The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Literary stirrings
Book fair brings good tidings

Books have a tremendous capacity to liberate minds, to enrich them, to make them transcend geographical and other limitations. They take their readers to places they might never go to in the normal course of their lives. It is, indeed, a sign of resurgence in Kashmir that a recent book fair brought together people in large numbers to explore the world of words. The National Book Trust-sponsored book fair in Srinagar not only drew in large crowds, it also brought in political leaders from all sides of the spectrum, including Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik and many Cabinet ministers.

Education, literacy and literature indeed work together not only to open minds, but also to dissolve prejudice. It is through education and hard work that success comes in competitive examinations, as the recent success stories from the troubled region have shown. It is by emulating such people that the youth of the state will find ways and means of personal development. Strife in the region has long stifled people’s growth, and it is indeed heartening to see the trend being reversed.

Literary events in Kashmir are not like those held in other places, and last year the Harud: The Autumn Festival of Literature had to be abandoned after strong opposition. Against such a backdrop, the book fair is being seen as an enabler for thousands of Kashmiris who have thronged the venue, some in search of their favourite book, others to browse and stumble upon treasures that will grace their bookshelves. Naturally, most readers wanted books in Urdu or English and many had specific lists of what they wanted. It was a poignant statement because Kashmir had become, to a certain extent, a book-deprived area. In some ways, Kashmir has an edge because it has not succumbed to the almost universal phenomenon of having to cope with the white noise associated with the invasion of electronic devices. The need for good books to read is universal. It brings a ray of hope among readers.

She shines only till college
Systemic disadvantage for women

Mr Smith would have been happy with Mrs Smith cooking and nagging. But Mrs Smith joined Mr Smith’s profession and the plot got complicated. The answering mirror on the wall got confused; it could not find answer to “who is the brightest of them all?” Mr or Mrs Smith! So, “The War of the Roses” ensued. Unfortunately, it was not confined to domestic walls.

Girls outshine boys in exams, year after year, and the cliché is repeated one more time, composing headlines as though it was a miracle, a surprise, something out of the ordinary. A bolt from the blue! Experts would believe that a bitch is more intelligent than a dog, a she-monkey possesses sharper senses than a he-monkey, and ditto for cats, whales, lions, et al. When it comes to homo sapiens, we try our best to prove we are an exception to the rule of the animal kingdom. We would go to any length to prove the point of male superiority. The most compelling of them all, data, that states women still comprise only 10 per cent of senior leaders in Fortune 500 companies; less than 4 per cent of CEOs, presidents, vice-presidents, COOs; and less than 3 per cent of top corporate earners. Clearly, there is some efficiency deficit in the female gene!

Legislation ensures that there is no overt gender discrimination, but scratch the surface and you will find the system fashioned to suit the gender that has enjoyed historical advantage in professional life. For women entering any profession is like a tall man entering a door built for a short man; they have to bend, to downsize what is feminine — their true strength! In a world fashioned to suit manly attributes, women have to reconfigure themselves to be accepted into a world predominantly suited for men. At times they have to create two personalities to suit both domestic and work fronts. Which sharpens their intellect but leaves them behind in the masculine race of the professional world.

Thought for the Day

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not. — Samuel Johnson

ARTICLE

The Shangri La dialogue
US dominance, China’s absence
by P.R.Chari

It is a Tibetan word meaning “mountain pass,” and is the name given by James Hilton in his novel “Lost Horizon” to an imagined paradise on earth. Shangri La is also the name given to a chain of luxury hotels (minimum off-season rates are $300 per night), which provides the venue for the annual conferences held by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) on global security issues. It is a Track-I event, and gives defence ministers around the world an opportunity to air their views on security problems excoriating the international system. Over the years the Shangri La dialogue process has acquired an iconic status, and it is important to be heard or, at least, seen here. The last 11th annual dialogue was held in the Shangri La hotel in Singapore between May 31 and June 3.

