By Abdul Ruff
World today is facing a lot of serious problems for which USA is the chief cause and even instrumental. Two major issues- Palestine in West Asia and Kashmir in South Asia – continue to derail peace momentum globally. Of these, genocides of Kashmiris in Jammu Kashmir, being perpetrated by India, remain the crucial problem that has not received the attention it does deserve.
Like Israel, India also puts pressure n world powers not to interfere in Kashmir issue. Similarly, Indian sources do not let any news paper or media publish anything that supports the Kashmir cause or against Indian occupational crimes. Clearly, upon enduring constant repressive and fascist methods by Israel for decades of its occupation and proliferation of illegal settlement construction operations in Palestine, Palestinians are on their way to gain full and complete sovereignty from Israel by legal means as the UN has approved Palestine as a defacto member and now all-powerful UNSC passed a resolution to remove and end further Jewish settlements in Palestine.
For the first time in years since 1948 when Israel was imposed on Mideast, USA as refused to use its veto to protect increasingly fascist Israel and defend its occupational crimes and expansionist operations. The establishment of Palestine sooner than later, thus, is a foregone conclusion. President Trump, though plays politics not to offend America’s close terror ally Israel, is reportedly supporting a soverign Palestine state and two-nation solution in Mideast.
Probe of Indian occupational crimes
A recent civil society’ fact-finding report notes that the concentration of security forces in JK is among the heaviest in the world. An estimated 700,000 Indian Army, paramilitary and state police forces watch over a population of just 14 million. Literally every Muslim in Kashmir is under Indian military surveillance and terror cum fake encounter target.
Trump needs to address the problems Kashmiris face under Indian brutal occupation as Kashmiris face very similar problem as of Palestinians as its neighbor occupies their nation Kashmir and keeps attacking and killing Muslims there. Soon after the establishment of Palestine, USA should also take up the issue of Kashmiri struggle for sovereignty back and ensure security of Kashmiris Muslims as India, its military and media care only about security of Hindus living in JK, supporting Indian case in Kashmir. Indian media want every Muslims in Kashmir is killed if they don’t accept Indian brutality occupational crimes in Kashmir as their ill-fate. India simply cannot accept any protest in Kashmir.
The population of Jammu Kashmir, now India’s only Muslim-majority state, confronts unrelenting repression by heavily-armed central and state government security forces, including indiscriminate pellet-gun barrages, arbitrary and repeated arrests, and deliberate blinding and killing of unarmed protestors. As Kashmir is reeling under continuous demonstrations and regular curfews imposed b the JK government to make life very difficult for the Kashmiris, last month a volunteer group, led by Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) and Anuradha Bhasin of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy (PFPD), visited Muslim dominated Jammu and Kashmir, formerly a soverign nation but now India’s northern-most state for 10 days to study real situation in the most militarized zone on earth. The expert report extensively documents widespread and shocking human rights violations by the Indian state and blatantly criminal behavior by security personnel.
For years, both the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party as ruling dispensation alternatively play mischief with Kashmiris. India’s Hindu supremacist BJP government and its local partner, the J&K People’s Democratic Party (PDP), responded with ferocious violence to the mass protests that convulsed the Kashmir Valley during much of the summer and fall.
While India targeted Muslims only in its occupied Jammu Kashmir, it never bothered about Azad Kashmir, the portion that is occupied by Pakistan, but of course without nay brutality meanly because Kashmiris do not oppose Pakistani occupation as a crime but a boon to protect themselves from Indian atrocities. In late September, the BJP government in India, seeking to increase its Hindu vote banks, plunged South Asia into its gravest war crisis in at least 15 years. Wanting to showcase its military prowess, New Delhi ordered illegal and highly provocative cross-border raids inside Pakistan-held Kashmir ostensibly in reputed retaliation for the September 18 attack on the Indian military base at Uri, then vowed it would continue to impose an ‘unacceptable’ price on Pakistan until all attacks on India from Pakistan ceased.
