Continuing a military escalation aimed at Pakistan that has brought the region to the brink of war, New Delhi insists that the government in Islamabad extend its crackdown on Islamic groups accused by India of carrying out an armed attack on the Indian parliament December 13. The five attackers killed eight people outside the parliament, most of them guards, before being gunned down.

Borrowing from the imperialist rhetoric used by Washington to justify its war moves against Afghanistan and other countries in the region, Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said December 30 that India's "objective is to put an end to Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of the country." Seizing on the opportunity provided by the armed attack on the Indian parliament, New Delhi seeks to deal a decisive blow to the Kashmir independence movement, and gain ground over its neighbor and capitalist rival in the region.

"Lowering the level of insurgency is not too high a price to pay for protecting the country" against attack from India, whose conventional forces far outnumber Pakistan's, said Musharraf on January 2.

The Pakistani regime had earlier moved to comply with India's demands to freeze the assets and arrest leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of the Prophet), the two groups that India alleges carried out the December 13 attack. More than 80 people associated with the two organizations have been detained by the Pakistani military in the last two weeks. New Delhi has also insisted that the leaders of the two groups be handed over for trial.

On December 29 White House spokesman Scott McClellan informed the press that U.S. president Bush had called Musharraf and had told him "to take additional strong and decisive measures to eliminate the extremists who seek to harm India, undermine Pakistan, provoke a war."

Calling the attack on the Indian parliament a "strike against democracy," Bush made a pledge to Vajpayee to work together against terrorism. The Bush administration has added Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad to the State Department list of "terrorist" organizations.

While welcoming the latest measures, the New Delhi government announced that it will not withdraw the hundreds of thousands of troops, short-range ballistic missile batteries, and hundreds of combat aircraft it has massed along its 2000-mile border with Pakistan. "It's too short a time to think of de-escalating now," said an Indian defense ministry official. Instead, India has pressed its demand that Pakistan arrest and hand over for trial 20 people it accuses of being "terrorists" who have committed crimes in India.

Along with its military moves, India has closed its international airspace to Pakistani airliners. On December 27 New Delhi ordered Islamabad to withdraw half its diplomatic staff and confined the remaining representatives to the capital.

Pakistan has responded to India's military threat by moving several army divisions and heavy arms equipment to its border, including medium-range ballistic missiles, and has declared that it will consider any attack on its territory an act of war.

The arsenal wielded by India's vastly superior and larger army of 1 million--compared to the 600,000-strong Pakistani force--includes some 75 Prithvi ballistic missiles that could be launched from any of its 14 Russian-made nuclear-capable bombers, as well as from any of its several hundred MiG-27, MiG-29, and Su-30 fighter planes. U.S. intelligence services estimate that India has about 60 nuclear weapons in its war chest. India's military mobilization includes a naval task force--incorporating its only aircraft carrier, six other ships, and two submarines--deployed off Pakistan in the Arabian Sea within striking distance of Karachi.

Seeking to exploit its growing ties to Washington, the government of India is encouraging Bush to keep up the pressure. "Pakistan cannot continue to support these groups for even one day if the American government puts enough pressure on because Pakistan is so vulnerable economically," said a senior Indian minister. The Pakistani regime has for decades been U.S. imperialism's key ally in the region, and it quickly opened its military bases for Washington to use in its assault on neighboring Afghanistan. In the period following independence in 1947 India had closer ties with the Soviet Union.

India has a population of more than 1 billion people, and a Gross Domestic Product in 1996 of $1.54 trillion, compared with Pakistan's population of 145 million and GDP of $296.5 billion. Close to one-fifth of India's export and 10 percent of its import trade is with the United States.

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have pressed for closer ties with India. This past November Bush hosted India's prime minister for talks, declaring his administration to be "committed to developing a fundamentally different relationship with India."

Commenting on the turn of events over the past few weeks, an aide to Gen. Musharraf said December 29 that "moving against Lashkar and Jaish was never an 'if,' it was only a 'when,'" adding that until India "threatened war over the issue, the Americans accepted that we should have to move carefully on any issue involving Kashmir. But the attack in New Delhi accelerated the agenda. Something that might have been accomplished in weeks suddenly had to be tackled in days."  
 
British division of Indian subcontinent
India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them ignited by their dispute over Kashmir. The roots of the conflict date back to the partition of colonial India in 1947 by the British imperialists. The colonial masters of the subcontinent, facing a rising anticolonial struggle after World War II in which masses of working people staged strikes and demonstrations, carved up the region in an attempt to split up the people, breaking bonds of unity being forged among the Indian masses.

London utilized religious divisions in its attempt to perpetuate imperialist domination of the Indian subcontinent, claiming to be creating two countries along religious lines. India was to be Hindu and Pakistan was to be Muslim. Following the 1947 partition, London's criminal policies sparked vast migrations and religious riots, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the creation of millions of refugees.

The British rulers played another card, "allowing" the heads of the princely states--essentially British military bases--which ruled over a third of the British colony, to decide which country they would become part of. In Kashmir, where a predominantly Muslim population was ruled by a Hindu aristocracy, the ruler, fearing rebellion by the Muslim population, remained undecided, despite pressure from India.

Three months after independence Pakistan moved to claim the province. Indian troops occupied the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. Fierce battles resulted in a stalemate, and the United States was called to establish a ceasefire line that to this date has marked Kashmir's division.

Two other major wars were fought, in 1965 and 1971, although the battle in Kashmir has raged on and off for decades. As late as 1999 Musharraf organized a major offensive in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir against Indian forces, claiming the disguised army troops were independence fighters. India is now fortifying the border in Kashmir with a wide fence of barbed wire and concertina wire patrolled by troops.

The Kashmir region has an estimated population of 14 million, overwhelmingly Muslim, including 1.5 million refugees in Pakistan. A long-standing movement for independence from both powers exists in the disputed area.  
 
 
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