vulnerability of the Maldives becomes, in this climate of collective resolve, the
vulnerability of all states.

Global warming is another issue where the resolve of the rest of the world has dramatic
consequences for the Maldives. It is expected that global warming will cause sea levels to rise
about three-quarters of a meter, which would wipe out the Maldives altogether, but a smaller
rise could also be very destructive.46 The Maldivian government has understandably been very
active in keeping this issue alive in international forums like the Global Conference on the
Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (1994).

The Maldives's closest relationship, traditionally, has been with Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is the
Maldives's main trading partner, and it was to Colombo that the Maldives government turned
in the colonial period, seeking protection or assistance. Sri Lankans work and vacation in the
Maldives, and Maldivians work, study, and vacation in Sri Lanka. However, since India helped
foil the coup in 1988, Indo-Maldivian relations have grown close, and India has become a major
donor of technical and financial assistance to the Maldives. The Maldives also have good
relationships with Pakistan and Bangladesh, with Islam underscoring the ties in both cases.
Bangladeshi workers have also found their way to jobs in the Maldives, adding a contemporary
economic dimension to the relations between the states. For the Maldives, as with other small
South Asian states, natural (through Islam, for instance) and cultivated (through SAARC, for
instance) affinities with all other states must be balanced so that
104

the relationship with India remains positive. This can be a very delicate matter, even beyond
the South Asian context.

While Maldivian Islam is moderate, the island state has not been immune to the waves of
radical Islamic movements that are sweeping the globe. Like many other states, the Maldives
must walk that tightrope between traditional moderation, the impulse to modernize, and the
pressure generated by this groundswell. With close ties to both Arab and non-Arab Islamic
states, in today's international relations climate where the clash of civilizations thesis meets
Thomas Hobbes and Hans Morgenthau with disastrous results, states like the Maldives are
called on to make diplomatic choices that reflect their affinities as much as their constraints.
The Maldives have joined the Nonaligned Movement, the Commonwealth of Nations, and the
Organization of the Islamic Conference in the last three decades*It has been a member of
SAARC since the latter's inception. Like the other small states of the region, it views SAARC as
providing an opportunity for its own development, as well as for the amelioration of the
regional security environment. It has twice hosted SAARC summit meetings, and at its initiative,
1992 was observed as the SAARC Year of the Environment.

In spite of its limited resources, the Maldives have taken membership in the international
system seriously and contributed in three significant ways. First, as an active member of SAARC,
the Maldives, along with Nepal and Bhutan particularly, have helped keep the organization
alive, notwithstanding the very acrimonious disputes that flare up from time to time between
India and the other three members. Second, the Maldives have consistently raised the question
of small-state security, forcing attention to an issue that at this particular moment could
acquire great significance. Finally, the role played by the Maldives in highlighting the impact of
global climate change has provided perspective to debates on sustainable development and
definitions of human security. After all, if a country can simply be swallowed by the rising ocean
tides, all other discussions of defense, trade, and diplomatic relations are really rather futile!

By most measures, and in any region outside South Asia, Sri Lanka would not be a small state.
At the very least, its record of international engagement and initiative would place it in a
different category. By virtue of its long coastline and proximity to the subcontinental mainland,
Sri Lanka has never been isolated from the rest of the world. The island served as an entrepot
between Africa and Asia, having trading contacts with imperial Rome and Greece, as well as
kingdoms in Africa, Persia, Byzantium, Southeast Asia, and China.

Historically, the island's most prominent and influential interactions were with the peoples and
states of the subcontinental mainland. Centuries of migration, commercial interactions, and
intermarriage created a composite culture on the island with three or four distinctive
ethnolinguistic groups. Over

the centuries, while not mutually exclusive, the Tamil communities have come to be associated
with the northern areas while the Sinhalese are associated with other parts; this separation is
underscored by the north's proximity to the South Indian home of many of the armies that
would maraud, and occasionally settle to rule, large parts of the island. The history of repeated
confrontation between Tamils from India and the people of the island resonates both in the
rhetoric of contemporary ethnic relations in Sri Lanka as well as in Sri Lanka's relationship with
India.

Colonialism affected Sri Lanka more profoundly than it did other parts of South Asia. Three
European powers successively sought to assert their paramountcy over the island. First, the
Portuguese arrived, establishing themselves on Sri Lanka's west coast and then seeking to
spread their influence into the hinterlands. They remained on the island from 1619 to 1663.
The Dutch, en route to their future stronghold, the Dutch East Indies, arrived around 1658 and
remained until 1796. Their presence in peninsular India was challenged by the Anglo-French
rivalry, and when they lost their mainland holdings altogether, they also ceded Ceylon to the
British, who initially ruled it as part of Madras Presidency. In 1802 Ceylon became a Crown
colony, and thence the British expanded and consolidated their administration, unifying the
island under their flag until 1948. For the first time, the maritime territories and the Kandyan
kingdom were brought together in a unitary arrangement, designed to disenfranchise the
powerful Kandyan aristocracy.

Ceylon's insular nature and size ensured the near-total penetration of its space and culture by
the colonial powers. This period saw the development of port cities like Galle, Colombo, and
Trincomalee, which became pivots for the large-scale movement of peoples and goods across
the global reaches of the British Empire. Apart from those western powers that sought political
control over Ceylon, there was also a significant missionary presence, mostly American,
concentrated in northern Ceylon. The missionaries established the island's first English schools
and colleges in the north, giving northerners an edge in modern education and, therefore,
eligibility for government and university employment that they would retain into the first
decades after independence. Like India and Pakistan, Ceylon chose to remain within the British
cornmonwealth, and it signed a defense pact with Britain. One of the early achievements of the
Commonwealth, the Colombo Plan, which remains one of the leading Afro-Asian initiatives for
technology transfer and development assistance, was launched in 1950. The fact that Ceylon
adopted the Soulbury Constitution, a legislative enactment presuming the continuing validity of
British laws and customs, in the same year as it became independent, retaining this as its basic
law until 1972, also cemented its postcolonial relationship with Britain.
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Swarna Rajagopalan

Sri Lanka also participated in the San Francisco Peace Conference in 1951, making a plea for
compassion and forsaking vengeance.47 The country was also in the forefront of the Asian
initiatives that led to the Bandung Conference in 1955 and, later, to the Nonaligned Movement.
As a founding member of the latter movement, Ceylon enjoyed great prestige in the developing
world. The success of its basic-needs development strategy contributed to this prestige as,
unique in South Asia, the strategy yielded excellent results in the spheres of education and
health. In 1971 Sri Lanka proposed the creation of a zone of peace that would encompass the
Indian Ocean, its islands, and littoral and hinterland states and that would be recognized by the
major powers. It also sponsored the related resolution in the UN General Assembly. Sri Lanka
has been a member of SAARC since its inception.

Sri Lanka has good relationships with all the other countries of South Asia, with educational,
cultural, and economic ties growing over time. However, its most important bilateral
relationship is with India, notwithstanding the many reservations Sri Lankan writers on
international relations express about India's motives and actions. This centrality is underscored
by the fact that research for this chapter on Sri Lanka's foreign policy revealed more writing on
the India-Sri Lanka relationship than any other topic.48 While India's relationship with this
neighbor has also had its problematic moments, on the whole they have been resolved
amicably. Four issues in particular have plagued this relationship. First, chronologically
speaking, came the question of the Tamils brought to Ceylon by the British to provide labor for
their tea and coffee plantations. In 1948 the new Ceylonese state deprived them of citizenship,
leaving them stateless. Several rounds of negotiations worked out specific formulae for their
repatriation, leaving thousands still stranded in the plantation districts. Second, the
demarcation of maritime borders between the two countries has led to disputes over the
possession of Kachchathivu in the Palk Strait. As the. strait is rich in marine life, the real victims
of this dispute are fishermen, who are arrested upon straying into the wrong waters.
Notwithstanding the 1976 agreement between the states, the question continues to be raised
from time to time, especially on the Indian side.49 Third, the tendency of many Indians to
regard South Asia as lying within India's proper sphere of influence is irksome to Sri Lanka. India
has regarded with disfavor any attempt by Sri Lanka (and its other neighbors) to enter into
close strategic relationships with other states. It sees these relationships as threatening to its
security. Sri Lanka has sought close relationships with Britain and the United States, and, since
the outbreak of the ethnic conflict, with Pakistan and Israel, but this has not been acceptable to
India. Finally, the issue of ethnic conflict has dominated the India-Sri Lanka relationship in
recent years. From India's point of view, the floods of Tamil
South Asia's Small States in World Politics

refugees, the prospect of other powers' intervening, and the political pressures created by the
people of Tamil Nadu constitute adequate grounds for concern about this internal conflict. The
view from Sri Lanka is not as simple. For some Sri Lankans, especially those in the Sinhalese
majority, the presence of fifty million Tamils across the straits makes it hard to think of
compromise on the question of national identity. India's part in arming and training the Tamil
militants is well documented,50 but events following the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord (1987) first
embittered Sri Lanka and then, after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, India. In recent years, in
spite of its continuing stakes in the Sri Lankan situation, India's participation in the conflict and
the peace process has been low-key. India's role in the escalation of the conflict is of a piece
with historical Indian interventions that remain vivid in the Sri Lankan collective memory. While
India's involvement in the conflict was abhorrent to Sri Lanka (as the reverse would have been),
its unwillingness to host peace talks or to mediate has also been regarded with dismay. This
ambivalence is illustrated by the fact that after he was sworn in, in April 2004, one of Mahinda
Rajapakse's first acts as the new Sri Lankan prime minister was to seek Indian assistance to
settle the problem. His party is allied with the party that most violently opposed the Indian
intervention in the late 1980s. India, unwilling to appear directly involved, has not hesitated to
actively cooperate with the Sri Lankan forces to provide training, functional assistance, and
intelligence.

A basic problem in South Asian international relations is illustrated by this dimension of the
India-Sri Lanka interaction-these are states whose peoples are organically connected but
politically divided by lines that are only arbitrarily designated internal or international at
particular historical moments. States, reflecting the reactions of their people, must respond to
each other's internal politics, but, respecting international law, they cannot in fact do so.

Beyond India and South Asia, Sri Lanka's most important international efforts in the last few
years have involved an effort to win support for its war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE), a secessionist militant group. It has tried to get the LTTE banned, and it has tried
to counter the propaganda and fund-raising efforts of that organization. Since the December
2001 cease-fire, it has attempted to win support for the peace process and reconstruction
assistance from the international community. Norway has been the chief mediator, and
Thailand, Germany, Sweden, and Norway have hosted sessions of the talks between the
government and the LTTE. Norway's role has, however, been contentious within Sri Lankan
political circles, and debates over the Norwegians' impartiality have slowed down the peace
process.

All of India's neighbors, except possibly Bangladesh, make some effort to distance themselves
from the South Asian heartland. Pakistan and the
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Swarna Rajagopalan

Maldives have built strong connections with the Islamic world, and Nepal and Bhutan have tried
to balance their relationships with India and China. Sri Lanka has tried to join the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), but as it does not meet the geographical criterion for
membership, this has not been possible.

THE SMALL STATES OF SOUTH ASIA IN WORLD POLITICS

Size, location, and resource limitations have not deterred the four small states discussed in this
chapter from being proactive in the international arena. Undeterred also by the shadow India
casts over their universes, they have asserted their individuality and their own strategic
interests at some risk. Combining the three policy alternatives identified by Espindola, they
have maximized their agency in an international system in which they are deeply
disadvantaged. All four states are members of the Nonaligned Movement. All of them are
members of major international groupings other than the United Nations, for example, the
Commonwealth of Nations in the instance of the Maldives and Sri Lanka. All of them are active
members of SAARC and use that forum to influence the regional political agenda. All four states
have also demonstrated a willingness to rely on India's support in critical matters-Nepal and
Bhutan for access to the sea, the Maldives during the 1988 coup attempt, and Sri Lanka in the
late 1980s-even though India's expanding presence in their politics is an important security
concern for each. Since the founding of SAARC, all four states have built ties with other regional
actors to counter or offset this dependence on India, but with varying success.

The two island states seem to have had more success at distancing themselves from India than
the two landlocked states. The Maldives are the least identified with India anyway, lacking
physical closeness and having the most tenuous of cultural ties. Sri Lanka operated very much
as an equal partner until the Indian intervention in its internal conflict, but given its high
international profile, it is not as vulnerable to the vagaries of its relationship with India as the
other states. The two landlocked states are literally in a bind on this score! They can go
nowhere past India, and wherever they go, there India is. It seems as though in the context of
smallness, being landlocked adds to vulnerability, while some of the vulnerability of island
states is offset by their physical separateness and their maritime contacts with others. This
chapter shows that while size and location limit choices, they do not have to strip a state of
agency. The four states of South Asia discussed here offer this morsel of hope to states similarly
or otherwise condemned to insignificance in realist readings of international relations.

South Asia's Small States in World Politics NOTES

109

1. I would like to thank Farah Faizal for her careful reading of an earlier version of this chapter
and especially for her invaluable insights (and corrections) on the Maldives section.

2. For a fuller discussion of smallness, see Sangeeta Thapliyal, Mutual Security: The Case of
India-Nepal (New Delhi: Lancer, 1998), 5-6.

3. To some extent, the inclusion of the Maldives in the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC) undercuts the Indocentric quality of the region, but not significantly given
India's size and strategic reach.

4. See, e.g., South Asia Terrorism Portal, at [Link]; Farah Faizal, '"Maldives," in "Security
Problems of Small Island Developing States: With Special Reference to the Indian Ocean," Ph.D.
dissertation (Hull: Hull University, 1996); Deepak Thapa, "Erosion of the Nepali World," Himal
South Asia (April 2002), available at [Link]/2002/april/[Link] (accessed
March 13, 2003); Aruni John, Potential for Militancy among Bhutanese Refugee Youth, RCSS
Policy Studies 15 (Colombo: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, 2000).

5. Roberto Espindola, "Security Dilemmas," in Politics, Security and Development in Small

States, ed. Colin Clarke and Tony Payne (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 75-78.

6. Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing
Countries and Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS), "Landlocked Developing Countries
(LLDCs)," 2002, available at [Link]/special-rep/ohrlls/lldc/[Link] (accessed February
2, 2003).

7. Martin Ira Glassner, "Resolving the Problems of Land-lockedness," in Land-locked States of

Africa and Asia, ed. Dick Hodder, Sarah J. Lloyd, and Keith McLachlan (London: Frank Cass,
1998), 198.

8. Thapliyal, Mutual Security, 20-21.

9. Mahnaz Ispahani, Roads and Rivals: The Political Uses of Access in the Borderlands of Asia
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 2.

10. Kautilya, The Arthashastra, trans. L. N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1987),

559-63.

11. Dick Hodder, "Conclusions," in Land-locked States of Africa and Asia, 210.
12. Syed Aziz-al Ahsan and Bhumitra Chakma, "Bhutan's Foreign Policy: Cautious
SelfAssertion?" Asian Survey, 33, no. 11 (November 1993): 1,049-51.

13. The historical review in this section draws on the detailed narrative in Leo Rose, The Politics
of Bhutan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 55-105.

14. Bhabani Sen Gupta, Bhutan: Towards a Crass-root Participatory Polity (New Delhi: Konarak,
1999), 141.

15. John, Potential for Militancy.

16. Srnruti S. Pattanaik, "Nepal-Bhutan Bilateral Talks and Repatriation of Bhutanese Refugees,"
Strategic Analysis 22, no. 10 (January 1999), available at [Link]/olj/sa/
sa_99pas01.html (accessed March 1, 2003).

17. On matters relating to nonproliferation and disarmament, Bhutan has on occasion voted in
opposition to India's position at the UN. See Rajesh Kharat, Bhutan in SAARC (New Delhi: South
Asian Publishers, 1999), 27-29.

18. Kharat, Bhutan in SAARC, 56.

19. Sen Gupta, Bhutan, 130.

20. Kharat, Bhutan in SAARC, 85-87.

21. Kumar B. Bhatta, "Sino-Nepalese and Indo-Nepalese Relations: A Comparative Study," The
People's Review, online edition, November 21-27, 2002, available at [Link]/ p-
review/2002/ll/21112002/[Link] (accessed March 2, 2003).

22. Thapliyal, Mutual Security, 18-20.

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Swarna Rajagopalan

23. Lok Raj Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence: Nepal and SAARC. New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers, 1988, 17.

24. Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 22-23.

25. Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 19.

26. See both Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 19, and Thapliyal, Mutual
Security, 38, for a discussion of this provision.

27. Partha S. Ghosh, Cooperation and Conflict in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989)

125-26.

28. Thapliyal points out that India is not a signatory to either the Convention on Trade and
Transit to Landlocked Countries or the Law of the Sea Convention governing transit rights.
Thapliyal, Mutual Security, 136.

29. See, e.g., Dipak Gyawali and Ajaya Dixit, "How Not to Do a South Asian Treaty," Himal South
Asian (April 2001), available at [Link]/apr2001/essayl .html (accessed March 2,
2003).

30. Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 66.

31. Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 31-32.

32. Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 32.

33. S. D. Muni, quoted in Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 33.

34. Baral, The Politics of Balanced Interdependence, 34.

35. Anthony Dolman, "Paradise Lost? The Past Performance and Future Prospects of Small
Islands Developing Countries," in States, Microstates and Islands, ed. Edward Dommen and
Philippe Hein (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 41-42. See also Francois Doumenge, "The Viability
of Small Intertropical Islands," in States, Microstates and Islands, 102-13.

36. Farah Faizal, "Smallness and Security of SIDS," in Security Problems of Small I'sland
Developing States, 11.
37. David Lowenthal, "Social Features," in Politics, Security and Development in Small States,
eds. Colin Clarke and Tony Payne (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987) 40-41.

38. Urmila Phadnis and Ela Dutt Luithui, Maldives: Winds of Change in an Atoll State (New
Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1985), 1-5. See also, Thor Heyedahl, The Maldives Mystery
(London: Adler and Adler, 1986).

39. Phadnis and Dutt Luithui, Maldives, 16.

40. The following is reconstructed from Phadnis and Dutt Luithui, Maldives, 17-19.

41. Faizal, "Maldives," 122-23.

42. Phadnis and Dutt Luithui, Maldives, 30-31.

43. Hideyuki Takahashi, "Maldivian National Security-and the Threats of Mercenaries," The
Round Table, 1999, no. 351,436.

44. Farah Faizal, personal communication, March 13, 2003.

45. Ravinatha Aryasinha, "Maldives, Sri Lanka and the 'India Factor,'" Himal South Asian (March
1997): available at [Link]/97mar/[Link] (accessed February 15,

2002).

46. "Not sinking but drowning," The Economist, May 11,2000, available at [Link]
.com/[Link]?Story_ID=333841 (accessed December 9, 2001).

47. K. M. de Silva, Regional Powers and Small State Security (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press, 1995), 39.

48. For instance, three out of nine chapters in Shelton U. Kodikara, ed., South Asian Strategic
Issues: Sri Lankan Perspectives (New Delhi: Sage, 1990), relate to the India-Sri Lanka
relationship, as do seven out of nineteen chapters in P. V. J. Jayasekera, ed., Security Dilemma
of a Small State, Part One (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1992). K. M. de Silva's Regional
Powers and Small State Security is subtitled India and Sri Lanka,

1977-1990.
South Asia's Small States in World Politics

111

49 One person who has regularly sought to highlight this issue is Professor V. Suryanarayan of
the University of Madras. See his book Kachchativu and the Problems of Indian Fishermen 'n
the Palk Bay Region (Madras: T. R. Publications, 1994).

51 The most commonly cited source is Rohan Gunaratna, Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka: jhe
Role of'India's Intelligence Agencies (Colombo: South Asian Network on Conflict Research,
1993).

FURTHER READING

Aryasinha, Ravinatha. "Maldives, Sri Lanka and the 'India Factor,'" Himal South Asian (March

1997), available at [Link]/97mar/[Link].

Aziz al-Ahsan, Syed, and Bhumitra Chakma, "Bhutan's Foreign Policy: Cautious Self-Assertion?"
Asian Survey 33, no. 11 (November 1993).

Baral, Lok Raj. The Politics of Balanced Interdependence: Nepal and SAARC. New Delhi: Sterling
Publishers, 1988.

de Silva, K. M. Regional Powers and Small State Security. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 1995.

Faizal, Farah. "Maldives." In "Security Problems of Small Island Developing States: With Special
Reference to the Indian Ocean." Ph.D. Dissertation, Hull University, United Kingdom,

1996.

Ghosh, Partha S. Cooperation and Conflict in South Asia. New Delhi: Manohar, 1989.

John, Aruni. Potential for Militancy among Bhutanese Refugee Youth, RCSS Policy Studies 15.
Colombo: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, 2000.

Kharat, Rajesh. Bhutan in SAARC. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1999.

Kodikara, Shelton U. Foreign Policy of Sri Lanka. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Chanakya, 1992.

Phadnis, Urmila, and Ela Dutt Luithui. Maldives: Winds of Change in an Atoll State. New Delhi:
South Asian Publishers, 1985.

Rose, Leo. The Politics of Bhutan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.
The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

Afghanistan is a dry, craggy, landlocked country roughly the size of Texas. Much of the country's
territory consists of steep mountains or barren deserts, and a mere 12 percent of the total land
area is arable. Afghanistan's place in world politics today is heavily influenced by its history as
an important corridor of commerce and conquest between Europe, Persia, and Central Asia, on
one hand, and South and East Asia on the other. Rarely in its frequently turbulent history has
Afghanistan been governed as a unified polity under the control of its resident population;
indeed, during much of the country's history, it has been administered as part of the territory of
one of its neighbors. Afghanistan's current boundaries reflect the borders of its
nineteenthcentury neighbors: imperial Russia to the north, Persia (now Iran) to the west, and
the British Indian Empire and its affiliated protectorates to the east and south. The population
of Afghanistan, estimated today at approximately twenty-five million, is at once
overwhelmingly Muslim (84 percent Sunni, 15 percent Shia) and exceedingly diverse, reflecting
the linguistic, tribal, and ethnic identities of neighboring Islamic populations. Persianspeaking
Hazaras live near the Iranian frontier; Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen speak the tongues of the
former Soviet Central Asian republics Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan; and Pashtuns,
Baluchis, and others communicate in the Indie languages of Pakistan. About 40 percent of
Afghans are Pashtuns, 25 percent are Tajiks, 20 percent are Hazaras, and 6 percent are Uzbeks.
Afghans speak some seventy distinct languages and dialects. This polyglot Afghan population is
united only by the fact that Islamic practices permeate every aspect of daily life.

Afghanistan's recent history has been a tortured one. War has raged in the country for much of
the last twenty-five years, first between a Soviet-supported Marxist regime and a nascent
Islamic resistance movement (1978-1979), then
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between the Soviet Red Army itself and the increasingly potent Afghan resjstance (1979-1989),
then between various Afghan factions themselves (1989-1996), then between the emergent
Taliban regime and northern opposition forces (1996-2001), and lastly between a U.S.-led
coalition and the Taliban (2001). With the toppling of the Taliban government in November
2001, the process of reconstitution and reconstruction has begun, but chronic violence
continues between a bewildering variety of political factions, each with its own well-armed
militia and its own parochial view of what Afghanistan's political future should look like.

Through it all, the Afghan people have suffered to a degree almost unimaginable. One credible
account estimates that more than 1.5 million Afghans have been killed in the fighting.1 Another
source puts the figure at two million.2 Some five to six million more have lived as refugees in
neighboring Pakistan and Iran. Those classified by the United Nations as "internally displaced
people" (i.e., residents forced to flee their homes owing to the violence raging around them)
numbered more than one million at the time of the Taliban's defeat in 2001.3 Innumerable
Afghans, certainly many hundreds of thousands, have been maimed in the world's most heavily
landmined territory.

Following the 2001 U.S.-led military victory in Afghanistan, the international community
pledged to put back together an Afghan entity that in recent years had ceased to be a country
in any meaningful sense. This will entail a long-term process of integrating into a functional
state what had for all intents and purposes become a semipermanent battlefield, occupied by a
variety of heavily armed ethnic groups, tribes, clans, and warlords. The task is enormous. It will
require the reconstitution of Afghanistan into a polity where the interests of all these groups
can be protected, the reconstruction of an economy that lay in ruins as of late 2001, and the
rebuilding of an Afghan society that offers a modicum of material well-being and opportunity in
a country where the life expectancy is forty-four years, one in four children dies before the age
of five, and 70 percent of the population is undernourished.4 This chapter examines the
ongoing process of reconstituting and reconstructing Afghanistan in the context of a historical
introduction to the country. The next three sections trace the political history of Afghanistan up
until I the Soviet invasion of 1979, during the Soviet war from 1979 to 1989, and in J
the post-Soviet era from 1989 to 2001. Subsequent sections analyze the J Afghan rebuilding
process in two broad areas: politics and security, and eco- I nomics and society. The issue of
security is crucial because the prospects for I Afghanistan's political and economic rebirth
are dependent on whether or not ^1 reform-minded Afghans and their international
backers can create a peaceful, stable order to replace decades of warfare and political tumult.
The chapter's final section assesses how far Afghanistan has progressed along the road to
The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

115

Ability as well as the likelihood that it can soon rejoin the international cornmunity as a fully
sovereign, democratic country.

HISTORY

Afghanistan's political history has been marked by periods of domination by one of its
neighbors, interspersed with frequent periods of chaotic internal struggle among local leaders
seeking to advance their own regional or tribal interests, often with the support of confreres
beyond Afghan frontiers. Important exceptions have been relatively short periods during which
a dynamic leader, usually arising in eastern Afghanistan, extended his influence further afield.
Perhaps the most famous and influential of these was Mahmud, a Turk in the city of Ghazni in
southeastern Afghanistan, who in the first millennium established a domain with enduring
historic importance that stretched eastward across the Indus River as far as Delhi, westward
into Persia as far as Isfahan, and northward across the Oxus River (known today as the Amu
Darya) into Central Asia.

In the eighteenth century, Ahmad Shah Durrani, a Pashtun from the Abdali clan, came to power
in Kabul and established an empire in Afghanistan that also encompassed portions of the Indus
valley to the east, including the Punjab and Kashmir. Durrani's imperial rule was relatively short-
lived, and his nineteenth-century heirs came increasingly under British influence. London's main
concern was to maintain Afghanistan as a neutral buffer between czarist Russian power in
Central Asia and the British Raj fleshing out its control westward in the Indian subcontinent.
Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was embroiled in the so-called
Great Game, a competition between the Russian and British empires for influence in Central
Asia. Between 1873 and 1887, Russia and Britain reached agreement on the details of the
border between Afghanistan and Russia, and the British negotiated with Kabul another series of
agreements that essentially placed Afghanistan under British protection. In 1893 the British
unilaterally drew the boundary between British India and Afghanistan. Called the Durand Line,
it ran mainly along a relatively low mountain chain separating the Indus River valley from
Afghanistan. This division had the effect of separating a substantial number of Pashtun tribes
from their kinsmen in Afghanistan by what had become, to them, a largely irrelevant
international border.

The British role in Afghanistan was further strengthened in 1907 when Russia, weakened by its
defeat in the 1904-1905 war with Japan, negotiated an agreement with the British that spelled
out spheres of influence in Asia. The agreement acknowledged Afghanistan to be an
unchallenged sphere of
116

British influence. The later Durrani rulers in Kabul were successful in negotiating virtual
"independence" agreements with the British in 191^ and 1921 setting the stage for
Afghanistan's emergence in modern times as a national state. From 1933 to 1973, the country
was governed by the final Durrani heir, King Zahir Shah, providing Afghanistan with one of its
longer periods of governmental continuity. After World War II, Afghanistan was widely
accorded the status of a sovereign, independent state, with seats in the United Nations and
other international fora. However, beneath the veneer of a modern-style royal government,
Kabul's writ over the entire country was often quite limited. The authoritarian regime dealt
harshly with challenges to its authority, especially by nonPashtun groups. At the local level,
governors appointed by Kabul exercised considerable autonomy, often in league with regional
or tribal warlords. A decision in the capital to replace or discipline a governor often required
enforcement by a military expedition.

In the bipolar international system that evolved after the end of World War II, Kabul's relations
with the world evolved against a Cold War background. Although Afghanistan was not a
significant player in the early years of U.S.- Soviet competition, Moscow's influence in the
country gradually outpaced Washington's, beginning in the 1950s. As discussed in chapters 1
and 2, the United States and Pakistan became strategic partners in 1954. This had the effect of
raising Moscow's concerns about security along the Soviet Union's southern frontier. In
addition, Afghanistan's relationship with the new state of Pakistan was strained and often
hostile as both sides inherited the stresses and conflicts that had long afflicted the Afghan-
British relationship. Far and away the main source of tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan
was Kabul's decision to pursue an active policy of reclaiming influence over the large Pashtun
population in the loosely administered tribal area on the Pakistani side of the international
border, the Durand Line that Afghans had never fully accepted.

When Afghanistan began to advocate the creation of Pashtunistan, an entity aimed at reuniting
all the Pashtu-speaking peoples on both sides of the border, presumably under Afghan control
and at Pakistan's expense, the issue deteriorated into a crisis between the two countries. As a
result, Pakistan closed its border from the late 1950s until 1963, embittering both sides and
forcing Afghanistan to seek alternative outlets to the sea and other sources of essential
products like petroleum, all of which provided an opportunity for Moscow to expand Soviet
influence in Afghanistan. Even after the border was reopened, the relationship between
Pakistan and Afghanistan remained unfriendly, with Pakistan exhibiting a constant wariness of
Afghan intentions on the never disavowed Pashtunistan issue.

In the meantime, the Soviet-Afghan relationship quietly blossomed. Soviet aid financed large
construction projects in Afghanistan, including the Bagram
The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

117

military air base some twenty miles north of Kabul and the 1.7-mile-long Salang Tunnel, which
was built through the Hindu Kush mountains at an altitude of more than eleven thousand feet.5
These facilities would prove useful to the Soviets during their subsequent invasion and
occupation of Afghanistan. Moscow and Kabul also collaborated on a variety of other projects
in the areas of telecommunications, road building, bridge building, hydroelectric power, and
river port construction.6 Moscow also carved out a role as the exclusive supplier of military
equipment and training for the Afghan armed forces. "Approximately 3,725 Afghan officers
were trained in the USSR .. . from 1956 to 1977." In addition, Soviet military advisers and
technicians were attached to Afghan units, and "Soviet military doctrine was adopted. Russian
became Afghanistan's military language."7 In 1964 Afghanistan became a constitutional
monarchy with a two-chamber legislature to which King Zahir Shah appointed one-third of the
deputies. Although Afghanistan's so-called constitutional period was short-lived, lasting only
until 1973, it gave rise to a number of new political parties. Afghanistan's first communist party
was formed in 1965. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) would be wracked by
chronic infighting, but all sides tended to toe the Soviet line. In 1967 the PDPA divided into two
major factions, the Khalq ("masses"), led by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, and
the Parcham ("banner"), led by Babrak Karmal. The Khalq enjoyed strong support within the
Afghan military.8 Experts date the stirrings of political Islam in Afghanistan to this period, when
groups of radical Muslims and Communists often went head-to-head in their competition for
the hearts and minds of the tiny, urban Afghan intelligentsia, mainly on the campus of Kabul
University. One scholar writes that the "young Islamists became actively militant on the
university campus from 1968 against the communist penetration of the army and the university
and against the Soviet infiltration of the state apparatus."9 In 1973 King Zahir Shah was
overthrown in a military coup by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, a former prime minister. The
king fled Afghanistan, eventually settling in Italy. Daoud abolished the monarchy, scrapped the
constitution, and declared Afghanistan a republic in which he would be the first president and
prime minister. In the coup's aftermath, the fortunes of the Communists and Islamists diverged.
Because of the PDPA's strength, Daoud was forced to curry the party's favor. The Islamists, on
the other hand, had no intention of working with Daoud's regime, which scorned the
"backward" religious establishment. Aided by the Pakistani government, which suspected that
Daoud wanted to reopen the Pashtunistan issue, the Islamists launched an unsuccessful 1975
insurgency in four Afghan provinces.

In 1978 Daoud's government was brought down by the PDPA, led by Khalq chief Nur
Muhammad Taraki. The new Communist regime imposed a
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spate of "modernizing" reforms that Islamists viewed as subverting their own traditional
leadership prerogatives in rural Afghanistan. The PDPA portrayed its coup as a "logical
continuation" of the Russian Revolution.10 Taraki himself declared that "in order to have a
revolution, a past path must be established. It was on this basis that the Great October
Revolution triumphed, with the help of a powerful workers' party, and we have followed that
path."11 For the Islamists, the PDPA's animosity toward Islam was symbolized by the
Communists' replacement of Afghanistan's black, red, and (Islamic) green flag with an all-red
one similar to those of the Soviet Central Asian republics. Perhaps most important for rural
Afghans, the Khalqis instituted a number of repugnant regulations concerning marriage and
other social practices by which, traditionally, alliances were made and disputes were resolved.
When they protested, religious leaders were imprisoned, tortured, and executed.

The PDPA's reforms soon led to spontaneous outbursts of popular discontent. Islamist leaders
began to mount violent attacks against regime targets while using Pakistani territory for
sanctuary against reprisals. The violence peaked with the Herat uprising of March 1979, in
which scores of Soviet advisers and thousands of Afghan Communists were killed during a local
rebellion. When Taraki's former deputy, Hafizullah Amin, ousted Taraki from office, with allies
of Amin murdering Taraki in the process, the Soviets searched in vain for a way to quell the
disastrous civil war that was shaping up on their southern flank. But with the threat of yet a
second southern neighbor undergoing an Islamic revolution, and with this neighbor, unlike Iran,
an avowed member of the Communist bloc, the Soviets saw no real option but to intervene
militarily in Afghanistan.

THE SOVIET ERA

With the PDPA regime crumbling under the weight of its own oppression, its factional purges
and desertions, and growing Islamist resistance, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in
December 1979. The invading forces killed Hafizullah Amin and installed in his place Babrak
Karmal, the formerly exiled leader of the PDPA's Parcham faction. The Soviet strategy was as
simple as it was brutal: control the cities, the communications and supply routes, and Soviet-
PDPA military garrisons in rural areas while using massive air power to empty rural Afghanistan
of people and livestock and to destroy the country's fragile agricultural infrastructure.

The Islamic insurgents, now known as the mujahideen ("holy warriors"), responded with
guerrilla attacks on regime targets; however, outfitted with little more than small arms in the
war's early years, the resistance was woefully ill equipped to withstand the sustained Soviet air
assaults. It is difficult
today to imagine the carnage inflicted upon Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986. The country's
prewar population was roughly fifteen million. By 1986 reliable estimates numbered Afghan
casualties at over one million. Some five million Afghans had fled into squalid refugee camps in
Pakistan and Iran. An additional one to two million Afghans were in internal exile, forced into
Kabul and other swelling cities to escape the violence and starvation of rural Afghanistan. The
United Nations's special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan wrote that "continuation of
the military solution will. . . lead inevitably to a situation approaching genocide."12

But then the tide turned. By the mid-1980s, international backers of the Afghan resistance-
China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Stateshad increased their support in both
quantitative and qualitative terms. The mujahideen were thus able to mount more effective
attacks on Soviet-Afghan positions, sometimes within miles of Kabul. Most important from the
insurgents' standpoint was the provision of advanced surface-to-air weapons, including the
U.S.-made Stinger missile,

[a] shoulder-fired weapon that proved durable and easy to use. Its automated heat-seeking
guidance system worked uncannily. CIA-supplied Afghan rebels used Stingers to down hundreds
of Soviet helicopters and transport aircraft between 1986 and 1989. The missile forced Soviet
generals to change air assault tactics. Its potency sowed fear among thousands of Russian pilots
and troops.13

By 1988 Cold War politics and Soviet military setbacks caused Moscow to give up on trying to
subdue Afghanistan. Soon after his rise to power in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
referred to the Afghan war as a "bleeding wound." Gorbachev was intent on saving the Soviet
Union by pursuing the twin reforms of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring").
These reforms, in turn, depended on the implementation of Gorbachev's "new thinking" in
foreign policy. Why was the Soviet Union devoting increasingly scarce resources to propping up
Marxist allies in Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam, or Afghanistan? From Gorbachev's perspective,
these commitments sapped Soviet strength and reaped no real security benefits. Instead, the
resources invested in propping up Soviet allies' unpopular governments could be rechanneled
into domestic reforms. Gorbachev authorized his diplomats to negotiate the Soviet Union out
of Afghanistan, and the last Soviet soldier walked over a bridge across the Amu Darya in 1989.

POST-SOVIET AFGHANISTAN

In the aftermath of the Soviet occupation, bickering Afghan factions fell upon one another in a
bitter civil war, waged in fits and starts, that lasted for seven
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Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

years. Early on, infighting among the resistance leaders prevented them from mounting a
unified assault on the PDPA regime, led since 1986 by Najibullah (who went by only one name).
As a result, and contrary to conventional expectations, the PDPA held on in Kabul until 1992.
After the mujahideen finally ended fourteen years of Communist rule in Afghanistan by
deposing (and murdering) Najibullah, they still could not cooperate sufficiently well to form an
effective government. Afghanistan's civil war continued for another four years, as the various
factions bludgeoned one another and destroyed much of Kabul in the process.

Only in 1996 did a political-military organization emerge that could control most of the country.
Known as the Taliban ("students"), this predominantly Pashtun movement adhered to a strict
version of Sunni Islamic law called Wahhabbism.14 Many of the Taliban had grown up in the
Afghan refugee camps of western Pakistan, where Saudi-funded madrassas (Islamic theology
schools) had instilled in them the Wahhabbi creed. Assisted by Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) organization, the Taliban had fought their way to power in Kabul from 1994 to
1996. Thereafter, the Taliban extended their dictatorial reign to perhaps 90 percent of
Afghanistan's territory, all the while imposing upon the war-weary Afghan people a severely
repressive brand of Wahhabbi rule.

In 1996 the Taliban made common cause with Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda ("the
base"), a network of radical Islamic terrorist groups. Bin Laden, the wealthy son of a Yemeni
bricklayer who made his fortune building roads and other infrastructure in a Saudi Arabia newly
flush with oil money, had originally traveled to Afghanistan in 1979. Like many other young
Muslim men from around the world, most but not all of them Arabs, bin Laden was originally
drawn to South Asia by the prospect of helping the Afghan resistance fighters to oust the
"infidel" Soviet occupiers from Afghanistan. As one informed account describes this influx of
Muslims, By early 1980, the call to jihad (holy war) had reached all corners of the Islamic world,
attracting Arabs young and old and with a variety of motivations to travel to Pakistan to take up
arms and cross the border to fight against the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. There were
genuine volunteers on missions of humanitarian value, there were adventure seekers looking
for paths to glory, and there were psychopaths. As the war dragged on, a number of Arab states
discreetly emptied their prisons of homegrown troublemakers and sent them off to the jihad
with the fervent hope that they might not return. Over the ten years of war as many as 25,000
Arabs may have passed through Pakistan and Afghanistan.15

Bin Laden reportedly spent much of the early 1980s funding Afghan resistance activities, raising
money from Muslims around the world, recruiting
The Reconstltution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

121

volunteers to the cause, and helping to build training camps, tunnels, military depots, and roads
that would facilitate the Islamic insurgents' military operations.16 In the late 1980s, as the Cold
War waned and the Soviets began to disengage from Afghanistan, bin Laden's aims grew more
expansive. During his anti-Soviet incarnation, bin Laden had come to be influenced by remnants
of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group of extremist militants who had been chased out of Egypt
following their assassination of President Anwar Sadat in

1981. By 1987 bin Laden had decided to undertake a global jihad against what he viewed as the
corrupt secular regimes of the Arab Middle East, as well as the infidel Western powers that
perpetuated their rule, especially the United States. He established al Qaeda as a means of
linking radical Muslims from around the world, training them to be terrorists, and sending them
forth to fight the jihad. From 1990 to 1996, bin Laden moved several times, all the while
building al Qaeda into the transnational terror network that would ultimately carry out the
September 11,2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He initially spent
time in Saudi Arabia, where he grew outraged at the deployment of U.S. military forces in the
kingdom during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Rebuffed in his efforts to gain Saudi support for a
guerrilla war to repulse Iraqi forces from Kuwait,17 bin Laden returned to Afghanistan briefly
before settling in Sudan, then governed by a radical Islamic regime. For the next five years,
under the cover of legitimate business interests, bin Laden oversaw the growth of al Qaeda,
which developed a compartmentalized corporate structure and trained Islamic militants in
Sudan and Afghanistan to use weapons, detonate explosives, kidnap adversaries, fight in urban
environments, and defy Western intelligence services.

In 1996, under pressure from the United States, which was only then awakening to the scope of
al Qaeda's activities, bin Laden fled Sudan. He moved back to Afghanistan as the Taliban was
consolidating its rule, and a marriage of convenience was arranged: bin Laden would provide
the Taliban with military assistance, build roads that would allow the regime to widen its
control over the country, arid buy off regional warlords opposed to the new regime; in return,
the Taliban would give al Qaeda sanctuary in one of the world's most remote and inhospitable
regions. It was in Afghanistan that bin Laden and his senior al Qaeda leadership plotted a series
of increasingly audacious terrorist attacks against American targets. In 1998 he declared that
"to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim
who is able, in any country where this is possible."18 Soon thereafter, explosions rocked the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. Undaunted by
the Clinton administration's response, which was to fire seventy-five cruise missiles at bin
Laden's
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Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

training camps in Afghanistan, al Qaeda-linked terrorists in 2000 bombed the USS Cole, a
destroyer berthed in Yemen, killing seventeen. Afghanistan's history would be profoundly
transformed in the fateful year of 2001. On September 11, Muslim terrorists, most of them
Saudis, believed to be part of al Qaeda flew highjacked commercial airliners into the World
Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C. Several thousand
people died in the attacks, which finally awakened Americans to the scope and severity of the
threat posed by bin Laden's terrorist network. President George W. Bush responded by
declaring a global war on terrorism, one that would target not only terrorist groups themselves
but also the regimes harboring them.

To pave the way for military operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan,
Washington exerted enormous pressure on Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, whose
government was by then one of only three that still maintained diplomatic relations with the
Taliban. Given that the Pakistan army, and particularly ISI, knew a vast amount about
Afghanistan's complex political landscape, the Bush administration viewed Islamabad's support
as vital to the antiterrorist campaign. U.S. officials also knew that if they expected Musharraf to
incur the huge political risks of abandoning a cause many Pakistanis believed in, Washington
would have to pay Islamabad handsomely. Faced with the prospect of Pakistan's becoming an
international pariah, Musharraf acceded to U.S. demands that he give the Americans airspace
rights, access to military bases, and intelligence. In return, Washington waived nuclear and
prodemocracy sanctions against Pakistan; pledged more than $1 billion in economic assistance
mainly in the areas of health, education, democracy promotion, counternarcotics, and law
enforcement; and promised to engineer grant, loan, and debt-rescheduling programs through
the major international financial institutions.

Musharraf's nationally televised speech on September 19 left no doubt as to what was at stake
for Pakistan. If it did not join the U.S. war effort, the country would be marginalized and
isolated. Noting that India had already offered its full cooperation to the United States,
Musharraf warned that Islamabad's refusal to toe the line would result in Pakistan's being
branded a terrorism-supporting state and the loss of any lingering international sympathy for
the Pakistani position on Kashmir. He also implied, obliquely, that the very survival of Pakistan's
hard-won nuclear-weapons capabilities were in jeopardy.19 Operation Enduring Freedom
(OEF), the U.S.-led war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, began on October 7, 2001. U.S. and
allied military forces began by launching air and cruise-missile strikes against government
positions and terrorist assets. Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance, a loose collection of mainly
Tajik, anti-Taliban groups who had fought in the Afghan resistance during the
The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

123

Soviet war, began ground assaults extending outward from their strongholds in the Panjshir
valley. Both the air and ground operations were abetted by U.S. special operations and CIA
paramilitary forces, which fanned out across the country identifying regime and al Qaeda
targets. Vastly overmatched by their adversaries' advantages in satellite capabilities and
precision-guided munitions, the Taliban and al Qaeda armies quickly crumbled, with survivors
melting away into the borderlands straddling the Afghan-Pakistani .frontier. Kabul fell on
November 12,2001.

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN

Since the Taliban's ouster, the United States, its allies, the United Nations, and the Afghans
themselves have embarked on an ambitious program to completely remake Afghan society.
Any analysis of this Herculean effort must begin with a realistic appreciation of its enormity.
Afghanistan as of 2001 was a deeply impoverished, topographically forbidding, politically
splintered entity-it was, in the blandly euphemistic jargon of the social sciences, a "failed state."
In neither the Taliban- nor the Northern Alliance-controlled areas was there much of a
functioning government; what passed for governance in Afghanistan was the province of
regional warlords, not bureaucrats. The Afghan economy was essentially a barter system based
on drug and weapons trafficking. The official currency, the afghani, was practically worthless.
Although Western journalists threw around a figure of $480 a year when they described Afghan
per capita income, that number was a fiction. Four years of drought and famine had brought
millions of already desperately poor Afghans to the brink of extinction. Educational, medical,
and other social services were exceedingly scarce. Through all the carnage of the 1978-2001
period, the Afghan countryside remained as it had been for centuries-underdeveloped, harshly
exploited, and deeply divided along regional, intra-Islamic, ethnic, and tribal lines. As discussed
above, Afghanistan's political history discloses little experience with the core Western
democratic traditions: popular sovereignty, regular elections, institutional checks and balances,
an independent judiciary, individual rights, a free press, and so forth. Only rarely, as in their
resistance to Soviet occupation, have Afghans acted together with a sufficient sense of unity
and common purpose to rise above their primary loyalties as Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras,
Turkmen, and Uzbeks. If the country is ever to move forward with a popular and enduring
representative government that serves the interests of all Afghans, it must decisively repudiate
this history. From a realistic, rather than an idealized, standpoint, the best outcome that can
probably be expected is a particularly Afghan form of democracy that combines a moderately
strong central government with substantial provincial and local autonomy.
124 Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

THE BONN POLITICAL ROADMAP

A month after the Taliban's ouster, all of Afghanistan's other political factions met in Bonn,
Germany, to create a blueprint for the country's political future The thirty-member Interim
Authority was formed, with Hamid Karzai as its chairman. Karzai, a member of the Pashtun
Durrani tribe with close ties to former king Zahir Shah, is widely regarded as a centrist in the
Afghan political context. The Bonn delegates also decided to convene a June 2002 loya jirga
("grand council") in Afghanistan. The loyajirga would choose a twoyear transitional authority
charged with drafting a new constitution and governing Afghanistan until elections could be
held in 2004. According to the terms agreed to at Bonn, the victorious Northern Alliance forces
would withdraw from Kabul, and an international peacekeeping force would be formed to
maintain security in and around the capital.

When the loyajirga was convened in June 2002, Karzai was selected by a large majority of
delegates to lead the two-year Transitional Authority. A thirty-five-member commission set
about drafting a new constitution in consultation with Afghans around the country, which was
then presented to a second loyajirga in December 2003. In the meantime, the Transitional
Authority and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) created a joint
committee to organize the planned 2004 elections. After a prolonged and sometimes
contentious debate, the second loyajirga approved the new constitution in January 2004, and it
was decided that national elections would be held in June. The elections were subsequently
postponed until autumn 2004, owing to widespread security problems, discussed below, and
difficulties in registering Afghan voters for the first time ever.

In the future Afghan government, the president will be elected by a direct majority and serve as
the head of state. In addition to being the commander in chief of the armed forces, the
president will appoint cabinet ministers, the attorney general, the head of the National Security
Directorate, and members of the supreme court, with the approval of a bicameral parliament.
The parliament will consist of two branches. The Wolesi Jirga ("House of People") will be
elected directly by voters in proportion to the population of each Afghan region; it will not
exceed 250 members. The constitution specifies that at least two female delegates will
represent each province. The Meshrano Jirga ("House of Elders") will consist of both elected
and appointed members. The president will appoint members to this body from traditionally
underrepresented groups, including women, and provincial and district councils will elect the
remaining members. Afghanistan's supreme court will have nine members to be appointed by
the president for ten-year terms. Matters of law with no provision in the constitution or other
standing laws will be judged by the Hanifi school of Sunni jurisprudence. Afghan courts will
apply the
The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

125

hool of law in cases dealing with the personal matters of Shia MusShia The constitution
identifies Islam as the state religion of Afghanistan, limS' e that "no law can be contrary to the
beliefs and provisions of the sacred ^lUon of Islam," but it also specifies that followers of other
religions are [ree to exercise their faiths.20

POLITICS AND SECURITY

The reconstitution and reconstruction of Afghanistan depends, first and foremost, on achieving
a level of everyday security in the country that will allow political and economic development to
proceed. The sad fact is that in matters of government and opposition, tearing down is easier
than building up. The ultimate measure of a country's "stateness" is whether or not national
leaders are able to monopolize authority over the legitimate means of coercion, namely, the
police and other law enforcement agencies, the armed forces, and the intelligence services. In
Afghanistan today, there is no lack of parochial interests that, due to past rivalries and fears
about the future, resist the orderly ceding of these coercive powers to a nationally recognized,
broadly representative authority.

Afghan politics under Karzai's Interim and Transitional authorities have been, as always,
characterized by a great deal of factional squabbling, both within the government and between
the government and other centers of power around the country. There are as yet no political
parties in the conventional Western sense; rather, the main players tend to be fluid political-
military coalitions loosely organized around ethnic, tribal, clan, and personal loyalties. As one
account puts it, "The new government is composed of militarily strong Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara
factions [all previously affiliated with the Northern Alliance], and a weak Pashtun majority."21
Karzai's writ does not extend much beyond Kabul, both because he has no personal militia and
also because the nascent Afghan National Army (ANA), which is being trained by the U.S.
military, has only nine thousand members to date.22

The core of the Transitional Authority is composed mainly of two groups: moderate-
conservative Pashtun leaders aligned with Karzai and Tajiks representing different factions of
the victorious Northern Alliance. Defense Minister Muhammad Fahim and Foreign Minister
Abdullah (half Tajik and half Pashtun, he uses only one name) are closely aligned with Tajik
Northern Alliance leader Burhannudin Rabbani. Fahim continues to command the loyalty of his
own battle-hardened Tajik militia, which, contrary to the provisions of the Bonn Accord
discussed above, remains garrisoned in Kabul even today. Other significant warlords affiliated
with the Northern Alliance and now the Transitional Authority include Ismail Khan, a Tajik
whose power is centered
126

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

in Herat Province, Abdul Rashid Dostam, an Uzbek based in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif,
and Abdul Karim Khalili, a Shiite Hazara whose supporters are located mainly in Bamiyan
Province. The ultraconservative Pashtun Abdul Rasul Sayyaf is officially outside the government
but commands influence in the Paghman area.

All of these competing power brokers have their own well-armed private militias, and
internationally mediated negotiations over how to disarm them in the lead up to nationwide
elections have proved extremely difficult.23 As political factions jockey for favorable position in
a democratizing Afghanistan, clashes between warlords and their militias remain a depressingly
common phenomenon all around the country. Karzai has grown bolder in deploying the new
ANA in an attempt to put a stop to regional clashes, but only with mixed results. *

The most challenging security threats to the new Afghanistan emanate from the southern and
eastern portions of the country (especially the provinces of Ghazni, Kandahar, Khost, Paktika,
and Zabul) along and across the border with Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province (especially
the semiautonomous tribal agencies of South Wazirstan, North Wazirstan, Mohmand Agency,
Khyber Agency, and Orakzai Agency). In this remote, traditionalist, Pashtun tribal belt, Taliban
and al Qaeda fighters who were widely dispersed during OEF in 2001 have to a considerable
extent regrouped to fight another day.

Both Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar are still at large, although
it is not apparent from public sources whether they exercise effective command over their
warriors or are able to collaborate with one another. It is clear that hundreds, if not thousands,
of Taliban and al Qaeda militants are armed and active on both sides of the Pakistan-
Afghanistan border. Over the past year, they have attacked U.S. military bases, set off
explosions in crowded Afghan cities, ambushed American, Pakistani, and Afghan soldiers, and
murdered and kidnapped Afghan and foreign aid workers.

Some of these Taliban and al Qaeda remnants are also believed to have aligned themselves
with warlord and Soviet-era Afghan resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his
ultraconservative Hizb-i-Islami Party, which remains powerful in the border regions of eastern
Afghanistan. Hekmatyar spent much of the 1996-2001 Taliban era in Iran but returned to
Afghanistan to resume the jihad in 2002, after which U.S. forces promptly tried, but failed, to
kill him in a missile attack. Washington has subsequently branded Hekmatyar a "Specially
Designated Global Terrorist."24
Battling these resurgent Taliban/al Qaeda/Hizb-i-Islami warriors on the Afghan side of the
Pashtun tribal belt is a combination of U.S. Army troops, U.S. Marines, U.S. Special Forces units,
and CIA paramilitary personnel. The number of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan totaled some
13,500 in the late spring of 2004. Also part of the OEF coalition have been about two thousand
military personnel from France, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Denmark,
although these forces are not deployed in southeastern Afghanistan. On the other side of the
border, the Pakistan army has deployed some seventy thousand troops in an attempt to flush
out the militants from tribal areas previously considered off-limits to the army. Its task is
complicated by the fact that local tribal leaders resent the army's intrusion and provide succor
to their fellow Pashtuns. Although the United States has said publicly that its forces operate
only in Afghanistan, Pakistani units have coordinated their assaults with the U.S. military and
been aided by U.S.-supplied intelligence.25 Pursuant to the 2001 Bonn Agreement and
subsequent UN authorization, security in and around Kabul has been the primary responsibility
of the multinational International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF). More than thirty
countries have contributed some six thousand soldiers to ISAF. In August

2003 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) assumed command of ISAF in what was the
trans-Atlantic alliance's first-ever deployment of troops outside Europe or North America. ISAF's
core force is the Kabul Multinational Brigade, headed by Canada and composed of three battle
groups led by Canada, Germany, and France.26 In 2002 and 2003, ISAF came under heavy
criticism from UN AM A, the Transitional Authority, and humanitarian nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) for not extending its security presence outside of Kabul, where Afghan
and international development specialists work every day under the threat of attack,
kidnapping, and murder. Responding to these complaints, NATO in October 2003 approved the
gradual expansion of ISAF's authority beyond the capital.

Over time, ISAF's mission has to an extent coalesced with that of a December 2002 U.S.
initiative, also undertaken at the behest of vulnerable aid workers. The Department of Defense
has spearheaded the creation of provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) that work with local
Afghan authorities to repair buildings, communications installations, bridges, dams, and roads,
while creating a secure environment for reconstruction. The PRTs are essentially partnerships
linking foreign soldiers, civilian affairs officers, and aid specialists with NGO and local Afghan
workers. They are intended to push the reconstruction process along by drawing security-
conscious NGOs into underserved areas and employing local Afghan labor in productive
activities. As of March 2004, some twelve PRTs were operational.27 So far, non-U.S. forces from
Germany, Canada, and New Zealand have led three of the operational PRTs. In January 2004
ISAF/NATO personnel assumed command of the German-led PRT in Kunduz.28 If all goes
according to plan, NATO-led ISAF forces will increasingly take responsibility for leading
additional PRTs.
ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

The international community is also engaged in a mammoth attempt to revitalize the Afghan
economy and society. The main priorities to date have been the resettling of Afghan refugees,
the rebuilding of the country's transportation infrastructure, the rehabilitation of schools and
medical facilities, and, increasingly, the eradication of opium poppy production, which has
skyrocketed since the Taliban's demise. Funding for these initiatives has been raised at a series
of international donor conferences since 2002. The latest donor meeting, held in Berlin in the
spring of 2004, resulted in pledges of $8.2 billion over the following three years, including $4.4
billion in the first year.29 Unilateral U.S. aid for Afghanistan has been targeted at enhancing
security, including a new Afghan police force, counternarcotics programs, human rights
(including women's rights) initiatives, humanitarian and development assistance, social
programs, including education and health care, technical support for Afghan ministries, and
infrastructure repair. Table 5.1 shows annual U.S. aid appropriations from 1990 through 2004.

Although international aid efforts have been significantly hampered by Afghanistan's precarious
security environment, notable successes have been achieved. Perhaps the most important of
these has been the repatriation and resettlement of some three million refugees by the United
Nations High cornmissioner for Refugees.30 Aid workers have also made appreciable strides in
The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

129

the area of infrastructure, crucial for a country with no functioning railroads and a road system
that was in total disrepair as of the beginning of 2002. The Salang Tunnel has been repaired and
reopened, restoring a vital lifeline between northern Afghanistan and the rest of the country.
The three-hundredniile Kabul-to-Kandahar highway was rebuilt and opened in December 2003
as the first leg of a planned "ring road" that will ultimately link all of Afghanistan's major cities.
U.S. aid has also helped to repair more than eight hundred miles of secondary roads.31

Afghan schools reopened in March 2003, with girls in attendance and women teaching for the
first time since the Taliban came to power in 1996. Since the war ended in 2001, the United
States has constructed and rehabilitated more than two hundred schools, trained some twenty-
one hundred teachers, and distributed more than ten million textbooks. U.S. aid officials plan to
build 152 new schools and refurbish 255 more by September 2004. The United States has also
rebuilt 140 health clinics and plans to complete work on a total of 378 new and refurbished
health clinics by the end of 2004 ?2

One cause of grave concern for the Transitional Authority and its international backers is the
dramatic resurgence of the Afghan drug economy, suppression of which was perhaps the
Taliban regime's only decent accomplishment. Opium is Afghanistan's biggest cash crop, with
the International Monetary Fund estimating that the underground opium economy is about half
the size of the country's legitimate gross domestic product. Afghans produced seventy-four
thousand hectares worth of opium in 2002 and another eighty thousand in 2003. Estimates for
2004 project that a record 120,000 hectares worth of opium will be produced. Some half a
million-one in fiftyAfghans are believed to be involved in narcotics production and trafficking,
which provides a steady stream of income for local warlords to invest in their militias.33
Recognizing that Afghanistan is once again the leading source of heroin in the world, $170
million of U.S. aid for fiscal year 2004 is dedicated to counternarcotics programs.34 See table
5.2 for U.S. funding priorities in •Afghanistan.

CONCLUSION

Afghanistan today is a country risen from the dead. To extend the metaphor, will it walk again,
gain strength, find nourishment, grow, perhaps even run one day? There is no dearth of
observers predicting that if present trends continue, Afghanistan will be bedridden for a long
time to come. Media accounts and expert reports are filled with grim stories about what is
wrong with the country: the central government's authority is too limited; warlords and their
130

militias continue to rule vast swatches of territory; the ANA is too small and too weak;
reconstruction is slow going; violence is pervasive; drugs and guns fuel a black-market
economy; roads, schools, health care, indeed, all the basics of a stable, modern society, are
woefully inadequate.

