Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

In a January 8 article for the World Policy Blog, Charles Cogan argued recently that the United States should not attempt to mediate the long-standing dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, as doing so could jeopardize America’s good relations with India and further muddle U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. On the contrary, only by accepting that India-Pakistan relations are a key part of the larger security problem can the United States end the war in Afghanistan. Thus, an active U.S. role in mediating the dispute over Kashmir and other issues dividing India and Pakistan is very much in America’s national interests. First, tensions between India and Pakistan are hindering the latter’s efforts to aid the U.S. military in fighting militant Islamists along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Indeed, senior American military officials like Admiral Michael Mullen have pointed out that Pakistan's need to maintain a heavy troop presence on its border with India limits the resources it can divert to fighting the Islamist insurgency elsewhere in Pakistan. These officials agree that such a presence is justified, given the history and current level of tension between the two states. While some commentators argue that the Pakistani Army is unwilling to fight extremists on its own soil, Admiral Mullen himself has suggested that casualty statistics show Pakistan to be very much engaged in the struggle against Islamist terror. Indeed, Pakistan’s military has already suffered more casualties in its own fight against militant Islamists than has the American military in Afghanistan. Suicide bombings within Pakistan have already claimed more than 11,000 victims. Thus, the Pakistani army's slow progress in its war against militant Islamists is due not to a lack of zeal, but rather is tied largely to its inability (because of lack of capacity) to focus exclusively on fighting terror as long as Indo-Pakistani tension persists. An easing of the tensions would likely enable Pakistan to redeploy more troops to the fight against insurgents, which would be to the benefit of American forces in Afghanistan. Second, poor India-Pakistan relations are central to longer-term but no less serious issues that plague the daily lives of Pakistanis and contribute to the conditions that drive some of the nation's poorest citizens into the hands of extremists. Pakistan's current water crisis is one case in point. While religious identity is at the core of the Kashmir dispute, water also is a root cause of the conflict. The region is the source of the main rivers flowing through much of the Indian and Pakistani Punjab (literally, "land of the five waters") that is South Asia’s breadbasket. Antagonistic relations only encouraged India to construct the dams that, in turn, now limit the flow of water to Pakistan, threatening its agricultural heartland and creating water shortages nationwide. Of course, myopic policymakers and political horse-trading in Pakistan have only made matters worse. But poor India-Pakistan relations remain the major contributing factor to the crisis. Far from fostering cooperation on the issue, they actually create an incentive for India to withhold water from Pakistan. The water crisis in Pakistan hurts the poorest of the poor in Pakistan—prime targets for Al-Qaeda’s recruiters.

America’s rapprochement with India, and its centerpiece nuclear agreement, is a bright star in the otherwise murky firmament of the George W. Bush years. India is a large power; it is a secular, democratic power, not influenced by Islamist radicalism. Its large Muslim population of 140 million seems generally—so far—not attracted to that kind of fanaticism. India is a country with a population of 1.17 billion whose numbers are destined to exceed those of China by 2050. (Pakistan’s population, much smaller, but not insignificant, is roughly 180 million). The advantage of the U.S.-India rapprochement, in the short and medium term, lies in the fact that this huge country is right next to a string of Muslim countries whose populations are generally (though not universally) hostile to U.S. interests. Because of the strategic importance that the United States places on both India and its troubled sister, Pakistan, policymakers in Washington have periodically tried to play the role of peacemaker in the region, hoping to push both nuclear-armed countries to resolve the bad blood between them—which, for the most part, has revolved around the contested province of Kashmir. In 2009, U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke reportedly tried to include India in his Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) portfolio, which seemed to mean that he wanted to take a crack at the Kashmir problem. The Indians, however, would have none of it, and AfPak remains limited to the two nations that make up the somewhat unwieldy conjunction. [caption id="attachment_4252" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Indian relief map of the Line of Control"][/caption] Steve Coll, in a New Yorker article on March 2, 2009, brought to light a parallel or “back” channel in Indo-Pak negotiations that took place during the regime of Pervez Musharraf. If the discussions had succeeded, and it appears they came close, it could have resulted in a sort of free movement of populations across the Kashmiri line of separation—without a change of sovereignty between the advantageous Indian and unimpressive Pakistani portions. However, Musharraf went into a political tailspin after his dispute with the Pakistan judiciary and had to leave office in August 2008. With his departure, the talks seem to have ended. Ironically, according to Coll, the Indians had come to trust Musharraf, despite the fact that he was the main instigator of the abortive Pakistani attack at Kargil, in Kashmir, in 1999. The arrangement nearly worked out reflects the Indian insistence that the line of separation (called the Line of Control) must not be altered, as this could affect the status of the Indian-held Valley of Kashmir, the beautiful “jewel in the crown” of the whole affair. Moreover, from the Indian point of view, ceding any part of Indian-held Kashmir, in what would be seen as stemming from religious reasons, would compromise the Indian political philosophy of secular government. In any event, a settlement now seems extremely unlikely in the short term, especially after the horrific attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 which originated in Pakistan. As long as Kashmir remains as it is, unequally divided, Islamabad will likely never be satisfied, which means we can expect more Pakistani agitation inside India and an increasingly stronger riposte from New Delhi. There is definitely a fear that the two Pakistan-sponsored terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are not only still active; worse, extrapolating from the attack on Mumbai, these groups may have set their sights on more ambitious targets, unleashing havoc within India’s metropolitan cities rather than engaging India’s massive deployments in Jammu and Kashmir. So where do things stand now?

