India implications on Musharraf exit

Sultan frames charges against Musharraf



Staff Reporter

ISLAMABAD: Former Azad Kashmir prime minister Barrister Sultan Mahmood Chaudhary has demanded the Pakistan government add a few more points to the charge-sheet against President Pervez Musharraf.

Sultan, a leader of People's Muslim League, said President Musharraf should be charged with installing a corrupt government in Azad Kashmir and putting forth the four-point formula that undermined the Kashmir cause.

He said that the incumbent AJK government had proved a major hurdle to the Kashmir freedom movement. "Therefore, the AJK government should be toppled prior to the impeachment of Musharraf," he opined.

He mentioned that all opposition parties in Azad Kashmir agreed on ouster of AJK Prime Minister Sardar Attique and his government. Most of Muslim Conference lawmakers would also support the opposition on in-house change, he added.

He said that Musharraf's Kashmir policy badly affected the freedom movement at national and international level and now India was engaged in flagrant human right violations in the valley.

Sultan said that his party observed the independence day of India as a black day and staged protests in front of Indian embassies all over the world.He said that India has imposed a state of emergency in nine cites of occupied Jammu and Kashmir and the situation along line of control (LoC) ws very critical. About his visit to London, he said that he wanted to draw western countries' attention towards the Kashmir issue.

What Musharraf's exit means for India
Indo-Asian News Service


With the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as president of Pakistan, there is a growing feeling that Islamabad is likely to be more hawkish on the Kashmir issue and its preoccupations with internal politics may affect the pace of the peace process between the two countries.

Although Musharraf is widely seen as the architect of the 1999 armed engagement in Kargil that led to a suspension of the peace process before its resumption in 2004, his tenure as the de facto ruler of the country for eight years and later as civilian president of the country saw perceptible improvement in the content and tone of dialogue not just over the Kashmir issue but in other areas also.

Nearly two years ago, it was Musharraf who floated a trial balloon in the form of a four-point formula for resolving the Kashmir issue that revolved around self-governance, demilitarisation and a joint supervisory mechanism and making the Line of Control irrelevant through more cross-border trade and travel.

Musharraf was the first Pakistani leader to suggest that Pakistan was ready to give up its demand for an independent Kashmir and assured that Islamabad would no longer insist on plebiscite and the UN resolutions on Kashmir if India accepted his four-point proposal.

Although India rejected the proposal, it underlined a significant shift from Islamabad's ideological rigidity to a more pragmatic approach, specially Pakistan's increasing acceptance of promoting a soft border, to resolve a dispute over which the two countries have fought two wars.

"Musharraf was a little more pragmatic than his predecessors. If we look at his exit purely from viewpoint of its bearing on the Kashmir issue, it's bad news for India," K Subrahmanyam, eminent strategic expert and a keen Pakistan-watcher, said.

"Moreover, we don't know how long will the unity between Asif Zardari, co-chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party, and Nawaz Sharif, head of Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), last. It also remains to be seen how stable this coalition will be," Subrahmanyam said.

"In such a situation, there is every chance that Kashmir will become an issue in party politics, with each side trying to outdo the other by more hawkish postures on Kashmir," he said.

"Musharraf was a little more reasonable on Kashmir. But his formulations were something India could not accept," said Kuldip Nayar, veteran journalist who has written extensively on Pakistan.

"The peace process is also likely to slow down due to domestic political preoccupations in Pakistan," he said.

Although India has made it clear that its ties with Pakistan are not individual-specific, there are concerns here that a weak civilian government in Islamabad may not be in a position to wield control over the powerful military establishment and the ISI who are seen to be driving the foreign policy of that country.

"We don't really know who is in control and whether they can rein in forces inimical to Indian interests," a government source, who did not wish to be named, said.

Last week, National Security Adviser M K Narayanan had voiced these anxieties when he said that Musharraf's exit would leave "a big vacuum" in Pakistan's politics.

The last few weeks have seen a straining of ties due to India's suspicion about the ISI's involvement in the July 7 bombing of its embassy in Kabul, a spike in infiltration and firing across the LoC.

After last four years of realistic diplomacy on Kashmir, Pakistan is now reverting to hawkish posturing and is threatening to internationalise the Kashmir issue.

Islamabad has accused New Delhi of excessive use of force and human rights violations in India-controlled Kashmir after protests over transfer of land to a Hindu shrine turned violent.

Compared to this, Musharraf's reign saw marked improvement in ties, after a brief interlude of Kargil misadventure and near-war situation in 2002, and resulted in a slew of ambitious initiatives, including the launch of more cross-border bus services, the restoration of a train link and cross-border confidence building measures like the setting up of an anti-terror mechanism.

Terrorism, however, continued to be a serious issue that shadowed their ties, especially after the 2006 bombings in Mumbai's commuter trains in which India suspected Pakistan's involvement - a charge that was denied by Islamabad.

