Softening Line of Control

MUCH is being said, and made, of the moves to soften the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, and we are being asked to believe that they bear the promise of blissful consequences, social and political. Let us try to read between the lines and figure out their inner meaning.

The border between the United States and Canada is soft. Persons from one side can enter the other without documentation other than a photo ID, such as a driving license. If the quantity of things they are bringing in is excessive, they will pay duty. They can stay in the host country as long as they wish, and if they want to work there, they will get the necessary permit without much of a hassle. Borders are even softer in the European Union. There is free movement of persons, goods, capital, businesses, and jobs between the member countries.

Until recently, and for many years, the border between Pakistan and India was truly forbidding. Overland movement of persons or goods between them was not permitted. Travel by air remained suspended for periods of time. Entry visas were hard to get. The talk of softening their borders began with their “Islamabad Declaration” of January 2004.

Since shortly after this event a bus service between Lahore and Delhi has been operating. Another one between Amritsar and Nankana Sahib, and two or more railroad links, may be established in the near future. There has been a bit more of trade through the Wagah-Atari border in recent months. But it is still a long way from being as soft as even the American-Canadian border.

Let us now turn to the LoC in Kashmir. A bus service between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar began in April 2005 and, until a day or two before the earthquake of October 8, it had made 14 trips back and forth. Travellers had to have the required travel documents and their names had to have been cleared by authorities at their destination. The bus was not always full. As many as 30 persons may have taken the bus each time, in which case a total of 420 persons may have travelled each way between the two parts of Kashmir during a period of six months. This was surely a modest number, indicating a rather limited interest on the part of people on either side to visit folks on the other.

The devastating earthquake of October 8 is thought to have created new, and urgent, reasons for further softening the LoC. It will allow divided families to meet and share each other’s sorrows and assist each other in the tasks of reconstruction. There is also the expectation in some quarters that contact between Kashmiris from the two sides, thus made easier and more frequent, will somehow bring the governments of India and Pakistan closer to a final settlement of the Kashmir issue.

Speaking in Muzaffarabad on October 18, General Musharraf declared that his government was ready to open up the LoC and let any number of persons cross over, meet relatives, and assist them in their reconstruction efforts. He thought political leaders on both sides should also have increased interaction to help the process of reconstruction. The Line of Control could thus be made “irrelevant.”

In a newspaper interview on October 30, the general said the earthquake had offered an opportunity for India and Pakistan to move forward towards a final Kashmir settlement. He went on to call for demilitarization of the territory, presumably, on both sides of the LoC.

The editors of this newspaper (November 1) believe that comradeship in adversity gives Pakistan and India an opportunity to join hands in providing relief to the earthquake victims and, in the process, strengthen peace and stability in South Asia. They hope the easing of travel across the LoC, now being undertaken, will continue.

New Delhi is not overflowing with enthusiasm over Pakistani proposals. While he was still India’s foreign minister, Natwar Singh, dismissed Musharraf’s call for demilitarization, saying that Pakistani spokesmen talked too much, and that there was a statement from them every second day.

The Indians have no intention of opening up the entire Line of Control and making it “irrelevant.” They have agreed to set up five points at which authorized persons from either side may cross over to the other. The authorization procedure will not become perfunctory. Intending travellers will have to make applications on prescribed forms, provide the required information and documentation, and submit them to designated authorities. Particulars of the approved persons will then be sent to designated authorities on the other side and, if approved at that end, the applicants will be allowed to go.

In order to understand the real significance (assuming that there is some) of all that is being said and done, a few elements in the discourse and action under way should be considered. First, the devastation wrought by the earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir is incredibly massive and assistance is being sought and received from all over the world for relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. Damage on the Indian side is not even remotely comparable; it is minor, judging by the fact that nobody anywhere (except Pakistan) is talking about it. The government of India is neither saying much nor seeking external help.

