And, as everyone knows, the police always tries to play down the people killed. So the group went house to house interviewing the victims and found that the number was 20,000 higher, most of them civilians.
The `official death toll in Kashmir is 41,000, killed between January 1, 1990, and October 31, 2006, out of whom 19,987 were said to be "insurgents" , 16,253 civilians and 4,982 soldiers. But anybody looking at the ratios would protest that they are skewed in favour of a bureaucratic assessment favouring the official position in New Delhi. The highest number of dead, according to this report, are among the "insurgents" , many of them, one is told, from across the border from Pakistan. Most Indians, it should be noted, believe their government's "official" view that there would have been no insurgency if it had not been for Pakistan `s `cross-border' infiltration policies.
It is natural for officials to claim fewer civilians dead than the "insurgents" . It assumes that the security forces were so careful and conscientious that they targeted the rebels without killing the innocent population. Only about 5,000 dead among the troops was thought to be credible on the basis of the argument that in such uprisings it is the lightly armed and ill-protected men who die more easily. But the Indian human rights group has tried to set the record straight by putting the real figure closer to what might really have happened.
On the Pakistani side, the same sort of "fiddle" is to be expected. For instance, the jihadi organisations will be inclined to put the number of people killed by the Indian troops much higher, and they will also add the figures for rapes and serious injuries in custody that went on as a part of the war. One has heard figures upwards of one hundred thousand. Similarly, the more aggressive jihadi militias in Pakistan would like to place the number of troops they killed at a much higher level. In fact, a high figure would prove their effectiveness as `freedom-Fighters' . That is how, for a long decade and a half, the `official broadcasts' on both sides of the border spread two diametrically opposed stories of what was happening in Kashmir, and the marker of the "death toll" was their main weapon.
The death toll tells a tragic tale of a population caught between two states not able to live peacefully together. At first there was no justice; later on, there was no realism. Two opposed nationalisms were fashioned in New Delhi and Islamabad and the "facts" related to Kashmir were made pivotal to them. India said it had annexed Kashmir correctly and wanted Pakistan to vacate Azad Kashmir. But India's claim was superseded by the UN Security Council resolutions that advised a plebiscite to assess which country the Kashmiris would like to join.
There is nothing more delusive than morality in world politics.
Pakistani nationalism was stiffened by the `morality' of the UN resolutions. Therefore, despite its smaller resource-base, it went on starting wars with India that it could not finish to its advantage.
When it was finally broken in the process, it signed the Simla Agreement, legally more binding than a UN resolution under Chapter Six, which now stood superseded. But Pakistan paid no heed, threw realism to the winds and fuelled a `low-intensity conflict' in Kashmir in 1990.
The death figures given above are the wages of this conflict. It covered no one with glory. India emerged from it as a state guilty of horrible human rights violations. Some honest Indians have objected to the way New Delhi allowed the people of Kashmir to become permanently alienated from India. On the Pakistani side, reality has also jolted the state and it doesn't want to live in the fantasy of jihad any more. During this jihad, India broke free from its low-growth Nehruvian paradigm to achieve economic success; Pakistan tumbled from its high-growth position to the status of a failing state with a jihadi blowback it could not cope with.
Has the death toll been in vain? So far, yes. But if the new generations in India make a proper assessment of how the world has changed they can actually use the highly sophisticated political consciousness of the Kashmiris "” who are neither besotted with Pakistan's Islam nor forgetful of India `s power "” to bring about a new era of economic prosperity for both the Valley and Azad Kashmir. *
SECOND EDITORIAL: PPP: a pro-Musharraf party?
An unwitting piece of wisdom from the minister of parliamentary affairs, Dr Sher Afgan Niazi, can clear the political mind in Islamabad. He says the Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarians
(PPPP) will contest the 2007 general elections as a "pro-Musharraf" party because Benazir Bhutto is a `wise politician and wants to maintain relations with the establishment' . (Moderator; wisdom does not mean joining the evil coup plotter"¦support on a issue and
supporting the military regime are two different issues"¦Benazir would be wise to realize that musharaf is no friend of hers or her partys"¦)
Dr Afgan is the one-minute expert on political trends in Pakistan. He was probably put in the mind of getting General Musharraf and Ms Bhutto together because of the PPPP's vote for the Women's Protection Bill (WPB) when the ruling PMLQ was at sixes and sevens and confused
about being in the camp of a liberal president. Ms Bhutto emerged as a wise opposition, not just because of her ability to `connect' with the establishment, but also because of her ability to adhere to her party's principles without caring for the politics of passing the law. Let Dr Afgan consider this proposition: since the PMLQ was so tortured about the WPB, should it be more inclined to part ways with Gen Musharraf who can't seem to abandon the political worldview of
the PPPP? *
Khawaja Ikram Ul Haq
70 Affendi Colony
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Email:
ihaq1@isb.paknet. com.pkTel: 9251-4840075