There is no denying any of this. Measured against idealized notions of what a healthy,
prosperous society looks like, Afghanistan is indeed in bad shape. But a fairer standard of
measurement is to assess how Afghanistan is doing today relative to its recent past-relative to
the Taliban period, when women were forbidden to work, girls were not allowed to go to
school, and "criminals" were "convicted" by mullahs and stoned to death or had limbs
amputated, relative to the post-Soviet civil war era, when competing warlords reduced literally
to rubble a city that had survived even the Soviet onslaught, and relative to the period of Soviet
occupation, when, again literally, half a nation was killed, maimed, or terrorized into flight.
By that measure, Afghanistan is in reasonably good shape. Its people are free. Men and women
can work and send their children-boys and girls-to school. A process has begun that will allow
Afghans, for the first time ever, to decide who will govern them. They can worship their God,
sing their songs, play soccer on dusty streets. As for material well-being, Afghans are a
profoundly destitute people; however,
The Reconstitution and Reconstruction of Afghanistan

131

boosted by relative calm after 20 years of conflict, by good rains and by foreign money, the
economy is picking up. The IMF estimates that Afghanistan's economy grew by almost 20% last
year. Agriculture, which makes up over half of the legal economy and sustains 60% of the
population, has started to recover from years of drought and fighting. Although Afghanistan still
suffers from the destruction of its irrigation systems, the IMF reports that cereal production has
gone up by 50% last year, following an 80% increase the year before. Foreign assistance has fed
the construction sector, while trade has picked up. The government, which is banking on the
private sector, is praised for its sound macroeconomic management, the introduction of a new
currency, and new financial and investment regulations. A few foreign investors have even
started to venture into the country. Two cellular telephone networks are operating, while a
five-star hotel project in Kabul is betting on a continued flow of diplomats and international
bureaucrats.35

Generalizations about a people, even positive ones, can be hazardous. But Afghans have to be
counted among the hardiest, most resilient people in the world. Unfortunately, their leaders
over the years have sacrificed their cornmon good in the pursuit of personal and parochial
ambitions. Among the many possible roads that lie ahead, two stand out. The first descends
into political and social division, economic deprivation, and, inevitably, a new cycle of disease,
death, and destruction. The second ascends into relative political and social harmony, gradual
but steady economic development, and, with a lot of help from friends, an improved standard
of living. If Afghan leaders can somehow find a way to bury their recent history, the Afghan
people may be headed along their road less traveled/Hope springs eternal.

NOTES

1. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), vii, 4.

2. Kenneth Katzman, "Afghanistan: Current Issues and U.S. Policy," CRS Report for Congress,
U.S. Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., October 1, 2003, 29.

3. "News Focus: The United Nations and Afghanistan," UN News Centre, April 25, 2004,
available at [Link]/apps/news/infocusnews.

4. UN Development Program, "Afghanistan: Preliminary Needs Assessment for Recovery and

Reconstruction," January 2002; UN Development Program, "Human Development Indicators,
2003," both available at [Link] The United Nations apparently cannot
calculate or does not report Afghanistan's Human Development Index.

5. Henry F. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1985), 9.

6. Anthony Arnold, Afghanistan's Two-Party Communism: Parcham and Khalq (Stanford, Calif.:
Hoover Institution Press, 1983), 13.

7. Muhammad R. Azmi, "Soviet Politico-Military Penetration in Afghanistan, 1955 to

1979," Armed Farces and Society 12, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 335.
132

Devin T. Hagerty and Herbert G. Hagerty

8. "Background Note: Afghanistan," Bureau of South Asian Affairs, U.S. Department of State,
January 2004.

9. Olivier Roy, "Islam in the Afghan Resistance," Religion in Communist Lands 12, no l (Spring
1984): 375.

10. Anthony Arnold, "The Stony Path to Afghan Socialism: Problems of Sovietization in an Alpine
Muslim Society," Orbis 24, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 45.

11. Louis Dupree, Leftist Movements in Afghanistan (Hanover, N.H.: American Universities Field
Staff, 1979), 2.

12. Dr. Felix Ermacora, "Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan," UN
Commission on Human Rights, February 1986, 27.

13. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the
Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 11. The helicopters referred
to in this quotation were Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships, arguably the single most significant
Soviet military asset in the war.

14. Founded in the eighteenth century, Wahhabbism began in what today is Saudi Arabia.
Named after Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, the movement is dedicated to the purification of
Islam through a return to Koranic principles.

15. Milton Bearden, "Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires," Foreign Affairs 80, no. 6 (November-
December 2001): 24. Bearden was the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in
Pakistan from 1986 to 1989. He was responsible for the CIA's covert action program in support
of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet-supported government.

16. The oft-heard notion that the CIA trained bin Laden is apparently incorrect. As one
authoritative account of this period says, "CIA archives contain no record of any direct contact
between a CIA officer and bin Laden during the 1980s. CIA officers delivering sworn testimony
before Congress in 2002 asserted there were no such contacts, as did multiple CIA officers and
U.S. officials in interviews. The CIA became aware of bin Laden's work with Afghan rebels in
Pakistan and Afghanistan later in the 1980s but did not meet with him even then, according to
these record searches and interviews. If the CIA did have contact with bin Laden during the

1980s and subsequently covered it up, it has so far done an excellent job." Coll, Ghost Wars, 87.
17. Coll, Ghost Wars, 222-23.

18. Kathy Lally, "The Face of Evil, the Voice of Terrorism," Baltimore Sun, September 13,

2001.

19. Devin T. Hagerty, "The United States-Pakistan Entente: Third Time's a Charm?" in Pakistan
on the Brink: Politics, Economics, and Society (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

20. The constitution's full text appears on the website of the Embassy of Afghanistan in
Washington, D.C., at [Link].

21. Kathy Gannon, "Afghanistan Unbound," Foreign Affairs 83, no. 3 (May-June 2004): 38.

22. Remarks by Christina B. Rocca, U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, as
delivered to the International Conference on Afghanistan, Paris, March 26, 2004.

23. "Elections and Security in Afghanistan," Asia Briefing, International Crisis Group,
Kabul/Brussels, March 30,2004.

24. Katzman, "Afghanistan: Current Issues and U.S. Policy," 10.

25. Much of the information in the previous four paragraphs is from press accounts: Phil
Zabriskie, "Undefeated: On the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border, the Taliban Are Regrouping, Bent
on Spreading Terror," Time Asia, July 14, 2003, available at [Link]/time/asia/
magazine; John Lancaster and Kamran Khan, "Pakistan to Step Up Border Operations,
Washington Post, February 23, 2004; Dana Priest and Kamran Khan, "Al Qaeda Leaders May Be
Cornered," Washington Post, March 19, 2004.

26. Gannon, "Afghanistan Unbound," 38-39; Katzman, "Afghanistan: Current Issues and U.S.
Policy," 16-17.

27 Ron Synovitz, "Afghanistan: PRTs Go beyond Humanitarian Assistance into Security Realm,"
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 6, 2004.

9g "NATO Expands ISAF Peacekeeping Mission in Afghanistan," United States Mission to the
European Union, January 7, 2004, available at [Link]/Categories/Defense/Jan0704
NATO Afghanistan .html,

29. "Berlin Declaration," International Afghanistan Conference, March 31-April 1, 2004. Overall
contributions since 2002 are difficult to calculate because at any given time countries make
pledges covering various future periods. Although critics claim that pledges for Afghanistan
have not been completely fulfilled, the $4.5 billion pledged at the 2002 Tokyo conference has
apparently been allocated in full.

30. Remarks by Christina B. Rocca, cited above.

31. "Fact Sheet: Progress in Afghanistan's Reconstruction," U.S. Department of State, March 26,
2004, available at [Link].

32. "The New Afghanistan: Progress and Accomplishments," U.S. Department of State, available
at [Link] (accessed May 1, 2004).

33. Statement of Robert B. Charles, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and
law enforcement affairs, before the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform,
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, April 1, 2004; Judy Aita,
"Opium Cultivation Continues to Grow in World's Largest Producer, Survey Finds," Washington
File, Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, October 29,2003.

34. Katzman, "Afghanistan," 34.

35. "Afghanistan: Passing the Hat [Link] for the Rebuilders; Money Is Good, but Afghans Need
Security as Well," The Economist, April 1, 2004.

FURTHER READING

Arnold, Anthony. Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Perspective. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover
Institution Press, 1985.

Borovik, Artyom. The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in
Afghanistan. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the
Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Dupree, Louis. Afghanistan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Goodson, Larry P. Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the
Taliban. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

Gunaratna, Rohan. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror. New York: Berkley, 2002.

Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2003.

Lamb, Christina. The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage through Afghanistan. New
York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Rashid, Ahmed. Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. New York: Penguin, 2003.

. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven, Conn.:

Yale University Press, 2001.

Roy, Olivier. Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University

Press, 1990.

Rubin, Barnett. The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the
International System. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.
Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

Robert Wirsing1

A steady accumulation of global crises since the catastrophic terrorist attacks on New York City
and Washington, D.C., in September 2001 transformed what in the previous decade had
remained a somewhat academic debate about the likely shape of the post-Cold War world
order into an immediate and insistent matter of foreign policy. Like it or not, world leaders
could no longer avoid either the question of the post-Cold War world's likely destiny or the
equally imperative question of how best to fashion their nations' foreign policies in response to
it.

Exactly where South Asia would fit in the emerging world order inevitably formed a subset of
the questions confronting world leaders. In 2003 the region held three (India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh) of the ten most populous nations on earth, and these three nations alone
constituted 21.3 percent of the world's total population. Two of them (India, Pakistan) ranked
among the world's nine nuclear-weapon powers. Aside from a huge share of the world's
economic, political, and environmental problems, South Asia also appeared to house a
disproportionate share of the world's terrorists. India and Pakistan had spent ten tension-filled
months, from December 2001 to October 2002, locked in a menacing, nuclear-weapons-tinged
confrontation, in which a million troops mobilized along their border. In short, South Asia could
be ignored only at the policymaker's peril.

For the policymakers of the United States, Russia, and China, implicated for decades in the
region's strategic development, the question of South Asia's evolving strategic role and
importance in the world was especially urgent. It is on these three great powers that this
chapter focuses. For each of these external actors, shaping strategic policy toward South Asia
continues in the new century to present formidable difficulty. No small part of the difficulty
arose from the inescapable fact of the South Asian region's premier
136

Robert Wirsing

strategic dilemma, the longstanding and seemingly intractable rivalry, now nuclear, between
India and Pakistan. As in the past, this rivalry offered all three of these powers tempting
opportunities for alliance, for arms sales, and for much else; at the same time it continued to
impose severe limitations on the policy options open to them. The most troublesome such
limitation was the zero-sum character of the India-Pakistan relationship and the consequent
immense burden of framing workable policy toward one side without alienating the other. In
theory, a country's policies toward India and Pakistan could be "dehyphenated" or "decoupled,"
as was urged upon American policymakers in the last years of the Clinton administration. In
practice, pursuing discrete policy trajectories toward India and Pakistan ran up against the
insuperable obstacle of their deep strategic entanglement with one another.

This chapter contends with these limitations upon great-power policies in South Asia,
particularly with the handicap imposed*on the foreign policy interests and objectives of the
United States, Russia, and China by the deep rivalry between India and Pakistan. The discussion
acknowledges important changes in the foreign policies each of the three external powers has
adopted in recent years toward India and Pakistan. It maintains, however, that the stubborn
persistence of the Indo-Pakistani rivalry exerts, for the most part, a profoundly conservative
influence on these policies, breeding in them at least as much continuity as discontinuity and, in
particular, discouraging changes in policy that would promote greater regional stability and
cooperation. The discussion argues, finally, that only the world's sole superpower, the United
States, appears to have the capacity to reshape fundamentally the security architecture of the
region, to break the logjam in India-Pakistan relations, so to speak, and thus to set the South
Asian region on a new, potentially less conflict-ridden, trajectory. Whether it has the will to do
so has yet to be demonstrated.

THE UNITED STATES AND THE INDIA-PAKISTAN EQUATION

For over fifty years, India and Pakistan have been rivals, not only of one another, but also for
the friendship of the United States. Pakistan has had lengthy stretches of formal alliance with
Washington, in earlier decades even earning the enviable reputation as "America's most allied
ally." Its reputation among Americans has been glaringly inconstant, however, slipping in the

1960s, rising swiftly during the Afghanistan War (1979-1989), falling again in the years following
the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, and then, following September 11, again rebounding.

India, apart from a brief flirtation with the idea of alliance with the United States in 1962-1963
in the immediate aftermath of China's military on-
Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

137

eht against India's northern borders, spent most of the first fifty years of

5 oostindependence history in a relationship with the United States that n nnis Kux
characterizes as one of "estrangement."2 India, however, always tstripped Pakistan in real or
potential economic and military weight. As a esult, many Americans persisted all along in citing
India as Pakistan's potential replacement. Toward the end of President Clinton's second term,
just such a move appeared in Washington's policy toward South Asia. It surfaced most visibly
during Clinton's much-publicized visit to the region in March

2000, in the course of which differences in Washington's attitudes toward India and Pakistan,
namely, a conspicuous tilt in favor of India, were evident not only in the length of the visits to
each country (five days in India, five hours in Pakistan) but in the president's public demeanor
and comments.3 During the early months of the George W. Bush administration, there were
indications that the shift in India's favor would continue. The events of September 11 disturbed
the shift, of course, giving an immediate and major boost to Pakistan. However, while the fact
of Pakistan's current rise in stature in Washington's eyes is readily demonstrable, its
permanence is not. The potential for yet another downturn in U.S. perceptions of Pakistan
continues to bedevil the relationship. In contrast, sustained efforts by Washington to foster a
closer strategic partnership with New Delhi seem likely.

INDIA IN WASHINGTON'S PERSPECTIVE

There is nearly uniform agreement among the subcontinent's observers that little remains of
the Nehruvian Weltanschauung that guided Indian foreign policy for decades after
independence. The familiar beliefs that went along with it, particularly in the virtues of
nonalignment, were shattered, along with much else, with the ending of the Cold War. The
collapse of India's principal ally, the Soviet Union, threw India's foreign policy into disarray and
left its decision makers with no option, as Sumit Ganguly puts it, but "to reassess the precepts
on which the country's policies had been based and recalculate their nation's goals, options and
strategies."4 In practice, this reassessment has brought the opportunity for a fundamental
redesign of Indian security policies. The possibility now looms for constructing new security
partnerships. As noted above, the United States has clearly emerged as the preeminent
candidate for such a partnership. A number of factors work in favor of such a partnership.
These include mounting economic ties, not only in trade and investment but in symbiotic
development of information-technology industries; an increasingly large, wealthy, well-
educated, and politically influential Indian diaspora community in the United States;
overlapping strategic interests when it comes to China,
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Robert Wirsing

Central Asia, and the Middle East; and finally, though by no means least importantly, shared
apprehensions in regard to global terrorism.5 These same factors lend themselves, of course, to
more than one interpretation. When it comes to two-way trade between the United States and
India, for instance there can be no doubt that it is on the rise. Merchandise exports from India
to the United States rose by 21.4 percent in 2002 to $11.82 billion, the highest figure yet
achieved. However, in the value of merchandise exports, India ranked only nineteenth among
America's trade partners, far behind China, of course, whose exports to the United States, at
$124.8 billion, ranked it fourth, but even behind tiny Israel. India's imports of merchandise from
the United States were still extremely modest. At $3.7 billion in 2002, India ranked twenty-
seventh among importers of U.S. goods.6

Just how far the Indo-U.S. relationship will or should go is thus inevitably the focus of a lively
debate in both countries. While virtually everyone concedes that the relationship has taken
significant strides forward in recent years, there is no consensus on what form it will take in
coming years. The broad outlines of the debate have been well captured in a pair of articles
published at the end of 2002 in the Washington Quarterly. In "A Paradigm Shift toward South
Asia?" C. Raja Mohan, noted Indian commentator and strategic-affairs editor of The Hindu,
observes, "U.S. policy toward the region since September 11 has signaled a fundamental
change in both the intensity and the quality of U.S. involvement in South Asia." The United
States, he says, "has begun to focus on the deeper conflicts that have long troubled the region.
For its part, the region itself has been more receptive than ever before to the new U.S.
engagement."7 Boiled down to its essentials, Mohan's essay argues that September 11
"globalized" South Asian security and that this fundamental alteration in the region's
geopolitical framework has opened wide the door to a qualitatively new role for the United
States in the region. He points to two specific discontinuities contributing to the new globalized
circumstances. The most significant of them, he claims, "has been the development of sound
bilateral relations between the United States and both India and Pakistan. One year after the
attacks, the Bush administration can rightfully boast of strong equities and unprecedented good
relations with New Delhi and Islamabad."8 The second of them, he says, is the shift in
Washington's priorities in the region from an exaggeratedly single-minded focus on nuclear
nonproliferation to a more comprehensive concern with regional peace. By this, he means that
Washington, while evincing thus far no enthusiasm for direct, overt mediation of the Kashmir
dispute, has discovered that its high-level political efforts at crisis management in spring and
summer
2002, at the height of India-Pakistan force mobilization, were successful in helping to de-
escalate tensions and might well serve as a model for the future.9 Mohan suggests that the
Bush administration, over the course of defusing the

2002 crisis, came upon three important realizations that could supply the basis for a continuing
peace process in the region:

Pakistan's sponsorship of cross-border terrorism can no longer be ignored or condoned. Conflict

resolution efforts are critical to end recurrent crises between India and Pakistan. Free, fair,
inclusive, and nonviolent elections to the state assembly on the Indian side of Kashmir could be
the starting point of a peace process on the subcontinent.10 South Asia, he declares,

is at the cusp of a historic transformation. India has begun to shed the accumulated mistrust of
Washington, is seeking stronger bilateral ties, and is ready to work with the United States to
promote peace and prosperity in the region. Washington will have to overcome its tendency to
obsess over single issues in the region-nonproliferation in the past and the war on terrorism
now-but the U.S. diplomacy since September 11 has set the stage for a more broadly based U.S.
policy toward the subcontinent.11 In short, says Mohan, a window of opportunity has opened
in South Asia, and the United States should jump through it.

In a companion piece, Satu Limaye, director of research at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security
Studies in Honolulu, Hawaii, takes a far less sanguine view of developments in the
subcontinent. His essay "Mediating Kashmir: A Bridge Too Far" focuses specifically on the
region's premier territorial dispute. Its implicit purpose, however, is clearly to introduce greater
skepticism into the Indo-U.S. equation, broadly construed, than was entertained in Mohan's
essay. In particular, Limaye's essay highlights the chilling effects the deep rivalry over Kashmir
has on American involvement in the region. Limaye argues that the U.S. stake in the
subcontinent's affairs, even after September 11, is more ostensible than real and that calls for
Washington to take a sustained interest in conflict resolution in the region are misguided.
"Although greater now than in the past," he observes, "the dangers and costs of the conflict's
persistence, the extent of U.S. influence, and Indian and Pakistani receptivity to U.S. mediation
are all largely overstated. U.S. interests in Kashmir and the prospect of achieving a compromise
are at best debatable."12

Limaye contends, in particular, that it is "a beguiling but illusory notion . . . that increased U.S.
engagement with the subcontinent after September 11 makes sustained U.S. mediation to
resolve the dispute in Kashmir more feasible."13 In actuality, he points out, neither India nor
Pakistan is especially enthusiastic about third-party intervention, Pakistan because of the fear
that the Kashmir dispute has become hopelessly entangled with the war on terrorism, India
because of its own deep reservations about the long-range implications
Robert Wirsing

of the close security relationship Washington has built with Pakistan in the wake of September
11. Limaye maintains,

Neither the profound commitment necessary to ensure Pakistan's security, nor the efforts
required to help achieve a compromise in Kashmir is justified by U.S. interests in India or
Pakistan or in their amity. Episodic crisis management and behind-the-scenes facilitation,
however cumbersome and unsatisfying, are feasible, effective, and more commensurate with
U.S. interests.14

In short, he bluntly suggests, "the United States does not have a dog in the Kashmir fight."'5

The Kashmir dispute is only one factor, of course, giving future shape to the Indo-U.S. strategic
relationship. Another, potentially very powerful factor is China. Some China watchers in the
United^States, banking on India's inevitable resentment toward China stemming from the 1962
war and the continued festering of their unresolved border dispute, have been pressing for
India's enlistment as a strategic counterweight to China. India and the United States may be
laying the groundwork for just such a strategic role through the conduct recently of joint
military exercises involving all branches of Indian and U.S. military forces. Indo-U.S. relations, by
any yardstick, have unquestionably made dramatic advances in recent years. Nevertheless, the
fact remains, as China specialist Mohan Malik comments in a recent and perceptive essay, that
"Washington's preoccupations with the war on terror and Iraq have tended to push into the
background the effort to fashion an overall strategic framework for advancing U.S.-Indian
interests in Asia." More than that, he points out, Pakistan's renewed importance in
Washington's eyes was bound to dim India's confidence in America's long-term reliability.
"While 'the China factor' draws the U.S. and India closer," he says," 'the Pakistan factor' pulls
them apart." When it comes to partnership with Washington, he concludes, there are both
great expectations and deep skepticism on the Indian side.16 How substantial the basis is for
India's skepticism deriving from "the Pakistan factor" requires close examination.

PAKISTAN IN WASHINGTON'S PERSPECTIVE

Just how favorably Washington is disposed toward Pakistan at any given time has been shaped
by many considerations, including the state of Pakistan's confrontational relationship with its
Indian neighbor, the strength of its embrace of political democracy and a free market economy,
the spirit in which it incorporated Islam into its state identity, and the license it took in the
pursuit of nuclear weapons. More than any of these, however, Pakistan's standing in
Washington was always impacted most heavily by its strategic utility

Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

141

or fit, in other words, whether and to what extent its leaders seemed able and willing to meld
Pakistan's national interests to U.S. policy imperatives. In this transparently dependent
relationship, it was always Washington's perception of strategic necessity, in company with
Pakistan's capacity for adapting to it, that drove the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Pakistan's
capacity in this regard has been put to its severest test ever in the period since September 11.
Washington's immediate identification of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as state sponsor of the al
Qaeda terrorist network, thus, as an active accomplice to the terrorist attacks and logical first
target in the global war on terrorism (GWOT), plunged the army-ruled government of Pakistan
into acute crisis. Pakistan's geographic proximity to Afghanistan made it a primary candidate for
renewed alliance with the United States. Also arguing for alliance with the United States were
neighboring India's prompt offer to Washington of total support in the war on Afghanistan and
Pakistan's dire military and economic weaknesses. By no means least among Pakistani
calculations, however, was the possibility of punishment by Washington if Islamabad made the
wrong choice. Thus, Pakistan's actual choice to join the global coalition against terrorism and to
offer immediate tangible aid, including military bases, in Washington's impending war on
Afghanistan came as no surprise. How much longer and how fully Islamabad will continue to
honor that decision, the policy implications of which clearly went well beyond the immediate
rupture of Pakistan's ties with Afghanistan, will depend to a large extent on how successfully
Islamabad manages to adjust its own paramount national security concerns to Washington's,
particularly as these relate to the war on terrorism. In this regard, three issues stand out as
crucial tests of the durability of the U.S.-Pakistani relationship: Pakistan's management of
Islamic extremism, the Kashmir dispute with India, and Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program.

PAKISTAN'S MANAGEMENT OF ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

On the day following the terrorist attacks on the United States, the president of Pakistan, Gen.
Pervez Musharraf, appealed for a "concerted international effort... to fight terrorism in all its
forms and manifestations."17 A few days later, Pakistan was formally enlisted in the global
coalition against terrorism. Islamabad quickly launched a desperate effort to persuade the
Taliban leadership to hand Osama bin Laden over to the West for punishment; but by the time
the U.S.-led bombing campaign against Afghanistan began on October

7, Islamabad had cut its formal diplomatic ties with Kabul (the last nation in the world to do so)
and was resigned to the virtually complete abandonment of its former ally. From the Pakistani
point of view, there was a bright side to all of this. For one thing, Pakistan's transformation
from pariah to partner
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Robert Wirsing

on the embattled frontline against terrorism brought a welcome political boost. For another,
while Musharraf was careful to describe his decision to support the international campaign
against terrorism as one based on principles, the promise of relief for Pakistan's beleaguered
economy brought an obvious material boost. However, there was also an unavoidable dark side
to Pakistan's choice. On September 20, President George W. Bush had warned that "every
nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the
terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will
be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."18 Musharraf had made plain in a candid
address to the nation only one day earlier that taking what he called "wrong decisions" in the
country's moment of crisis could have serious consequences for Pakistan's "critical concerns."
These he identified as Pakistan's security against "external threat," revival of the economy, the
country's "strategic nuclear and missile assets," and "the Kashmir cause." These had to be
safeguarded at all costs. "Any wrong judgment on our part," he warned, "can damage all our
interests."19

What Musharraf did not say, at least in public, was that Pakistan's avoidance of "wrong
decisions" was going to be far from easy. There were several reasons for this. First, Islamic
extremist forces were well entrenched in Pakistani society and would not easily be brought to
heel. This was a by-product, to no small extent, of sustained and deliberate state policy. For
over two decades Islam had been granted an increasingly important role not only in Pakistan's
domestic politics but in its international politics, too. In the words of Islamic scholar Vali Nasr,
Islamic ideology has become the framework through which Pakistan has defined its national
interests and provided cadence between its domestic politics and regional ambitions. In fact,
Islam has provided Pakistan with a powerful political language and policy-making framework to
bring domestic and international interests and engagements of Pakistan into alignment. In
Islam the state has found a powerful means to shore up domestic authority and to project
power regionally, to make Pakistan a stronger state. Islam has also opened new foreign policy
possibilities to Pakistan, most notably in Afghanistan and Kashmir.20

Second, Washington's conduct of the GWOT was clearly having a negative impact on public
opinion in Pakistan, bringing Islamabad under increasing domestic pressure to break free of
Washington's embrace. In disturbingly large numbers, Pakistanis were reported to dislike
America and to be mainly unsympathetic with the GWOT. A massive Pew Global Attitudes
opinion survey of over thirty-eight thousand people in forty-four nations, conducted roughly a
year after September 11, reported, for instance, that only 10 percent of Pakistanis (the second
lowest percentage among all the nations surveyed)
Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

143

had a favorable opinion of the United States; only 2 percent (the lowest figure among all the
nations surveyed) had a positive impression of the spread Of American ideas and customs; only
9 percent (again, the lowest figure among all nations surveyed) preferred American ideas about
democracy; and while 45 percent opposed the U.S.-led war on terrorism, only 20 percent
favored it.21

Additional evidence of anti-American feelings surfaced in the results of the October 2002
elections of Pakistan's national and provincial assemblies. In the National Assembly election, an
alliance of religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), won an unprecedented 52 of
272 seats (19 percent), assuring Islamists of a power-brokering role in the central government
for the first time in Pakistan's history; and in the provincial elections, the alliance won outright
control of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and a share of power in a coalition
government in Baluchistan-like the NWFP geographically adjacent to the strategically sensitive
Afghanistan border. Electoral support for the MMA was largely confined to these two
provinces, and even in those there were a number of alternative explanations (among them,
public disgust with the incumbents' corruption and misgovernment) for the MMA's electoral
success. Nevertheless, the centrality of anti-American diatribes in its election campaign implied
that anti-Americanism had had more than a minor impact on the electoral outcome. Especially
hazardous for Musharraf, in any event, was the MMA's insistent demand for an end to the
American military presence in Pakistan, a demand that not only ran afoul of the Pentagon's
plans for forward troop deployment in a region of exceptional instability but jeopardized its
capacity for tracking down remnants al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives. Pakistan had clearly been
riding an extremist tiger for a long time. At a minimum, this translated in practice into what one
writer describes as "Pakistan's ambivalent role in the fight against terrorism."22 More
alarmingly, it could mean that President Musharraf's disgruntled Islamic opponents might one
day instigate a violent coup that could result in an extremist Pakistan.

KASHMIR'S DISPUTE WITH INDIA

President Musharraf raised the issue of Kashmir with Secretary of State Colin Powell on
September 16, 2001, during the secretary's hastily arranged, post-September 11 visit to
Islamabad. Musharraf emphasized to Powell that there could be no normalization of India-
Pakistan relations without resolution of the Kashmir dispute and, moreover, that resolution had
to be "in accordance with the wishes of the Kashmiri people."23 This was a formulation that
Musharraf knew would raise India's hackles while also reminding Washington
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Robert Wirsing

that Pakistani collaboration with the United States would come with a political as well as an
economic price. The political price asked of Washington was bound to be steep. For years, the
government of India had been attempting without much success to persuade global opinion
that the roots of the Kashmiri insurrection, begun in 1989, lay mainly on the Pakistani side of
the border. It had increasingly emphasized not only what it claimed was Pakistani society 's
steady drift toward Islamic extremism and fundamentalism, its "Talibanization," in other words,
but also what New Delhi claimed was Pakistan's official sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir.
The terrorist assault on the United States in September 2001 thus presented New Delhi with an
opportunity to join its hitherto largely ignored concerns over the threat of radical Islam with the
now hugely heightened and overlapping concerns of the United States. No less importantly, the
assault significantly increased New Delhi's prospects for refraining the world's understanding of
the Kashmir dispute in terms better fitted to New Delhi's strategic interests-that it was a
dispute having less to do with human rights, in other words, than with the menace of global
terrorism.24

It quickly became apparent that Washington faced a dilemma: how to balance its immediate
requirement for Pakistan's seemingly irreplaceable partnership in the war on terrorism with its
longer-term requirement for the goodwill of Pakistan's vastly bigger and more powerful rival?
Largely to pacify India, the Department of State at the end of 2001 added to its list of
designated terrorist organizations two Pakistan-based groups. Washington sent an even
stronger message to Islamabad of its growing dissatisfaction with Pakistan's Kashmir policy with
the dispatch to Islamabad in June 2002 of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Armitage
maintains that in his two-hour meeting with Musharraf he managed to extract from the
Pakistani leader the pledge of "a permanent end" to Pakistan's support of terrorist activity in
Kashmir. News accounts of the meeting suggested there was room for varied interpretation. In
any event, Musharraf's apparent concession was described in the Washington Post as "a huge
foreign-policy victory for India."25 This seeming U-turn in Pakistan's Kashmir policy actually
produced little more, however, than a suspension, rather than a permanent cessation, of
Pakistanaided cross-border infiltration. Pakistan's reluctance to cave in entirely on the matter
of infiltration is understandable. In recent years, the ratio of "guest" to "indigenous" militants
fighting in Kashmir had grown substantially in favor of the former, most of them Pakistanis. The
fact is that the active armed element of the Kashmir insurgency had gradually been not so
much Talibanized as Pakistanized. Were Pakistan to permanently sideline the Pakistani
element, while also putting the militants' Pakistan army support system out to pasture, there
would be no more insurgency, at least not one New Delhi couldn't easily handle. For Pakistan to
help India out in this manner was just not in the

cards. As Musharraf told Newsweek senior editor Lally Weymouth in an interview published
shortly after his meeting with Armitage, Kashmir, unlike Afghanistan, "is our national
interest."26

PAKISTAN'S NUCLEAR-WEAPONS PROGRAM

Apart from inevitable lingering suspicions in Washington stemming from Islamabad's previous
close ties to the Afghan Taliban, there remained between Pakistan and the United States a host
of unsettled issues relating to Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program. Pakistan was clearly
vulnerable to pressure in regard to these issues, and the possibility existed that their
exacerbation could at any time, notwithstanding Pakistan's cooperation in the war on
terrorism, trigger a major upheaval in Islamabad's relations with Washington. High on
Washington's own list of critical concerns about Pakistan's real or potential nuclear
transgressions was the threat that Pakistan's nuclear weapons or fissile materials might fall into
extremist hands in the event of a radical Islamist takeover of the government. Seymour Hersh's
article "Watching the Warheads," published in a prominent American periodical at the height of
the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, was symptomatic of the danger. In it, he made the
hugely provocative allegation that joint training of American and Israeli commando teams was
already underway in the United States in preparation for possible surprise raids on Pakistan's
nuclear-weapons facilities. The raids were being contemplated, Hersh said, as a prophylactic
measure for implementation if required to keep Pakistan's nuclear weapons from falling into
extremist hands in the event of a radical Islamist takeover of the government.27 Apart from the
fact that Pakistan's nuclear program had been developed in most important respects with
Beijing's illicit, but utterly crucial, assistance, there was now the startling report (denied by
Pakistan) of a Chinese-facilitated nuclear barter arrangement-advanced missiles in exchange for
uraniumenrichment technology-between the Pakistanis and the North Koreans, the third
member of Washington's Axis of Evil.28

Seen from Islamabad, the South Asian region's nuclear danger sprang from an entirely different
source, India primarily, and thus required a remedy tailored specifically to India. Musharraf
outlined the Pakistani point of view in this regard in an address to the UN General Assembly in
November 2001, not long after September 11. Reassuring his audience that Pakistan was "fully
alive to the responsibilities of its nuclear status," Musharraf pointed out that "a stable South
Asian security mechanism" could be achieved, but its achievement was dependent on "a
peaceful resolution of disputes, preservation of nuclear and conventional balance, confidence
building measures and non-use of force prescribed by the UN Charter."29 The linkage to
Kashmir
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Robert Wirsing

was obvious in the first of these; Pakistanis' anxiety over their country's diminishing ability to
keep pace with Indian military acquisitions, whether conventional or nuclear, was evident in the
second. This anxiety showed up in a different context some months later in June 2002 in
Weymouth's abovementioned interview with Musharraf. Speaking of the "root cause" of the
Kashmir issue, the Pakistani president offered a formulation that seemed to depart from the
standard interpretation of Kashmir as the single "core issue" between India and Pakistan. "If
you want a guarantee of peace," he reportedly told Weymouth, "there are three ways: (1)
denuclearize South Asia; (2) ensure a conventional deterrence so that war never takes place in
the subcontinent; and (3) find a solution to the Kashmir problem."30 The second of these,
implying that Washington should arm Pakistan and thus be a conventional arms "balancer" in
the region, rather than India',s preferred military partner, hinted at Islamabad's actual strategic
priorities: while sending a subtle reminder of Pakistan's unavoidable dependence on nuclear
deterrence for its security, it also avowed Islamabad's conviction that an enduring regional
arms balance, conventional or nuclear, could not possibly be achieved irrespective of
Washington's own regional arms policy. It happened that this policy was showing increasing
signs, Islamabad's apprehensions notwithstanding, of deepening military cooperation with
India.

PAKISTAN AND U.S. STRATEGIC DOCTRINE

One is immediately struck, when examining current Pakistani reactions to American strategic
doctrine, by the profound lack of correspondence between the way Pakistani and American
leaders tend to view the emerging world order. As outlined by Richard N. Haass, director of the
policy planning staff at the Department of State, in an address to the Foreign Policy Association
in April 2002, what he termed the post-post-Cold War world would not only be one in which
"American primacy was unprecedented and uncontested" but also in which "increasingly
potent transnational challenges intersect with still important traditional concerns."31 Haass
explicitly cited the India-Pakistan conflict as one in which traditional (rival-nation) concerns
would predominate. But the doctrine of integration, which he advanced to encompass the
complexities of the new traditional/transnational era and to capture the ideas and policies of
the Bush administration, left hardly any room for a conception of the world compatible with
Islamabad's understanding of its national security predicament.

According to Haass, the principal aim of American foreign policy was "to integrate other
countries and organizations into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S.
interests and values, and thereby promote peace,
Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

147

prosperity, and justice as widely as possible." Integration, he said, was "about bringing nations
together and then building frameworks of cooperation and, where feasible, institutions that
reinforce and sustain them even more." Far from being a defensive response, integration, he
said, was "a profoundly optimistic approach to international relations." "We can move from a
balance of power," he said, "to a pooling of power."32 Haass commended Pakistan in the
address for having made the proper strategic choice, namely, to reorient Pakistan's foreign
policy and to "stand with the United States and the rest of the international community against
the Taliban and al-Qaida." Simultaneously, however, he explicitly named India among those
countries slated for partnership with Washington. "This is an era of new partnerships," he
advised.33 Haass's comments did not appear to hold out any hope that the United States would
bring pressure to bear on India to end what Pakistanis insisted was "state terrorism" in Kashmir
or that the United States would actively mediate the Kashmir dispute. Moreover, they seemed
much more likely to endorse intensified military-to-military relationships between Indian and
U.S. armed forces than to license the sale of advanced military hardware to Pakistan, an
interpretation of integration that would surely be favored in Islamabad. Implicit in Haass's
remarks was a steadily widening world of enduring partnerships. Yet, Musharraf was bound to
wonder, as he did in an interview with Larry King in October 2001, whether Pakistanis, once the
moment of their country's immediate strategic utility had passed, would experience once again
the sense of "betrayal and abandonment" that had been their lot in past encounters with the
United States.34 The doctrine of integration, seen from Islamabad, promised not so much a
pooling of power among the world's countries as short shrift for the American-orchestrated
balancing of power that Islamabad felt was essential for peace and security to thrive in the
South Asian region. Pakistanis had grounds for thinking, in other words, that Haass's cornments
signaled not Pakistan's enduring partnership with America but rather Pakistan's far-from-
commanding position in Washington's long-term strategic thinking.

RUSSIA ANDTHE INDIA-PAKISTAN EQUATION

China and the Soviet Union each laid down in the course of the 1960s the foundations of an
"enduring entente" with one of the two South Asian rivals, China with Pakistan, the Soviet
Union with India. China's alliance with Pakistan grew directly out of China's 1962 border war
with India, a conflict that underscored indelibly in Chinese minds Pakistan's potential utility as a
strategic counterweight to India. India's alliance with the Soviet Union was also engendered,
then was hardened as a result of warfare, namely, the 1965 and
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Robert Wirsing

191 \ clashes between India and Pakistan. The alliance rewarded both India and the Soviet
Union with leverage against China, which had moved in the early 1970s toward an increasingly
warm relationship with Washington. The geopolitical furnishings of the South Asian region and
its surroundings have changed in a number of fundamental ways since the Sino-Pakistani and
Indo-Soviet alliances were first fashioned. The Soviet Union's demise is one of the most obvious
of these changes. The emergence of both India and Pakistan as nuclear-weapons-capable states
is another. Still another is the recent formation of the U.S.-led global antiterrorist coalition and
the vast increase in U.S. military presence and power in Central and Southwest Asia that has
resulted. Inevitably, these and other changes in the region are subjecting these two alliances to
considerable strain. Observers wonder whether either one or both of them will survive the
strain. They also wonder, assuming these alliances do not survive, what pattern of alignments
might replace them. India's longstanding security relationship with the Soviet Union had
brought it a number of tangible benefits, including not only the above-mentioned leverage
against China but also a favorable trade relationship; massive quantities of technologically
advanced naval, air, and ground weaponry at concessional rates; attractive coproduction
agreements that gave a boost to India's nascent indigenous defense industries; and the
guarantee of a Soviet veto in the event of adverse actions in regard to Kashmir by the UN
Security Council. All of these benefits were jeopardized, of course, by the Soviet Union's
collapse. Virtually overnight, a comprehensive and mutually beneficial relationship was in
danger of being transformed into what one observer described as "little more than a weapons-
supplier nexus."35 The Indo-Russian relationship today is unquestionably less significant than
was its Indo-Soviet forerunner, and given Russia's breathtaking post-Soviet economic and
military decline, there is no reason to expect restoration of the relationship to anything along
the lines of what it once was-at least not in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, there is still
considerable disagreement among professional watchers of the relationship as to precisely
what to make of its prospects. On one side of the issue are those, such as Pramit Pal Chaudhuri,
foreign editor of the Hindustan Times, who see in India's remaining links with Russia little to
crow about. "[Tjhe shared ground between Indian and Russian interests is shrinking,"
Chaudhuri comments, "not expanding." First, he points out, India can contribute very little to
the Russian economy, which is Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's number one priority. Nonmilitary
trade between India and Russia, he notes, has shrunk to barely more than $1 billion a year.
Given the geographic distance between the two countries, it is unlikely to grow very rapidly.
Add to the geographic distance the presence between them of a hostile Pakistan, Chaudhuri
observes, and there is equally little prospect of India's becoming a significant consumer of
Russian gas and oil. Second,
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149

says Chaudhuri, Russia is simply no longer in a position either to fund the development of the
smart weapons India seeks or to subsidize Indian purchases of Russian arms. Russia's bargain
weapons sales are a thing of the past. Third, there are no longer grounds for Moscow and New
Delhi to make common cause against China. Increasingly, Moscow sees China not as a threat
but as a market. "The truth is," asserts Chaudhuri, "that on almost every economic issue, China
is far more useful to Russia than India." According to Chaudhuri, "It all comes down to this: the
Putin doctrine has little or no place for India. It may one day, but for now India is really just a
place to make a quick buck through arms sales."36

On the other side of the issue are those like Nirmala Joshi, a Russian studies specialist at
Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who concluded, following Putin's visit to India at the
end of 2002, that Indian and Russian geopolitical and security interests, at both the global and
the regional levels, continued to coincide. "India's ties with Russia," she said, "are on a firm
footing; Mr. Putin's visit has added new dynamism to them."37 However firm may be the
footing on which Indo-Russian ties currently rest, one thing is certain: Moscow no longer has
any good reason to remain at arms length from Pakistan. Even on the extremely volatile subject
of terrorism, Pakistan's cooperation may well be more important to Moscow than is India's. "In
any case, Putin clearly believes," argues Chaudhuri, "that Russia can benefit by engaging
directly with Pakistan. . . . Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is part of the solution to
terrorism, not part of the problem as India believes."38 Not wanting a hostile relationship with
Pakistan is one thing. Finding a way to build a friendlier relationship with Pakistan, without at
the same time driving away India, with whom Moscow continues to sustain a lucrative arms-
sales relationship, is another. Not unlike the United States, Moscow today finds itself caught
uncomfortably in the zero-sum rivalry between India and Pakistan.

CHINA: BALANCING INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Western watchers of the strained relationship between China and India have long been divided
into two camps on the issue of the prospects of a breakthrough in Sino-Indian relations. On the
more pessimistic side are those strategic analysts who consider the enmity the "natural"
outgrowth of a growing clash of interests between two of Asia's largest, most populous, and
most powerful continental powers. Analysts in this camp tend to argue that India's interests are
better served through closer ties with the geographically "distant" United States than with
"proximate" China. On the more optimistic side are those who trace the enmity to more
immediate, hence removable, irritants. Analysts
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Robert Wirsing

in this camp generally view Washington's strategic maneuvers in Asia as potentially equally
threatening to India's interests as those of Beijing.

Best representing the first camp, perhaps, is China scholar John W. Garver who points to a
fundamental "security dilemma" confounding Sino-Indian relations. "China," he says,re-harbors
deep suspicions about possible future Indian policies toward Tibet. India holds similar fears
about possible Chinese intervention in a future India-Pakistan war. China has consistently
striven to maintain a balance of power in South Asia, a region far beyond its major industrial
and population centers. Since about 1998, India has launched a similar project in East Asia.
India struggles to maintain control over, and China to neutralize Indian control over, strategic
frontier zones in the Himalayan lands of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. The military instruments of
each state pose inadvertent threats to the other. China*s increasingly powerful and long-range
naval forces pose challenges, intended or unintended, to Indian security in the Indian Ocean.
India's maintenance of substantially ethnic Tibetan paramilitary forces . . . touches Chinese
vulnerabilities associated with the huge civilizational cleavage between Beijing and the Tibetan
population. And both China and India believe their international stature is at stake in
interactions with the other. Each state sees small issues as tied to many other issues to make
up a larger balance and, ultimately, to their status as a major power.39

"The primary activities that constitute the Sino-Indian security dilemma," Garver explains, "are
Chinese efforts to establish and expand political and security relations with the countries of the
South Asia-Indian Ocean region (SA-IOR), on the one hand, and Indian efforts to thwart the
establishment of such links, on the other."40 From the Indian perspective, China's "aggressive"
activities in the SA-IOR, according to Garver, include

• Continuing nuclear, missile, and conventional arms assistance to Pakistan

• Development of a military cum intelligence relationship with Nepal

• Development of increasingly dense military relations with Myanmar

• Mounting People's Liberation Army activities in the Indian Ocean

• Formation of military relations with Bangladesh

• Efforts to establish normal diplomatic relations with Bhutan41

From China's perspective, Garver suggests, these activities are fully warranted by two
fundamental Chinese security vulnerabilities-to both of which India is a substantial contributor.
One is the stability of China's control over Tibet; the second is the safety of China's sea lines of
communication across the Indian Ocean. India's close cooperation with the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency's efforts to penetrate Communist-held Tibet in the 1950s, documented in a
recent study, underscores for Beijing the inherently perishable

Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

151

Character of New Delhi's present hands-off policy toward Tibet.42 By the "arne token, India's
mid-2001 decision to create a Far Eastern Strategic Command at Port Blair for the Andaman
and Nicobar island archipelagos, significantly enhancing India's capacity to monitor and
potentially to threaten key chokepoints in the Indian Ocean, had to be looked upon
apprehensively by Beijing, which was busily expanding its own military activities on islands off
the coast of Myanmar. Compounding Chinese suspicions was India's Look East Policy, launched
in 1995 under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. A mix of economic and military rationales, this
policy aimed at expanding India's security ties with states neighboring China in the Pacific
Ocean. Alarming to Beijing, in particular, were New Delhi's efforts to deepen security dialogue
and cooperation with Vietnam and lapan, both of which had long historical records of bitter
enmity with China. As the Chinese saw it, the Look East Policy, more than anything, had the
earmarks of a counterencirclement policy aimed against China.43 Fundamental to China's
security, viewed in the light of the foregoing, is the restraint of India, an objective that
translates, in general terms, into a broadly based power-balancing strategy in the SA-IOR, and,
more directly, into China's desire for both "a strong Pakistan, and a solid strategic partnership
between China and Pakistan."44

Analysts on the pessimistic side of the debate over China's strategic relationships with the
states of South Asia acknowledge both the strains that have developed in China's alliance with
Pakistan as well as the powerful incentives, for both China and India, of building a closer and
more cooperative relationship between the world's two most populous states. Distinguishing
them from their analytical rivals, however, is the belief that the primarily conflictive
relationship that now prevails between these two states is likely to endure indefinitely.45 The
reasons given for the likely persistence of Sino-Indian rivalry vary all the way from the existence
of two radically opposed "strategic cultures" in India and China46 to the prospect of a "coming
showdown between China and the United States, which will further increase the significance of
China's strategic ties with Pakistan."47 A factor common to virtually all of them, however, is the
strong and interdependent relationship that exists between the Sino-Indian and the
IndoPakistani rivalries. When it comes to Sino-Indian relations, Indians' inevitable anxiety about
China and the nightmare of Sino-Pakistani collusion, on the one hand, and China's huge
incentive to take advantage of India's implacable rivalry with Pakistan, on the other, are
powerful-for the pessimists, unbeatable-security-strategy drivers.

One of the best-known representatives of the optimist camp, Mohan readily concedes that
New Delhi's handling of the relationship with China "is likely to be the biggest political challenge
for Indian foreign policy in the coming decades."48 He concedes, too, that China's dense
strategic ties with
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Robert Wirsing

Pakistan, including active aid in building Pakistan's India-targeted nuclearweapons and

strategic-missile capability, put the Sino-Pakistani relationship "in a category of its own."49
Nevertheless, he is adamant that "India's position is not as hopeless as Carver makes it out to
be."50

Central to Mohan's argument is his belief that the geopolitical and geoeconomic forces released
everywhere by globalization are rendering obsolete traditional Indian objectives of regional
domination and economic exclusivity, while at the same time energizing new objectives of
regional integration and economic cooperation with India's neighbors, including China. Rather
than viewing mounting Chinese economic ties with the eastern part of the subcontinent,
especially with Myanmar and Bangladesh, "as a Chinese plot to swamp the sensitive Indian
North-East," says Mohan, "a confident India could in fact leverage China's growing economic
presence to achieve its own objective of regional integration in South Asia."51

A similar but much loftier, even breathtaking, vision of the positive potential of Sino-Indian
relations is that of B. G. Verghese, a versatile and prolific writer long based at New Delhi's
Centre for Policy Research. In a recent book, Reorienting India: The New Geo-Politics of Asia,
Verghese maintains that an Asian century is in the making and that an emerging "Eurasian land
bridge," consisting of new or improved infrastructural architecture (including river basin,
railway, and road transport routes, gas and oil pipelines, and modernized port facilities) and the
trade and transit diplomatic agreements to go along with it, is already at work, reshaping
fundamentally economic and political relationships among the nations of the Eurasian
heartland, India and China among them.52 He acknowledges that unsettled problems between
these two Asian giants await resolution. "For the next few decades at least," however, "they
should have a strong common interest in working together to build themselves and, with
others, create a framework for peace and stability in Asia and a more equitable and just world
order."53 Now that "the land bridges of and to Inner Asia are redrawing the geo-political and
economic map of Eurasia," he concludes, "Asia is coming together again."54

The contemporary South Asian geopolitical landscape is littered with developments sufficient to
sustain indefinitely the argument between optimists and pessimists over the likely future
trajectory of great-power involvement in the region. At practically the same moment that
Pakistan's naval chief announces a visit to Beijing to nail down a contract to secure three
Chinese frigates by June 2004,55 there are reports that India-China two-way trade, having risen
in 2003 by 53.6 percent over 2002, might well reach $20 billion by 2010, a development that
must be reassuring to those who believe in the primacy of economic drivers.56 For every
Andrew Selth, who argues persuasively that "Beijing's influence with Rangoon has never been
as strong as is sometimes portrayed . . . [and that] Indian fears of encirclement by China,

Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia 153

with Burma being used to secure India's eastern flank, have been exaggerated,"57 there is a
Mohan Malik to suggest (also persuasively) that power-balancing still has its attractions.58

CONCLUSION

Geography, history, and widely disparate definitions of national interest have teamed up to
ensure major differences in the strategic agendas advanced in South Asia by the United States,
Russia, and China. China, sharing a lengthy and disputed border with India and with restive
ethnic minorities inhabiting its own borderlands, has naturally looked upon its neighbor far
differently than has Russia, which for the bulk of its long and friendly association with India
could cite extensive commonality of interests. While the United States has long shared with
China close (including military) ties with Pakistan, the motivation for acquiring them has sprung
from profoundly different sources. For the United States, forging an alliance with Pakistan was
always primarily aimed at containing an extraregional adversary (the Soviet Union). For China,
the alliance with Pakistan was always largely intraregional in focus, prompted mainly by
Beijing's wish to prevent India's emergence as a serious rival and, i in particular, to block India
from any role in China's encirclement. i Differences in the definition of these national
interests naturally persist today. As India's primary arms supplier, Russia inevitably benefits
from continuing tensions between India and Pakistan. So does China. While it "does not want a
heightened crisis in South Asia," says Andrew Scobell, "a certain low level of tension is
desirable. China seeks to thwart Indian hegemony and the emergence of a pliant or subjugated
Pakistan that does India's bidding is not appealing."59 In the absence of tensions, Pakistan
would have vastly reduced incentive to seek China's friendship and, at the same time, India
might show less restraint either in its border dispute with China or in dabbling in Tibetan affairs.
It hardly needs mentioning that the increasing warmth in Washington's relations with New
Delhi inevitably breeds distrust in Beijing. Neither Beijing nor Moscow would welcome
America's undisputed dominance of the region.

Nevertheless, all of the three great powers we have dealt with in this chapter have a major
interest not only in the stability of the South Asian region and the avoidance of nuclear war
between India and Pakistan but also, for economic and other reasons, in simultaneous
development of friendly parallel ties with both of these states. China and the United States, in
particular, have striven in recent years to forge just such parallel ties. For all three of these
great powers, however, this goal has thus far proven extremely elusive, demanding a balancing
act none of them has yet mastered.
154

Robert Wirsing

The only one of the three currently to have highly promising relationsh' with both India and
Pakistan is, of course, the United States. Arguably th United States alone has the resources and
capabilities to convert its parall and positive bilateral relationships with these two states into a
sustained nm' ect of regional conflict resolution. It scarcely needs to be pointed out, however
that Washington, apart from its inevitable reticence about getting sucked into a bilateral
conflict widely viewed as a tar baby, is elsewhere wholly preoccupied at the moment and most
unlikely to invest the objective of improving India-Pakistan relations with the priority needed to
achieve a significant breakthrough. Just such a reordering of priorities is the sine qua non, I
believe for placing India and Pakistan on a path of reconciliation firmly enough to survive the
political turbulence that has come to characterize the region. Russia is clearly in no position to
undo the paralysis that afflicts Indo-Pakistani relations. China's motives are yet far too mixed
for it to take on the task. The task, if the political will can be found, is Washington's.

NOTES

1. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official
policy or position of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, the U.S. Pacific cornmand, the
U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

2. Dennis Kux, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies (Washington, D.C.: National
Defense University Press, 1992).

3. For details, see Robert G. Wirsing, Kashmir in the Shadow of War: Regional Rivalries in a
Nuclear Age (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2003), 108-12.

4. Sumit Ganguly, "India's Alliances 2020," in South Asia in 2020: Future Strategic Balances and
Alliances, ed. Michael R. Chambers (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, November 2002),
364.

5. Teresita C. Schaffer, Rising India and U.S. Policy Options in Asia, A Report of the CSIS South
Asian Program (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2002),
9-10.

6. "Indo-US Bilateral Trade Zooms in 2002," Hindu, March 5, 2003; and statistical table: "U.S.
Trade Balance, by Partner Country 2002 in Descending Order of Trade Turnover (Imports Plus
Exports)" (Washington, D.C.: U.S. International Trade Commission, 2003), available at
[Link]
7. C. Raja Mohan, "A Paradigm Shift toward South Asia?" Washington Quarterly 26, no. 1
(Winter 2002-2003): 141.

8. Mohan, "A Paradigm Shift," 143.

9. Mohan, "A Paradigm Shift," 150.

10. Mohan, "A Paradigm Shift," 150.

11. Mohan, "A Paradigm Shift," 155.

12. Satu P. Limaye, "Mediating Kashmir: A Bridge Too Far," Washington Quarterly 26, no.

1 (Winter 2002-2003): 157.

13. Limaye, "Mediating Kashmir," 161.

14. Limaye, "Mediating Kashmir," 158.

Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

155

15 Limaye, "Mediating Kashmir," 164.

16 Mohan Malik, "High Hopes: India's Response to U.S. Security Policies," Asia-Pacific curity
Studies, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii, March 2003.

17 Press Release, "Statement by the President of Pakistan" (Islamabad: Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, September 12, 2001), available at [Link]/pr/2001/[Link].

18 "Transcript of President Bush's Address," Washington Post, September 21, 2001, 24.

19 "Address by the President of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf to the Nation on September
19,2001, Islamabad" (Islamabad: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 19, 2001).

20. Vali Nasr, "Islamic Extremism and Regional Conflict in South Asia," paper presented to the
conference on Prospects for Peace in South Asia, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford

University, January 21 -22, 2003.

21. Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002 (Washington, D.C.: Pew
Research Center for the People and the Press, December 2002), 53-71. The survey was
conducted in Pakistan in August-September 2002. Respondents, mainly urban, numbered
2,032.
22. Joe de Courcy, "Pakistan's Impossible Dilemma," Asialnt Special Bulletin, Asia Intelligence
Ltd., March 7, 2003.

23. "Joint Press Conference of President of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf and Colin
Powell, U.S. Secretary of State, on September 16, 2001, Islamabad" (Islamabad: Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, September 16, 2001), [Link]/[Link].

24. See Robert G. Wirsing, "Kashmir in the Terrorist Shadow: Impact of 9/11," Journal of Asian
Affairs 33, no. 1 (February 2002): 91-97.

25. Glenn Kessler, "A Defining Moment in Islamabad," Washington Post, June 22,2002, Al.

26. Lally Weymouth, "Voices from a Hot Zone," Newsweek, July 1, 2002.

27. Seymour M. Hersh, "Watching the Warheads: The Risks to Pakistan's Arsenal," New

Yorker, November 5, 2001.

28. Glenn Kessler, "Pakistan's N. Korea Deals Stir Scrutiny," Washington Post, November

13, 2002, Al.

29. "Address by the President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, at the Fifty-Sixth Session
of the United Nations General Assembly, 10 November 2002" (New York: Pakistan Mission to
the United Nations), at [Link]/pakistan/[Link].

30. Weymouth, "Voices from a Hot Zone."

31. Richard N. Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-Post-Cold War World," Remarks to
Foreign Policy Association, New York, April 22,2002, available at [Link]/s/p/

rem/[Link].

32. Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy."

33. Haass, "Defining U.S. Foreign Policy."

34. "Live Interview of General Pervez Musharraf with Larry King of CNN on October 23,

2001" (Islamabad: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, October 23, 2001), at [Link]/CE-017

.html.

35. Ganguly, "India's Alliances 2020," 364.

36. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, "Why the Indo-Russian Relationship Is Going Nowhere in a Hurry,"
Hindustan Times, December 16,2002.

37. Nirmala Joshi," The Putin Visit," The Hindu, December 11,2002. For an earlier and also
relatively upbeat comment on the Indo-Russian relationship, at least the military side of it, see
P. R. Chari, "Indo-Russian Military Cooperation," The Hindu, June 28,2001.

38. Chaudhuri, "Why the Indo-Russian Relationship Is Going Nowhere."

39. John W. Garver, "The Security Dilemma in Sino-Indian Relations," India Review 1, no.

4 (October 2002): 2-3.

40. Garver, "The Security Dilemma," 3-4.

41. Garver, "The Security Dilemma ,"4-5.

156

Robert Wirsing

42. See Kenneth J. Colby and James Morrison, CIA's Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence- Un' versity
Press of Kansas, 2002).

43. Carver, "The Security Dilemma," 25-28.

44. Garver, "The Security Dilemma," 8-9.

45. See, e.g., Devin T. Hagerty, "China and Pakistan: Strains in the Relationship," Current History
(September 2002): 284-89; Mohan Malik, "The China Factor in the India-Pakistan Conflict,"
Parameters 33, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 35-50; and Andrew Scobell, "Does South Asia Matter to
Moscow and Beijing?" paper presented to the Conference on Prospects for Peace in South Asia,
Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, January 21-22, 2003.

46. Andrew Scobell, '"Cult of Defense' and 'Great Power Dreams': The Influence of Strategic
Culture on China's Relationship with India," in South Asia in 2020, 329-59.

47. Malik, "The China Factor," 48.

48. C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy (New Delhi:
Penguin Books India, 2003), 142^3.

49. Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon, 158.

50. Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon, 155. *

51. Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon, 156-57.

52. B. G. Verghese, Reorienting India: The New Ceo-Politics of Asia (New Delhi: Konark
Publishers, 2001), 151-214.

53. Verghese, Reorienting India, 255.

54. Verghese, Reorienting India, 265, 269.

55. "Pakistan May Get Chinese Frigates by June," South Asian Media Net, April 1, 2004.

