BLACK HOLE OF THE NORTH
NAWAZ SHARIF’S ‘PIVOT TO KASHMIR’ ISN’T RANDOM. IT IS A CALCULATED MOVE IN THE NEW GREAT GAME AS INDIA AND PAKISTAN JOSTLE FOR POSITION, AND GILGIT-BALTISTAN BECOMES A VITAL CHINESE PAWN
The status of Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B) in the grand scheme of the Pakistani state is, for lack of a better term, a black hole. Since 1947, the territory’s position has been compromised by the Islamic republic’s desire to exercise power and control in an on-again, off-again cycle that has been linked to Pakistan’s larger plans for Jammu & Kashmir. Though reforms (most recently in 2009, under Yousaf Raza Gilani’s Pakistan People’s Party administration) have taken place to grant the residents of GilgitBaltistan greater autonomy, the relatively peaceful region’s political structure remains predominantly in the hands of the federal government. Surely, G-B does not have the political or military wounds Balochistan has suffered. But in the new Indo-Pak dynamic of vicious bilateralism, it will continue to be used by New Delhi in a tit for tat, rightback-at-ya for Pakistan’s positioning as Kashmir heats up.
Bordering both China and Afghanistan, GilgitBaltistan has obvious geopolitical significance for Pakistan (and India). But as China rolls out its One Belt, One Road pilot project via the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and pursues greater economic initiatives in the region with the full cooperation of the civilians in Islamabad and the generals in Rawalpindi, the question of GilgitBaltistan’s constitutional status remains ambiguous. Will its residents be granted Pakistani citizenship? Will the region itself be granted provincial status? Or, is it merely an economic pawn, exploited to its full potential by neighbouring countries, and picked up and dropped according to the whims of the central government?
NAWAZ 2.0 AND THE BITTER NEW BILATERALISM
Now here’s the big picture. G-B is being discussed because of Kashmir. And Kashmir is being discussed because of one Burhan Wani. Following the killing of Wani by Indian security forces earlier this summer, and the subsequent unrest in the Kashmir valley, Nawaz Sharif capitalised on the opportunity to highlight New Delhi’s high-handedness in the disputed region and play the India card at home with those who seem to matter (voters) and those who really matter (the army).
Sharif’s zen moment came last month when on his first full day back in office after a two-month hiatus in London for heart surgery (it opened up his valves and also had the other advantage of buying him valuable time to ward off pressure from the Panama Leaks, which named his sons and daughter as owners of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands), he addressed a massive victory rally in Muzaffarabad following the landslide victory of his party, the PML(N), in ‘Azad’ Jammu & Kashmir’s legislative assembly elections. After congratulating himself and his voters in his usual safe-and-sound rhetoric, Sharif wiped his forehead in the sweltering morning with a silk handkerchief, folded it back into his pocket and then switched into a gear that will define the future of his relationship with India: he raised his arms high, pumped both fists and shouted out for the crowd what only the hard-right and the military have uttered in recent years: “Kashmir will become (part of) Pakistan.”
The new ‘pivot to Kashmir’ by Sharif isn’t random, and New Delhi has taken note. The Pakistan media was soon bristling at Sushma Swaraj’s riposte to Sharif: that he will have to wait till Armageddon for Kashmir’s union with Pakistan. Yet, here’s a third-time prime minister, under Panama Leaks pressure, prone to catching up on his Whatsapp messages just before bedtime at 10 pm and who only trusts his daughter to run his public relations, responding to the growing and organic ‘anti-Indianness’ in Pakistan with savvy little giveaways composed by his media machine: he’s offered to treat pellet gun victims in any hospital of the world; he’s declared Wani a martyr; he’s made his ministers and cricketers wear black armbands. In a meeting with the outgoing president of ‘Azad’ Kashmir, M. Yaqoob Khan, on August 16, Sharif called on the global community to take note of New Delhi’s ‘brutalities’ in the region. He’s even getting the OIC involved in Kashmir all over again. Sharif sounds serious about looking serious about Kashmir. His new hardline rhetoric, timed for Independence Day and the upcoming Defence Day, is showcased in an advertisement running clips of Sharif’s pre- and post-Musharraf coup speeches on Kashmiri rights. Owning up to his newfound clarity on Kashmir, the prime minister of Pakistan talked to me about this issue earlier this week, saying, “There is no compromise on Kashmir, because it’s a matter of principle.”
