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mehrauli · 4 years

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Notes on Kashmir history

The way I learned about the history of Kashmir was actually living there. I’d go to the bookstores and just read books there, so I don’t have an on-hand list of online resources. Also, people would tell me stuff, which I would then investigate or not. This is going to be almost entirely from memory, based on not-that-much research, and so it’ll have huge omissions and possibly errors simply because I do not know those things. The point of this isn’t so you can read this and call yourself an expert, it’s so you know what to ask for further questions. Also, if I do link to big books people won’t read them, but maybe they will read a post.

Kashmir’s history is contentious because hindus have made many attempts to recuperate its history in order to justify their settler colonialism. The hindu mythification of Kashmir is intense. So hindus will tell you a very different story about this than anyone else. Some articles on, for example, wikipedia, consult these hindu myths as real history. This is something to be aware of when doing independent research on Kashmir.

Kashmir is not a part of India, never has been, and never will be.

Islamification

As far as I know, Islam was first introduced to Kashmir by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1015, who did not make serious progress conquering it but did station some Muslims on the outskirts of the valley. Marco Polo (who traveled asia in the late 1200s) reports that the butcher castes in Kashmir were all Muslims. This is consistent with other evidence that Kashmir’s islamification took place over several centuries, and was a bottom-up affair; butchers are a low-caste group.

The first Muslim ruler of Kashmir was Rinchan (r. 1320-1323). He was an heir to a Buddhist dynasty, who considered a conversion into shaivism, which was a form of brahminism which had entered Kashmir somewhere around the time of Muhammad of Ghazni. However he was turned away from the brahmins who considered him to be low-caste. Brahmins at this time called Buddhism “the religion of the Shudras”.

Rinchan accepted Islam instead, and took the name Sadruddin Shah, under the tutelage of the Sufi missionary Bulbul Shah. The first mosque in Kashmir was a converted Buddhist temple which instututed a twice-daily charity meal. To this day, inter-dining between castes is still a really big deal in a lot of parts of India.

Throughout the late 1300s, Sufi missionaries were active throughout Kashmir including Ali Hamidani. Other important figures include Lal Ded, who was a Shaivite poet who has been disowned by Hindus due to her emphasis on social reform and embraced by Muslims for the same reason. Ded is said to have been incredibly influential to Nund Rishi, AKA Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, who started the Rishi Sufi order, who were social renunciates who lived in caves and helped popularise Islam.

I can find almost nothing online about this subject. There is one story that I remember about Hamidani meeting Nund Rishi. In the story, the other sayyids warn Hamidani not to meet with Nund Rishi, because he is not a sayyid and had a very unorthodox practice. The point of the story is that Hamidani ignores this advice and with his help, Nund Rishi becomes one of the most important figures in the Islamification of Kashmir. I like the story, because it emphasises the importance of social equality in the spread of Islam throughout Kashmir.

Hamidani writes elsewhere, in Volume 10 of his Dhakhirat:

One feels proud of one's self on the basis of one's pedigree, in comparison to others who are better than he as regards to knowledge and action. He understands others as his slaves. His eyes are full of anger. And the signs of his malevolence are lucid in his actions. He can cure this disease, if he realises that it is foolish to understand others low on the basis of pedigree.

Hamidani’s Dhakhirat ul Mulk is still read from mosques in Kashmir to this day.

Dogra Empire (1846-1952)

Kashmir never came directly under British rule. They won it in a war against the Sikhs and immediately sold it to a petty tyrant named Gulab Singh who instituted an overt hindu theocracy, which was characterised by unreasonable taxation, arbitrary rules, etc. During this period the brahmins, predictably, enjoyed vast social and political privileges.

As it was explained to me by a Kashmiri friend of mine, an Englishman by the name of Robert Thorpe is considered by Kashmiris to be the “first martyr” of the freedom struggle. He documented the horrific circumstances that Kashmiris lived under and called for Kashmir to come under British rule. I have a copy of this PDF, you can probably find it online yourself if you look. The circumstances he describes are absolutely horrific and mirror . Some excerpts on this post: [x]

(Some of the above excerpts are from Arthur Brinckman, a missionary who documented the same thing around the same time. My pdf is a compilation of their two papers.)