56. "India, China Hold Talks on Free Trade Agreement," Indian Express, March 25,2004; and
"India-China Trade Pegged at US $20b by 2010," South Asian Media Net, April .3,2004.
57. Andrew Selth, Burma's North Korean Gambit: A Challenge to Regional Security? Canberra
Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 154 (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre,
2004), 37.

58. Mohan Malik, "Burma's Role in Regional Security," in Burma/Myanmar: Strong Regime
Weak State? ed. Morton B. Pederson, Emily Rudland, and R. J. May (Adelaide: Crawford House
Publishing, 2000), 241-77.

59. Scobell, "Does South Asia Matter?" 32.

FURTHER READING

Chambers, Michael R., ed. South Asia in 2020: Future Strategic Balances and Alliances.

Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002. Faruqui, Ahmad. Rethinking the National Security
of Pakistan: The Price of Strategic Myopia.

Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002.

Garver, John W. "The China-India-U.S. Triangle: Strategic Relations in the Post-Cold War Era,"
NBR Analysis 13, no. 5 (October 2002).

. "The Security Dilemma in Sino-Indian Relations," India Review 1, no. 4 (October

2002).

Limaye, Satu. "Mediating Kashmir: A Bridge Too Far," Washington Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Winter
2002-2003).

Malik, Mohan. "The China Factor in the India-Pakistan Conflict," Occasional Paper Series,

Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, November 2002. . "High Hopes: India's
Response to U.S. Security Policies," Asia-Pacific Security Studies,

Asia-Pacific Center for Securitv Studies Hr>i..i.. \*-i- '•««-

^ ^~.,Fu,i;>c 10 u.o. security Policies," As

Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, March 2003.

Great-Power Foreign Policies in South Asia

157

Mohan, C. Raja. "A Paradigm Shift toward South Asia?" Washington Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Winter
2002-2003). Schaffer, Teresita C. Rising India and U. S. Policy Options in Asia. Washington, D .C.:
Center for

Strategic and International Studies, 2002. Wirsing, Robert G. Kashmir in the Shadow of War:
Regional Rivalries in a Nuclear Age. Ar-

monk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. _. "Pakistan and the Bush Administration: Precarious
Partnership," Asia-Pacific Security

Studies, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, March 2003.

II
INTERNATIONAL ISSUE AREAS
__________________________________

Kashmir and India-Pakistan Nuclear Issues

Gaurav Kampani

South Asia is often described as the most dangerous place on earth, the likeliest place where a
nuclear war might be fought in the future. Such concerns center on India and Pakistan's
unabated rivalry over Kashmir and the continuing low-intensity, or subconventional, war in the
region amid vertically proliferating nuclear capabilities.

As discussed in chapters 1 and 2 of this book, the Indo-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir stretches
back to the founding of the states in 1947. India and Pakistan were partitioned out of the
remains of the British Indian Empire on the basis of two rival ideological principles: India as a
secular homeland for the Hindu majority and other religious minorities and Pakistan as a
homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims. Since Partition, New Delhi has considered the
successful incorporation of Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority province, critical to affirming
the success of its secular experiment. Likewise, in the absence of Kashmir's incorporation,
Islamabad regards Pakistan as incomplete.

In the first two decades after Partition, India and Pakistan fought two wars to try to settle their
claims over Kashmir. The first war in 1947-1948 led to Kashmir's division into Pakistani- and
Indian-administered sections, with India gaining control over roughly two-thirds of the territory.
In 1948 India unwittingly internationalized the dispute by seeking UN mediation. The original
UN formula called for a plebiscite to grant the Kashmiri people their right to self-determination.
Although India agreed in principle to a plebiscite, over time it diluted that commitment and
tried to make Kashmir's accession to India permanent. Faced with a growing conventional
disparity with India and frustrated by the failure of UN and U.S.-British third-party mediation
efforts to resolve the dispute, in 1965 Pakistan made a military grab for Kashmir. That effort
failed; subsequently, New Delhi and Islamabad reaffirmed their commitment to the status quo
under the 1966 Tashkent Agreement.
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Gaurav Kampan

Kashmir remained a marginal issue during the 1971 Bangladesh war which resulted in Pakistan's
dismemberment and the emergence of East Pakistan as the independent state of Bangladesh.
However, the peace settlement that followed the aftermath of that war was significant. Under
the 1972 Simla Agreement, India and Pakistan agreed to resolve the dispute bilaterally through
peaceful means. From that time until the late 1980s, Kashmir receded into the background and
almost became a nonissue in Indo-Pakistani relations. However, the outbreak of an insurgency
in Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK) in 1989 once again gave Pakistan the opportunity to revive
the dispute and seek revisions to the existing status quo.1

From the late 1980s, Pakistani military and intelligence agencies used their experience in the
Afghan war, covered in chapter 5, to train and arm Kashmiri insurgents to wage
subconventional war against the Indian government and its security agencies. Beyond the
obvious goal of seeking to revise the political status quo in Kashmir, Pakistan has used this
strategy to keep India off balance and draw down New Delhi's historic conventional advantage
by diverting Indian military resources into a debilitating lowintensity war of attrition. In this
regard, nuclear weapons have become key facilitators of Islamabad's strategy, for such
weapons have induced caution in potential Indian conventional escalatory responses to
Pakistani provocations. Nuclear weapons have also partially internationalized the Kashmir
dispute and brought great-power attention to the region due to fears that the ongoing
subconventional war could spill into a wider conventional war and possibly result in a nuclear
exchange.

India's initial response to Pakistan's proxy war was defensive. But over the past decade, New
Delhi has adopted a more threatening posture toward Islamabad in an attempt to bring the
insurgency to an end. As a result of the intensification of the Kashmir dispute since the late
1980s, three major crises have broken out in the region. Two of them resulted in military
standoffs, one of which involved military operations along a localized front in Kashmir. Nuclear
weapons have assumed higher salience with the passage of each successive crisis. And
international, more specifically, U.S., diplomatic efforts have been critical to resolving all of
them.

The first crisis began in the winter of 1989 when India's human rights abuses and denial of
democratic rights led to an insurgency in IAK. Islamabad's support for the insurgents fueled
suspicions in New Delhi that the Pakistan army's prolonged deployment close to the
international border after completion of its Zarb-i-Momin military exercises was a calculated
attempt to support the Kashmir insurgents, divert the Indian army from counterinsurgency
operations, or fight a short and sharp war to seize Kashmir from India. As a precautionary
response, the Indian military reacted with counterdeployments. Mirror imaging and worst-case-
scenario factoring led to mounting ten- sions, processes made worse by the political rhetoric of
weak leaders in both countries. However, U.S. diplomats in the region helped defuse the crisis
by intervening early in February 1990. U.S. military attaches carried out confidence-building
inspections on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani divide to reassure the antagonists. Eventually,
both the Indian and Pakistani militaries used hotlines to seek further clarifications. In May 1990
President George H. W. Bush, fearing that the crisis in South Asia could spiral out of control and
involve a nuclear exchange, dispatched Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates to the
region. The Gates mission urged both India and Pakistan to exercise restraint and offered U.S.
national technical assistance to reassure both parties of each other's intent.

The 1989-1990 crisis is famous for its alleged nuclear dimensions. During the crisis, Pakistani
foreign minister Sahibzada Yakub Khan obliquely threatened India with a nuclear response in
the event that the latter launched a conventional war. Fears of a conventional war also
probably persuaded the Pakistani military to assemble nuclear weapons as a precautionary
measure. Finally, Washington's fears of a possible nuclear exchange led to the dispatch of the
Gates mission. However, subsequent analysis suggests that although the 1990 crisis did have
nuclear overtones, sensationalist details about Pakistan's transfer of nuclear warheads to
airfields were most likely exaggerations. By the time the Gates mission reached the region in
late May, the crisis was already winding down; it soon ended in June after India and Pakistan
withdrew field deployments.2

The second crisis, or what is now commonly referred to as the Kargil war, occurred in the
summer of 1999. Indian military patrols discovered that Pakistani regular and irregular forces
had illegally occupied posts along mountain ridges on the Indian side of the line of control
(LOG) in Kashmir. After initial localized operations to evict the intruders proved unsuccessful,
Indian military commanders sought the government's permission to cross the LOG to interdict
enemy supply lines in Pakistani-administered Kashmir (PAK). The Indian cabinet subsequently
debated proposals to widen the war as a means of exerting additional pressure on Pakistan.
Ultimately, the Indian government exercised restraint and kept military operations limited to
the disputed territory. However, New Delhi used the implicit threat of widening the war to
mobilize U.S. diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to vacate its aggression. During the course of the
crisis, which lasted from May until the end of July 1999, both capitals traded nuclear threats.
Pakistan declared that it might be compelled to resort to use nuclear arms if its existence was
threatened. Likewise, Indian leaders threatened Pakistan with nuclear annihilation in the event
Islamabad carried out such a threat. There is some evidence to suggest that both India and
Pakistan upgraded the alert status of their nuclear forces as contingency measures. Ultimately,
the crisis ended when Pakistan caved in to
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Gaurav Kampani

U.S. diplomatic pressure, agreed to unconditionally withdraw its forces from Indian territories
and return to the status quo ante.3

The third crisis emerged in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States
and lasted from December 2001 until October 2002. India used the backdrop of the U.S. global
war on terror to frame Pakistan's support for the low-intensity conflict (L1C) in IAK as terrorism.
Subsequent suicide attacks by Islamic militants on the Srinagar state assembly and the Indian
Parliament induced New Delhi to order military mobilization and threaten war against Pakistan
unless the latter terminated its policy of aiding and abetting the LIC in IAK. The military standoff
between India and Pakistan lasted for nine months. On at least two occasions, in January-
February 2002 and May-June 2002, the Indian cabinet reportedly came close to authorizing
limited conventional strikes in PAK. The threat inherent in India's compellence strategy was that
a conventional war could be localized, contained in its scale and scope, and fought below the
nuclear threshold. Confronted with the possibility of a larger conventional war, Pakistani
president Pervez Musharraf issued an ambiguous warning that India should not expect a
conventional war if its military crossed the LOG.4 In May 2002 the Pakistani military followed
up this warning by conducting ballistic-missile tests to underline its nuclear resolve.5 However,
Washington defused the crisis in June 2002 by extracting promises from Islamabad to
permanently end support for the insurgency in IAK. The Indian leadership, fearing the
unpredictability of a conventional war, as well as the dangers of nuclear escalation, accepted
these assurances despite reservations. Finally, in October 2002, citing the decline in infiltrations
along the LOG, the Indian government ordered the military to stand down, thus ending the
longest military standoff in the history of Indo-Pakistani relations.6

The increased tensions, recurring crises, military standoffs, limited conventional war, and
threats of a larger conventional war in South Asia have reignited the academic debate among
so-called proliferation optimists and pessimists. The optimists cite the absence of large-scale
war in South Asia as evidence that nuclear weapons keep the peace.7 Pessimists fear that the
dangers of a nuclear war in South Asia are more real than apparent because of the potential for
strategic miscalculation, accident, and organizational failure, factors compounded by India and
Pakistan's geographical proximity and the incipient state of their nuclear capabilities.8 In light
of the prevailing instability in the region, this chapter analyzes how nuclear weapons have
shaped India and Pakistan's security competition and strategy in Kashmir. Its primary focus is
not on the military aspects of nuclear strategy, but rather on how nuclear weapons have
become political tools in the furtherance of New Delhi and Islamabad's political agendas. The
first section focuses on the link between nuclear weapons and Pakistan's subconven-
Kashmir and India-Pakistan Nuclear Issues

165

u'onal war in Kashmir, as well as the implicit threat of a nuclear exchange in the region, to
Islamabad's attempts to catalyze international intervention in the Kashmir dispute. The second
section analyzes India's transition from defensive to proactive responses to Pakistani
provocations in the context of nuclearization and the evolution of New Delhi's doctrine of
limited conventional war under nuclear conditions. The third section links the intensified
security competition in Kashmir to some of the technological, organizational, and doctrinal
pressures in both New Delhi and Islamabad toward operational nuclear capabilities. Finally, the
chapter concludes by making observations about the state of India and Pakistan's decade-old
security competition in Kashmir in light of their acquisition of usable nuclear capabilities; the
implications of India's doctrine of limited conventional war under nuclear conditions; the
nature, extent, and meaning of the internationalization of the Kashmir dispute; whether
nuclear-arms control or regional nuclear-disarmament regimes remain viable propositions; and
why vertical proliferation in the background of unresolved ideological and political conflict
makes South Asia the likeliest place in the world for a potential nuclear exchange.

PAKISTAN: THE LINK BETWEEN NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND KASHMIR

In the early 1970s, Pakistan decided to invest in a nuclear capability to avoid a repeat of the
1971 Bangladesh war, which resulted in its defeat and dismemberment. Pakistan's strategy was
simple: it hoped that a nuclear deterrent would neutralize India's superiority in conventional
forces and deter New Delhi from waging large-scale war in the future.9 However, Pakistan soon
discovered other creative uses for its nuclear capability. Most notably, the nuclear deterrent
became a political tool with which it reopened the Kashmir dispute with India to seek a
settlement on the basis of a revised status quo.10 Historically, Pakistan has adopted two
approaches to changing the status quo in Kashmir. Successive Pakistani governments have
sought to create new political and territorial faits accomplis in a bid to force New Delhi to arrive
at a negotiated settlement on terms amenable to Pakistan. Equally significant, they have
attempted to internationalize the dispute by lobbying in multilateral forums such as the United
Nations or by seeking third-party intervention, preferably U.S. and British mediation, to offset
India's larger size and strength and to level the playing field so that both countries can
negotiate a political settlement from positions of relative equality.11 Pakistan used both
approaches from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, until its decisive defeat in the 1971
Bangladesh war effectively froze the Kashmir dispute and relegated it to the background.12
166

Gaurav Kampani

Since the late 1980s, however, nuclearization of the subcontinent has enabled Pakistan's
strategic establishment to leverage Western proliferation concerns and fears of a potential
nuclear exchange in the region to revive the strategies it had devised in the pre-1971 period. As
part of its post-1988 strategy to change the political status quo in Kashmir and force India into
negotiations to resolve what Pakistani leaders describe as the "core issue" or the "unfinished
business of partition," Islamabad has used the cover of its nuclear umbrella to aid and abet a
subconventional war by disaffected Muslim insurgents in IAK.)3

The insurgency in IAK is not a Pakistani creation; its causes are diverse. Scholars have attributed
the ongoing conflict to a variety of causes, which range from India's political mismanagement,
human rights abuses, denial of democratic rights to the Kashmiri Muslims, ethnographic issues,
socioeconomic factors, and the rise of religious extremism.14 However, Pakistan's political,
economic, and military support has been critical to sustaining it.15 Pakistan's nuclear deterrent
has been a critical factor in shaping Indian strategy and ultimately restricting New Delhi's
counterresponse to the low-intensity war. In 1965, when Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar
and infiltrated thousands of irregulars into IAK in the hope of inciting a revolt, India did the
unpredictable. Instead of fighting a localized war in Kashmir as Pakistani military leaders had
hoped, New Delhi widened operations by ordering the Indian army to cross the international
border and carry the war into Pakistani territory.16 Since the 1980s Pakistan's nuclear
deterrent has prevented India from repeating its 1965 strategy. Fears of a wider conventional
war and the inherent risks of nuclear escalation have prevented India from attacking insurgent
bases, training camps, and infiltration routes in Pakistani-controlled territories. Instead, New
Delhi's response has been restricted to fighting a defensive and reactive counterinsurgency
campaign in Indian-controlled territories.17 Likewise, the acquisition of a proven nuclear
capability also emboldened Islamabad to attempt minor, though illegal, changes in the
territorial status quo along the Kargil mountain ridges of the LOG in late 1998 and early 1999.
Given the sensitivity and secrecy surrounding the Kargil campaign in Pakistan, Islamabad's
motivations can at best be inferred indirectly. Nevertheless, Pakistani operations appear to
have been guided by the desire to force India into negotiations over Kashmir, to provide
encouragement to insurgents battling the Indian army and paramilitary forces, to divert the
Indian military's attention from counterinsurgency operations, and to highlight to the
international community the urgency of resolving the Kashmir dispute.18 Pakistan's attempts to
stoke the insurgency in IAK and its subsequent Kargil operation constitute classic examples of
Glenn Snyder's stabilityinstability paradox.19 The paradox lies in the strategic stability that
ensues between two nuclear rivals due to mutual fears that a conventional war could
Kashmir and India-Pakistan Nuclear Issues

167

turn nuclear and result in mutual destruction. At the same time, the very prevalence of such
stability makes it safe for a revisionist state to apply small amounts of violence along the
periphery on the assumption that the low stakes involved and the dangers of a possible nuclear
exchange are likely to dampen its rival's escalatory response.20 As a corollary to this strategy,
Pakistani leaders have also sought to mount political pressure on India by seeking to
internationalize the Kashmir dispute.21 In this regard, Pakistan's efforts have benefited from
Western concerns about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in South Asia. Beginning in the
early 1990s, as South Asia became an important battleground in U.S. attempts to stem the
global proliferation of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, Pakistan linked the
possibility of a regional nuclear-restraint regime to the successful resolution of the Kashmir
dispute.22 Pakistani leaders have since argued that Kashmir is the root cause of tensions
between the two countries; its resolution is therefore a precursor to the achievement of
regional nuclear disarmament or, alternatively, the creation of a restraint regime in South
Asia.23 The above argument is certainly not without merit. However, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto's government first proposed the establishment of a South Asia Nuclear Weapons Free
Zone (SANWFZ) in the 1970s; successive Pakistani governments reiterated their commitment to
regional nuclear disarmament in the UN General Assembly during the mid-1980s.24 As such,
the proposal for a SANWFZ precedes the resurgence of the Kashmir dispute in the late 1980s.
Equally significant, regional nuclear disarmament would undermine the strategic rationale for
Pakistan's nuclear capability, which it ostensibly acquired to deter India. Routine statements by
key Pakistani leaders also suggest that the country's nuclear capability is nonnegotiable.25
Hence, the political linkage between regional nuclear disarmament and the resolution of the
Kashmir dispute appears to be an opportunistic attempt on the part of Islamabad to create
nonproliferation incentives for U.S. policymakers to intervene in the Kashmir conflict.

The achievement of some form of regional nuclear restraint in the aftermath of the resolution
of the Kashmir dispute appears more plausible. However, the Pakistani military's control of the
nuclear-weapons program since the early 1980s has created an in-built bias toward operability.
Evidently, the Pakistani military favors continued weaponization, even as it accepts other
restraints, such as the 1989 temporary cap on uranium-enrichment levels.26 Furthermore,
Pakistan's obsession with the notion of proportional parity with India, coupled with the latter's
refusal to be tied down by regional arms-control arrangements and security concerns vis-a-vis
China, render unlikely the idea of a strictly South Asian nuclear-restraint regime.

In a parallel tactic to internationalizing Kashmir, Pakistan has also resorted to amplifying

Western concerns that South Asia constitutes a nuclear
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Caurav Kampani

flashpoint.27 With the passage of each Indo-Pakistani crisis, Pakistani leaders have endorsed
fears expressed by Western leaders and the nonproliferation lobby that a conventionally
outnumbered and outclassed Pakistani military might be compelled to resort to nuclear arms to
ensure national survival, or that a nuclear war might be triggered by inadvertence, accident or
command-and-control failure.28 To be sure, the dangers of a nuclear war in South Asia are real.
But Pakistani leaders have undermined their own case for international intervention by
privately dismissing Western concerns as exaggerations.29 Furthermore, Islamabad's role in
sustaining the Kashmir insurgency and the Pakistani military's policy of provoking conflict, as
during the 1999 Kargil crisis, have exposed the disingenuousness of Pakistan's arguments and
contributed to Western fatigue in trying to resolve the Kashmir dispute through external
mediation.30

INDIA'S SHIFT FROM A REACTIVE TO A PROACTIVE STRATEGY

For the greater part of the 1990s, successive Indian governments responded to Pakistan's
subconventional war in Kashmir in a defensive manner. New Delhi's hesitancy and
defensiveness were tacit acknowledgment of the domestic roots of the insurgency, as well as of
India's political mismanagement in creating it. The brutal nature of the counterinsurgency
operations deeply embarrassed the Indian government, which resorted to its time-tested
strategy of using a combination of military force and political and economic inducements to co-
opt the insurgents in the Kashmir valley.31 In addition, weak coalition governments, the
economic crisis of the early 1990s, and serious conventional shortcomings also factored in
India's response to the insurgency in Kashmir.32

Domestic reasons apart, nuclearization of the subcontinent in the late

1980s and early 1990s also influenced Indian policies significantly. The theoretical possibility of
a large-scale conventional war culminating in a nuclear exchange induced caution in India's
dealings with Pakistan. During the early

1990s, India's own weaponization program was in a rudimentary stage. Airand ballistic-missile-
deliverable nuclear warheads only became available to the Indian government in the mid-
1990s.33 To be sure, Indian government leaders were not necessarily convinced that Pakistan
was further along the path of weaponization.34 Yet, the mere possibility of the existence of a
small arsenal of air-deliverable Pakistani nuclear weapons produced strategic uncertainty in
New Delhi and deterred Indian leaders from taking any precipitate action.35
Two additional nuclear-related factors conditioned New Delhi's cautious approach toward
Islamabad in the early 1990s. The first had to do with con-

cerns that a conventional war with Pakistan and Western fears of a nuclear exchange in the
region might invariably lead to the internationalization of the Kashmir dispute.36 A second
factor was that fears in the West of a nuclear holocaust in South Asia could invite international
pressures on India to accept a regional disarmament initiative, which the first Clinton
administration summed up as a "freeze, cap, and roll back" strategy.37

India's fears about international conflict-resolution efforts in Kashmir have a long history. In
1948 Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's government brought the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan
before the then newly formed UN Security Council. India's objective at the time was to have the
United Nations uphold its legal claims over Kashmir. Much to New Delhi's chagrin, however, the
Kashmir dispute became enmeshed with the wider issues raised by the partition of India and
Pakistan along the Hindu-Muslim religious divide; the legitimacy and manner of the Kashmiri
ruler's accession to India; and more vexingly, the issue of self-determination of the Kashmiri
people in deciding whether to accede to India or Pakistan.38 During the Cold War years,
Pakistan exploited Washington's rivalry with Moscow to join U.S.-led security alliances in the
Middle East and Southeast Asia. It also sought military aid and political support from the United
States to challenge India in Kashmir. Although the United States never acquiesced to the
Pakistani agenda in Kashmir, India's policy elites resented the U.S.-Pakistani alliance and feared
that the United States was trying to contain India's regional ambitions by building up Pakistani
military capabilities and imposing external mediation on Kashmir.39

In New Delhi's view, internationalization has the potential for diluting the legitimacy of
Kashmir's legal and political union with India; Muslims in the province might vote for
independence or accession to Pakistan if a plebiscite were allowed under the original UN
formula. Indian leaders' sensitivity on Kashmir stems from the fact that it is India's sole Muslim-
majority province. New Delhi considers the continued presence of Kashmir within the Indian
Union as critical to affirming India's secular identity. Indian policymakers also fear that
Kashmir's secession from India could reopen the wounds of Partition and unleash a Hindu-
Muslim civil war. Kashmir's independence from India or secession to Pakistan would also create
Hindu and Buddhist minorities in that province.40

Singed by seeking UN mediation efforts in the 1940s and 1950s and suspicious of U.S. and
British third-party intervention during the 1960s, India thereafter sought to remove the Kashmir
dispute from the ambit of multilateral or third-party conflict-resolution mechanisms. India
temporarily succeeded in this quest after signing the Simla Agreement with Pakistan in the
wake of the latter's defeat in the 1971 Bangladesh war, until Pakistan, taking advantage of the
insurgency in the Kashmir valley, sought to revive the dispute in the late 1980s.41
170

Gaurav Kampani

From the late 1980s until 1999, there were great concerns in New Delhi about the possible
internationalization of the dispute.42 Indian fears largely stemmed from three issues. First,
India's brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in the Kashmir valley created a spiral of violence,
further alienated the disaffected Muslim population, and brought international attention to the
human tragedy and the political volatility of the situation. India was thus clearly embarrassed.
Second, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, India lost its major Cold War strategic
ally.43 At the time, New Delhi's relations with Washington were relatively cool in comparison
with Pakistan's. Indian leaders were therefore distrustful of any potential U.S. mediation efforts
in Kashmir. In this regard, Indian sensitivities were particularly aroused when senior officials in
the first Clinton administration made statements that placed the entire status of Kashmir in
doubt.44 Third, India* feared that U.S. policymakers might leverage any potential military crisis
in Kashmir to pressure India into making concessions along the nonproliferation front.45
Indeed, this last factor was critical in politically restraining India from considering more
proactive military responses in the early 1990s. Although Indo-U.S. differences on proliferation
stretch back to the 1960s, they reached a peak in the early and mid-1990s.46 To a large extent,
Washington's nonproliferation agenda in South Asia was driven by concerns that an Indo-
Pakistani nuclear capability would encourage other aspiring proliferants; that robust technology
controls would be difficult to achieve in second-tier proliferator states; and that it would be
difficult if not impossible to accommodate emerging nuclear powers within the existing nuclear
order.47 Equally significant, U.S. and Western concerns were driven by fears that South Asia
was the likeliest place for a nuclear war in the future.48 In response to Western
nonproliferation pressures, New Delhi sought to portray India, and to an extent even Pakistan,
as responsible nuclear powers. It dismissed the viewpoint that South Asia was the likeliest place
for a nuclear war as ill informed, biased, and racist. Instead, it argued that India and Pakistan
were aware of the responsibility that came with the acquisition of a nuclear capability.49 In this
regard, India and Pakistan's nonweaponized postures, in which nuclear weapons were stored
unassembled and away from delivery systems, acted as natural firebreaks and inserted time
and organizational barriers in the path of a nuclear exchange.50 In a further attempt to buttress
its claims to responsibility, New Delhi was careful to avoid initiating crises that could snowball
into a conventional, and possibly nuclear, war with Islamabad. By the late 1990s, as Indo-U.S.
relations began to improve, Indian fears of the possible negative consequences of
internationalization of the Kashmir dispute began to recede. Similarly, Washington's tacit
acceptance of India's nuclear status after New Delhi's nuclear tests in May 1998 relieved
concerns
Kashmir and India-Pakistan Nuclear Issues

171

among Indian policy elites that a potential crisis in Kashmir might result in pressures for a
"nuclear rollback."51 These factors, in addition to India's exasperation with the mounting costs
of the low-intensity war, improved political conditions in IAK, and Pakistan's growing
international isolation because of its policy of using radical Islamic proxies to achieve strategic
goals in Afghanistan and Kashmir, ultimately paved the way for a more muscular and proactive
Indian response.52

In President Clinton's second term, the United States and India embarked on a major course
correction in their post-Cold War foreign policy to repair relations. When confronted by India's
nuclear determination in the post-May 1998 period and the political impossibility of a nuclear
rollback in South Asia, the second Clinton administration changed tack and tacitly accepted
New Delhi's nuclear status. Washington now sought to persuade both New Delhi and Islamabad
to accept strategic restraint and participate in the nonproliferation regime by accepting the
comprehensive test-ban treaty and an interim cap on fissile-material production.53 There was
also a change of tone in Washington's public diplomacy, complemented by a newfound respect
and sensitivity for Indian security concerns. In contrast to the public recriminations and
hectoring that had characterized Indo-U.S. nuclear diplomacy in the past, proliferation
differences were now addressed quietly through private diplomacy.54 By the time India and
Pakistan fought the Kargil war in the summer of 1999, the balance of political forces had shifted
in India's favor. India successfully capitalized on Islamabad's transgression of the LOG in
Kashmir to characterize it as a revisionist and irresponsible power that threatened the peace in
South Asia. During the war, India also won international plaudits for restraint in the face of
Pakistani provocations and for not escalating the war by crossing the LOC into PAK or by
widening the war across other fronts. Indian diplomacy also succeeded in portraying Pakistan as
a revisionist state bent on creating nuclear crises to change the political status quo in the
region.55 These shifting political winds were evident when the United States publicly
demanded that Islamabad withdraw from occupied Indian positions and respect the sanctity of
the LOC in Kashmir. By implication, Pakistan was branded as the aggressor state. U.S. pressure
to withdraw also meant that Washington would no longer acquiesce to any rewriting of the
status quo in Kashmir by force. Ultimately, Pakistan was forced into making a humiliating
withdrawal, which resulted in an unambiguous victory for India.56

Kargil proved to be a turning point in the history of Indo-U.S. relations. The war allayed
concerns in New Delhi that internationalization of the Kashmir dispute would invariably favor
Pakistan. Instead, it opened up the new and tantalizing possibility that India could highlight
Pakistan's role in fomenting Islamic militancy in Kashmir, as well as the Pakistani military's
172

Gaurav Kampani

strategy of wielding its nuclear deterrent irresponsibly for political ends, to persuade Islamabad
to terminate support for the insurgency in IAK.57

During the Kargil war, India's strategy of restraint succeeded in mobilizing international
pressure to evict Pakistani forces from Indian territories. But it left open the question of how
India should respond to similar Pakistani adventurism in the future. Frustrated with the decade-
old low-intensity war in Kashmir, Indian political and military leaders and the strategic
establishment at large reopened the debate on approaches to bringing the subconventional
war in Kashmir to a successful end.58 The central issue in this debate was whether nuclear
weapons would force India to fight a war on Pakistan's terms indefinitely or whether there
existed alternative means through which India could force war termination on Pakistan without
significant risk of nuclear escalation. This debate reached an interim conclusidh in January 2000
when India's defense minister, George Fernandes, announced a doctrine of limited
conventional war under nuclear conditions. Fernandes asserted that there existed strategic
space between a low-intensity and high-intensity conventional war where a limited
conventional war was indeed a possibility.59 The premise behind this doctrine was that it was
possible for New Delhi to raise the costs of the subconventional war in Kashmir for Pakistan by
creating local contingencies. Such contingencies, the Indian assumption went, would not
threaten Pakistan's fundamental existence and, hence, could be fought below the nuclear
threshold.60 India's espousal of the doctrine of limited conventional war under nuclear
conditions, just before President Clinton's March

2000 visit to New Delhi, coincided with a phase in Indo-U.S. relations when proliferation was no
longer the central issue.

Proliferation receded even further into the background when President George W. Bush
assumed the presidency in January 2001. The neoconservatives in the administration, eager to
manage China's power transition in the twenty-first century, view India as a major stabilizing
force in the AsiaPacific region and as a country that could eventually emerge as China's peer
and balance Beijing's power in the region. The Bush administration has therefore built on the
Clinton administration's record to further consolidate strategic ties with New Delhi, relegating
nuclear proliferation even further into the background.61

It was in this external political framework, where the negative consequences of

internationalization of the Kashmir dispute and the risks of nuclear roll back were minimal, that
India was able to threaten Pakistan with war in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terror
attacks on the United States. In the immediate aftermath of those attacks, global attention
focused on the links between militant Islamic groups and Pakistan's military-intelligence
agencies, groups that the Pakistani state patronized to fight its proxy wars in both Afghanistan
and Kashmir. Following the Bush administration's decision to wage war against al

^* *Tan- ^2*^££££££&

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policies came to the contradictions between Patastan.*^ ^ militarily «

saw-sES^s^^^ S^JKP^^«^»

as cross-border terrorism. To an ext ^^ paki re.

Afghanistan and the deployment of US to ce di lomacy. New

ated a safe space for India to «^^£°Paklstan could be kept geoDelhi's confidence that
a/^^"below the nuclear threshold was graphically localized to Kashmi ^oug .^^ to ^ s,ch

partly the result of calculations.^Wa^ng ^ ^.^ ^ Tal.

a war in its initial stages to avoid dlsPjonS tfon was that the presence

iban and al Qaeda. Another ^ ^^taSi ports, air bases, and airof U.S. forces in Pakistan and
heir^use ^a rf the limited nature of

space would serve to reassure.^ ^am ^ ^ ^ ^

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ruption of the U.S. military ca«^adfpost-SePtember 11 policies* Jo confronting the duality in

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174

complicity in the insurgency campaign in Kashmir and extracted public and private assurances
from Islamabad that it would effectively terminate support for the insurgents waging war in
IAK. However, Pakistani military leaders privately maintain that nuclear weapons deterred India
from going to war during the 2001-2002 crisis, a conclusion that Indian leaders believe is
overdetermined.67

RECURRING CRISES: THE IMPACT ON NUCLEARIZATION

The low-intensity war in Kashmir and recurring political crises, accompanied by the threat of a
wider conventional war, have had a significant impact on the nuclear politics in India and
Pakistan. Admittedly, New Delhi and Islamabad's nuclear-weapons programs are not rooted in
the Kashmir dispute. Nonetheless, chronic instability has had a decisive impact on the pace,
scope, and nature of weaponization efforts, the development of nuclear-use doctrines, and
patterns of bargaining among strategic elites in both countries. Frequent crises have spurred
both countries in the direction of seeking operational nuclear forces. In the late 1980s and early
1990s, New Delhi and Islamabad sought to deter one another by obliquely hinting at their
existential nuclear capabilities. Observing the pattern of mutual bargaining among them,
scholars inferred that the South Asian elites had perhaps discovered a new way to practice
nuclear deterrence: the existence of nonweaponized capabilities shrouded in opacity might be
sufficient to deter an adversary.68 On occasions, New Delhi and Islamabad publicly parroted
this latter conclusion to score propaganda points about their peaceful intent and to reinforce
the notion that South Asian elites were responsible nuclear actors.

Owing to the possibility of nuclear use, however remote, policy elites in both countries have
more recently concluded that nuclear deterrence cannot be anchored in phantom capabilities.
Rather, the demands of credibility require that India and Pakistan at least partially replicate
some of the technical and organizational models of the de jure nuclear-weapon states.
Gradually, the Indo-Pakistani elites have imbibed Michael Novak's observation that greater user
ease, as well as improved planning and readiness to use nuclear weapons, might lessen the
political likelihood of their actual use. As such, political leaders, scientific bureaucracies, and the
militaries in both countries have, at first slowly, proceeded down the path of weaponization,
while each crisis has had the effect of accelerating the process.69 This by no means implies that
India and Pakistan seek to replicate the technological sophistication or redundancies built into
the U.S. and former-Soviet arsenals. Nevertheless, during the past decade both countries have
acquired weaponized nuclear devices; sought to develop a diversified set of reliable delivery
systems; devel-
oped procedures for the safe storage, transport, and handling of nuclear weapons and their
component parts; created protocols for rapid constitution of the unassembled weapons during
a national emergency; and invested in command, communications, and control networks to
enable their use during

a contingency.70

However, despite the upward trend in favor of operability, there has been no change in India or
Pakistan's peacetime nuclear posture. Both countries maintain their nuclear arsenals in a
"recessed," or unconstituted, state. The warhead assemblies and fissile-material cores are
stored separately, away from aircraft and ballistic-missile delivery systems. Control of the
component parts is divided among different civilian and military agencies with protocols and
procedures for reconstituting them rapidly during a crisis. But better coordination and training
procedures have shortened deployment times and improved operational readiness.71 Inherent
in the thrust toward operationalization is the development of nuclear-use doctrines. This is a
significant development because during the early 1990s India and Pakistan possessed nuclear
capabilities only in a purely symbolic sense. Neither government had given much serious
thought to how nuclear weapons might eventually be used. For Pakistan nuclear weapons
guaranteed national survival, if only in a perfunctory sense; it could in theory attack one or two
major Indian urban targets in a last desperate act of survival. Likewise, for India nuclear
weapons constituted a symbolic reassurance against potential nuclear blackmail.

The emergence of an operational nuclear capability against the background of a

subconventional war in Kashmir and increased prospects for a wider conventional war have
created a strategic context in which India and Pakistan have seriously begun to plan for the
operational use of their nuclear forces. In comparison with India, Pakistan has had less aversion
in this regard. To an extent, the Pakistani military's control of the nuclear effort from the early
1980s has built an operational bias into the program. Furthermore, as the weaker power,
Pakistan has sought nuclear weapons to offset India's conventional superiority. This has also
created a structural imperative in favor of operability. To deter India from waging a
conventional war of unlimited or limited aims, Pakistan has espoused a nuclear first-use
doctrine akin to NATO's doctrine of flexible response, which envisaged the use of nuclear
weapons against a Soviet attack in Europe even with conventional weapons.72 However, the
issue of how and when Pakistan might use nuclear weapons remains unclear. Beyond vaguely
stating that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons in the event that its national existence was
threatened, no government in Islamabad has ever formally articulated an operational-use
doctrine. The assumption among Pakistani government leaders is that any formal delineation of
Pakistan's nuclear thresholds or how it proposes to use nuclear weapons at the operational
level might unwittingly create incentives for India to test those limits.73
176

Gaurav Kampani

Former Pakistani government leaders have suggested that Pakistan would not use nuclear
weapons to fight local wars; such contingencies would be dealt with using conventional means.
Nuclear-weapons use would be considered only in grave situations where Pakistan's national
existence might be threatened.74 At the operational-policy level, there is thus considerable
uncertainty as to whether the Pakistani military would use nuclear weapons in a demonstrative-
warning role on Pakistani territory early in any conflict with India, against massed Indian
military formations to deny New Delhi its war objectives, or in graduated or massive punitive
strikes against "countervalue" targets as a last resort after conventional defenses fail. Such
ambiguity, Pakistani leaders believe, is necessary to enhance deterrence.75

India's transition toward an operational capability has been more painful. This is largely
because, historically, civilians have controlled the nuclear program to the relative exclusion of
the military. The civilian politicians, strategic thinkers, and nuclear-defense scientists who
determine nuclear policy share an institutional aversion to sharing and transferring control of
nuclear weapons to the military. This aversion partly stems from the need to ensure the
institutional predominance of civilians over the military. But the biases also flow from the
philosophical and moral aversion of India's civilian elites toward nuclear weapons and their
view that nuclear weapons, as political instruments whose sole purpose is to deter war and
nuclear coercion, are not usable instruments of war.76 However, the multiple Indo-Pakistani
crises since

1989 have starkly demonstrated the limitations of the above political view of nuclear weapons.
As a result, India's civilian elites have begun to shed some of their prevailing biases against the
militarization of nuclear policy.77

The Indian government has concluded that in the event of deterrence failure, the Indian
military will have to fight and win limited conventional wars under nuclear conditions. Although
some Indian military leaders and strategic thinkers believe it is possible to fight a conventional
war localized in scope and geography, the prospect of fighting a limited war has also forced the
Indian government to contemplate an Indian nuclear response to Pakistan's use of nuclear
weapons. Some Indian observers speculate that initial Pakistani nuclear strikes might be
restricted to a demonstrative-warning role on its own territories.78 However, the Indian
military believes that its Pakistani counterpart has seriously planned for the operational use of
nuclear weapons on the battlefield. To prepare for such contingencies, the Indian army plans to
change its equipment profile to operate in a nuclear, chemical, and biological environment. The
army's plans to operate in a nuclear environment also emphasize mobility and dispersal into
small units to avoid attracting nuclear firepower.79

At the declaratory level of policy, India subscribes to the no-first-use nuclear doctrine, but
Indian leaders have threatened Islamabad with "massive" punitive retaliatory attacks were
Pakistan to resort to nuclear-weapons use. For moral and strategic reasons, it is likely that an
Indian operational response would be calibrated to match the nature and scale of a Pakistani
attack. Likewise, any punitive Indian strikes would probably be restricted to military tarsets with
the objective of restoring intrawar deterrence or seeking early waran termination.80 Finally,
the development of operational nuclear forces and use doctrines has changed the erstwhile
pattern of implicit bargaining between the strategic elites in India and Pakistan. During the late
1980s and early 1990s, for example, rudimentary capabilities were matched by veiled allusions
to existential capabilities.81 Nuclear threats were coyly conveyed through private diplomacy.
Nuclear signaling, as alleged by some during the 1990 crisis, was at best ambiguous.82 In
comparison, Indian and Pakistani leaders now openly engage in rhetorical flourishes; nuclear
warnings are communicated publicly.83 Both countries routinely resort to public displays of
nuclear delivery systems. Borrowing tactics used by the superpowers in crisis situations during
the Cold War, New Delhi and Islamabad have also resorted to direct nuclear signaling through
ballistic-missile tests or by changing the operational status of their missile forces.84 Such tactics
underline the political volatility and mounting dangers of a potential nuclear exchange in the
region.

CONCLUSION

Since the late 1980s, nuclearization of the subcontinent has facilitated the revival of the
Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. Nuclear weapons have allowed Pakistan's military
to exploit the disaffection of India's Kashmiri-Muslim population to wage a subconventional war
against New Delhi. Although Pakistani military leaders privately believe that Pakistan's nuclear
weapons have effectively deterred India from fighting a larger conventional war, Indian
restraint is likely determined by multiple factors. Chief among them are New Delhi's fears that it
might be unable to achieve its political or military objectives in any limited war, that it would be
difficult to terminate such a war at will, that India might be unable to invite international
intervention to end the war at a time of its choosing, that hostilities might cost India the
goodwill of the international community, and that the war could not be kept limited and would
carry significant risks of nuclear escalation. On balance, the evidence suggests that from the
late 1990s on, nuclearization has been one of several factors that have contributed to
maintaining a regime of "ugly stability" in South Asia.

No doubt, India and Pakistan's concurrent march up the ladder of vertical proliferation amid
continuing conflict in Kashmir has contributed to international
178

Gaurav Kampani

perceptions that South Asia constitutes a nuclear flashpoint. However, Islamabad's hopes that
global concerns about a potential nuclear exchange in the region would place Kashmir at the
heart of international conflict-resolution efforts have not materialized. Rather Pakistan,
because of the role of its military in fomenting regional instability, is increasingly viewed as a
"misdirected state," prone to wielding its nuclear deterrent irresponsibly toward dubious
political ends. Further, Islamabad's reliance on radical Islamic proxies in Kashmir has also
rebounded to its disadvantage; it has enabled New Delhi to characterize Pakistan as the
"epicenter of terrorism."

Thus, Kashmir has become internationalized, but not in the manner Pakistani leaders once
imagined. International misgivings about Pakistan's strategy in Kashmir have enabled Indian
diplomacy to prevent UN mediation and restrict great-power intervention in the region. Indian
leaders have also capitalized on such misgivings to portray Pakistan as a rogue state that wages
terrorism from behind the security afforded by its nuclear umbrella. Washington's tacit
acceptance of the new South Asian realities in the wake of India and Pakistan's May 1998
nuclear tests have given New Delhi confidence that the risks of Kashmir's internationalization
are manageable; a future crisis over Kashmir would not necessarily translate into international
demands or pressure for nuclear restraint or rollback. India's newfound confidence was evident
during the 2001-2002 crisis; New Delhi hijacked Pakistan's agenda of framing South Asia as the
likeliest place for a nuclear exchange by itself threatening just such a possibility unless
Washington pressured Islamabad to end "cross-border terrorism."

Pakistan's attempts at foisting the Kashmir dispute onto the Western nonproliferation agenda
have also failed. The idea that a resolution to the Kashmir dispute could pave the way for
regional disarmament was never credible to begin with. The inception of Pakistan's efforts to
acquire nuclear-weapons capability precedes the resurgence of the Kashmir dispute in the late
1980s by nearly two decades. The motivations behind that effort lie in the strategic logic of
neutralizing India's conventional advantage and immunizing Pakistan from the risk of a large-
scale war and dismemberment. Pakistan's rivalries with India are rooted in ideology and the
fundamental power disparities between the two countries. As such, the Indo-Pakistani security
dialectic, and by extension the conventional and nuclear-arms competition, would probably
transcend any resolution of the Kashmir dispute.85 Equally significant, India's ideological
quarrel with the nonproliferation regime, espousal of universal global norms, and unaddressed
security concerns vis-a-vis China preclude the possibility of a SANWFZ.
It is conceivable that if Pakistan's irredentist claims in Kashmir were satisfied, tensions with
India might subside to the extent that Islamabad would be willing to abide by its proposed
nuclear restraint regime. But it is unlikely that jx[ew Delhi would abide by such restraint
pending the resolution of the border dispute with China, absent security guarantees to
immunize India from the theoretical risk of Chinese nuclear blackmail. Further, considering
Pakistan's self-image as India's peer and obsession with the notion of parity, the proposed
regime is unlikely to come to fruition. However, regardless of whether nuclear restraint in
South Asia is possible, a resolution to the Kashmir problem would almost certainly dampen the
intensified drive in both countries toward nuclear operability. Multiple crises, military standoffs,
and threats of a larger conventional war with the possibility of a nuclear exchange have created
technological, organizational, and doctrinal pressures in the direction of operational nuclear
forces. Pakistan has come more than ever to rely on its nuclear deterrent to bridge the
widening conventional disparity with India. The Pakistani military has decided to invest in a
diversified nuclear arsenal, the largest possible warhead numbers, and procedures for dispersal
and activation of such forces to engage in nuclear signaling early in any potential crisis with
India. Likewise, the civilians who determine nuclear policy in New Delhi are now under
increasing pressure from the Indian military to replicate Islamabad's efforts and to prepare for
conventional escalation and ultimately nuclear-use scenarios. Thus, the ongoing transformation
in Indo-Pakistani nuclear politics from tokenism to usable capabilities has heightened risks of a
nuclear exchange through deliberate choice, accident, inadvertence, or cornplex organizational
failure. During the last decade, Indo-Pakistani relations have alternated between troughs and
plateaus. Diplomatic efforts have followed each military crisis to try to repair relations, but all
have failed. The two countries are currently in the midst of another peacemaking exercise,
characterized by revived government talks, summitry, and people-to-people contact. In a joint
statement issued in January 2004, Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Musharraf agreed "to
the resumption of a composite dialogue" on all issues "including Jammu and Kashmir to the
satisfaction of both sides." Musharraf also assured the Indian government that "he will not
permit any territory under Pakistan's control to be used to support terrorism in any manner."86
Many observers have interpreted the joint statement as a tacit admission of Pakistan's past
support for the LIC in Kashmir and an indication of its resolve to finally end military
confrontation over the dispute. However, there is also considerable skepticism in India on the
nature of change in Pakistan's policy: is it tactical or strategic? Similarly, the Pakistani
government fears that India is taking unfair advantage of Islamabad's restraint to consolidate its
political and military grip over Kashmir. In March

2004 President Musharraf warned Indian leaders that Kashmir was central to Indo-Pakistani
differences and that the peace process would collapse in the absence of progress in resolving
the dispute.87 Musharraf's statement has raised grave doubts in New Delhi over the Pakistani
government's true intentions.
180

Gaurav Kampani

A failure to sustain the current peace effort and Islamabad's return to the LIC option could
gravely harm Indo-Pakistani relations. Vajpayee has made it plain that this is his third and last
attempt at peace with Pakistan. In the past Pakistani leaders have operated on the assumption
that nuclear weapons will enable them to wage subconventional war against India indefinitely
and to eventually force New Delhi to the negotiating table. For their part, Indian leaders are no
longer prepared to fight a reactive counterinsurgency campaign on Indian territories alone;
they are determined to increase the cost of the subconventional war for Pakistan. An influential
section of India's political and military leadership also believes that Pakistan's nuclear bluff
needs to be called and that there exist opportunities to fight a limited conventional war in PAK
below the nuclear threshold.

Equally significant, the external constraints that acted to restrain India from initiating military
action against Pakistan in the late 1980s and early

1990s have eroded considerably. As international opinion has swung against Pakistan's policy
of fighting wars through radical Islamist proxies, New Delhi has gained confidence that the
potential negative fallout of the internationalization of the Kashmir dispute can be contained.
Furthermore, after the May 1998 nuclear tests, India believes that it has gained legitimacy as a
responsible nuclear power. Instead, the onus is now on Pakistan to maintain the status quo
during crises in light of the nuclearization of the subcontinent. Many factors in combination
suggest that future crises may erupt: the low-intensity war in Kashmir, India and Pakistan's
ideological antagonisms, their mutual political obstinacy, differing perceptions of past crisis
outcomes, and subjective perceptions of the international environment. The next crisis could
spill into a wider war and possibly involve the detonation of nuclear weapons.

NOTES

^^^^M)nending: IndiMista" Tensions since 1947 (New York: Co-

^^'^^T^^0^^ The '*» Indo-Pakistani Crisis,"

and Stephen Philip Cohen eds., Per^P^ j? R *' ^ P *** Cheema,

TTfhLT? T I""0" R°UtledgeCu"< 2003) andSeCUntyinSouthA^ The Compound

clear U,£^^^^^^ ^ Medby, Limited Conflict under the Nu-

Rand, 2001); also see Bruce Reidel "The^h D ^ °*" (Sa"ta Monica' Calif.:
KarSl Submit at Blair House(ph^d * .*^2002^?** ^^ "* the >"9

-,Paklstan Was **~ <° -U^r;,^ york Tmes, December 30

-5'^M-'1^^a^,SIta^^n^M,y25i2oo2

Kashmir and India-Pakistan Nuclear Issues

181

6. Gaurav Kampani, "India's Compellence Strategy: Calling Pakistan's Nuclear Bluff Over
Kashmir," CMS Research Story of the Week, June 10,2002, available at
[Link] week/[Link].

7. Ganguly, "The Nuclear Dimension," Conflict Unending, 101-13; Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N.
Waltz, "Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Weapons: For Better or Worse?" The Spread of Nuclear
Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 109-24.

8. Sagan and Waltz, "Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Weapons," The Spread of Nuclear Weapons,
90-108.

9. Samina Ahmed, "Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons Program," International Security 23, no.4
(Spring 1999): 183-85.

10. Peter R. Lavoy, "The Uses of Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons: Politics, Personalities, and
Perceptions," paper presented at the Conference on Prospects for Peace in South Asia, Stanford
University, Stanford, Calif., January 21-22, 2003, 8-9.

11. Ganguly, "The First Kashmir War," Conflict Unending, 26-27; Victoria Schofield, "Diplomacy
and War," Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unfinished War (London: I. B. Tauris
Publishers, 2000), 99-103.

12. Ganguly, "The Bangladesh War," Conflict Unending, 69-74.

13. Lavoy, "The Uses of Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons," 10-11.

14. Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, "Kashmir: From Simla to Chaos," Perception, Politics and
Security in South Asia, 57-64.

15. Mary Anne Weaver, "Kashmir," Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan (New
York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002), 260, 262; Owen Bennett Jones, "Musharraf's Challenge,"
Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 26-33.

16. Bennett Jones, "Kashmir," Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, 74-80.

17. This view was best summed up by the famous Indian strategic analyst K. Subrahmanyam in
the aftermath of the 1990 Indo-Pakistani crisis. According to Subrahmanyam, "The awareness
on both sides of a nuclear capability that can enable either country to assemble nuclear
weapons at short notice induces mutual caution. This caution is already evident on the part of
India. In 1965, when Pakistan carried out its "Operation Gibraltar" and sent in infiltrators, India
sent its army across the cease-fire line to destroy the assembly points of the infiltrators. That
escalated into a full-scale war. In 1990 when Pakistan once again carried out a massive
infiltration of terrorists trained in Pakistan, India tried to deal with the problem on Indian
territory and did not send its army into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir." See, K. Subrahmanyam,
"Capping, Managing, or Eliminating Nuclear Weapons?" in South Asia after the Cold War, ed.
Kanti P. Bajpai and Stephen P. Cohen (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), 184.

18. Dr. Suba Chandran, "Why Kargil? Pakistan's Objectives and Motivations," in Kargil: The
Tables Turned, ed. Maj. Gen. Ashok Krishna and P. R. Chari (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001).

30-38.

19. Glenn Snyder, "The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror," in The Balance of Power,
ed. Paul Seabury (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), 184-201.

20. Robert Jervis, "The Theory of the Nuclear Revolution," The Meaning of the Nuclear
Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,

1989), 19-22.

21. "Pakistan Urges U.N. Role in Solving Kashmir Issue," Xinhua News Agency, June 22,

1998, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, June 22, 1998, available at [Link] .corn
(accessed August 12, 2003).

22. "The Nuclear Backdrop," From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report
(New Delhi: Sage Publications, December 15, 1999), 194.

23. Anwar Iqbal, "Outgoing Prime Minister Says Kashmir at Root of Nuclear Arms Race," United
Press International, October 18, 1993, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, October 18,
182

Gaurav Kampani

1993, available at [Link] (accessed August 11, 2003); "Foreign Minister

Speaks on Kashmir Issue, NPT, Relations with India, USA," BBC Summary of World Broadcasts,
January 10, 1995, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, January 10, 1995, available at
[Link] (August 11, 2003); Phil Chetwynd, "Pakistan Demands Kashmir Talks
to Defuse Nuclear Tension," AFP, May 31, 1998, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe May 31,
1998, available at [Link] (accessed August 11, 2003).

24. Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, "Pakistan's Quest for Nuclear Technology," Australian Outlook

34, no. 2 (1980): 194; "Pakistan Proposes Nuclear Test Ban in South Asia," New York Times,
September 25, 1987, A9, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, September 25, 1987, available at
[Link] (accessed August 2003).

25. "Pakistan Holding Firm to Nuclear Arms Plan," New York Times, November 21,1993, in Lexis-
Nexis Academic Universe, November 21, 1993, available at [Link]
(accessed August 11, 2003); "No Freeze on Nuclear Program: Pakistan," Indian Express, July

3,2003, [Link] (accessed July 2003).

26. Zafar Iqbal Cheema, "Pakistan's Nuclear Use D*octrine and Command and Control," in
Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical
Weapons, ed. Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James J. Wirtz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2000), 164.

27. Mohammad Ilyas, "Pakistan Says Kashmir Major Flashpoint," AAP Information Services Pty.
Ltd., June 11, 1998, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, June 11, 1998, available at
[Link] (accessed August 11, 2003).

28. "Nuclear Backdrop," Kargil Review Committee Report, 197-99, 206-9.

29. Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, "1990 as a Nuclear Crisis," Perceptions, Politics, and Security in
South Asia, 125-26.

30. Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair, and Jamison Jo Medby, "The Significance of the Kargil
Crisis," Limited Conflict under the Nuclear Umbrella, 25-59.

31. Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, "Kashmir: From Simla to Chaos," Perceptions, Politics, and
Security in South Asia, 43-64.
32. Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, "A Region in Turmoil on Eve of Crisis," Perceptions, Politics, and
Security in South Asia, 22-24; also see Ashley Tellis, Stability in South Asia (Santa Monica: Rand,
1997).

33. Raj Chengappa, "End the Wink and Nudge Approach," Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story
of India's Quest to Be a Nuclear Power (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India,

2000), 353-66; "Nuclear Backdrop," Kargil Review Committee Report, 205.

34. "Nuclear Backdrop," Kargil Review Committee Report, 204.

35. Bharat Karnad, "Hesitant Nuclear Realpolitik: 1966 to Date," Nuclear Weapons and Indian
Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy (New Delhi: Macmillan India Limited,

2002), 368.

36. Indian concerns are articulated in several Joint Intelligence Committee reports submitted to
the Indian government during the 1990s. See "Nuclear Backdrop," Kargil Review cornmittee
Report, 197-99; for further examples see, Arthur Max, "U.S. Exploring Peacemaking Role in
Indo-Pakistani Conflict," AP, May 25, 1993, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, May

25, 1993, available at [Link] (accessed August 2003); "Raphel Reasserts

U.S. 'Disputed Territory' Stance on Kashmir," AFP, November 8, 1993, in Lexis-Nexis Academic
Universe, November 8, 1993, available at [Link] (accessed August

2003).

37. "Prepared Statement by Robin Raphel, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs
before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee," Federal Information Systems Corporation,
Federal News Service, March 9, 1995, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, 1995, available at
[Link] (accessed August 11, 2003).

Kashmir and India-Pakistan Nuclear Issues

183

38. Ganguly, "The First Kashmir War," Conflict Unending, 15-30.

39. Y. K. Malik and Ashok Kapur, "Introduction: India and America-Engaging Each Other in a
Changing World," in India and the United States in a Changing World, ed. Ashok Kapur, Y. K.
Malik, Harold A. Gould, and Arthur G. Rubinoff (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001),
17-22; also see Milind Thakar, "Coping with Insecurity: The Pakistani Variable in Indo-U.S.
Relations," in Engaging India: U.S. Strategic Relations with the World's Largest Democracy, ed.
Gary K. Bertsch, Seema Gahlaut, and Anupam Srivastava (New York: Routledge, 1999),

223-33.

40. Sumit Ganguly, "Introduction," The Origins of War in South Asia: Indo-Pakistani Conflicts
since 1947 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986), 10-14; Jones, "Kashmir" in Pakistan:

Eye of the Storm, 104-8.

41. Stephen P. Cohen, "India and Pakistan," India: Emerging Power (Washington, D.C.: The

Brookings Institution, 2001), 217-20.

42. "India: Government Will Not Allow Pakistan to Link Nuclear Issue with Kashmir," PT1 News
Agency, December 16, 1998, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, December 16, 1998, available at
[Link] (accessed August 12, 2003).

43. Sheldon U. Kodikara, "South Asian Security Dilemmas in the Post-Cold War World," in

South Asia after the Cold War.

44. Michael Battye, "Angry India Accuses U.S. Tilt to Pakistan," Reuters, October 30,1993.

45. C. Raja Mohan, "Fostering Strategic Stability and Promoting Regional Cooperation," in

Engaging India, 26-28.

46. George Perkovich, chapters 12, 13, and 14 in India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global
Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 318^03.

47. P. R. Chari,"Indo-U.S. Relations: Nonproliferation Concerns," in Engaging India, 7-11.

48. "Prepared Statement by John H. Kelly, assistant secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian
affairs before Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, House Foreign Affairs cornmittee,"
U.S. Department of State, November 2,1990, in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, November 12,
1990, available at [Link] (accessed August 2003).

49. K. Subrahmanyam, "Capping, Managing, or Eliminating Nuclear Weapons," in South

Asia after the Cold War, 178-84.

50. George Perkovich, "A Nuclear Third Way in South Asia," Foreign Policy, no. 91 (Summer
1993): 85-104.
51. Interview with Strobe Talbott, Hindu (Chennai), January 14, 2000, available at www

.[Link] (accessed January 14,2000).

52. For a snapshot of growing U.S. concerns, see State Department's annual reports, Patterns of
Global Terrorism, between 1996 and 2000, available at [Link].

53. Interview with Strobe Talbott, Hindu.

54. This is evident from the testimonies, public comments, speeches, interviews, and
statements made by Clinton administration officials in the aftermath of India's May 1998
nuclear

tests.

55. Tellis, Fair, and Medby, "Lessons Learned on Both Sides," Limited Conflict under the

Nuclear Umbrella, 53-54.

56. See chapters 5,6, and 7 in Kargil: The Tables Turned.

57. Tellis, Fair, and Medby, "The Significance of the Kargil Crisis." Limited Conflict under

the Nuclear Umbrella, 21-22.

58. C. Raja Mohan, "Jaswant Cautions Pak.," Hindu, August 12, 1999, available at www

.[Link] (accessed August 12, 1999).

