Opinion | Even After Operation Sindoor, Gilgit-Baltistan Will Be Crucial To The Bigger Picture
The reclamation of Gilgit-Baltistan will be a strategic and economic watershed moment for Bharat
Operation Sindoor has electrified the nation, sorrowing and grieving after the dastardly terrorist attack in Pahalgam on 22 April. The nation’s resolve has been made a reality by the Modi government in the form of decisive action against the perpetrators of terror and their supporters with attacks on Bahawalpur, Muridke and Muzaffarabad among others. Twenty-four hours later, it is now amplified into a systematic attack on the air defence systems in the largest and most strategically vital cities of Pakistan—Lahore, Karachi, Sialkot, Peshawar, Astore, and even Rawalpindi. The defence minister has more than delivered what he promised, in that the people of India got what they wanted. They will probably get even more.
Exceeding mere revenge or revanchism, however, public sentiment has transcended emotionality, and is seeking a long-term solution to the blight known as Pakistan, and settle forever the unresolved issues of partition. How our country and its armed forces achieve this goal, in what timeframe, and by employing which means is not the subject of this piece. In fact, this would be a futile exercise in a war situation where events are changing by the hour. Instead, we attempt to understand why the return of Gilgit-Baltistan to Bharat is of paramount importance.
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Before advancing further, it is important to understand what Pakistan is and why it exists. These questions are strongly interrelated. In essence, Pakistan is a geography for hire under an extractive elite, eager to find a larger power to which it may sell its geography. Pakistan, in essence, is the Sindhi and Baloch coastline on one end, the gates to Central Asia on the other (via Khyber Pakhtunkhwa onto Tajikistan and Afghanistan), with a Muhajir-Punjabi elite enriching themselves off the connection between these two ends and the intervening land. This elite called upon the British, the Americans, the Gulf States, and then finally the Chinese to successively rent out Pakistan’s geography, which connects the western Indian Ocean to the Central Asian heartland and beyond, and incidentally fund their debauchery in upscale neighbourhoods in Islamabad and Lahore.
The government is the Pakistani State but the power lies with the army. Pakistan’s bloated and ruthless army is the obvious conduit for this business of geographic renting and feudal landlordism because controlling (and immiserating) disparate ethnicities with their own sense of history, and preventing a population reduced to serfdom from demanding economic betterment, requires extensive use of force. The bogeyman of India, or the rabble-rousing calls of Ghazwa-i-Hind, were convenient distractions to paper over the severe internal contradictions existing within Pakistan.
The above scheme was not an accident, or a case of convoluted historical evolution, but of conscious design. Pakistan’s history can be reduced to transactions between roughly 70 families, many of who were zamindars wary of pre-independence socialists who intended to place land ceilings and found a convenient way of retaining holdings by demanding a separate State altogether, control all institutions (including the military and judiciary) within and beyond the Pakistani State.
This elite inspired great confidence in the British, such that they could set up a suitable entity providing sufficient leverage in the region. Thus, Cyril Radcliffe carved out a geographical oddity which connected the heartland with the rimland, and could be intermeshed with the British coastal colonies such as Aden and Singapore, perched upon global sea lanes of communication. Unsurprisingly, Karachi port remained directly in British hands till 1979, and indirectly thereafter.
While the plan was in motion by 1947, one major complication remained. Even though the Pakistani coast was secured, Jammu & Kashmir held out from joining Pakistan. The reason was obvious—Jammu, Kashmir, Gilgit, Kargil-Baltistan, and Ladakh are separate geographies, separate peoples, and have separate religious beliefs. However, this rendered the creation known as Pakistan with severely limited utility, since access to Central Asia remained cut off. Central Asia, at the time, was the setting for a second round of the Great Game, where Soviet writ held sway.