Legend has it that Thorpe was assassinated by the Dogras shortly after publishing his paper, Cashmere Misgovernment.

After Thorpe’s death, there was a famine in which half to three fifths of the population of the valley died. Not a single brahmin died of starvation during this period. It is documented in more detail in the book Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects.

Property remained owned by the small hindu minority, who functioned as feudal lords stipulating various forms of untouchability which are common in India as well.

Partition and the Plebiscite

The British only directly controlled about 62% of British India. The rest consisted of Princely States.

The gist of this is that during partition, most of the petty monarchies unconditionally surrendered to, and were annexed by, India or Pakistan. One notable exception to this was Hyderabad, which was forcefully invaded by India which proceeded to slaughter tens to hundreds of thousands of people (estimates vary) because its ruler was Muslim, but it was geographically isolated from Pakistan.

I don’t want to dwell on Kashmir’s case here too much because I’m not that familiar with it. I don’t personally care about the history or the legal arguments. I’ve been to Kashmir and it is manifestly obvious that Kashmir is not and should not be a part of India. Not a single person in Kashmir wants anything to do with India. When you say something to the effect that Kashmir will be free in Kashmir, everyone stops what they’re doing to say “inshallah”. It is not the unenthusiastic lackadaisical “inshallah” of the Arabs. It is an enthusiastic punctuation mark to whatever you just said, which comes powerfully from the gut, a prayer in its own right, as if to flag it as important in God’s inbox. Almost like how African-Americans can use “amen” sometimes.

Muslims in India are an outlaw class. As far as we are concerned, there is, properly speaking, no law. This is doubly so in Kashmir. If you walk around downtown Sirinagar, you’ll see a huge number of blind people and amputees, while most shops or pharmacies are raising money for charities for the blind. This is because the Indian army has a policy of shooting Kashmiri protesters in the eyes. It is not secret. The brutality of the Indian occupation is on full display. Most of the tourists to Kashmir are Indian and the brutality is part of the attraction.

So I don’t care whatever horseshit “laws” India rationalises its occupation with. India should fucking burn for what it’s done to Kashmir.

The short version of this story is, though, that Kashmir’s then-petty tyrant agreed to a temporary Indian presence contingent on an eventual plebiscite regarding whether Kashmir would go to India, Pakistan, or remain independent. Or something. I cannot stress how little I care about this.

The fact that a plebiscite was part of the original arrangement, though, does influence activism both in Kashmir and India as well as Pakistan. Pakistan, for its part, has agreed to a plebiscite in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir (PAK) as soon as India allows it to happen in IOK.

Jammu, which is a city south of the Kashmir valley proper, saw the worst violence of the partition, worse even than the annexation of Hyderabad (though, again, estimates vary in both cases and it could go either way). Unlike the case of Hyderabad, the violence in Jammu was organised by Hindu supremacist groups including RSS, the political arm of which is the current ruling party of India, the BJP. After the violence, Jammu has gone from being Muslim-majority at time of partition to 7.1% Muslim at the time of the 2011 census.

Indian Rule

I am also not too familiar with anything here up until the 90′s or so. One important figure to know here is Maqbool Bhatt, a charismatic revolutionary who co-founded the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. He was a guerilla organiser who crossed the line of control into Pakistan “illegally” several times in order to work towards an independent Kashmir.

One event that gets disproportionate attention is the exodus of the brahmins from Kashmir. The early 90s were the start of the current insurgency, and political assassinations were carried out against people like local administrators and other active collaborators with the Indian colonial regime. brahmins were disproportionately represented among these people, because duh of course they were. But Muslim collaborators were targeted by these groups just the same. While the number of brahmins to be killed during this period was about 2-300, thousands of Kashmiris were killed by the colonial state which of course did target Muslims exclusively.