59. Inaugural address by Raksha Mantri at Habitat Center, New Delhi, "The Challenges of
Limited War: Parameters and Options," National Seminar organized by IDSA, January 5,2000.

60. Address by Raksha Mantri.

184

Gaurav Kampani

61. Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta, "U.S.-South Asia: Relations under Bush," Oxford
Analytica, 2001, available at [Link] (accessed April 2001).

62. Ayaz Amir, "Standing a 2-Year Nexus on Its Head," Dawn, September 28, 2001, available at
[Link] (accessed September 28, 2001).

63. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, "Why a War against Terrorism Has Pakistan Terrified," Hindustan
Times, September 16,2001, available at [Link] (accessed September 16

2001).

64. Kampani, "India's Compellence Strategy."

65. Shishir Gupta, "When India Came Close to War," India Today, December 23, 2002 available
at [Link] (accessed December 2002).

66. Transcript of PBS interview with U.S. undersecretary of state Richard Armitage, August

30, 2002, in Outlooklndia, September 3, 2002, available at [Link] (accessed

September 2002).

67. Michael Krepon, "Escalator to Nowhere," Outlooklndia, November 11, 2002, available at
[Link] (accessed November 2002). *

68. Perkovich, "A Nuclear Third Way in South Asia."

69. For an Indian perspective see, Raja Menon, "Pure Strategy and Technology," A Nuclear
Strategy for India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000), 171-73; Brahma Chellaney, "Nuclear
Deterrent Posture," in Securing India's Future in the New Millennium, ed. Brahma Chellaney
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1999), 141-51. Pakistan's efforts in this direction are best
summed up by Cheema, "Pakistan's Nuclear Use Doctrine," in Planning the Unthinkable,

70. Ashley Tellis, "Toward a Force-in-Being: Understanding India's Nuclear Doctrine and Future
Force Posture," India's Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready
Arsenal (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001), 251-475.

71. Office of the Secretary of Defense, "South Asia," Proliferation Threat and Response
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 2001), 21-30.

72. Lavoy, "The Uses of Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons," 13-14.

73. Agha Shahi, Zulfikar Ali Khan, and Abdul Sattar, "Securing Nuclear Peace," News
International, October 5, 1999, available at [Link] (accessed October

1999).

74. Shahi, Khan, and Sattar, "Securing Nuclear Peace"; also see P. Cotta-Ramusino and M.
Martellini, "Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Stability, and Nuclear Strategy in Pakistan," The Landau
Network, Centre Volta, January 21,2002, available at
[Link] .pdf (accessed January 2002).

75. Cheema, "Pakistan's Nuclear Use Doctrine," in Planning the Unthinkable, 175-78.

76. Tellis, "Toward a Force-in-Being," India's Emerging Nuclear Posture, 261-366.

77. Tellis, Fair, and Medby, "Kargil: Lessons Learned on Both Sides," Limited Conflicts under the
Nuclear Umbrella, 56-57.

78. Chengappa, "End the Wink and Nudge Approach," Weapons of Peace, 357.

79. Karnad, "The Perils of Deterrence by Half-Measures," Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security,
666-82.

80. Tellis, "Toward a Force-in-Being," India's Emerging Nuclear Posture, 341-66.

81. "Review of Events Leading up to Kargil," Kargil Review Committee Report, 65-66.

82. Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, "1990 as a Nuclear Crisis," Perception, Politics, and Security in
South Asia, 115-36.

83. Vijay Datt, "Pak. Does Not Rule Out Use of N-Arms: Report," Hindustan Times, June

24, 1999, available at [Link] (accessed June 1999); "India Not Daunted by
Pak. Nuke Threat: PM," Times of India, July 1,1999, available at [Link]
.corn (accessed July 1999).

Kashmir and India-Pakistan Nuclear Issues

185

84. "Delhi Positions Missiles on Border," Dawn, December 27, 2001, available at www
[Link] (accessed December 2001); Gul, "Pakistan Tests Ghauris, Shaheens Today."

85. Tellis, Stability in South Asia, 8-11.

86. "Text of PM, Musharraf Statement," Hindu, January 6,2004, available at [Link]
corn (accessed January 2004).

87. "General Musharraf Addresses India Today Enclave, Calls for 'New Road Map for Peace,'"
Aaj Tak, March 13, 2004, in FBIS Document SAP20040313000066, March 13, 2004.

FURTHER READING

Bennett Jones, Owen. Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,

2002. Chellaney, Brahma. "India Is Ready to Defend Itself," New York Times, December 28,2001,
at

[Link].

From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report. New Delhi: Sage
Publications, December 15,1999.

Gupta, Shishir. "When India Came Close to War," India Today, December 23, 2002, at www

.[Link].

Jervis, Robert. The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of
Armageddon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Krepon, Michael. "Escalator to Nowhere," Outlooklndia, November 11,2002, at [Link]

[Link]. Singh, Jasjit. "Rethinking the Unthinkable: How Pakistan's Nuclear Strategy Went for
a Six,"

Indian Express, June 13, 2002, at [Link]. Tellis, Ashley. Stability in South Asia.
Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1997. Tellis, Ashley J., C. Christine Fair, and Jamison Jo Medby,
Limited Conflict under the Nuclear

Umbrella: Indian and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand,

2001.

Wirsing, Robert G. Kashmir in the Shadow of War: Regional Rivalries in a Nuclear Age. London:
M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2003.
187

International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

Maya Chadda

The term ethnic conflict may best be defined as a conflict between groups of communities that
regard themselves as distinctly different from other groups on account of shared characteristics
such as myths of origin, language, religion, cultural heritage, race, and clan or tribal association,
and perhaps most importantly, a shared sense of history/Although there is no consensus as to
why ethnic conflicts arise or to what extent they are critical in any given region, most scholars
agree that such conflicts contribute significantly to the escalation of international tensions. This
chapter examines the role of ethnic conflicts in the shaping of South Asia's interstate relations
by outlining several cases of internationalized ethnic conflicts, exploring the conjunction of
situational elements that make them a part of interstate relations in the region, and examining
current debates as to why ethnic conflicts spread beyond the state to become a factor in
regional relations. However, while this chapter focuses on how ethnic division is the principal
setting within which conflict and cooperation occurs, two important facts must be noted: first,
ethnicity is by no means the reason for all conflicts in South Asia, and second, all ethnic conflicts
do not necessarily become internationalized.

There is an abundance of ethnic conflicts in South Asia, and many extend beyond the state.
Here, we examine the common patterns among them to construct a broad picture of how
ethnic conflicts became internationalized in South Asia. As a starting point, it might be more
useful to imagine South Asia not as a subcontinent of separate sovereign states but as one of
graded ethnic differences. The Pathans in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan
gradually extend into the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan; the Rajasthani language, spoken mainly
in the Indian state of Rajasthan, changes only by degrees every hundred miles, depending on
whether one travels toward Sindh in Pakistan or Gujarat in India. It takes on local coloration as
it gains distance
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Maya Chadda

and moves toward the area of the next proximate language. The Indian province-state of
Bengal, parts of Assam and Bihar, and what is ,today Bangladesh share scores of dialects
derived from Bengali. South Asia's ethnolinguistic communities are concentrated in compact
areas or regions. It is within such a milieu that the British colonial authorities drew the
boundaries of modern South Asian states. The purpose was to legitimize conquest and facilitate
colonial administration, but there is ample evidence to suggest that the colonial policies
strengthened ethnic identities. The territorial boundaries that the British left behind when they
departed from the subcontinent in 1947 cut across the cultural and ethnic boundaries of South
Asia. The problems of territorial consolidation that bedevil the regional states today cannot be
understood unless we take into account pan-Indian nationalism, narrower ethnic nationalism,
and the old colonial state. Independence did not meld the disparate identities into a single
whole; nor did it resolve conflict between cornpeting identities, which now extended into the
international arena.

We need to consider two additional features of South Asia. First, in size, population, and
economic and military power, India dominates the region. Second, all South Asian states, with
the exception of Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Afghanistan, share borders with India, but-with
the exception of Pakistan and Afghanistan-none shares them with each other. This has several
immediate implications. India must contend with the problem of ethnic overlap with a large
number of states. All neighboring states regard her as a hegemonic power anxious to reduce
the smaller countries to a satellite status. The states that share borders with India have
therefore pursued a variety of strategies to offset India's superior strength. Pakistan's reliance
on the United States and Nepal's attempt to enlist China are instances of these counteracting
strategies. Are South Asia's international conflicts a result of this asymmetry of power in size
and military capabilities, or are they a consequence of nonconcurrence between territorial and
cultural boundaries?1 This is the overarching question that must be answered to understand
the international implications of ethnic conflicts. In this chapter, I try to show that we need to
consider ethnic conflict as an integral part of South Asia's security dilemma.2

SOUTH ASIA'S INTERNATIONALIZED ETHNIC CONFLICTS

Ethnic identities become internationalized in two ways: they may generate actors, movements,
and consequences that extend beyond the claimed boundaries of a state; or events beyond the
borders, such as wars, large-scale migrations and refugees, separatist agitation and militancy,
political collapse or instability, might "ethnicize" a state's regional and international policy. In
both instances, international boundaries become blurred and separation of domestic
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

189

from foreign policy becomes difficult to maintain. In South Asia, ethnic cornmunities that reside
along international borders or those that are divided by such borders are more frequently the
cause of interstate tensions than those in the interior of the country in question. Territorial
concentration of an ethnic group provides greater ease in mobilizing the community behind
ethnic demands than a group whose members might be geographically scattered. The three
most important players in such a conflict are the host state facing ethnic dissent, the ethnic
community that has the geopolitical and territorial basis to enlist support from international
actors, and the neighboring state, often referred to as the ethnic kin-state, that either shares
the ethnic overlap or is affected by policies of the host state. Kashmiris, Pashtuns, and Baluchis
represent overlapping nationalities. The Sikhs are a case of an alienated ethnic community
residing on the Indian side of the Indo-Pakistani border. India is the host state while Pakistan is
an ethnic kin-state for Kashmiris and a supporting state for the Sikh separatists. Iran and
Afghanistan are the ethnic kinstates for the Baluch nationalists, as is Afghanistan for the
Pashtuns. South Asia's ethnic demography provides a fertile arena for several crossborder
conflicts. For the purpose of analysis here, these are grouped into three separate clusters based
on their consequences for the region: (1) conflicts that have led to war, partition,
rearrangement of sovereign territories, or collapse of the central state, as in East Pakistan in the
1970s and Afghanistan since the 1990s; (2) conflicts that have led to military action in which
one or more extraregional states were involved but that resulted in no division of territories, as
in the Baluch struggle in the 1970s and the Sikh and Naga struggles over many decades; (3)
conflicts that have led to military intervention as an extension of diplomacy, as in Sri Lanka.
These are not proposed as scientific categories; their purpose is mainly heuristic.

THE FIRST CLUSTER: WAR, PARTITION, STATE COLLAPSE

While there are many causes that lead to the long history of ethnic conflicts, only three events
in particular have reached the status of great tragedies in South Asia: the partition of India in
1947, the partition of Pakistan in 1971, and the disintegration and collapse of Afghanistan in
1992 and beyond.3 Each tragedy illustrates the enduring power and disintegrative potential of
uncontrolled warfare between ethnic communities. No other regional conflicts in South Asia
compare in the scale of killing, destruction, and human displacement with the three events
mentioned above. Each represents a decisive turning point in the international relations of
South Asia,

Let us take the first tragedy, the partition of India in 1947, and ask whether this was caused by a
particular distribution of international power and the
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declining military capabilities of the British Raj or by internal factors, such as the British agenda
on the eve of departure and the nature and popular base of Indian nationalism, its ideology,
organization, and leadership. Most importantly, we need to ask if Partition was not primarily an
outcome of rivalry mistrust, and struggle for ascendancy between the Muslim League, claiming
to represent the Muslims of the subcontinent and the Indian National Congress (INC), claiming
to speak for all Hindus and Muslims. Although the British will to hold on to India had weakened
greatly in the aftermath of World War II, the extensive literature on the causes of Partition
suggests that while the British may have decided to leave, division of the colony was not
necessarily slated in the initial plan. To understand why India came to be divided, we need to
turn to political developments within the subcontinent.4 The 1947 partition underlined the
ways in which a demand for power sharing can become a demand for a separate state. It
foreshadowed the enduring nature of such conflicts, which over the decades since have led to
wars (between India and Pakistan), the implosion of a region (Kashmir), and continuing
insurgency.

The Muslim League charged that the INC's secular claims disguised its communal (religion-
based) biases. The League argued that INC provincial governments, elected under the partial
representational system introduced by the British in the 1930s, had systematically
discriminated against Muslims in education, jobs, and share of political office. Many in the
League were convinced that by virtue of history, religion, and cultural traditions, the Muslims
and Hindus constituted two separate nations, each equally needing a state to flourish without
interference or domination by the other. This last rationale has given much currency to the
"primordialist" explanations (based on ancient ethnic hatreds) for the communal violence that
occurred in 1947. While the argument for a separate Muslim state was not prominent until the
1940s, it gained ground as the hour of freedom from the British approached. The British had
promised independence in return for Indian nationalist support for Allied efforts in World War
II. By the end of the war, it was clear that the British Raj had come to an end.

Historians are divided over what caused the partition and who was to blame for the communal
carnage that followed.5 Some suggest that British manipulations had sown the seeds of division
between the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent. For evidence they point to the colonial
dispensation of separate electorates during the 1930s, which had fomented Muslim ambitions
and fears. If the Muslims of British India were to elect their own leaders exclusively from their
community, they could concentrate only on what they wanted and avoid having to seek a
larger, national consensus. Others point to the fragile and uncertain social base of the Muslim
League and argue that Muhammad AM Jinnah had no option but to demand a separate country
if the Muslims were ever to have a decisive voice in the subcontinent. Yet, other scholars
conclude that political and electoral considerations within the Congress Party outweighed its
commitment to inclusive principles and drove the Muslim League from the fold of composite
Indian nationalism. Historians are not then in agreement about whether Partition was a result
of ancient hatreds, political ambitions, or expediency.

The consequences of the Partition are not, however, in doubt. In its immediate aftermath,
more than twelve million people fled their homes in search of safety across the border, Hindus
migrating to India and Muslims to Pakistan. This was the largest refugee migration ever
experienced in the subcontinent; Punjab, Sindh, Bengal, now the border provinces, were
divided. Many have described these events as an epic tragedy that cast a dark shadow over two
generation of South Asians, breaking up a centuries-old social order that had set patterns of
mutual ethnic tolerance and social intercourse.6 The Partition also drowned out the voices of
other ethnic nationalisms: the Bengali, Sikh, Tamil, Naga or Assamese, Singh, and Baluch. The
Kashmiri and Sikh reconstruction of the events of Partition is for that reason significantly
different from that of the official and national histories of India and Pakistan.7 These were
destined to surface with renewed vigor in the postindependence

period.

Wary of further divisions and anxious to consolidate their rule, India and Pakistan moved to
create unified sovereign nation-states. Pakistan, the more fragile of the two, opted for a
centralizing viceregal model and a unitary political system, which has had a profoundly
damaging impact on its history. Pakistan denied autonomy to ethnic regions and power to
ethnic parties that had agreed to the creation of a separate Pakistan.8 India, too, balked at
granting political self-rule and a territorial homeland to the Sikhs, Nagas, and Assamese residing
on her international borders, although the 1956 state reorganization gave ethnolinguistic
homelands to other ethnic communities within India. The permanent state of conflict that
marks the past fifty-eight years of Indo-Pakistani relations might have been avoided had
Partition produced neat cultural and territorial divisions, but this was not possible. A large
number of Muslims continue to reside in India, including Kashmiri Muslims, who constitute a
majority in Indian Kashmir.

Since the Kashmir dispute is examined elsewhere in this volume, I will not discuss it here at any
length. It is nevertheless important to bear in mind that the 1947 partition created an enduring
ethnic conflict between India and Pakistan. This conflict has since determined their foreign and
defense policies and shaped the balance of regional power. For instance, the dispute over
Kashmir largely explains why Pakistan joined the military alliances led by the United States and
why a nonaligned India leaned toward the Soviet Union. It explains why Pakistan forged
strategic ties with China in the 1960s
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and developed nuclear weapons as a counter to the larger and militarily superior India. One
could argue that Pakistan might have forged such ties in any event, but historians tell us that
immediately after independence, Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaqat All Khan, was greatly
attracted to the nonaligned alternative and would have opted for it had the dispute over
Kashmir not compelled him to defer to the military and set Pakistan on a course of permanent
rivalry with the larger India. Had there been no dispute over Kashmir, Pakistan's ties with China
and the United States might have had a different focus. India might have still sought out the
Soviet Union, but less as a counter to Pakistan than to America's Cold War ambitions.

These international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute had an equally profound effect on the
domestic policies of each country. Scholars are divided over what occurred first, militarization
of Pakistan or the conflict over Kashmir. Most would agree that the two are inextricably
intertwined. India's federal design accommodated the demands of Kashmiri nationalism, but
the Indian governments were never comfortable with the special status of Kashmir and sought
to integrate it in contravention of the constitutional provisions of Article 370. The erosion of
Kashmiri autonomy in combination with other social and economic frustrations eventually led
to the insurgency in 1989, which has resulted in more than sixty thousand deaths, a large
number of them of civilians, and has made Kashmir the most dangerous nuclear flash point for
the past seven years

The Second Partition: The Bangladesh War

The partition of Pakistan in 1971 was a second stage replay of the first partition.9 The uneasy
integration of Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan did not survive the course of politics in West
Pakistan. Bengali Muslims constituted not only a majority in Pakistan but possessed a separate
landmass where they were concentrated. Most significantly, a swath of Indian territory
separated East and West Pakistan. Pakistan feared that electoral democracy would empower
the Bengali majority in the east and threaten the dominance of the Punjab-Pashtun ruling
classes, who were ascendant in Pakistan's two important political institutions, the military and
bureaucracy. Between 1947 and

1971, the Bengali nationalists confined their demands to linguistic, economic, administrative,
and political autonomy for East Pakistan.10 The West Pakistani elite feared that autonomy
would set the stage for independence. In any event a grant of autonomy to its eastern part
would have probably entailed a parallel grant of autonomy to other ethnically defined
provinces, or so Pakistan's military bureaucracy thought. In any event, the result would be the
same: a serious challenge to the dominance of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy. The
elections of December 1970 brought these matters to a head. In these the East Pakistan based
Awami League led by Sheik Mujibur Rehman obtained 167 seats, which gave it the majority
needed to form a government. Neither the military nor the Pakistan People's Party, which had
won the second largest number of seats in the National Assembly, were willing to let
democracy take its course. The leaders of the Awami League were arrested, and the military
struck in March 1971, unleashing a campaign of terror and killing in the months that followed.
Incensed by the military's brutal response, the Awami League declared independence and
mobilized the Bengali masses.11 Pakistan was plunged into a civil war in which the Punjabi elite
in the west sought to crush the revolt by its Bengali fellow Muslims in the east. Close to ten
million Bengalis-Muslims and Hindus-fled across the border into India where they were granted
refuge.

The Indian role, however, went well beyond humanitarian concerns. India had provided
substantial support to the Bengali resistance (Mukti Bahini), extended safe sanctuaries, and
trained and armed guerrilla forces under Indian military supervision.12 The Awami League was
permitted to form a government in exile in Calcutta. The flood of refugees had virtually erased
the boundaries between East Pakistan and India, and the civilian suffering evoked images of the
1947 communal holocaust. India too prepared for war. During the months of March and April
1971, the Pakistani military crackdown escalated while, paralyzed by Cold War divisions, the
international community did little more than criticize Pakistan for its action. In December 1971
Pakistan launched a surprise attack on the Indian airfields, officially beginning the war. The war
lasted for about four weeks, at the end of which Pakistan's armed forces surrendered to India
and Bangladesh became an independent country.

The Bangladesh war underlines the role of ethnic conflict in reordering the boundaries and
determining interstate relations in the region. It provides insights into the mix of motives that
might compel an ethnic kin-state to balance foreign policy considerations against domestic
concerns. India had a compelling interest in repatriation of the refugees, who were a heavy
economic burden and a potentially destabilizing presence in Bengal and Assam, where they had
taken refuge. India also wanted to weaken Pakistan in order to extract from it major
concessions along the line of control (LOG) in Kashmir.13 It was anxious to calm sentiment in
West Bengal, which was pressing for military action to stop the genocide of fellow Bengalis.
Equally if not more compellingly, New Delhi wished to preserve the boundaries between East
and West Bengal to prevent any future mobilization of pan-Bengali nationalism. A continued
civil war in East Pakistan would have seriously endangered India's territorial unity. Finally, for
Indira Gandhi and the Congress government, it was a highly popular war. If India won, the ruling
party was certain to reap the benefits in the 1971 and 1972 elections. For the Bengali
nationalists, access to safe sanctuaries, training, and
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arms, not to mention diplomatic support from a regionally powerful state meant enhanced
chances of liberation from Pakistan. The cultural and linguistic ties between East and West
Bengal and its shared borders with India made the latter a powerful ethnic kin-state. Pakistan's
vulnerability, its military weakness against both India and the Mukti Bahini, was made worse by
the lack of international support. Ethnic conflict had again led to territorial partition in South
Asia, and the behavior of the state and nonstate actors, India, Pakistan, the Mukti Bahini, and
the West Bengali people, was shaped by consideration of ethnic interests. Focusing only on the
external elements, such as the military balance of power, in which India was obviously "the
superior state, offers only partial explanations as to why the Bangladesh war occurred. The
popular mobilization in East Pakistan was triggered by the oppressive policies of leaders in West
Pakistan, the denial of autonomy, and the growing resentment over the treatment of East
Pakistani Bengalis by the Punjabi West Pakistanis, who saw themselves as a superior people.
India did not intervene simply because it had the military capabilities to undertake the
liberation of Bangladesh without excessive costs. Had ten million refugees not fled across the
border and endangered West Bengal and the Indian northeast, New Delhi would have had far
less justification for its intervention. We need therefore to integrate into our analysis the logic
of ethnic mobilization and the security concerns created by South Asia's ethnic overlap. The
Bangladesh war had, however, sown the seeds that were to bear a poisonous fruit in the 1990s,
not in the east where the war had been fought, but in the west where nuclear-armed India and
Pakistan confronted each other over the disputed Vale of Kashmir.

War, Disintegration, and Regional Reordering: The Afghan War

The collapse of Afghanistan in the early 1990s and the civil war that followed between its
warring ethnic groups is the third tragedy of historic proportions whose repercussions will
continue to reverberate around the region into the future. The Afghan conflict can be divided
into several phases, discussed at length in chapter 5.14 Their progression does not concern us
here. What concerns us is the role of ethnic conflict in shaping these events. First of all, the
Afghan civil war erased the international border that divides Afghanistan from Pakistan. The
Pashtun people who reside on this border have historically possessed a sense of ethnic
difference from the non-Pashtun population of British India and, later, Pakistan. Their imagined
homeland stretches from Qandahar in the south and west, to the Indus River in the east, and to
Dir and Swat in the north.

The Afghan civil war offered Pakistan an opportunity to settle the Pashtun question in its favor.
It could do this by securing a friendly and dependent
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

195

government in Kabul.15 Pakistan hoped that such a regime in Afghanistan would permanently
end the irredentist demand for Pashtunistan. In the past several governments in Kabul had
denounced the Durand Line (which divides Afghanistan and Pakistan) as a colonial creation and
extended support for a separate Pashtunistan or demanded that the Pashtun areas be
incorporated into Afghanistan. It is against this history of Pashtun claims that Pakistan
encouraged and armed pro-Pakistani Pashtuns, referred to as the Taliban, to wage a war for
ascendancy in Afghanistan. The Taliban victory in the late 1990s signaled the advent of a
fanatical Islamic regime in Kabul, but it also underscored the triumph of Pakistan's ethnically
driven regional strategy.16 The human toll in life and limb of the people of the region has been
horrendous. The events after 1997, when the Taliban captured nearly 90 percent of
Afghanistan, the international isolation that propelled them into the arms of Osama bin Laden
and al Qaeda, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the American
intervention in Afghanistan, are the subject of other chapters in this volume. What needs
stressing here is the ethnic character of these events, that the behavior of countries in the
region-Pakistan, the Central Asian states, Iran, India, and Saudi Arabia-can be explained largely
as an attempt to strengthen friendly ethnics or fellow ethnics to acquire influence over the
course of events. The establishment of the Taliban regime had provided a brief hiatus in the
ethnic wars between 1998 and 2001, but ethnic identities were to again serve as a wedge for
dislodging the Pashtun Taliban and securing Kabul for the Northern Alliance composed of the
Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and other nonPashtuns. The Bonn Agreement in December 2001, which
followed the Taliban's defeat and expulsion, tried to balance the ethnic claims and
counterclaims, as did the loyajirga, the traditional tribal council held in June 2002. The latter
was meant to legitimize the leadership of Hamid Karzai, who had emerged from the Bonn
Agreement as the compromise candidate to head the proposed provisional government in
Kabul. Post-Taliban Afghanistan is a place of warring ethnic regions held together by the
military presence of U .S. and NATO forces. In the view of many observers, the central state has
simply disappeared or is too weak to perform its conventional functions in Afghanistan. A large
number of pro-Taliban ethnic Pashtuns who fled to their ethnic homeland in Pakistan have
continued to regroup and attack the Karzai government and American forces from their
hideouts across the border. The history of subsequent attempts to stabilize the Karzai
government and the problems encountered in nation building in Afghanistan underscore the
importance of internationalized ethnicity as a factor in the shaping of war and peace in South
Asia. The meddling by regional powers-Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia-has not only
ethnicized the nation building, but it has prevented full reintegration of disparate regions of
Afghanistan. Having expelled
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the Taliban regime from Kabul, the United States has turned its guns toward the al Qaeda
elements in order to drain the swamp and eliminate the terrorists from the Pashtun areas. That
has required the United States to seek out local support. The United States is thus sucked into
the vortex of domestic ethnopolitics in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By many accounts Pakistan is
now "Talibanized," meaning ethnic conflicts have merged with those over religious
fundamentalism.17 The immediate consequence is the intensification of crossborder infiltration
from Pakistan into Indian Jammu and Kashmir. How and why the two fronts came to be
connected is the subject of discussion in other chapters of this volume. It is enough to note
here that the violence caused by the two sets of overlapping ethnicities, the Pashtun and
Kashmiri, has escalated tensions between India and Pakistan and turned South Asia not only
into a nuclear flash point but a battleground between the regular armies of states and armed
insurgents that belong to no state.

It is then difficult to separate the domestic from the international issues in this situation. The
interests of the United States, Russia, China, and India are at stake, but so are those of lesser
powers. Indeed, proximity and ethnic affinity give those in the lesser-power category greater
leverage to affect the course of events compared to those in the great-power category. What is
more, the United States and China, the two great powers with important stakes in South Asia,
must rely on regional states to protect their interests. The United States needs Pakistan's
cooperation in hunting for al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan. In return, the Bush
administration is willing to ignore questions of democracy and human rights, even when
Pakistan continues to support jihad in Kashmir. This is a case of reverse leverage that cannot be
explained without reference to South Asia's ethnic divide.

THE SECOND CLUSTER: ETHNIC VIOLENCE AND INSURGENCY

The Indian military suppression of the Sikh separatists in Punjab during the 1980s and Nagas in
the northeast since the 1950s, the use of coercion against the tribal communities in the
Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) by the government of Bangladesh in the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistani
military actions against Baluch nationalists in the early 1970s, and ethnic violence caused by
largescale migration of Nepalis into India and Bhutan over several decades do not approach the
scale and impact of the three historic tragedies described above, but their effects have been
intense in the areas where they occurred.18 They outline yet another pattern in which ethnic
conflicts can become internationalized. The two most important factors that shape the
outcome of these conflicts is, first, the overwhelming strength of the host state in comparison
to the secessionist community, as well as the ability to hold the territorial status quo,
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

197

and, second, the limited and frequently episodic nature of support from ethnic ]0n-states for
the secessionists. The cross-border ethnic linkage is then one among several factors-at times a
critical one-that determines the balance of relations between states with overlapping ethnic
nationalities. The intensity of conflict will depend more on the internal conditions-unity,
organization, popular support, negotiating skills, and staying power-of the secessionists in
question. Kin-state support certainly plays a role, but ultimately it does not determine the
outcome. The response of the host state has usually depended on a whole host of factors, such
as the stability of the ruling regime, election schedules, the stance of the political opposition,
public opinion, relations with the ethnic kin-state such as India's with Pakistan and China, the
strength and intensity of insurgency, the possibility of splitting the ethnic cohorts, and the level
of international criticism for violations of human rights.

Baluchistan, the western border province of Pakistan, has been and continues to be the main
obstacle in the path to greater political integration of Pakistan.19 The conflict reached its peak
in 1973 when the Baluchis tried unsuccessfully to secede from Pakistan and create an
independent state of Baluchistan. About five million people of Baluch ethnic origin are located
primarily in Baluchistan in southwestern Pakistan, in southeastern Iran, and at the southern tip
of Afghanistan. The Baluch region is divided by the Goldsmid Line, which marks the border
between Iran and Pakistan and by the Durand Line, which, as mentioned above, divides
Pakistan from Afghanistan. Iran and Afghanistan are then the ethnic kin-states to the Baluch.
Both these states have played opposite roles in the spread and containment of the Baluch
conflict. According to Robert Wirsing, Baluch nationalists felt threatened by changing
demographics that reduced them to a minority within their own homeland, socioeconomic
modernization that threatened their lifestyle, and the fallout from the struggle for power in
Pakistan, which led to arbitrary dismissals of provincial governments and denial of autonomy.
Extensive emigration of the Baluchis and immigration of nonBaluchis, many of whom were
pensioned officers in the Pakistan armed forces, produced a sense of cultural invasion. The
Pakistani government's modernization policies further reinforced the Baluch fear of cultural
annihilation. While Pakistani officials criticize the Baluchis for clinging to their outmoded Sardari
(tribal kinship) system, the Baluchis saw Pakistani governments as exploitative and
manipulative. The immediate trigger for the confrontation of 1973 was the dismissal of the
Baluch provincial assembly by Prime Minister Z. A. Bhutto, who accused the elected Baluch
governor Ghaus Bux Bizenjo and Chief Minister Ataullah Mengal of plotting secession with the
help of Iraq and the Soviet Union. The dismissal plunged the province into a bloody civil war.
The two kin-states of the Baluch, Iran and Afghanistan, took contrasting stances on the conflict.
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Afghanistan provided small amounts of material assistance to the Baluch secessionists because
of its own longstanding dispute with Pakistan over the Pashtuns, while Iran extended military
assistance to Pakistan to crush'the Baluch revolt.20 The Shah of Iran feared that the Iranian
Baluchis would join those rebelling across the border in Pakistan. He suspected that Saddam
Hussein was aiding and abetting the Baluchis in retaliation for Iran's support for the Iraqi Kurds.
Although the Baluch revolt was brutally put down and drew some international attention at the
time, subsequent events in Afghanistan took center stage. Also, Pakistan entered a period of
shaky democracy in the late 1980s. It was hoped that stabilization of democracy in Pakistan
might create new power-sharing arrangements between the dominant Punjabis and the rest of
ethnic Pakistan, but that was not to be. Pakistan's democratic experiment ended abruptly as its
military and civilian leaders clashed over turf and policy toward India, especially Kashmir.
Pakistan's Baluch problem had now merged with its problems with Islamists, whose numbers
have been greatly augmented by the Taliban and al Qaeda forces who have fled from across
Afghanistan into Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province. Although the Taliban regime
has been ousted, Afghanistan remains extremely fragile and with it the bordering Baluch region
of Pakistan. The memories of the brutal oppression of the 1970s are still alive. The fall out from
the Afghan disintegration has many armed Taliban from across the boundary seeking
sanctuaries and safe havens while the government of Pakistan holds the most tenuous control
over the tribal regions. If Pakistan fails to check the growth of fundamentalists and meet the
demands of the beleaguered Baluchis, that region may become a dangerous challenge to
Pakistan's political integrity.

Internationalization of the Sikh militancy did not occur until the 1980s, although the Sikh
movement for greater political autonomy dates back to the period before 1947. This is also true
of the Naga demand for an independent Nagaland. But unlike the Sikhs, who accepted their
inclusion within the Indian Union, the Naga declared an armed revolt against the government
of India soon after independence.21 The Indian government treated Sikh nationalism as an
internal problem and therefore amenable to negotiated solution; however, it deployed the
army against the Naga insurgents and fought battles to neutralize them. As the armed
operations intensified, the Nagas sought support across the border from China and fellow
Nagas in Myanmar. India saw the Naga secessionism largely as a security problem and a
challenge to India's territorial unity.

The history of Sikh and Naga militancy is long and complicated. Each is different in its
particularities.22 Similarly, the Nepalis in Bhutan and the Chakma tribals in Bangladesh operate
in very different domestic and international settings. There are, however, several common
features shared by them all. First, demographics are an important factor in each, as are social,
eco-

nomic, and political inequalities. The Nagas resent the encroachment of the plains people from
West Bengal and Assam into their homeland, and the Sikhs see numerical majority as a key to
political power in Punjab. The Chaknias in the CHT of Bangladesh also shared with the rest of
the northeast Indian tribal belt a desire to safeguard their lifestyle from Bangladeshi migrants
to their tribal homeland. The mass migration of Bangladeshi Muslims into Assam, first in the
aftermath of the 1947 partition, then in 1971-1972 during the Bangladesh war, and in
substantial numbers since then, has created a similar sense of demographic invasion in Assam,
leading to the intensified Assamese nationalism and escalated tensions between India and
Bangladesh. The emergence of the militant United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) has further
complicated the geopolitics in these regions. Over the passage of years, militant organizations
of Nagas, Assamese, Mizolanders, and Tripurans have frequently collaborated to frustrate the
Indian security forces and border police.

The second common reason for the internationalization of the above ethnic struggles is the
strategies their respective governments have employed to contain, diffuse, and weaken ethnic
nationalities. The Bhutto government dismissed the popularly elected provincial government of
Bizenjo and deployed armed forces against its members. Prime Minster Indira Gandhi sought
first to split the Akali Dal (which represented the Sikhs in Punjab) by supporting the religious
radical priest Jairnal Singh Bbindranwale against them and later deploying the army against
Bhindranwale when he demanded a separate Khalistan for the Sikhs in India. New Delhi
cultivated a faction of the Nagas and sought to isolate the militants by granting a new state of
Nagaland within India. The governments in South Asia have therefore employed a carrot-
andstick approach to controlling ethnic nationalities, but this has still left the fundamental
grievances behind the ethnic disaffection unresolved.23 These surface with greater ferocity
each time. Indeed, Atul Kohli talks about a Ucurve in the ebb and flow of ethnic conflicts: they
rise to a peak, then fall in intensity, only to rise up again if the circumstances that created them
in the first place resurface, namely, loss of political control and socioeconomic
discrimination.24 Use of force by the state has frequently led to guerrilla warfare and terrorist
actions, as well as attacks on security forces and civilians. State coercion and enforcement of
draconian laws has hardened the ethnic extremists in turn and forced them beyond the
international boundaries. Many extremist groups (United Liberation Front of Assam, Khalistan
Liberation Front, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) have resorted to intimidation and criminal
activities to raise funds for arms. The porous nature of South Asia's international borders in the
Indian northeast, along Pakistan's northwest border, as well as along sections of the Indo-
Pakistan border makes the flow of arms and insurgents a routine phenomenon. Armed groups
have easy access to international
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bazaars in arms and weapons. Smuggling and drug dealing are the other avenues of raising
funds. In many instances the state is very thinly represented in the area, and its officials are
often co-opted in the informal networks that sustain ethnic violence, corruption, and crime.25

The third element common to these conflicts is the episodic nature of kinstate support. When
such support has been forthcoming, relations between the host and the kin-state have
invariably soured. Pakistan's support for the Sikh separatists in the 1980s, although never very
significant, generated serious talk of military retaliation. India has been more careful in its
statements linking the Naga conflict to China, but the connection is a constant reminder to
India of its vulnerability, should China resume its support of the Nagas. Indo' Bangladesh
relations have also frequently soured over illegal migration from Bangladesh into Assam and
Tripura. There have been a fair number of clashes between their respective border police and
security forces, and recently the Indian government requested that the United States supply it
with monitoring technology to seal the border. The suppression of Baluch nationalists similarly
led to deterioration in relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1970s. If Afghanistan
does not stabilize under the unified national government of Hamid Karzai, both Pakistan and
Afghanistan will again face challenges from the overlapping ethnic nationalities in Baluchistan
and the Northwest Frontier Province. Although these movements have failed so far to secure a
separate state, they have mobilized considerable international support from human rights
groups (for example, in the Baluch and Naga conflicts) and/or from an ethnic diaspora, as in the
case of the Sikh separatists. Each case of ethnic resistance mentioned above vacillated between
autonomy and independence. Insistence on separate statehood was frequently a bargaining
ploy to maximize concessions at the negotiating table. This ambivalence about goals within the
ethnic group often produced factions, some of which spun off into militancy and armed revolt.
The movement for Khalistan led by Bhindranwale did not reflect the majority of Sikhs in Punjab.
Bhindranwale represented the extreme end of a broad-based Sikh disaffection.26 Nagas are
similarly split between moderates and radicals. There is a delicate balance to be preserved
between the possibility of independence and agreement to stay within the national boundaries.
Should violence escalate, the central state can reimpose coercive control and bring the political
careers of the moderates to an end. On the other hand, the moderates can always point to the
potential escalation of violence to wrest more concessions from the state. Broad-based ethnic
movements clearly rely on the popular support of these cohorts.

The Sikh separatist demands have evaporated since the formation of the Akali government in
Punjab in the late 1990s. Punjab has returned to the fold of Indian electoral democracy. The
recent negotiations with the Nagas may
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

201

not turn out to be as fortuitous. The demand for a greater Nagaland would mean carving out
portions of Naga concentration from the adjacent states of Tripura and Manipur,27 This is
bound to unleash yet another round of ethnic violence. For the time being, however, China
appears less interested in fomenting ethnic trouble in northeastern India. The potential
nevertheless exists for a cascading impact of ethnic conflicts from Manipur to Assam, including
Nagaland and Tripura. Internationalization of Baluch, Sikh, Naga, and Bangladeshi Muslim
conflicts underscores the failure to consolidate territorial nation-states in South Asia.

THE THIRD CLUSTER: ETHNIC CONFLICT AND INTERVENTION IN SRI LANKA

Although Sri Lanka's Tamil-Sinhala conflict has a long history and shares many features with the
conflicts discussed above, it is the only instance where a government invited military
intervention for the purpose of settling ethnic conflict and preserving the territorial unity of the
state.28 The other two interventions, India's in East Pakistan and Pakistan's clandestine
intervention in Indian Kashmir, were hardly invited. The causes of Sinhala-Tamil conflict are not
dissimilar to those enumerated in ethnic conflict elsewhere in South Asia: denial of fair share in
power and office, unequal access to jobs and economic opportunities, political and social
discrimination, demographic aggression by a rival ethnic community backed by the central
state, denial of equal cultural rights, as in language discrimination, attempt to impose
hegemony of the rival ethnonationalism (in this instance Sinhala Buddhist nationalism), and use
of state coercion. Most importantly, insistence on majoritarian rule within a unitary political
system has linked the logic of Sri Lanka's modern democracy to illiberal rule. There is
substantial literature on the causes and evolution of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict.29 These
need not detain us here; their international dimensions, however, are important.

The political stability of Sri Lanka, located about ninety miles from the southern tip of India, is a
matter of serious political concern for New Delhi. India and Sri Lanka are closely connected by
history, mythology, and ethnicity. At least three separate strands can be identified in the way
ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka became internationalized. The first is a result of the strong ethnic
bond between Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Tamil Nadu in India. India is not only the first-order
ethnic kin-state for Sri Lanka but also a large and powerful state compared to the island
country. The fifty million Indian Tamils are linked by history, language, and culture, not to
mention geographic proximity to the seventeen million Sri Lankan Tamils. Tamil cultural figures,
entertainers, politicians, and films have natural audiences on both sides of the Palk
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Strait. The cause of the Sri Lankan Tamils is a popular one in Tamil Nadu Since the 1980s
political parties in Tamil Nadu have made liberation of their Tamil brothers an election plank.30
Family connections and kinship tie the northern part of Sri Lanka-the Jaffna and Eastern
provinces-to the state of Tamil Nadu in India. The Tamil separatists on both sides of the Palk
Strait envision the creation of a greater Tamil homeland, which would include northern and
eastern Sri Lanka, as well as Tamil Nadu in India. After the outbreak of the civil war in 1983, the
Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups were granted safe sanctuaries in Tamil Nadu and provided with
small arms and training by the government of Indira Gandhi.31 These Sri Lankan groups
developed close ties to the political parties in Tamil Nadu. The latter raised huge sums of
money to fund the Tamil cause. These informal networks, although weakened after the
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 19,91 and disillusionment with the militants, had managed to
survive the interim period when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were expelled from
Tamil Nadu in 1987 and India waged a war against the LTTE in northern Sri Lanka.

The Indian involvement does not end here. Its kin-state status is only one dimension of the
internationalization of the ethnic conflict. The Indian government also has great interest in
preventing the Sri Lankan civil strife from fomenting Tamil separatism within India.32 New Delhi
has followed two broad strategies to prevent the emergence of a separate Tamil state of Elam:
it has, on the one hand, sought to represent and own the Tamil quest for justice and equality in
Sri Lanka and, on the other hand, applied alternating pressure on the disputants to shape the
course of the conflict. It has failed in both these efforts. The Indian strategy nevertheless
exposes the mix of motives from which ethnic kin-states may act. It shows that
internationalization can make ethnic conflicts even more intractable and lethal for the civilians
who get caught in the crossfire.

The alternating-pressure strategy was meant to reward or punish the disputants, the Tamil
groups and the government in Colombo. The grant of safe sanctuary to the Tamil militants by
Indira Gandhi and induction of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) into northern Sri Lanka
(largely to protect the militants while they disarmed) by Rajiv Gandhi exemplified the first
approach. Expulsion of the militant groups from Tamil Nadu in 1987 and subsequent military
action against them by the IPKF once the disarming efforts failed were meant to punish and
weaken the recalcitrant Tamil groups. India also alternated between a tough or supportive
stance toward Colombo. The dispatch of combat aircraft over Sri Lanka and dropping of tons of
food in
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

203

1987 was designed to breach the economic embargo imposed by Colombo and issue a warning
that India would not stand aside while the Tamils in Jaffna (northern Sri Lanka) were starved
and denied basic necessities. These actions contrasted with the consistently staunch support
India offered to Sri Lanka's territorial integrity. In fact, the purpose behind the dispatch of the
rpKF was to help Sri Lanka do what it could not do alone: disarm the Tamils in an orderly
manner, prepare the ground for negotiations that would grant provincial autonomy to the
Tamil homeland, and end the conflict without jeopardizing Sri Lanka's unity. As mentioned
above, a separate Tamil Elam posed a threat to India's own political integrity. While the Sri
Lankan government eagerly accepted the Indian support in disarming the militants-the
expulsion of the militants and induction of the IPKF came at the urging of Sri Lankan leaders-it
sought to diversify international support by approaching the governments of the United States,
Great Britain, and Israel. Mobilization of support from sympathetic or kin-states is then the first
strand in the internationalization of the Sri Lankan civil war. Among all the ethnic secessionists
seeking independence in South Asia, no group, except perhaps the Kashmiris, has developed as
large and effective an international network of support as have the Sri Lankan Tamils. They
have been able to do this partly because of the existence of a large Tamil diaspora in Tamil
Nadu, Europe, the United States, Australia, and Malaysia. The LTTE opened offices in London
and Melbourne and created influential lobbies in Canada and European capitals. The
effectiveness of the informal network is evident in that the militant groups have been able to
carry on the war against the Sri Lankan forces for the past two decades without any significant
state support for their cause. Their campaign to portray Colombo as a violator of human rights
was highly successful until recently. The situation has changed since the mid-1990s, especially
as atrocities committed by the LTTE have become public knowledge, but throughout the early
1990s the propaganda campaign put the governments in Colombo on the defensive. Since
September 11 and the listing of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by the Bush administration,
the former has become more receptive to peace efforts.

A third strand of international involvement is the third-party mediation by state actors. India
played this role between 1983 and 1987, but since the withdrawal of India's peacekeeping
forces in 1990, Norway has stepped in to mediate several rounds of talks between the LTTE and
the government in Colombo.33 Indian mediation was hardly a disinterested effort. Norway on
the other hand has no evident instrumental or affective motives for extending its good offices.
It has no ambitions in the region and has no ethnic affinity to the disputants. The only motive
one might attribute is the honor and prestige a successful mediation might bring it in
international politics.
To sum up, ethnicity is a principle mode of social and political organization of the South Asian
states. It needs to be given the proper weight in any analysis of interstate relations in the
region. Inadequate attention to this basic fact, evident in unitary constitutions in Pakistan and
Sri Lanka and mismanagement in India, has led to instability, war, secession, and violence. This
of
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course suggests that regional conflicts in South Asia frequently originate in ethnic overspill. No
single cause, be it economic, political, or based on considerations of social status and equality,
can explain why conflicts arise'. More often than not, ethnic grievances are a mix of cultural,
political, and economic demands. State response, whether cooperative or coercive, is equally a
mix of many compulsions. A kin-state may extend support because of ethnic, religious, and
ideological affinity, or it might be moved by humanitarian considerations. But frequently, the
explanation for support is found in reasons of realpolitik, domestic and international political
advantage, and economic and military gain. These have been evident in India's interventions in
Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Pakistan's interventions in Kashmir and Punjab, Iran's support for
Pakistan against the Baluchis, and Afghanistan's support for the Baluchis against Pakistan. A kin-
state may extend support to placate its own population. Consider the pressure generated by
West Bengal on the Indira Gandhi government. The cause of Kashmir is similarly popular in
Pakistan. One might even argue that, in some instances, involvement might not be in the larger
strategic interests of the state. Pakistan is walking on a thin line by continuing its support for
the Kashmir jihadis. An ethnic kin-state can keep the conflict alive by extending arms and
weapons and safe sanctuaries, but it may not prevail if the host state is militarily superior and
willing to commit its strength to prevent secession. Indeed, a weak state may use the ethnic
conflict against the host state to equalize the balance of power or to tie up the military forces of
an adversary in ethnic wars. If the ethnic kin-state is more powerful than the host state, as India
was in the Bangladesh war, the host state may have to seek a settlement unfavorable to its
interests. Although the outcome of a conflict might be constrained by the distribution of power
and capabilities between the countries involved, it cannot be explained without reference to
ethnic animosities. Several factors determine whether an ethnic conflict will in fact spread: its
location, the distribution of ethnics across borders, the policies of a central state toward the
ethnic community, the nature of relations between the host and ethnic kinstate, and the
regional political environment. Size and geopolitics have made India the dominant regional
power, but they have also made it vulnerable to conflicts of ethnic overlap. The course of civil
war in Sri Lanka tells us, however, that a weak state can still exercise reverse leverage against a
powerful, large state if both fear secessionist demands from a shared ethnic nationality. The
internationalization of ethnic disputes can produce serious consequences for the host as well as
the ethnic kin-state, depending on their ability to prevent the conflict from spreading within
and beyond their national boundaries. Ethnic conflict can lead to militarization of a society if
prolonged. At the minimum, it will strengthen the hard-line elements and tilt the domestic
balance in favor of authoritarian forces within that society. The fear
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

205

of a Bengali majority in Pakistan strengthened the arguments in favor of military regimes over
democratic rule. The example of the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic ethnocracy, underlines
the devastating consequences of ethnic wars for a society and people.

DEBATING THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF ETHNIC CONFLICTS

The above examples of ethnic conflicts, partitions, and wars tell us that they are a frequent
occurrence in South Asia. But there is no agreement among scholars about how to fit such
conflicts into the mainstream theories of international relations. Some scholars view ethnic
identities as primordial and unchanging; others see them as a tool used by individuals, groups,
and elites to obtain some larger material end.34 We might do better to see ethnic identities as
products of enduring social construction forged by human action and choice, instead of as
primordial accidents of birth. Similarly, ethnic solidarity does not evaporate when the political
or material ends of leaders and political elites are fulfilled. The establishment of the Akali Dal
government in Punjab might have ended the violence for the time being, but there is no
assurance that violence will not resurface should the balance of economic and political power
shift in Punjab. The sense of collectively belonging to a group usually endures beyond the
immediate calculations of gain and loss. Indeed, one of the hard lessons leaders of
postindependence India had to learn was that ethnic loyalties could not be modernized out of
existence. India would have to build its democracy within a deeply divided social context.

Each of the three perspectives, primordial, instrumental, and constructivist, has distinctly
different implications for the internationalization of ethnic identities. The notion of
primordiality leads to the thesis of ancient hatred and the inevitability of war and violence,
hence permanent separation of the warring ethnics. The partition of India in 1947 and then
Pakistan in 1971 are cases in point. In both instances, the primordialists would argue that the
departure of the British from India and a weak central state in Pakistan led to large-scale
violence and a resurfacing of ancient hatreds. Pakistan insisted on a twonation solution. In 1971
the Bengali Muslims turned the two-nation thesis against Pakistan by asserting their own right
to a separate nation-state. Instrumentalist interpretations tend to focus on calculations of
political gain, but they frequently ignore the social and economic causes of ethnic conflict. In
this perspective, preventive strategies usually focus on building incentives for leaders to
abandon ethnic vote banks and seek broader representation from among competing ethnic
communities. Such a remedy will not, however, remove the root causes of ethnic conflict; nor
will it diminish the sense
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of accumulated injustices. The continued turmoil in the seven states of India's northeast
(created in response to demands for ethnic homelands) provides ample evidence for this. To
prevent internationalization of ethnic conflict alienated ethnic communities must be
reintegrated into the larger body politic in which they can live with a renewed sense of
confidence. This requires changes in the social and economic structures that breed ethnic
inequality The constructivist approach points to historically accumulated conditions that
produce the divide, but it also points to socially relevant models of ethnic coexistence.35 A
constructivist perspective alerts policymakers to the dangers of pursuing homogenous
nationalism, European-style states, and hardened boundaries. I explained earlier why we might
do better to see South Asia as a society of graded ethnic differences. In light of that and the
accumulated history of conflict since 1947, a condominium solution with soft international
boundaries and shared or overlapping political regions might be a solution for the Kashmir and
Pashtun areas. The Sri Lankan conflict might be more amenable to solution within a federalized
Sri Lanka and a larger Indo-Sri Lankan common market. A second set of controversies revolves
around preventive strategies. A majority of South Asian scholars argue that denial of political
and economic autonomy, use of coercion, and attempts to forge monolithic nationalism lead to
conflict and violence. Others point to institutional decay.36 There is a great deal of evidence
supporting these arguments. The mobilization of Tamil, Kashmiri, Assamese, Naga, and Baluch
nationalism occurred around the themes of oppression, exploitation, and loss of autonomy.
Several have therefore endorsed the solution of consociational democracies to distribute
power and office proportionally among competing ethnic groups.37 Others, however, point to
the danger of disintegration via ethnic self-determination. Examples of the Soviet Union,
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan are often cited to show how privileging ethnicity can lead to
violence, chaos, and collapse. Choices of strategy to contain or settle conflict depend largely on
how one perceives the conflict, its causes, and the mechanisms required to contain or settle
them. A majority of realist and neorealist perspectives define conflicts mainly as conflicts
between states. A state is assumed to be a self-interested, rational, unitary entity that engages
in conflict or cooperation because of external cornpulsions, such as anarchy, power
distribution, and the presence or absence of factors that inhibit or exonerate the conflictual
consequences of international anarchy.38 Critics of neorealism, however, argue that this is
essentially a Eurocentric perspective and is, for that reason, limited in its ability to explain
ethnic conflicts in the Third World. If we concretize this criticism in the context of South Asia,
we might ask if the India-Pakistan conflict is entirely a result of asymmetrical distribution of
power between them. Why did India not move to partition Pakistan before 1971 when it had a
military advantage in
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

207

East Pakistan? Why did India withdraw from Sri Lanka, and why might it again intervene should
the Tamil-Sinhala conflict escalate to envelope Tamil Nadu? Is distribution of power and
international anarchy a sufficient explanation for these anomalies? As we have seen in the
foregoing pages, India and Pakistan are not fully consolidated nation-states. The process of
state formation in each shapes their national-interest agenda. Similarly, their regime types-
democratic, quasidemocratic authoritarian-have profound implications for the prospects of war
and negotiations between them. Similarly, the neorealists are likely to explain the war and
collapse in Afghanistan in at least two ways: as a result of the Cold War competition
(international anarchy) during the 1980s and the jockeying for influence among the regional
states after 1992. As argued in a previous section, such an explanation is both insufficient and
misleading. Afghanistan's collapse cannot be understood separately from its ethnic divide. One
could debate whether its ethnic divisions are primordial or instrumental. We still need to
explain how Afghanistan became an arena of proxy wars waged by foreign intelligence
agencies, such as the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, and
regional political leaders, such as Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf. Nor is the story of collapse and
chaos complete without explaining how Afghanistan and Kashmir became issues in the
domestic straggle for power in Pakistan. A perspective that ignores the nature of the state and
its internal dimensions fails to explain adequately the wars and violence in South Asia.
Reversing the argument of anarchy, Steven David suggests that it might be more accurate to
"assume a world of international order and domestic anarchy" in explaining wars and violence
in the Third World.39 While realism and neorealism have yet to collapse the bifurcation of the
internal and external factors into a theoretically empowering framework, the other genre of
international-relations theories, economic underdevelopment and dependency theory, ignores
issues of war within and between Third World states. How do we then construct a broad
conceptual frame that will link domestic to international dimensions and accommodate the
peculiarities of ethnic conflicts in South Asia? First, we need to understand the nature of
relationships between the South Asian state and its ethnic groups and nationalities. Since their
inception, states in South Asia have sought to achieve coherence and territorial unity. Their
failures and successes in this regard can provide clues to at least three sets of key questions:
What accounts for failures and what convergence of factors produced the successes? What
kind of operational mechanisms has the state evolved? What capacity does the state have to
learn from its failures? In other words, can it alter the operational logic that underlies the
mechanism of integration? Second, we need to analyze the internal political and economic
conditions of the ethnic community. Is it unified? Is it diasporic or territorial, dispersed or
concentrated in what it considers a homeland? What
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are its grievances? A third set of questions must deal with the impact of ethnic conflict on
reordering a state's international objectives (i.e., security, development, and legitimacy). I have
constructed such a conceptual frame for analyzing India's regional policy and found that
conventional analysis of India's role in the region has focused too much on the external
pressures on foreign policy making. India's relations with South Asian states, its insistence on
bilateralism and desire for preeminence in the region, is explained in large part by the lack of
congruence between the boundaries of the Indian state and its ethnic nations. India seeks
relational control, that is, the ability to structure interstate relations so as to insulate itself from
the fall out from overlapping ethnic conflicts in the region. The ultimate purpose of relational
control is internal, namely, building a consolidated modern nation-state. Given India's
enormous diversity, this task can be accomplished only within a democratic framework. But
democracy is not a panacea for ethnic conflict.40 The decades since independence show that
party competition and electoral logic in fact exacerbated ethnic polarization. Darini
Rajasingham-Senanayake comes to a similar conclusion about Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict.41 It is
then not enough to define India as a developing democracy, assume its state to be unified, and
move on to analyzing India's international relations in terms of the balance of regional power.
We need to factor in the failures of ethnic integration within India's democracy.

These failures point to the second paradox that challenges conventional wisdom. Ethnic
diversity suggests decentralization as a solution, but my analysis of India's ethnic relations
shows decentralization alone will not resolve ethnic conflict, especially when the central state's
capacity to diffuse, negotiate, and contain conflicts is declining. The debates about
centralization and decentralization that have so preoccupied India scholars are largely
misleading. Abdication of the central government's role in negotiations and, hence, power to
punish or reward ethnic parties did not make for a quick solution. We need to separate the
quantum of power defined as an ability to successfully negotiate conflicts and to centralize
decision making. These are conversely related. Critics of Indira Gandhi's government are not
wrong in pointing to centralization as the cause of ethnic conflict, but they are wrong in arguing
that centralization is a sign of a muscular and strong Indian state. The rise of authoritarian
tendencies at the center can reflect the weakening, not strengthening, of the state. The study
of ethnic conflicts in India shows that the state cannot delegate power and abandon the task of
building consensus to ethnic communities ."It needs to stay in the process and use its power (to
punish and reward) to forge an agreement. Ethnic differences need to be resolved before they
transgress international boundaries. South Asian states have a poor record of ethnic
accommodation, although arguably India has
International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict

209

done better than most other states in institutionalizing ethnic accommodation. What is
important for the purpose of international-relations theory is the presence or absence of such
domestic accommodations as they shape the state and its relations with overlapping ethnic
communities. To build a predictive and prescriptive model of international relations in South
Asia, we need to take into account domestic compulsions, particularly those that arise from the
evolution and spread of ethnic conflicts.

The comparative experiences within the region suggest that ethnic accommodation is a key to
building democracy and forging a viable nation-state. If the Kashmiris had been content to live
within India, Pakistan would have had a hard time fomenting separatism. In this sense, India's
failure in Kashmir is the failure of the Indian state to accommodate its ethnic nationalities.
Pakistan's drift into military rule is partly a consequence of failing to build just such a
mechanism for ethnic integration. Sri Lanka needs similarly to provide autonomy and political
self-rule to its large Tamil minority, but that can be done only within some form of a federal
democracy with self-rule for the Sri Lankan Tamils. For Afghanistan the process of national
consolidation will require establishing conditions that will prevent fragmentation and ethnic
wars, but that also means setting up political institutions that are ethnically neutral. Current
international theories do not therefore adequately capture the origin or nature of conflicts in
South Asia. For that, we need a theory sensitive to the domestic and international problems
created by the diverse nationalities of the subcontinent.

NOTES

1. T. V. Paul and John Hall, eds., International Order and the Future of'World Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chapters 13 and 14.

2. Barry Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival 35, no. 1 (Spring

1993); I. William Zartman, "Introduction: Posing the Problem of State Collapse," Collapsed
States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1995), 1.

3. Thomas Kuhn argues for a fundamental distinction between normal and extraordinary
events. In the latter, all rules of social life are violated. See The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
4. A short list will consist of C. H. Phillips and M. D. Wainwright, eds., The Partition of India,
Politics and Perspectives, 1935^7 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970); W. H. Morris-Jones, "The
Transfer of Power: A View from the Sidelines," Modern Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (1982):

1-32; C. M. Ali, The Emergence of Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); R. J.
Moor, "Towards Partition and Independence in India," Journal of Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics 20, no. 2 (July 1983): 189-99; A. Roy, "The High Politics of India's Partition:
The Revisionist Perspective," Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 2 (1990): 385^-15.