The 28 countries represented in this event included the majority of the Southeast Asian and East Asian nations, all the nuclear weapon states — minus Israel and North Korea plus a few European countries, mostly allies of the United States. The most critical item on the agenda was the first plenary meeting on the US rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific that was addressed by US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. He sought to explain the decision of the United States to “re-posture” its naval forces from a roughly equal distribution between the Pacific and the Atlantic to a 60/40 split between the two oceans by 2020, emphasising the new importance of Asia. Other sessions were devoted to maritime security, the disputes in the South China Sea and Northeast Asia, cyber warfare, disaster management, role of submarines and South Asia’s security threats.

Taking into account its pattern of representation, it was quite natural that the 11th Shangri La dialogue devoted quality attention to the maritime disputes in the South China and East China Seas. It was also to be expected that the rising contention between China and the United States, embedded in the latter’s “pivot” towards Asia, would get fore-grounded. Incidentally, the new term of art is “rebalancing” instead of “pivot.” In his address Leon Panetta, US Secretary of Defense, distanced himself from beliefs that the US “rebalancing” was directed at China; instead, he said, “increased US involvement in this region will benefit China as it advances our shared security and prosperity for the future.”

In response to questions, he added, “the United States has been a power presence in the Pacific in the past and we will remain so and strengthen that in the future, and that’s true for China as well. But if both of us work together, if both of us abide by international rules and international order, if both of us can work together to promote peace and prosperity and resolve disputes in this region, then both of us will benefit from that.” But, he hastened to add, “We’re not naive about the relationship and neither is China. We both understand the differences we have. We both understand the conflicts we have, but we also both understand that there really is no other alternative but for both of us to engage and to improve our communications and to improve our relationships.”

He ended by expressing the hope that the Congressional mandate to cut an additional 20 per cent from the US defence budget in the next fiscal would not be pressed, and that Congress would come up with an alternative deficit reduction plan.

The eyebrow-raising incident, however, during this dialogue was that China’s Defence Minister Liang chose to absent himself. Therefore, China was represented by a relatively low-level military official who carried little weight in this stellar assembly. The official explanation, provided by the convener of the conference, was that the Chinese Defence Minister was preoccupied with “domestic priorities”. This excuse might sound plausible, in that senior Chinese officials might be hesitant to leave Beijing at the present juncture when a game of musical chairs is gathering speed after the political leadership’s serious discomfiture in recent weeks like the Bo Xilai affair. But a better explanation was needed since Liang went to Cambodia a week earlier to attend the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting. China is not a member of this grouping, but Liang had sought this opportunity to come and explain China’s position on the South China Sea. It would, therefore, seem that Liang was probably persuaded to absent himself from the Shangri La dialogue as he would have been called upon to answer tough questions on the South China Sea controversy by foreign journalists before an international audience. Inevitably, questions about China’s internal politics could have been asked that could lead to more speculation on China’s secretive governing processes.

India’s Defence Minister A.K.Antony spoke of the country’s interests in the session on maritime security. He clarified its position that “maritime freedoms cannot be the exclusive prerogative of a few. Large parts of the common seas cannot be declared exclusive to any one country or group. We must find the balance between the rights of nations and the freedoms of the world community in the maritime domain.” He clarified India’s position further, saying that “keeping in view the issues that have arisen with regard to the South China Sea, India has welcomed the efforts of the parties concerned in engaging in discussion… We hope that the issues will be resolved through dialogue and negotiation.” Antony was thereby able to convey India’s perceptions on the South China Sea vis-à-vis the contending nationalist and internationalist approaches of China and the United States.

Meanwhile, much greater recognition is needed that China remains far behind the US in terms of military strength and sophistication. China’s GDP has, no doubt, become the second largest in the world, but it lags far behind in technological capacity and knowledge industries. China may have become more confident now in challenging the US, but its self-confidence is fairly circumscribed.

There is no other way to explain why Liang absented himself at the Shangri La conference in Singapore.

MIDDLE

Not shy to be small
by Chandni Chandel

When God might be glancing down at the earth in his hours of leisure from heaven, he might be viewing us as we watch ants in our free time. Ants? Always in a hurry, moving endlessly, not aimlessly, busy fetching something. At some places there’s a greater rush while others are sparsely populated.