The Indians are setting up relief camps at the five designated points on the LoC, some of them for persons who are trapped in places on the Pakistani side which are easier to reach from the Indian side. This is good and thoughtful of them. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has said that Pakistan will establish similar relief camps on its side to extend help to the stricken Kashmiris on the Indian side. The other day 30 Indian truckloads of supplies were delivered across the LoC in Azad Kashmir, and one Pakistani truck was unloaded on the Indian side. Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, our information minister, has announced his intention of taking 30 trucks of relief supplies to Kashmiris on the Indian side and visiting the whole region.

This is hard to understand. If the problem on the Indian side is minor, if India is resourceful enough to offer Pakistan $25 million plus a lot in kind, if Pakistan is in dire need of external assistance, what business do the Pakistani authorities have to be setting up relief camps for Kashmiris on the Indian side or sending truckloads of supplies for them? If it is some kind of a pride, an attempt to appear as givers and not only as takers vis-a-vis India, it is immature and misplaced.

The Line of Control should be opened up, it is said, so that divided families can grieve together and help each other rebuild. It would help intelligent discussion if we had some idea of the numbers involved, even an approximate figure for these divided families. The great majority of persons in Pakistani Kashmir are Punjabi-speaking people whereas most of them on the Indian side speak Kashmiri. The possibility of persons belonging to the same family, but speaking two different languages, is obviously slim.

I cannot imagine that persons belonging to places in Pakistani Kashmir migrated to the Indian side after the first ceasefire in 1949 when the dividing line was first created. Some Kashmiris from the Indian side did move to Pakistan during the war and at various times after the ceasefire. It is my understanding that most of them came to Lahore, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Rawalpindi, and other larger towns in Punjab. Few of them, if any, went to Azad Kashmir. But note that those who did go to Azad Kashmir have been divided and away from any families they had left behind for a very long time; in some cases for 50 or more years. The children and grandchildren of the original migrants may now have no more than a hazy notion of their “relatives” on the other side.

Let us assume for the moment that I am being excessively cautious, and that there are in fact several hundred divided families who would want to get together. Let us say that some persons from the Indian side, authorized to cross the line, have travelled to Muzaffarabad, asked around in tent settlements, located their relatives, hugged and cried with them, and even comforted them to some degree. What then?

Someone will have to figure out where these visitors will stay and who will feed them. Surely their relatives, who depend upon public authorities or donors for their food and shelter, cannot do anything in this regard. It is said that these visitors will help with the tasks of reconstruction. I am not sure how that will be. It depends on where the responsibility for rehabilitation and reconstruction is going to be placed, and whether the stricken and homeless Kashmiris will have a role in it.

I have read at some place that Muzaffarabad will be rebuilt not on its original site but some distance away. The same may be done with other towns. It will then not be a matter of putting fallen homes and buildings back on their original foundations. An entirely new town will be built. It is evident to me that government engineers and contractors will do the job in which case the currently displaced persons, the future occupants of this town, will have little or no part in this enterprise, except perhaps as paid manual workers or as tradesmen (masons, carpenters, electricians, etc.) if they have the needed skills. Their visiting relatives, if they have not gone back home already, will have even less to do.

It seems to me that the establishment of five crossing points on the Line of Control has no obvious relevance to the task of reconstruction in Pakistani Kashmir. Nor does it have any apparent connection with a final resolution of the “core issue” in Pakistan-India relations. It is essentially one more of the CBMs (confidence building measures) that the two governments have been putting in place to blunt the edge of hostility that has characterized their relations for 50 years.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, US. E-Mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

Faith and conscience

PRESIDENT Bush has made three important promises on foreign aid. In 2002 he announced plans for a Millennium Challenge Account that would dispense aid to a short list of poor countries that had good policies.

The following year, in his State of the Union speech, Mr Bush announced a new international effort against Aids. In June of this year, Mr Bush promised to double US assistance to Africa. Taken together, these pledges are not enough to shift the United States from its position at the bottom of the ranking of donors when measuring aid as a share of gross domestic product. But they do promise a reversal of the decline in US foreign assistance during the 1990s as well as some fresh thinking on how aid should be spent. Unfortunately, the pledges aren’t being fully implemented.