5. Tai Young Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London:
Routledge, 2002), 9-28.
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Maya Chadda

6. Tan and Kudaisya, Aftermath, 8.

7. Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security and Separatism in India (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997), 49-77.

8. Iftikhar Malik, State and Civil Society in Pakistan (London: Macmillan Press, 1997)- Maya
Chadda, "Pakistan's Road to Military Dictatorship," in Ethnicity and Polity in South Asia ed. Giri
Phukon (New Delhi: South Asia Publishers, 2002), 35-58.

9. Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, 84-97; Richard Sisson, War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the
Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

10. M. Rashiduzzamn, "The Awami League in Political Development of Pakistan," Asian Survey
10, no. 7 (July 1990): 574-87.

11. Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangladesh (New Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1972)

12. Rajat Ganguly, Kin State Intervention in Ethnic Conflicts (New Delhi: Sage Publications,

1998), 123-24.

13. Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, 97.

14. Larry Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War (Seattle: University of Washington Press,

2001). *

15. Amin Saikal, "The Rabbani Government 1992-1996," in Fundamentalism Reborn?

Afghanistan and the Taliban, ed. William Maley (New York University Press, 1998), 37.

16. Ahmed Rashid, "Pakistan and the Taliban," in Fundamentalism Reborn! 85-89.

17. For a detailed analysis of how Pakistan's Taliban strategy emerged from domestic
imperatives, see Maya Chadda, "Talibanization of Pakistan's Afghan Policy," World Affairs 3, no.

3 (July-September 1999): 98-116.

18. For the evolution of these movements see Rajiv Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Al Sinha, Bhutan: Ethnic Identity and National Dilemma (New
Delhi: Reliance Publication House, 1991); Jaswant Singh, "Assam's Errors," Asian Survey 24, no.
10 (October 1984): 1,056-68; Amena Mohsin, The Politics of Nationalism: The Case of
Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh (Dhaka: The University Press Ltd, 1997); Subir Bhaumik,
Insurgent Crossfire: Northeast India (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1996).

19. Selig Harrison, In Afghanistan's Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptation (New
York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1981); Robert Wirsing, "South Asia: The
Baluch Frontier Tribes of Pakistan," in Protection of Ethnic Minorities: Comparative Perspective,
ed. Robert Wirsing (New York: Pergamon, 1981).

20. Ganguly, Kin State Intervention, 154-55.

21. Sanjib Baruah, "Generals as Governors," in Ethnicity and Polity in South Asia, 191.

22. Yogendra Malik, "The Akali Party and Sikh Militancy: Move for Greater Autonomy or
Secession in Punjab," Asian Survey 26, no. 3 (March 1996): 345-62; Sanjib Baruah, India against
Itself: Assam and Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999),
144-72.

23. Partha Ghosh, "Ethnic Conflict and Conflict Management," in Ethnicity and Constitutional
Reform in South Asia, ed. Iftekharuzzamn (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), 49-84.

24. Atul Kohli, "Can Democracy Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? The rise and Decline of Self-
Determination Movements in India," Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 2 (May

1997): 326.

25. Sanjib Baruah, "Generals as Governors," in Ethnicity and Polity in South Asia, 188-89.

26. Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, 123-39.

27. Wasbir Hussain, "Northeast Polls: Bullets and Ballots," South Asia Intelligence Review,
Weekly Assessment and Briefings, l,no. 32 (February 24,2003), available at [Link].

28. On November 3, 1988, at the request of President Gayoom, India sent its forces to help foil
a coup attempt by Sri Lankan mercenaries in the Maldives, but this was not of the same order
as the Sri Lanka intervention.

29. S. D. Muni, Pangs of Proximity: India and Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis (New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1993); Dayan Jeyatileka, Sri Lanka: Travails of a Democracy: Unfinished War,
Protracted Crisis (New Delhi: Vikas, 1995); Robert Oberst, "Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri
Lanka," Publius 18 (Summer 1988): 175-94; Wilson Jeyaratnam, The Break Up of Sri Lanka: The
Sinhalese Tamil Conflict (London: C. Hurst 1988); S. Ponnampalam, Sri Lanka: The National
Question and Tamil Liberation Struggle (London: Zed Books,1983); David Little, Sri Lanka: The
Invention of Ethnicity (Washington, D.C.: United Institute of Peace Press, 1994).
30. Salamat Ali, "The Dravidian Factor," Far Eastern Economic Review (February 4,1988): 20.

31. Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, 153.

32. Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, 145-74.

33. "Norway Opens Sri Lanka Talks," BBC News, January 10, 2002, available at
[Link] asia/[Link] (accessed March 6, 2003).

34. For the primordialist view see Walker Connor, "Nation-Building or Nation Destroying,"
World Politics 24, no. 3 (April 1972): 319-55; Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Conflict and Political
Development (Boston: Little Brown, 1973); Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). For the instrumentalist view, see David Lake and Donald Rothchild,
"Spreading Fear: The Genesis of Transnational Ethnic Conflict," in The International Spread of
Ethnic Conflict: Fear Diffusion and Escalation, ed. Lake and Rothchild (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 5.

35. Sudipta Kaviraj, "Religion, Politics and Modernity," in Crisis and Change in Contemporary
India, ed. Bhiku Parekh and Upendra Baxi (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996), 30.

36. Atul Kohli, "Interpreting India's Democracy," India's Democracy: An Analysis of Changing
State-Society Relations, ed. Atul Kohli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

1988), 16.

37. Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Explanation (New Heaven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); E. A. Nordlinger, Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1972).

38. Stephanie Neuman, ed., International Relations Theory and the Third World (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1998), 1-31.

39. Steven David, "The Primacy of Internal Wars," in International Relations Theory and the

Third World, 78.

40. Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, 1-26.

41. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, "Democracy and the Problem of Representation: The

Making of Bi-Polar Ethnic Identity in Post-Colonial Sri Lanka," in Ethnic Futures: The State and
Identity in Asia, ed. Joanne Pfaff-Czarnecka et al. (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999),

99-135.
FURTHER READING

Ali, Mahmud S. The Fearful State: Power, People and Internal War in South Asia. London: Zed

Books, 1993. Basu, Amrita, and Atul Kohli, eds. Community Conflict and State in India. New
Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1998.

Brass, Paul. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison. New Delhi: Sage, 1991. Chadda,
Maya. Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1997. . Building Democracy in South Asia: India, Pakistan and Nepal. Boulder, Colo.:
Lynne

Rienner, 2000.
212

Maya Chadda

Ganguly, Sumit. The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace. Cambridge UK •

Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gurr, Ted R. Minorities at Risk: A Global View of
Ethnopolitical Conflicts. Washington D C •

United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993.

Hazarika, Sanjoy. Strangers of the Mist: Tales of War and Peace from India's Northeast New
Delhi: Viking, 1994.

Kapur, Rajiv. Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith. London: Allen Unwin, 1986.

Mitra, Subrata, and Alison Lewis, eds. Subnational Movements in South Asia. Boulder, Colo •
Westview Press, 1996.

Phadnis, Urmila. Ethnicity and Nation-Building in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage, 1989.

Taras, Raymond, and Rajat Ganguly. Understanding Ethnic Conflict: The International
Dimension. New York: Longman, 2002.

Religion and Politics

David Taylor

Why is religion such a problem for the countries of South Asia? In the decade or so leading up
to 2005, there have been major clashes on the streets of many Indian towns and cities in which
people have been brutally killed simply for belonging to the "wrong" religious community, and
certain members of the leading party in the ruling coalition in Delhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) or of its ally, the Shiv Sena, have been complicit in attacks on religious minorities, such as
those that erupted in Gujarat in the first few months of 2002.' In Pakistan and Bangladesh,
clashes over the extent to which Islamic injunctions on issues of blasphemy or sexual morality
should be enforced by the state have led to fierce political battles and to the victimization of
individuals, very often women or members of small and vulnerable religious minorities.

The implications of these conflicts for South Asian states in the global context are very
significant. First of all, there is the question of perception. Despite the postmodern turn in the
academy, Western imaginings of societies in South Asia as somehow defined and determined
by religion appear to be reinforced by the images that constantly emerge from the region and
are distributed through the global media. Second, decisions on matters such as investment and
trade relations reflect these perceptions so that the region as a whole and individual countries,
such as Pakistan in particular, risk being ignored in the globalization of the world economy that
is currently taking place. Third, internal differences within the region, expressed in some
respects in terms of religious difference, most notably between India and Pakistan, inhibit the
ability of South Asia as a whole to make its full contribution to global affairs. India, currently the
world's second most populous country and at some point in the next half-century the world's
largest, is still without a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, in large part because of
external perception.
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David Taylor

Conflict between adherents of different religious traditions in South Asia is often referred to
within the region as communal conflict, and this term brings out the inherently social and
political context within which it takes place. Religious belief, in the conventional sense, plays
only a limited role, and indeed some of those most heavily involved in communal violence may
be people with little religious sensibility. It is equally important to note that communal conflict
is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century.2
Different religious groups or communities have lived together in South Asia for many centuries
in social and economic interdependence (although often in some sort of hierarchical
relationship). What is critical, therefore, is the way that the notion of community has changed
radically in the region over the last two hundred years, first under the impact of colonialism and
second in response to the compulsions of political competition under conditions of universal
franchise.

This chapter begins by setting out some general considerations about religion and society and
the way their interrelationship changed during the colonial period. It then discusses the
experiences of the three largest South Asian countries, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, since
they achieved independence in 1947 (with Bangladesh separating from Pakistan in 1971) to
demonstrate the complex interaction of religion and politics within the domestic, regional, and
international spheres.3

THE COLONIAL PERIOD

Like all premodern societies, South Asia had seen no sharp dividing lines between religion,
social structure, and political power. While this was seen in the past as a recipe for stasis and
fatalism, in fact the evidence shows that men and women have always had some scope for
making conscious choices both in religious and social matters, even if the power structures
have restricted the means by which they can be expressed. One important way, in fact, of
approaching South Asian history over the very long term is to study the ebb and flow of
religious reform movements and to link them to political and social change in the same period.
The political rise of Buddhism in the third century BCE, the penetration of Islam into many parts
of the subcontinent, not by forced conversion but by the actions and examples of Sufi saints,
the devotional sects within Hinduism at different times, and the growth of a distinct Sikh
community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are all examples of ways in which social
and religious change were interconnected.4 Changes in the way local communities of farmers
or artisans chose to articulate their religious beliefs were linked, on the one hand, to changes in
the political balance at the regional level and, on the other, to the
Religion and Politics

215

continual revitalization of regional religious traditions through charismatic preachers or holy

men.5 It is significant that throughout the subcontinent the hierarchical social ranking implicit
in the Hindu caste system was capable of embracing groups that were not in the religious sense
Hindu. Even in areas where Muslims were in a majority, such as the western parts of the
Punjab, social institutions developed that had close parallels to caste. The biradari, or
brotherhood, was, like the individual caste, generally an endogamous group and acted
collectively to defend and advance its members' interests. Rulers such as the Mughals
recognized these blurred lines and made use of them in their strategies of government. During
the colonial period, the British rulers adopted a policy, subject always to the needs of imperial
power, that recognized the rights of the individual, for example in the courts or in some cases
as a voter, but which simultaneously embedded that individual, whether he or she liked it or
not, in a web of prescriptive identities, the most important of which were religious community
and caste (or in some areas, tribe). Whether it was in the decennial census forms that had to be
completed from the late nineteenth century or in legislation about who was entitled to hold
agricultural land or in the writings of colonial administrators, the assumption was made that
individuals acquired a large part of their social identity from the primordial group into which
they had been born. Much scholarly work was undertaken by colonial officials, Christian
missionaries, and others to delineate the minutest details of such identities through works on
individual castes and tribes.6 Despite the recognition of the rights of the individual in some
areas, the direction of colonial policy was very strongly to emphasise a coincidence between
the different aspects of an individual's social being. In the language of Sudipta Kaviraj, the fuzzy
identities that had characterized the precolonial period were replaced by enumerated
identities.7 The political implications of the British analysis were clear: India could never form a
united society, and imperial rule, recognizing the due rights of all the groups, was valid and
legitimate.

Although the process described above was dominated by colonial concerns and perspectives,
countermovements began to assert a single identity for all Hindus or all Muslims. Among
Hindus, Swami Vivekananda in Bengal stands out for his ability to inspire young men to spread
the universal message of Hinduism, as does Swami Dayanand Saraswati in Punjab, who
preached a message of Hindu solidarity in the face of perceived challenges from Christianity
and Islam alike.8 Among Muslim communities Syed Amir Ali wrote about the glorious history of
Islam, while in several different parts of the country, Muslim reform movements, such as the
one based around the seminary in the town of Deoband, preached the importance of purifying
Islam of its local accretions.9 Ironically, the assumptions about identity that underlay
216

David Taylor

these movements were often derived from colonial models, even as they strove to reject the
colonial presence. The assumptions that the British had made about Indian society provided
some basis for government and political activity. Entitlements to land, for example, were linked
to caste status in the Punjab, while certain low-status seminomadic groups were collectively
identified as "criminal tribes," subject to special regulation.10 The census process itself brought
into existence large numbers of groups claiming separate recognition for themselves, while
from the beginning of the twentieth century, political organizations such as the Hindu
Mahasabha and the Muslim League began to lobby for the interests of their constituents and to
do so within the framework that the British had created. Some of their demands had to do with
access to government-controlled resources, jobs in particular, while others were symbolic, for
example claims to disputed religious sites. In the 1920s determined efforts were made to claim
additional converts or to reclaim those who had earlier shifted from Hinduism to Islam. At the
same time local clashes between members of the main communities became more common,
mainly in the larger cities. In the light of the hardening of identities described above, these
clashes were generally described as communal, although responsibility for their occurrence was
hotly disputed.

The Indian National Congress, led and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, tried hard to find inclusive
ways of representing the nation, but it was difficult to achieve this on a reliable basis. Gandhi
himself, whose strength came from his ability to move from one political idiom to another while
remaining firmly rooted in his personal Hindu identity, attempted to reach out on a basis of
equality to all sections of the population but had only limited success. His message was rejected
not only by many Muslims but among Hindus by significant sections of the lowest caste groups,
the so-called Untouchables, whose leader B. R. Ambedkar accused Gandhi of trying to deprive
them of the right to independent action and who eventually in the 1950s led many of his
followers out of Hinduism into the Buddhist faith.11 In 1925 a representative from the opposite
end of the caste hierarchy, K. B. Hedge war, who felt that Congress under Gandhi's leadership
did not recognize the importance of the Brahminical core of Hinduism, founded the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an organization devoted to recruiting young boys and offering them
physical training alongside indoctrination in the RSS view of India.

With the decision of the British in the early 1930s to cede some local power to elected
governments, then the pressure during World War II to announce its intention to grant full
independence, the use of "community" for political advantage became overwhelming. The
Muslim League under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a successful lawyer and at one
time an advocate of joint political action between the Congress and the League to achieve inde-
Religion and Politics

217

pendence, articulated the two-nation theory, in which Islam was seen as the basis of a
fundamentally different way of life from Hinduism. This in turn authorized a claim for a
separate state.12 From 1940 on, when this goal was adopted as official Muslim League policy,
Jinnah waged a highly effective campaign to bring most of the other Muslim leadership groups
under the wing of the Muslim League and then in 1946 to conduct an election campaign on the
slogan, "Islam in danger." With help from some, but by no means all, of the religious leaders of
the community, the established Muslim political leaderships of the various provinces,
reinforced by a new generation of enthusiasts for the cause, achieved a sweeping victory in
most parts of the country (the sole major exception was the Northwest Frontier Province
[NWFP]). The Congress achieved a similar degree of success in the "general" constituencies,13
and for the next few months the three-way negotiations between the outgoing British and the
two main political blocs made little progress. On the streets, however, the level of communal
violence began to rise alarmingly. A new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, who arrived in February
1947, made the decision shortly after he arrived that partition as demanded by the Muslim
League was an inevitable accompaniment of independence.

The months that followed Mountbatten's announcement of partition in June saw an eruption of
communal violence in which hundreds of thousands of people on both sides lost their lives and
in which millions became refugees. The position was especially bad in the Punjab, where there
was a virtually complete expulsion of Hindus and Sikhs from the Muslim-dominated areas and
vice versa. The position in Delhi and other parts of North India was hardly any better. At the
same time, the two new states quickly came to blows over the fate of the princely state of
Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority area ruled by a Hindu dynasty. Whether, given the
constraints of the colonial period, a political formula could have been found that preserved the
unity of India while giving all religious groups a proportionate share of power and resources is
problematic. Comparative experience in other multiconfessional situations suggest that
ultimately such power-sharing formulae tend to fall apart and that tensions between religious
communities, as in the Balkans, tend to survive state-imposed attempts to reduce them to the
purely private sphere or to eliminate them altogether in favor of secular identities.

INDIA SINCE 1947

Although British India was partitioned in 1947 into two successor states, the Republic of India
was able to claim continuity with the British Raj. This included the ambiguous legacy of a
government that claimed to be impartial while ruling over a people defined in terms of multiple
religious communities.
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David Taylor

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, made a conscious decision to break from this by
moving toward a model of secularism in which the spheres of religion and of social and political
life were decisively separated and the institutions of democratic participation were open to all
citizens equally. In Nehru's view, a state that could achieve rapid economic development and a
massive improvement in the living standards of the poor would at the same time have removed
the conditions in which religious identifications were relevant for political action. Economic and
social development, including the development of national consciousness, had to take place in
parallel, with the state acting as benevolent mentor and facilitator. In the mid-1950s, for
example, Nehru introduced major reforms to personal law, including the abolition of polygamy,
the possibility of divorce, and greater freedom for individuals to will their property. But
ironically, the scope of the reforms had to be restricted to the Hindu population, as short-term
political considerations, namely, the risk of losing the electoral support of prominent, but
socially conservative, Muslim leaders, led to the exclusion of the Muslim minority, despite the
injunction in the Indian constitution, which had had Nehru's full backing, to move toward a
uniform system of personal law for all Indian citizens. Until Nehru's death in 1964, and for some
time thereafter, the official discourse on secularism appeared to be gaining some ground. In
particular, once the immediate partition violence was over, there were no major clashes until a
riot in Ahmedabad in 1969, which cost nearly a thousand lives. The institutions of Indian
democracy appeared to be able to accommodate a variety of group interests and religious
identifications without allowing any one of them to dominate. The diversity of India, in which
no individual group could dominate and in which broad class interests linked otherwise
divergent sections, seemed to be a guarantor of a broadly secular democracy. In fact, the
Gandhian approach to secularism, in which the state was expected to give equal respect to all
religions rather than to ignore religion, was just as important as the Nehruvian in providing its
underpinnings.14 What could not be achieved under colonial conditions could be achieved in a
state of [Link] developments in the Punjab, for example, gave weight to theories
that argued that allowing space for the articulation of group interest but laying down certain
ground rules would lead to the blurring of lines and to the re-creation of the fuzzy identities
mentioned above. The part of Punjab that had remained in India had been characterized
immediately after independence by sharp conflicts between different groups, one of whose
characteristics was religious difference. The demand for a reconstituted state that was
forcefully articulated in the 1950s, although expressed in linguistic terms, could easily, and in
some respects correctly, be construed as a Hindu-Sikh conflict. Initially the Congress had aimed
at a political coalition representing all religious groups in the state, but by a series of steps and
manoeuvres it
Religion and Politics

219

eventually permitted in 1966 the division of Punjab into two states, one a truncated Punjab
with a Sikh majority and the other the new state of Haryana, which was predominantly Hindu.
This was achieved without major violence and with the apparent end to demands for secession.
Two aspects of the Punjab case need to be emphasized. First, the Sikhs who had taken the lead
in the demand for Punjabi statehood were predominantly rural farmers from one particular
caste group. Although there were no doubt cultural motives in their demand for separation,
there were equally powerful economic interests at work. The post-1966 success of the Green
Revolution in Punjab undoubtedly owes much to this fact. Second, although the Sikhbased Akali
Dal Party has always made much of its special association with the achievement of separation,
the Congress and, indeed, other parties have also been able to maintain their strength in the
Punjab. Governments in the state are typically coalitions between one or another element of
the Akali Dal and one of the national parties.15

In contrast to the picture sketched above, the last quarter-century in India has seen a much
more explicit expression of religion in public life. Two major examples are presented here. In
the Punjab itself, the balance described above was upset at the end of the 1970s by the rise of a
movement led by a Sikh preacher called Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Using targeted
assassinations of Hindu and Sikh opponents, he led a demand for Khalistan, an independent or
autonomous region within South Asia, where Sikhs would hold power and Sikhism would set
the dominant values. After a series of clashes with the government, he eventually took refuge
in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, from where he directed further militant actions. In June 1984
Indira Gandhi, who had succeeded her father Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister in

1966 (except for a brief interlude from 1977 to 1980), sent the Indian army in to take control of
the temple. In the ensuing battle, Bhindranwale and some hundreds of his followers were
killed. On October 31 of the same year, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikhs from her
personal protection group, and in the following week large-scale rioting broke out in Delhi in
which up to two thousand Sikhs were massacred.16 At around the same time, the position of
the Muslim minority in India became much more problematic. Partition had led to large-scale
movements of population, especially in the Punjab, and to a very substantial movement of
businessmen, professionals, and senior government officials and army officers from across the
whole of India. What was left behind was a demoralized community, with a proportionately
much smaller middle and professional class than the majority community. For many years it
chose to trade its electoral support for a measure of protection and symbolic representation. In
practice, this meant supporting the Congress. Yet, even within the Congress, and certainly
outside it, there were political leaders who deeply distrusted the
220

David Taylor

Muslims and doubted their commitment to the Indian state. Pakistan's constant campaign to
gain control of the state of Kashmir was proof in their eyes that Indian Muslims were potential
fifth columnists. Building on themes and organizations that had existed from the late
nineteenth century, certain political parties had constructed narratives of Indian history in
which the Muslim was always cast as the invader and enemy of true Indian (Bharatiya) culture.
The most prominent of these was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded in 1951. In so doing it had
the ideological and organizational support of the RSS. Until the 1970s the Jana Sangh had
enjoyed some support in the Hindi-speaking northern states of the country, especially among
the Hindu refugees who had been forced to migrate from Pakistan. But beyond inclusion in
coalition governments at state level, it had never come close to power nationally. At the end of
the 197»0s, it was included in the nonCongress government formed after Mrs. Gandhi's
electoral defeat in 1977. The party's defeat in the 1980 election led it to regroup under a new
name, the BJP, and briefly to experiment with a politics of class interest, attempting to create a
coalition of farmers and small businessmen. However, the failure of this tactic led to a
reconsideration of its strategy. Under the leadership of Lai Krishna Advani (at the time of
writing, India's home minister), the party linked hands with the RSS and its daughter
organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to launch a nationwide campaign around the
theme of Hindutva (approximately translated as Hinduness). Hindutva, according to its
advocates, was an inclusive umbrella under which all those who recognized India as their
homeland could find shelter. The only groups that were excluded were those with alleged
foreign connections, that is, Muslims and Christians.17

The themes around which the BJP and VHP were able to mobilize support in the 1980s were in
some respects presented to them by the Congress itself. In 1985, for example, a court case over
an issue of Muslim divorce law and a subsequent attempt by the Congress to pass legislation to
gain support among some Muslim groups allowed the BJP and VHP to raise the issue of a
uniform civil code for all Indian citizens. Crude stereotypes of Muslims were propagated; for
example, the allegation was made that they recklessly had large families so as to increase their
proportion of the population. Above all, however, the main focus of the BJP and VHP's joint
campaign during the late 1980s was a smouldering dispute over control of a sacred site at
Ayodhya in northern India, where a mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built on what some Hindus
believed was the site of the birthplace of Lord Ram, one of the incarnations of Vishnu. The
Congress had attempted to gain some mileage out of the same issue but had easily been
outplayed by their opponents. The conflict over the mosque played itself out over several years
until a VHP-led mob stormed the building in December 1992 and
Religion and Politics

221

demolished it by hand. The act was followed by communal riots in a number of cities in which
the victims were largely Muslim. The worst such event occurred in Bombay (now Mumbai) in
January the following year. With the active connivance of the state government, a local ally of
the BJP, thousands of Muslims were massacred.

The BJP did not make immediate electoral gains from the demolition of the mosque; in fact,
they lost ground among some sections of the population otherwise sympathetic to their
emphasis on the Hindu basis of Indian culture. By 1998, however, the BJP was in power at the
national level (and in a number of states) as the dominant partner in a coalition government
and has remained so under Atal Behari Vajpayee's leadership to the time of this writing. It
would be wrong, however, to link this success directly to the communal mobilization that took
place during the 1980s and early 1990s. The BJP more accurately can stay in power only if it
does not follow the logic of its earlier actions. Thus, the commitment to build a temple on the
site of the mosque has yet to be fulfilled, with the Indian courts being used as a means of
staving off a decision. At a more general level, rather than harping on a narrow Hindutva
agenda, the government has tried to emphasize its economic policies, which have begun to
bear fruit for some sections of the electorate, as well as its success in raising India's
international profile as a mature member of the international community. Since 1998 it has
been difficult to assess precisely the direction in which the electorate has moved and the way
the political parties have interpreted the popular mood. Elements within the BJP have
encouraged continuing campaigns by the VHP to build a temple at Ayodhya, even though
officially the policy appeared to be to allow the status quo to persist. On February 27,2002, a
group of VHP members returning by train from a demonstration at Ayodhya were attacked at a
station in Gujarat with many deaths and injuries. This attack was very probably the result of
action by a group of Muslims.18 Its aftermath was a sustained pogrom against the Muslim
population of the state in which a thousand or more were killed and in which there was clear
evidence of the direct involvement of the state chief minister and the state apparatus. Although
the chief minister was eventually forced to resign, the resultant elections at the end of the year
brought the BJP back to power with an increased majority, demonstrating the popular support
in some quarters for a purely communal appeal to anti-Muslim sentiment.

But although there were important elements in the BJP outside Gujarat who shared the same
strong anti-Muslim elements, the emphasis of central government policy and of the prime
minister personally was to continue its broad-based, economically focused policies. Linked to
this have been Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's efforts to secure an improvement in
IndoPakistani relations with a view to a final settlement of the Kashmir dispute.
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David Taylor

As the general election scheduled for 2004 approached, the BJP's strategy was evidently to
send a dual message: that it understood the feelings of the Hindu majority but that it wanted to
limit the role of the state to sympathetic encouragement while pursuing a vigorous agenda of
economic and social development.

A significant dimension of recent developments in India (as elsewhere in South Asia) has been
the role of the diaspora. Emigrants from India who have settled in North America and Europe
and have often done very well economically have at the same time had to face issues of
discrimination and exclusion in their new countries of residence, as well as more personal
issues of identity. Responses to these dilemmas have been very diverse, but for some people
transnational identities and networks that link them back to their regions of origin have been
very important. Untempered by the constant interaction of different spheres of life, which
make up the political world within the region, people in the diaspora have often given moral
and material support to exclusivist movements "at home." In both the cases outlined above,
this has clearly been the case. Supporters of the Khalistan movement in Britain and North
America sent material and moral aid to the militant groups in the Punjab. So, too, did many
Hindu groups in the same countries support the campaign to build a temple at Ayodhya. The
leaders in India readily received this support, and they made regular trips abroad to enhance
the flow. As well as providing bilateral support to their fellows in India, members of the
diaspora acted as lobbies for Sikh and Hindu nationalism in their countries of adoption, often
translating the issues at stake into idioms that made sense in local political discourse.19

PAKISTAN SINCE 1947

Pakistan is the country of South Asia where over an extended period of time religion appears to
have played the highest-profile role, but the situation is a great deal more complicated than it
might appear at first sight. The leaders of the movement for the creation of a separate Muslim
state adopted, by and large, a modernist view of religion, v/hich sat easily enough with a
secular state.20 Many (although not all) of the religious leaders of the community in the years
before 1947 had, by contrast, been opposed to the idea of Pakistan, in part precisely because it
meant the ascendancy of men like Jinnah. More recently, the so-called religious parties, the
three most important of which are aligned, broadly speaking, with different sectarian traditions
within South Asian Islam, have not been able to win more than a small fraction of the total
votes cast in a general election. Even in October 2002, when the parties came together on a
common platform and were able to appeal to anti-Western senti-
Religion and Politics

223

rnient expressed in terms of religious conflict (Muslims under threat from a Christian- and
Jewish-dominated United States), they only won 11 percent of the vote and forty-five seats in
the National Assembly. Today, Pakistan is stalemated as far as religion and politics are
concerned. While, as indicated above, religious parties are unlikely ever to win a majority of the
popular vote, they can obstruct change in critical areas such as gender equity. This power of
veto can extend beyond the social to the key area of relationships with India and the question
of Kashmir. Although there had been opposition from religious leaders to the creation of
Pakistan, once it was an accomplished fact, they began to see the new state as an opportunity
to pursue their own specific agendas. Political parties were formed with close links to particular
religious tendencies, notably the Jamaati-Islami, founded by Maulana Abul Maududi. In 1953
the Jamaat led a major agitation aimed at the small Ahmadi sect. Members of this group had
elevated their own founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, to a position close to that of the prophet
and were thus accused of rejecting one of the basic tenets of Islam, namely, the finality of
Muhammad's prophethood. The agitation became violent, especially in Lahore, and was only
brought under control by the declaration of martial law in the city. Yet, although some
participants felt strongly about the central issue, others were venting their opposition to the
autocratic politician who ran the Punjab at that time. The chief justice of Pakistan, Muhammad
Munir, held an official inquiry into the disturbances, part of which restates in clear terms the
official understanding that religion and politics belonged to two separate spheres, despite the
opinions of some that Islamic belief led necessarily to an Islamic state.21 This issue was further
discussed in the lengthy debates that led to the framing of the first constitution in 1956
(although it was never implemented). The Objectives Resolution passed in 1949 had stated
clearly that Pakistan was to be a state where "Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in
the individual and collective spheres in accord with the teachings and requirements of Islam as
set out in the Holy Quran and the Sunna," but it also explicitly recognized the rights of
minorities and the sovereignty of Parliament. The 1956 constitution, which incorporated the
Objectives Resolution, designated Pakistan as an Islamic republic and stated that no law should
contravene Islamic beliefs, but it also reaffirmed the sovereignty of Parliament (although there
was provision for an advisory body to advise on the compatibility of legislation with the
teachings of Islam).22

For nearly two decades the relationship between religion and politics remained stable. Popular
religious feeling and practice continued largely unaltered, while the bureaucracy, the army, and
the political parties pursued their own agendas. In 1961 the first military ruler of Pakistan, Ayub
Khan^, introduced the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance. This was a substan i
224

David Taylor

attempt (comparable to the legal reforms in India mentioned above) to align marriage and
inheritance laws with the requirements of a progressive society and introduced significant
improvements in the status of women But while the ordinance was welcomed by those who
were actively cornmitted to the separation of religious and political spheres of life, it was only
very patchily implemented in the rural areas where the majority of the population lived.23

Pakistan faced a major crisis at the end of the 1960s and, in 1971, following a civil war and
military intervention from India, broke into two states. Politically, this resulted in Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto's coming to power. While Bhutto presented himself as a radical populist committed to
social justice and reform, he chose to describe his goal as "Islamic socialism." Whether this
made much difference to his electoral success is doubtful, given that there was a great deal of
popular support for a new beginning after the failures of previous regimes to make progress in
dealing with issues of poverty and social exclusion. However, as the immediate surge of support
for him began to decline, Bhutto saw the possibility of using religious sentiment to bolster his
position. In 1973 he declared the Ahmadis to be a non-Islamic sect, thus conceding what had
been refused in 1953. Immediately after the disputed 1977 elections, when he was fighting to
survive in power, he declared a complete ban on alcohol consumption and moved the weekly
holiday from Sunday to Friday.

While Bhutto was merely using whatever political tools were at hand, and although he was, of
course, toppled in 1977 and executed for alleged cornplicity in the murder of the father of a
political opponent, there was nevertheless clearly a constituency in the country that would
respond to religious appeals. Bhutto's successor, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, a man of strong religious
conviction, decided to attempt a thoroughgoing reform of Pakistan's institutions with the
intention of thereby encouraging, if not compelling, the individual citizen to live his or her life in
accordance with the strict provisions of religious law as interpreted by the dominant Hanafi
school of interpretation. Changes were introduced into the legal system: the boundaries
between the private and the public were altered, women's equal legal status was challenged,
and a blasphemy law was introduced that gave special protection to Islam. In the economic
sphere efforts were made to eliminate interest (riba) as a principle of borrowing and lending,
and zakat, a levy on wealth traditionally used for charitable purposes, was made obligatory for
all Sunni Muslims. Parties were denigrated as un-Islamic, and committees were set up to
discuss what a truly Islamic form of government would look like. One of the last actions that Zia
took before his death in August 1988 was to insist that Pakistan's existing legal framework
should be entirely subordinated to sharia, or Islamic law.
Since 1988 Pakistan has seen an extended period of instability. Four shortlived civilian
governments, two led by Benazir Bhutto from the Pakistan People's Party and two by Nawaz
Sharif from the Pakistan Muslim League, failed to sustain themselves in power, not least
because of the unresolved tensions between the army leadership, the president, and the party
leaders. In 1999 the army again intervened, this time with an avowed modernist at its head,
Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Like Ayub Khan and other military rulers before, he saw the way
forward as being to revitalize local government and to promote a new generation of political
leadership free from the encumbrances of the past. Having declared himself president in June
2001, he then held elections in September 2002. A breakaway group from Nawaz Sharif's party,
which was the clear favorite of Musharraf, eventually succeeded in cobbling together a
government. In the meantime, however, the situation had been substantially affected by the
World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11,

2001, and by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Musharraf had chosen to offer full support to the
United States and its allies, largely for pragmatic reasons. On the one hand, the United States
offered economic and diplomatic incentives and, on the other, he must have been aware that
opposition to the United States would have weakened his own internal position. However, the
consequence was to promote strong anti-American feeling in the areas bordering Afghanistan.
This translated into support for the Muttahida Majlis-iAmal (MMA), a grouping of Islamic
parties that gained their best-ever result in the 2002 elections and control of the provincial
government in the NWFP. Members of this government made a number of strong statements in
favor of Islam and passed a measure that in principle introduced sharia law into the province.24
At the same time the MMA played an active role in the maneuverings for and against
Musharraf. In an apparent volte-face, it concluded a political deal with the president at the end
of 2003, which permitted him to pass key constitutional changes. The quid pro quo was not
specified but appears to have been linked to the requirements of provincial politics and the
maintenance of MMA strength in NWFP and Baluchistan.

The personal preferences of the key political players in Pakistan are clear enough. Musharraf
himself supports a separation between religion and the public sphere.25 The MMA is working
toward a political system that would use state power to enforce an orthodox Sunni set of
norms and values, for example, in the way women dress and behave. But while the constraints
of politics force both sides into deals and compromises, the potential power of religion at the
street level makes it very difficult for there to be an open debate on such questions as women's
rights, the position of minorities, and the rigid law on blasphemy. Nor has the government been
able to find effective ways of restraining the growth in violence between different Muslim
groups, notably between the Sunni and Shia.
226 David Taylor

BANGLADESH SINCE 1971

Bangladesh came into existence in 1971 on the basis of what appeared fo be a forthright
assertion of the importance of language as the basis of national identity. Bengali had been
systematically downplayed during the Pakistan period, and the first confrontations with the
Pakistani state in 1952 had come as a result of protests over language policy. Yet, there was no
rush to reunite with Bengali-speakers across the border in India, despite the role that India had
played in defeating Pakistan during the civil war that preceded independence. Indeed, since
1975 if not earlier, relations with India assumed an ambiguous quality that persists to the
present day, while normal relations with Pakistan were established sooner than might have
been expected, given the mass murders and other atrocities that occurred in 1971. This points
to the complex relationship that has existed in East Bengal between language, religious identity,
and politics since at least the nineteenth century. Islam in the delta area of Bengal had not been
imported by force, even though for some centuries the region's rulers had been Muslim.
Rather, it had gradually taken hold in the rural areas; it had in the process become particularly
associated with the small peasantry of the region, tenants for the most part of Hindu
zamindars, or landlords, although a few Muslim zamindars, descendants of non-Bengali
migrants, also existed. Local accommodations developed between inherited beliefs and
practices and those that had been imported, in many cases by Sufi saints. But although in some
respects Islam appeared to have assumed a quietist form in Bengal, the message of equality
that was implicit in Islamic belief was potentially a powerful political resource. This first
manifested itself in religious reform movements in the nineteenth century, which
simultaneously targeted exploitative (Hindu) landlords, as well as calling for stricter adherence
to orthodox practice. During the course of the century, Muslims in the remote villages of the
delta region were brought into closer contact with Muslims and the practice of Islam in the
wider Islamic world.26 Yet, some political leaders were conscious of the importance of
maintaining a Bengali identity as well, not least because of the way that official Muslim
leadership in India was closely identified with the Urdu-speaking elites of northern India. At the
first major test of Muslim sentiment in the elections of 1937,27 the Krishak Praja Party (KPP) of
Fazlul Huq, rather than the Muslim League, won the day, even though the latter won a number
of seats by allying with a local group of landlords. The KPP in practice represented principally
the Muslim peasantry, but it was in theory open to all, and its platform was one of land reform
and social justice. Yet, only three years later Huq joined hands with Jinnah to move the so-
called Pakistan Resolution.

This ambivalence toward the idea of Pakistan and therefore to a political role for religion has
persisted to the present day. During the period when East
Religion and Politics

227

Bengal was part of a united state, the overweening arrogance of the West Pakistani ruling elites
meant that religious identity as a basis for political action was replaced by linguistic affinity.
Many sections of the country, especially the educated, felt that they had been permanently
relegated to second-class citizenship, despite forming a majority of the population. Their
religious status itself was undermined by casual references to their convert status and to the
continuing presence in East Bengal of a significant Hindu minority. At independence in 1971,
therefore, the initial decision was to emphasize the Bengali identity of the country's citizens
and their commitment to a secular political system. But taken to its logical conclusion, this
would have meant reunification with West Bengal under the Indian Union, something that
would have been difficult to fit with other aspects of East Bengal's modern history.28 Even the
close relationship with India that Sheikh Mujib pursued was unacceptable to many.

Following Mujib's assassination in August 1975 for reasons that had in part to do with his failure
to establish a stable relationship between the elements that had taken part in the liberation
struggle and those that had not, power eventually devolved to the army, and in particular to
Gen. Zia-ur Rahman. A major figure in the liberation struggle, he understood that for both
internal and external reasons, a new Bangladeshi identity had to be constructed that
recognized both dimensions of its history. In 1977 a new constitution deleted the references to
secularism that had been there initially and replaced them with a specific reference to Islam.
However, his policies emphasized economic progress and development, and there was little
attempt to change the practices of everyday life. In 1988 Zia's successor, General Ershad, who
had also come to power through a military coup, changed the constitution again to declare
Islam as the country's state religion. More significantly, he allowed the Jamat-e Islami, which
had been discredited after the creation of Bangladesh, to reemerge. In 1993 and 1994 writings
and interviews by a feminist author, Taslima Nasreen, provoked large-scale demonstrations
demanding her arrest and execution, orchestrated by religious groups. These in turn led to
widespread concern among human rights groups internationally. As in Pakistan, the
government did not tackle the problem head-on, but found ways of circumventing it.
Eventually, Nasreen found refuge in Sweden. Since 1990 Bangladesh has returned to civilian
rule, and both the main parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP),
have been concerned primarily with maintaining themselves in power. The personal rivalry
between the two leaders has been a major factor. While neither party has seen religious
appeals as of immediate political value, the BNP was prepared to enter into a coalition with the
Jamat-e Islami in order to come to power in 2001. The price of this was a marked increase in
some areas in pressure on the country's Hindu minority. Bangladesh has not, however, had to
228 David Taylor

face the same international and regional pressures as Pakistan, such as, for example, the
backwash from Afghanistan both before and after the fall of the Taliban regime, and the
dynamics of politics have been somewhat'different

CONCLUSION

Current modes of religious identification, born in the colonial period, continue to emphasize the
link between the individual and the group in ways that often emphasize and heighten
difference and at particular moments give concrete form to some elements of individual
identity in ways that sideline others. The democratic political process plays an ambivalent role
in perpetuating these identifications. Religiously defined groups (in the same way as other
groups) may create their own leaders, who* then enter formal political institutions with clearly
articulated objectives, as happened with certain Hindu figures at the time of the Ayodhya
agitation. Bolstered by their support on the street, such leaders can make an immediate impact
and obtain some of their goals. Yet, at the same time the constraints of politics in terms of
coalition building and compromise soon take effect as well. In most cases, in fact, the
mainstream political parties themselves bring religiously defined groups into politics, so these
processes are in operation from the very beginning. Internationally, there seems to be a
contrast between Pakistan and the other two countries discussed above. While India and
Bangladesh have been able to keep their domestic disputes over the place of religion more or
less to themselves, except for the diaspora involvement in the Punjab, Pakistan's Islamist
groups have attracted considerable, generally negative attention, at least outside the Muslim
world. This reflects both the strategic location of the country in the present world situation, as
well as features of Islamic assertion there.

NOTES

1. Arguments about the rights of the majority are often used as code to condone such attacks.
There is now a large literature on the Indian case. For a sample, see David Ludden, ed., Making
India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Manjari Katju, Vishva Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics
(Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003).

2. A standard expression of this view can be found in G. Pandey, The Construction

ofCommunalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). Note, however,
the important caveat entered by C. A. Bayly, "The Prehistory of 'Communalism': Religious
Conflict in India, 1700-1860," Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 2 (1985): 177-203.
3. Sri Lanka has been excluded for reasons of space, but much of the argument that follows
would apply. The case of Nepal is rather different, in part because it was never formally colo-

Religion and Politics

229

nized. Officially a Hindu kingdom, it nevertheless has a significant Buddhist population living
symbiotically with the Hindu.

4. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), is a standard history of South Asia. See also Burton Stein, A History of India
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

5. A particularly instructive example of these processes is that of East Bengal. In this remote
delta region, where Buddhism had survived longer than almost anywhere else in the
subcontinent, Islam did not arrive in a rush; nor was it imposed by force. Rather, it was adopted
through the gradual influence of Sufis, or holy men, whose shrines became the focus of popular
religious enthusiasm. Islam in this area, therefore, developed organically out of the previous
patterns of religious belief and practice and did not mark a sharp break. See especially Asim
Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

1983). In the early nineteenth century, Islamic reform movements emerged that were closely
linked to political and social protest against (Hindu) landlords and other exploitative elements.
They are covered in the introductory chapter of Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims,

1871-1906: A Quest for Identity, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

6. Among many others, see the seven volumes of Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern
India (Madras: Government Press, 1909). Thurston was superintendent of the Madras

Government Museum.

7. Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," in Subaltern Studies, vol. 7, ed. Partha
Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1-39.

8. William Radice, ed., Swami Vivekananda and the Modernization of Hinduism (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Gwilym Beckerlegge, The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a
Modern Hindu Movement (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); L E. Llewellyn, The Arya Samaj
as a Fundamentalist Movement: A Study in Comparative Fundamentalism (Delhi: Manohar,
1993).
9. Martin Forward, The Failure of Islamic Modernism? Syed Ameer Ale's Interpretation of Islam
(Bern: Peter Lang, 1999); Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband,

1860-1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).

10. For the Punjab, see Norman Barrier; for the "criminal tribes," see Anand Yang, ed., Crime
and Criminality in India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); Sanjay Nigam, "Disciplining
and Policing the 'Criminals' by Birth," Indian Economic and Social History Review 27, nos. 2 and
3 (1990): 131-64, 257-88.

11. Eleanor Zelliott, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi:

Manohar, 1992).

12. Initially, the claim was for two Muslim states, one in the west and the other in the
Bengalispeaking areas of the east.

13. This is a euphemism for Hindu constituencies.

14. For a discussion of the different meanings of secularism in India, see Rajeev Bhargava, ed.,
Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

15. The Punjab case is well covered in the literature. See, e.g., Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion
and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Baldev Raj Nayar,
Minority Politics in Punjab (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966).

16. People's Union for Civil Liberties, Who Are the Guilty?-Report of a Joint Inquiry into the
Causes and Impact of the Anti-Sikh Violence in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November, 1984

(Delhi: PUCL, 1984).

17. Katju, Vishva Hindu Parishad; Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle, Brotherhood in Saffron:
A Study of Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987); Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu
Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

18. The argument has been made that the fire that destroyed the train was accidentally ignited,
although most of the evidence points in the opposite direction. For further comment, see
230

David Taylor

BBC World Service story, July 3, 2002, available at [Link]

[Link].

19. Katju, Vishva Hindu Parishad.

20. On the eve of independence, Jinnah made a much-quoted speech setting out a vision of
Pakistan that was entirely compatible with the European notion of a secular state, with religion
operating entirely in the personal sphere.

21. Report of the Court of Inquiry . . . into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953 (Lahore:
Superintendent of Government Printing, 1954).

22. Rubya Mehdi, Islamisation of the Law in Pakistan (London: Curzon Press, 1994).

23. Mehdi, Islamisation of the Law.

24. The act that was passed was in fact a virtual carbon copy of an earlier bill passed at the
national level in 1991, although it was never implemented.

25. General Pervez Musharraf, "Personal Liberties and Freedoms Should Be Respected. Nobody
Has Any Right by Virtue of Being in Power to Tell Others Who Is a Good Muslim and Who Is
Not," Dawn, June 9, 2003. *

26. Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims.

27. These were held on a restricted franchise, and only around a third of the adult population
had the right to vote, but this was a much higher proportion than in previous elections under
colonial rule. The British had taken care to ensure that rural, as well as urban, voters were
enfranchised, so the results can be taken as a not-wholly-unreliable test of opinion at that time.

28. In practice the Indian government would have been most unwilling to take on the burden of
coping with East Bengal's economic problems, as well as coping with a doubling in size of the
Muslim minority.

FURTHER READING

Andersen, Walter, and Shridhar Damle. Brotherhood in Saffron: A Study of Hindu Revivalism.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987.
Beckerlegge, Gwilym. The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a Modern Hindu Movement.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Bondurant, Joan Valerie. Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Fuller, Graham E. The Future of Political Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998.

Katju, Manjari. Vishva Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics. Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003. Ludden,
David, ed. Making India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Mitchell, Richard P. The Society of the Muslim Brothers. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1993.

Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza. The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001.

Pandey, G. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1990.

Roy, Asim. The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1983.

10
Democratization and Development

Jonah Blank

Democracy (as Winston Churchill famously noted) is the worst form of government ever
devised-except for all the others. To many twenty-first-century readers this proposition may
seem obvious, but the real test of a political system is whether or not it delivers the goods.
Does democracy? The postcolonial history of South Asia provides evidence both for and against.

The five largest countries of South Asia have all experimented with democratization, and the
results have been decidedly mixed.1 Democratic norms have taken firm root in India and Sri
Lanka but at present are struggling to implant themselves in Bangladesh and are observed
mainly in the breach in Pakistan and Nepal. If democratization led inevitably to economic and
social development, the question as to which form of governance to follow would be a matter
of dogma rather than discussion. And discussion is an integral part of democracy; how ironic if
the end sought should be an end of political debate, or even (as some theorists would have it)
an end of history.2 Democratization must be seen as a process, not as a mere destination.

Economists and political scientists are often given to grand comparisons: the trade figures
posted by China compared with those of Russia over the past decade demonstrate the
ascendancy of economic reforms over political ones; the trade figures posted by Thailand
compared with those of Vietnam demonstrate just the opposite. But any such comparison is
necessarily apples to oranges: no two countries are exactly alike, so the basis for evaluation is
inherently speculative. Even comparisons of development in the same nation during periods of
democratization and authoritarianism must be somewhat hypothetical-an economy can grow
or shrink for any number of reasons (drought, worldwide recession, regional warfare) that may
have little to do with the way political leaders make their decisions. In order to be truly
meaningful, a country's performance should be judged not against that of its
232

Jonah Blank

neighbors, or even within the context of its own history, but according to where the state
would be if a different system had been in place. Such a question is, by its very nature,
unanswerable. Further complicating the issue is the matter of definitions. Democratization
means far more than the mere exercise of periodically holding elections; if that were the only
requirement, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea would be deserving of its name. But
where can a line be drawn between a less-thanperfectly-democratic democracy and a less-
than-perfectly-oligarchic oligarchy? The threads from which a democracy can be woven may
include rule of law, civil-society groups independent of state control, freedom of speech, and a
wide range of others. But the precise pattern of the weave, let alone its component threads,
are duplicated inexactly. Moreover, development must be understood in more than merely
economic terms. The standard of living in a particular country cannot be fully captured in an
array of figures or ratios. Such indices as gross national product (GNP) per person are very
useful, but they do not present the whole picture. If we know that the average annual income
in a particular country is $400, what does that tell us? What can be bought for that sum of
money in country x, as opposed to county y?3 What social mechanisms are in place to make life
worth living in the absence of material abundance? To put development in its proper
perspective, one must consider a wide range of indices, from literacy to caloric intake to gender
equality to social mobility. Even then, any cornparisons will be far from objective: whatever
human beings may be, they are more than the sum of the figures by which they may be
measured. Further complicating the equation is the interaction between any given society and
the wider world. How do democratization and development affect a country's relations with
neighboring states, with traditional rivals, and with the rest of the global community? How do
external forces, in turn, affect a country's democratization and development? It is often
assumed that democracies will inevitably enjoy more harmonious international relationships
and present fewer challenges to global peace than nondemocratic states, but there are plenty
of counterexamples. Saber rattling and war mongering have been effective electoral tools for
more than a few politicians, be they in India, Pakistan, or the United States of America.

With all of these caveats, however, South Asia provides a relatively good means of examining
the interplay of democracy and development. Four of the major countries of the region share a
common colonial history up to the midtwentieth century. (The fifth, Nepal, was under the
thumb of the British Raj, but not actually a part of it). The history of these countries prior to
European domination had been closely linked, and there are innumerable ties of language,
ethnicity, religion, and social strata that run from one nation to the next. How, then, to explain
the different political paths tread by the South
Democratization and Development

233

Asian states over the past fifty-odd years? Perhaps the only generalization one can safely make
is to avoid generalizations. Any attempt to situate a propensity for democratization in religious
values is, at best, highly doubtful. Max Weber's identification of the spirit of capitalism with a
supposed Protestant ethic today seems (in light of, say, the entrepreneurial Muslim, Hindu, and
Parsi bania communities of Gujarat) as if it were written in 1905.4

India is home to most of the world's Hindus, but an attempt to postulate links between that
faith and democracy founders on the fact that the world's only constitutionally Hindu nation,
Nepal, is an old-fashioned monarchy. Sri Lanka's success with democracy can hardly be chalked
up to its Buddhist roots, at least, not without taking into account the counterexamples of
traditionally Buddhist China, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and North Korea. And attempts
to portray Islam as a faith inherently inimical to democracy must somehow deal with the
examples of fledgling democracies in Turkey, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, nations that, together
with the 140 million Muslims in India and a similar number in occasionally democratic Pakistan,
contain a solid majority of the world's Muslim population.

Both democratization and development are slow processes, unfolding over the course of
decades rather than years. Nor is the order of the two preordained: economic development can
lead to democracy, as it has in Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand. The counterexamples,
including countries like the People's Republic of China, Malaysia, or Singapore in which
economic reforms have not yet led to political ones, may simply have a longer road to travel.
On the other side of the ledger are those countries that have undertaken democratization prior
to, or in tandem with, rapid economic development. The foremost example in South Asia would
be India, but this pattern has been seen throughout Europe and the Americas.5 Whether the
effect had anything to do with the supposed cause must remain unprovable. The examples of
the five major nations of South Asia provide some basis for believing, however, that while
democracy isn't the only path to development, it may well be the most reliable one.

INDIA

From 1947-1991 economic development in India took a back seat to democratization.

Economists and businessmen have criticized this decision by India's first prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru (particularly in recent decades), but the slow process of solidifying democratic
norms established a firm foundation for more rapid economic development in the 1990s and
the new century. Seen from the vantage point of the present, the stifling economic restrictions
placed on the Indian economy during its first four decades strike
234

Jonah Blank

many observers as thoroughly misguided. The so-called license permit raj suppressed
innovation and entrepreneurial experimentation, and lazy statesupported enterprises were
guaranteed market domination without the threat of domestic or foreign competitors. But at
the time this system was instituted many Western economists were lauding the supposed
efficiencies of a Sovietmodel centralized economy, particularly for a nation such as India that
was early in its development curve. Much of the criticism leveled at Nehru has been based on
the only type of economic analysis to stand the test of time: hindsight.

Nehru's economic model subsidized staples such as rice, flour, and cooking oil: this did not steer
production in the most cost-effective directions, and it required families to waste time standing
in line with their ration-books, but it insured that after the wait, they would not go home
empty-handed. Inefficient factories and government offices kept vast numbers of unproductive
employees on the books, often maintaining a dozen workers to do a job that could be better
performed by one. This practice (still a hallmark of the Indian economy) hurt the financial
balance sheet: productivity figures were poor and remain far below those of industrialized
countries.

The social balance sheet, however, is a different story: bloated job rolls meant relatively little
unemployment, which avoided the creation of a discontented urban underclass that could have
been easy tinder for antidemocratic firebrands.6 Under the license permit raj, very few got rich,
but almost everyone got fed. The system was not a formula for rapid economic growth of the
type enjoyed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Southeast Asian "Tigers," which were
averaging 8 to 15 percent annual growth during the same period. India's growth rate between
1950 and 1980 averaged a mere 3.5 percent per year, a figure that economist Raj Krishna
termed (tongue only partially in cheek) the Hindu rate of growth? But it was a system designed
to insure social stability, and without social stability, the slow, steady institutionalization of
democratic norms would probably have been impossible. What norms were instituted? One of
the most important was land reform, without which many others might have been strangled in
their cribs. Nehru abolished the feudal zamindari system, which had concentrated land and
wealth in the hands of a tiny class of rich noblemen for centuries. The cornpensation paid to the
former zamindars insured that the reform would not be blocked outright, and by separating the
feudals from their traditional power bases, India was able to mitigate their dominance of
democratic politics.8 Civilian control over the military was institutionalized as a bedrock value, a
value so deeply engrained in the Indian officer corps that there has never been a serious threat
of military coup
Democratization and Development

235

d'etat. Even when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi set aside democratic governance during the
1975-1977 Emergency, the army refrained from stepping in. This decision was very good for
both the professional standing of the military and for the future of democratization: the Indian
people were able to see that even the most dire threat to democratic rule could be overcome
without breaking the fundamental taboo against military intervention in political affairs.

This taboo had an important ancillary benefit to both India and to the region: the solidification
of democratic norms and the prohibition against military veto of civilian initiatives, served to
cushion India's foreign policy from the adventurism that has plagued many quasidemocratic
and nondemocratic regimes. Despite India's military supremacy over any South Asian rival,9
New Delhi has never sought to conquer the territory of a neighboring state. Since
independence India has fought three and a half wars against Pakistan (with the 1999 Kargil
conflict counting as the "half), and despite at least one crushing victory in 1971, it has not
sought significant territorial expansion.10 In the 1980s India sent peacekeeping troops to Sri
Lanka and was quite happy to withdraw them as quickly as possible. Military involvement in
Nepal and Bhutan has been covert and never designed to alter the boundaries of either state.
As for Bangladesh, India's principal involvement took place during the 1971 war, when Indian
troops engaged those of Pakistan to help usher Bangladesh into existence and safeguard its
newly won independence. In brief, then, democracy has not guaranteed India a uniformly
placid relationship with its neighbors, but it has served (at least to some degree) to keep the
country from embarking upon wars of territorial conquest. None of these decisions were
preordained by the political structure of the Indian state: there is no way of proving that a
nondemocratic India would have made different choices regarding military policy. But the
record of engagement- a series of limited wars, several of them resulting in clear Indian
victories, none of them leading to significant shifts in boundaries-is at least highly suggestive.

Perhaps most important for the purpose of the current discussion, four decades of economic
inertia gave Indian politicians a free hand to work out the kinks of an electoral system
encompassing a greater variety of languages, ethnicities, religions, and competing social
interests than perhaps any other democratic country in existence. The creative turmoil
characteristic of freemarket capitalism may unleash productivity, but it also unleashes an
unruly array of challenges to any newly developing country. Open economies create winners,
but they also create losers, and every loser may be tempted to turn his anger against the entire
political system responsible for his loss. Between
1947 and 1991, India established itself as a secular state in which Hindus, Muslims, and
practitioners of at least half a dozen other faiths are all equal citizens. This was by no means a
foregone conclusion at independence (and is not necessarily an inevitable condition of the
future), so the institutionalization of a secular norm must rank as a key aspect of India's
democratization. In the 1950s Nehru forged a lasting compromise between subnational
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ethnic aspirations and the need for national unity. The reorganization of India's states along
linguistic lines largely satisfied the demands of Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, and other groups
agitating for increased recognition of their unique identities. By making the basis for
reorganization linguistic rather than religious or ethnic, Nehru avoided the legitimization of
communal schisms which had already caused unspeakable bloodshed during Partition and at
other times in India's history. This did not prevent such schisms from coming to the fore:
Kashmir's insurgency is now in its second decade and shows few signs of burning out; Punjab
was in a state of near rebellion for much of the

1980s and early 1990s; and several northeastern states are periodically shaken by separatist
movements with varying degrees of grassroots support. But the political decisions made during
India's first few decades have firmly established a national identity for India that is strong
enough to survive any centrifugal pressures of the past, present, and foreseeable future.

