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INDIA/PAKISTAN: Kashmir Jittery Over Prospect of War

January 20, 2009


By Athar Parvaiz | Inter Press Service


SRINAGAR, Jan 19 (IPS) – As war clouds hover over India and Pakistan, anxiety levels have risen in Kashmir, often described as the bone of contention between the South Asian neighbours

Bellicose posturing by the two countries, following the Nov. 26-29 terror strikes in Mumbai, has, according to analysts here, the potential of spiralling into yet another one of a series of wars fought over the territory by the two countries, created in 1947 following the decolonisation of the sub-continent.

”War between India and Pakistan appears to be a possibility given the course the two countries have taken,” Mohammad Sayeed Malik, a well-known, Srinagar-based political commentator told IPS. “If not checked, it may reach a point of no return and actual war would be impossible to avoid.”

The Mumbai attacks, which left 180 people dead, rudely interrupted the ‘composite dialogue,’ begun in February 2004 after the nuclear-armed neighbours restored diplomatic ties – downgraded in reaction to a similar armed attack on India’s parliament in December 2001.

Accusing Pakistan-based militant groups, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), for staging the attack on Indian parliament, India massed troops along the border in the largest military mobilisation since the two countries went to war in 1971.

The LeT, set up to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, has now been implicated in the Mumbai attacks as well by India and by United States officials and analysts who have also linked it to Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attack, war between the neighbours was avoided by intense diplomatic activity led by the United States. But it took until February 2004 before the composite dialogue process – a serious effort aimed at confidence building, normalisation of bilateral relations and dispute resolution – could be put into place.

The peace process brought better diplomatic, trade and people-to-people contact across the 298-km, fenced and fortified Line of Control (LoC) that divides Indian Kashmir from the Pakistan-administered part of the territory and has served for decades as the de facto international border.

Most significantly, for people living along the LoC, the peace talks brought about a cessation of the constant exchange of artillery fire by the Indian and Pakistani armies across the border. Scores of civilians have been reported killed, maimed or displaced by the destructive exchanges.

“After the ceasefire, we had been living in a comfortable manner without any fear, but now we might again have go through the traumatic times before the ceasefire,” Rustum Gelani, a resident of the border town of Tangdar, told IPS over telephone.

Reports from the other towns near the LoC such as Uri and Poonch suggested that people were close to panic. “We would appeal the two countries to maintain the ceasefire,” said Abdul Gafoor, a resident of Poonch.

People living along the road leading to LoC in Tangdar, Uri and Poonch have reported seeing deployment of troops and equipment for several days now. “More military and machines are being stockpiled on the LoC… it looks like war is brewing up,” said Neik Mohammed, a resident.

Army officials have downplayed the activity as part of routine exercises, normally conducted at this time of the year. But one defence source said the moves were ”precautionary measures as our neighbour Pakistan is mobilising troops on its side of the border”.

Malik said that should war break out between India and Pakistan, Kashmiris would be the worst sufferers; socially, economically and politically. “It would wash away all the gains of the five-year-old peace process. The positive mood in the aftermath of the peaceful elections in Kashmir may vanish into thin air,” he said.

“During and after Gen. [Pervez] Musharraf’s rule, Pakistan had made quite a lot of progress in disengaging itself from active involvement in Kashmir… a war could reverse it,” Malik added.

Civil society and NGOs have been busy urging India and Pakistan to work towards de-escalating tension and peace-building. “We call upon India and Pakistan to sign the convention and treaty to ban production, stockpiling and use of cluster munitions and landmines,” said ActionAid’s Arjimand Talib, a peace activist.

”A war would seriously dent efforts at poverty eradication in the region and shift focus from development to further militarisation,” Talib added.

“After India felt that international pressure had started working on Pakistan, it has helped bring down tension levels. This should have been enough, but since India’s elections are just round the corner, one can’t be sure that the war hysteria will come down,” said Malik.

Tapan Bose, secretary general of the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD), told IPS that public anger projected in the media carried the danger of precipitating war, forgetting that ordinary people would suffer the consequences most.

“We have been so overwhelmed by the war jingoism of the media and sections of the state and upper middle class [because they were hit by the Mumbai attacks] that we forget what the peace process means for thousands of ordinary people,” Bose said. ”Who speaks for them?”

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India stages “martial law” elections in Kashmir

January 8, 2009
By Deepal Jayasekera and Keith Jones |  World Socialist Web Site,  January 8,  2009

Omar Abdullah was sworn in as the chief minister of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir Monday, ending six months of central government or “president’s” rule.

India’s lone Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir has for two decades been convulsed by a popular insurgency against Indian rule.

Indian authorities recently reported that 47,000 people have died in the conflict, including 20,000 civilians and a like number of anti-Indian insurgents. The Coalition of Civil Society, a prominent Kashmiri-based human rights group, says the true death toll is in excess of 70,000.

Abdullah leads a coalition that was patched together after last month’s state assembly elections produced a fractured verdict. The coalition unites his National Conference, a Kashmiri regionalist party, with the Congress Party, the traditional governing party of the Indian bourgeoisie and the dominant partner in India’s United Progressive Alliance government.