On the way from Worli to my aunt’s house off Nepean Sea Road, there are two gigantic posters for the new Mont Blanc Mahatma Gandhi commemorative pen. The posters feature a thin and grizzled Gandhi in profile. Against the photograph, rendered in historically appropriate sepia tones, a short quotation written in Gandhi’s own hand is featured in luminous gold: “The way to truth lies through ahimsa (nonviolence).” To the right of the photograph, is an image of the pen itself, uncapped, ready to be used. This pen, designed to honor a man who dedicated himself to the masses of India’s poorest, who dressed and lived in the strictest simplicity as they are forced to dress and live, costs $27,000, more than most Indians will earn in a decade. According to the billboard, it is available in Bombay exclusively at the Taj, the city’s most opulent hotel. For centuries, India has evoked for Western observers images of extreme wealth existing cheek by jowl with the worst human misery—Maharajahs weighed down by ropes of pearls and rubies the size of pigeon’s eggs using virtual slave labor to build extravagant palaces hung with rich brocades and filled with trinkets of silver and gold, while outside the palace gates skeletal subjects eke out a living with nothing more than their calloused hands and bent backs. The contrasts of wealth and poverty in India today are less visible but hardly less extreme. On magazine stands and in bookstores across the city of Bombay, a special edition of Forbes magazine featuring “India’s 100 Richest” is on sale. In the last year, a year when the rest of the world, especially the United States, reeled from a massive economic crisis, a year when India’s financial capital Bombay was hit with a devastating terrorist attack, India doubled its number of billionaires, from 27 to 54. These 54 individuals, according to the Forbes special-edition cover, represent 25 percent of India’s total GDP. The country’s remaining 1.2 billion people have to make do with the remaining 75 percent, and that is hardly distributed equally. 800 million Indians still live on less than $2 dollars per day; of those, half live on less than $1.25 per day. Absent from magazine stands is the recent annual UNDP Human Development Index report. While India’s richest were getting richer, its poor were barely running in place. India, the world’s fourth-largest economy when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), ranks a miserable 134th on the UNDP’s human development index. 47 percent of its children are malnourished. Famed for its brainy software engineers, poised to become a world R&D center, more than a third of Indians are illiterate and only one in 10,000 benefits from higher education. In the streets of Bombay, these contrasts are visible as ever. During my stay in Bombay, the occasional beggar displaying twisted limbs or a baby with matted, russet hair has accosted my car when it stopped at a red light. Returning home at night from dinner, we have passed the recumbent forms of people too poor even to string a patch of tarpaulin over their heads; men, women, and children curled up in a thin blanket on the sidewalk. On either side of the manicured park where I go to walk each morning with my aunt, the slums still hug the narrow line where the land meets the sea. The stench from the rocks below the park can’t be blocked by the landscaping that screens the hunched backsides of people who have no other toilet. In the buildings of the rich, where apartments with polished marble floors equipped with wi-fi and flat-screen televisions are elegantly furnished and hung with paintings by contemporary Indian artists, servants are barked at and sleep on kitchen floors, in hallways, or in entry foyers. One does not reach across the table for the salt or pepper; one calls the servant who has retired to the kitchen to come to the dining room and move it nearer. The stark contrast between the physical size, the clothing, and the hairstyles—not to mention the bearing of the rich and the stunted poor—still shocks, though I have known this my whole life.