Moreover, the breathing space provided by economic order (as opposed to more-productive
economic activity) helped India solidify the workings of the democratic process. Unlike many
leaders of independence movements who found themselves suddenly in control of their
nations during the postcolonial period, Nehru nurtured the mechanisms of democracy rather
than fostering a cult of personality or subverting democratic processes to attain his favored
political outcomes. Despite a legacy of one-party rule lasting well into the

1980s and despite an abrupt (albeit temporary) setback to democratization under the
administration of Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi, the various aspects of democratization
appear firmly embedded in the Indian body politic. Free elections, an independent judiciary, a
critical press, freedom of expression: all are practiced at least as zealously as in democratic
states elsewhere in the world.11

In 1991 the shortcomings of the Indian economy were brought into embarrassing highlight:
much of the nation's gold reserves had to be put forward as collateral to secure a loan from the
International Monetary Fund. The prospect of defaulting on international obligations shocked
Indian decision makers into action: Congress prime minister Narasimha Rao undertook reforms
to liberalize the Indian economy, and all other Indian governments since have maintained the
program. The license permit raj, which carved up the economy into a patchwork of inefficient,
de facto monopolies, has largely been dismantled. Many burdensome regulations still exist, and
many enterprises (private and state-owned alike) still keep large numbers of unproductive
workers on the books, but India is no longer a place, wholly insulated from the business
practices of the outside world. Tariffs protecting Indian products from external competition are
still very high compared with those of most industrialized countries, but by 2002 they had
dropped to an average 32 percent; ten years earlier, the average Indian tariff was 128
percent.12 In response, the Hindu rate of growth nearly doubled: India's gross domestic
product (GDP) averaged 6.6 percent growth per year between 1992 and 1997, and even since
the Asian financial crisis of 1997, it has been outpacing not only the rates of its own prereform
past but also those of several Southeast Asian "Tiger" economies. Total flows of foreign direct
investment rose from $133 million in 1991/1992 to $4.8 billion in 1997/1998.13 Indian cities
that once looked like overgrown villages are now sprouting skyscrapers. But how much of this
economic development is due to democratization? Indeed, how much more impressive might
India's economic performance figures be without democracy's burdens? The case of China is
sufficient to put a damper on any enthusiasm. India's economic growth rate may be twice what
it used to be, but it is only half that of China. India's GDP per capita was slightly higher than that
of China in 1990, but in 2002 (after both countries had instituted economic reforms) it was
barely half that of its rival.14 Whatever the benefits of democratization, it has not caused India
to outpace an avowedly communist dictatorship in the sphere of pure capitalism. Moreover,
the World Bank estimates that 44.2 percent of the Indian population lives below the
international poverty indicator level of $1 per day.15 While the Chinese government has not
delivered its people into a workers' paradise, at least since the end of the Cultural Revolution, it
seems to have done a better job of tending to its citizens' most basic material needs. But basic
material needs are only one part of the development equation. Many of the core elements of
social uplift, the things that make life worth living, are bought more easily with nonmaterial
capital. The economists Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen make a valuable point when they add the
Indian state of Kerala to the standard India-China comparison. In real GNP per capita for 1992,
based on purchasing-power parity (a scale in which the United States forms the benchmark at
100), China scored 9.1, India 5.2, and the state of Kerala a mere 4.6. The annual growth rate of
per capita GNP between 1980 and 1992 for China was 7.6 percent, for India 3.1 percent, and for
Kerala a stagnant 0.3 percent.16 But when one moves from macroeconomic statistics to
numbers that measure true quality of life, the tables (quite literally) are turned. The 1992 rates
for life expectancy at birth were fifty-nine years for India, sixty-nine for China, and seventy-two
for Kerala. Infant mortality the same year was seventy-nine per thousand live births for India,
thirty-one for China, and seventeen for Kerala. India's fertility rate (one indicator of both female
disempowerment and general poverty) was 3.7, China's (due to draconian forced-abortion
policies) a nationally mandated 2.0, and Kerala's a voluntary 1.8. Perhaps most noteworthy are
the literacy figures: India's rate for 1990-1991 was 39 percent for women, 64 percent for men;
China's was 68 percent for women, 87 percent for men. Kerala's literacy rate was an astounding
86 percent for women and 94 percent for men.17 Nor are these numbers a
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statistical fluke: the social development indicators for Kerala are widely r ognized to have been
far superior to those of India as a whole both prior to and since the 1991 economic reforms,
despite Kerala's persistently poor overall economic performance. These numbers indicate that
social development mav well outstrip economic development and that the intangibles of a
society that places a high value on social equity (as the Marxist state governments of Kerala
have ever since independence) can improve the daily lives of its citizens more effectively than
any accountant's balance sheet might suggest. With India poised to become a regional
superpower in the twenty-first century, democratization may well provide the needed edge.
Lacking vast deposits of oil, valuable minerals, or excess acreage of agricultural land, India's
greatest natural resource might well be its people. Southern states such as Andhra Pradesh,
Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu are already discovering this: since the Asian financial crisis, India's
economic engine has been kept primed largely by the information-technology sector centered
in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai. For such knowledge-based sectors to succeed, however,
India will need to nurture its human capital. As the Keralan example indicates, it is possible to
do this in a cost-effective manner, but only if the government is firmly committed to such a
program. In Kerala the advances in social development were directly due to the impact of
democratization: in colonial times, Brahmins and ritually impure, but locally powerful,
"dominant castes" joined with the British to put the brake on moves for universal education or
social uplift of the lower Shudra or Dalit jatis. With democracy, however, the majority has ruled
and legislated its own development. In the years to come, perhaps the lesson will spread
northward to the rest of the country.

PAKISTAN

Throughout the past half-century, Pakistan's experience of both democracy and development
has been sketchy at best. This confluence may not be a coincidence: lack of representative
government has enabled the military-led regimes to avoid delivering on promises of
development. For all of Pakistan's changes of leadership, whether by coup d'etat, executive
order, or back-room handover of power, the citizens of the country have never been involved in
the decisions. Five governments (led by three prime ministers) have been voted into office, and
all five have been removed through nondemocratic means.

Pakistan's failure to institutionalize democratic norms owes much to the unique circumstances
of the nation's founding: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the towering leader of the movement for
creating Pakistan as a state independent of India, died barely a year after seeing his vision
achieved. India's new gov-
ernrnent was able to survive the political shock caused by the assassination around the same
time of Mahatma Gandhi: the nation-building movement was well-stocked with strong political
figures in addition to Prime Minister jawaharlal Nehru, such as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel,
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, all firm advocates of democratization, albeit
from different viewpoints. In Pakistan, however, the burdens of political leadership had been
tightly concentrated with Jinnah alone, both before and after independence. When he passed
away, the country lacked a ready-made cadre of political leaders to carry on his work.

The first decade of Pakistan's existence was an untidy display of would-be leaders jockeying for
authority, with the only enduring source of power remaining the military's top brass. Liaquat Ali
Khan, Jinnah's ally and succes1 sor, was assassinated after three years in office, and no other
civilian of stature emerged from the fray. In 1958 President Iskander Mirza, a former major
general, suspended the newly written constitution and declared martial law. Almost
immediately, his prime minister and army commander, Gen. Muhammad Ayub Khan, forced
Mirza to resign and stepped into the presidency. Ayub continued martial law for three and half
years, then instituted a pseudodemocratic form of government based on an easily rigged
assembly. His leadership was confirmed in 1962 and 1965, but these polls are cornmonly
regarded as window-dressing for a de facto military regime rather than a genuine example of
democratic rule. Following a drubbing at the hands of the Indian military in an ill-considered
1965 war over Kashmir, Ayub fired his foreign minister, a rising star named Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
and imprisoned East Pakistan's Bengali nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In 1970 an
ailing Ayub turned power over to his army chief of staff, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan,
who declared martial law and announced free multiparty elections. He would not, however,
prove willing to abide by the results.

Two decades of denial of political power and economic development to the half of the Pakistani
population who lived in the eastern wing would not have been sustainable under a democratic
form of government; any regime attempting to maintain such policies would have been voted
out of office. And in Pakistan's first democratic elections in 1970, that is exactly what happened.
As discussed below, the election of 1970 was a turning point for East Pakistan, directly leading
to its independence as Bangladesh. It was also a turning point for West Pakistan. After a
humiliating defeat by India and the loss of half of the nation's territory, Pakistan's military was
thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the people. Gen. Yahya Khan permitted Zulfiqar Bhutto to
take over control of the wreckage.

Bhutto negotiated the 1972 Simla Agreement with India, returned Pakistan to parliamentary
democracy in 1973, and recognized Bangladesh as an independent state in 1974. But in the
elections of 1977, accusations of fraud on
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the part of his Pakistan People's Party (PPP) led to street protests and the imposition of martial
law. Shortly thereafter, Bhutto's army chief, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, staged a coup d'etat.
Despite worldwide outcry, under Zia's rule Zulfiqar Bhutto was hanged on widely discredited
charges of murder. Zia promised free elections within three months, but until 1988 Zia
governed by virtual fiat. He banned political parties, kept martial law in place until 1986, and
pushed forward a program of Islamizing the Pakistani military, government, and society. While
Pakistan had been notionally an Islamic republic since the short-lived constitution of 1956, it
was only under Zia's rule that sharia (Islamic law) became institutionalized as a key component
of the legal framework. In 1988 Zia unexpectedly dismissed his prime minister and announced
open, multiparty elections. On August 17 of that year, he and several of his closest allies within
the military echelon died when their jet crashed under circumstances that remain cloaked in
mystery.

The elections brought to power Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, who at the tender age
of thirty-six became the first woman ever elected to lead a Muslim nation. The military
establishment had much residual hatred for the long-dead Zulfi and little affection for Benazir;
after less than two years, the generals pressed President Ghulam Ishaq Khan to dismiss
Benazir's government on charges of corruption and abuse of power. In new elections Mian
Nawaz Sharif, who owed his political rise to the patronage of Gen. Zia during the 1980s,
emerged victorious. For a decade, from 1988 to 1999, Pakistani politics consisted largely of a
duel between Benazir's PPP and Nawaz's Pakistan Muslim League (PML). Both prime ministers
were elected twice, and both were twice evicted from office on similar charges when they ran
afoul of the military establishment. Despite stirring populist rhetoric since the days of Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto, both parties allied themselves with the powerful zamindars, whose control over
most of the country (particularly the rural areas) has never been broken. In India Nehru's land
reforms of the 1950s set the stage for genuinely popular political parties, but in Pakistan the
absence of such reforms insured that politics (when permitted to be practiced at all) would
remain a family affair. The bitter contests between Benazir and Nawaz were not so much a
battle between two competing ideologies, or even between Sindh (the PPP heartland) and
Punjab (the base of the PML). As the 1990s wore on, Pakistani politics seemed little more than a
duel, at both the local and national levels, between rival feudal clans loosely disguised as
political parties, with all participants well aware that the real power would remain in the hands
of the military brass.

Well aware, that is, until 1999. Following a humiliating Kargil conflict (a Pakistani incursion
across the line of control in Kashmir was driven back by Indian forces, while the rest of the
world watched), Nawaz tried to pin all blame for the fiasco on his generals. Army chief of staff
Pervez Musharraf, one step ahead of Nawaz's clumsy attempt to remove him, staged a
bloodless coup and declared himself chief executive (later president). The move was initially
popular with a citizenry disillusioned by years of failed democratic government, but in the
subsequent years Musharraf has not done a noticeably better job of providing effective
governance or material development than his civilian predecessors.

The Kargil conflict illustrates the dangers to international order of weak (or nonexistent)
democratic standards. While the legitimately elected civilian government appears to have been
informed (at least in vague terms) of the Kargil project beforehand, there is considerable
evidence that the operation was planned and executed by the military, with little detailed
knowledge or input from civilian authorities. According to documents released subsequent to
the coup that deposed Nawaz Sharif, at the height of the crisis the Pakistani prime minister
seemed genuinely unaware of nuclear preparations set in motion by his own general staff
.18One school of thought among students of Pakistan's political history notes that military
regimes have been more likely than civilian ones to initiate conflict with India. They point to the
army's dominance over inchoate civilian political systems during the 1947-1948 Kashmir war
and to military adventurism in 1965 and 1971. On the other side of the ledger, however, a
plausible case can be made that army leaders have greater power, should they choose to
exercise it, to exert the necessary control over their military colleagues and deliver the
sacrifices necessary to solidify any long-term peace agreement. Thus far, neither military nor
democratic leaders of Pakistan have proven themselves willing or able to establish a durable
peace. Perhaps one or the other will eventually demonstrate the power of its respective
system, but at the time of this writing, the case remains unproven. If an edge can be given to
either camp, it would have to go to the advocates of democracy: Even during periods of
democratic rule, the military has exercized power of veto over any important government
decisions. In such a context, democratic regimes in Pakistan can legitimately argue that they
haven't actually failed, but rather that they've never truly been given the chance to succeed.

The economic picture is similarly shaded. After half a century of governments controlled by the
military (whether directly or thinly concealed behind an elected prime minister), Pakistan has a
gross national income per capita far below that of India: $1,860 versus $2,820 (when measured
by purchasingpower parity).19 Its poverty rate is four percentage points higher than that of
India, and only one point below that of desperately poor Bangladesh.20 Infant mortality is
eighty-three per thousand live births, ten higher than the South Asia average. Literacy is a mere
46 percent, well below the regional mean. Moreover, Pakistan's economy has barely kept pace
with the growth of its population, and civilians seem to have done at least as bad a job as the
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generals at managing the nation's finances: GDP per capita grew at 3.3 per. cent annually from
1981 to 1991 and a mere 1.0 percent between 1991 and

2001. In 2001 the growth rate approached the point of total stagnation, clocking in at only 0.3
percent.21 But the military itself may be the greatest drag on Pakistan's material development.
Whether openly running the government or controlling affairs from behind the scenes,
Pakistan's military has eaten up a disproportionate share of the country's resources. It has
pushed the nation into three self-destructive wars with India (and one mini war, Kargil, that ran
the risk of escalation to the nuclear level), and despite losing all of these conflicts, it continues
to support an insurgency in Kashmir, which makes future warfare virtually inevitable.

The cause of democratization in Pakistan has been seriously damaged by the poor performance
of duly elected governments. None of Pakistan's democratically elected prime ministers could
credibly claim to have delivered the goods: the best that either of the two living former
premiers can assert is that their terms were cut short unfairly and that their successors were
worse. Neither claim, justified or not, constitutes a ringing endorsement for the project of
democratization. Yet, the Pakistani people remain generally supportive of democratization. The
most authoritative current polling data suggests that a decade of bad experience with elected
leaders has not soured Pakistanis on the experiment. According to the Pew Global Attitudes
Project, 57 percent of Pakistanis surveyed in 2003 said that Western-style democracy could
work in their country, up from 44 percent the previous year. This figure is markedly higher than
those posted in Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia that are also making the slow
transition from military to civilian rule. Almost twothirds of the respondents said it was very
important to live in a country where people can criticize their government, and when asked
whether a democratic government was more important than strong leadership, 42 percent of
Pakistanis opted for democracy while only 32 percent favored a strong leader instead.22 Having
seen bad governance both in and out of uniform, Pakistanis seem to prefer (all things being
equal) inept civilians over inept generals.

SRI LANKA

An island known until 1972 as Ceylon, Sri Lanka highlights both the weaknesses and the
strengths of democratization. As is the case for any nation ravaged by decades of warfare, the
weaknesses are more visible. But on closer examination, it is the strengths that seem most
notable. Ever since gaining independence in 1948, Sri Lanka has been governed by politicians
rather than generals. The shortsightedness of democratically elected leaders, however, was
perhaps the key cause of the country's long civil war. In a democracy the
majority rules, but if the rights of the minority population are not respected, the wheels of
governance grind to a halt. Prior to independence, Sri Lanka's Tamil minority (currently 18
percent of the population and predominantly Hindu) had enjoyed a privileged position in the
British colonial regime. Since 1948 the Sinhalese majority (now 74 percent of the populace and
predominantly Buddhist) has controlled the government. It is only natural that a people shut
out of power in their own homeland might exercise it too freely when they finally win the
opportunity. But if the majority treats democracy as a winner-takes-all sport, it is also only
natural for the minority to make "all" seem more like nothing.

In 1983 after a quarter-century of feeling shut out of the circles of power and being treated like
second-class citizens, Tamils in the northern and eastern portions of the country started a
rebellion that continues to this day. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were only one
of the militias to spring up during the 1980s, but they are now the only one left standing. Led by
the reclusive Vellupillai Prabhakaran, they battled government troops to a standstill, governed
a quarter of the country as their virtual fief during the early 1990s, and pioneered terrorist
techniques (suicide bombings being only the most dramatic) that have paralyzed most of the
nation for a whole generation.

Sri Lanka's two major political parties have highlighted the uglier side of democracy: for most of
their history, they have been more interested in partisan wrangling than in solving the
problems of the nation. Both parties have engaged in shameless nepotism. The United National
Party (UNP) has so thoroughly entrenched the practice that Sri Lankans joke that its initials
stand for the Uncle-Nephew Party. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party has blazed a new trail in old
terrain: current president Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga is the daughter of Sri Lanka's
first prime minister, S. W. R. D Bandaranaike, and of its (and the world's) first female prime
minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike. In 1978 a constitutional reconfiguration moved the country
from a Westminster-style government to a model based on that of France, greatly increasing
the power of the president vis-a-vis the prime minister. When Kumaratunga won the
presidency in 1994, she established what may have been a landmark in the annals of nepotism:
a daughter appointing her mother to their nation's second-highest office.23 Politics as a family
affair has not discredited democracy in the eyes of its Sri Lankan practitioners, but the inability
of the two major parties to set aside their rivalry for the sake of the common good just might.
Throughout the mid- 1990s, Kumaratunga's attempts to negotiate an end to the civil war were
impeded by backbiting from the UNP. In 2003, on the verge of what appeared to be a
breakthrough, UNP prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe found his own efforts to negotiate
peace with the Tamil Tigers subjected to harsh criticism and legislative roadblocks cast up by
President Kumaratunga herself.
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The civil war is clearly the greatest failure of the Sri Lankan government: any regime that
permits widespread bloodshed to continue for twenty years can hardly be called a success. In
this context, democracy has shown itself to be no magic cure for the chronic ailments of
religious or ethnic conflict. Not only have the parties to the civil war had access to the political
process, but they have availed themselves of this opportunity while still maintaining military
capabilities. In the parliamentary elections of April 2004, the Tamil National Alliance (a proxy
party for the dominant faction of the rebel LTTE) won twenty-two seats and 7 percent of the
vote. With Kumaratunga's party dominant but unable to gain an absolute majority, this
outcome put the representatives of the insurgents, composing the third largest party, in a fairly
powerful position. It has not, however, brought the civil war any closer to a longterm
resolution. And, as the Indian intervention of 1987-1990 made clear, Sri Lanka's internal
warfare has a way of spilling over to affect its regional neighbors. Since the outbreak of
hostilities, it is believed that sixty-four thousand Sri Lankans have been killed. Sri Lanka's
economy is expected to grow 4 to 5 percent over each of the next two years, but this rate
would be an estimated three percentage points higher in the absence of civil strife. As it is, the
growth rate is overshadowed by inflation (9.6 percent in 2002 and expected to remain high for
the near future), and the country has only begun to recover from a recession in which the
economy shrank by 1.4 percent in 2001.24 On the other hand, Sri Lanka's success in economic
and social development is all the more remarkable considering the challenges presented. The
first South Asian nation to liberalize its economy (as far back as 1977), Sri Lanka has had nearly
a fifteen-year head start on its neighbors. The GNP per capital for 2001 was $3,260 in
purchasing-power-parity terms, well above that of India or Pakistan, and more than double that
of Bangladesh or Nepal; in the Atlas model, Sri Lanka's figure is $880, about twice that of India,
Pakistan, and Bangladesh and more than triple that of Nepal.25 Peace talks between the
government and the LTTE are underway, and for the first time the rebels have agreed to accept
autonomy rather than full independence. The World Bank has pledged "unconditional support"
to the tune of $800 million in grants and no-interest loans over the next four years. In the realm
of social development, the gains are even more impressive than those in the economic sphere.
Life expectancy at birth is seventy-three years. Literacy is an astounding 89.3 percent for
women, 94.5 percent for men, about double the figures for India or Pakistan and approaching
those of Western Europe and the United States.26 Democratization may not be able to deliver
all of the goods, but it can clearly deliver some of them.
Democratization and Development 245

NEPAL

The only major South Asian nation never to have fallen under colonialist domination, Nepal is
also the poorest country in the region and the one with the least success in democratization.
The lack of democratic norms seems to be impeding Nepal's social and economic development:
decades of unresponsive monarchical rule have given rise to a powerful grassroots rebellion
that has stifled the Nepali economy and poses a very real danger to the government itself.

Since its consolidation as an independent country in 1768, a monarch enjoying more or less
absolute power has governed Nepal. In 1959 King Mahendra decided to set his country on a
democratic path and held open parliamentary elections; the following year, however, he
reconsidered the experiment, suspended the newborn constitution, and banned all political
parties. Democratization remained on hold for another thirty years.27 In 1990, following similar
ferment throughout the Soviet bloc, and particularly in neighboring China and Tibet, Nepali
students and political activists began to stage increasingly vociferous protests. After first
attempting to suppress the movement by force, King Birendra decided to accede to their
requests and declare his nation a constitutional monarchy. The next decade showcased the
wide range of ideas and viewpoints that democracy can set free, as well as the dangers of too
much politics and too little governance.

Corruption, never distant from official dealings, became omnipresent. Governments waltzed in
and out of office like changing seasons: eleven years of democratic rule saw eleven different
parliamentary governments. There was endless talk, but all too little real action. For the second
half of the decade, the struggling democracy faced a new challenge: a civil war launched by two
communist parties that had previously been successful participants in the electoral process. The
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the United People's Front had been part of a left-wing
coalition that had actually won power through the ballot in 1994, but two years later they
abandoned their more mainstream comrades in the Nepal Communist Party (united Marxist
and Leninist) to go underground and launch a people's war. The fact that this guerrilla
movement could be conducted so successfully without the backing of any foreign state, relying
purely on grassroots support (be it willing or not) and limited material assistance from
ideological soul mates among the Naxalites of India, is testament to the depth of
democratization's failure in Nepal. In the latter half of the 1990s, the Maoists established de
facto governments in remote rural areas and by many accounts did a better job of providing
basic government services than the authorities appointed by Kathmandu. The Nepali army was
a ceremonial force, unprepared for actual combat, and therefore kept out of the fight. Police
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were overextended, underpaid, underequipped, and compelled by circumstances to rely on

brutal abuses of human rights instead of professional counterinsurgency campaigns. Every
attempt to terrify the populace into cutting off support for the guerrillas merely deepened the
alienation of the embattled villagers. This dynamic-an antidemocratic government
strengthening the appeal of an antidemocratic rebel army-has had a deleterious impact on the
nations of the region. Instability and lack of governmental control has led to an upswing in
international terrorist activity in Nepal. India's Research and Intelligence Wing (RAW) and
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) bureau have staged a low-intensity espionage war in
Kathmandu. It is widely believed that RAW supplies the Royal Nepalese Army with arms and
training, and in recent years this role has expanded beyond Indfa to such states as Great Britain
and the United States.

The stakes are particularly high for India: the Maoist rebels are widely believed to get arms and
financial support from ideological soul mates based in India, such as the Naxalites and the
People's War Group. The Nepali insurgents, in turn, send battle-hardened cadres back to India
to help train and indoctrinate their comrades to the south. In brief, therefore, Nepal's civil war,
fed and perpetuated by a lack of responsive democratic government, has both stoked and been
stoked by external forces of varying political hues. The moral standing of the Nepali state was
shaken to its core on the evening of June 1,2001, in a tragedy almost too bizarre to be credited.
Crown Prince Dipendra, in the grip of narcotics and alcohol, distraught over his inability to gain
permission to marry the woman of his choice, burst into a family gathering in the royal palace
armed with a shotgun, a pistol, and two automatic rifles. Within minutes he had killed both his
parents and seven other relatives, before firing his last bullet into his own head. Two years
later, Nepalis still refuse to believe that their popular crown prince could have killed their
beloved king-there must be some other explanation. But none of the rumors are at all flattering
to the parliamentary officials, the rebels, the generals, the few royals lucky enough to survive
the massacre, or to anyone else on the political stage.

Prince Gyanendra, the former king's brother, assumed the throne. Gyanendra was widely
regarded as being very close to the army-an army that had thus far been kept out of combat
against the Maoist rebels, but was quite able to exert its authority over the streets of
Kathmandu. In November after the Maoists broke a cease-fire, Gyanendra issued a state of
emergency and let the military join in the civil war for the first time. The results have not been a
cause for pride: of the seventy-two hundred deaths recorded since the insurgency began in
1996, roughly 60 percent have occurred since Gyanendra's state of emergency. The bulk of
these have been killings of civilians (whether
Democratization and Development

247

Maoists or bystanders; the figures cannot be reliably broken down) by military and police. This
crackdown, however, did little to weaken the insurgency's power. If anything, it may have
strengthened the movement by turning yet more of the populace against the government.28
Nepal's experiment with democratization was suspended on October 3, 2002. Prime Minister
Sher Bahadur Deuba, having rashly asked the king to declare new elections, was forced to admit
that his government didn't have the military means of conducting open polling in vast areas of
the country. King Gyanendra dismissed parliament and assumed the unfettered monarchical
powers of his forefathers. He has opened peace talks with the Maoists, but little progress has
been made: the rebels appear to believe they have reached the phase of revolution known in
Maoist terminology as strategic stalemate. Their goal, say former comrades and mainstream
Communists within the political sphere, is to consolidate their gains in the countryside while
preparing for the final strategic offensive against the capital itself. Ironically, the Maoists' grip
on the rural areas is itself contingent on the government's failure to democratize. If the palace
were able to provide genuine grassroots support to the people, to address their concerns,
provide them with basic services, and empower them to take control of their own political,
social, and economic fortunes, it is unlikely that the Maoists would find such a widely
responsive audience. As it is, Nepal is a fertile recruiting ground for revolutionary ideas. It is by
far the poorest nation in South Asia and one of the dozen poorest nations in the world. The
country's GNP per capita is a mere $1,360 (by the purchasingpower-parity model; $250 by the
traditional model), barely half the average for the region or the global average for low-income
countries. Nearly half the population (42 percent) lives below the poverty line. Life expectancy
at birth is a mere fifty-nine years, and literacy is only 43 percent.29 Even compared with
chronically impoverished neighbors like Bangladesh, Nepal seems mired in exceptional
destitution. Neither half-hearted stabs at democratization nor the long-term practice of
authoritarian monarchical rule has succeeded in bring economic or social development to
Nepal. The country is heavily dependent on foreign capital merely to stay afloat: not only is
Nepal heavily reliant on direct foreign assistance from governments and international financial
institutions, but it depends on international nongovernmental organizations to provide many
basic services to the population. Tourism is a crucial part of the domestic economy and is highly
vulnerable to upswings in civil unrest.

All of these elements suggest that Nepal's hope may lie in more democratization rather than
less: a country able to wall itself off from the outside world can afford to play by its own rules,
but a state like Nepal (landlocked, sandwiched between three enormous neighbors, possessing
few readily exploitable
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Jonah Blank

natural resources other than its beautiful scenery) will remain dependent on the goodwill and
support of the wealthy aid-giving nations. Even a more competent display of democratization
than that Nepal experienced during the 1990s would not cure the ills of the country quickly, but
it might entice the deeppocketed countries of Western Europe, the United States, and Japan to
provide more desperately needed financial medicine.

BANGLADESH

As the only country in South Asia to experience a one-way postcolonial journey from
authoritarianism to democratization, Bangladesh might come closer than its neighbors to
providing lessons about* the interplay of representative government and material
development. But any lessons one might draw depend on what point one wishes to
demonstrate: is Bangladesh proof of democracy's success or its failure?

From 1947 to 1971, the nation now called Bangladesh was an integral part of Pakistan. During
this period the inhabitants of East Pakistan often cornplained that the government in Islamabad
(before that, Karachi) treated them as second-class citizens. They were separated from the
center of power not merely by sixteen hundred kilometers of Indian territory but also by the
chasms of language, ethnicity, and history. Nearly all of the citizens of East Pakistan were
Bengali, while the top ranks of the Pakistani military and political elite were dominated by
Punjabis and Urdu-speaking mohajirs (migrants from India) of the Western wing. During
Pakistan's limited forays into representative government, Bengali politicians failed to mobilize
their followers along East-West lines in sufficient numbers to stake a claim at the center; that is,
until the election of 1970. The polling of December 7, 1970, Pakistan's first nationwide election,
caused a political crisis. The Bengali nationalist Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman,
won 160 of the 162 seats assigned to the eastern wing. It was an overwhelming victory: the
nextlargest party nationwide was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's PPP, which won a majority of seats
assigned to the west, but barely half (81) as many as the Awami League overall. Neither Bhutto
nor military commander Gen. Yahya Khan were willing to shift Pakistan's center of gravity east,
and in March of the following year Mujib (as Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was called) declared
Bangladesh independent. He was promptly thrown into jail, and the nation began to unravel.
Bengali rebels, often armed and equipped by India, staged attacks on government institutions,
and the Pakistani military suppressed popular dissent in the east with extreme brutality. By
December ten million Bengali refugees had fled to India. The financial burden ($200 million per
month30), combined with the strategic opportunity
to truncate an enemy against which it had already fought two wars, impelled . India to prepare
for invasion. Fighting on the western front was inconclusive, but in the eastern theater Indian
troops and their Bengali allies routed the Pakistani military. Mujib was released from prison and
became Bangladesh's first prime minister. Bangladesh may be the only nation in the world to
experience a free election prior to independence but not again for two decades afterward.
Mujib was assassinated in 1975, before his party would have to face the electorate. The
following sixteen years were a time of military rule and a period characterized by material
hardship, political repression, and economic stagnation.

During this period military tensions with neighboring states (especially India) ebbed and flowed
but never burst into full-fledged conflict. It would be difficult, however, to attribute this to the
form of government in place. A fledgling state greatly indebted to its vastly more powerful
neighbor to the west, Bangladesh lacked the military capabilities to challenge India in a
meaningful way. With a host of more pressing problems on its plate (floods, poverty, the
creation of a national identity distinct from both Pakistan and from Bengalis across the border
in the Indian state of West Bengal), the government of Bangladesh had little incentive to
embark on foreign adventurism. In 1991 the country held its first democratic elections. Since
then the prime minister's office has been battled over by the two dominant figures of
Bangladeshi politics: Khaleda Zia, the daughter of assassinated military leader Gen. Zia-ur
Rahman, who won the elections of 1991 and 2001, and Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the daughter of
Mujib, who won the election of 1996. Zia's Bangladesh National Party is sometimes described
as right-wing and Sheikh Hasina's Awami League as left-wing, but the ideological differences
between the two parties are negligible. For more than a decade, the scions of two murdered
leaders have used the realm of politics to engage in a bitter contest for the spoils of rule.

It is sometimes said that Bangladesh is a democracy, but only for one day out of every five
years. Leaders from both parties have been freely elected and have voluntarily turned power
over when voted out of office, but between elections both parties have behaved with scant
regard for democratic norms. When in power the ruling party (be it the Awami League or BNP)
has treated government as a resource to be exploited to the fullest. When out of power the
opposition party has sought to undermine the political process through street protests, strikes,
and boycotts of Parliament.

Has democratization led to greater development in Bangladesh? Both democratically elected

prime ministers have pursued a program of economic reform, and this has had a generally
beneficial effect on the Bangladeshi economy. The country is still very poor: nearly half of the
nation's population lives in poverty, and in 2001 a UN report ranked Bangladesh's foreign direct
investment 122nd
250 Jonah Blank

out of 128 countries listed.31 But the glass can more accurately be described as half-full than
half-empty. The economic figures are less gloomy looking forward than backward. The GDP per
capita ($1,600 for 2001) is projected to grow nearly 4 percent for the next two years. The
country is nearly self-sufficient in rice, the staple food. The rate of population growth has fallen
from over 3 percent per year at independence to less than 2 percent at the time of this
writing.32 Moreover, Bangladesh has made significant strides in indices of social, as opposed to
strictly economic, development. Literacy is higher today in the (democratizing) former East
Pakistan than in the (nondemocratizing) former West Pakistan: 63 percent versus 55 percent
for men, and 49 percent versus 29 percent for women. Bangladesh and Pakistan have nearly
identical rates for life expectancy at birth (about 61 years), but this figure hides a telling
disparity: Bangladesh has lower rates of both birth and death (25 births and 8.5 deaths per
thousand, compared with 30 births and 9 deaths for Pakistan).33 Bangladesh's success in
microenterprise is a good example of development in both the economic and the social sphere.
Grameen Bank has made small loans to over 2.4 million clients, and boasts a recovery rate of 99
percent. Other microenterprises have replicated the formula on a somewhat more modest
scale. A common feature of this mode of lending is that it is explicitly geared toward the
women of the community: by enabling women (many of them from traditionally conservative
rural areas) to start their own businesses, microenterprises advance the causes of economic
uplift and female empowerment at the same time. Elections may check the temperature of the
populace only once every half decade, but polling data indicates Bangladeshis see the
democratic experiment as one eminently worth pursuing. In the Pew Global Attitudes Project,
more than two-thirds of Bangladeshi respondents favored a good democracy over a strong
economy and a democratic government over a strong leadership. These percentages are
significantly higher than those of Indian and Pakistani respondents or of respondents from the
other five Asian countries cited.34 Moreover, Bangladeshi respondents to the survey topped
the Asia list when it came to valuing many of the specific elements of democratization. In
enumerating the essential norms of good governance, 71 percent of Bangladeshis cited honest
elections, 89 percent a fair judiciary, 93 percent religious freedom, 81 percent free speech, and
64 percent a free press. The figures for Indian respondents were between eight and twenty-
three percentage points lower in all categories.35 The large majority of the Bangladeshi
respondents noted that they lacked the very democratic norms that they valued,36 indicating
that Bangladeshis recognize both the promise of democracy and the fact that their own
democracy is very much a work in progress.

Has Bangladesh been better served by democracy than military rule? Bangladeshis seem to
think so. Despite the slow pace of material develop-
Democratization and Development

251

ment, they want more democratization, not less. Democracy isn't a magical potion; Bangladesh
is still a poor country and, deposits of natural gas notwithstanding, will remain one for the
foreseeable future. But the flawed, unsteady, democratizing government seems to provide
more to its citizens than the prior military governments, be they Bangladeshi or Pakistani, could
deliver.

CONCLUSION

Amartya Sen has observed that democracies in South Asia may not always be effective at lifting
their populations from poverty and hunger, but they are extremely effective at preventing
these social ills from turning into disaster. He notes particularly the case of famine: during
(nondemocratic) British colonial rule, India suffered several localized famines in the twentieth
century, in which millions of people died, despite the presence of sufficient quantities of food
elsewhere in the country. The same can be said of (nondemocratic) Communist China: during
the Great Leap Forward, the death toll from unnecessary, man-made famines is reckoned in the
tens of millions. No democratic government, Sen argues, could survive such epic
mismanagement, and for this reason, he writes, "no substantial famine has ever occurred in a
country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press."37

Sen's argument is reinforced by the record of nondemocratic authorities in the other portion of
his native Bengal. In 1970 East Pakistan was ravaged by a cyclone of almost apocalyptic
proportions; the callous indifference of the government, a military regime dominated by
officers from the Western portion of the country, was a key factor in driving the population of
the east into first voting overwhelmingly for the Awami League, and then, when their votes
were rendered meaningless, to rising in open rebellion. Throughout the

1970s, other cyclones, floods, and natural disasters turned the newly independent Bangladesh
into a virtual synonym for developing-world misery, a country known internationally largely for
misfortune. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that during this period none of the underperforming,
out-of-touch, woefully derelict leaders ever had to subject himself to a democratic election.
Contrast this with the situation in 1998. In that year, Bangladesh, by this time under democratic
rale, suffered its worst flooding of the entire twentieth century. Monsoon rains lashed the
country for three solid months and left two-thirds of the nation's landmass under water. The
extent of the human tragedy was enormous, but the death toll was only about one thousand.38
The government knew it would have to face the voters and that it stood no chance of retaining
office unless it did everything in its power to mitigate the impact of the floods.
252

Jonah Blank

Democracy's results are unpredictable: Sheikh Hasina, the Bangladeshi prime minister who
ordered massive flood relief, lost badly in the elections of

2001. Indira Gandhi, after leading her nation to overwhelming victory in the

1971 war against Pakistan, saw her popularity plummet after she staged an unnecessary power-
grab during the Emergency of 1975-1977 and was voted out of office at the first available
opportunity. But the results of democratization almost always provide a more accurate
reflection of popular sentiment than other systems. Democracy doesn't automatically produce
economic or social development, but it lays a foundation that may well be essential for such
development to take place.

Can democratization deliver the goods? Not always, not all the goods, and not to all people, but
a democratizing government, even one wracked by corruption and incompetence, may deliver
one thing that few military regimes have the ability to conjure up: hope for better performance
in the future. Winston Churchill never applied his own maxim to Britain's colonial possessions in
South Asia. A champion of democracy at home, he was ironically blind to the inconsistency of
denying this form of government to the countries that would soon become modern India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. But democracy tosses up its share of surprises:
immediately after winning a war for Britain's (and democracy's) very survival, Churchill was
unceremoniously voted out of office. By 1948 he could no longer call himself prime minister
(he'd later return for a brief swansong), but Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and S. W.
R. D. Bandaranaike could. The worst form of government, indeed-except for all the rest. a

NOTES 1

1. Of the countries not discussed in this chapter, the Himalayan kingdoms of Bhutan and (until
its absorption into India in 1974) Sikkim never ventured down the democratic path. The
Maldives took a few minor steps toward representative government in the late 1990s but still
forbid the existence of political parties. These states are too small to be considered good test
cases: The population of Bhutan and the Maldives together is probably less than one million.
The World Bank figures for 2001 list the Maldives as having 280,000 citizens and Bhutan as
having

830,000 (World Bank Development Indicators Database, at [Link], World Bank,

April 2003), but the latter figure includes 100,000 Bhutanese refugees in Nepal and an
unspecified number of residents of Bhutan whose citizenship is in dispute. In personal
conversations in Thimpu in December 2002, top-ranking officials of the Bhutanese government
quoted to me the figure of 600,000 as their best estimate of their country's population.

2. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books,

1993).

3. To help overcome this definitional problem, economists at the World Bank and elsewhere
have begun using models based on purchasing-power parity. This method uses as its
benchmark not the U.S. dollar but the local purchasing-power equivalent to what a U.S. dollar
would have bought in the United States.

4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New
York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1958; original German edition, 1905).

5. Not that it has been universal even in these spheres. Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the states
of the former Soviet bloc have only recently democratized, as have most of the countries of
Latin America. And as the 2000 election demonstrated, democracy in the United States is still
very far from a finished product.

6. India has experienced a great deal of underemployment but less unemployment than it
would have if millions of nonproductive workers were cut from the employment rolls. The
argument here is not that it makes economic sense to provide ten workers with a pittance
instead of one worker with a healthy wage; it is that keeping ten workers on the payroll creates
greater social stability than turning nine of them out into the street.

7. Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Arcade, 1997), 166. For a
discussion of the economic failings (and modest successes) of India from 1947-1991, see

pp.159-99.

8. For details of Nehruvian land reform, see Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In
Pursuit ofLakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 109-10, 354-56.

9. The only one of India's neighbors that boasts greater military resources, the Peoples'
Republic of China, is beyond the ambit of South Asia.

10. One of the very few instances in which Indian forces took and held any significant amount
of territory occurred in the mid-1980s when Indian troops seized possession of much of the
Siachen Glacier straddling the poorly demarcated line of actual control between the two
countries. This barren patch of land, the world's highest-altitude battleground, is utterly
uninhabitable and contested purely for reasons of military and political advantage. For further
discussion of conditions on the Pakistani portion of the glacier, see Jonah Blank, "Kashmir: All
Tactics, No Strategy," in The Kashmir Question: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Sumit Ganguly
(London: Frank Cass, 2003), 193-94.

11. One might attach a number of asterisks to this statement, the most notable indicating the

state of Jammu and Kashmir.

12. For a more detailed discussion, see Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ashutosh Varshney, and Nirupam
Bajpai, eds., India in the Era of Economic Reforms (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1999). Tariff figures: Wayne Morrison and K. Alan Krondstadt, "India-US Economic Relations,"
Congressional Research Service Report for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research
Service, April 22,2003), 3.

13. Montek Ahluwalia, "India's Economic Reforms: An Appraisal," in India in the Era,

33, 55. The World Bank puts India's GDP growth rate for 1992-2002, a period including both the
high-growth 1990s and the lower rate after 1997, at an annual average of 6.1 percent (World
Bank Development Indicators Database, at [Link], World Bank, April 2,

2003).

14. Morrison and Krondstadt, "India-US Economic Relations," 3. India: 1990, $1,400; 2002,
$2,610. China: 1990, $1,390; 2002, $4,700. All rates given are calculated on the basis of
purchasing-power parity.

15. This rate is slightly down from a 50 percent measure estimated by the World Bank for the
1970s. The Indian government uses a different scale, measuring its poverty rate at 26 percent
of the population at the end of the 1990s (versus 36 percent in 1993-1994).

16. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 60.

17. Dreze and Sen, India, 60.

18. Bruce Riedel, "American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit at Blair House," Center for
the Advanced Study of India, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
254

Jonah Blank

19. World Development Indicators Database, World Bank, at [Link], April

2003. The figures are for 2001. By the Atlas method of calculation, Pakistan's ONI per capita
was $420, while India's was $460.

20. World Development Indicators Database, World Bank, at [Link]: Pakistan: 33

percent; India: 29 percent; Bangladesh: 34 percent. These figures are for 2001 and vary from
higher poverty figures listed by the World Bank in other documents since they use a different
method of calculation. I employ the lower figures here in the interest of transnational
comparability.

21. World Development Indicators Database, World Bank, at [Link], September

30, 2002.

22. The Pew Global Attitudes Project, "Views of a Changing World." (Washington, D.C.: Pew
Research Center, 2003), 7, 37,41. The survey size for Pakistani respondents was 2,032 in the
2002 poll and 999 in the 2003 one. For polls conducted in Bangladesh and India in 2002, the
survey size was 689 and 2,189, respectively.

23. For a more extensive discussion of the political framework of Sri Lanka, including the impact
of the civil war on the political system, see Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God:
Retracing the Ramayana through India, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 277-300,

360-64.

24. Teresita Schaffer and Nisala Rodrigo, "Sri Lanka: Finding the Start of a Long Road," South
Asia Monitor 54, Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 1, 2003; World Bank
press release, April 1, 2003; "Sri Lanka: Executive Summary," Global Insight, May 14,

2003; [Link] Kronstadt, "Sri Lanka: Background and U.S. Relations," Congressional Research
Service Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, May 30,

2003), 1,9.

25. Figures from the World Bank, using Atlas method of calculation: Sri Lanka: $880; India:
$460; Pakistan: $420; Bangladesh: $360; Nepal: $250. World Bank figures using the purchasing-
power-parity method of calculation also put Sri Lanka on top: Sri Lanka: $3,260; India: $2,820;
Pakistan: $1,860; Bangladesh: $1,600; Nepal: $1,360. World Bank Development Indicators
Database, at [Link], World Bank, April 2003.
26. "Sri Lanka at a Glance," World Bank Development Indicators Database, at [Link]
[Link], World Bank, September 18, 2002. Kronstadt, "Sri Lanka," 1; The World Bank
estimates overall literacy for India at 58 percent and Pakistan at 44 percent (World Bank
database at [Link], March 28, 2003). In both countries it is widely accepted that
the rate for male literacy is significantly higher than the rate for female literacy.

27. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that my father-in-law served as Nepal's
foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations during this period. The analysis laid out
here is mine alone-and most certainly not his.

28. This view was expressed to me in December 2002 by high-ranking Kathmandu-based

Western diplomats and by top officials of the Nepali government.

29. "Nepal at a Glance," World Bank Development Indicators Database, at [Link] [Link],
World Bank, November 2002. Dozen poorest countries: K. Alan Kronstadt, "Nepal: Background
and U.S. Relations," CRS Report for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research
Service, 2003), 11.

30. Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press), 389.

31. K. Alan Kronstadt, "Bangladesh: Background and U.S. Relations," CRS Report to Congress
(Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, April 29, 2003), 3-4. The total amount of
Bangladesh's foreign direct investment was listed as a mere $78 million for 2001.

32. "Bangladesh at a Glance," World Bank Development Indicators Database, at www

.[Link], World Bank, May 22, 2003. Kronstadt, "Bangladesh," 1,3,4.

33. World Factbook, 2002 (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002), 43, 397.
Democratization and Development

255

34. Bangladesh figures: 73 percent favor good democracy versus 19 percent for strong
economy; 70 percent favor democratic leadership versus 24 percent for strong leadership. By
contrast, 56 percent of Indian respondents favored good democracy versus 31 percent for
strong economy, and 54 percent of Indians favored democratic leadership versus 34 percent for
strong leadership. Results for Pakistani respondents are noted only for the second question,
and the comparison is revealing: 42 percent for democratic leadership versus 32 percent for
strong leadership. Pew Global Attitudes Project, "Views of a Changing World," 41, 65.

35. Pew Global Attitudes Project, "Views of a Changing World," 62-63.

36. Only 6 percent of Bangladeshi respondents said they had a fair judiciary, 19 percent free
speech, 17 percent honest elections, and 13 percent a free press. Pew Global Attitudes Project,
"Views of a Changing World," 62-63.

37. Amartya Sen, "Freedoms and Needs: Why Political Rights Are Primary, Even in the Face of
Dire Economic Need," The New Republic, January 10, 1994, 31. Sen outlines his theory in
greater detail in his book Democracy as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999). Among the
most notable colonial-era famines was that which hit Bengal in 1943-1944.

38. Kronstadt, "Bangladesh," 4.

FURTHER READING

Bhagwati, Jagdish. India in Transition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Bhattachan, Krishna B., and Chaitanya Mishra, eds. Development Practices in Nepal. Kath-

mandu: Tribhuvan University, 1997. Blank, Jonah. Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and
Modernity among the Daudi Bohras.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Brass, Paul R. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and
Comparison. New Delhi: Sage Books,

1991. Cohen, Stephen P. India: Emerging Power. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,

2001. Dreze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity.
New

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Ganguly, Sumit. The Origins of War in South Asia. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994. Jalal,
Ayesha. The State of Martial Rule. Lahore: Vanguard Press, 1991. Kux, Dennis. Disenchanted
Allies: The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000. Washington,

D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001.

Lodhi, Maleeha. Pakistan's Encounter with Democracy. Lahore: Vanguard Press, 1994. Pandey,
Devendra Raj, and Anand Aditya, eds. Democracy and Empowerment in South Asia.

Kathmandu: Nepal South Asia Center, 1995. Rudolph, Lloyd, and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. In
Pursuit ofLakshmi: The Political Economy

of the Indian State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Scott, James C., and Nina Bhatt,
eds. Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Sen, Amartya. Inequality Reexamined. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992. Sisson, Richard, and Leo E. Rose. War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and
the Creation of

Bangladesh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Globalization and Economic Liberalization

Anupam Srivastava

This chapter discusses the state of the economy in the countries of South Asia and examines
the impact of globalization and economic liberalization on their economies. In an increasingly
interconnected world of instant communications, rising popular expectations, and relentless
scrutiny, the national leadership in the relatively impoverished countries of South Asia is
struggling to balance the competing demands for enhanced security, economic growth, and
environmental safety, among others. This task has been made more cornplicated with the
intensification of the forces of globalization that present greater opportunities as well as
greater perils. This challenge is reminiscent of the difficult economic choices that Britain faced
at the end of World War II. Sir Winston Churchill, then the prime minister, is said to have
remarked, "I would like to appoint a Finance Minister who has only one hand ... so that his
policy advice does not begin with ... on the one hand we should do this, and on the other do
that."

This chapter examines the state of the national economy in the seven countries of South Asia
(excluding Afghanistan, whose war-ravaged economy is treated to the extent possible in
chapter 5), including how globalization has influenced their policy choices and might impact
their future. It proceeds in three sections. The opening section describes the terms globalization
and economic liberalization and provides the overall context within which to examine their
roles and influence in South Asia. The second section provides a succinct portrayal of the
contemporary state of the economy in each of the seven countries and their principal strengths
and weaknesses. The bulk of this discussion focuses on the last decade of the twentieth century
since it was in

1991 that the Soviet Union disintegrated, signaling the end of the Cold War. The consequent
end to the East-West confrontation also marked the start of the process to dismantle
technology embargoes, provided greater latitude and
258

Anupam Srivastava

impetus for countries to undertake political and economic reforms, and witnessed an overall
intensification of the forces of globalization. The third section assesses the role and relevance
of regional organizations and other models that might assist in improving the overall economic
performance of the South Asian states.

GLOBALIZATION AND ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION

The true meaning of the term globalization, its core contents, and its impact on the economies
and societies of developed versus developing countries have been vigorously contested for a
long time now. This debate reminds one of the story of the elephant and the seven blind men.
Each person touched a separate part of the pachyderm's anatomy, and depending upon the
contours of that part, described the complete animal, with his imagination taking over where
his visual faculty left off. The message of this allegory is not that the narratives were inherently
flawed in their analytical conception. It is rather that globalization is a complex dynamic that is
still unfolding and one account of it could be at significant variance with another; yet, both
might offer true but partial accounts of the overall phenomenon.1

Indeed, in contemporary international discourse this term is often bandied about as a new
phenomenon. In reality, globalization has long been a feature of the international system,
whether it relates to transmigration of people, cross-fertilization of ideas, or even
transmutation of technologies. What has changed distinctively in recent decades is the pace
and scope of globalization, and as its most powerful manifestation, advanced technology runs
through the increasingly complex jigsaw of the international system as a lubricant, imparting to
it liquidity as well as dynamism. Thus, the distinctive aspect of contemporary globalization is
the increase in its liquidity, which makes it a diabolical phenomenon, capable of tremendous
progress but also considerable harm.

Most experts agree that at its core, globalization denotes the international integration of the
basic factors of production (i.e., labor, capital, technology, and entrepreneurship) and their
output (i.e., goods and services).2 As national economies become increasingly integrated into
the global economic matrix, this blurs the traditional boundaries between the local, national,
and transnational and impinges crucially upon the latitude, jurisdiction, and sovereignty of state
actors in the international system. For instance, the volume of total capital flows across
international markets often exceeds $100 billion a day, which is greater than the size of the
national economies of over half the countries in the world! Clearly, adverse capital flows, that
is, foreign investment flowing out of an important sector of a country's economy, could prove
dis-
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Anupam Srivastava

contact, technology, and political engagement.5 Other yardsticks of globalization include

percentage of trade to gross domestic product (GDP), technology flows (especially intangible or
knowledge-based technologies), levels of telephone density, per capita usage of personal
computers, and access to the Internet, among others. In sum, the forces of globalization and
their impact are neither uniformly positive nor negative. Instead, this dynamic, which is almost
technologically deterministic in nature, must be conceptualized in value-neutral terms.
Globalization signals a logical progression of the freemarket capitalist ideology, and embracing
it proactively can assist in devising a policy and regulatory framework that optimizes the gains
from this powerful force. At the international level, it underlines the need for policy
coordination among the community of nations and principal substate or parastate economic
actors, including the MNCs. Arid at the domestic level, it underscores the need for generating
wider clarity and subsequent consensus on proactive policy making where significant national
actors and interests act in concert to pursue realistic goals within the permissible domain of
enlightened self-interest. By comparison, the term economic liberalization is relatively simpler
to comprehend, even if not easy for governments to implement and sustain over time. In
essence, economic liberalization denotes an attitudinal change along with changes in the
structures and processes of an economy that was hitherto closed to the international markets.
In attitudinal terms, this means change in the role of the government from chief controller to
facilitator and arbiter of competing economic groups and interests within a country. The
structural and procedural derivatives of liberalization signify the entire gamut of changes that
result from the deliberate policies of governments to permit a greater role for market forces in
the functioning of the economy. It includes, for example, reduced regulations in the labor
market concerning the setting of wages, conditions for hiring and firing of workers,
compensation, medical and retirement benefits, and laws governing the operation of labor
unions. More broadly, in the factor market, it means a greater role for market forces to
determine resource allocation in different sectors of production, as well as in the mobility of
labor and capital. Further, the government lowers the overall levels of tariffs on imports and
exports, desists from an overly protectionist use of nontariff barriers (NTBs) and quotas that
infringe on free trade, and simplifies the rules for the entry, exit, and functioning of domestic
and international firms, among others. Along with the above are a host of policy changes that a
government enacts to implement economic liberalization. This includes changing the regulatory
framework of the economy, strengthening the rule of law, securing intellectual property rights,
reforming the banking sector, and taking active membership in regional organizations and
multilateral institutions.
Globalization and Economic Liberalization 261

COUNTRY ASSESSMENTS

India's relative scores on almost all indices of measurement accord it the predominant position
among the seven South Asian countries examined here, although this does not ipso facto imply
that it is the most successful of them. To an extent this preponderance is natural, given that the
remaining six countries were formally or otherwise a part of the ancient Indian Empire or a
protectorate of it, as in the case of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), until their independence at varying
times during the twentieth century. Thus, India's economy is nearly 80 percent of South Asia, its
population over 65 percent, and its landmass over 55 percent, and it is the only country that
shares land or sea borders with all of the other six countries.

After securing its independence from the British on August 15, 1947, the government of India
(GOI) pursued a conscious policy of welfare socialism until at least the mid-1980s, when the
first hesitant blush of reforms appeared on the Indian economic horizon. Prior to that, partly
buoyed by the early successes of the Soviet planning model (including the Gos Plan and
Pyatiletki), the GOI launched its five-year plans. During the 1950s and 1960s, the plans
emphasized development of agriculture, heavy engineering, and the need to locate major
industrial centers in the strategic hinterland of the four metropolises (New Delhi, Mumbai,
Kolkatta, and Chennai) so as to prevent inordinate population pressure over any one area. This
industrial-dispersal strategy has worked up to a point (in contrast to Mexico City, Taipei, or
Tokyo), although the enormous population still puts an onerous burden on domestic resources
and strategies to avoid urban congestion.

Further, in the years after independence, the GOI enacted the Industrial Development and
Regulation Act (1951), the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act (1969), and the
Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (1973) to deliberately restrict growth of the domestic private
sector and limit the scope for foreign participation in Indian firms. Sadly, the government did
not progressively roll back its overly protectionist policies. One consequence was the birth of
the infamous "license raj" (or "license rule"), a moniker suggestive of the cumbersome
procedures for obtaining licenses and government clearances and a host of operational
constraints. Over time, this created an unhealthy collusion of political-bureaucratic-economic
interests, and this entrenched troika effectively thwarted the enterprise of all but the strongest,
wealthiest, and politically best connected.6 The inevitable outcome was that the inefficiencies
of the production process, including high costs and low quality, were passed on to the
consumers in an economy insulated from cornpetition by high protective tariff walls.

An acute balance-of-payments crisis in July 19917 was in part the catalyst for the GOI decision
to initiate a bold and systematic process of economic
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Anupam Srivastava

reforms. One of the more heartening developments today is a grudging consensus among the
major political parties that reforms must be continued and deepened, although differences
remain regarding their center of gravity along the growth-versus-redistribution axes. This is
crucial for the pursuit of the second generation of reforms, which will be easier for those who
have embraced the reforms but harder for many others. A succinct review of the first-
generation reforms reveals that the GOI has undertaken a series of progressive measures in
fiscal policy, trade- and exchange-rate policy, industrial policy, and foreign-investment policy.
Thus, tariffs have been successively lowered from a high of 200 to 300 percent in 1991 to below
25 percent in 2004, although these rates are still among the highest in Asia (a comparative tariff
in the advanced industrialized countries is 10 percent). As a founding member of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor body, the World Trade Organization
(WTO), India is obligated to reduce its median tariffs to 15 percent by 2005. Other indices
measuring the openness of the Indian economy and the influence of globalization reveal a
mixed picture. On the positive side, foreign exchange ("forex") reserves have grown from near
zero to $110 billion.8 The average GDP growth for the period from 1991 to 2000 is 6.5 percent
and is sustainable at this rate in the medium term. The size of the economy has more than
doubled during this period to over $500 billion, making India the tenth-largest economy in the
world and the fourth largest in terms of purchasing-power parity (PPP). Exports grew from a
low of $9 billion to $58 billion in 2004, while imports during the same period grew from $10
billion to $65 billion. Even more significant, both the export and import baskets have shown a
positive diversification of product-country mix during this period. The relative weight of
traditional export earners (gems, jewelry, textiles, handicrafts, tea, minerals, etc.) has declined
in favor of newer items (chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, engineering goods, marine products,
petroleum derivatives, software and IT-enabled services, etc.). International estimates of
software and IT-enabled exports alone will top $50 billion by 2008, and biotechnology-related
exports are expected to net $25 to $50 billion by 2010. The import basket too has changed
significantly over this period and now includes a larger share of capital goods and equipment to
stimulate domestic export-oriented production. This diversification in the export and import
profiles is indicative of the conscious policy to pursue modernization and a broad export-led
growth (XLG) strategy.9 The import-substitution-industrialization (ISI) strategy, which yielded
partial dividends as India briefly experimented with it through the 1960s and 1970s, as did
much of Latin America and parts of Africa, has been given a quiet burial.10 On the negative
side, a consistent criticism offered by both international and domestic experts is the
consistently high level of fiscal
deficit (4 to 5 percent of GDP), which left unchecked might constrain rapid economic growth in
the future. Clearly, the macroindicators at the close of the previous decade reveal an
encouraging trend. To wit, India's middle class has become a rapidly growing consumer market
that by international standards of disposable income is over 150 million strong. However, even
accounting for the lower prices in the domestic market that swell the actual size of the Indian
middle class, the country is still home to a staggering population below the poverty level (25
percent of the total population of over one billion). At the same time, since 1991, poverty has
declined both in percentage terms (from 36 percent to 25 percent) and in absolute numbers.
This negates the popular myth propagated in Indian domestic politics that economic
liberalization favors the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor. On the other hand,
although the rate of population growth has been brought down to 1.47 percent, India's sheer
population (nearly one-sixth of the world's population) renders the scale and scope of the
remaining task of eliminating poverty and promoting balanced development a formidable one.
Yet, the strong fundamentals of its economy and the ongoing reforms have consistently
merited a significant portion of developmental aid from the World Bank. In recent years India
has considerably reduced its foreign indebtedness (its percentage of external debt to GDP is
now about 4.5 percent), especially the share of short-term borrowings. This, and the fact that
forex reserves are above $110 billion, have prompted the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to
take India off its list of countries in need of borrowings in the foreseeable future.

Another significant impact of the reforms process has been the declining role of state-owned
enterprises (SOEs) in India: the private sector now accounts for almost 75 percent of the
national GDP. Similarly, life expectancy has improved to sixty-four years and literacy levels to 60
percent, although regionwide data remain highly skewed in favor of the economically
progressive southern states. Finally, India has one of the largest technical manpower pools in
the world, a well-developed banking system, an extensive commercial banking network of over
sixty-three thousand branches, and a vibrant capital market comprising twenty-two stock
exchanges with over nine thousand listed companies. A well-established rule of law, an
independent (though tardy) judiciary, English as the preferred language of business, and
entrenched democratic institutions complete the picture.

The country is now embarked upon the second generation of economic reforms. One of its
most important features is the attempt to make individual state governments partner with the
federal government in an "alliance for progress." For instance, until 2000, foreign trade had
remained part of the central government's jurisdiction such that state governments could not
tax the exports generated in their territory; nor would the revenue return directly
264

Anupam Srivastava

to their exchequer. But starting in 2000, the GOI allocated $60 million, to be renewed annually,
to assist states in the development of their export-related infrastructure based upon their
export performance. States would spend this sum on building roads that connect production
centers to commercial ports, research and development of state-specific ethnic products,
development of cold chains for agroproducts, development of market infrastructure, and so
forth. Another crucial feature is the emphasis on developing special economic zones (SEZs) and
upgrading the export-processing zones (EPZs) to SEZ status. This approach, analogous to the
Chinese Shenzen model, includes tax breaks for firms exporting over 50 percent of their
outputs, a modern and reliable infrastructure, and a host of measures to attract domestic and
foreign industry.