The National Conference captured 28 assembly seats and the Congress 17, meaning that the coalition has only a bare majority in the 87-member state legislature.

Neither party improved its standing from the last election. The National Conference won the same number of seats as it secured in the 2002 election when it fell from power, while the Congress suffered a net loss of 3 seats.

The Kashmiri-based People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which co-governed the state with the Congress from 2002 till last June, won 21 seats, five more than in 2002, and thereby supplanted the Congress as the state’s second largest party. The Hindu communalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 11 seats, all of them from the Hindu-majority Jammu region. Smaller parties took six seats and four were won by independents.

India’s political establishment and corporate media have proclaimed the staging of state assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the installation of a new coalition government, and the lifting of president’s rule a triumph for “democracy.”

The reality is that Jammu and Kashmir, especially the Kashmir Valley, remain under military occupation, with half a million security forces deployed in a state whose total population is little more than 10 million. Since 1990 the state has been under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives the military sweeping powers. These include the right to use deadly force and raid any premises without a warrant, as well as immunity from prosecution.

The elections were held in seven phases, stretching from November 17 to December 24 so as to maximize troop deployment in areas during and immediately before voting.

Curfews, declared and undeclared, were imposed by security forces so as to prevent anti-Indian government protests and those protests that were mounted were brutally suppressed. Several dozen prominent opponents of Indian rule were kept under house arrest throughout the election campaign, under the draconian Public Safety Act, which authorizes police to detain people for up to two years without trial.

The state of siege was intensified following the commando-style terrorist attack on Mumbai in late November. BBC correspondent Chris Morris, reporting from Srinagar on the eve of polling in the state’s largest city, said, “Every 50 meters or so, on every main street, stand several men (or very occasionally women) armed with assault rifles and—more often than not—big sticks.”

Indian authorities continue to adamantly oppose any serious investigation of the horrific human rights abuses, including torture and summary executions, perpetrated by security forces—some of them former insurgents who have been coerced into becoming police “auxiliaries”—in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The “disappeared” number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.

Much has been made of an increase in the election turnout from the 2002 state election. Although the advocates of union with Pakistan or an independent Kashmir called for an election boycott, 61.5 percent of the electorate voted as compared with just 43 percent in 2002. In the Kashmir Valley, the state’s most populous region, and the center of both its Muslim population and the opposition to Indian rule, half or more of the electorate voted.

The increased voter turnout came as a welcome relief to the Indian elite. Indeed, in announcing last fall that the Jammu and Kashmir state elections would be held on schedule, the head of India’s election commission conceded it was a calculated risk.

In June, the PDP had withdrawn from its coalition with the Congress, forcing the imposition of president’s rule, after popular protests broke out against a state government decision to cede 100 acres of Kashmir Valley land to a Hindu shrine. The shrine has become a major pilgrimage site in recent years, at least in part because of the efforts of Hindu supremacist organizations who view its veneration as a means of asserting Indian/Hindu control over the valley. The protests quickly mushroomed into a mass popular movement against the police-military occupation of the state and to a considerable degree Indian rule itself. State authorities brutally suppressed the protests, killing dozens of people. Meanwhile the Hindu right, with the connivance of local Congress leaders, whipped up a Hindu communal counter-agitation. (See: Indian government mounts brutal campaign of repression in Kashmir)

More astute and less-biased observers concede that the increased turnout in the 2008 election is not indicative of any new-found enthusiasm for the repressive rule of the Indian state among Kashmir’s Muslim majority. Rather, the populace seized on the elections as a means of trying to influence government decisions concerning economic development. “In their approach to the elections,” wrote The Hindu‘s Siddharth Varadarajan, “it is apparent that the people in the valley made a distinction between the ‘masla-e-kashmir,’ or the problem of Kashmir, and ‘kashmiriyon ke masail,’ or the problems of Kashmiris.”

A second factor in the widespread spurning of the anti-Indian opposition’s boycott call is increasing popular disaffection with the insurgency. Not only do the insurgents advance no progressive program to address poverty and economic backwardness, they have become ever-more explicitly communalist and Islamic fundamentalist in program and orientation. Pakistan, it should be noted, played an important part in this process, as it viewed Islamicist elements as the most malleable in its efforts to exploit the grievances of the Kashmiri people to serve its own predatory ends.

The National Conference, which favors increased autonomy for Kashmir within the Indian Union, placed economic issues at the center of its election campaign, promising to improve the state’s dilapidated or non-existent infrastructure and create jobs. “If voted to power, National Conference will usher an era of unparalleled development in the state and open new avenues of employment,” declared Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah’s father, and himself a four-time Jammu and Kashmir chief minister.

The central theme of the PDP election manifesto was “Make Self-Rule Happen.” In a 2006 address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank, Mufti Mohammad Syed, the father of PDP head Mehbooba Mufti, and the party’s official “patron,” argued that autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir and the development of cross-border ties with Pakistan-controlled Azad Kashmir, would allow the state to become the hub of a thriving Indo-Pakistani capitalist trade.

