Times (London)
May 30 1998
ARMS CRISIS
Kashmir threats mere rhetoric, Christopher Thomas reports
in Islamabad
Pakistani war drums fail to unnerve
Delhi
PAKISTANIS awoke yesterday to a country that seemed on
the verge of war. The official propaganda machine has
justified Thursday's five nuclear explosions, and draconian
measures imposed under a subsequent state of emergency,
by warning of Indian aggression in Kashmir. The largely
illiterate population smells a battle coming.
It is a contrived crisis. India has made no special troop
deployments, aside from some strengthening of positions in
the immediate border areas to thwart a traditional springtime
movement of armed militants across the mountains from
Pakistan. The Islamic state is believed to have moved its new
Ghauri missiles to border areas, but more for show than
necessity.
Villages on both sides of the 1947 ceasefire line, later slightly
modified and renamed the line of actual control, occupy the
most dangerous border region in the world, much of it
snaking through valleys and mountains populated by
shepherds living in primitive conditions, their lives
overshadowed by what they are told might be an imminent
Indian invasion. Sometimes they hear mortars, shelling and
rifle fire as soldiers aim across the valleys at each other from
bunkers, hoping to kill an enemy soldier or two, as they have
for years. There have been reports of Indian commandos
crossing into Pakistani territory and attacking villages, which
Delhi denies.
There is a danger of the two sides stumbling into war, but it
does not seem to be coming yet, despite Pakistan's feverish
beating of the war drums for domestic political reasons. The
poor are being told they must become poorer to save their
Islamic nation from Hindu aggression. They have thus been
dancing in the streets.
Feudal landlords and the elite business classes are less joyful -
their pockets risk being depleted by a collapse in domestic
and international confidence in the economy. They know the
warmongering is political rhetoric: if it were more they would
be building shelters or moving their families to London,
regarded by many rich Pakistanis as a second home. Only the
illiterate poor, at the mercy of government-run television and
radio news, think they may be honoured with the opportunity
to die. This is not the mood in India, where jubilation over the
bomb is fading as the cost begins to dawn. There is no talk
of war in Delhi. The sound of tom-toms beating furiously in
Islamabad is not being taken seriously - not yet, anyway.
India's Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, said yesterday
that Pakistan's tests posed no new threat to the nation's
security and added that Delhi had no intention of joining an
arms race.
But President Tarar of Pakistan, in announcing a state of
emergency, said he was satisfied national security was
threatened by "war or external aggression".
India's army chief, General V.P. Malik, said there was "no
warlike situation" on either side. Delhi's Defence Ministry
called in defence attach‚s of embassies to deny Pakistani
claims of planned Indian aggression. Officials called the
allegations "disinformation". General Malik was not surprised
that Pakistan had tested its nuclear devices in the wake of the
Indian tests. "If there was any ambiguity earlier about their
nuclear capability, that no longer exists. It's better this way."
There has been no official criticism of Pakistan: India says
the Islamic state has every right to test nuclear devices. But
there are fears that nuclear weapons will be under the control
of the army chief - one of the three main centres of power,
with the President and the Prime Minister - rather than
civilians. Hardliners in the ISI, the military intelligence wing,
exert a decisive influence over Kashmir policy and would
doubtless favour using nuclear weapons in a battlefield crisis.
India, conversely, plans to establish a command and control
structure that will leave the Government firmly in control.
The Indian armed forces are strictly apolitical - unlike in
Pakistan.
Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistani Prime Minister, alarmed India by
making clear that nuclear weapons might be used in response
to either a nuclear or a conventional weapons threat. Pakistan
will be ready to use nuclear weapons to compensate for its
inferiority in conventional arms. If war comes, it is likely to
go nuclear.
Geneva: Munir Akram, Pakistan's envoy to the United
Nations-backed Conference on Disarmament, called
yesterday for a global arms negotiating body to help to avert
an all-out nuclear arms race in South Asia, and to stabilise the
region. (Reuters)
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