New Delhi, Aug 17 (PTI) Close on the heels of growing global criticism over ISI links with Islamic militants, a leading US think-tank has said that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is a key figure in Pakistan's Kashmiri Islamist militant project.
It also said that the US could officially designate the ISI as a terrorism-supporting entity.

Stating that ISI played a key role in the rise of transnational jihadism by cultivating Islamist militants for its own strategic purposes in Afghanistan and Kashmir, the Texas based Intelligence analysis agency, Stratfor has said that "Pakistan lacks any institutional checks that could help maintain oversight over ISI operations." Giving support to India's long held view that ISI is patronising militants in Kashmir by giving them all possible help, Stratfor which is a publisher of online geopolitical intelligence in its recent report 'Pakistan: Anatomy of the ISI' said the ISI had cultivated Kashmir-specific Islamist militant groups.

The report also said though Pakistan is trying to maintain its status as an ally in the US war against terror, "there is evidence implicating the ISI in large-scale attacks in both Afghanistan and India." Talking about the Kargil war which it said was against the state intent, the report said, "ISI and Pakistan army had been working to send Islamist militants into Indian Kashmir, a process that led to short Kargil War in the summer of 1999 - the same year in which army chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key figure in Pakistan's Kashmiri Islamist militant project, came to power in an October coup." PTI


BBC says
By Alistair Scrutton - Analysis

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Coincidence or not, as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's influence waned this year, there was a spike in firing across the Indian border, a bomb attack on India's Kabul embassy and diplomatic spats over Kashmir.

Now he has been forced to resign, India fears that relations between the two nuclear rivals could now get even worse.

While many Pakistanis despised Musharraf as a dictator, India enjoyed some of its best diplomatic relations in decades during his rule.

New Delhi's fear is that a weak civilian government in Islamabad will be unable to exert the same muscle that Musharraf did over Pakistan's army and the powerful military spy agency, the ISI, which India suspects has a hand in most attacks on its soil.

"How the vacuum is handled by the civilian government, how much control they can exercise on the radical elements remains to be seen," a senior Indian foreign ministry official, who asked to remain anonymous, told Reuters.

The Indian government reacted cautiously to word that Musharraf had quit. "We have no comments to make on the resignation of President Musharraf of Pakistan," it said in a statement. "This is an internal matter of Pakistan."

The two countries have fought three wars since independence in 1947 and nearly came to a fourth one in 2002.

But since a peace process began in 2004 under Musharraf, there has been a string of improvements from a cross-border bus service to more trade and some progress over border disputes.

That peace process could now be dumped, with a return to the hostilities that dogged South Asia for decades. Some Indian experts fear more Pakistan-backed militant attacks in Kashmir and the rest of India if Islamabad's new civilian government fails to assert control over the military.

"After four good years in which India had high hopes for the peace process, in the last four months the opposite has happened," said C. Raja Mohan, an Indian foreign affairs analyst based in Singapore.

"Musharraf was seen by India as decisive and ready to engage, compared with the chaos and division of the last few months."

RELATIONS UNDER STRESS

This month's mass protests in Kashmir, for example, sparked some of the sharpest diplomatic spats in years between Islamabad and New Delhi. India accused Pakistan of interfering in its internal affairs after Islamabad talked of U.N. intervention.

There has been a spate of clashes in the past few months along the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, after relative calm that followed the start of the peace process.

India's government said in July that the peace process was "under stress". The statement came soon after a bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed at least 58 people. Both India and Afghanistan blame the ISI for that bombing.

"The ISI enjoyed greater autonomy since Musharraf's wings were clipped," said Ashok Mehta, a security analyst and former Indian army commander, referring to the coming to power of Pakistan's new civilian government in March.

"Once he is removed from the scene, ISI may have even greater autonomy."

Pakistan has denied any role in the attacks.

Some analysts see a worst case scenario in which Pakistan's military or ISI persuade militant groups on its Afghan border to switch attacks away from that frontier and towards India.

That strategy, Indian analysts say, could ease U.S. pressure over the Afghan border, as well as make Indian troops, and not the Pakistani army, the victims of militants.

Earlier this month Indian National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan gave the government's clearest expression yet of its worries about Musharraf leaving.

"Whether he is impeached or not is not important from the Indian point of view," Narayanan told Singapore's Straits Times.

"But it leaves a big vacuum and we are deeply concerned about this vacuum because it leaves the radical extremist outfits with freedom to do what they like, not merely on Pak(istan)-Afghan border but clearly our side of the border too."

But it is early days in Pakistan, and few are willing to predict the outcome of the civilian government.

"We'll have to wait to see how the dust settles," said Mohan. "If the resignation of Musharraf leads to the primacy of the civilian leaders or to the primacy of the ISI and the army."

(Additional reporting by Krittivas Mukherjee; editing by Roger Crabb)