The Kashmiri regional parties speak for rival sections of the local elite. Their autonomy demands and maneuvers with New Delhi—the National Conference was aligned with the Hindu supremacist BJP from 1998 to 2002—have nothing to do with meeting the socio-economic needs and fulfilling the genuine democratic aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, be they Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist.

Neither of them challenge the reactionary 1947 communal partition of the subcontinent. Imposed by the Congress and Muslim League in connivance with British imperialism, Partition is at the root of the ordeal of the Kashmiri people, on both sides of the Line of Control that divides Indian- and Pakistani held Kashmir, and of the geo-political rivalry between India and Pakistan—a rivalry that has repeatedly erupted in war.

The Congress and National Conference have had a tumultuous, decades-long association, involving periods of partnership and confrontation. The founder of the National Conference, Omar Abdullah’s grandfather, Sheikh Abdullah, supported the accession of the princely state of Kashmir to India and became the Indian state’s first chief minister. He was jailed by the Congress from 1953 to 1964, after he balked at declaring the state an integral part of the Indian Union.

In 1984, a Congress central government through the centrally-appointed state governor maneuvered to dismiss a National Conference ministry, only to prod the National Conference into an electoral alliance three years later. The joint efforts of the Congress and National Conference to rig the 1987 elections did much to discredit the Indian state and fuel the eruption two years later of mass protests against Indian rule.

If the Congress has rushed to forge a new governmental coalition with the National Conference, agreeing that Abdullah will serve as chief minister for the government’s full prospective six-year term, it is because it is anxious to give the state the appearance of a stable, democratic government. It is leery of the PDP’s more assertive position on autonomy, what many in the press have termed “soft separatism.”

More importantly, it and the Indian elite as a whole have been rattled by last summer’s sudden eruption of mass protests and want to ensure that there is a democratic fig leaf for the continuation of its two decades-long campaign to stamp out opposition, whether in the form of an armed insurgency or civil unrest, to Indian rule.

At the same time, New Delhi, with the full support of the official opposition BJP, has seized on the recent Mumbai terrorist atrocity to push through even more draconian “anti-terrorism” legislation and to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan to end its political and logistical support for the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir.

Several factors account for this belligerence. India’s military-security establishment and the Hindu right have long been pressing for a more belligerent stance against Pakistan and various national-ethnic and Naxalite (Maoist) insurgencies within India. With national elections looming, the Congress is anxious to counter any attempt by the BJP to cast it as “soft” on terrorism. The campaign against Pakistan also serves to divert attention from, and channel in a reactionary direction mounting frustration over, the deepening economic crisis.

That said, the Indian government’s attempt to cast Pakistan as a nexus of international terrorism is also clearly aimed at preempting any attempt by the incoming US administration of Barack Obama to take a greater role in the Indo-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir. A number of Obama aides have suggested that as a quid pro quo for Islamabad intensifying its efforts to eradicate support within Pakistan for the insurgency against the US-installed government in Afghanistan, Washington would facilitate a settlement of the Kashmir dispute. Obama himself told Time magazine last October that he wants to “devote serious diplomatic resources” to the Kashmir dispute, including getting “a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach.”

India has long opposed any outside intervention in the Kashmir dispute, since it believes that bilaterally its economic and military power far outweighs that of Pakistan. Obama’s suggestion was, consequently, pilloried in the Indian press and quietly but firmly rejected by Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

The strength of the reaction from India has been duly noted by members of Washington’s geo-political establishment. Speaking Tuesday, Selig Harrison, a longtime US think-tank specialist on South Asia declared, “A US Kashmir initiative, however veiled, would poison relations between New Delhi and Washington.”

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India’s Reckless Road to Washington Through Tel Aviv

December 24, 2008

By VIJAY PRASHAD | Counterpunch, Dec 23, 2008

On Thursday, November 27, in the middle of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Imran Babar, one of the terrorists, called India TV from Nariman House. He used a cellphone that belonged to Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the co-director of the Chabad-Lubavitch Center. The following day, Babar and his associates killed Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka. The phone call he made was not long. Babar opened with a comment that made little sense to most people: “You call [Israel’s] army staff to visit Kashmir. Who are they to come to J &K [Jammu and Kashmir]? This is a matter between us and Hindus, the Hindu government. Why does Israel come here?”

Little is known of Babar’s babbles outside the confines of Hakirya, the “campus” of the Israeli high command, and of South Block, which houses the Indian External Affairs and Defense ministries. What he referred to are the growing military and security ties between India and Israel. As well, he might have referenced the now rather solid links between the Hindu Right and the Israeli Right, and how their view of the conflicts that run from Jerusalem to Srinagar mirror those of the jihadis like Babar. Imran Babar and his fellow terrorists come to their critique from the standard anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism that blinds many aggrieved jihadis. Rather than make a concrete assessment of their grievances, they take refuge in as mythical a world as sketched out by the Israeli Right-Hindu Right, where Jews, Hindus and America are arrayed against Muslims.