Some, not all, brahmins left Kashmir during this period. A few remain in Sirinagar, they own shops and stuff, I bought a pencil from one. They were never numerous because brahmins are never numerous. Since then, though they for their part mostly do not want to return and are well provided for in India and the western diaspora, Much of India’s current campaign of settler colonialism is rationalised as an effort to resttle them in Kashmir. The argument falls apart, however, as they themselves have no such agenda. If they really wanted to go back, they would just go back. They do not face communal violence. In addition, India has never made such an effort to resettle victims of real pogroms, like the Bombay Riots or the Delhi Pogrom earlier this year.

In response to this insurgency, the Indian government began to heavily promote a “pilgrimage” to the Amarnath cave as a tourist attraction. The Amarnath "pilgrims” are the worst and most obnoxious people I have ever met in my entire life. They are drunken (in a place that is 97% Muslim where alcohol is illegal, in full view of the heaviest military occupation in the world), obnoxious, light firecrackers (in a fucking warzone where a Muslim would be killed for it), disrespect the property of the people they stay with, etc.

Since 5 August 2019, there has been no internet in Kashmir and all industry has been shut down. Real journalism is impossible and press and TV media are nothing but mouthpieces for BJP. At first this was rationalised by a false-flag discovery of weapons outside the “pilgrimage” route, because all terrorists like to bury their weapons in the ground outside of where they plan to use them, for convenience, like squirrels hiding acorns for the winter. India quickly dropped this pretense and just maintains an “everything is normal” line now, although there has been no internet or economic activity for over a year and schools have been converted to military bases while the environment is destroyed (not even for “development” purposes, think USA and the buffalo).

At the same day of the internet shutdown important parts of the Indian constitution were repealed which allow Kashmir to maintain some semblence of autonomy with an aim towards implementing a settler-colonial West Bank model; various things have been proposed to the effect of Hindu settlements guarded by the military and this is all completely brazen and open while the colonial administration has started granting residence to non-Kashmiri migrant workers.

Migrant workers have not faced legal discrimination; the only implications of this are that they can now own property in the Valley and vote in local elections. There is a similar statute in the neighbouring Indian state of Himachal Pradesh where only Paharis are allowed to own property or businesses, despite most of them actually in practice being run by Kashmiri and Tibetan refugees. In Kashmir there is no such contradiction. Businesses are Kashmiri-owned, Kashmiri-run.

This is with an eye to demographic change in the valley by way of which Indian rule can be legitimised through the above-mentioned plebiscite. Again this is all completely in the open, though supplemented with “what about the Kashmiri pandits!!!!” wailing. Pandit is another word for brahmin.

The militants are not bad guys. The people of Kashmir do not fear them and in fact pray for their success. The funerals of martyrs are very well-attended and before the current blockate, India used to shut down the internet on the days of their martyrdom anniversaries. Local people graffiti their names on walls and name streets after them.

The movement for a free Kashmir is an uncomplicated freedom struggle against a brutal military occupation.

See also: Understanding the Indian Occupation of Kashmir

#Kashmir #Hinduism

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yourfaveanon · 8 years

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whats going on between india and pakistan

In 1947, India and Pakistan became two independent nations as the result of a reckless British withdrawal, religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims, demand from Muslim elites, effects of the Great Depression and a slipshod border agreement. Over the following decades, India and Pakistan will continue their border dispute, focusing on Kashmir currently slip between the two nations, aggravated by a nuclear arms race and increased economic disparity.

Recent conflicts: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37531900

Important figures: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple

In depth discussions: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/partition1947_01.shtml

Some highlights:

1947 - Britain, as part of its pullout from the Indian subcontinent, divides it into secular (but mainly Hindu) India and Muslim Pakistan on August 15 and 14 respectively. The partition causes one of the largest human migrations ever seen, and sparks riots and violence across the region.

1947/48 - The first Indo-Pak war over Kashmir is fought, after armed tribesmen (lashkars) from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (now called Khyber-Pakthunkhwa) invade the disputed territory in October 1947. The Maharaja, faced with an internal revolt as well an external invasion, requests the assistance of the Indian armed forces, in return for acceding to India. He hands over control of his defence, communications and foreign affairs to the Indian government.