Sharif would go on to admit the cost of turning up the volume on Kashmir: “I do think about the goodwill that was built up over the last couple of years and may be lost with India, but there is no going back from here without resolving Kashmir. It is an indigenous freedom struggle, for me and for them (the Kashmiris). And Wani is a martyr. The whole effort is clearly different this time, with the youth using social media to rally the people. You can’t pellet gun your way out of this one. Nor can you just blame Pakistan for this unrest.”
Commenting on the divergent views in India—one side concerned about his increasing hard line on Kashmir as a real political development, the other thinking it’s just a compromise move to assuage the military and the right— the Pakistan prime minister said, “I’m just doing what I believe in, which is to help the Kashmir cause. If India is confused about me actually going right wing, or me doing this without sincerity, then those are two different arguments they need to figure out for themselves.”
HE’S EVEN GETTING THE OIC INVOLVED IN KASHMIR ALL OVER AGAIN. SHARIF SOUNDS SERIOUS ABOUT LOOKING SERIOUS ON KASHMIR
This recent shift in Indo-Pak bilateral rhetoric became even more apparent on the 15th of August. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day address to the nation, he referred directly to the people of Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan who, he said, had praised him and sent him personal messages. By bringing into focus a region that has not figured prominently in previous diplomatic exchanges over the Kashmir issue, the implications of PM Modi’s statement are immense.
THE I-DAY FALLOUT
Following the I-Day speech, protests erupted in ‘Azad’ Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan over the controversial statements. Thousands took part in raising slogans against, and burning effigies of, Modi in Skardu and Chilas, as well as in Muzaffarabad, where demonstrators also burned the Indian flag. On August 19, the Gilgit-Baltistan legislative assembly unanimously passed a resolution condemning Modi’s remarks, calling them “madness” and a ploy to “divert attention” from the atrocities in Kashmir. The results are obvious: After Pakistan’s foreign secretary Aizaz Chaudhry invited his Indian counterpart for talks on Kashmir, the latter stressed the importance of focusing the two countries’ dialogue on cross-border terrorism rather than the disputed territory.
With regard to Balochistan, the Indian prime minister’s rhetoric provides validation and optics to Pakistan’s claims that New Delhi is responsible for unrest in the province. Mere days after the bloody Quetta attack, the impact of Modi’s remarks on Balochistan has been visceral. Pakistanis have reacted, physically and politically. Effigies of Modi will be burnt in G-B and Balochistan for some time to come. And regardless of who is in the centre, seeing how Sharif balked at the “Modi ka jo yaar hai, gaddar hai” slogan raised by an increasingly aggressive Bilawal Bhutto Zardari recently, the template is set: you can’t be seen to be too close to Modi.
The Indian PM’s remarks were also, understandably, heard in Beijing. China’s infrastructure projects in Pakistan are now centred around CPEC, and will have a direct impact on both Gilgit-Baltistan and Balochistan, where Pakistan’s biggest ally hopes to gain access to the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, and run logistics via a series of roads that open into its western Xinjiang province. In G-B, a part of which, in the extreme north, was given to China for the construction of the Karakoram highway, Beijing has made investments to make use of the territory’s mineral resources. India’s foreign minister Sushma Swaraj has already termed the use of G-B territory for CPEC “unacceptable”, considering India claims the area. But because Pakistan hasn’t granted G-B either autonomy or absorbed it fully, the region’s opaque status could leave the legal lid open for China and CPEC. AFP reports that soon Gilgit-Baltistan will be mentioned in the Pakistani Constitution for formal absorption, and observer-level parliamentarians from the region will sit in Pakistan’s assembly for the first time.
But despite such high-level stratagems, both Beijing and Islamabad have reason to be concerned about what the locals are thinking. Some of the region’s residents fear that they have little to gain from the Pak-Sino agreement. At a session chaired on August 11 by PPP senator Taj Haider, who heads a special committee of senators on CPEC, G-B rights activists and journalists raised their grievances and noted that residents have been kept in the dark about the project’s details. However, Sharif’s appointment of Masood Khan, a diplomat who has served as ambassador to China, as president of Pakistanadministered Kashmir, points to Islamabad’s desire to pursue the project and further strengthen and articulate its economic and diplomatic relationship with Beijing visa-vis Kashmir. Whether or not the concerns of the residents of G-B are heard while Sharif’s government goes full steam ahead on CPEC is a question only the mountains of the north may have an answer to. Wajahat S. Khan is a multimedia journalist based in Islamabad