Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century by Shashi Tharoor Read Free Book Online

irregulars, who made considerable inroads before being distracted by the attractions of rapine and pillage. The panicked maharaja, fearing his state would fall to the marauders, acceded to India, which promptly paradropped troops who stopped the invaders (by now augmented by the Pakistani Army) in their tracks. India took Pakistan’s aggression to the UN as an international issue and declared a ceasefire that left it in possession of roughly two-thirds of the state.
    To ascertain the wishes of the Kashmiri people, the UN mandated a plebiscite, to be conducted after the Pakistani troops had withdrawn from the territory they had captured. India had insisted on a popular vote, since the Kashmiri democratic movement, led by the fiery and hugely popular Sheikh Abdullah, was a pluralist movement associated with India’s Congress party (Abdullah was president of the Indian States’ Peoples’ Congress, a body set up by the Congress party to represent independence-minded people in the princely states) rather than with the Muslim League that had demanded the creation of Pakistan, and New Delhi had no doubt that India would win a plebiscite. For the same reason, conscious of Abdullah’s popularity, Pakistan refused to withdraw, and the plebiscite was never conducted. The dispute has festered ever since.
    Four wars (in 1947–48, 1965, 1971 and 1999), all initiated by Pakistan, have been fought across the ceasefire line, now dubbed the Line of Control (LoC), without materially altering the situation. In the late 1980s, a Pakistan-backed insurrection by some Kashmiri Muslims, augmented by militants infiltrated across the LoC and supplied with arms and money by Pakistan, began. Both the militancy and the response to it by Indian security forces have caused great loss of life, damaged property and all but wrecked a Kashmiri economy dependent largely on tourism and the sale of handicrafts. In the process, both countries have suffered grievously: India, whose citizens have been killed in large numbers and which has had to deploy over half a million men under arms to keep the peace, and Pakistan, whose strategy of ‘bleeding India to death’ through insurgency and terrorism, in Kashmir and beyond, has accomplished little of value, while making its military enormously powerful within Pakistan and disproportionately well-resourced (largelythanks to Kashmir, the Pakistani Army controls a larger share of its national budget than any army in the world does).
    If Kashmir is, to Pakistanis, the main casus belli, the horrors that were inflicted on Mumbai by terrorists from Pakistan at the end of November 2008 remain the starting point for any Indian’s discussion of Pakistan. They have left an abiding impact on all Indians. India picked itself up after the assault, but it counted the cost in lives lost, property destroyed and, most of all, in the scarred psyche of a ravaged nation. Deep and sustained anger across the country—at its demonstrated vulnerability to terror and at the multiple institutional failures that allowed such loss of life—prompted the immediate resignations of the home minister in Delhi and the chief minister and his deputy in Maharashtra. But ‘26/11’ in Mumbai represented a qualitative change in Pakistan’s long-running attempts to pursue ‘war by other means’. The assault, and the possibility of its recurrence, implied that there could be other consequences, yet to be measured, that the world will have to come to terms with in the future—consequences whose impact could extend well beyond India’s borders, with implications for the peace and security of the region, and the world.
    I had grown up in Bombay, as it was then called, and so watched the unfolding horror there in November 2008 with profound empathy. There is a savage irony to the fact that the attacks in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India. The magnificent arch, built in 1911, has ever since stood as a symbol of the