Not that I have a PhD in the study of ants; l always get fascinated by them whenever I spot them in my kitchen as busy as I am. Ants always have an end task to accomplish; they don’t rest till their mission is accomplished. Wherever they find enough resources for their community or even one of them discovers a bread crumb or a drop of honey, a speck of toffee or chocolate which our children aimlessly throw around while eating, they just make a party out of it. They trail each other with the help of their scent.

Foodgrains in tonnes and tonnes get wasted in our country. Just visualise what one ant would correspond with the other through their means of communication, when they see heaps of rotting foodgrains. Ant A says, “Hey, did you see those light brown mountains? I saw them for the first time, I almost fainted.”

Ant B retorts back, “I hope it’s not some apocalypse, let’s warn everybody.” Ant A responds, “No, I just managed to pick up one sack (equivalent to a grain), very heavy but something to eat, I think. Look at these senseless human beings. They claim to be big and intelligent, but how hollow they are? They hardly realise the importance of food.”

Then, they would immediately summon a high-level meeting to discuss how to make the best of it for the betterment of the entire community.

The most interesting fact that I came across while surfing the Internet was that each ant has two stomachs, one for itself and the other for storing food to be shared with other ants. How generous! Despite the fact that a colony of 40,000 ants collectively has the same size brain as that of one human being.

Whenever they get stomped under our feet, they would think that a demon has hit them, just as we watched “rakshasas” in the epic TV serials, “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”, trampling enemies under their feet.

I cannot hold myself back from admiring these little beings for their hard work, community feeling, discipline, not being shy of being such small little creatures.n

OPED DEFENCE

The origins, course, consequences and lines of resolution of the Siachen imbroglio have been misunderstood, confused and even mismanaged by Indian policymakers over the years
Siachen follies: Facts & objectives
B.G. Verghese

A memorial to Operation Meghdoot in the Siachen area. Tribune photo: Manoj Mahajan

There has been a flurry of interest after Pakistan's all-powerful Army Chief, Gen. Kayani, reversing gear, suddenly declared (April 2012) that India and Pakistan must live in peaceful coexistence as defence without development is neither viable nor acceptable. True!

With US aid becoming increasingly conditional on Pakistan's good conduct and delivery of prescribed outcomes, China's reluctance to fill the breach, its economy on drip, the need to counter internal security threats, and questioning stirred by the recent Gyari avalanche disaster, Pakistan needs respite. Kayani is articulating that dawning reality.

Pakistan's solution calls for an Indian withdrawal from the glacier, a mutual pull-back and demiltarisation. India however insists on authentication and demarcation of the AGPL (Actual Ground Position Line that we hold) before redeployment to mutually defined positions, to prevent the vacated area being otherwise stealthily seized. Nevertheless, the Kayani initiative should be pursued so that no opportunity for peace is lost.

Ceasefire agreement

Both Siachen "solutions", however, beg the question. There was no AGPL prior to 1984. Where then did the northern extremity of the CFL/LOC lie? The critical date is therefore not 1984 but July 29, 1949, when the Ceasefire Agreement was signed in Karachi by ranking military representatives of India and Pakistan and the UN Military Observer Group in pursuance of Part I of the key UN resolution of August 8, 1948. This was to be followed by a truce under Part II and, after full compliance, by a plebiscite under Part III.

The Karachi agreement delineated the entire CFL, demarcating over 740 km on the ground. With the CFL increasingly running through high mountains and glaciated areas as it traversed north, it often followed a directional path in the absence of clear landmarks. Thus, finally, "Chalunka (on the Shyok river), Khor, thence North to the glaciers", passing through grid reference NJ 9842. The segment, beyond NJ 9842 was by mutual agreement not demarcated on the ground, being a highly elevated, glaciated, unexplored and unpopulated region that had not witnessed any fighting. A plebiscite was soon to follow and the matter, it was assumed, would soon be settled.

