Where Kashmir Valley merges with ISIS

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), commonly known as ‘shock therapy’, is the best treatment for people with highly severe, neurotic or suicidal depression. The common perception is that it is a harsh, cruel treatment, but then, it can be life-saving. The drawback is that ECT’s effects are not lasting, and it needs to be followed up quickly with further treatments.

If ECT has a variant in politics, the former Jammu & Kashmir deputy chief minister and eminent parliamentarian Muzaffar Hussain Beg has just administered it when he said in New Delhi that there is a danger that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) “might penetrate into the minds and hearts in Kashmir unless we do something farsighted and effective”.

The Harvard-educated politician who is also a savvy intellectual with a cosmopolitan outlook – a rare thing among Indian politicians – has given a historical perspective on the growing appeal of the “world vision for the revival of the Khilafat and the hegemony of religious extremism” even as the decades-long uprising in the Valley has “gone into rural Kashmir” and is “infecting the hearts and minds of youths”.

Beg’s incisive analysis of the paradigm shift in the Valley – transformation of Pakistan-supported insurgency into a potential “international struggle” — can be overlooked only if one takes a view of the ISIS as a corporate body rather than the seductive idea that it is, which finds appeal far and wide beyond the geographical limits of Mesopotamia and the Levant.

Put differently, if Pakistan is far-sighted enough not to exploit the current upheaval in the Valley to rekindle the moribund insurgency and instead would let it make its inevitable progression into an Intifada, it would have a far better case for ‘internationalising’ the Kashmir issue.

All Pakistan needs to do is to keep its cool against the vacuous Indian rhetoric on POK and Northern Areas and Baluchistan. That is not particularly difficult, because there are no ‘pro-India’ sentiments in those areas worth mentioning, and, despite the disaffection arising out of misgovernance and lack of development in those remote regions, in sheer criticality, they are nowhere near the boiling cauldron that the Valley has become through decades of mishandling from Delhi. (Having said that, the strong likelihood is that the Pakistani agencies will jump into the fray in the Valley, finding the prospect irresistible.)

However, no matter Pakistan’s reflexes and capacity for rational thinking, if the call of the ‘jihad’ begins to resonate in the Valley for the first time in these past six decades, as Beg has forewarned, the repercussions are most serious. Three things must be noted here.

First, so far it has been the case that while the Muslims in the Indian hinterland (roughly 170 million) might have emotionally connected with sentiments of the Kashmiri Muslim, they never identified or even bonded with the insurgency in the Valley. But this may change if the decades-old insurgency in the Valley hitherto drawing sustenance out of Kashmiri sub-nationalism and/or the widespread alienation of the people (and mentored by the Pakistani agencies), transforms into a ‘jihad’ or the lure of theKhilafat in an unjust world order.

The unfortunate reality is that alienation is setting in among Indian Muslims too, and even ‘outsiders’ (perceptive Hindus) living amongst them, side by side with them, can sense the dull roar of aloofness and alienation. The trend is accelerating alarmingly after the present government rooted in the Hindutva ideology came into power in 2014. The ruling party is unabashedly propagating communal polarization and if media reports are to be believed, its election strategy in the upcoming UP state election will be to do ‘social engineering’ with a view to somehow get the OBCs and Dalits to align with the (upper caste) Hindu nationalists — and to hell with the Muslim vote.

Evidently, India’s electoral politics lies in the pits today. Suffice it to say, the Muslim alienation in India is only going to aggravate in the foreseeable future under these grim circumstances. The ground is becoming favorable for an ‘integration’ of the Kashmiri Muslim with the Indian Muslim psyche, based on their shared alienation in an alchemy that would have been unthinkable so far.

Meanwhile, externally, too, Beg has a point that the spectre of the ISIS in the Valley at once ‘internationalses’ the Kashmir problem in a way that was not possible for Pakistan to achieve so far. The fact of the matter is that ISIS is a trans-national beast, which impacts international security.

It is unclear whether Beg, who must be well-versed with the American thinking, is hinting at something we do not know. For, ISIS is, in the ultimate analysis, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. From time to time, reports have appeared that it had a strange upbringing in Mesopotamia. (See a riveting piece last year by Seumas Milne in Guardian newspaper entitled Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq.)

Indeed, Iran has been crying hoarse from the rooftop all along that the US is conducting a phony war in Iraq and Syria – creating an illusion of fighting the ISIS but in reality disallowing others from doing that job. (If you can cut your way through the thicket of Iranian rhetoric, read an incisive commentary recently by FARS news agency entitled US Warmongers Seeking to Distort ISIL Parents.)

Of course, it is not a great revelation that the Anglo-American strategy in Afghanistan since the eighties was to create all sorts of geopolitical tools – from jihadists to drug traffickers – to push the geopolitical agenda. Nonetheless, the recently-declassified British Foreign Office documents would help us comprehend what could possibly be the real US strategy vis-a-vis the ISIS today. (Sputnik)

Now, sit back, hold tight to your chair and take a deep breath before reading the research paper prepared as recently this month by one of Israel’s elite think tanks, The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, regarding the seamless geo-strategic potential of the ISIS phenomenon, authored by the well-known Israeli strategic thinker Efraim Inbar. Its title says it all – The Destruction of Islamic State is a Strategic Mistake.

Make no mistake, any perception of the ISIS shadows falling on the Kashmir Valley would attract predators of all kinds – friends and foes alike – with multiple agenda (not even necessarily toward India), whom the overstretched Indian national security state may find it beyond its capacity to ward off. That is the spectre that is haunting India.

It remains to be seen if Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh comprehend that the old recipes of sitting out the unrest can still calm the Valley with the help of the security forces and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act — and pellet guns, of course –may no longer work.

Statesmanship of the highest order and seamless political courage is needed on their part to deviate from the hardline Hindu nationalist path (which also happens to find favor with our national security state — with the exception of the professional Indian Army). Simply put, are they capable of it — that is, even if they wish to?

Beg’s electroconvulsive therapy needs to be followed up with treatment for bringing about an enduring end to the upheaval in the Kashmir Valley. A good starting point will be to dig deep and understand how Article 370 in the Indian constitution — not its present mutilated form — needed to be incorporated in the first instance.

Article By M K Bhadrakumar