Some people in India are calling upon the new coalition government to make a series of bold moves towards Pakistan that will compel the neighbour to put its money where  the mouth is.

If Pakistan keeps saying that it cannot fully and single-mindedly go after militants on its northwest frontier and indeed increasingly within the heartland because of the threat it faces from India, then New Delhi must call its bluff, argued authors Nitin Pai and Sushant K. Singh in a recent piece for India’s Mint newspaper.

How about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, back for a second term, giving a categorical public declaration that Pakistan need not fear an Indian military attack so long as the Pakistan army is engaged in fighting with Taliban militants?  While a verbal commitment may not convince the military brass in Rawalpindi, it will likely play well in Washington as it rathchets up pressure on the Pakistan army to take the battle to the militants.

Second and to back up its assurance, India could move some of the army strike formations from the international border with Pakistan in Punjab and Rajasthan. “Such a bold, strategic move will not only make India’s verbal assurances credible, but it will also immediately result in irresistible pressure on the Pakistani army to commit more of its troops to the western border,” the authors wrote in the Mint piece.

Clearly, the aim of such a peace gamble is to expose the contradiction within the Pakistani position, force them to either go full throttle after militant groups, some of whom are suspected to be tied to its intelligence agencies, or  face America’s wrath.

Moving Indian troops back will compel the Pakistan army to act against the Taliban, and because it is incapable of doing so, will cause the United States to realise that there is no alternative to dismantling the military-jihadi complex, Pai and Singh argue.

Taking out Pakistan’s military-jihadi establishment is really what the battle in Pakistan is all about - that is the refrain you hear incessantly in the strategic establishment in New Delhi  as I did during a visit over the past few weeks, and one you can be sure it will be telling U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expected to visit sometime in July.

But in the immediate future, is such a bold gamble as troop pullback really going to work?
Two issues. One, what about Kashmir ? No pullback is proposed on Kashmir where tens of thousands of troops are massed on both sides of the Line of Control, and according to some Pakistani experts this really is where is there should be a re-deployment of forces.

Ejaz Haider in a piece for Pakistan’s Daily Times, says the bulk of India’s military deployment  iscentred on Pakistan, with 7 of the army’s 13 corps “specific to Pakistan.”  In any case, given that the Pakistan army’s numerical strength is half that of India, the deployment of the Pakistan army along the eastern frontier is much thinner than India’s.

And if Pakistan does not face the threat of a hot war from India as everyone keeps telling it, Haider says, then India too does not face that prospect.

“If Pakistan is asked by the US and other western capitals on the basis of this argument to pull out troops from the eastern border and deploy them to the west, then perhaps India should also be called upon to thin its much-heavier Pakistan-specific deployment along the international border, the Line of Control, the working boundary and the actual ground position line,” he says.

But can the Indian army really thin out of Kashmir? At this point when the threat of infiltration of militants from Pakistan is again being talked about?

And finally does Singh, even with a stronger parliamentary support after a general election, really have the people’s endorsement of cutting back troops from the Pakistan frontier. The wounds from the 26/11 attack on Mumbai for which the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba has been held responsible, remain fresh for a large number of Indians.  They are not in a mood to forgive or forget.

[Photos of Indian and Pakistani troops at a border checkpoint and the site of a car bombing in Lahore on May 27)

India and Pakistan will open a trade link across divided Kashmir for the first time in six decades on Tuesday, aiming to ease tensions by creating soft borders in the disputed region. The move looks to be fairly tentative; lorries will be allowed across the military ceasefire line only once a week, carrying a limited list of goods, and will be expected to unload some 10 km to 15 km beyond the Line of Control which separates the Indian and Pakistani-held parts of the region. But it has potentially more than symbolic significance, particularly if it helps to open up the isolated Kashmir Valley — at the heart of the separatist revolt – to the outside world.

The step, which would have been unthinkable before a ceasefire on the Line of Control in late 2003, is also meant to build trust between India and Pakistan. The region’s governor, N.N. Vohra, described it as an important milestone in India-Pakistan relations. But as is so often the case in India-Pakistan relations, there have been some unexpected counter-currents recently, acting as a powerful undertow against attempts to improve the two countries’ approach to Kashmir.

As I discussed in a post in June, the two countries are getting tetchy about the use of water from rivers they share in divided Kashmir. India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived long periods of intense antagonism.

But matters came to a head earlier this month when Pakistan complained that India had violated the treaty while building a dam on the Chenab river in Kashmir for a power project. Although a Pakistani team is now in India for talks on the controversial Baglihar dam, the row has raised questions about the durability of the Indus Waters Treaty at a time when both countries are desperate for water both to grow food and provide hydroelectric power. (The Times of India has just run two stories on it here and here.)

In a separate issue, Pakistan also protested last week against a trip by US Army Chief General George Casey to the Siachen glacier while he was visiting India. It complained the trip might be seen as an endorsement of the Indian position. India and Pakistan have battled since 1984 for control of Siachen, in the mountains beyond Kashmir, though they stopped actual fighting there when the 2003 ceasefire was agreed. 