1963 - Following the 1962 Sino-Indian war, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan - Swaran Singh and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto - hold talks under the auspices of the British and Americans regarding the Kashmir dispute. The specific contents of those talks have not yet been declassified, but no agreement was reached. In the talks, “Pakistan signified willingness to consider approaches other than a plebiscite and India recognised that the status of Kashmir was in dispute and territorial adjustments might be necessary,” according to a declassified US state department memo (dated January 27, 1964).

1964 - Following the failure of the 1963 talks, Pakistan refers the Kashmir case to the UN Security Council.

1965 - India and Pakistan fight their second war. The conflict begins after a clash between border patrols in April in the Rann of Kutch (in the Indian state of Gujarat), but escalates on August 5, when between 26,000 and 33,000 Pakistani soldiers cross the ceasefire line dressed as Kashmiri locals, crossing into Indian-administered Kashmir.

1971 - India and Pakistan go to war a third time, this time over East Pakistan. The conflict begins when the central Pakistani government in West Pakistan, led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, refuses to allow Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a Bengali whose party won the majority of seats in the 1970 parliamentary elections, to assume the premiership.

1974 - The Kashmiri state government affirms that the state “is a constituent unit of the Union of India”. Pakistan rejects the accord with the Indian government.

1988 - The two countries sign an agreement that neither side will attack the other’s nuclear installations or facilities. These include “nuclear power and research reactors, fuel fabrication, uranium enrichment, isotopes separation and reprocessing facilities as well as any other installations with fresh or irradiated nuclear fuel and materials in any form and establishments storing significant quantities of radio-active materials”.

1998 - India detonates five nuclear devices at Pokhran. Pakistan responds by detonating six nuclear devices of its own in the Chaghai Hills. The tests result in international sanctions being placed on both countries. In the same year, both countries carry out tests of long-range missiles.

2012 - In November, India execute Pakistani national Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor of a fighter squad that killed 166 people in a rampage through the financial capital Mumbai in 2008, hanging him just days before the fourth anniversary of the attack.2013 - In January, India and Pakistan trade accusations of violating the cease-fire in Kashmir, with Islamabad accusing Indian troops of a cross-border raid that killed a soldier and India charging that Pakistani shelling destroyed a home on its side.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/kashmirtheforgottenconflict/2011/06/2011615113058224115.html

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whittlebaggett8 · 5 years

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Islamic State Comes for South Asia

Last month, the Islamic Condition (IS) formally introduced the creation of wilayah (provinces) in Pakistan and India. The announcement was created by the Islamic State’s media entrance, the Amaq News Company.

The two provinces have been carved out of the erstwhile Islamic Point out of Khorasan Province (ISKP), which encompassed the Af-Pak border region. ISKP, which was started in January 2015, months immediately after IS experienced declared its so termed caliphate in the Iraq and Levant, spearheaded all action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was the resource of IS-affiliated militant action in India as very well.

The two IS provinces in India and Pakistan ended up introduced in the speedy aftermath of the team claiming responsibility for gun attacks on safety forces in Shopian district of Indian-administered Kashmir. For the duration of the same 7 days, IS claimed a related gun attack in Mastung district of Pakistan’s Balochistan province.

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A thirty day period prior to the Islamic State’s creation of the Wilayah Pakistan, the team bombed the Hazarjangi industry in Balochistan’s capital of Quetta, killing 20 individuals. April’s Quetta bombing specific the Shia Hazara ethnic team, which, alongside with the local Christian neighborhood, has been routinely focused by the Islamic Point out and its affiliate marketers, in line with the ideological goal of purging religious minorities from areas it intends to occupy. Pakistan’s Hazara group has been the Islamic State’s most frequent targets, many thanks to an virtually two century-previous record of violent persecution in the location owing to their Shia identification, and quickly identifiable physical options owing to their Uzbek and Turkic ancestry.

The existence of currently marginalized religious communities, coupled with Balochistan’s multipronged volatility – owing to a Baloch separatist movement, jihadist turf wars, and a continuum of military services functions – would make the province the ideal floor for IS. After getting been pushed out of the Center East, it is in Balochistan that the Islamic Condition observed a pathway into South Asia.