The record is best on Aids. Mr Bush promised to spend $15 billion over five years and is almost on track. He secured a total of $5.2 billion from Congress in the first two years and seems likely to get nearly all of the $3.2 billion he has requested for this year. The Aids czar’s office initially faced justified uproar over its slowness in approving the use of cheap, generic antiretroviral drugs and less-justified uproar over its insistence that sexual abstinence should play a role in Aids prevention.

But the office is now procuring generics, and its operations are efficiently decentralized (compared with traditional U.S. assistance programmes). US officials based in recipient countries choose which Aids initiatives to support. Much of the money flows through low-cost local organizations rather than expensive US-based contractors.

The Millennium Challenge Account hasn’t fared as well. The concept is great: Direct money to a few countries with effective governments, both because these are most likely to spend the money well and because this may motivate other countries to improve their policies. But the administration took two years to secure legislation setting up the programme, and its first boss quit after an unsuccessful tenure.

As a result, Mr Bush’s pledge that the account would be sending $5 billion a year to poor countries by 2006 will not be realized. The account has made commitments amounting to about $200 million annually for the next five years. Actual disbursements have been infinitesimal. So Congress is set to appropriate just $1.77 billion for the current fiscal year, a third of Mr. Bush’s target.

Because the Millennium Challenge Account is behind schedule, Mr Bush’s most recent pledge — to double aid to Africa by 2010 — is not on track either. That would involve a $4.3 billion increase over five years; according to the anti-poverty group Bread for the World, Congress is set to deliver an increase this year of about $400 million.

—The Washington Post

Misuse of religion and laws

MOST laws enacted after independence to prevent crime have, ironically, given rise to bigger crimes. And when it comes to offences relating to religion, the new laws or stiffer punishments under old laws have, in addition, fostered falsehood, hypocrisy and hatred.

The latest testimony of this came on November 11 at Sangla Hill where three churches and houses of their pastors, hostels for nuns and nurses and a convent school in which 650 girls studied — among them more Muslims than Christians — were burnt. In a relieving departure from past agitations engineered on rumours of blasphemy or desecration, there was no blood shed amid the destruction.

The events preceding the trouble in Sangla Hill, a town in the hot central Punjab plains which has nothing hilly about it, have a familiar ring. A rumour spread that Yusuf Masih, a Christian, had set alight a religious book depot which reduced to ashes some copies of the Holy Quran as well. Calls for protest and revenge went out from the mosques and the following day a rampaging mob of 3,000 went on a burning spree.

Yusuf Masih had to be either mentally deranged or, as we are made to believe in such circumstances, a RAW agent to have set fire to the book shop named Quran Mahal next to a madressah. Since he is said to be neither, the version of the leaders of the Christian community (numbering no more than 300 families in the town) gets credence that the mischief was done by Yusuf’s Muslim gambling companions to avoid paying a large sum of money they owed to him. The fire was either accidental or they themselves lit it.

That is about the motive. A more sordid aspect of the episode is that the administration took no action against the use of the pulpit and public address system of the mosques to incite passions nor did it take any measures to protect the churches and other Christian property during the hours a menacing mob was gathering. Neither the police nor the nazim has been held to account.

In fact the news reports make no mention of the nazim playing any role at all either in calming the mob or in preventing arson. Under Musharraf’s power-to-the-people system it is the nazim who is responsible for law and order. The use of the mosque loudspeaker for a purpose other than azan is illegal. Section 144 should have been instantly imposed to prevent on illegal assembly once calls for strike and protests were broadcast.