On top of that, Indian plans to push ahead with state elections in Jammu and Kashmir in November and December, after the biggest protests since the separatist revolt began in 1989, and in the face of a planned boycott by Kashmiri separatists, also complicate the picture. Pakistan has traditionally opposed elections in Jammu and Kashmir, seeing them as an attempt by New Delhi to impose a purely Indian solution that excludes Islamabad.

So one step forward and three steps back? The usual eddying currents that have made the Kashmir issue so intractable for more than half a century? Or will the opening up of trade shift mindsets enough to offer the possibility of further progress?

One of the more troublesome aspects of the latest protests in Kashmir, among the biggest since a separatist revolt erupted in 1989, is the impact on the younger generation.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra writes that India’s attempt to crush the revolt in 1989 and 1990 ended up provoking many young Kashmiris to take to arms and embrace radical Islam. 

“A new generation of politicized Kashmiris has now risen; the world is again likely to ignore them - until some of them turn into terrorists with Qaeda links,” he writes.  Calling on India to take some first steps to ease the situation by cutting the number of troops in the Kashmir Valley and allowing Kashmiris to trade freely across the Line of Control – the military demarcation line which divides the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan – he says the past record does not inspire much hope.

“But a brutal suppression of the nonviolent protests will continue to radicalize a new generation of Muslims and engender a fresh cycle of violence, rendering Kashmir even more dangerous - and not just to South Asia this time,” he says.

It would be wrong to overstate the role of radical Islam in the revolt – the Kashmir Valley is primarily Sufi and the hardline brand of Wahhabi/Deobandi Islam followed by al Qaeda and the Taliban has never really managed to take root there.

And nor would it be correct to hold India alone responsible — many Pakistanis will admit privately that Pakistan played its own role in encouraging the separatist revolt, in part to use as a pawn against its much bigger neighbour.

But no amount of finger-pointing or bitter wrangling over history can take away from the fact that children who were born after the revolt erupted and grew up in violence, are now turning into teenagers as the troubles flare anew. What hope for them?

As the comments on my last post on Kashmir  showed, the Kashmir question is one that still stirs powerful and divisive emotions.

There is no “quick fix” solution. The former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, promised a plebiscite after partition in 1947, is an intricate mosaic of different ethnic, national and religious identities, now held in parts by India, Pakistan and China, and caught between the strategic interests of all three.

It’s also hard also to see how India and Pakistan can now muster the political will to seek a solution on Kashmir when they failed to do so in the space that opened up after they agreed a ceasefire on the Line of Control at the end of 2003. In Delhi, the Congress-led government faces elections due by May next year, and would be vulnerable to accusations by the Hindu right of betraying India were it to give too much ground. Pakistan is stumbling through a chaotic transition to civilian government, whose leaders will be watched carefully by the powerful Pakistan Army for any signs of weakness in dealing with India.

But then again, what is the price of doing nothing? Children born when the Kashmir revolt erupted will be 20 next year. What will they tell their children? What legacy will they hand on to the next generation?

Take two nuclear-armed countries which are not officially at war, yet whose armies shell each other on a near-daily basis.  That is how it was between India and Pakistan before a November 2003 ceasefire ended their fighting over the divided former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.  With that ceasefire now showing signs of fraying at the edges and India saying that its peace process with Pakistan is under stress, it is worth remembering quite what a dramatic development it was for two countries which had come close to war in 2001/2002 to tell their armies to stand down.

Nearly five months after the ceasefire, I visited an Indian border post that had seen heavy fighting for years. It was in the Jammu region, at what had been a busy railway station in pre-partition days, on a road that once ran from the town of Jammu to Lahore. The railway station was left in India, with a railroad track that led nowhere, while the road had been closed since 1947.

The station building was pock-marked with bullets, but the guns had disappeared and the grass was beginning to grow again in the surrounding fields. The Indian troops had stripped down to their vests and trousers and were out playing soccer. On the megaphone,  they played music from Hindi films. They knew the Pakistanis at the other side liked the music. But they remembered to turn it down when it was time for the call to prayers. They had a respect for the other side here, born out of the strange courtesies that grow between two land armies when they fight each other for long enough.

Beyond the Indian checkpoint, a long avenue lined with poplar trees led up to the “zero line” between India and Pakistan. Virtually every tree was marked with bullets that had scraped across them or in some cases passed right through them. In the middle of the avenue, a giant peepul tree straddled the two countries, half of its roots in India, half in Pakistan. We walked up to the tree and waved at the Pakistani soldiers at the far end of the avenue. 

This was the closest India and Pakistan had come to peace in half a century.

Is this peace now unravelling as each country faces its own domestic crisis? The current situation does not create a stable foundation for  talks — Pakistan’s shaky coalition is struggling with an economic crisis, political instability and the threat of U.S. action against al Qaeda and Taliban militants on its border with Afghanistan, while the Indian government faces a showdown over its nuclear deal with the United States.

A return to the pre-ceasefire days looks unlikely, at least for now.  But with violence also on the rise in the Kashmir Valley — at least nine soldiers were killed by an IED at the weekend –you have to ask whether the two countries might have missed their chance to secure a durable peace in the more than four years since the ceasefire was declared.