While ISKP continued to concentrate on Afghanistan, after obtaining shaped its regional hub together the Af-Pak border, it has intermittently introduced fatal assaults in Pakistan as reminders of its ambitions in the region. These attacks incorporated the deadliest massacres in the nation due to the fact the development of ISKP. In February 2017, 72 persons ended up killed when the Sehwan sufi shrine in Jamshoro District was bombed. Very last year’s Mastung bombing, in the direct up to the general elections, was the 2nd deadliest assault in Pakistan’s historical past.

The expansion of IS in Balochistan and Sindh has been monitored and reiterated by impartial security analysts and militancy experts. Having said that, the official placement of the Pakistan Military has been entire denial of any IS presence in the state.

“They’ve introduced their chapters into the al-Qaeda structure, which has affiliates instead of a caliphate. They feel they will be able to create human useful resource and sort a network,” Muhammad Amir Rana, the director of Pak Institute for Peace Experiments (PIPS) and creator of Dynamics of Taliban Insurgency in FATA, informed The Diplomat.

“However, the stability forces are functioning on thwarting the menace posed by IS. NACTA [the National Counter Terrorism Authority] has fashioned a database for all people who has returned from Iraq and Syria. Equally, the full target of the CTDs [Counter Terror Departments] is on comparable cells affiliated with IS and al-Qaeda,” Rana added.

Resources within just the military reiterate that the assaults claimed by IS in Pakistan are carried out by their “foot soldiers” in the state. These local groups operate underneath the umbrella of the Islamic State, which does not have operational ability in the region. The most prominent between these is the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), whose al-Alami faction has cast an alliance with the Islamic Condition.

“Most of the so called IS operatives in Balochistan are either affiliated with the LeJ or some faction of the Pakistani Taliban. All of them are local, and none from the Middle East. These teams, which have mostly been decimated in Pakistan, are gravitating towards IS to retain by themselves pertinent,” a senior military official based in Balochistan instructed The Diplomat.

Last month, militants affiliated with the Islamic State and LeJ had been arrested in Dera Ghazi Khan and Sialkot. IS cells affiliated with Kashmir-bound Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) have been busted in Punjab in the past. Similarly, IS affiliates have been arrested from Karachi’s Sakran and Manghopir place, underlining the group’s existence across the nation.

Armed service officers retain, off the report, that sympathizers for jihadist teams like the IS and LeJ are existing inside the Army. Pakistan Army Chief Normal Qamar Javed Bajwa has also conceded that some armed service officers are facilitating assaults in Balochistan though speaking to Hazara protesters last 12 months.

When officers preserve that jihad sympathizers in the Pakistan Military are a fringe team that is remaining tackled, there has been international concern above the armed forces shielding jihadist groups to progress their strategic aims in the location.

Over and above reiterations of this by international powers trying to get to force Pakistan more than its duplicitous stability policies, this is also confessed by previous Military chiefs and spymasters. Specified this, it seems probable that the Islamic Condition asserting provinces in Pakistan and India – two nuclear armed states, which had been on the brink of war as not too long ago as February this calendar year – will multiply the group’s opportunity threat even further.

In India, the Islamic Point out is eyeing a existence in Jammu and Kashmir, capitalizing on the existing separatist motion, which has morphed into jihad. Just like disintegrated jihadist teams in Balochistan, the condition-backed violence in Kashmir gives the Islamic Condition a recruiting floor.

However, equivalent to Pakistan, the Indian protection agencies are downplaying the IS menace.

“What we have in Kashmir is a couple flags by some men and women who may possibly be camp followers, sympathizers, admirers who romanticize medieval brutality. There is no network no genuine IS terrorist,” previous chief of India’s intelligence agency, the Investigation and Analysis Wing (Raw), Vikram Sood informed The Diplomat.

“There are no liberated zones in Kashmir the place they could have operated. The intelligence and SF network in Kashmir is really strong and productive as a person can see from the numbers eliminated, supplying them very low shelf existence,” he added.

When the Islamic State’s operational capability may possibly not rival what it had throughout its heyday in the Middle East, its ideological lure is seen throughout South Asia as the team orchestrates attacks across the region. This year’s Easter bombings in Sri Lanka, related to latest attacks in Pakistan, underline that the Islamic Condition has finished its shift as an entity from the Middle East to South Asia.