The automotive industry adequately represents*the pains and gains of the Indian experience
with economic reforms and globalization. India's bigger and paternalistically oriented
automotive houses, as well as several inefficient, smaller firms, closed down or suffered under
the stiff competition, especially from Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy. Within a few
years of painful restructuring and investment in the latest capital equipment and production
techniques, however, the Indian automotive industry recovered to emerge at par with the
competition. Further, a number of major Indian cities now employ compressed natural gas
(CNG) as an alternate fuel, and all cars produced since 2000 require the installation of catalytic
converters that cornply with Euro-2 emission standards. Equally significant, when the labor
union of a government-owned automobile company (Maruti Udyog Limited) staged a protest to
demand a hike in wages, the government refused to cave in, stating that salaries of workers in
private firms with higher productivity remained lower than those of workers in the government
ones. The automotive industry clearly serves as a microcosm of the Indian experience with
economic reforms and coping with the forces of globalization.

On a broader plane, the increased pragmatism and growing success of the economy has
gradually influenced India's foreign and security policy trajectories as well. Rapid economic
growth is seen not just as reducing poverty and addressing developmental imperatives but also
as a means to elevate the country beyond the confines of South Asia. As such, growing
economic ties are being leveraged to secure better outcomes in foreign policy negotiations.
Thus, while the European Union and the United States remain the largest bilateral trade
partners, India has steadily increased economic ties with China and with East and Southeast
Asia.11 Similarly, in 2003 India made available a small, but highly symbolic, grant (of $250
million) to the "least developed countries." The message was that India is no longer merely a
recipient, but now also a donor, country. Overt comparisons with China and the adroit use of
economics in China's foreign policy negotiations are becoming common in Indian strategic
discourse. Both domestic and foreign participation are increasingly permitted in defense
production, while the government and industry are coordinating strategies to offset the
growing backlash in the United States against the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to India.
Thus, India's ongoing economic reforms are instructive of how this large, diverse, and relatively
poor country in South Asia has sought to harness, as well as cope with, the forces of
globalization.

The economy of Pakistan is characterized by a relatively well-developed agrarian sector and a

manufacturing sector primarily engaged in the production of goods that embody modest levels
of labor and technology specialization. The same is true for the service sector, which in 2003
contributed about 51 percent to the national GDP while employing 39 percent of the labor
force, with outputs embodying modest levels of specialization. The overall GDP for Pakistan
recorded a moderate-to-high growth rate of 4 to 6 percent after its independence until the
mid-1990s, making it one of the faster growing economies in South Asia. The subsequent
dramatic slowdown in its growth rate is attributable in part to the international sanctions
imposed on Pakistan after it (and India) conducted a series of subterranean nuclear explosions
in May 1998.

Following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Washington enlisted the
support of Pakistan in its global war on terrorism, restoring the frontline status of that country
in the U.S. strategic calculus. This has resulted in the U.S. waiver of economic sanctions, fresh
aid exceeding $3 billion, help in renegotiating longer payment terms for prior international
loans, and fresh allotment of multilateral loans with an extended payment window (over $3
billion from the World Bank, IMF, and Asian Development Bank). This period has also seen most
advanced industrial countries lifting their sanctions and renewing economic aid to Pakistan. The
net result has been that Pakistan has secured valuable breathing room to implement much-
needed reforms and put its economic house back in order.

Pakistan briefly attempted economic reforms in the early 1990s, but its momentum and scope
were constrained by longer-standing structural problems and the adverse role of entrenched
politico-economic forces. The unfinished agenda of land reforms from the early decades after
the country's creation in 1947 set this stage, resulting in distortions of the size of individual land
holdings and uprooting peasants and sharecroppers from their ancestral lands without offering
them viable employment in the formal agrarian sector. Over the years the landowning elite
with political patronage consolidated their hold over economic decision making and extended
their influence on the industrial sector as well, with the military controlling the majority of
national economic assets. Income inequality in Pakistan has worsened to the point where over
80 percent of the national wealth is
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Anupam Srivastava

controlled by the top 10 percent of the population, severely limiting the rise of the middle class
and the voice of progressive forces in economic agenda [Link] spite of sectoral and
structural distortions, Pakistan's economy has never been completely insulated from
international influence. A private consortium called the Independent Power Producers has
made Pakistan an electricitysurplus country since the mid-1990s, while a host of MNCs in the
apparel and textile industry continue to operate from Pakistan to service their global markets.
The pathology of the malady that has plagued Pakistan's economy over the decades is the
monopolistic stranglehold of entrenched domestic interests that resist opening the economy to
free competition, both from within and without. A revealing example is the refusal to export
surplus electricity to India and to remove quantitative restrictions and quotas on imports from
India. Worse, Pakistan has refused to grant most-favored nation (MFN) status to India, although
as a member of the WTO (and GATT before that), it is obligated to do so.

A brief review of the principal challenges facing the Pakistani economy enables us to make an
objective assessment of its longer-term viability.12 The GDP of Pakistan in 2000 was
approximately $67 billion in constant 1997 U.S. dollar terms. When one adds up the total debt,
interest payments on the debt, and the defense budget, the sum nearly equals the total GDP
for the country! This leaves precious few resources in the hands of the government to allocate
for economic development or investments in education, infrastructure, or other targeted
spending to stimulate growth. One possible avenue to generate additional resources for the
government would be to enhance its tax receipts, an endeavor that has had limited success so
far. Other revenue could come from enhanced domestic investments, given the relatively
modest per capita domestic-savings rate (about 25 percent), but this in turn is limited by two
factors. One, the disposable income in the hands of the average Pakistani for mediumto-longer
term investment is relatively modest. Two, given the uncertainties of return on investment in
the national market, a majority of Pakistanis instead opt to invest their money abroad. This
changed somewhat between 2001 and 2003 because U.S. and EU efforts at tracking and
freezing financial networks suspected of supporting al Qaeda have scared many expatriate
Pakistanis, who have started to remit their savings, causing a sharp rally of the Karachi Stock
Exchange.13 But this phenomenon is not expected to last long and, in any case, does not
provide sufficient capital to finance the enormous developmental requirements of the country.
In the absence of genuine banking reforms, the investment prospects are unlikely to improve
drastically. A case in point is the March 2004 report by the auditor general of Pakistan, which
states that foreign exchange reserves had been shored up using irregular speculation that cost
the State Bank of Pakistan, the apex bank of the country, $109 million.14
GlobaliZation and Economic Liberalization

268

mean a revisitation of the nonvirtuous cycle of military and civilian rule that has scoured the
economic landscape of many a country in Latin America and Africa. Sri Lanka was the first
country in South Asia to have initiated economic reforms in a process that started as early as
1977. Indeed, during the initial period after its independence in 1948, Sri Lanka (or Ceylon as
the country was called until 1972) pursued a liberal trade regime until growing balance-
ofpayments (BOP) problems induced a policy shift toward the protectionist ISI approach in the
early 1960s. By the mid-1970s, Sri Lanka had become one of the most inward-oriented
economies outside the group of centrally planned, Soviet-style economies. In 1977 it responded
to the dismal economic outcome of the protectionist era by embarking on an extensive
economic liberalization process, making it the first South Asian state io pursue this course of
action.17 In spite of major macroeconomic problems and political turmoil, the trajectory of
reforms has been maintained, making it one of only four countries outside of East Asia
(together with Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile) to have achieved a clear policy shift from ISI to
XLG.18 The lessons from the earliest attempts at reforms (1948-1965) and the adverse
outcomes of the protectionist era (1965-1976) proved instructive in initiating the first
generation of reforms in 1977. Significant trade reforms were enacted wherein quantitative
restrictions were replaced by tariffs, and tariff structures were simplified and streamlined.
Similarly, restrictions on foreign investment were reduced and attractive norms provided to
stimulate investment in export-oriented firms operating in the free-trade zones (FTZs). Other
changes included substantial financial- and banking-sector reforms, realignment of exchange
rates, and limits placed on the role of SOEs, especially in determining resource allocation,
output, and employment outcomes in the national economy.19 To a great extent, the
trajectory and momentum of these reforms suffered during the 1980s with a partial return to
populist government schemes and the rising toll of the raging ethnic violence between the
majority Sinhalas and the secessionist Tamil movement. However, in 1990 the government
responded by initiating the second generation of reforms designed to carry forward the
liberalization program. This included the promotion of privatization, further tariff cuts, removal
of exchange controls on current account transactions, and broader changes to the foreign-
investment policy. In the late 1990s the economy stumbled, and GDP growth has slowed down
considerably, partly on account of the Asian financial crisis (1997) and later with the surge in
domestic separatist violence.20 Nevertheless, cumulative assessment of the two generations of
economic liberalization reveals a modest, but wholesome, impact on the national economy,
factor productivity, employment, foreign investment, and export orientation of the national
economy. The government has also permitted market
Globalization and Economic Liberalization

269

forces a greater influence in the domestic labor market. This has resulted in a reduced number
of work hours lost to labor disputes, flexible wages, a rise in labor productivity, and an increase
in its mobility and skill levels in response to the aggregate demand in the more productive
sectors of the domestic economy. One heartening aspect of the reforms is the growing
bipartisan political consensus to continue with this process and trajectory. For instance, the
long rule (1977-1994) of the United National Party (UNP) ended when it lost power to its main
opposition party, the People's Alliance (PA), in the 1994 general elections. Contrary to popular
fears, the PA continued and to an extent accelerated the reforms, particularly toward
privatization. Similarly, in 1997 an important policy report commissioned by the National
Development Council recommended greater, albeit selective, state intervention to enhance
domestic technological capability and improve coordination between SOEs and the private
sector.21 The central bureaucracy declined to implement these guidelines, persisting with a
more laissez-faire approach, a decision that is perhaps a reflection of their growing experience
in economic management and recognition of limits on the utility of state intervention. It is clear
from the preceding analysis that the Sri Lankan economy has been exposed to international
economic forces since 1977, including during the last decade of the twentieth century, which
coincided with the intensification of the impact of globalization. It is further evident that on
balance the economy has performed better when it has not been completely insulated from
international competition. On the contrary, external technological and capital investments have
improved the capacity utilization of Sri Lankan firms, increased factor productivity and brought
it closer to international standards, enhanced the share of exports and the role of the private
sector in national output, and made the economy more resilient to international cornpetition.

Finally, the operation of foreign-owned export-oriented firms alongside domestic ones has
improved business performance and factor productivity to the point where the prices of Sri
Lanka's major exports (especially textiles, engineering goods, and electronics) have increasingly
converged with international prices, a clear pointer to their longer-term viability. This is
significant, given that the benefits from the quota-based Multi-Fiber Agreement (MFA) will now
erode for a small country such as Sri Lanka as the MFA gets folded into the WTO by 2005. This is
in addition to the wider set of WTO obligations that Sri Lanka must adhere to in terms of tariffs,
nontariff barriers, and other restrictions. On balance, a longer-term projection of the economic
performance of Sri Lanka reveals a cautiously positive picture.22 On the other hand, significant
impediments to this salutary outcome reside in the political arena. The economic costs of the
long civil war on Sri Lanka's economy have been significant,
270

Anupam Srivastava

especially during its worst phase, when the country's military budget jumped from 1 to 7
percent (it is now back to about 4 percent). It is notable that the government has managed to
adequately insulate the conflict from destroying the larger economic landscape, although
economic disparity across the region has certainly grown over time. Moreover, the conflict has
kept foreign investors away from making any longer-term investments and locating their
exportoriented businesses in Sri Lanka. Thus, the country's ability to fully realize its economic
potential (beyond its current plateau) will remain impaired until its longer-term political and
macroeconomic stability is assured.

The economic landscape of Bangladesh bears the mark of its creation and political history.
When Britain granted independence to India in 1947, it partitioned the country into two, in the
process creating Pakistan, with East Pakistan separated from its western part by over one
thousand miles of Indian territory. The mechanism for sharing seats and power in the unified
Pakistani Parliament, located in West Pakistan, never reached an optimal stage, with the center
of gravity of political and military powers heavily skewed in favor of the west. The landslide
victory of the Awami League party led by Mujib-ur Rehman in East Pakistan during the 1971
general elections stipulated that he form the government to oversee both parts of the country.
This was unacceptable to the military and the political leadership of West Pakistan, triggering a
major political crisis that rapidly escalated into a war of independence. The Bengali separatists
requested that India intervene, and the ensuing war ultimately resulted in East Pakistan
becoming the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971.

The political landscape of Bangladesh and the country's economic decision making continue to
bear the imprint of its turbulent past. Thus, Mujib's insurgents morphed into the Bangladesh
Krishak (farmer) Shramik (laborer) Awami League party, which he used as a vehicle to centralize
power and amend the constitution. His daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, is now the leader of the
Awami League ("party of the masses") in the personality-dominated politics of Bangladesh. The
rival, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), took power in the October 2001 elections and is led
by Begum Khaleda Zia, widow of the former president, Gen. Zia-ur Rehman. General Zia had
seized power in a coup (in 1976) a few months after Mujib's assassination in 1975, while his
own assassination in 1981 brought General Ershad to power and a prolonged military rule
(1982-1990). And although democratic governance has not been interrupted since 1990, the
military continues to wield enormous power over national decisions, including in the economic
arena.
Agriculture has been the mainstay of Bangladesh's economy, although the country took notable
steps during the 1990s to diversify its agrarian output, enhance factor productivity, and
improve the share of agrobased products in national exports. It is now largely self-sufficient in
rice production,

Wlth jute and wheat product ^*££££%£££ on monsoons for irrigation « ^* * and ocean tides

affecting agro-outpu . The destrucU P ^ rf [Link] has been managed to a

^e^olembedded. capital investments weather-forecasting data, whil ^k^^ distdbution, and
exports. have improved cropping^^^^isodic progression toward a Since 1975 Bangladesh has
deia; J although inefficient and greater role and market share for ^^^ gOverLent doles.
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eradicated ^ * enhanced struccluding the ^^^^^^ clthe IMF during 1989 tural
adjustment facility <&**> d m reforms and per-

to 1993. The BNP government (1991 199C,) i §ec_

mitted greater foreign ^^^^ Jsteps of the previtors. The Awami League (1996-200 ) h^ Pp d
the reforms trajectory,

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other ^e^ymP ^ concept of

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haye a track

group pride in repaying the loans hameant that g ^^ ^ record of over 95 percent of loan rePay
industries in textiles and

has spurred the growth of ^^^^ the international market, jute-derivative products that are able
to comp ^ villagers pur-

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In sum, Bangladesh embarked on *f^b^on dunng the 1990s alization and harnessing the
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ltive side, the GDP

(35 percent), and ^^j^^-*^ remained in single dighas grownconsistently around5 ^C^« natural
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i*:^^
272

Anupam Srivastava

energy-deficient India25) or as liquefied natural gas (LNG) via ships to distant markets. In either
case, sound economic decisions would persuade foreign companies to invest in longer-term
exploration and exports and in the process augment national capacity to accelerate the task of
economic growth and its equitable distribution.

Nepal is the only country in the world with Hinduism as its official state religion. Nestled in the
Himalayas, it is linked by arduous mountain passes to China in the north, and its only viable land
access to the outside world is through India to the south. India's assistance was crucial in 1951
when this landlocked country established a constitutional monarchy whose governance is aided
by a parliamentary democracy. While India remains the predominant factor in Nepal's
economic and strategic calculus, the country has diversified its economic profile and policy
options to engage other states in the region and outside.

Agriculture remains the mainstay, employing 80 percent of the population, contributing 40

percent to the GDP, and comprising 70 percent of total exports. Rice and wheat are the staple
crops for both domestic consumption and exports, with carpets, garments, jute goods, and
basket weaving as the other principal contributors to exports. Average GDP growth during the
1990s was between 4 to 6 percent, but unemployment remains very high at over 45 percent,
and foreign aid contributes over 50 percent to the total development budget.26 The Nepalese
economy displays the familiar pattern of the entrenched role of inefficient SOEs in the
production process, capital and labor markets, and banking and financial sectors. During the
1990s the government took hesitant strides to enhance the role of the private sector, made the
currency (Nepalese rupee) convertible on the current account, and privatized seventeen SOEs.

Trade with India constitutes over 40 percent of Nepal's total exports and imports and received
a big boost with the 1996 signing of a bilateral trade treaty. This treaty, which has been
renewed to run until March 2007, permits zero-duty access of Nepalese exports to Indian
markets, in addition to providing other preferential measures. Hydroelectricity represents a
major potential for boosting export revenues, with India as the principal market. India has
partially or wholly financed several hydel projects, and bigger ones are in the pipeline with
funding from diverse international sources.

In 2000 the Asian Development Bank signed a partnership agreement on poverty reduction
(PAPR) with Nepal to bring poverty down from over 40 percent to below 10 percent by 2017. In
1998 Nepal submitted its memorandum of understanding (Moll) on foreign trade to the WTO
and in May 2000 began direct negotiations regarding its entry into this international body.
Tourism is another major source of foreign exchange, although terrorist strikes on U.S. targets
on September 11, 2001, and subsequent crises have drastically reduced tourist influx and
revenues. By far the greatest threat to longer-term economic viability, however, is the pitched
battle that the fivethousand-strong Maoist rebels have fought against the government since
1996, estimated to have cost about $300 million to the national exchequer so far. In 2003 the
government and the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) agreed to a cease-fire and a
code of conduct to guide their negotiations. CPN-M recognizes that political parties, whose role
was suspended following the national emergency of 2002 when most members of the royal
family were massacred, will have a central role in the future governance of Nepal. However,
this will be determined within the framework of an amended constitution that rectifies the
balance of power that is currently heavily skewed in favor of the monarchy. A pragmatic and
durable resolution of this impasse will permit Nepal the latitude and resources to respond
favorably to the challenges and opportunities presented by globalization.

Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom with a population under seven hundred thousand, presents a
wholesome variation from the traditional developmental models for small LDCs. King Jigme
Singye Wangshuk, whose long rule (over twenty-seven years) has provided political stability,
stresses that "gross national happiness" is more important than GNP. Pursuant to this goal, the
country's developmental strategy emphasizes health, education and environment, and blending
new technology and a cash economy with spirituality and ancient Buddhist values, particularly
the famous "median path." The impact of this approach on the socioeconomic health of the
country, as measured by major indicators of the Human Development Index (HDI), has been
remarkable. State investment has revolutionized health and patient care, achieving near-
universal child immunization and a high life expectancy of sixty-six years. Primary and
secondary education is free, and medical care is virtually free. Similarly, strategic investments in
agriculture, including terraced farming and modern methods, have enhanced productivity such
that agro-outputs contributed nearly 36 percent to the national GDP during the 1990s, even
though arable land is scarce (only 7 percent of total land area) and employs nearly 95 percent
of the population.

During the 1990s GDP grew by 6 to 8 percent, with the government focus on boosting exports
by increased sale of hydroelectricity to India, which already imports 80 percent of the country's
surplus power and has financed several hydel projects.27 Broadly, India's influence remains
writ large on Bhutan's economic landscape, with its currency (ngultrum) tied to India's rupee.
India is by far the largest source of trade and largest donor of external aid. India entirely
financed the first two five-year economic development plans (1962-1967, 1967-1972) of
Bhutan, contributed $215 million to the eighth plan (1997-2002), and closely coordinates the
country's security affairs. During December 2003 the Bhutanese Royal Army mounted a
successful operation, with
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Anupam Srivasiava

tactical and logistical assistance from India, to drive out separatist guerrillas from India's
province of Assam who for years had taken refuge in southern Bhutan. The rebel leadership is
now seeking political reconciliation, while some of their cadres have moved into neighboring
Bangladesh. Maoist rebels from Nepal also continue periodically to seek refuge in Bhutan, and
that problem will require greater political accommodation and resource coordination between
the various stakeholders. Another major challenge facing Bhutan is that at the current growth
rate of 3 percent, its population will double in eighteen years, putting a severe strain on
national resources and developmental targets. The government is devising strategies to cope
with future changes.28 Thus, in June 2000 the king permitted the entry of satellite TV and the
Internet into Bhutan, while the first Internet cafe opened in March 2001, and two online
newspapers began to operate. The Center for Bhutan Studies is the country's only think tank
and is increasingly tasked to provide policy briefs to the government on various social and
economic priorities.29 Bhutan is also working with the Asian Development Bank to corporatize
its power sector and created the Bhutan Power Corporation in 2001.30 Other priorities include
measures to liberalize investment, foreign-trade, and exchange regulations.31 In sum, the
country's leadership is sensitive to the myriad challenges and is formulating policies to sustain
and enhance national development without loosening the spiritual moorings of Buddhist
values. The island nation of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean presents another variation of
economic policies to cope with the limits of size, natural resources, and the external
environment. Its economy is based on tourism and fishing, while severe limits on potable water
and arable land have meant that only 198 of the Maldives' 1,900 islands are inhabited. Tourism
constitutes about 33 percent of the national GDP, with the share of agriculture being 6 percent,
industry 7 percent, and fishing another 10 percent. The bulk of the domestic industry and
service sectors is designed to support earnings from tourism and fishing. GDP growth during the
1990s fluctuated from 10 percent to 3 percent but averaged around 7.5 percent, while inflation
remained in single digits. The government has permitted the private sector, which manages the
bulk of cornmercial shipping, to play a strong role. Further, the government is working with the
Asian Development Bank to reform the telecommunications and energy sectors and open them
up to foreign competition, improve infrastructure and capacity utilization, and develop an
information-and-communication network in the atolls.32 Foreign aid has come to the country
from multilateral sources (United Nations Development Program, Asian Development Bank, and
World Bank) and from India, Japan, Australia, and some European and Arab countries (as well
as the Islamic Development Bank and the Kuwaiti Fund). Piracy on the high
Globalization and Economic Liberalization

275

seas represents a significant threat to the Maldives' maritime commerce, and so it remains
engaged in efforts to secure sea-lanes of communication (SLOC) and other dimensions of
maritime security. In November 1988 the Indian navy foiled a serious threat to the political
leadership of the Maldives, and bilateral cooperation now includes augmenting the Maldives'
national capability against such threats in the future. Similarly, the U.S. government has
recently funded training in airport management and narcotics interdiction and provided laptop
computers for customs and immigration officials.33 Finally, global warming represents another
serious threat to the survival of the island group if ocean water rises more than two meters
beyond current levels. In sum, the economic policies of the Maldives indicate serious attempts
at structural, financial, and other reforms and greater sensitivity to calibrate resource allocation
to optimize gains from the international environment. The immutable limits of size, location,
and resource endowment obviously influence the pursuit of its policy options, and on balance
the country appears to have modestly succeeded in its developmental endeavors.

REGIONAL AND WIDER IMPLICATIONS

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (S AARC) is the principal regional
organization, created in 1985 to promote economic, scientific, technological, and cultural
cooperation among the seven South Asian countries discussed in this chapter. Keeping in mind
the sensitivities of India and Pakistan, the S A ARC mandate was revised to exclude security
matters from its ambit of deliberation and adjudication. Since the first summit meeting on
December 7-8, 1985, SAARC has evolved gradually in terms of both its institutions and its
programs. It appeared to have taken a major step forward when the seven states ratified the
South Asian Preferential Trading Agreement (SAPTA) in December 1995 and decided to create a
South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) "at the earliest possible date."

On balance, however, SAARC has failed to realize its potential, as well as the enormous
expectations vested in it, especially by the smaller states of the region. The principal
impediment from the outset was the difference in perception of the leadership in the various
countries about the true purpose behind creating this body. India, as the predominant country
in the region, would like to make SAARC a vibrant and viable entity, especially if investing in it
would not heighten the suspicions of smaller states that India is pursuing its hegemonic agenda
in South Asia via this multilateral mechanism. On the other hand, the Indian leadership has a
lingering suspicion that SAARC could become the vehicle for smaller states to bandwagon
against it on issues where they felt less confident of securing favorable terms in a bilateral
negotiation with India.
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Anupam Srivastava

The empirical outcomes of subsequent SAARC negotiations reveal that both the above
scenarios proved correct at different points, with Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular
withholding cooperation due to concern about India's hegemonic designs. This was illustrated
again in 2004, when, during the January summit meeting of SAARC in Islamabad, Bangladesh
remained the only country not to endorse the commitment to a speedy implementation of
SAFTA. In February 2004 Bangladesh withheld its signature to the creation of a free-trade area
between the member countries of an economic group still known by its erstwhile designation
Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand-Economic Cooperation (or BIMST-EC).
Nepal and Bhutan joined this group and signed the agreement, which seeks to bridge South and
Southeast Asian economies.34

On the other hand, India has also been^selective in investing its resources and political will to
strengthen SAARC and has remained distant when it seemed inconvenient to pursue the matter
within SAARC. Thus, the gains from SAARC have been limited to two spheres. One, it has
provided a platform for regular interaction of officials from the member states and the growing
confidence to pursue a pragmatic and incremental agenda of cooperation. Two, it has led to
extensive data creation of the comparative economic advantages of each country, identifying
sectors in which national exports will complement and not compete with each other, and to
modest reductions in tariffs and regulations to boost intraregional trade and facilitate factor
movement (especially labor) across the region. The ratification of SAFTA has aided the above
process, but doubts remain about its actual performance, although preparatory work at
national levels has begun for its phased implementation from 2008.

The most voluble indicator of this pessimistic assessment is that intraSouth Asian trade has
scarcely increased over the past decade and still constitutes less than 5 percent of the overall
trade by these countries with the rest of the world. Another serious impediment to SAARC's
longer-term economic viability comes from evaluating the experience of other regional
organizations, including the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European Union (EU), and the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). This assumes added relevance given the oft-expressed wishes of South
Asian leaders to build transregional bridges with ASEAN and APEC and to emulate the positive
lessons oftheEU.

To an extent policy coordination on security issues has acted as a cementing factor or facilitator
of economic cooperation in the other regions. Broadly speaking, the United States, China, and
Japan expect positive security derivatives from an economically stronger and integrated APEC
and have accordingly invested in this organization. To an extent the same is true about ASEAN

and is further reflected in the dynamism of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) that coordinates
policy on a growing list of security issues. In recent years, issues that bear on economic security
have become more prominent, including international terrorism, piracy on the high seas,
transshipment of contraband, precursors or components of weapons-of-mass-destruction
programs, export controls, enforcement, and interdiction. India is a member of ARF and a
"dialogue partner" of ASEAN, while its request for entry into APEC is pending since the
organization has decided to freeze its membership level until a suitable future date. But India's
growing trade and contact with these bodies reflects its domestic decision to reinvigorate its
Ostpolitik ("look east") policy and is not driven by its intent to leverage these ties to facilitate
closer SAARC ties with East and Southeast Asia. Similarly, on the economic side, the institutional
and programmatic development of the EU has taken place in stages and over several decades,
aided by the participation of major European countries within the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). On the security side, their participation in NATO and a
host of multilateral regimes that regulate the production and export of dual-use goods and
technologies has forged a closer sense of collective security.35 Over time, the notion of shared
security has helped to keep detractors in check and forge greater economic cooperation. The
formalization of NAFTA also followed the establishment of strong economic linkages between
the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as the conscious U.S. decision to invest
considerable financial and policy resources to make NAFTA a viable entity. This is certainly not
to suggest any direct comparison between Indian and U.S. leadership capabilities but that such
a facilitating role by India remains bitterly contested in South Asia, primarily by Pakistan but
also by Bangladesh.

An appraisal of these intraregional organizations brings into sharper focus two interrelated
variables that stymie the progress of SAARC. One, states in South Asia were partitioned or
created such that the ethnic, cornmunal, or linguistic identity of groups is divided by
international boundaries. Two, the process of nation building has not been completed, wherein
ethnic, religious, or other identities are submerged to forge a national identity. As a
consequence of the interplay of the above factors, high levels of mistrust, even antagonism,
prevent the states from participating fully and voluntarily in the process of economic
cooperation and the building of institutions to pursue shared prosperity. Finally, and partly a
result of the above, the depressed economic condition and lack of strong institutions in these
countries denies them the capacity and will to face external competition. This impedes regional
cooperation and economic interpenetration out of fear that the stronger economic actors in
the other states would dominate the indigenous actors in the host country. And it also limits
the resolve, and
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Anupam Srivastava

ultimately the capacity, to forge regional links to gainfully harness the forces of globalization.

NOTES

1. Gene Sperling, national economic advisor to former U.S. president Bill Clinton, provides a
good account of the political prism through which this debate often plays out. See Gene
Sperling, "How to Be a Free Trade Democrat," Foreign Policy (March-April 2004), at wwwforeign
[Link]/story.

2. For a good analysis, see Matthew J. Slaughter and Philip Swagel, "Does Globalization Lower
Wages and Export Jobs?" Economic Issues No.11, International Monetary Fund, September
1997, available at [Link]. For a broader analysis, see Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and
the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, rev. e"d. (New York: Anchor Books,

2000), 512. See also Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2000), 304.

3. "Foreign Investment, Remittances Outpace Debt as Sources of Finance for Developing

Countries," World Bank, Washington, D.C., April 2, 2003.

4. The issue of outsourcing has recently attracted much attention in the United States. For a
concise account, see Vivek Agrawal and Diana Farrell, "Who Wins in Offshoring?: By Moving
Service Industry Work to Countries with Lower Labor Costs, US Companies Can Focus on
Creating Higher-Value Jobs," The McKinsey Quarterly, no. 4 (2003).

5. "Measuring Globalization: Economic Reversals, Forward Momentum?" Foreign Policy (March-

April 2004). As per the 2003-2004 rankings, Pakistan comes in at number 46, Sri Lanka at 51,
Bangladesh at 56, and India at 61, while the remaining three South Asian countries fall outside
the range of measurement.

6. For a good historical account, see B. R. Tomlinson, "Historical Roots of Economic Policy," in
Foundations of India's Political Economy, ed. Subroto Roy and William E. James (New Delhi:
Sage, 1992), 274-302.

1. It is estimated that in July 1991, the forex reserves of around $600 million were barely
sufficient to service two to three weeks of India's external debt.
8. The receipts of $5.5 billion from the Indian Millennium Deposits pushed forex reserves in
January 2001 past the $40 billion mark. In April 2004 forex reserves crossed $110 billion,
growing at about $3 billion per month.

9. The economic manifesto of the ruling National Democratic Alliance, unveiled during the
election campaign in April 2004, proposed to create a Ministry of International Trade to
"capture opportunities in global trade, promote Special Economic Zones and multicommodities
exchanges, and remove internal trade barriers" (see, "NDA Pledges 8-10 pc Growth in Next Five
Years," The Hindu, April 8, 2004, available at [Link]/thehindu/holnus). Since 1996
successive ministers of finance and of commerce and industry have made greater export-
orientation a core element of India's economic policy, stressing this theme while addressing
both domestic and foreign audiences.

10. For a survey of dependency theory, world systems theory, and related scholarly work on
models of economic development, see the works of authors such as Andre Gunder Frank, Raul
Prebisch, Oswaldo Sunkel, Samir Amin, Paul Baran, Celso Furtado, Immanuel Wallerstein, and
Gunnar Myrdal.

11. Despite outstanding border-dispute and mutual-security concerns, Sino-Indian bilateral

trade grew from $1 billion in 1999 to $7.5 billion in 2003 and is projected to reach $20 billion by
2010. Economic ties with East and Southeast Asia have deepened, where some smaller

states, leery of Chinese power preponderance in the region, welcome the growing Indian
presence as promoting a soft balance of power.

12. For a detailed treatment on this subject, see Anupam Srivastava and Seema Gahlaut, "A
New Policy for Pakistan," in Kargil and After: Challenges for Indian Policy, ed. Kanti Bajpai, Afsir
Karim, and Amitabh Mattoo (New Delhi: Har Anand Publishers, 2000), 164-90.

13. "FBI Fuels Pakistan's Share Boom," British Broadcasting Corporation, July 23, 2002, available
at [Link]

14. Maryam Hussain, "Musharraf Sitting on Multi-Billion Dollar Scandal Reported by Auditor
General," South Asia Tribune, no. 85 (March 28-April 3, 2004): available at www

.[Link].

15. "Address to the Nation by Chief Executive of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf," The

Dawn, December 15, 1999.

16. The World Bank Group: Pakistan Economic Report, April 7, 1999, available at www
.[Link].

17. For an incisive account, see Prema-Chandra Athukorala and Sarath Rajapatirana,
"Liberalization and Industrial Transformation: Lessons from the Sri Lankan Experience," in
Economic Development and Cultural Change 48, no. 3 (April 2002): 543-72.

18. John Williamson, "Sri Lanka's Search for the Right Economic Policies," keynote address
delivered at the conference "Independent Sri Lanka: Economic Development (1948-1998) and
Prospects," Kalutara, Sri Lanka, March 1998.

19. See, e.g., Don K. Embuldeniya, "Economic Reforms and the Corporate Sector in Sri Lanka,"
Contemporary South Asia 9, no. 2 (July 2000): 165-79.

20. Manik de Silva, "The Peace Dividend," Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong),

July 4, 2002.

21. Sanjaya Lall, Kishore Sharma, Ganeshan Wignaraja, Sabrina Di Addario, and Gokhan Akinci,
"Building Sri Lankan Competitiveness: A Strategy for Manufactured Export Growth" (Colombo:
National Development Council, 1996).

22. For a more critical assessment of the Sri Lankan economy, see, e.g., V. Nithyanadam, "Ethnic
Politics and Third World Development: Some Lessons from Sri Lanka's Experience," Third World
Quarterly (London) 21, no. 2 (April 2000): 283-311.

23. "Bangladesh: Economic Performance," Annual Report 2002, Asian Development Bank,
available at [Link]/Documents/Reports/Annual_Report/2002/[Link].

24. Muhammad Yunus, "The Grameen Bank," Scientific American (November 1999).

25. Bangladesh has had a high trade surplus with India (over $700 million in 2001), which the
latter permits in search of a broader economic engagement, but persistent political differences
prevent a consensus in Bangladesh regarding expanded trade with India. In April 2004, the
American oil and natural gas company UNOCAL, which is operating in Bangladesh, was once
again rebuffed when the Bangladeshi parliament overturned the proposal to sell natural gas

to India.

26. Babu Ram Shreshtha, Managing External Assistance in Nepal (Kathmandu: Jamuna

Shrestha, 1990).

27. Report of the Central Statistical Organization, Royal Government of Bhutan, 2000.
28. Thierry Mathou, "Bhutan in 2001: At the Crossroad," Asian Survey 42, no. 1 (January-
February 2002): 192-97.

29. David L. Wheeler, "Blending Buddhism and Technology: Bhutan Develops on Its Own
Terms," Chronicle of Higher Education 46, no. 33 (April 21, 2000): A54-A56.

30. Editorial, "The Cost of Necessities," Kuensel (Bhutan's only public online newspaper), April
8, 2003, available at [Link]/[Link].

31. "Bhutan: Economic Performance," Annual Report 2001, Asian Development Bank, available
at [Link]/Documents/Reports/AnnuaLReport/2001/[Link].
280

Anupam Srivastava

32. "Maldives: Economic Performance," Annual Report 2001, Asian Development Bank,
available at [Link]/Documents/Reports/Annual_Report/2001 /[Link].

33. "Background Notes: Maldives," Bureau of South Asian Affairs, U.S. Department of State,
October 2001, available at [Link]/r/pa/ei/bgn/[Link].

34. "Bimstec Nations, Barring Bangladesh, Sign Trade Pact," The Financial Express, February 9,
2004, available at [Link].

35. The principal multilateral security regimes in this context are the Nuclear Suppliers' Group,
the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group, the Chemical Weapons
Convention, and the Wassenaar Arrangement.

FURTHER READING

Banerjee, Parthasasathi, and Frank-Jurgen Richter, eds. Economic Institutions in India:

Sustainability under Liberalization and Globalization. New Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Dreze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. India: Development and Participation. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002.

Hossain, Moazzem, lyanatul Islam, and Reza Kibria, eds. South Asian Economic Development:
Transformation, Opportunities and Challenges. London: Routledge, 1999.

Looney, Robert E. The Pakistani Economy: Economic Growth and Structural Reform. New York:
Praeger, 1997.

Scholte, Jan Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

ul Haq, Mahbub. Human Development in South Asia 2001: Globalisation and Human
Development. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Vanaik, Achin, ed. Globalization and South Asia: Multidimensional Perspectives. New Delhi:
Manohar, 2004.
Weiss, Linda, ed. States in the Global Economy: Bringing Domestic Institutions Back In.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Zaidi, S. Akbar. Issues in Pakistan's Economy.
Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

The War on Terrorism: Implications for South Asia

Timothy D. Hoyt1

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon prompted
fundamental changes in the foreign and security policies of the United States. These changes
affected security and stability throughout the international system and redefined the U.S.
relationship with many states and regions. South Asian security, in particular, is now evolving in
a significantly different direction, due at least in part to the new U.S. "terrorismcen- tric"
strategy.

Using terrorism as a defining concept in U.S. relations with South Asian states complicates an
already historically difficult relationship. Definitions of terrorism abound, and the concept can
be shaped to fit any particular policy. In an effort to reduce these complications, I focus on
terrorism from an American perspective, using speeches and publications from U.S.
government agencies as the defining tool. This chapter is organized into three sections. First, I
briefly discuss and analyze terrorism in South Asia, examining in particular the relationship
between regional terrorism and extraregional states and nonstate actors. Next, I analyze the
impact of U.S. actions on regional states, focusing in particular on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
and, to a lesser extent, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Each of these states has been affected
by, and has attempted to exploit, the new U.S. focus on terrorism. Finally, I assess the U.S. war
on terrorism's long-term implications, which are mixed: while smaller states like Nepal, Sri
Lanka, and Afghanistan may benefit significantly from the war on terrorism, the larger states
(India, Pakistan, and perhaps even Bangladesh) may find U.S. involvement confusing,
contradictory, and even destabilizing.
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Timothy D. Hoyt

WHAT IS TERRORISM?

No single definition of terrorism is commonly accepted by the international community. As a

result, any analysis of the terrorism issue causes disagreement. As elsewhere, multiple
definitions of terrorism compete for acceptance in South Asia, based on one's support for or
rejection of the political objectives of a given group. The U.S. State Department defines
terrorism this way: "The term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence
perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually
intended to influence an audience."2 This definition does not address some types of incidents
that many analysts consider to be terrorism. The attack on the USS Cole, for example, would
not be considered terrorism under this definition.

The U.S. government refines this definition slightly to distinguish between international
terrorists and other terrorist groups. Again, using the State Department definition, "The term
'international terrorism' means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one
country," and "the term 'terrorist group' means any group practicing, or that has significant
subgroups that practice, international terrorism."3 This definition, again, creates difficulties for
assessing terrorism in South Asia. Terrorism exists in various forms throughout the region. It
can be based on local conditions, a response to political oppression, social injustice, economic
disparity, or caste, religious, or ethnic differences. Many terrorist groups in the region benefit
from state support in the form of intelligence sharing and support, training facilities, arms
supplies, or territorial sanctuary. This support ranges from tacit to deliberate and varies in
scope from minor to massive. For the purposes of my analysis in this chapter, a "state-
supported" terrorist group lies at the tacit/minor end of the spectrum, while a "state-
sponsored" group lies at the deliberate/massive end of the spectrum.4

A brief examination of the major terrorist groups in South Asia, from a pre-September 11
perspective, suggests that these three categories, local, state-supported, and state-sponsored,
roughly describe most of the terrorist activity in the region. Local terrorist groups include the
Maoist United People's Liberation Front (UPLF) in Nepal, which arose in the 1990s as a result of
failure in democratic elections, ideological fervor, exploitation of social deprivation, and policy
failures on the part of the Nepalese government.5 The UPLF accelerated its military activities in
the summer of 2001, after the tragic massacre of Nepal's King Berendra and his family in June,
and formed the People's Liberation Army in November 2001.6 This organization benefits,
according to regional reports, from tacit Indian support in the form of territorial sanctuary, but
it must also be recognized that this region of the world is extremely difficult to police.7
Other local terrorist groups can be found in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where political, sectarian,
and ethnic conflicts have fueled domestic terrorism. Among these groups are the Sipah-e-
Sahaba, Pakistan (SSP), a violently anti-Shia Sunni sectarian group, and its offshoot Lashkar-I-
Jhangvi, which has been linked to attacks on Pakistani Christian communities and an
assassination attempt against then prime minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999.8 In Bangladesh,
Harakut ul-Jihad-I-Islami/Bangladesh (HUJI-B) aims to establish an Islamic regime in that
country, and infighting between the two major political parties raises the possibility that it or
other domestic terrorist organizations could play a destabilizing role in the future.9 Another
local group, but one with substantial international connections, is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE, or Tamil Tigers), founded in 1976.10 The LTTE's objectives are independence or
substantial regional autonomy for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. The group has waged war in
Sri Lanka since 1983 and is the de facto inventor of the suicide bomb. It benefited early in its
existence from modest Indian state support and has created a formidable extortion network for
coercing resources from the Tamil diaspora.11 The LTTE has targeted non-Sri Lankans, most
notably in the assassination by suicide bomb of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in
1991. The United States designated LTTE a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997, reflecting its
international links and connections.12

State-supported groups were also abundant before September 11 and were often difficult to
distinguish from state-sponsored groups. The Kashmir conflict, for example, spawned a series of
groups whose objectives varied from independence to absorption into the Pakistani state,
whose personnel were composed of different proportions of Indian Kashmiris, Pakistani
Kashmiris, and foreign nationals, and whose reliance on and support from Pakistani authorities
ranged from minimal to almost total.13 The decline of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Front, the most autonomous Kashmiri group, can be traced directly to Pakistani efforts to
isolate it and promote alternative groups with objectives closer to Pakistan's.14 An umbrella
political organization, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), was formed in 1993 to
represent a common political front for Kashmiri separatist movements.

Other ethnic and religious separatist groups exist in the northeast of India, including the United
Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), the National Democratic Front for Bodoland (NDFB), and the
United People's Democratic Solidarity (UPDS) in Assam, the most troubled of India's
northeastern states. In Manipur, Tripura, Nagaland, and Mizoram, separatist groups utilize low-
level violence, and the violent Naxalite movement also remains a problem.

The most important terrorist organization in the region, however, is al Qaeda, a group that
created a close alliance with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.15 Led by Osama bin Laden, al
Qaeda consists of a loose alliance
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Timothy D. Hoyt

of Islamic extremist groups. Originally assembled and financed by bin Laden for jihad (holy war)
against the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan, al Qaeda evolved into a pivotal force in
anti-American terrorism in the 1990s.16 The organization has been blamed for an attack on the
World Trade Center (1993), the Khobar Barracks assault (1996), the bombing of two U.S.
embassies in Africa (1998), and the attack on the USS Cole (2000). Al Qaeda moved its
headquarters from Sudan to Afghanistan in early 1997.17

In Afghanistan, al Qaeda received significant support from the Taliban regime. The Taliban, an
unusually extremist Islamic regime, came to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. It found in
al Qaeda a close ally, as well as a source of scarce hard currency. Al Qaeda benefited from
Afghan bases for training and logistics and provided the 055 Brigade, a force of several
thousand volunteers that constituted the spearhead of the*Taliban's conventional fighting
forces.18 In turn, the Taliban received substantial support from Pakistan, particularly from
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's powerful and highly independent intelligence
service.19 Pakistan saw a friendly Afghanistan as crucial to its security, both as a source of
strategic depth versus India and also as a means of minimizing tensions from a porous and
politically disputed border in the northwest. Pakistan first provided the Taliban with military
equipment and advisers in August 1994.20 After the Taliban took control of Kabul and most of
the countryside, ISI used Afghanistan as a training facility for militants preparing to fight in
Kashmir.

The rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda's increasing influence in Afghanistan severely complicated
regional politics. Bin Laden had twice attempted to assassinate then prime minister Benazir
Bhutto in Pakistan.21 But Pakistan's eccentric civil-military relationship and its commitment to a
secure relationship with Afghanistan in order to obtain strategic depth trumped any
reservations about the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship. By 1997 regular Pakistan army troops
fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance, which still controlled some of the
more distant northern provinces in Afghanistan. India provided financial and logistic support to
the Northern Alliance, increasing Pakistan's concern and providing incentives to assist a friendly
Taliban regime.22 As one analyst writes, "Increasingly, the Kashmir issue became the prime
mover behind Pakistan's Afghan policy and its support to the Taliban. The Taliban exploited this
adroitly, refusing to accept other Pakistani demands knowing that Pakistan could deny them
nothing, as long as they provided bases for Kashmiri and Pakistani militants."23

The potential difficulties this relationship posed for U.S. relations with the region were first
demonstrated on August 20, 1998, when U.S. naval ships fired cruise missiles against al Qaeda
installations in Afghanistan in response to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa. The missiles
had to fly over Pakistani air space, nearly causing a diplomatic incident.24 The al Qaeda bases

they struck reportedly housed both Pakistani citizens ("volunteers" in the Kashmir struggle) and
ISI trainers. According to Western reports, two ISI facilities were destroyed in the attack, killing
five ISI officers and twenty trainees.25 The deteriorating U.S. relationship with Pakistan-the
result first of Pakistan's nuclear program, then accelerated by the South Asian nuclear tests of
May 1998, Pakistan's military incursions across the line of control (LOG) in Kashmir in May-July
1999, and General Musharraf's coup of October 1999 overthrowing Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif-impeded efforts to undermine al Qaeda or the Taliban.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: THE WAR ON TERRORISM BEGINS

Shortly after the stunning terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States began a
campaign against the forces of international terrorism. In his speech of September 20, 2001,
President Geroge W. Bush referred specifically to the forces of international terror and declared
that the United States would wage war against them wherever they were found:

Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. . . . Our
war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every
terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. .. . Every nation, in every
region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with U.S. or you are with the terrorists.26

In the attack's immediate aftermath, the United States approached General Musharraf about
Pakistan's role in the coming conflict. The initial conversation between ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud
Ahmad and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was confrontational. Armitage
reportedly told Mahmoud that "the future begins today" and that Pakistan needed to decide
whether it was with the United States or against it.27 The next day, Mahmoud was summoned
to the State Department, where Armitage provided a list of seven demands and stated that the
list was nonnegotiable. To the administration's surprise, General Musharraf agreed to support
the United States in all seven actions ,28

Reports from the subcontinent suggest that this decision was not an easy one for Pakistan.
According to Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, minister of communications, the cabinet unanimously
supported acceptance of the U.S. demands.29 A September 14, 2001, meeting of the Pakistani
army's corps commanders, generally acknowledged as a key element in Pakistani national
policy, demonstrated significant divisions in this crucial group. At least two key commanders,
Lieutenant Generals Mahmoud and Usmani, were reluctant to overturn Pakistan's Afghan
policy, and it reportedly took six hours of debate before
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Musharraf was able to gain support for the policy change.30 The result was that Musharraf
made a groundbreaking speech in which Pakistan completely reversed direction, removing its
support for the Taliban and pledging cooperation with the United States. Musharraf stated that
this decision was necessary to obtain four key objectives for Pakistan: security, long-term
economic development, the protection of Pakistan's nuclear assets, and a settlement of the
Kashmir dispute. Pakistan's concerns about its nuclear assets stemmed, in part, from an article
claiming that the United States was training with Israeli special forces to seize the Pakistani
nuclear arsenal, an issue on which Musharraf reportedly received very direct assurances from
President Bush.31 Pakistani assistance to the United States eventually included logistical
support, base rights in western Pakistan, and vital intelligence collaboration. Without this
assistance, the campaign in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, would have been very
difficult. India also offered unexpected assistance. Immediately after the attack, India sent
formal condolences and offered the United States Indian air bases for use in military operations
against Afghanistan. Indian intelligence also offered unprecedented cooperation, including
substantial information about al Qaeda and the Taliban, information that India had been
collecting both through sources focused on Pakistan and through its connections with the
Afghan Northern Alliance. This assistance was unprecedented and reflected an Indian effort to
capitalize on the changing international environment to create a deeper strategic relationship
with the United States. U.S. delays in responding to Indian offers and prompt reestablishment
of a close relationship with Pakistan dashed Indian hopes and caused great disappointment in
policy circles.32 The end result of this cooperation from the two most powerful states in the
subcontinent was that the United States carried out an enormously successful military
operation in one of the most foreboding environments on the planet. Operation Enduring
Freedom began on October 7, 2001, with the support of a coalition of ninety nations, the
largest coalition in world history.33 The Taliban were routed in a little over a month. Al Qaeda
has been battered and harassed; more than three thousand al Qaeda operatives and associates
have been detained in over one hundred countries.34 A new government, headed by Hamid
Karzai, took power and reasserted control, supported by an international military force and
substantial international-development aid.35 In the course of just a few months, the U.S. war
on terrorism had substantial and significant results.

Operation Enduring Freedom did not, of course, result in an end to all terrorism in the region.
On October 1, 2001, terrorists in Kashmir attacked the state legislative assembly in Srinagar,
killing over thirty people.36 India, not
The War on Terrorism: Implications for South Asia

287

surprisingly, viewed this incident as a direct attack on the legitimacy of its government in the
state of Jammu and Kashmir, the area Pakistan still disputes. Even more audacious was the
December 13, 2001, five-person suicide attack on the Indian parliament building in Delhi.
Several of the terrorists nearly made it inside the building, which at the time contained
hundreds of members of Parliament and much of the cabinet. India swiftly attributed
responsibility to two Pakistan-based insurgent groups with links to al QaedaJaish-e-Mohammad
(JeM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT).37

India responded with an unprecedented military mobilization, ultimately reaching over seven
hundred thousand men.38 Entire "strike corps," mechanized forces based around India's three
armored divisions, were moved to forward positions on the Indo-Pakistani border, and
mountain infantry divisions were moved from the border with China into Jammu and
Kashmir.39 The crisis peaked in early January 2002 when Indian officials spoke publicly of the
possibility of nuclear-weapons use, stating bluntly that if war broke out and Pakistan used
nuclear weapons, its continued existence would be jeopardized.40 According to reports from
the region, India was prepared to launch a cross-border conventional strike that risked
escalating to a broader regional conflict.41 Faced with a more serious threat of regional war
than at any time since 1971, the United States responded by sending Secretary of State Colin
Powell to the region in an effort to avert a calamity. India's demands were simple: the
extradition of twenty suspected terrorists and an end to infiltration of combatants from
Pakistan across the LOG into Jammu and Kashmir.42 On January 12,2002, President Musharraf
dramatically announced to the nation that Pakistan would no longer be used as a base for
terrorism of any kind, stated that the government would crack down on madrassas (religious
schools) suspected of aiding terrorist groups, and banned several terrorist groups including JeM
and LeT. The demand for extradition of terrorist suspects was not met. These dramatic
statements sufficed to calm the crisis, and at the State of the Union address on January
29,2002, President Bush specifically praised President Musharraf for his courageous acts.
However, President Musharraf's address was made in the winter, when infiltration across the
LOG is historically constrained. As the weather warmed, infiltration across the LOG became
evident.43 The brutal slaughter of women and children at an Indian military barracks in
Kaluchak in early May 2002 reinvigo- rated the crisis.44

Indian troops, which had remained in place rather than retiring to their usual peacetime
cantonments, conspicuously began preparations for military operations, laying mines and
moving reserve ammunition to forward depots.45 The Pakistani ambassador to the United
Nations bluntly threatened the
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use of nuclear weapons in the event that Pakistan's existence was jeopardized by an Indian
assault.46 The United States again intervened diplomatically with a parade of high-ranking
officials in May and June and recommended the evacuation of all American civilians from India.
The crisis was defused in mid-July, again with Pakistani promises to rein in infiltration across the
LOG, but as of this writing U.S. officials admit that infiltration has not ceased. India has
heightened patrols on the LOG and is improving surveillance measures.47 The war on terror
thus created opportunities for changing relationships between India, Pakistan, and the United
States, but cooperation against international terrorism has not resulted in fundamental
breakthroughs in IndoPakistani relations. Terrorism remains a powerful force in the region, and
U.S., Pakistani, and Indian perceptions of regional terrorism differ considerably, which impedes
triangular cooperation. For example, during the Kaluchak crisis of 2002, Pakistan drew forces
away from the Afghan border (where they operated against al Qaeda and Taliban remnants) to
the west for possible deployment against India.48 In Sri Lanka and Nepal trends are somewhat
more positive. In each case, terrorist groups have reached a cease-fire with the government in
the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and increased U.S. presence in the region. It is
reasonable to assume that an increased U.S. military presence, U.S. support for governments
fighting terrorist threats, and the spectacular pulverization of al Qaeda and the Taliban may
have prompted some reconsideration on the part of terrorist leaders. In the case of Sri Lanka,
the LTTE ceased hostilities with the government on December 23, 2001. It reached a
memorandum of understanding with the government in February 2002, has accepted the
concept of considerable autonomy within a federalized state, and has engaged in six rounds of
talks with the government, using Norway as an intermediary.49 Negotiations have failed in the
past, in 1981,1983, 1989, and 1994, but the current cease-fire is considered promising.

In Nepal talks were held between the Maoists in July, September, and November of 2001, but
the monarchy refused to accept the three main demands of the Maoist leadership: abolishing
the monarchy, establishing an interim government, and forming a constitutional assembly. As a
result, on November 24, 2001, the Maoists declared the formation of the Peoples Liberation
Army and launched a new wave of attacks on government forces and installations. In May 2002
the United States provided $20 million in assistance to help the government fight the
insurgency. U.S., Indian, and British support to the Royal Nepal Army played a crucial role in
forcing the Maoists in 2002 to accept first a cease-fire and then a code of conduct, perhaps a
stepping-stone to genuine negotiations.50 Continued conflict appears likely in the near term,
however, due to the fundamental discrepancies between Maoist demands and the
government's position.
The War on Terrorism: Implications for South Asia 289

FUTURE TRENDS?

The war on terrorism changed the terms of U.S. engagement in South Asia. Most of the states
in the region saw opportunities created by a U.S. decision to engage in a global war against
international terrorism. Some of the more astute nonstate actors in the region also perceived a
distinct threat emerging from new U.S. policy and adapted their political positions accordingly.
In the cases of the largest and most important actors in the regional balance of power, India,
Pakistan, and the United States, these new opportunities have not resulted in fundamental
changes in policy toward or within the region. Both India and Pakistan hoped to leverage the
terrorism issue to their benefit and to the detriment of the other. Judged by this standard, both
states have been frustrated.

India sought to use this opportunity to fundamentally alter a traditionally problematic

relationship with the United States.51 India hoped to emphasize Pakistan's links with the
Taliban and al Qaeda and its support for groups staging terrorist attacks across the LOG into the
Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.52 A greater U.S. awareness of terrorism, it was hoped,
would accelerate the tilt toward India evident from President Clinton's 2000 visit and increase
U.S. sympathy for India's position on Kashmir, sympathy already evident in the Clinton
administration's vocal defense of the sanctity of the LOC during the 1999 Kargil war. The war on
terrorism, therefore, could be used to move the United States even further away from Pakistan
and relatively closer to India. A more positive Indo-U.S. relationship would, it was hoped, lead
to tangible benefits, including the lifting of sanctions imposed after the May 1998 nuclear tests
and greater openness to the transfer of both military and civilian technologies. In most of these
objectives, India was ultimately frustrated. Pakistan's links with the Taliban were emphasized,
but those very links meant that Pakistan also provided the best intelligence on the Taliban, an
issue of great importance as the United States committed itself to the Taliban's overthrow.53
U.S. concerns about Pakistani support for terror did emerge, particularly in the 2001-2002 crisis,
but never resulted in wholehearted support for the Indian position on Kashmir or, in fact, for
India's efforts during the crisis. The order for evacuation of American civilians from India at the
height of the Kaluchak crisis was viewed by some Indians as an act of economic coercion.
Despite India's best efforts, the United States maintains a close relationship with Pakistan. Indo-
U.S. strategic partnership, perhaps always an unrealistic near-term objective, has been
compromised in favor of the short-term advantage of Pakistani cooperation in the war on
terror, while the China factor has, at least temporarily, receded from the forefront of U.S. policy
concerns. Technology transfer, while forthcoming, remains at a much more limited level
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than India would prefer. In short, India's hopes for a rapid transformation of its relationship
with the United States have not been achieved.54 This does not mean that the relationship is
not evolving in a favorable manner, with highlevel meetings, military cooperation, joint
terrorism task forces, and intelligence cooperation.55 India hoped that the war on terror would
spark rapid, almost revolutionary change in the relationship. Instead, it continues to mature in a
more evolutionary fashion.

Pakistan also hoped to revitalize a traditional relationship with the United States-renewing a
Cold War alliance.56 Pakistani leaders viewed the United States as a critical, but unpredictable,
perhaps unreliable, partner. Musharraf's rejection of the alliance with the Taliban and
Pakistan's continuing efforts to cooperate with the United States in pursuing al Qaeda and
Taliban leaders come at a high cost domestically.57 Pakistani unrest during the Afghan conflict,
while manageable, indicated substantial opposition to government policy. More recently, the
surprising strength of the alliance of Islamist parties after the fall 2002 elections and the public
uproar when the United States published details of Pakistani cooperation in the Afghan
campaign suggest that the government's policies have substantial opposition.58

Pakistan also hoped for substantial U.S. concessions in both the economic and the military
spheres. Although the administration recently announced a five-year, $3-billion aid package for
Pakistan, many Pakistanis are critical about what they see as a lack of reciprocity in the
relationship. Two items of particular concern, the transfer of F-16 fighter aircraft and Pakistani
textile imports to the United States, are matters of constant comment. The U.S. decision to
allow India to purchase the Israeli PHALCON aerial warning and control aircraft will, over the
course of several years, substantially add to India's already formidable advantages in air power.
Pakistan, by contrast, cannot get the United States to release F-16 aircraft, now over a decade
old, which are already built and paid for. The Pakistani economy, in relatively dire straits after
decades of mismanagement and institutionalized corruption, would benefit enormously from
the opportunity to export more textiles into the U.S. market.

