Show off Force

By George Russell

Troops move into Kashmir

There was an eerie sense of familiarity to the drama. For hours on end last week planes filled with heavily armed Indian paramilitary forces thundered into the airport outside Srinagar, capital of the mountainous northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir on the border with Pakistan. In the overwhelmingly Muslim city (pop. 550,000), black flags of protest flew as at least 6,500 soldiers and police enforced a curfew with the threat of shooting violators on sight. Regular air traffic to and from Srinagar was cut off. The last civilian airliner to leave the capital, with 264 aboard, was hijacked by fleeing Sikh extremists. The plane landed in Lahore, Pakistan, where the hijackers surrendered to the authorities after having held the passengers and crew hostage for 20 hours.

A month after she ordered the bloody assault in Punjab against Sikh fanatics at the Golden Temple of Amritsar, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had once again pounded her fist in the name of buttressing India's system of centralized government. Mercifully, there seemed to be little immediate likelihood in Srinagar that the action would lead to the type of bloody confrontation that claimed more than 600 lives in Amritsar. The troops had been sent to Jammu and Kashmir to keep the peace as the state government was being rocked by New Delhi's ouster of the freely elected Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah. The beneficiary, and undoubted instigator, of the incident was Mrs. Gandhi and her Hindu-dominated Congress (I) Party.

Abdullah, 46, is the leader of the Muslim-oriented National Conference Party. He became a leading target for Mrs. Gandhi's enmity in June 1983, when he won 46 of 76 state assembly seats in fiercely contested local elections; the Congress (I) Party won only 26. During the campaign Abdullah forged an alliance with Mirwaiz

Maulvi Farooq, an Islamic zealot whose followers are fervent admirers of Pakistan. Mrs. Gandhi has long feared secessionist tendencies in the strategic state, where Muslims outnumber Hindus by 3.9 million to 1.8 million. The Prime Minister's anger increased when Abdullah joined with politicians from other states whose intent was to form an anti-Gandhi alliance for the national elections that she must call by January 1985.

Last January Mrs. Gandhi's Congress (I) Party gave its rough response. Party militants led street riots against the Chief Minister, and in the ensuing violence nine people were killed and hundreds injured. In March Mrs. Gandhi asked the state governor to impose a form of direct rule that would bypass Abdullah and his government. When the governor refused, he was replaced by a Gandhi loyalist. Congress (I) Party politicians then secretly promised state government cabinet posts to twelve National Conference Party assemblymen, led by Abdullah's brother-in-law, in exchange for their agreement to abandon the Chief Minister and thus deprive him of a majority in the assembly. Kashmir's new pro-Gandhi governor then dismissed Abdullah, first taking the precaution of calling in the Indian army.

Abdullah denied that he advocated secession from India, and vowed to fight back. He declared, "We shall begin a massive civil disobedience program at all levels of life here, but it will remain non violent." Mrs. Gandhi's latest show of strength is unlikely to damage seriously her standing among the 83% Hindu ma jority of India's 746 million population.

The explosive resentments in Kashmir, however, have added to the strain of other sectarian agonies in India: the rebellion that continues to disrupt neighboring Punjab, and the Hindu-Muslim animosity that has simmered for months in India's northeastern state of Assam. The question many concerned Indians are asking is whether Mrs. Gandhi is a bulwark against disruptive regionalism, or one of its principal causes.

With reporting by Dean Brelis