“The Sri Lanka church bombings could have ripple results in southern India and this would be a matter of some problem for the protection companies. There have been scenarios of people heading throughout from South India but minimal in amount. This is probably because of indoctrination in UAE or KSA [Saudi Arabia],” mentioned Sood.

Nevertheless, though India and Sri Lanka have witnessed gory manifestations of IS existence in the region, albeit with contrasting devastation, it is Pakistan exactly where the team is wanting to capitalize on a jihadist vacuum.

Lieutenant Standard Talat Masood, a previous secretary at Pakistan’s Ministry of Defense Generation, warned the Pakistani management in opposition to the perils of underplaying the Islamic State’s presence in the state.

“They may be downplaying the group’s foothold in the region owing to the present financial circumstance, especially given the simple fact that there are threats of sanctions nonetheless looming about Pakistan,” he stated, referring to terror watchdog Economical Action Endeavor Force’s (FATF) warnings to Islamabad, indicating a possible blacklisting.

“But they must keep in mind that it [the Islamic State] is contrary to any other team that has functioned in Pakistan in the previous. It is the only team that has managed any territory, and its ideological overreach continues to be unparalleled,” Masood included.

The post Islamic State Comes for South Asia appeared first on Defence Online.

from WordPress https://defenceonline.com/2019/06/19/islamic-state-comes-for-south-asia/

#Balochistan insurgency #Features #India terrorism #Islamic State #Islamic State in India #Islamic St

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lordsrivenkateswaraswamy · 6 years

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Punishing Pakistan for using terrorists as an elemental pillar of foreign policy will require not only India but the US as well to disencumber themselves from Pakistan’s nuclear coercion strategy

How is that Pakistan, a country with a shambolic economy and an army that has never won a war, can unremittingly orchestrate a deadly arpeggio of terror against India, a larger and generally better-armed country, without any significant adverse repercussions? Not only has Pakistan deliberately cultivated a menagerie of Islamist militant groups to harass India and Afghanistan since its inception as an independent state in 1947, many of the 9/11 conspirators stayed and enjoyed sanctuary in Pakistan, while — perhaps most egregiously — US forces located and killed Osama bin Laden in the cantonment town of Abbottabad, less than one mile from the prestigious Pakistan Military Academy. Despite what was surely a vertiginous outrage to the United States, Pakistan escaped American wrath unscathed. Understanding how Pakistan has managed to use Islamist (and non-Islamist) proxies with breathtaking impunity requires one to grasp how the state developed its nuclear program precisely to shield it from reprisals for its proxy warfare strategy. In many ways, the history of Pakistan’s nuclear program and strategy of proxy warfare are inexorably tied together.

Not only does Pakistan’s nuclear program constrain India’s punitive options, it also keeps in check the options of the international community, which is also coerced by Pakistan’s fast expanding arsenal. Punishing Pakistan for using terrorists as an elemental pillar of foreign policy will require not only India but the United States as well to disencumber themselves from Pakistan’s nuclear coercion strategy. While not impossible, doing so is politically risky and few policy makers would be willing seriously to contemplate such options.

Pakistan first grasped the utility of proxy actors in 1947, when it mobilized lashkars (or tribal militias) from Pakistan’s Pashtun areas to invade and seize Kashmir. From 1947 until the mid-1980s, Pakistan supported various kinds of low-level sabotage. Its efforts to spark a wider insurgency in the 1960s failed. Pakistan’s opportunity and capabilities to cultivate mayhem dramatically improved in the mid-1980s when Kashmiris in Indian-administered Kashmir began to rebel against New Delhi for an array of excesses including appalling electoral manipulation, malfeasance in managing Kashmiri political expectations, and state-sponsored violence against protestors. While the uprising began indigenously, by the early 1990s Pakistani Islamist militants had taken the helm from the local ethnic Kashmiri insurgents who had initiated this phase of political violence.