That the terrorists attacked the Chabad-Lubavitch Center has renewed the call to see the commonalities between the victims of terrorism, whether those in a Haifa restaurant or a Mumbai train, between 9/11 and 11/26. To do so flattens out a significant differences, and reduces the violence to their acts themselves rather than to the social context that leads people to acts of terror. Mumbai provokes the Right to seek recourse to the solutions of war and surveillance, methods that might create a moment’s sense of security before the wily adversary finds a new technological means to strike back. There is no common technical solution: better sniper rifles or iris scanners, better intelligence databases or cattle prods. The weapons used to deal the fatal blow to the terrorists are also incubators of a new generation of terrorists. This is an elementary lesson, lost to those who seek the silver bullet.

Why Does Israel Come Here?

On September 10, 2008, Israel’s top army official, General Avi Mizrahi landed in New Delhi. He met with India’s leading army, navy and air force officials before leaving for a short visit to Jammu and Kashmir. Mizrahi, a long-standing officer in the Israeli Defense Force, lectured senior Indian army officers at the Akhnur Military Base, near the Indo-Pakistan border, on the theme of counterterrorism. Later, in Srinagar, Mizrahi and his Indian counterpart, Army Chief Deepak Kapoor agreed to joint counterterrorism activities, notably for Israeli commandoes to train Indian soldiers in urban combat.

The Mizrahi visit in 2008 is not extraordinary. He had been to India in February 2007. In June 2007, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky brought a team of IDF officers to Jammu and Kashmir, where they met senior Indian officials at the 16 Corps headquarters at Nagrota in the Jammu region near the India-Pakistan border. Kaplinsky’s team discussed the problem of infiltration, how militants from the Pakistani side enter the India. The 720-kilometer barbed wire fence, an echo of Israel’s wall, has not prevented the transit of militants. Kaplinsky came to push other, high-tech means, such as night-vision devices, to help interdict militants. En route to Israel, Kaplinsky’s team went to the Mumbai-based Western Naval Command.

In January 2008, to continue these contacts, the IDF’s chief, Brigadier General Pinchas Buchris came to India and met the top civilians and the top brass. They discussed the procedures to share intelligence on terrorist activity. A week after Buchris returned to Israel, India’s Navy Chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta spent time in Jerusalem, meeting IDF heads Gabi Askhenazi and Buchris. Between 2007 and early 2008, all three Indian defense chiefs visited Israel. The framework for these meetings is the 2002 agreement to form an Indo-Israeli Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, a long-standing attempt to create an entente between the armies of India and Israel, and to consolidate the immense arms trade between the two countries (India is now Israel’s largest arms buyer).

The impetus for the relations goes back to the 1990s, when the governing Congress Party began to dismantle the dirigiste Indian State and to withdraw from India’s long-standing non-aligned policy. The Congress government believed that it was time to reassess its relations with the United States, and that the best way to get to Washington was through Tel Aviv. Stronger ties with Israel might soften the reticence in Washington toward India, and lead it to loosen its bonds with Pakistan and China. India banked on Israel to play the broker with Washington. (This is the argument of my book, Namaste Sharon: Hindutva and Sharonism Under U. S. Hegemony, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2003).

In January 1992, the Indian government recognized the state of Israel. The next month, Defense Minister Sharad Pawar called for Indo-Israeli cooperation on counter-terrorism. Israel’s Director-General of Police Ya’acov Lapidot visited India for an international police convention, and returned to Israel with news that the Indian government wanted Israeli expertise on counter-terror operations. Government spokesperson Benjamin Netanyahu told India Abroad (29 February 1992) that Israel “developed expertise in dealing with terrorism at the field level and also internationally, at the political and legal level, and would be happy to share it with India.” In the Congress years, the main arena of cooperation came in arms deals, as India’s massive purchases provided stability to Israel’s previously volatile arms industry.

When the Hindu Right came to power in the late 1990s, it hastened both the economic “liberalization” policy (with a Minister for Privatization in office) and it shifted its attentions to Washington, DC and Tel Aviv: an axis of the three powers against what it called Islamic terrorism was to be the new foundation of India’s emergent foreign policy. The close relationship between Netanyahu (then Prime Minister) and L. K. Advani (the Home Minister of India, and a brigand of the Hard Right) smoothed the path to intensive collaboration. Advani admires Netanyahu’s personal history as a member of the Sayeret Matcal (special forces) unit of the IDF; Advani himself has no such on-the-ground experience. In 1995, when in Israel, Advani happily received Netanyahu’s new book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism.

Advani has since made it his practice to quote from the book, particularly the view that a “free society must know what they are fighting,” which is the “rising tide of Islamic terrorism.” This was all honey in Advani’s ear. He drew the central concepts of his counter-terrorism policy from his friends in the Israeli government: a wall at the border, threats of “hot pursuit” across it; demur against political negotiation, escalation of rhetoric; limits on civil liberties when it comes to suspects in terror cases. Netanyahu had purposely refused to distinguish between Iran and Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood. Advani too began to collapse the distinction between Kashmiri separatist groups and post-Afghan war terror outfits based in Pakistan, between aggrieved Indian Muslims and Pakistani proxy forces. As well, Netanyahu and Advani crafted a stage on which to enact an endless battle between Democracy and Terrorism, where the role of Democracy is played by the United States, Israel and India and where the role of Terrorism is played by Islam. It is all simple and dangerous.