Both India and Pakistan, to some extent, view their relationships with the United States as a
zero-sum game, where one state improves its relationship at the expense of the other. The
United States, on the other hand, continues to follow a long policy of attempting to maintain
good relations with both states. This policy has been difficult to manage in the past and remains
highly problematic as the subcontinent enters a new era of nuclear confrontation. Due to shifts
in domestic politics in both India and Pakistan, religion has become politicized to a greater and
more dangerous extent than at any time since Partition. Sectarian killings in Pakistan, cries for
jihad against both Westerners and Hindus by extremist Islamic groups, and the emergence of
Hindu nation-

alism as a powerful force in India-not always a benign force as demonstrated by the massacre
of Muslims in Gujarat in early 2003-do not contribute to regional stability.59

Competing policy priorities further complicate the U.S. predicament. These include terrorism,
nonproliferation, human rights, and democracy. Because the United States has publicly
declared its intention to wage war against international terrorists, the issues of terrorism, its
definition, and its condemnation represent a focal policy concern in both the United States and
the region. The U.S. definition has not remained constant-an issue of some concern to both
India and Pakistan. The same war on terrorism that prompted a preemptive strike on the
Taliban, clearly linked to al Qaeda, has also been used to justify the conquest of Iraq, an
American policy priority, but one that has not, as of this writing, been reliably linked with al
Qaeda or other international terrorist groups of concern.60 India argues that Pakistan is the
epicenter of international terrorism, but the United States refuses to treat Pakistan in the same
way it treats other state supporters of terrorism, including Iran, Syria, or even North Korea,
whose links with international terrorism are minimal.61 Instead, the United States reassures
Pakistan but recently has put the Hizb ul-Mujaheddin on the Other Terrorist Organizations list,
suggesting that the largest (and least overtly Islamic extremist) Kashmiri insurgent group is now
on watch and perhaps signaling to Pakistan that the Kashmir insurgency needs to be shut
down.62 Indian sources note, however, that even banned Pakistani groups are now
reorganizing to continue operations in Kashmir.63 U.S. leaders vacillate on whether al Qaeda is
active in Kashmir, although clearly at some point al Qaeda had significant contact with various
Kashmiri groups through the complex of Afghan training camps.64

The United States also faces a double standard on nonproliferation. On the one hand,
nonproliferation was a major element of U.S. policy from 1990 to

1998, when the objective was to halt and, if possible, roll back the Indian and Pakistani nuclear
programs. After the 1998 tests, U.S. nonproliferation policy unwound but continues to
influence policy in the region. Pakistani use of nuclear weapons as cover for a limited invasion
of Indian territory, exploiting the stability-instability paradox,65 caused a regional crisis in 1999.
India's threat of a massive invasion in 2001-2002 led to another crisis. Neither crisis has
resulted in significant U.S. penalties against either state, in a major effort to cap or reduce
nuclear weapons in the region, or in significant U.S. pressure to end the Kashmir impasse and
eliminate the most likely cause of a future, possibly nuclear, conflict.66 The United States has
instead opted to live with a nuclearized region-President Bush's reassurances to President
Musharraf on the security of Pakistan's strategic arsenal are now a matter of anecdotal record-
and has not undertaken any significant diplomatic efforts outside of crisis management.
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Human rights are also a matter of some confusion. It is a tragic truth that India's human rights
violations in Kashmir, a matter of record with multiple independent observers and reports,
have been widely ignored by the international community.67 Ethnic and religious separatist
tendencies in India have only been exacerbated by the rise of extremist Hindu nationalism,
which has manifested itself in the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque, the Gujarat riots of 2002
and other sectarian attacks, and occasional murders of Christian missionaries. Pakistan's
support for Kashmiri separatists, whose brutal attacks on Hindu pandits and innocent women
and children are also a matter of record, has drawn no formal U.S. condemnation, only the
condemnation of the groups involved, and only after the September 11 attacks. Sectarian
attacks within Pakistan were also generally ignored until after the war on terrorism was
declared. In fact, the U.S. internment without trial of Pakistani nationals at a facility in
Guantanamo, Cuba, could be condemned as a violation of the rights of those citizens. The
contradictions in American human rights policy in the subcontinent have only been
exacerbated, and not resolved, by the war against terrorism.

Finally, the U.S. commitment to democracy remains an issue, particularly regarding Pakistan.
President Musharraf took power in a military coup, overthrowing a democratically elected, but
extraordinarily corrupt, government in October 1999. After several years of attempted
economic and political reforms, Musharraf held nationwide elections in October 2002.68 The
list of possible candidates for election was deliberately limited in hopes of minimizing the
possibility that supporters of former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto would
gain substantial representation. The result, however, was that an alliance of Islamist parties
became the primary opposition force in government. This alliance now controls the Northwest
Frontier Province/tribal areas, where it has implemented Taliban-style codes of conduct, and is
a partner in the government of Baluchistan. These two regions border Afghanistan and are
believed to house large numbers of Taliban and al Qaeda refugees.69 While a new prime
minister has been selected, central authority remains in the hands of President Musharraf, and
the current U.S. policy appears to be to accept Musharraf as the lesser of a range of possible
evils, even if his commitment to democracy appears selective at best.70

Elsewhere in the region, terrorism remains a simmering threat. In Afghanistan the Taliban has
reestablished a presence despite the new regime and a force of international peacekeepers.71
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, former leader of Afghanistan, has joined forces with the Taliban and al
Qaeda.72 The new Karzai regime still has unresolved border issues with Pakistan as well.73
Despite generous U.S. and international assistance, stability in Afghanistan is far from assured,
and a resurgence of the Taliban remains a possibility.74 Nepal and Sri Lanka face similar
problems. Negotiations with terrorists and insurgents are a notoriously difficult problem. As
mentioned above, the LTTE has already engaged in numerous talks with various Sri Lankan
governments, and Nepal has also attempted to negotiate with its Maoist opponents in the past.
The looming threat of U.S. intervention or enhanced U.S. assistance may have played a role in
the decision of these groups to negotiate. A key factor in defusing these conflicts will be the
willingness and ability of the United States to provide diplomatic, economic, and military
assistance to the governments of both countries. Bangladesh also remains an area of concern
for the U.S. government. While it is not a sanctuary for al Qaeda, the U.S. government believes
that Bangladesh acts as a conduit for illicit financial flows to terrorist organizations.75 Deep
divisions between the country's two major parties and abundant corruption threaten economic
growth and create obstacles for cooperation against terrorism. In fact, the U.S. government
fears that these factors may endanger long-term Bangladeshi stability and perhaps even make
it vulnerable to an outbreak of terrorism.76

CONCLUSION

The September 11,2001, terrorist attacks fundamentally changed U.S. policy in South Asia
because of the physical presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The renewed American presence
and interest in the region offered new opportunities for both of the major regional players
(India and Pakistan) and also many of the smaller states (Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and
Bangladesh). A more robust American military and diplomatic posture also forced nonstate
actors, from the relatively friendly Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to the more hostile LTTE
and Nepalese Maoists, to reexamine their policies and objectives and to adapt to a far more
threatening U.S. presence. It would appear, at least in the short term, that the smaller states in
the region have been more successful in leveraging the new U.S. role to their advantage. Sri
Lanka and Nepal are now both engaged in promising negotiations with local terrorist and
insurgent groups. Afghanistan has been freed of the repressive and bizarre Taliban regime and
has an opportunity for the first time since the Soviet invasion in 1979 to rebuild and restore
itself with strong international support.

The larger players in the region are less satisfied with the new U.S. role, and for good reason.
India truly hoped to leverage a war on terrorism to its advantage and Pakistan's detriment.
India had much to offer a business-oriented Republican administration that saw China as a
likely adversary, voiced a strong preference for democracies, and saw India as a natural
counterweight both to radical Islamic movements and to Chinese expansion. India's
disappointment is due, in large part, to differing definitions of terrorism. India perceived the
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epicenter of radical Islam to be moving east from Afghanistan into Pakistan. International
terrorism, from an Indian standpoint, began in the Khyber Pass and threatened the east, a
viewpoint reinforced by the fifteen-year conflict in Kashmir that has resulted in tens of
thousands of deaths. Although it is clear that the United States recognized the shift of the
political and religious center of radical Islam from Iran to Afghanistan and South Asia, U.S.
concern over terrorist activity remains focused on points west, on the threat to the U.S.
homeland, its allies in Europe, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and most especially to the
global supply of oil. As a result of these differing definitions, based on different national
interests, India was disappointed when the United States renewed its relationship with
Pakistan. What India saw as the major threat, the United States saw as the major asset:
Pakistan was the one state that best understood the Taliban and al Qaeda artd whose support
was absolutely critical in the waging of perhaps the most geographically difficult military
campaign in American history.

Pakistan, however, has also been deeply disappointed by the U.S. role in the region. Pakistan's
military remains technologically backward and suffers from a significant qualitative
disadvantage compared to the Indian military, particularly the air force. The United States has
not attempted, as it did in the past, to redress that disadvantage with high-technology arms
transfers to Pakistan. In fact, it has permitted the transfer of PHALCON aircraft that will
significantly increase the Indian air force's capabilities over time. In addition, Pakistan now has
an Afghan neighbor that is distinctly less friendly than Pakistan's former Taliban friends.
Although Pakistani leaders complain about inadequate economic compensation for their
sacrifices, the Pakistani economy has benefited enormously from U.S. and international
assistance. Pakistan's intelligence services apparently continue to cooperate closely with their
U.S. and Western counterparts, creating an atmosphere where al Qaeda and its associates
cannot move freely about the region or pose a significant threat to the Musharraf regime.
While Pakistan was widely viewed as a failing state before September 11, 2001, it now has a
temporary window for reform and renewal. Whether it can take advantage of that opportunity
remains to be seen.77

The new U.S. role in the region remains fragmented and unclear. As soon as Operation
Enduring Freedom deposed the Taliban, the primary focus of U.S. policy shifted to Iraq. This
resulted in embarrassing mistakes, including neglecting to ask for funding for Afghan aid in a
budget request, as well as a series of ad hoc crisis interventions by increasingly high-ranking
government officials in the 2001-2002 Indo-Pakistani crisis. The international wrangling over
intervention in Iraq and the U.S. decision to undertake operations without UN authorization did
nothing to stabilize relations with the region. Neither India nor Pakistan supported the U.S.
intervention, and India recently refused to supply a division of seventeen thousand troops for
post- war peacekeeping and reconstruction without a UN mandate and command structure.78

The war on terrorism provided the opportunity for a fundamental reassessment of U.S.
interests and opportunities in the region. It provided a motive to engage all of the states in the
region in a more productive manner on issues of mutual concern and for the United States to
intervene to promote stability and security. The United States had an opportunity to redress
mistakes and neglect stemming from the Cold War and to forge new relationships with states in
a region of increasing importance to the global economy and international security system. As
of this writing, it is not clear that the United States is truly capitalizing on this opportunity.
Repeating the errors of past administrations, the United States is focusing on crisis avoidance in
the region, rather than taking the risky alternative of attempting to negotiate a solution to the
region's most intractable problems. This hands-off posture has not harmed negotiations in the
smaller states, but it will not and cannot help resolve the fundamental issue in the region that
represents the greatest threat to both U.S. and regional interests, the ongoing Indo-Pakistani
conflict, which is exacerbated by the presence of nuclear weapons on both sides.

The Bush administration came into office hoping to back away from the Middle East conflict,
only to be dragged back into the fray because it is the only state with sufficient power and
gravitas to help solve such an intractable problem. The same is almost certainly true in South
Asia as well. In the absence of a concerted effort by the United States to help create the
conditions for a solution, it will continue to be dragged into the region as a crisis manager as
each successive Indo-Pakistani crisis gets a little more dangerous. Resolving the Kashmir issue,
the fundamental stumbling block in Indo-Pakistani relations and in regional stability, will not be
easy. But it will not happen by accident, and it will not happen as long as each state sees the
United States as a tool to use against the other. The United States has the ability to play a
leadership role in the region. It remains to be seen whether it has the will and the stamina.

NOTES

1. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author, and do not reflect the official
policy of the United States Navy, the Department of Defense, or any other agency of the United
States government.

2. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, April 2003),
xiii. This definition has been used in this report since the mid-1980s. For purposes of this
definition, "noncombatant" is interpreted to include, in addition to civilians, military personnel
who at the time of the incident are unarmed and/or not on duty.

3. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, xiii.

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4. This distinction is not reflected in U.S. policy, but is simply a convenience used by the author.

5. See "Nepal" in Country Reports on Human Rights Practices-2002, Bureau of Democracy,

Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, March 21, 2003, available at www .state
.go v/g/drl/rl s/hrrpt/2002.

6. Ahmad Abbas, "Impact of 9/11 on Smaller States of South Asia," Strategic Studies 22, no. 3
(Autumn 2002): 78.

7. Shireen Mazari, "Comments," Strategic Studies 22, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 13.

8. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, 114, 143. The United States has declared Lashkar-IJhangvi
a Foreign Terrorist Organization because of its link to the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl in
early 2002. SSP is considered an Other Terrorist Group by the United States and was banned by
Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in January 2002.

9. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003, 133-34; "United States Relations with South Asia,"
Christina Rocca, assistant secretary for South Asian affairs, testimony before the House
International Relations Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, March 20, 2003. HUJI-B is classed
an Other Terrorist Organization by the United States but has financial links to Pakistan-based
groups. According to other sources, HUJI-B was established with financial backing from Osama
bin Laden.

10. Patterns of Global Terrorism. 2002, 114-15.

11. India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) trained and armed the LTTE in the early

1980s and reportedly failed to warn Indian officials of this when India intervened in Sri Lanka in
1987. Stephen Philip Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution
Press, 2001), 150.

12. "Foreign Assistance Programs in South Asia," Christina Rocca, assistant secretary for South
Asian affairs, testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 26,

2003. Al Qaeda reportedly maintained connections with both LTTE and Hezbollah in order to
learn about suicide tactics. Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror
(updated with new material) (New York: Columbia University Press, May 2003), 98.
13. For brevity's sake, these groups will be listed here and discussed in more detail below.
According to Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, foreign and other terrorist groups engaged in
Kashmir include Harakut-ul-Mujaheddin (HUM), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Lashkar-e-Tayyiba
(LeT), Harakut ul-Jihad-I-Islami (HUJI), Hizb ul-Mujahiddin (HM), and Jamiat ul-Mujahidin (JUM).
Other groups exist, and some groups have changed their names. Prior to September 11, 2001,
the only Pakistani group listed by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization was
HUM, formerly known as Harakut ul-Ansar, for its kidnapping of five Westerners in Kashmir in
1995. Owen Bennett Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2002), 27.

14. Bennett Jones, Pakistan, 83.

15. The best works on this relationship are Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, and Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).

16. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, 118-19.

17. Rashid, Taliban, 133.

18. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 78-80.

19. Rashid, Taliban, 184

20. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 53.

21. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 40.

22. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 57.

23. Rashid, Taliban, 186.

24. See Mary Anne Weaver, Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), 32-33.

The War on Terrorism: Implications for South Asia

297

25. Bennett Jones, Pakistan, 27; Weaver, Pakistan, 32-33.

26. President George W. Bush, "Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American
People," September 20, 2001.

27. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 47.
28. Woodward, Bush, 58-59. The demands included stopping any and all support for al Qaeda,
either official or unofficial; overflight and landing rights; access to Pakistan, including basing and
possibly use of the borders; intelligence and immigration information; Pakistani condemnation
of the September 11 attacks and curbing all domestic expressions of support for attacks against
the United States and the West; cutting off shipments of fuel and volunteers to the Taliban; and
breaking diplomatic relations and ending support for the Taliban if Afghanistan continued to
harbor bin Laden and al Qaeda. The last demand amounted to a complete reversal of almost a
decade of Pakistani foreign policy.

29. Isabel Hilton, "The General in His Labyrinth," The New Yorker, August 12, 2002.

30. To complicate matters further, Generals Mahmoud and Usmani were key Musharraf
supporters, who had played critical roles in the coup that brought him to power in October
1999. According to one report, Mahmoud was sent to Afghanistan in an effort to persuade
Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, to hand bin Laden over to the United States but instead
assured Omar that he could continue to count on ISI support! In October 2001 Musharraf
removed both Mahmoud and Usmani from positions of power. Bennett Jones, Pakistan, 3, 25-
26.

31. See Seymour Hersh, "Watching the Warheads: The Risks to Pakistan's Nuclear Arsenal," The
New Yorker, November 5,2001. According to Bob Woodward, President Bush told Musharraf
bluntly in a phone conversation that "Seymour Hersh is a liar." Woodward, Bush, 303.

32. Juli A. MacDonald, The Indo-U.S. Military Relationship: Expectations and Perceptions
(Washington, D.C.: Office of Net Assessment, October 2002), 52.

33. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, ix.

34. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, iv.

35. Karzai was elected leader of Afghanistan in July 2002. Patterns of Global Terrorism

2002,9.

36. Indian sources attest that JeM carried out this attack. See Patterns of Global Terrorism

2002,109.

37. See Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, 10, 109-10, 113.

38. This total includes members of official paramilitary formations that carry out
counterinsurgency and policing operations in Kashmir. "India Builds Up Forces as Bush Urges
Calm," New York Times, December 30,2001. This report cites Pakistani intelligence officials as
having identified twenty-three Indian divisions on the border, in addition to 600 aircraft. India
moved troops from the border with China (in Corps) as well.

39. "India Fully Prepared to Meet Exigencies, Says Jaswant," The Hindu, December 24,

2001.

40. "Pak Would Be Wiped Out if It Uses Nuclear Bomb: BJP," Hindustan Times s December

26, 2001; "Military Option if Diplomacy Fails," The Hindu, January 4, 2002; Army Ready for War,
Says Chief," The Statesman (India), January 12, 2002. According to reports, Chief of Army Staff
general Padmanabhan remarked that if Pakistan used nuclear weapons against Indian soldiers
on the battlefield, "the continuation of the existence of Pakistan as a nation would be in
doubt."

41. Rahul Bedi, "A Strike Staunched," Frontline 19, no. 12 (June 8-21, 2002); "India Had Planned
Offensive," Dawn, December 24, 2002. The latter noted that according to Indian chief of army
staff designate Lt. Gen. N. C. Vij, the army planned a joint army/IAF mission with paratroopers,
pushing a brigade of army commandos to capture key infiltration routes like Haji Pir Pass in
January 2002 to hit and seal off major terrorist bases in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. This
attack was called off at the last moment.
298

Timothy D. Hoyt

42. "India's Leader Continues Accusing Pakistan of Terror," New York Times, December 30,

2001.

43. "Militants Still Entering India, Says Musharraf," London Daily Telegraph, August 21,

2002.

44. India claimed that the attack had been carried out by LeT. Patterns of Global Terrorism

2002,10,113.

45. A former Pakistani chief of staff insists that the crisis proved that India could not win a war
against Pakistan and that Pakistan's conventional forces deterred India. See General Mirza
Aslam Beg, "Converging Interests on Kashmir," The News International (Pakistan), May 18,

2003. In this article, Beg asserts that 50 percent of the insurgents in Kashmir are local, and the
other 50 percent are foreign volunteers, Pakistani, or from the Pakistani-held section of
Kashmir. The notion that India's forces were inadequate for rapid, decisive victory was
supported by the testimony of Indian army leaders in 2003. According to defense sources, the
Indian conventional combat ratio advantage declined from 1.75:1 in 1971 to 1.56:1 in 1990 and
is now only 1.22:1. "Army Seeks Swift Modernisation to Counter Paik," Times of India, April 3,
2003.

46. "Pakistan Won't Rule Out Use of Nuclear Arms if Attacked," Media Corporation of Singapore
Pte Ltd. (Channel News Asia), May 29, 2002 (accessed through Lexis-Nexis); "At UN, Pakistan
Defends First-Strike Nuclear Policy," Agence France Presse, May 29, 2002.

47. "India Starts Blocking Infiltration Routes," The Hindu, May 21, 2003.

48. K. Alan Kronstadt "Pakistan-U.S. Relations" (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research

Service, Library of Congress, September 24, 2002), 9.

49. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, 8,12.

50. "Foreign Assistance Programs in South Asia," Christina Rocca, assistant secretary for South
Asian affairs, testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 26,2003.
51. The most comprehensive study of the Indo-U.S. relationship is Dennis Kux, Estranged
Democracies: India and the United States (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press,
1993).

52. "US Refusal to Admit Iraq-Pak Similarities Unacceptable," Times of India, April 14,

2003. External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha said Pakistan was the "epicentre and exporter of
terrorism."

53. Indians, for example, were furious at the reported "Kunduz airlift," in which Pakistani
aircraft moved Pakistanis and, perhaps, Taliban and al Qaeda leaders from the Afghan city of
Kunduz shortly before it fell to the Northern Alliance in late 2001. See Seymour Hersh, "The
Getaway," The New Yorker, January 28, 2002.

54. According to Indian and U.S. interviewees, three areas of difference may prevent longterm
Indo-U.S. strategic convergence: different definition of threat (international versus regional
focus), different views on the roots of terrorism (Pakistan as root of problem or part of
solution), and Indian concerns about the impact U.S. campaigns on terrorism (especially Iraq)
may have on destabilizing the Persian Gulf or other regions. McDonald, Indo-U.S. Military
Relationship, xxiv.

55. For example, a U.S.-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group met twice in 2002.
Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, 10. See also McDonald, Indo-U.S. Military Relationship.

56. The most comprehensive study of the U.S.-Pakistani relationship is Dennis Kux,
Disenchanted Allies: The United States and Pakistan 1947-2000 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001).

57. Pakistan arrested and transferred into U.S. custody nearly 500 al Qaeda suspects and
associates in January 2001 and ranked third behind the United States and Switzerland in seized
terrorist assets. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, 11. Key al Qaeda leaders have been arrested
in Pakistan, including Abu Zubaydah (March 2002), Ramzi Binalshibh (September 2002), Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed (March 2003), and Walid Ba'Attash (April 2003).

The War on Terrorism: Implications for South Asia

299

58. "U.S. Report on Aid From Pakistan Angers Islamists," Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21,

2003. According to a report from U.S. Central Command, 57,800 air missions over Afghanistan
crossed Pakistani air space, and 800 U.S. Marines used a Pakistan port to transit to the war
zone.
59. According to India: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices-2002 (Washington, D.C.:
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, March 31,

2003), "NGOs [non-governmental organizations] reported that police were implicated directly
in many of the attacks against Muslims in Gujarat, and in some cases, NGOs contended, police
officials encouraged the mob."

60. Iraq was listed, along with Syria, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, and Libya, as a state
sponsor of terrorism in Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, xi.

61. "US Refusal to Admit Iraq-Pak Similarities Unacceptable," Times of India, April 14,

2003. External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha said Pakistan was the "epicentre and exporter of
terrorism." This statement occurred just a few days after the Indian parliament (Lok Sabha)
condemned the U.S. invasion of Iraq and called for immediate withdrawal-on the same day U.S.
military forces entered Baghdad. "Irrelevant India," India Today International, April 21,

2003, 6.

62. "Terror Label Upsets Kashmiris," Washington Post, May 24, 2003. After the State
Department classified HM as an Other Terrorist Group in late April, Pakistan followed suit in
midMay by announcing a ban on the group. Analysts in South Asia have described HM as the
group "most likely to put down its weapons and pursue peace" if India and Pakistan start
serious talks.

63. "Pak Has Revamped Kashmir Terror Strategy: BSF," Times of India, April 2, 2003. According
to this report, JeM, LeT, Al Badr, and HUJI have formed a Joint Command Council to coordinate
operations and infiltration. The latter two groups are on the State Department Other Terrorist
Organization List, and President Musharraf formally proscribed both JeM and LeT in his January
2002 speech.

64. See Weaver, Pakistan, 261, for an account of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's
contradictory remarks on the presence of al Qaeda in Kashmir during the June 2002 crisis.

65. The stability-instability paradox, essentially the idea that nuclear deterrence created
opportunities for low-intensity conflict because neither participant would want to escalate
fighting to a level where nuclear use was possible, was first identified in by Glenn Snyder, "The
Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror," in The Balance of Power, ed. Paul Seabury (San
Francisco: Chandler, 1964), 184-201, and is discussed in Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the
Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 19-22. See also Michael
Krepon and Chris Gagne, eds. The Stability-Instability Paradox: Nuclear Weapons and
Brinkmanship in South Asia (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center, June 2001).
66. See the dedicated issue of India Review (Summer 2002) on the Kashmir problem.

67. See, e.g., Bennett Jones, Pakistan, 83.

68. The United States officially views these elections as flawed. "Foreign Assistance Programs in
South Asia," Christina Rocca, assistant secretary for South Asian affairs, testimony before the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 26, 2003.

69. The Muttahida Majlis-I-Amal (MMA), an alliance of six religious parties, won 11 percent of
the votes cast but a total of 45 of 268 directly elected seats (18 percent). See "Two Elections:
New Hopes and Old Frustrations," South Asia Monitor 52 (November 1, 2002). By January 2003,
after additional by-elections, the MMA held 83 of 342 seats and had become the biggest
opposition block. "Right, Pro-Military Big Winners in Pakistan By-elections," Sydney Morning
Herald, January 17, 2003.

70. A recent article noted that "of all of Pakistan's leaders, Musharraf has most explicitly and
forcefully reiterated [Pakistani founding father Muhammad Ali] Jinnah's vision of a liberal,
secular, and democratic Pakistan." Stephen Philip Cohen, "The Nation and the State of
Pakistan," Washington Quarterly 25, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 111.
300

Timothy D. Hoyt

71. "Taliban Appears to Be Regrouped and Well-Funded," Christian Science Monitor, May

8, 2003. According to this report, the Taliban has appointed regional commanders in all of the
regions of Afghanistan and is receiving cross-border support from supporters in Pakistan,
including members of Pakistan's MMA.

72. See "Designation of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as a Terrorist"-Press Statement, Richard Boucher,

U.S. Department of State, February 19, 2003.

73. "Border Issue with Pakistan Raises Concern in Afghanistan" New York Times, April 21,

2003.

74. The United Slates pledged $897 million in assistance in 2002. "Foreign Assistance Programs
in South Asia," Christina Rocca, assistant secretary for South Asian affairs, testimony before the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 26, 2003.

75. "United States Relations with South Asia," Christina Rocca, assistant secretary for South
Asian affairs, testimony before the House International Relations Subcommittee on Asia and
the Pacific, March 20, 2003.

76. "Foreign Assistance Programs in South Asia" and "United States Relations with South Asia."

77. An ominous note is sounded in "Musharraf Mulls Options for Reasserting Authority," Wall
Street Journal, July 21, 2003. According to the article, the MMA can combine with other
factions to create a 160-seat opposition in the current 360-seat government, one that has
refused to enact Musharraf's policies or grant him the constitutional amendments and
sweeping powers he desires. This may bode poorly for Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali. The
article also notes a recent surge in sectarian murders of Shiites and Christians in Pakistan.

78. "U.S. Downplays India's Choice of Not Sending Troops to Iraq," Washington Times, July

15,2003.

FURTHER READING

Clarke, Richard A. Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. New York: Free Press,

2004.

Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the
Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin, 2004. Hoffman, Bruce. Inside
Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Laqueur, Walter. No End to War:
Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Continuum,

2003.

Margolis, Eric S. War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet.
New York: Routledge, 2002.

Santhanam, K., et al. Jihadis in Jammu and Kashmir: A Portrait Gallery. New Delhi: Sage,

2003.

Stern, Jessica. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: Ecco Press,

2003.

. The Ultimate Terrorists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Talbott, Strobe, and Nayan Chanda. The Age of Terror: America and the World after September

11. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Weaver, Mary Anne. Pakistan in the Shadow of Jihad and
Afghanistan. New York: Farrar,

Strauss, & Giroux, 2002.

Index

Abdullah, 125

Abdullah, Farooq, 36-37

Abdullah, Sheikh, 19

Advani, Lai Krishna, 38, 79, 220

Afghanistan, 113-31; and Baluchistan, 198; Britain and, 115-16; civil war in, 5, 120,

194-96; conflicts' effects on, 114, 119; economy and society of, 128-29, 131; ethnic/linguistic
groups of, 113; future government of, 124-25; history of,

113-18; India and, 29-30; Islam in, 113,

117-18, 120-21, 125; opium trade in,

129; Pakistan and, 4-5, 54-55, 66, 116,

120, 127, 194-95; politics and security in, 125-27; post-Soviet, 119-23; al Qaeda and, 284;
rebuilding, 123-29; reconstitution of, 114; Russia and, 115; as South Asian country, 4-5; Soviet
Union and, 116-17; Soviet-backed war in, 2, 5,

29, 118-19; Taliban in, 120-23; United States aid to, 128,130; United States and,

2, 5, 122-23, 126, 128. See also Taliban

Ahmad, Mahmoud, 285

Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam, 223

AkaliDal,30, 199,205,219

Ali, Liaqat, 192

All, Syed Amir, 215

All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC),

283

All-India Muslim League. See Muslim League

Ambedkar.B.R., 216, 239

Amin, Hafizullah, 117-18

al Qaeda: activities of, 121-22; and

Afghanistan, 5, 126; Bangladesh and, 79;

campaign against, 286; establishment of,

120-21; Pakistan and, 54; significance of,

283-84 area studies, 3

Armitage, Richard, 41, 143-45, 285 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC),

276-77

Assam, 199, 283 Association of Southeast Asian Nations

(ASEAN), 108,276-77 Awami League, 72, 193, 227, 248, 270-71 Ayodhya, destruction of mosque
at, 220-21 Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, 239
Baghdad Pact, 22, 52, 59, 62

Baluchistan, 65, 197-98

Bandaranaike, Sirimavo, 243

Bandung (Indonesia) Conference (1955), 24

Bangladesh, 71-86; China and, 84-85;

democratization in, 248-51; development in, 249-50; economy of, 249-50, 270-72; European
Union and, 84; floods of 1998 in, 251; gas exports from, 80; and globalization, 270-72; illegal
immigration from, 79; independence of, 26-27, 50,

71-74, 192-94, 248-49; India and,

74-80; and international organizations,

85-86; Islam in, 226-27, 229n5; Japan and, 84; land boundary of, 76-77; 301
302

Index

liberalization in, 270-72; Myanmar and,

78, 80-81; Pakistan and, 81-83; politics in, 248-51; poverty in, 249; recognition of, 73; relations
with neighbors of, 74; religion and politics in, 226-28; and SAARC, 83-84; sea boundary of, 77-
78; Soviet Union and, 85; terrorism and,

78-79, 293; United Nations and, 85-86; United States and, 84 Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri
Lanka and

Thailand-Economic Cooperation, 276 Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), 227,

249,270-71 Bay of Bengal, 77-78 Beg, Mirza Aslam, 63 Bengali, 226

Bharatiya Jana Sangh, 220 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People's

Party), 34-35, 38, 43, 77, 213, 220-22 Bhindranwale, Jairnal Singh, 199, 200,219 Bhutan, 91-96;
development in, 95-96, 273; economy of, 273-74; and globalization,

273-74; India and, 23, 94, 273; militant groups in, 94-95; Nepal and, 95; politics in, 252nl; South
Asian relations of, 95 Bhutto, Benazir, 63,225, 240, 284 Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali, 46n24, 57, 58, 62,
64,

65, 73, 82, 167, 197, 224, 239-40, 248 Biharis, 82 Bin Laden, Osama, 5, 120-21, 126, 132nl6,

141,283-84

Birendra, king of Nepal, 99, 245, 282 Bizenjo, Ghaus Bux, 197 Bonn Agreement on Afghanistan,
124-25,

195

Brasstacks, 32-33

Britain: Afghanistan and, 115-16; India and,

13-14, 190, 215-17; Nepal and, 96-97; Sri Lanka and, 105 Buddhism: in Bhutan, 273; Mahayana,
93;

Untouchables and, 216 Burma. See Myanmar Bush, George H. W., 37, 54, 163 Bush, George W.:
and India, 137, 172; and Pakistan, 55-56, 196, 286,287; and war on terrorism, 40, 122, 142, 203,
285
Carter, Jimmy, 29, 54 caste system, 215, 216 Central Asia, 60

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): and Afghanistan, 29, 119, 123; and bin Laden, 132nl6; and
Tibet, 24, 150 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), 22,

52,59,67n6 Ceylon. See Sri Lanka Chakmas, 198-99 chars, 78

Chaudhuri, Pramit Pal, 148-49 Chengappa, Raj, 79

China: Bangladesh and, 84-85; economic growth of, 237; India and, 21, 23-25,

28-29, 38,43, 149-53; and Kashmir agreement with Pakistan, 25-26, 56-57; Pakistan and", 25-
26, 27, 56-58; United States and, 27, 53 Chowdhury, Abu Sayeed, 72, 73 Chowdhury, Humayun
Rashid, 86 Churchill, Winston, 231, 252, 257 Clinton, Bill: and bin Laden, 121; and India,

39^0, 136, 137, 169, 171, 289; and Pakistan, 57, 136

Cold War: India and, 19-22; Pakistan and, 52 colonialism: Cold War politics and, 20; religion and
politics during, 214-17; Sri Lanka and, 105

communal violence, 214, 217, 221 Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), 245,273 community,
concept of, 214 comparative politics, 7

Dalai Lama, 24-25

Daoud, Mohammed, 117

David, Steven, 207

democratization, 231-52; definition of, 232; and development, 231-52; effectiveness of, 252;
India, 233-38; Nepal, 245-48; Pakistan, 238-42; religion and, 233; South Asian experiments with,
231; Sri Lanka, 242-44; U.S. policy on, 292

Desai, Morarji, 76

Deuba, Sher Bahadur, 247

development: Bangladesh, 249-50; Bhutan,

273; definition of, 232; democratization and, 231-52; India, 233-38; Nepal, 247; Pakistan, 241-
42; Sri Lanka, 244. See also liberalization

diaspora, from India, 222

Dipendra, crown prince of Nepal, 246

Dostam, Abdul Rashid, 126

Index

303

Dreze, Jean, 237 Drukpa sect, 93 Dulles, John Foster, 22, 53 Durand Line, 66, 115, 195 Durrani,
Ahmad Shah, 115 Dzongkha, 93

Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO),

60

economic liberalization. See liberalization

economics: Afghanistan, 128-29, 131; Bangladesh, 249-50,270-72; Bhutan,

273-74; globalization and, 258-59; India,

35-36,42, 233-38,261-65; Maldives,

274-75; Nepal, 247, 272-73; Pakistan,

241-42, 265-68; regional issues in,

275-78; Sri Lanka, 244, 268-70. See also liberalization; trade

Egyptian Islamic Jihad, 121

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 21-22, 25, 52, 53

Ershad, Hussain Muhammad, 83, 227, 270

Espindola, Robert, 91

ethnic conflicts, 6-7, 187-209; Afghanistan and, 194-96; Bangladesh and, 192-94; causes of, 201;
definition of, 187; ethnic accommodation and, 208-9; ethnic identities and, 205-6; India and,
189-92; internationalization of, 188-89, 205-9; military intervention in, 201-3; preventive
strategies for, 206; realist approaches and, 206-7; Sri Lanka and,

201-3; and state structure alterations,

189-96; theories of South Asian, 207-9; violence and insurgency in, 196-201

European Union, 84, 277

exclusive economic zones, 77-78

Fahim, Muhammad, 125 Faizal, Farah, 100 famine, 251

Farakka Barrage, 75-76 Farouq, king of Egypt, 59 Feith, Douglas, 56 Fernandes, George, 172
France, 23

Gan Island air force base, 101-2

Gandhi, Indira, 29, 30, 31, 32, 73, 74,76,82,

193, 199, 202,208, 219,234, 236,252 Gandhi, Mohandas, 14-15, 216

Gandhi, Rajiv, 30, 32, 35, 37, 107,202, 283

Ganges River, 75-76

Ganguly, Sumit, 137

Garver,JohnW., 150

Gates, Robert, 37,163

Generalized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

(GAIT), 262 global warming, 103 globalization, 257-78; Bangladesh, 270-72;

Bhutan, 273-74; definition of, 258;

economic, 258-59; India, 261-65; island

states and, 100-101; Maldives, 274-75;

measures of, 259-60; Nepal, 272-73;

Pakistan, 265-68; regional issues and,

275-78; small states and, 90-91; Sri

Lanka, 268-70 Globalization Index, 259-60 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 119 grand strategy, 44n2 Great
Game, 115 Group of 77,86 Gulf War (1990-1991), 63 Gupta, Bhabani Sen, 95 Gurkhas, 97
Gyanendra, prince of Nepal, 246-47

Haass, Richard N., 146-47 Hanafi school of interpretation, 224 ul-Haq, Zia, 31, 63, 64, 65, 224,
240 Harakut ul-Jihad-I-Islami/Bangladesh

(HUJI-B), 283 Hedgewar,K. B.,216 hegemony, 45n3

Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, 126, 292 Hersh, Seymour, 145 Hilary, Agha, 72 Hinduism, 215,220-22
Hindutva, 34-35,47n37, 220-21 Hizb ul-Mujaheddin, 291 Hizb-i-Islami Party, 126 Hodder, Dick,
92 human rights, 292 Huq, Fazlul, 226 Hussain, king of Jordan, 73 Hussein, Saddam, 63, 198
Hyderabad, 18

imperialism. See colonialism India, 11-44; Afghanistan and, 29-30; automotive industry in, 264;
Bangladesh.
304

Index

and, 74-80, 193; Bhutan and, 94, 273; Britain and, 13-14, 190, 215-17; China and, 21,23-25, 28-
29, 38,43, 149-53; Cold War and, 19-22; in contemporary world politics, 41-44; cultural
flowering of, 13; democratization in, 233-38; development in, 233-38; diaspora from,

222; economy of, 35-36,42, 233-38,

261-65; frontier security of, 22-26; and globalization, 261-65; gross domestic product of, 42;
Hindu nationalism in,

34-35, 47n37; human rights violations by, 292; independence of, 11, 12-16; Islam in, 13-19, 216-
21; and Kargil War,

39^*0, 171-72; Kashmir strategies of,

168-74, 191-92; land reform in, 234; liberalization in, 261-65; Look East Policy of, 151; military
in, 234-35; military spending of, 43; Nepal and,

96-98; nonalignment of, 12, 15-16,

20-22,41; and nuclear weapons, 28-29,

32-33,37-38,163-64,170,174,176-77,

291; Pakistan and, 16-19, 26-28, 30-33,

36-37, 39-41, 44,49-52,136-37,

287-88; Partition of, 16-19, 189-92,

217; political distancing from, 107-8; politics in, 233-38; in post-Cold War era,

34-36; poverty in, 237, 263; princely states in, 17-19; regional affairs in,

33-34; religion and politics in, 14-19,

217-22; Russia and, 43, 148^9; SAARC and, 275-76; secularism in, 218, 235; significance in South
Asia of, 1, 5-6,

11-12; Sikhs and, 30-31; small states in relation to, 90; socioeconomic development of, 42-43;
Soviet Union and, 27-28, 29-30, 36, 147-48; Sri Lanka and, 33-34,106-7, 201-3; statefederal
government partnerships in,
263-64; terrorism and, 40, 287, 289,

293-94; United States and, 21, 25, 26,

30,43,52-53, 136-40, 154, 170-71,286,

289-90, 293-94. See also Kashmir Indian Independence Act (1947), 16 Indian National Congress,
13-16, 190-91,

216,219-20

individual, social role of, 215 Indo-Bangladeshi Treaty (1972), 74 Indonesia, 59 Indus Basin
Project, 76

International Monetary Fund, 236, 263

international relations, 7

Iran: and Baluchistan, 198; Pakistan and,

59-61,65

Islam: in Afghanistan, 113, 117-18, 120-21,

125; in Bangladesh, 226-27,229n5; and democracy, 6: in India, 13-19, 216-21; and Iran versus
Pakistan, 61; in Kashmir,

36-37, 51, 169; in Maldives, 104; militant, 39, 141^3; in Myanmar, 8]; and nationalism, 59-60; in
Pakistan,

49-51,55,59-60,61-62, 141-43,

222-25, 240, 292; prevalence in South Asia of, 1; reform and purification movements in, 215.
See also Taliban Islamic Development Bank, 85 island states, situation of, 100-101 Ispahani,
Mahnaz, 92

Jaish-e-Muhammad (Muhammad's Troops),

40,287

Jamaat-e-Islami, 55, 223,227 Jammu. See Kashmir Japan,84 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 50,
190,216-17,

226, 238-39 John, Aruni, 95 Johnson, Lyndon B., 26 Joshi, Nirmala, 149 Junagadh, 18

Kargil War, 39-40, 163, 171-72, 240-41

Karmal, Babrak, 117-18

Karzai, Hamid, 124-25, 195, 286

Kashmir, 161-80; Chinese-Pakistan

agreement on, 25-26, 56-57; Cold War and, 22; human rights violations in, 292; Indian and
Pakistani strategies concerning, 165-74, 191-92; insurgency in, 36-37, 51, 166, 283; as
international concern, 6,37,51, 161, 165, 169-70,

178, 287-88; Islam in, 36-37, 51, 169;

1965 war over, 26, 166; and nuclear weapons, 161-80; Partition and, 16, 51,

161; as princely state, 18-19; recent crises in, 162-64, 287-88; Siachen Glacier conflicts, 31-32;
Simla Agreement and, 28,47n39, 162, 169; terrorism in, 143-45, 286-87, 291; United States and,
139-40, 143-45

Index

305

Kautilya, 92

Kaviraj, S udipta, 215

Kennedy, John R, 53

Kerala, 237-38

Khalid, king of Saudi Arabia, 62

Khalili, Abdul Karim, 126

Khalistan,30-31,219,222

Khan, Abdul Qadeer, 58

Khan, Agha Muhammad Yahya, 239, 248

Khan, Ayub, 46n24, 53,56,223,239

Khan, Ishaq, 240

Khan, Ismail, 125

Khan, Liaquat Ali, 21,239

Khan, Sahibzada Yakub, 163

Kharat, Rajesh, 95

Kidwai, Khalid, 65

King, Larry, 147

Kissinger, Henry, 27, 53, 73, 86

Kohli,Atul, 199

Krishak Praja Party (KPP), 226

Krishna, Raj, 234

Kumaratunga, Chandrika Bandaranaike, 243

Kux, Dennis, 137

landlocked states, situation of, 91-92

language: in Afghanistan, 113; Bengali, 226; Dzongkha, 93; Indian state organization by, 236;
Urdu, 82

Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), 40,287

Lashkar-I-Jhangvi, 283

Law of the Sea Treaty (1982), 78

liberalization, 257-78; Bangladesh, 270-72; features of, 260; India, 35-36, 236-37,

261-65; Nepal, 272-73; Pakistan,

265-68; Sri Lanka, 244, 268-70

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LITE),

107,202-3,243-44,283,288

license permit raj, 234, 236, 261

Limaye, Satu, 139^40

Look East Policy, 151

Lowenthal, David, 100

LTTE. See Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

Mahasabha, 216

Mahendra, king of Nepal, 97, 245

Mahmoud (lieutenant general), 285

[Link]

Maldives, 100-104; coup attempts in, 102-3; economy of, 274-75; global warming and, 103; and
globalization, 274-75;

history of, 101; Islam in, 104; politics in,

252nl; security issues for, 101-3; South

Asian relations of, 103^ Malik, Mohan, 140, 152 Mao Zedong, 23 Maududi, Maulana, Abul, 223
Mengal,Ataullah, 197 microenterprise, 250,271 Middle East, 22 military: India, 234-35; Nepal,
246-47;

Pakistan, 238-42 Mirza, Iskander, 239 Missile Technology Control Regime, 57 Mohan, C. Raja,
138-39, 151-52 Mountbatten, Lord, 217 Mughals,215 Muhith,A. M.A.,72 mujahideen, 118-20
Mujib, Sheikh, 227 Mukti Bahini, 72, 193-94,270 Munir, Muhammad, 223 Musharraf, Pervez,
40-41,44, 55, 63, 83,

122, 141-^17, 164, 179, 225, 240^1, 267,

285-87,292 Muslim Family Laws Ordinance (1961),

223-24 Muslim League, 13-16, 50,190-91,216,

216-17,226 Muslims. See Islam

Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), 143,225 Myanmar (Burma), 78, 80-81

NAFTA. See North American Free Trade

Association Nagas, 198-201 Najibullah, 120 Nasr, Vali, 142 Nasreen, Taslima, 227 National
Congress Party, 34, 35 National Democratic Front for Bodoland

(NDFB), 94, 283 Naxalites.245,246 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 11-12,15-16, 20,22,

23-25,50,52,53,59,92,97,169, 218,
233-36

neorealism, 206-7 Nepal, 91-92,96-100; Bhutan and, 95;

Britain and, 96-97; China and, 24; civil

war in, 245^7,273, 288;

democratization in, 245-48; development

306

Index

in, 247; economy of, 247, 272-73; Ganges River and, 75; and globalization,

272-73; India and, 23, 96-98; liberalization in, 272-73; military in,

246-47; politics in, 245-^-8; poverty in,

247, 272; South Asian relations of, 98-99; terrorism in, 246; as zone of peace, 99 New Moore
Island, 78 Nixon, Richard, 27, 53, 73 Nonaligned Movement: Bangladesh and, 86; Bhutan and,
94; formation of, 24; India and, 21,25; Nepal and, 99; Sri Lanka and, 90,106 North American
Free Trade Association

(NAFTA), 277 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),

127

North Korea, 58 Northern Alliance, 122-23,284 Norway, 107, 203 Novak, Michael, 174 Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP),

28-29

nuclear weapons: effect on conflict/peace of,

164, 166-67; India and, 28-29, 32-33,

37-38, 163-64,170,174,176-77; Kashmir and, 161-80; Pakistan and,

32-33, 38, 46n24, 53-54,57-58,145-46,

163-68, 174-76, 241, 286; storage and readiness of, 174-75; U.S. policy on,

291; use doctrines for, 175-77

Objectives Resolution (1949), 223

Omar, Muhammad, 126

Operation Bluestar, 30

Operation Enduring Freedom, 54-56, 122,

286

opium, 129 Organization of the Islamic Conference

(QIC), 73, 85

Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza (Shah of Iran), 60,

65,198

Pak-Afghan Defense Council, 55 Pakistan, 49-67; Afghanistan and, 4-5,

54-55, 66, 116, 120, 127, 194-95; and Arab states, 62-63; background of, 14; and Baluchistan,
65,197-98; Bangladesh and, 81-83; China and, 25-26, 27,

56-58; Cold War and, 21-22; constitution

of, 223; democratization in, 238-42; development in, 241-42; economy of,

241-42, 265-68; ethnic/linguistic groups of, 49-50, 64-66; and globalization,

265-68; independence of, 11, 16-19,

49-50, 59; India and, 16-19, 26-28,

30-33, 36-37, 39-41, 44, 49-50,49-52,

136-37, 287-88; Indonesia and, 59; Iran and, 59-61, 65; Islam in, 49-51,55,

59-60,61-62,141-43,222-25,240,292; and Kargil War, 240-41; Kashmir strategies of, 165-68,

191-92; liberalization in, 265-68; military in,

238-42; North Korea and, 58; and nuclear weapons, 32-33, 38,46n24,

53-54, 57-58, 145^6, 163-68, 174-76,

241,286, 291; Partition and, 50-51,

189-92; politics in, 238-42; religion and politics in, 222-25; Russia and, 149; Saudi Arabia and,
59-63; Sindhis and,

64-65; Taliban and, 54-55, 120, 141,

195,284, 286; terrorism and, 40, 54-56,

140-41, 143^5, 173, 287, 298n57; Turkey and, 59-60; United States and,

21-22, 26,49, 52-56, 122, 136-37,

140-41, 146--47,154, 284-86,290-91,

294, 297n28. See also Kashmir Pakistan Muslim League (PML), 240 Pakistan People's Party
(PPP), 240, 248 Partition, 16-19,50-51, 161, 189-92,217 Pashtuns: Afghanistan and, 66, 116,
127,

194-95; and Kashmir, 19 Patel, Sadar Vallabhbhai, 239 People's Alliance (PA, Sri Lanka), 269
People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan

(PDPA), 117-18, 120 People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil

Eelam (PLOTE), 102-3 People's War Group, 246 Portugal, 23 Powell, Colin, 143,287
Prabhakaran, Vellupillai, 243 Pressler Amendment, 54 Punjab, 218-19 Putin, Vladimir, 148-49

Qazi,JavedAshraf, 285

quality of life. See social development

indicators Quit India campaign, 15

Index

307

Rabbani, Burhannudin, 125

Rahman, Mujibur, 72, 73, 74, 76,193,239,

248-49,270

Rahman, Zia-ur, 72, 81, 83, 227, 249, 270 Rajapakse, Mahinda, 107 Rajasingham-Senanayake,
Darini, 208 Rao, Narasimha, 151, 236 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 216,

220

Reagan, Ronald, 29, 30, 54 realism, 206-7 Regional Cooperation for Development

(RCD), 59-60 regions, definition of, 4 religion, 213-28; colonialism and, 214-17;

communal violence and, 214, 217;

democratization and, 233; Indian

conflicts involving, 14-19; political

significance of, 7; reform movements in,

214, See also Buddhism; Hindutva; Islam Rohingyas, 81 Russia: Afghanistan and, 115; India and,
43,

148-49; Pakistan and, 149. See also

Soviet Union

SAARC. See South Asian Association for

Regional Cooperation Sadat, Anwar, 121 Saraswati, Swami Dayanand, 215 Sattar,Abdus, 83
Saudi Arabia, 59-63 Sayyaf, Abdul Rasul, 126 Scobell, Andrew, 153 secularism, 218,235 Selth,
Andrew, 152 Sen, Amartya, 237,251 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 2, 3,

285

Shah of Iran. See Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza Shah, Prithvi Narayan, 96 Shah,Zahir, 116, 117, 124
Shamsul Huq, Muhammad, 71, 85 sharia (Islamic law), 224, 240 Sharif, Nawaz, 225, 240-41,
283,285 Shiv Sena, 213

Sikhs, 30-31, 198-200, 218-19, 222 Sikkim,23,92 Simla Agreement (1972), 28,47n39, 162,

169 Sindhis, 31,64-65

Singh, Hari, 18-19 Singh, Manmohan, 44 Sinha, Yashwant, 77,79 Sipah-e-Sahaba, Pakistan (SSP),
283 small states: defining, 89-90; India in

relation to, 90; international relations of,

91, 108; island, 100-101; landlocked,

91-92; and militancy, 90-91; security

issues for, 102-3 Snyder, Glenn, 166 social development indicators, 237-38,244,

250,273 Soekarno, 59 South Asia: academic study of, 2-4;

defining, 4-5; ethnic conflicts in, 207-9;

ethnic/linguistic groups of, 187-88; great

power foreign policies toward, 135-54;

overview of, 1; significance of, 5-7,135;

U.S. foreign policy and, 1-2, 294-95;

world perceptions of, 213 South Asian Association for Regional

Cooperation (SAARC), 4, 33;

Bangladesh and, 81, 83-84; Bhutan and,

95; India and, 33; Maldives and, 104;

Nepal and, 99; pros and cons of, 275-77;

small states and, 91 South Asian Free Trade Association

(SAFTA), 83,275-76 South Asian Preferential Trade Association

(SAPTA),83,275 South Asia Nuclear Weapons Free Zone

(SANWFZ), 167 South Talpatty Island, 78 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization

(SEATO), 22,52,67n6 Soviet Union: Afghanistan and, 116-17; and

Afghanistan war, 2, 5, 29, 118-19;

Bangladesh and, 85; India and, 20-21,

20-21, 22,27-28,29-30,36,147-48.

See also Russia special economic zones, 264 Sri Lanka, 100, 104-8; Britain and, 105;

civil war in, 243^4, 269-70, 288;

colonialism in, 105; democratization in,

242-44; development in, 244; economy

of, 244, 268-70; ethnic conflict in,

201-3; and globalization, 268-70; history

of, 104-5; India and, 33-34, 106-7,

201-3; liberalization in, 268-70; politics

in, 242-44
308 ;

Sri Lanka Freedom Party, 243

Suharto,59

suicide bombings, 243, 283

Taliban, 5, 120-23, 126; Bangladesh and, 79; Bin Laden and, 121; Pakistan and, 54-55,

120,141,195, 284, 286; al Qaeda and,

284; reestablishment of, 292; routing of,

286

Tamil National Alliance, 244 Tamils, 105, 106-7, 201-3, 243 Taraki, Nur Muhammad, 117-18
Tashkent Agreement (1966), 161 terrorism, 281-95; Bangladesh and, 78-79,

293; definition of, 282; India and, 40,

287, 289, 293-94; Kashmir and, 143-45,

286-87, 291; local, 282-83; Nepal and,

246; Pakistan and, 40, 54-56, 140-41,

143-45, 173, 287, 298n57; South Asia and, 6; state-sponsored, 282; statesupported, 282-83;
United States and,

122, 142, 203, 281-95. See also al Qaeda

Tibet, 24-25,94 trade: India-China, 152; India-U.S., 138. See

also liberalization

Treaty of Peace and Friendship (1950), 97 Treaty of Sugauli (1816), 96-97 Tripartite
Memorandum of Agreement

(1947), 97 Turkey, 59-60 tyranny of terrain, 92

United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA),

94,199,283 United National Party (UNP, Sri Lanka),

243, 269 United Nations: Bangladesh and, 85-86; and

Hyderabad, 18; and Kashmir, 19, 161 United People's Democratic Solidarity

(UPDS, Assam), 283

Index

United People's Liberation Front (UPLF,

Nepal), 245,282

United States: academic study of South Asia in, 2-4; Afghanistan and, 2, 5, 122-23,

126,128, 128,130; Bangladesh and, 84; China and, 27, 53; India and, 21, 25, 26,

30, 39-41,43,52-53,136-40,154,

170-71, 286,289-90,293-94; Kashmir and, 139^0,143-45; Pakistan and,

21-22,26,39-41,49,52-56,122,

136-37, 140-41, 146-47, 154,284-86,

290-91, 294, 297n28; South Asian policy of, 1-2, 294-95; and terrorism, 122, 142,

203,281-95

universities, South Asian studies in, 2-4

Untouchables, 216

Urdu,82

Usmani (lieutenant general), 285

USSR. See Soviet Union

Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 41,44, 83-84,

179-80,221 Verghese, E.G., 152 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 220-21 Vivekananda, Swami, 215

Wahhabbism, 120, 132nl4 Wajed, Hasina, 80, 249, 252,270 Wangchuk, Ugyen, 93 Wangshuk,
Jigme Singye, 273 Weber, Max, 233 Weymouth, Lally, 145, 146 Wickremesinghe, Ranil, 243
Wirsing, Robert, 197 World Bank, 244

World Trade Organization (WTO), 262,269,

272
Zhao Enlai, 56

Zia, Khaleda, 249,270

Zinni, Anthony, 40

f&

About the Contributors

Craig Baxter, a retired Foreign Service officer, is professor emeritus of politics and history at
Juniata College in Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His
books include Bangladesh: From a Nation to a State (1997). Baxter is also coauthor with Syedur
Rahman of Historical Dictionary of Bangladesh (2003). He was the founder and first president of
the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies.

Jonah Blank is chief policy advisor for South Asia to the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. Concurrently with his government service, he has taught anthropology
and South Asian studies at Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of
Advanced International Studies. He is author of Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and
Modernity among the Daudi Bohras (2001) and Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the
Ramayana through India (2000).

Maya Chadda is professor of political science at William Paterson University of New Jersey and
author of Building Democracy in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Nepal (2000); Ethnicity, Security,
and Separatism in South Asia (1997); and Paradox of Power: The United States Policy in
Southwest Asia (1987). Chadda is the U.S. editor of Global Review of Ethnopolitics (UK) and is
currently working on a volume to be entitled Ethnicity and Economic Development in India and
Sri Lanka.

Devin T. Hagerty is an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland,

Baltimore County. He was previously a senior lecturer in government and international
relations at the University of Sydney in Australia.

309
310

About the Contributors

Hagerty was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A.L.D. by the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy, and a B.A. by Rutgers University. He is the author of The
Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (1998), as well as (with Sumit
Ganguly) the forthcoming Fearful Symmetry: Indo-Pakistani Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear
Weapons. Hagerty is also the founding managing editor of a new Taylor and Francis journal,
Asian Security.

Herbert G. Hagerty is a member of the Senior Foreign Service (Ret.) and a graduate of the
National War College. He has a B.A. from Columbia College and an M.A. in South Asia regional
studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Hagerty served in New Delhi and Oslo as a political
officer, in Islamabad as political counselor, in London as political advisor to the commander in
chief of U.S. Naval Forces, Europe, and in Colombo as deputy chief of mission. His State
Department assignments included country officer for India; director of the Office of Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and Bangladesh Affairs; and director for Intelligence Liaison. Among other
publications, Hagerty has written a first-person account of the 1979 attack on the U.S. embassy
in Pakistan for Embassies under Siege (1995) published by the Institute for the Study of
Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

Timothy D. Hoyt is an associate professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College,
teaching about strategy, terrorism, contemporary conflict, and South Asian security. In October
2003 he testified before two subcommittees of the House Committee on International
Relations regarding terrorism in South Asia. He is the author of Military Industries and Regional
Power (forthcoming), in addition to numerous chapters and articles on terrorism, nuclear
proliferation, and security in the developing world. Hoyt is beginning work on technology and
international security and a coauthored volume on strategy and the global war on terrorism.

Gaurav Kampani is a senior research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in
Monterey, California. Kampani is an expert on South Asian affairs. His publications span a wide
range of media and locales, including articles in numerous U.S. academic journals and
periodicals. He has been cornmissioned by the Department of Defense's Defense Threat
Reduction Agency to conduct research on South Asian political stability and relations between
India and Pakistan, and he is a frequent commentator and analyst for the news media. Kampani
was previously a research assistant at the United States Institute of Peace and a Herbert
Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C.

Peter R. Lavoy is director of the Center for Contemporary Conflict at the Naval Postgraduate
School. He coedited Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological
and Chemical Weapons (2000). His forthcoming books are Learning to Live with the Bomb: India
and Nuclear Weapons, 1947-2002 and an edited volume titled Asymmetric Warfare in South
Asia: Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict. During 1998 to

2000 he worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, serving as director for counter-
proliferation policy and then principal director for requirements, plans and counterproliferation
policy. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A.
in government from Oberlin College.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a Chennai, India-based analyst of South Asian politics and security
interested in the intersection of security, governance, and identity politics, in addition to
women in politics and security. She has written State and Nation in South Asia (2001) and
coedited Re-distribution of Authority: A Cross-Regional Perspective (2000). Her forthcoming
book is titled A Clearing in the Thicket: Women, Security, South Asia. Educated at the University
of Bombay, Syracuse University, and the University of Illinois, Rajagopalan has taught at
Michigan State University, Yale University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Anupam Srivastava is the codirector of the South Asia Program at the Center for International
Trade and Security, University of Georgia. Srivastava teaches courses on Asian and South Asian
security and political economy within the university's School of Public and International Affairs.
He has provided briefings on U.S.-South Asia technology-security issues to various government
agencies and presented his research at numerous international academic and policy forums. He
has published widely in books and policy journals, appears regularly on the BBC and Voice of
America, and is quoted in several mainline U.S. and international newspapers.

David Taylor has been vice provost (academic development) at the Aga Khan University in
Karachi since 2002. Before that, he was for thirty-two years on the faculty of the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A political scientist and historian, he was
educated at the Universities of Cambridge and London. He has spent extended periods in South
Asia and has been a visiting scholar at Panjab University (Chandigarh) and Jawaharlal Nehru
University (New Delhi). He has published regularly on the history and politics of India and
Pakistan.
312

About the Contributors

Robert Wirsing is a member of the faculty of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies,
Honolulu, Hawaii. A specialist on South Asian politics and international relations, he has made
over thirty research trips to the South Asian region since 1965. His publications include Kashmir
in the Shadow of War (2002); India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute (1994); and Pakistan's
Security under Zia, 1977-1988 (1991).