While Pakistan is renowned for its efforts to instigate Islamist insurgency and terrorism, it has also supported other militant movements in India. In the mid-1950s, Pakistan (as well as China) backed India’s Naga rebels in the northeast and, in the 1960s, Pakistan supported the Mizo rebels, also in India’s northeast. From the mid-1970s through the early-1990s, Pakistan also supported the Sikh insurgency in Punjab. Similarly, before and during the 1971 war in East Pakistan, the military relied upon Islamist militants to brutalize ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan.

To complement and enable its advances at the lower end of the conflict spectrum, Pakistan also innovated at the strategic level through the acquisition of nuclear weapons. We now know that Pakistan had a crude device around 1983–4, if not earlier. Varun Sahni, describing Pakistan’s beliefs that its capabilities deterred crises with India in the 1980s, refers to the lingering but indecisive role of nuclear weapons as “nuclear overhang.” As Pakistan became increasingly confident of its nuclear capabilities, it was ever more emboldened to use its proxies in India, secure in the belief that India would be unable to punish Pakistan militarily. Consequently, Pakistan’s adventurism in India became bolder both through the use of state-sponsored proxies, but also through Pakistani security forces masquerading as militants in the 1999 Kargil War. Until the reciprocal nuclear tests by India and then Pakistan in May 1998, scholars used a term introduced by McGeorge Bundy, “existential deterrence,” to describe the deterrence that seemed to exist between India and Pakistan. Given the opacity and uncertainty surrounding the two countries’ programs, the mutual deterrence calculation of India and Pakistan did not rest on “relative capabilities and strategic doctrines, but on the shared realization that each side is nuclear-capable, and thus any outbreak of conflict might lead to a nuclear war.”

After the 1971 war, the Pakistan army was demoralized and held in low esteem by its citizens after effectively losing half the country. The people’s ire was compounded when they learned that Pakistan had been defeated despite unremitting state propaganda to the contrary. Z.A. Bhutto, whose Pakistan Peoples’ Party won the largest share of votes in West Pakistan in the 1970–1 elections, seized the reins of power. He had wanted to pursue a nuclear weapon as early as 1964; however, General Ayub rebuffed him then, arguing that developing a weapon would alienate Pakistan’s western allies and furthermore, if necessary, Pakistan could likely “buy a weapon off the shelf somewhere,” presumably from one of its Western allies. With his now unchecked authority, Bhutto began actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, hoping to curry favor with the army, diminish the chance of a coup, and consolidate the role of civilian decision-making in security and defense matters. Bhutto tasked A.Q. Khan with the ignominious task of stealing nuclear secrets for his country, and established two rival organizations in the hopes that their competition would hasten Pakistan’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. In his gasconading death-row autobiography, If I am Assassinated, Bhutto professed that the United States facilitated Zia’s coup for the sole purpose of denying Pakistan a nuclear future. (I found no evidence to support this claim in any secondary or primary source I have encountered.) According to Bhutto, when he came to power in December 1971, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program was twenty years behind that of the Indians. However, by the time he was deposed, in 1977, Pakistan was on the threshold of possessing a nuclear capability. #MohnishAhluwaliaNotes

#News Updates #Pak jihad’s nuclear umbrella

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eurasiantimess-blog · 6 years

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Kashmir news

Welcome to Eurasian Times, We provide the best the Kashmir and Asian Times in India. if you want to read the latest news, then you can come to visit our website. Last weekend, several innocents were killed in associated Kashmir news and therefore the violence had reached a new level. the phobia of the occupying forces in geographic region News is mounting then area unit the violations and therefore the risk of associate India-Pakistan war – aforesaid the Pak Minister. An operation administered by the Indian military forces junction rectifier to the killing of the many innocents and lots of additional blistered within the Shopian district. The Minister expressed that the federal cupboard of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has passed a resolution to denounce the ‘Indian Terrorism’. He additionally aforesaid that matters were being obsessed to higher international bodies, as well as the world organization.

#Kashmir news

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lordsrivenkateswaraswamy · 6 years

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Punishing Pakistan for using terrorists as an elemental pillar of foreign policy will require not only India but the US as well to disencumber themselves from Pakistan’s nuclear coercion strategy

#IFTTT #Blogger

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