During his June 2000 visit to Israel, Advani underscored his adoption of Netanyahu’s framework during a lecture at the Indian Embassy. “In recent years we have been facing a growing internal security problem,” he said. “We are concerned with cross-border terrorism launched by proxies of Pakistan. We share with Israel a common perception of terrorism as a menace, even more so when coupled with religious fundamentalism. Our mutual determination to combat terrorism is the basis for discussions with Israel, whose reputation in dealing with such problems is quite successful.” Advani invited a team of Israeli counter-terrorism experts to tour Jammu and Kashmir in September 2000. Led by Eli Katzir, an aide to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the team conducted a feasibility study of India’s military security needs and offered suggestions for Israeli assistance. Three years later, Israel and India signed a military-arms pact that included a specific training mission. Israeli forces would train four new Special Forces battalions of the Indian Army; other battalions would learn the practice of “irregular warfare” and work with the Northern Command in Kashmir.

When the Hindu Right lost the election in 2004 to a Congress-led alliance, the pace of contacts lessened. With both Advani and Netanyahu in the shadows, the alliance lost its main champions. The Congress government recognized how toxic this alliance would be, unnecessarily inflaming an already difficult relationship with Pakistan. This was also recognized within Israel. Efraim Inbar, director of Israel’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, who is actively involved in the Indo-Israeli contacts, recognizes the political problem; “this kind of cooperation needs to be secret if it can be,” he told Newsweek. The military and arms deals between India and Israel continued, even if it was now treated as a sideshow. India remains a major importer of Israeli arms. What lingers in the shadows is the Israeli work in Kashmir. Little is officially revealed of it, even as leaks here and there hint at the extent of the contacts.

Technocrats of Terrorism.

Ami Pedazhur, a political scientist from the University of Austin-Texas, joins the chorus on the New York Times op-ed page with suggestions for the Indian government after Mumbai (“From Munich to Mumbai,” December 20). Rather than see anything new in the Mumbai attacks, Pedazhur conjoins it with an unbroken history that stretches back at least to the 1972 Munich attacks. What links Munich to Mumbai is neither the identity of those who kill nor those who are killed, but the means by which the killing occurs. Analysts of terrorism, like Pedazhur, are technocrats of counter-terrorist actions. They study how terrorists operate, and so what best security and military force can constrain them. The public policy that stems from this sort of technocratic view of terrorism has one end, to restrain the terrorist with more security checkpoints, more hot pursuit.

Why does the Indian government take advice from a government whose own security services have a dismal record of preventing terror attacks and whose own armed forces have failed to create stability on its borders? Israel’s weaponry works fine. But Israel’s counter-terror expertise is questionable. Pedazhur takes pride in Israel’s counterterrorism policy. What pride there can be in a regime that maintains its safety through a ruthless military strategy is questionable. The Israeli government, regardless of the party in charge, is conspicuous not only for its treatment of the Palestinians but also, significantly, for its failure to create a secure society for its own citizens. It is easy enough to make the Palestinians the author of the troubles, but this of course ignores the intransigence of Israel’s political leadership to produce a settlement. Because it cannot make a political peace, the Israeli authorities have perfected various technological means to minimize the consequences of its failures. This is what it wishes to export to India. For India, the imports signal the surrender of its leadership to the current imbroglio. Gated countries wallow in fear and hatred.

The costs of the Tel Aviv-New Delhi-Washington axis are too much to bear, at least for India. India cannot afford to mimic Israel’s failed neighborhood policy, nor can it follow the U. S. example that seeks to solve its problems by aerial bombardment. South Asia requires a regional solution to what is without doubt a regional problem, one with its roots in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s as much as the unresolved Kashmir question (with close to a million troops in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian government runs what is tantamount to an occupation – they provide the opposite of security for the residents of the state). When the Afghan civil wars came to a unjust quiet in the early 1990s, the various foreign fighters returned to their homelands, emboldened by their self-perception of their victorious struggle: they went to Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and into the Kashmir struggle. Pakistan and India are equally victims of these veterans of the jihad, and both have a vested interest in their demobilization. But more than that, there is a danger that as the U. S. amps up its war in Afghanistan and treats Pakistan with contempt, the jihadis  will take out their wrath with the same kind of ferocity as they demonstrated in Mumbai. Rather than risk a failed military strategy against the jihadis, it is time for a regional conference on human security, one that includes better cooperation between the states and a program for the lives of those who are driven to the compounds of hatred through their many, many grievances.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

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Indian-Controlled Kashmir: Police Fire Bullets Against Kashmir Protesters

December 14, 2008
The New York Times
By REUTERS
Published: December 13, 2008

Filed at 6:19 a.m. ET

Reuters

PAMPORE, India (Reuters) – Government forces in Indian Kashmir fired bullets to disperse hundreds of anti-poll demonstrators during state elections in the disputed region on Saturday, killing one and injuring 25, police said.

