The latest heat-up started with a terrorist attack against the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi.

This was clearly aimed at killing almost the entire top echelon of the Indian political leadership.

A similar plot had been hatched against the Russian Parliament in Moscow in 1998.

In both cases, the aim of the plotters was to push an old conflict into a new degree of intensity.

In both cases the terrorists’ aim was to exclude the mass of the people from the political process.

In Chechnya, the terrorists sidelined the democratically elected government of President Aslan Maskhadov and provided Russia with a pretext to move against it.

The damage that the terrorists did to Chechnya’s long-term national interests, not to speak of the suffering of its people is beyond calculation.

Had the terrorists not intervened, the country would have been able to consolidate its autonomy, build independent institutions, and develop new relationships not only with Russia but with the European Union as well.

What the terrorists deliberately ignored is that Russia is a burgeoning democracy in which public opinion counts.

But when Chechnya is turned into a terrorist threat in the heart of Moscow, it is inevitable that Russian voters will support politicians who preach force.

Kashmir’s chances of exercising self-determination were better two decades ago than today.

Zia needed this to prop up his unpopular military regime that required supposedly Islamic credentials to justify its repressive and often corrupt policies.

Once Zia was gone, the weakness of successive Pakistani governments and their inability to develop an efficient policy on Kashmir opened the way for self-styled "Mojaheds" in search of holy wars.

By the mid-1990s, radical groups linked with the Taleban and the Al-Qa’eda gang had emerged as main players in Kashmir, at least as far as violence was concerned.

The emergence of these groups coincided with the coming to power in New Delhi of a coalition government dominated by radical Hindu chauvinists.

That government needed Jaish-e- Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba to justify its repressive policies in Kashmir.

As always in history, terror and repression were Siamese twins.

The Indian government’s current game plan is simple.

It pursues three objectives.

The first is to persuade the world, especially the United States, that the issue of Kashmir is about nothing but terrorism.

The second objective is to exclude the people of Kashmir from the scene.

The third objective is to destabilise President Parviz Mosharraf’s government in Islamabad by pushing it into an open conflict with powerful Taleban-style forces within Pakistan.

For the first time, India itself hopes to fill that slot to counterbalance its more threatening neighbour, China.

India’s strategy has a subtext also.

This consists of the fact that many within the Indian ruling elite have never swallowed the emergence of Pakistan as an independent state.

At the time of partition, the Indian ruling elite that had inherited the British imperial mentality saw India as the successor to the British Raj in the subcontinent.

They ignored the fact that India, a geographical expression, had never existed as a single state and that most of the areas that now form Pakistan had been attached to the Raj as a result of British conquest.

An American mediation may well be on the cards this year.

As newcomers to an old conflict, the Americans would do well to remember a number of key points.

The two major wars fought between the two neighbors were only incidentally affected by Kashmir.

The 1965 war was over the Rann of Kutch area, hundreds of miles from Kashmir that both armies regarded as a strategic prize.

The 1971 war was provoked by Islamabad’s crazy policy in what was then East Pakistan and India’s opportunism in seeking to carve Pakistan in two.

The second point is that Kashmir is occupied by both India and Pakistan.

In neither part of the divided country have the people been given a chance to decide their status.

This point must be emphasized because an improvement in India-Pakistan relations will not necessarily mean a better deal for the people of Kashmir.

Yet another point is that only a consolidation of the democratic process in India and the development of democracy in Pakistan could ensure peace.

In working democracies, war cannot be caused by the fantasies and/or ambitions of ruling elites.

India is already a democracy with solid institutions that have withstood many challenges, including emergency rule under Indira Gandhi and the advent of radical Hindus to power.

The only way that an Indian government can drag that country into war is by claiming that it is fighting terrorism.

For most of its half-a-century of existence, various military chiefs, seeking legitimacy with reference to nationalism or religion, have ruled it.

One must always be suspicious of generals who seize power and promise to build democracy.

This writer has met and interviewed three such Pakistani military rulers already: Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan, General Muhammad Yahya Khan and General Muhammad Ziaul Haq.

All three promised to build democracy.

All three failed to deliver.

All three ended in disgrace or death.

For some strange reason, however, this writer believes that he will be.

This is, perhaps, because the world has changed.

It is also, again perhaps, because Mosharraf has nowhere to go but to pluralism.

He cannot revive Ayub’s farce of "basic democracy".

Nor can he build anything with Yahya’s caricatural nationalism.

Zia’s Islamism, on the other hand, is the last thing that Pakistanis want.

Highlights and some phonetisation of names and places are by IPS