Personal perspectives: Thoughts on the India-Pakistan conflict

I grew up with the dispute between India and Pakistan constantly in the news. Poverty in India, a nation of one billion people, was and continues to be a distant second in media coverage. Having heard about the conflict so often, I've wondered about the source and sustenance of the 50 year long dispute between the two countries.

Was the source of the conflict Jawaharlal Nehru's — the first prime minister of India — refusal to hold a referendum in Kashmir at a crucial political moment, depriving Kashmir — an autonomous kingdom under British rule — of the freedom to decide its own fate?

Does the conflict persist because Indian children grow up believing history textbooks that say India is morally entitled to the state of Kashmir because its maharaja ruler chose to hand it over to us? If only the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir hadn't had the misfortune of being ruled by a Hindu king at the time of the India-Pakistan independence, they would have undoubtedly merged with Pakistan and been spared the fate of being a war-torn land for 50 years. These same textbooks deplore Pakistan's invasion of parts of Kashmir while commending India for making the predominantly Hindu kingdom of Hyderabad a part of India, against the wishes of its Muslim ruler. One should not be surprised, then, that Indians grow up believing that we should never part with Kashmir.

I wonder whether this skewed sense of history is a cause, or an effect, of the belief that India is a living, breathing organism that was always meant to be. Severing Kashmir would then be tantamount to amputating an integral part of a body. That may explain why people in my town — more than one thousand miles from Kashmir — and people who have never set foot in the land or who are as culturally related to the Kashmiris as to the Nepalese or Sri Lankans, care so much about the fate of Kashmir.

I feel alone in my stand on Kashmir. When I talk to people who I believe are otherwise very rational, they seem blinded by patriotism and skewed history when it comes to Kashmir. When I argue that the land belongs to the people who live in it, they say that Kashmiris should walk over to Pakistan if they want to be ruled from Islamabad. Sometimes I take comfort in the fact that people who have lost family and friends in this struggle seem to be equally, if not more, supportive of the cause of Kashmir remaining in India. Perhaps I am overestimating the consequences of this dispute by not taking the complexities of the human utility function into consideration because people are proud to be a part of the struggle.

I wonder what the politicians at the helm of government are thinking. Even though I have strong convictions on the issue, I don't know what I would do if I were the head of the government. Would I choose to give Kashmir away and chance sparking communal riots over the entire subcontinent? These considerations leave me confused about an issue that almost everyone from India seems to understand. Sarah Mathew '03 is an ecology and evolutionary biology major from Oog, India. She can be reached at smathew@princeton.edu