In the fifth phase of the vote, angry protesters shouting “we want freedom” besieged a group of police and threw stones in the Koil area of Pulwama district about 35 kilometers (20 miles) south of Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital.

“Ten policemen were among those injured,” Bashir Ahmad, a police official, said.

Separatist leaders, most of them in jail or under house arrest, have called for a boycott of the seven-stage state polls saying India portrays voting as an endorsement of its rule over the Himalayan region.

But there has been a high turnout in the elections so far and Saturday large numbers came to the polling booths, though many voting stations in Koil and other areas were deserted.

“It is not a vote for Indian rule or against separatists. Voting is for development,” Sajjad Ahmad, a fruit grower, said. “We want better roads, schools and hospitals.”

Thousands of soldiers and policemen patrolled the streets and guarded polling stations in the strife-torn region beset by massive anti-India protests earlier this year.

Villagers dressed in long woolen robes queued outside heavily-guarded polling stations to vote in Kakpora area in Pulwama.

The turnout in eleven constituencies was more than 22 percent in the first four hours of voting, election officials said.

Authorities, buoyed by a decent turnout in the first four rounds of the vote, deployed extra troops in Srinagar, erected barricades and warned residents to stay indoors, in what amounted to an undeclared curfew to thwart planned protests.

Srinagar goes to the polls in the last phase on December 24.

Violence has declined significantly after India and Pakistan, which both claim the region in full and rule in part, began a slow-moving peace process in 2004.

Officials say more than 47,000 people have been killed since a revolt against New Delhi’s rule broke out in 1989. Separatists put the toll at 100,000.

(Reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq; Editing by Matthias Williams)

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The Kashmir issue and the violence in the Indian subcontinent

December 10, 2008

Nasir Khan, December 8, 2008

Almost the whole world has condemned the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Such terrorism has also, once again, reminded us how important it is to combat the forces of communalist terror and political violence in the Indian subcontinent. But what is often ignored or suppressed is the fact that there are deep underlying causes of the malaise that erupts in the shape of such violent actions; the unresolved Kashmir issue happens to be the one prime cause that inflames the passions and anger of millions of people.

However, to repeat the mantra of “war on terror” as the Bush Administration has done over the last eight years while planning and starting major wars of aggression does not bring us one inch closer to solving the problem of violence and terror in our region. On the contrary, such short-sighted propaganda gimmicks are meant to camouflage the wars of aggression and lay the ground for further violence and bloodshed. The basic motive is to advance imperial interests and domination. The so-called “war on terror” is no war against terror; on the contrary, it has been the continuation of the American imperial policy for its definite goals in the Middle East and beyond. Obviously any serious effort to combat terror will necessarily take into account the causes of terror, and not merely be content with the visible symptoms.

The unresolved issue of Kashmir has kept India and Pakistan on a dangerous course of confrontation since 1947, when the British raj came to an end and as a last act of charity to their subjects the imperial rulers agreed to divide India along communal lines that was to prove a Pandora’s box for the coming generations. We had witnessed their double-dealings in the process when they gave their blessings and patronage here and there and a lot of mischief wherever possible especially while they drew the boundaries between the two emerging countries. The recipients of favours reciprocated in kind: the last viceroy Lord Mountbatten was made the first Governor-General of Free India! This carefully crafted expedient arrangement served its purpose well for one country at the cost of the other.

At the time of partition, the princely State of Jammu and Kashmir was ruled by the Hindu Dogra ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh who was the great-grandson of Gulab Singh, to whom the British, under the terms of the Treaty of Amritsar (1846) had sold the entire valley of Kashmir. Because the overwhelming majority of Kashmir was Muslim, it was thought that Kashmir would  join the new state of Pakistan. When the Kashmiris from what came to be  known  as Azad Kashmir and the tribal fighters from the North Western Frontier Province of Pakistan started a guerilla offensive on the state to bring pressure on Hari Singh to join Pakistan, he asked Lord Mountbatten for help, who agreed to give military help if the ruler joined India. Thus started the first war between India and Pakistan that finally stopped in 1949 when the newly-formed United Nations Organization arranged a ceasefire. The Line of Control was established that has remained the de facto boundary between the Indian-controlled Kashmir and ‘Azad’ (Free) Jammu and Kashmir (but called Pakistan-occupied Kashmir by the Indians).

To affect a ceasefire, in 1948, India took the matter to the Security Council of the United Nations against Pakistan. As a result the Security Council passed three resolutions in 1948 and 1949 that also acknowledged the rights of the people of Kashmir about whose land the two countries were fighting . According to the resolutions, India and Pakistan were to hold plebiscite in Kashmir so that the people could decide their own future. The Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru promised that the people of Jammu and Kashmir would gain independence when the peace was restored. After the end of the hostilities, he did not keep his word; neither were the terms of the resolutions ever fulfilled. The Indian government granted a special status to Kashmir that allowed more internal autonomy. This was thought to pacify the people when Kashmir’s ruler joined India. But the promise to hold plebiscite was not kept and the successive Indian governments have adamantly held that Kashmir is an integral part of India, and all demands of the Kashmiri people for plebiscite or defying Indian occupation were presented as internal Indian matters. No third party was allowed to speak on behalf of the Kashmiri people or voice their legitimate demands under the UN Charter or the UN resolutions. Meanwhile India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir another war in 1965.