When the 25-member fact-finding group visited Kashmir between November 11 and 20, the Indian and Pakistani armies were mounting massive military barrages across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistan-held Kashmir, effectively blowing apart the shaky truce that has prevailed between the rival nuclear-armed states since 2003. Kashmiris on both side of LOC feel heavily terrorized.
Turning point
India for years has adopted different strategies to silence Kashmiris from raising objections to Indian military misrule of Jammu Kashmir but has failed. New Delhi could not successfully use its government in Sri Nagar to work for Indian cause in the region. But military misadventures have harmed Indian cause of continued occupation of Jammu Kashmir. Even after seeing the secret graveyards in Kashmir, revealing what has happened to those Kashmir Muslims who fought against military of India and imposition of extra military laws to give a free hand to the state killers in Kashmir, Kashmiris continue their struggle for sovereignty.
The worst and strongest ever Kashmiri national protests erupted following the July 8 ‘encounter killing ’by summary execution by India, which cannot tolerate any opposition from Muslim leaders for state repression and murders, of a 21-year-old leader of an Islamist, Kashmiri separatist insurgent group, the Hizbul Mujahideen. Rattled by the size and tenacity of the protests, the BJP government blamed them on “Pakistan-supported ‘terrorists” and ratcheted up pressure on Washington and Islamabad. Its aims were two-fold: to draw attention away from the popular protests in J&K and their brutal repression at the hands of the India state forces and fanatic media and to compel Pakistan to end all logistical support for the quarter-century long insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir.
The ‘civil society’ fact-finding report notes that the concentration of security forces in JK is among the heaviest in the world. An estimated 700,000 Indian Army, paramilitary and state police forces watch over a population of just 14 million. The fact-finding volunteers traveled to the Kashmir Valley districts where the recent protests have been most widespread and gathered much evidence of the violence and humiliations that the Indian military and state police have imposed on the local populace. Moreover, because of the legal immunity granted the state police under the JK Public Safety Act (1978) and the army and paramilitary forces in Kashmir under India’s notorious Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, they can and do act with impunity.
The report states ‘unarmed and symbolic protests in Kashmir have been met with sustained attack by the Indian army, police and paramilitary, including with the use of pellet guns, (chili-based) PAVA shells and firearms. Several deaths have been caused by targeted killings of unarmed civilians by armed forces even in the absence of protests or demonstrations. The volunteers further found that most pellet-gun wounds have been above the waist, indicating that security forces have deliberately sought to blind and kill protesters. ‘Most deaths we came across’, say the volunteers, ‘have been caused by injuries waist-above, without any warning fire. Deaths and injuries caused by pellet guns too are all above the waist and preponderantly at eye level causing blinding or long-term ophthalmic damage.’
Indian security forces invariably justify their violence by dubbing its victims as ‘anti-national.’ In fact, this is a catch-all phrase that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government routinely employ against persons or organizations expressing even sympathy with the victims of the state repression in Kashmir. The report documents how families that pursue legal remedies against the security personnel responsible for the killing of their loved ones are subjected to raids, repeated arrests and even torture from the out-of-control security establishment. Casualty counts vary, as the government is trying to cover up the scale of its repression and families often fear informing authorities that a member has been injured for fear of reprisals. But close to a hundred civilians have been killed since the protests erupted in early July. Many thousands more — the J&K daily Greater Kashmir claims 15,000 — have been injured.
Collective punishments, including destruction of property and animals and revenge attacks, akin to those Israel’s security forces mete out to the Palestinians, are the norm in Kashmir. The fact-finding report bears witness to this: ‘In the towns and villages where there were killings by the Indian Army, police and paramilitary, we met with ordinary people who narrated a cycle of search and seizure raids following killings, and of indiscriminate firing, including at funerals and memorial gatherings. In several of these instances the Indian Army, police and paramilitary broke windows and destroyed household goods, livestock, and food rations in peoples’ homes.’