A physical land border of the sympathetic Soviets with a socialist India might have spelled disaster for the West at large, since they were already seeing that Soviet assistance to communist forces in the then-raging Chinese Civil War was turning the tide in favour of the reds. A strong India could frustrate Western planning of keeping the country under soft colonisation, and India’s location could sever the West from access to Asia by sea altogether. Further, parts of Gilgit-Baltistan showed evidence that uranium may be lying there—a critical material for nuclear weapons, of which Britain did not have any natural reserves. These factors made Jammu and Kashmir, especially Gilgit-Baltistan, indispensable to British plans in the 1940s.
Thus, one of the worst cases of post-colonial treachery was executed in 1947. At the time, the Indian and Pakistani armies were still manned by British officers. Large parts of today’s Gilgit, at the time, were under British administration, under a structure known as the Gilgit Agency, whereby the British Empire had forced the Maharajas to hand over large tracts which abutted Central Asia and Afghanistan. Major William Brown, a British officer, was manning a unit of the Maharaja’s troops in the Gilgit Agency known as the Gilgit Scouts.
In October 1947, Major Brown mutinied unopposed against his own army, took over Gilgit, linked up with Pakistani marauders who had begun a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Hindus, and held a sham referendum where the people of Gilgit supposedly demanded accession to Pakistan. His mutiny was rewarded by the British government with an award of the Order of the British Empire (an award of great esteem) in 1948, and his continued stay in Pakistan till 1959. As is obvious, the British had arranged for the whole affair, and had successfully secured a valuable crossroads in the form of Gilgit-Baltistan between India, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean via Karachi. Unsurprisingly, Chinese interests are concentrated in Gilgit-Baltistan as well.
The erasure of the stain of the continued occupation on what is legally Indian land naturally evokes much pain in us. Even if we choose to stick to the outcome of the foolish decision to take the invasion to the UN, the legal sleight of hand played by Pakistan in making the world, even Indians, forget that the very first operative condition of the UN resolution on the matter is a complete and unconditional Pakistani withdrawal is a great diplomatic failure on our part. How much of this inability was due to foreign powers exerting pressure remains unknown. From Baltistan to Chitral, and from Poonch to Shaksgam, an incontrovertible legal claim was relegated to just ink on paper, with even reclamations made during the 1971 war abandoned when foreign powers’ access to Central Asia via Gilgit-Baltistan was threatened.
However, much water has flown under the bridge since. The withdrawal of the USA from Afghanistan marks a watershed moment, where faraway powers are downsizing their presence in the heartland, and concentrating on the rimland instead. India has shed its socialistic infatuations, and has become a power to reckon with. With India willing to trade freely, and even offer limited military access through landmark agreements like the LEMOA with the USA, the logic with which Pakistan was established has ceased to exist. The fact of the matter is that the business model underpinning Pakistan finds no takers today, and has become obsolete.
A scramble for Pakistan is well underway between global powers, USA, China, India and Russia, and maybe even settled amongst them. Large tracts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have fallen to the Afghans and their proxies, while Balochistan’s independence movement cannot be ignored anymore. Sindh too has some interesting murmurs. Occupied Jammu & Kashmir and occupied Ladakh (containing Gilgit-Baltistan) are already gravely restive. Global powers find it in their interest to see an independent Balochistan which can be dealt with directly, or an independent Sindh which exists as a Belgium-like buffer entity for the rest of the world to trade through.
The rump of Pakistani Punjab, which dominates Pakistan’s affairs, is a severe inconvenience for all involved. It makes much more sense for global powers to cooperate with India, and with individual provinces of interest, instead of the artificial creation known as Pakistan. It is thus not surprising that Chinese help has become severely limited, with talks of ‘taller than the Himalayas’ and ‘sweeter than honey’ replaced with increasingly harsh loan conditions and anger on destroyed military equipment tanking the marketability of Chinese equipment worldwide. The USA has all but become hostile too, with a supposed endorsement of secessionist movements.