The grievances of Kashmiris had accumulated over the decades. Kashmiris challenged the legitimacy of the Indian occupation and in 1989 they started armed struggle to evict the occupiers. Mass arrests, disappearances and violence followed in the wake of the military crackdown. India deployed more than 500,000 soldiers to suppress the Kashmiri Muslims.

According to conservative accounts Indian forces killed about 78,000 people and  brutalized the whole population, but the Kashmiri sources put the number of those killed  around 100,000. In this militant struggle, Kashmiri Hindu minority, the Pandits, also became the victims insurgents; according to the state government over 200,000 fled the valley. They sought refuge in Jammu and some fled to India. The conditions under which the Pandits have lived since their displacement have been deplorable. But it is heartening to see that all sections of Kashmiri Muslims and their leadership are now pleading for the return of their Hindu brothers to their homeland.

After 18 years of brutal military occupation, the Indian government was faced with a new situation. The Kashmir Jehad Council called for an end to armed struggle and instead appealed to all militant freedom-fighters to use only non-violent and peaceful means to achieve liberation from India. The call for Azadi (freedom) is getting louder which the Indian machine guns and their marauding forces are not able to drown. But the Indian rulers have shown little willingness to listen to the people and have kept a tight military stranglehold over the Kashmir Valley.

The Kashmir conflict has caused untold misery and destruction in Kashmir, both in life and property. It has also been the key cause of tension between India and Pakistan as rivals. The tremendous drain of resources incurred by the two countries on military buildup and arms-race including the acquisition of nuclear bombs is a result of their confrontation over Kashmir. The official propaganda each government has directed against the other created enmity, distrust and hatred in the respective populations of these countries against their “mortal enemy”. This has gone on for over six decades and there is no end in sight. This has poisoned the minds of Indian and Pakistani people. As a result we see political polarization and perennial tensions amongst the people that stand in the way of settling the issues like Kashmir and the normalization of relations between the two neighbours. In addition, another ghastly development has been the rise of political and religious extremism in India and Pakistan.

The growth of religious and political extremism in India and Pakistan is not new. But what is new is the general acceptance of extremist tendencies in the social and political fabric of the two countries. The preachers and high priests of communalism and hatred influence the mainstream politics.

In India, some political parties have been closely allied with communalist militant political Hinduism or Hindutva. The Sangha Parivar is the umbrella organization for all Hindutva parties. The avowed aim of Hindutva has been to assert Hindu supremacy and Hindu communalism in India by identifying India with Hinduism and Hindu rule. Hindutva organizations are influenced by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which stands for a Hindu majoritarian rule. The Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) is the leading political party of India that stands for Hindutva doctrine and Hinduising the entire country. Jawaharlal Nehru had once warned that if fascism would arrive in India, it would arrive in the form of majoritarian (Hindu) communalism. His words and warning were almost prophetic.

Of course, the main targets of Hindutva have been the Indian Muslims in the first place, followed by low-caste Hindus–formerly “Untouchables” (!) and now called Dalits–, and Christians. Over 150-million Indian Muslims are a religious minority in India. Since the unfortunate circumstances that led to the partition of India in 1947, Indian Muslims have come under enormous pressure. They have gradually found themselves at the mercy of Hindus, politically marginalized and socially alienated in their own country. Even their national status and loyalties became suspect. They are “Muslims first”, so how can they be “true Indians”? And, why are they in Hindu India anyway if they don’t like India or complain about their lot in India? They can just pack up and go away. They are ‘Pakistanis’ and should migrate to their own country!

Such views and political developments in India have left Indian Muslims in an extremely difficult situation. In 1992, Hindu militants destroyed sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya while the state authorities stood idle by. The then Indian prime minister promised to re-build the mosque. The promised was not kept. Instead a temple was raised on the site of the destroyed mosque that provoked religious frenzy and communal passions. Three thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the ensuing riots.

Two thousand Muslims were massacred in 12002 in Gujarat, which was a full blooded pogrom which took place under the state government run by the BJP. The New Delhi rulers did not intervene to stop the massacre of Muslims.

Attacks on Muslim holy places and people have increased in the recent years. In one recent attack by Hindutva activists on a mosque a Hindu lieutenant-colonel of the Indian army was arrested for his involvement in the attack.

In Pakistan, fundamentalist religious parties have felt duty-bound to monopolise Islam, but they have never at any time gained much support in the masses. Their poor electoral results in various elections have clearly demonstrated that. However, Pakistani Muslim clerics have gained much notoriety for their inter-religious invective. The Sunni preachers direct their anger at the “infidel” Shias and the Shia preachers reciprocate by calling the Sunnis “infidels”! This leads to an unending cycle of violence and acrimony in the name of Islam. But the danger posed by militant Islamist groups in stirring violence and hatred is beyond doubt. However, the Indian treatment of the Kashmiri Muslims and the unresolved Kashmir issue because of Indian intransigence is universally condemned by all Pakistanis; it also provides an opportunity to the militant groups like Lasher-e-Taiba and others who exhort their followers to avenge the grievances of their Indian co-religionists at the hands of Hindutva militants as well as to make a stand for the freedom of Kashmir by all means, including violence. This is exactly what happened last month in the Mumbai attacks.