The delineation of the northern-most segment of the CFL was, however, unambiguous: NJ 9842, "thence north to the glaciers". The very next section crucially directed that "the ceasefire line described above" be drawn "so as to eliminate any no man's land". Therefore, the Line, whether delineated or demarcated could in no way be left hanging in the air.

The CFL was ratified by both sides and deposited with the UNCIP. It was revalidated as the LOC under the Suchetgarh Agreement of December 1972, in accordance with the clear intent of the Simla Conference earlier that year to move from military confrontation to political resolution in J&K. However, the LOC incorporated the military gains made by either side in J&K in the 1971 war. Thus in the Kargil-Siachen sector, all territorial gains went entirely to India which acquired the 254 sq mile Turtok salient comprising five villages just south and west of NJ 9842. This military acquisition provided India an additional territorial bulwark against hostile claims on Siachen.

At Simla, Mrs Gandhi demanded acceptance of the CFL/LOC as the permanent political boundary but accepted Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's honeyed assurances that he would take steps to promote the evolution of the LOC into a permanent boundary. But no sooner were his POWs back home and his lost territories in the West restored than he raged and reneged. Mrs Gandhi's Secretary, P. N. Dhar, put the record straight in the Times of India (April 4-5, 1995).

Even so, when later Pakistan sought to incorporate the Northern Areas within its territory, and still later when it announced construction of the Basha-Diamer dam, and yet again when it conferred a limited constitutional status on Gilgit-Baltistan, India protested against what it said was an infringement of its own sovereignty, betraying policy inconsistency in its stance on the contours of a final political settlement in J&K.

Cartographic aggression

All Pakistan, UN and global atlases depicted the CFL neutrally or correctly till around 1964-72. By the mid-1950s,China had commenced its creeping cartographic aggression in Ladakh. In 1963 it signed a boundary agreement whereby Pakistan unilaterally ceded it the Shaksgam Valley. Thereafter, Pakistan kept extending its lines of communication eastwards and began licensing western mountaineering expeditions to venture east of K2. It was emboldened to extend this "eastward creep" when, between 1964 and 1972, the US Defence Mapping Agency, an international reference point for cartography, began depicting the CFL as extending from NJ 9842 to a point just west of the Karakoram Pass. The most charitable explanation for this totally unwarranted and unfriendly action was that it erroneously hardened what was possibly no more than an extant dotted World War II air defence information zone (ADIZ) line into a politico-military divide. World atlases followed suit, depicting the line drawn from NJ 9842 northeast to the Karakoram pass as the authentic and internationally accepted CFL/LOC, backed by international mountaineering lore that India did little to rebut or put in context.

Pakistan gladly accepted this fraudulent international endorsement and thereafter initiated moves to occupy Siachen. Reconnaissance teams were sent to the Saltoro Ridge, Siachen's western wall, in 1983. Getting wind of this stratagem, India pre-emptively occupied the glacier in March 1984.

At a US Institute for Peace conference on J&K in Washington in 1991, delegates were delivered a map at their hotel rooms without the mandatory credit line regarding its origins. It was headed "The Kashmir Region: Depicting the CFL/LOC, Siachen and Shaksgam". This showed a hatched triangle NJ 9842-Karakoram Pass-K2, and Shaksgam in the north, with a legend reading, "Indian occupied since 1983". The conference organisers disowned what they surmised could be a CIA map and suggested it be treated as "withdrawn"! The map not only confirmed Pakistan's claims but labelled India an aggressor. Years later, US Ambassador Robert Blackwill said the US Defence Mapping Agency had got its lines wrong and that the impugned maps would be amended. Nothing ensued.

If the USDMA map was a product of genuine error, howsoever irresponsible, it would have been natural and simple to apologise and make amends in an appropriate manner. Nothing of the kind happened. Nor did the Indian Government respond to any of these alarm bells.

