China in a hurry to get to Gilgit

The Northern Areas of Pakistan, the forgotten region that once formed a part of the domain of the Maharaja of Kashmir, was in the news recently when the Pakistan government, with its Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self Governance Order, restored the old name of the region, Gilgit-Baltistan, and devolved greater administrative and political powers to the region.

With huge amounts of investment scheduled to pour into the region — China is due to invest billions of dollars in Gilgit-Baltistan, building infrastructure, including upgradation of the Karakoram Highway that connects China and Pakistan — it could have been embarrassing for Islamabad to continue to deny the people of the region some basic democratic rights.

However, for the people of Gilgit-Baltistan, some of whom have agitated for autonomy and even independence, the only measure of satisfaction the order provides is that they have regained their distinct identity instead of having their homeland known only by its geographical location. While leaders on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) have criticised the order for seeming to acquiesce to the partition of Kashmir, pro-independence leaders in Srinagar have said it dilutes Pakistan’s commitment to “self-determination” in Kashmir.

It took the Indian government two weeks to convey its protest through diplomatic channels at the “cosmetic” changes that it said were intended to camouflage Pakistan’s illegal occupation of the region. It also pointed out that the people had been denied basic democratic rights for past six decades.

The Pakistan government’s order seemingly gives a measure of autonomy to a region long ruled by Islamabad as a department under the federal ministry of Kashmir and northern affairs with the help of the Pakistani Army.

The Constitution of Pakistan made no mention of the Northern Areas though it referred to Azad Kashmir as a disputed territory, which created an anomalous situation for the residents. It meant that they had no constitutional or legal rights under Pakistan’s Constitution, nor any political representation. The region will now have a local administration headed by a chief minister and a council of ministers, a partly elected and party-nominated body.

The Northern Areas are of immense geo-strategic importance, but its inaccessibility and other restrictions had relegated it to the background. The region lies south of Afghanistan and China’s Xinjiang Province, on the west is the strife-torn North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) with Azad Kashmir to the south and the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the east. Its strategic and political importance was greatly enhanced when the Chinese built the Karakoram Highway connecting Pakistani cities to Kashgar in Xinjiang province.

To most Indians, the area across the LoC is Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Media shorthand assumes that PoK is co-terminus with the area known in Pakistan as Azad Kashmir. But the Kashmir territory in Pakistan’s occupation is not just the narrow strip of land that is showcased as Azad Kashmir by Pakistan; it includes the vast, sparsely-populated Northern Areas that comprised a third of the former princely state of Kashmir and the Trans-Karakoram Tract that Pakistan ceded to China under a bilateral agreement in 1963.

The Northern Areas were formed from the amalgamation of Gilgit Agency, Baltistan District of the Ladakh Wazarat, and the states of Hunza and Nagar, with Gilgit town as the administrative headquarters. Pakistan divided the Northern Areas into three parts — it detached Gilgit-Baltistan from Azad Kashmir because of its strategic importance, it separated the state of Chitral and integrated it into the NWFP and later it hived off the Shaksgam Valley and ceded it to China.

The Shias of Baltistan have close ethnic and cultural ties with the Shias of Kargil. The people do not consider themselves Kashmiris as the state of Gilgit came under the suzerainty of the Maharaja of Kashmir only after 1866. The original inhabitants of the region are Shias and Ismaili Khojas, but in 1975 Islamabad repealed the old Kashmiri “state subject” regulation that prevented outsiders from purchasing land and settling down in the state. The government then encouraged migration by Pathan Sunnis from the Federally Administered Tribal Agency (Fata) region and the Army facilitated settlement by ex-servicemen to ensure greater control of the area. The settlement of outsiders has reduced the local Shia residents from 80 per cent in 1947 to about 53 per cent. There have been violent clashes between Sunnis and the local Shias on several occasions that were put down with a ruthless hand by the authorities.

The Karakoram Highway is to be upgraded to a 30-feet wide highway that would eventually link up to provide an all-weather access route to the Chinese-built Gwadar port on the Balochistan coast at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Among the other Chinese investments in the region are plans to construct a hydro-electric power station at Bunji, building the Bhasha dam as well as building bridges and irrigation works and providing telecom facilities to the remote area. China is also constructing a dry port at Sost near the border with Xinjiang.

Gilgit was the route through which trading goods from Central Asia reached the Kashmir Valley. Years later, a British agent was located in Gilgit to watch over Russian incursions into Afghanistan and the Central Asian region. Now the arid, mountainous region is set to become China’s gateway to the warm waters off Pakistan’s coast.