Disquiet on the northern front

But while India does talk about the absence of democracy and civil rights in ‘‘Azad Kashmir’’, the alienation within the Northern Areas goes largely unnoticed.

Over the past year, the two million people who live in the area they call Gilgit-Baltistan have intensified their struggle for freedom from Pakistan. The struggle dates back 55 years, to the days when this was the border between the British and Russian empires.

Termed by the British as the ‘‘Gilgit Agency’’, this region — it included the towns of Gilgit, Skardu and Hunza — was controlled by a British-led militia, the Gilgit Scouts.

On Britain’s departure, Maharaja Hari Singh feebly tried to establish his control over the area. On his part, the British commander of the Gilgit Scouts refused to recognise a local declaration of independence and. Instead, on November 16, 1947, he handed over the area to Pakistan.

Realising the region’s strategic value, Pakistan moved quickly to segregate it from the Kashmir dispute. The 72,000 square km of Gilgit-Baltistan were designated the Northern Areas, separate both in name and governance from ‘‘Azad Kashmir’’, which was reduced to a 5,500 sq km sliver of land around Muzaffarabad and Mirpur.

The invisibility of Gilgit-Baltistan is at least partly due to Pakistan’s success in separating this area — at least terminologically — from the Kashmir dispute. But historical and legal bonds refuse to go away.

All relevant United Nations resolutions after 1947 mentioned the Northern Areas as part of Jammu and Kashmir. In official maps — of the UN, the World Bank or even the Survey of Pakistan — the Northern Areas are shown as part of Jammu and Kashmir.

When Pakistan gifted away 5,000 square km of the Northern Areas to China, in the 1963 Sino-Pakistan Border Agreement, China insisted on a clause that made this transfer conditional on the final settlement of the Kashmir dispute. More recently, in a 1993 judgment, the ‘‘Azad Kashmir’’ High Court declared the Northern Areas were ‘‘historically, geographically and constitutionally’’a part of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan’s treatment of the Northern Areas can at best be described as colonial. ‘‘Azad Kashmir’’ has been given a semblance of an administration that includes a sadr (president) and a vazir-e-azam. The Northern Areas are still administered by a toothless council, headed by a deputy commissioner-level officer appointed by Islamabad.

When the strategic Karakoram Highway was built, linking Islamabad with Kashgar in Chinese Xinjiang, Pakistan began changing the demographic balance of the Northern Areas. The 80 per cent Shia majority of 1947 has been whittled down to 55 per cent by Punjabi and Pathan immigration.

The Indus river, Pakistan’s most vital water resource, flows through this area but does not benefit it. The Northern Areas have no university and only 12 high schools. Adult literacy is 14 per cent for males and 3.5 per cent for females.

The primarily Shia populace is outraged at attempts to foist a Sunni curriculum in the few schools that exist. There is no daily newspaper and no radio or television station.

In the early years after 1947, Gilgiti leaders chose a pragmatic response. Their demand was not full-fledged democracy, just parity with ‘‘Azad Kashmir’’. But when even this was not forthcoming, Gilgit rose in revolt in 1988. Pervez Musharraf, then a brigadier, played a key role in what transpired. Truckloads of Pathan tribesmen and Sunni Lashkars were brought into Gilgit by the Pakistan army to put down the rebellion.

The ISI brought in the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, now an internationally designated Sunni terrorist group, to counter what it saw as a Shia threat. A civil rights agitation was transformed by a Shia-Sunni struggle into an independence movement.

In 1993, the Balawaristan National Front (BNF) was created as an umbrella body for political groups in the Northern Areas. In the past two years, the BNF has joined forces with political groups in ‘‘Azad Kashmir’’ and also Yasin Malik’s faction of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front.

A new body — All Parties National Alliance (APNA) was formed in 2001 with the aim of ‘‘organising the masses of Jammu and Kashmir, including Gilgit-Baltistan, for the independence of Jammu and Kashmir’’.

The Pakistani response has been measured. The entire leadership of APNA was arrested in February 2002 but released later. The authorities have clamped down on press coverage of the movement. Earlier this year, a Reuters team that filmed an APNA meeting near Rawalakot, just across the LoC from Poonch, was detained and its tapes and camera confiscated.

But concern is growing in Islamabad. International attention would bring onto the negotiating table a region that Pakistan sees, like Britain before it, as strategically vital. Not only is this a bridge between the sub-continent and Central Asia, it also forms the land route to China, Pakistan’s only ‘‘all-weather ally’’.

Consignments of M-9 and M-11 missiles, the backbone of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent, were picked up by US satellites while being transported from China on the Karakoram Highway. A hostile local population would threaten this pipeline and make it difficult for Pakistan to maintain its positions on the LoC, opposite Kupwara, Kargil and Siachen.

For India, Gilgit-Baltistan could be a critical pressure point against Pakistan, already feeling encircled by loss of influence in Afghanistan. But New Delhi must realise this is a double-edged sword.

Strengthening the APNA movement to a point where the region could actually break free from Islamabad would create for India an uncomfortable precedent. Redrawing boundaries in the region is not a thought that comforts New Delhi.

Therefore, counter-intuitively, while India’s immediate benefit lies in supporting azadi in the Northern Areas, its long-term interests lie in integrating this area with Pakistan.

The challenge for Indian policy-makers is dealing with the situation ethically and effectively. The aspirations in Gilgit-Baltistan must be translated into strong pressure on Pakistan, without creating for the people there the wasteland of misery that Pakistan has created on our side of the LoC.

(The author is correspondent with NDTV. Views expressed in this article are personal)