Abstract
Indo-Pakistan relations present the analyst and the policy maker with one of the most intransigent cases of mistrust, suspicion and threat to be found in the contemporary world. The early 1990s witnessed a series of diplomatic expulsions, mutual accusations of spying, the closing of consular offices, and allegations of covert support for separatist groups and militants operative in Kashmir, Sindh (especially Karachi), India’s northeast and Baluchistan. In March 1993, a series of bomb explosions in the Indian city of Bombay killed 250 people, and led to the accusation that Pakistan was behind the carnage. In early 1996, a bomb explosion in Lahore led to similar accusations by the Pakistanis against India. In mid-1999, following incursions from the Pakistani side, the two countries fought a short war in the Kargil area of Kashmir.
I would like to thank my colleagues Eric Herring and Richard Little for reading over this chapter and making various comments and suggestions. Both brought my attention to a particularly useful set of articles and books.
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Notes
BJP, Manifesto 1998: Vote For a Stable Government and an Able Prime Minister (New Delhi: 1998), 31, ‘Policies on National Defence’.
Perhaps the most revealing statement on the wider context in which the BJP-led government decided to test can be gleaned from Jaswant Singh’s book, Defending India (New Delhi: Macmillans, 1998).
For a fascinating study of the problems faced by the boundary commission, see R. J. Moore, Making the New Commonwealth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Moore notes that ‘the essential conditions of [Radcliffe’s] brief [from the government] which he took up on 8 July was that he must exercise independent judgment to bring down the awards by 15 August (p. 25).
The Afghan claims on Pakistan primarily involved the province of Baluchistan. As late as 1969, the Afghan government issued a postage stamp that showed the borders of Afghanistan as incorporating Baluchistan and parts of the Pakistan tribal belt. See M. Z. Ispahani, Roads and Rivals: The Politics of Access in the Borderlands of Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 25.
Sajjad Hyder, Reflections of an Ambassador (Lahore: 1988), 75.
Z. A. Khan, Pakistan’s Security (Lahore: 1990).
Space precludes a full discussion of the immensity of this subject. See Alastair Lamb’s two books Kashmir, A Disputed Legacy 1846–1990 (Roxford: 1992), and Kashmir Birth of a Tragedy: Kashmir 1947 and my own Reclaiming the Past: The Search for Political and Cultural Unity in Jammu and Kashmir (1995) for a good overview of the controversies.
See Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
A. Vanaik and P. Bidwai, ‘India and Pakistan,’ in R.C. Karp, ed., Security With Nuclear Weapons? Differing Perspectives on National Security, (London: 1991), 263.
P. N. Haksar, India’s Foreign Policy and its Problems (New Delhi: Patriot Publishers, 1989), 53.
Ibid.
While I recognise the vagueness of this term, it seems to me to convey the right sense of urgency about defence expenditure, and weapon system procurements currently witnessed in Indo-Pakistan relations. I am convinced that the current position between India and Pakistan fits both Martin Wight’s definition of an arms race (in Power Politics, 239), and Colin Gray’s discussion of an arms race in ‘The Arms Race Phenomenon’, World Politics 24, 1974, 41. Note Gray’s fourth point that ‘there must be a rapid increase in quantity and/or improvements in quality of weapons,’ Ibid.
IISS, The Military Balance 1989–90, (London: OUP, 1990). Put another way, however, India still spends less on defence as a percentage of her GNP (about 4 percent) compared to Pakistan’s estimated 7 percent. There are difficulties in calculating or estimating China’s defence expenditure, and quotes vary from 4–8 percent: see Brassey’s Asian Security (London: 1989), 43.
See my mimeo ‘Containing Shiva? India and the Politics of Nuclear Non-proliferation’, in IISS, The Military Balance 1998/9 (London: OUP, 1998).
S. C. Gangal, India and the Commonwealth (Agra, India: Shiv Lal Agarwal, 1970), 63.
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© 2001 Amita Shastri and A. Jeyaratnam Wilson
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Hewitt, V. (2001). Creating a Common Home? Indo-Pakistan Relations and the Search for Security in South Asia. In: Shastri, A., Wilson, A.J. (eds) The Post-Colonial States of South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11508-9_14
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