Up to the time General Ziaul Haq appeared on the scene as a standard-bearer of Islam and its worldwide renaissance, Pakistan’s penal code contained comprehensive provisions (Sections 295-298) and adequate sentences to punish offences relating to religion like destroying or defiling a place of worship or a sacred object, maliciously outraging or wounding of religious feelings, disturbing a religious assembly or worship and trespassing in a place of worship or graveyard. The sentence ranged from one to two years of imprisonment.

Come Ziaul Haq, the punishment for hurting religious feelings was raised to 10 years’ imprisonment and two new sections were added to the penal code laying down imprisonment for life for desecrating a copy of the Holy Quran or of an extract from it (Section 295-B) and death, or life imprisonment, for defiling the sacred name of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) contained in Section 295-C.

Also added to the penal code were two more sections — 298-B and 298-C — specifically to punish Ahmadis if they were to pose as Muslims or use certain epithets or titles like calling their place of worship “masjid” and the call to prayer azan. (The harassment and agony that these laws continue to inflict on the Ahmadis is another story).

Before Ziaul Haq’s laws, hardly ever was anyone accused of defiling the Quran or the sacred name of the Prophet. A spate of such allegations with accompanying murders and arson was let loose after the penalty for these offences was enhanced to death or life imprisonment. The victims invariably have been the minorities, eccentrics and also, surprisingly, the servants of humanity (like Akhtar Hameed Khan) who held that the clergy was alien to Islamic doctrine and burdensome for Muslim society.

Because of the capital punishment and a sweeping definition of defiling (“by word either spoken or written, or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation directly or indirectly”) the law has become an instrument for the persecution of the weak and vulnerable.

Don’t the proponents of this law find it agonizing that never, not even once as far as one can recall, in all these years has a Muslim been accused of defiling a church or a mandir or the Bible or Gita? Or of outraging the religious feelings of the Christians and Hindus by insulting Jesus Christ or Krishna? After all, this too is an offence under our penal code though carrying lesser punishment. And, conversely, what do the minorities (who are but three per cent of the population) stand to gain by defiling frequently and openly the holy personages and scriptures of the majority?

The Christians of Sangla Hill are lucky to have got away lightly with burnt churches and homes though it is a hard blow for the country at a time it is wooing the Christian world to give money for repairing the earthquake damage. The Christian communities in Bahawalpur, Khanewal, Murree, Islamabad and elsewhere in recent times have been subjected to much greater violence.

The Christians are not alone in suffering the prejudice and fury generated by religious laws. Some years ago, three Hindus were murdered and five of their temples in far-away Dalbandin were vandalized when an old and illiterate Hindu woman was allegedly seen distributing sweets wrapped in a newspaper on which Quranic verses were printed.

Some one in the government should feel compelled to explain now after four years whether the perpetrators of multiple murders in Bahawalpur and Dalbandin or the officials responsible for hauling them up or the courts duty bound to punish them have been held to account. Perhaps no one has been in these two cases nor in any other before or after that. When the minorities are aggrieved their tormentors enjoy immunity and the officials have no fear of accountability.

Seldom has a case alleging the desecration of the Holy Quran or defilement of the Prophet’s name resulted in conviction or acquittal of the defiler or insulter. He is either lynched in public or murdered while in judicial custody or has sought asylum abroad. No one has been hanged for sure but the damage done to the concerned family and to the country as a whole is enormous and irreversible.

Here we can recall just one such case. Four Ahmadis, members of a rural land-owning family, were tried in a Mianwali court of sessions on the complaint of a villager that they had “uttered derogatory words against the Holy Prophet (PBUH)”. At the end of a long trial, the judge found that there was no evidence against the accused, they had been implicated falsely and that the complainant had “made the sentiment of the Muslims as a tool for worldly benefit and also used the name of Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) for this purpose”. The accused were in jail for seven years. Their acquittal notwithstanding the complainant’s “worldly purpose” which was to drive them out of the village and capture its headship was achieved.

Maybe one day the conscience of the people and the legislators and even of the clerics will revolt against these laws that are so arbitrary, so oppressive and yet enacted in the name of one who came as a mercy for entire mankind.