It is portentous that Russia maintains a distance, perhaps anticipating access to warm water ports via a Bharat that has reclaimed Gilgit-Baltistan. The Gulf, eager to distance itself from radical Islam and to embrace trade, finds much to gain if Pakistan were to cease to exist in its present form. Pakistan was born to serve the interests of others; now, there is no one interested in the entity’s continued existence.
Hence, the timing of events in which we find ourselves presents a historical opportunity to begin the process of finally resolving the tragedies and unresolved questions of the partition. The time for action is thus nigh upon us. Military action and legal or civilisational claims aside, the end of the story should rightfully be from where it began, i.e., Gilgit-Baltistan. While sabre-rattling plays out across occupied territory, the pressure on Gilgit-Baltistan is the most crippling for Pakistan.
The return of Gilgit-Baltistan will cause a massive shift in the strategic thinking, reach, and power projection of Bharat. Bharat will, after almost a gap of a century, become a key player in Central Asia, and offer itself as a much-needed strategic alternative to China in the region. This will also enable Central Asia as well as Russia to find access to the Indian Ocean, and for India to get access to the Arctic. Gilgit-Baltistan will extend Bharat’s strategic presence to hitherto untouched areas, and trigger a strong rethink amongst Russia and China to imagine a truly Eurasian future, where none can afford to ignore Bharat.
Gilgit-Baltistan’s economic potential could also lead to new avenues of economic growth. It has historically been an entrepot between Afghanistan, China, Bharat, the Russian far East, and Tibet; a reactivation of the region’s silk-trade era prowess will rearrange domestic and global supply chains. This region is also crucial to Bharat to secure critical minerals and energy from Central Asia and Russia, apart from reactivating and rejoining silk-road era trade routes. With Sagarmala along the coasts, a Girimala along the Himalayas with Gilgit-Baltistan as its fulcrum holds potential to supercharge Indian economic growth and supply chain power. This will make Bharat the primus inter pares in a transcontinental trading bloc, which will inevitably also lead to the export of Bharatiya trade and digital public infrastructure.
The reclamation of Gilgit-Baltistan will be a strategic and economic watershed moment for Bharat, and coupled with the strong legal basis for the same, the region remains the prime contender for its ghar waapasi. However, the civilizational confidence such a move will instill in India, and the demoralisation it will inflict on the Ghazwa-i-Hind extremists, will lead to a resolution of many problems in the subcontinent and the country. Unsurprisingly, while missiles rained over Pakistani military installations, a hue and cry emerged from rioters in Darbhanga, peddlers of fake news eager to demoralise the nation presiding over newspapers and TV studios, and so-called pacifists in upmarket neighbourhoods across the country—Lutyens, South Mumbai, Park Street and Cathedral Road.
The problem of Pakistan is only a facet of a broader issue of the coalition which wishes to destroy Bharat and Bharatiyata, and is often labelled the Mullah-Missionary-Marxist axis. The fall of Pakistan will, thus, pulverise enemies within and without, and lead to an all-out efflorescence in Bharat. The Bharatiya civilisational revival will stand vindicated and reinvigorated with the recovery of some of its Bhumi, and while Westphalian norms will receive a final burial, the march towards a truly Bharatiya system of governance will start taking concrete shape. Meanwhile, other regions and peoples may see reason and engage with Bharat. In such a context, Gilgit-Baltistan’s unique history and potential accord it a special long-term significance.
Events over the past few days indicate that the return of Gilgit-Baltistan to Bharat may be sooner than what any of us might have imagined; from thinking in terms of years, it may be more realistic to think in terms of months or even weeks, that too without our armed forces firing too many shots. In geopolitical matters, actual events are governed by the dynamics of circumstance rather than the statics of diplomatic exchanges. Many a great country has come and gone throughout history; Pakistan, being just a clumsy arrangement to continue a neocolonial project, may not even warrant a footnote in the years to come.
Gautam Desiraju is in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and UPES Dehradun. Deekhit Bhattacharya is an Advocate based in New Delhi. Views are personal to the authors. The views expressed in this article are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of News18.
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