THERE IS NO INDIA:

The unhealed wound of Kashmir (H.D.S. Greenway, December 2, 2008, Boston Globe)

[I]t's becoming clear that the unhealed wound of Kashmir is spreading its gangrenous grievance yet again. The mostly Muslim region was assigned to India when the subcontinent was being partitioned, and the Muslim population remains unreconciled to Indian rule.

The terrorists seemed so familiar with their targets, including a hard-to-find Jewish center. One wonders if they had local help. How sad for India if local Muslims were involved. Although a minority, Muslims in India represent either the world's second- or third-biggest Muslim population, after Indonesia and Pakistan, which was created as a Muslim homeland. Communal violence has always been the lethal gene in the Indian body politic, and Mumbai's Muslims were hunted down and massacred by angry Hindus as recently as 1993.

One terrorist screamed "Remember Babri Masjid!" a mosque destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992. Another cried "Remember Godhra!" the scene of anti-Muslim riots in Gugarat six years ago.

Local elections have begun in India, leading up to a general election next year, and the Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, longs to paint the ruling Congress Party as soft on terrorism and national security.

The big question is to what degree will Pakistan be blamed? A similar attack on the Indian parliament seven years ago brought the two counties to the brink of war. Pakistan wants no trouble with India while a consuming fire of Islamic militancy blazes in its own country. But elements of Pakistan's military and security forces have been known to give succor and support to militants just in order to bedevil India over Kashmir. The terrorists clearly hoped to worsen Indo-Pakistan relations.

India and Pakistan have fought several wars, most of them over Kashmir, and Pakistan feels threatened by India's growing influence in Afghanistan. India, in turn, fears becoming a war zone itself with constant bombings and terrorist outrages, some of them traceable to Pakistan.

The British partition of India 60 years ago, which cost so many lives and so much anguish, was designed to resolve the problems between Hindus and Muslims. It did not. The grievances growing out of that partition live on to poison both successor states to the British Raj.

The country can't be held together in the long run generally, but Kashmir in particular isn't part of India.

MORE:
The Great Game’s bitter legacy (Jonathan Power, December 2, 2008, The Prospect)

These cleavages can be traced back to the days of the Great Game of the 19th century—the British-Russian struggle for supremacy in Afghanistan and central Asia. But ever since the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and was finally defeated by the Taliban aided by American, Saudi Arabian and Indian arms and training, the intensity of the Game has been ratcheted up and extended step by step to now frightening proportions, worsened by America’s decision to go to war with its former close ally, the Taliban. It is no longer just a Great Game. It has become a Great Madness. One hostile act impacts on another and then the two together create a third and then the three together create a fourth… and so on.

It has long been known that the Pakistan-based terrorists who struggle to liberate Kashmir from India’s grip have close connections with the Taliban. There is also little doubt that those Pakistani terrorists whose primary interest is a free Kashmir know that one way of wounding India is to hurt India’s growing political and diplomatic interests in Afghanistan—interests that are, in turn, all about encircling Pakistan in order to have a counter against Pakistan’s ambitions for Kashmir.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2008 12:20 PM