In several villages and towns they visited, the armed forces, during their search and seizure operations, routinely destroy the local electricity transformer or sub-station, denying the entire village or locality access to electricity.’ The mass character of the protests in the Kashmir Valley have given the lie to the Modi government’s claims that the opposition to Indian rule is simply or mainly the product of Pakistani intrigue and ‘Pakistani-sponsored terrorism.’ The Kashmiri separatist groups supported by Islamabad were in fact taken by surprise by this summer’s eruption of mass protests.
The report describes the widespread popular disaffection with an Indian state that has repeatedly violated JK’s special autonomous status within the Indian Union, imposed ‘presidential’ or central government rule, rigged elections, and for decades resorted to mass repression, including ‘disappearances’, torture and summary executions. ‘From common people’, says the report, ‘we heard articulate accounts of what they have faced from the Indian state and, in particular, of the sustained attack on their democratic rights from 1989 onwards. The failure of the Indian state and every government since independence to address the political sentiments of Kashmiri people is a source of both hurt and enormous resentment.’
Indian parties speak in one voice against Muslims
The Modi government’s violent repression of the popular protests in JK has been politically aided and abetted by the opposition parties, including the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its Left Front. Interestingly, all of them unequivocally defend the right of the Indian bourgeoisie to rule over Kashmir, have helped in the cover-up of the atrocities being carried out by Indian security forces in Kashmir, and have hailed the provocative military strikes that Indian Special Forces troops carried out inside Pakistan in late September. India bases its claim not on the support of the Kashmiri people, but on the document of accession to the Indian Union signed by the last member of the British-backed Hindu princely dynasty that ruled Jammu and Kashmir.
India claims its prerogative to kill every Muslims in occupied Kashmir who refuses to accept Indian occupation. The reactionary character of the false Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir is exemplified by the legal basis of their respective claims to ‘undivided’ Kashmir i.e., to all of the territories that had belonged, prior to Partition, to the British Indian Empire princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan’s claim is based on the reactionary ideology that underlies the Pakistani state: Kashmir is rightfully Pakistan’s because it is a majority-Muslim area contiguous to the Muslim ‘homeland’ in the subcontinents northwest. Kashmiris, besieged between these two illogical claims, have been the target of both Indi and Pakistan. Shockingly, the ruling as well as opposition parties are together when it comes to attack Muslims either in India or Kashmir or anywhere in the region.
Observation
As a mere formality, India continues to claim ownership of Jammu Kashmir and reiterates that Kashmir is an integrate part of India. The Kashmir tragedy and the reactionary military-strategic rivalry between India and Pakistan with which it is inextricably enmeshed are the outcome of the reactionary communal Partition of South Asia. In 1947, South Asia’s departing British imperial overlords and the rival factions of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie divided the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. While the India ruling class and its state machinery have repressed the people of Jammu Kashmir, the Pakistani corporate lords have run roughshod over the basic rights of the people of Pakistan-held Kashmir and systematically sought to manipulate the Kashmir question for its own profit ends.
The democratic rights of the Kashmiri people will be secured and the threat of a catastrophic nuclear war between India and Pakistan lifted only through a joint struggle of the common masses of the subcontinent to put an end to capitalist rule and establish genuine the Socialist regional system. That could help end blood bath in the region, in Kashmir, end terror attacks, open the way for the improved governance for the causes of people. Notwithstanding the pressure tactics from Indian government being applied directly and through its former rulers UK and US government directly as a so-called strategic partners in terror machinations, and through the Zionist criminal regime, one hopes President Trump would rise to the occasion to help and save the remaining Kashmiri Muslims by forcing both India and Pakistan to allow the Kashmiris to have rebirth of Kashmir to exist as a soverign nation in South Asia. Meanwhile, Indian and Pakistani governments and political calls need to consider the normalcy of the region that is being harmed by the nuclear race and LOC conflict, usually fanatic Indian media mischief to promote state arrogance towards Muslims and Kashmir.
