This is a battle of political pride, not national interests

If war does break out between India and Pakistan, it will be an entirely unnecessary and avoidable disaster. There is not the slightest sign that the populations of either countries are clamouring for conflict. Nor is there any real reason for one.

None of the "terrorist" incidents of the past few weeks, savage though some have been, warrants an escalation of tension to this level. After all, if India didn't launch retaliatory attacks after its own parliament had been assaulted in Delhi at the beginning of the year, why do so now because some soldiers have been killed in Kashmir?

On this occasion at least, India can't even claim to have been directly provoked by the military regime in Islamabad. If anything, the opposite is the case. Despite Indian accusations of mere tokenism, President Musharraf has actually acceded to most of India's demands for outlawing the more militant Kashmiri organisations based in Pakistan.

What's at stake is not national interest but political pride: Indian Prime Minister A B Vajpayee's need to restore his ailing domestic fortunes and General Musharraf's fear of losing face to the fundamentalists and the army if he backs down in face of Indian threats. And what is being quite cynically played on this time is the outside intervention of America and other powers such as Britain to force the two sides to an agreement that will put Kashmir back into its Indian box.

That India should be up to these tricks is a sad comment on the state of its politics. The largest democracy in the world is also the one that shows its greatest weaknesses. To the north, the world's largest non-democracy, China, is a hive of growth and positively bursting with activity. Back in India the economy slurps along while the political system is run by a series of vested interests whose position depends on making sure that nothing changes. On a visit this month I didn't meet a person who didn't believe that the outbreak of religious violence in Gujarat was due to any other factor than political manipulation by the ruling BJP party. Nor did I find, outside Delhi, anyone who believed that the Kashmiri crisis was at a stage when it demanded war.

Not that Pakistan in the past hasn't been just as guilty of stirring up trouble for India in Kashmir as the other way round. The tragedy of this garden state is that, ever since it was handed over to India by its Hindu ruler in 1947, both sides have used it as a proxy for their enmity, regularly clashing over the border and irregularly engaging in peace talks which neither party has had the will to see succeed.

But that meddling appears to be on the turn recently as General Musharraf, under pressure from the US, has acted to rein in the same fundamentalist groups and the security forces which have supported Kashmiri groups as they have the Taliban. Indeed, some of the recent outrages within Kashmir, and even the attack on the Delhi parliament, can be seen as efforts by these groups to stop Musharraf's slide towards the US and an anti-terrorist stance.

For the same reason India, assured by President Clinton that America was changing its stance from a pro-Pakistani military one to a pro-Indian one, has upped its rhetoric to prevent the pendulum swinging back again under President Bush. For Vajpayee, a shrewd if narrowly focused politician, threatening war is one way of forcing American back on side.

The tragedy, just as in the Middle East, is that these conflicts concern real people whose prospects grow worse each time one of these confrontations occurs. To read the press reports and the political statements of the politicians of both sides you would think that this was a bilateral issue of frontiers. It isn't. It is about the future of Jammu and Kashmir's population of around seven million, and more particularly the Kashmir Valley's largely Muslim population of 3.5 million, who were handed over to India at the whim of their ruler and who have found, despite a plethora of UN resolutions about self-determination and Indian promises of a plebiscite, have never had a chance to have even a say in their own future. A land which could have been one of the greenest and most visited spots in the sub-continent has instead become a place of shattered hopes and needless violence.

The past 10 years have seen a sorry record of local election manipulation, arrests, torture and murder by the Indian army and their Hindu local militia in the fight against any sort of secessionist movement. Promises of plebiscite have been conveniently shelved. Pakistan, while supporting secessionist movements, has very clearly not extended any helping hand to Kashmiri moderates who have sought not union with Pakistan but independence. The bitterest note of the week has been the murder by the extremists of the moderate independence leader, Abdul Gani Lone.

The more India's warnings of war are sounded, the more the issue will be taken out of the realm of Kashmir's future on to the table of direct Indian-Pakistani security agreements. Which is precisely what India wants and, presumably, Western intervention will promote. Half a century ago Britain abandoned the occupants of the Kashmir Valley to their fate. No doubt Jack Straw will do it again when he goes to the region next week in the spirit of "reducing tensions".

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk