Measured Fallouts

Barring China’s serious “concern about the situation in Kashmir” in the light of India's move to revoke Article 370, which gave a special status to the state, the international community has largely refrained from making adverse comments. On the contrary, global reactions have been largely supportive and do not constitute any real threat to India’s security environment

- Prakash Nanda

Though underplayed, there is a clear strategic angle to the decision of the Modi government to reorganise the state of Jammu and Kashmir by diluting the Article 370 of the Indian constitution. Little is it realised that it was the strategic imperatives of the British colonial masters to not only divide the Indian sub-continent in religious terms in 1947 but also ensure that Kashmir remained an eternal problem for India so that the Western Block would retain its manoeuvrability in exercising indirect power in this part of the world through newly created country called Pakistan. And as the years have passed by, the Western game-plan of controlling Kashmir though Pakistan has not exactly worked, but it has been adopted by China with some success.

Years preceding the partition of India had seen the intense geopolitical rivalry between the Western countries led by the United States and Britain on one hand and the then Soviet Union and China on the other. As it was, London always suspected Moscow to be nurturing an ambition for having an access to a warm-water port in the Indian Ocean. Besides, the discovery of oil in the Arab countries and the global economy’s increasing dependence on oil made it imperative that Britain, or for that matter the US, must have a strong military presence, whether direct or indirect, in a part of India so as to control and secure the oil production in and oil supply from the Middle East. After all, it was from India that the imperial Britain was mastering the waves east of Suez Canal. An undivided, independent and democratic India would not have played such a role. So, Pakistan had to be created out of India at any cost. In fact, in one of his letters to industrialist G D Birla, Sardar Patel had clearly linked the creation of Pakistan to the unhindered access of the Western powers to oil in the Gulf region.