Raashid Wali Janjua
THE rigged Instrument of Accession signed by the Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir under duress has sown the dragon teeth that several Kashmiri generations have paid with their blood to remove. That the harried Maharaja who having signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan had lost control of his state because of an armed rebellion by his state subjects is lost on apologists who believe in the fiction of legal accession. A conflict therefore that started with an illegality has perpetuated a vicious circle of illegality in the shape of revocation of Article 370. Indians have blatantly rejected each one of the UN mandated initiatives while duping the naïve Kashmiri nationalists like Shiekh Abdullah who fell hook, line and sinker for the Indian ruse of conferring a special status upon Kashmir outside Indian Union, pending a final resolution of the conflict.
After three wars the Simla Agreement between the two countries in 1972 also retained the relevance of past UN Resolutions despite the dominant flavor of bilateralism. It was another UN Security Council Resolution i.e 1172 after the nuclear tests by both countries in 1998 that called for a serious dialogue amongst both countries to remove the root causes of conflict. The UN urge for removal of the root causes of the conflict that could lead towards a nuclear Armageddon in the region, also apparently fell on deaf ears as India persisted with her obdurate stance on Kashmir.
All pretence of a fair deal to Kashmiris however was finally dropped in a horrid denouement of the Kashmir Act when Indian government illegally annexed the Kashmir state in the Indian Union by revoking the Article 370. For a world apprehensive of such blatant violation of international law the act elicited a surprising apathy. The reason was the geopolitics of the region. India the main violator was the darling of the West due to its counter China fetish. The two main tectonic shifts in geopolitics of this age i.e shifting of the global political and economic power from West to East and the resurgence of Asia led by China drive the US-led Western bloc’s policies vis a vis India. Small wonder then that the annexation of Kashmir was treated cavalierly while the annexation of Crimea by Russia was mourned as a grave humanitarian crime.
The slow descent of India into a rabidly intolerant Hindu State modelled on the ideas of Savarkar, an ideologue of religious exclusivism has resulted in the rise of Hindutva ideology, a virulently hateful creed that celebrates human inequality on the basis of religion and accident of birth. Prime Minister Modi is leading a nation of billion plus Indians pellmell into the hateful inferno of communal disharmony. Despite 17 active insurgencies and a war of liberation in Kashmir State the Indian government has the temerity to annex a territory that is under watch of UN Resolutions. The blind hatred being generated by such policies of Modi-led BJP government is fanning the fires of separatism inside India which might come to haunt Modi in future. Once a secular country is now conferring the highest award of India ie “Bharat Ratna” on the RSS godfather ie Savarkar. Arundhati Roy, one of the brave voices of sanity in India, writes in New York Times that “Modi’s action in Kashmir has a whiff of colonialism in the air.”After dissolution of Article 35-A the Indians could now purchase property in Kashmir altering its demography and financial ecology. As per Arundhati Roy, “their recurring nightmare of being swept away by a tidal wave of triumphant Indians wanting a little home in their sylvan valley could easily come true.” Nothing could capture the travails of the incarcerated denizens of the fair valley better than her words ie “the loudest sound, however, is the deathly silence from Kashmir’s patrolled, barricaded streets and its approximately seven million caged, humiliated people, stitched down by razor wire, spied on by drones, living under a complete communications blackout.” The Indians hardly understand that they are under the sway of a religious fascism the likes of what the world saw under Nazi rule.
Nazism and Indian BJP Hindutva creed are almost the same having even the same salutes and same symbolism. And the world does not realize the power of the irrationality emanating out of a Hindutva drunk religious fascist like Modi who having a finger on the nuclear button talks of attacking Pakistan, another nuclear country with such insouciance merely to divert attention of his population from internal governance failures. And all that is happening because the global powers view the Kashmir tragedy from the lens of “China-Containment” policy. A provocative statement of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling China as the new central threat of this century is indicative of above policy.
While seven million Kashmiris suffer a savage repression entering 190th day the world community still looks askance helplessly at USA. It is time the US realized that the cost of a humanitarian catastrophe and a possible nuclear holocaust could far outweigh the gains of geopolitical one upmanship being encouraged in the region. It is time the world community cautioned India to stop human rights violations in Kashmir and desist from externalizing its domestic failures in the shape of war rhetoric. It is time for Indians as well as the world community to know that if Kashmir bleeds, so shall the regional and global peace.
— The writer, a Retired Brig, is a PhD scholar at NUST, Islamabad.