The American scholar, Robert G. Wirsing dwelt on this issue at some length in "India, Pakistan and the Kashmir Dispute: On Regional Conflict and Its Resolution" (Rupa 1994). He writes: "By the early 1980s, practically all the most respected atlases … were showing the CFL/LOC extending beyond grid reference point NJ 9842 about 55 miles in a clear north-easterly direction all the way to the Karakoram Pass on the Chinese border. The extension was a distinct departure from past cartographic practice. UN maps of Kashmir produced in the early years of the dispute all terminated at the map coordinate NJ 9842. In India and Pakistan display of the CFL or LOC on publicly sold maps has been officially discouraged at least since the 1965 war; but among the scores of pre-1965 official or officially-approved maps surveyed by this author in the Library of Congress, not a single one showed any extension beyond NJ 9842".

Wirsing notes "a nearly universal shift by map-makers to an extended and eastward -running CFL/LOC (from NJ 9842 to the Karakoram Pass) was eventually achieved. .…One can hardly escape the conclusion that the US Defence Mapping Agency, one of the largest and probably the most influential of international map-makers, played a far from inconsequential role in the world's "cartographic award of Siachen to Pakistan".

Indo-China quagmire

On March 12, 1987, the Office of the Geographer of the U.S State Department issued guidelines to producers of official US maps that admitted past inconsistencies and specifically instructed them not to extend the line beyond NJ 9842 to the Karakoram Pass. Nonetheless, the damage had been done and remains uncorrected, with no apologies by or to anybody to this date.

If innocent absent-mindedness on the part of one or more official US agencies is not altogether convincing, where else might one look, howsoever tangentially, for possible explanations of the Siachen muddle? The Sino-Soviet rift was out in the open and the US, having extricated itself from the Indo-China quagmire, had begun to review its relations with the People's Republic of China, now a nuclear power. The Sino-Pakistan rapprochement post-1963 made Pakistan a critical conduit for quiet Sino-US talks. Kissinger headed to the sub-continent to stave off the possibility of an Indo-Pakistan war on account of the Bangladesh liberation struggle, a mission famously overshadowed by his secret dash to Beijing from Islamabad and the ensuing announcement of a Mao-Nixon meeting. The Indo-Soviet Friendship Pact was signed and the notorious "Nixon tilt" against India went into play. "Kissinger Transcripts" by William Burr (1999) makes the extraordinary disclosure of the Secretary of State encouraging the PRC in December 1971, through its UN Ambassador Huang Hua in New York with whomhe was now in very close touch, to move against India in order to divert it from severing Bangladesh from Pakistan, a mutual ally. The US reassured Beijing that it would counter any Soviet riposte. Nixon had already ordered a US naval squadron headed by the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise into the Indian Ocean to show the flag, although this might ramp up tensions with the Soviet Union.

Options and implications

Was it in the background of this bizarre play of events that US map-makers started fiddling gratuitously with India's strategic boundaries?

Look now at the implications of the options being canvassed for resolution of the Siachen matter. Any unqualified redeployment from the Siachen glacier without asserting the correct delineation of the CFL/LOC from NJ 9842 "thence north to the glaciers", will mean accepting the Pakistan claim and throwing the August 1948 UN Resolution and derivative 1949 Karachi Agreement into the dustbin. This "mother" Resolution on J&K implicitly found Pakistan the aggressor and intruder, required its military personnel and tribal cohorts to leave the State forthwith, and upheld India's de jure sovereignty over the entire State even while preparations were made for a plebiscite. On February 4, 1949, the U.S representative, Senator Warren Austen, told the Security Council that "with the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India, the foreign (external) sovereignty (over Kashmir) went over to India and is exercised by India, and that is how India happens to be here as petitioner". The LOC is a subsequent derivative of the August 8, 1949 Resolution that drew the CFL.

The Manmohan Singh-Musharraf 2005 peace formula would sanctify the LOC as an evolving international boundary, rendered porous as "a mere line on a map" across which movement, investment, commerce, exchange and cooperation might be encouraged and joint institutions allowed to develop for their management. Manmohan had hinted that this arrangement might even include water. Such a progression could bind the peoples of J&K and of India and Pakistan together in friendship and cooperation. Indeed, this arrangement harks back to some kind of proto-confederal vision for J&K projected by Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964 without prejudice to the existing twin sovereignties.