For the last six decades India has maintained its occupation of the Kashmir Valley by political manipulation and brutal military force. The massacres of the Kashmiri Muslims by Indian forces amount to war crimes under international law; however, the ultimate responsibility for this genocidal policy lies with the New Delhi rulers. If Indian government wants to continue with the occupation of Kashmir and also expect that people of Kashmir will forego their demands for freedom because they face a great military and economic power like India, which has extended its cooperation with other imperialist powers like America and Zionist Israel, then one thing is certain: the situation will get worse; violence and terror will flourish.

The 10-million Muslims of the Kashmir Valley want independence from Indian colonial rule and oppression. The best course left for India is to make a break with its previous policy, and accede to the right to self-determination of the Kashmiris. This will not weaken India; instead, it will show the strength of Indian democracy as well of the humane aspects of Indian cultural tradition.

Whether the people of the Kashmir Valley decide to join India or Pakistan, or they opt for full independence should be for them to decide. No matter what decision they make to determine their future as stipulated by the UN resolutions should be their and their alone. However, it is far from certain that they will choose to join Pakistan, but if they do so that should not worry India. In such a case, Hindu Jammu and Buddhist Ladakh will certainly join India. Thus, by a wise and courageous step Indian leaders can create the political conditions under which a new era of good neighbourly relations between India and Pakistan can materalise if they allow the people of the Kashmir Valley to control their own destiny instead of the inhumane treatment and humiliation at the hands of the Indian state and its armed forces. Once the main bone of contention between India and Pakistan is removed then the two former rivals and “enemies” can become friends and concentrate on socio-economic problems of their people within a peaceful atmosphere. An independent and self-governing entity in the Kashmir Valley will bring hope and good-will to its neighbours. By removing the biggest unresolved problem of Kashmir that has fueled hostility and has caused immeasurable damage, the two countries will also be able to contain the forces of communalism and religious fanaticism that plague India and Pakistan.


Nasir Khan is a peace activist. He is the author of Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx’s Writings 1843-44 (1995) and Perceptions of Islam in the Christendoms: A Historical Survey (2006). He has his own blogs at http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com and  https://sudhan.wordpress.com through which he can be contacted.

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Mumbai atrocities highlight need for solution in Kashmir

November 30, 2008

    Jihadi groups will exploit Muslim grievances unless peace can be brought to the troubled state

  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008 00.01 GMT
  • The Observer, Sunday November 30 2008

Three weeks ago, in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar, I met a young surgeon named Dr Iqbal Saleem. Iqbal described to me how on 11 August this year, Indian security forces entered the hospital where he was fighting to save the lives of unarmed civilian protesters who had been shot earlier that day by the Indian army. The operating theatre had been tear-gassed and the wards riddled with bullets, creating panic and injuring several of the nurses. Iqbal had trained at the Apollo hospital in Delhi and said he harboured no hatred against Hindus or Indians. But the incident had profoundly disgusted him and the unrepentant actions of the security forces, combined with the indifference of the Indian media, had convinced him that Kashmir needed its independence.

I thought back to this conversation last week, when news came in that the murderous attackers of Mumbai had brutally assaulted the city’s hospitals in addition to the more obvious Islamist targets of five-star hotels, Jewish centres and cafes frequented by Americans and Brits. Since then, the links between the Mumbai attacks and the separatist struggle in Kashmir have become ever more explicit. There now seems to be a growing consensus that the operation is linked to the Pakistan-based jihadi outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, operates openly from his base at Muridhke outside Lahore.

This probable Pakistani origin of the Mumbai attacks, and the links to Kashmir-focused jihadi groups, means that the horrific events have to be seen in the context of the wider disaster of Western policy in the region since 9/11. The abject failure of the Bush administration to woo the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan away from the Islamists and, instead, managing to convince many of them of the hostility of the West towards all Muslim aspirations, has now led to a gathering catastrophe in Afghanistan where the once-hated Taliban are now again at the gates of Kabul.

Meanwhile, the blowback from that Afghan conflict in Pakistan has meant that Asif Ali Zardari’s government has now lost control of much of the North West Frontier Province, in addition to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, while religious and political extremism flourishes as never before.

Pakistan’s most intractable problem remains the relationship of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) over the last 25 years with myriad jihadi groups. Once, the ISI believed that they could use jihadis for their own ends, but the Islamists have increasingly followed their own agendas, to the extent that they now feel capable of launching well-equipped and well-trained armies into Indian territory, as happened so dramatically in Mumbai.

Visiting Pakistan last week, it was clear that much of the north of the country was slipping out of government control. While it is unlikely that Zardari’s government had any direct link to the Mumbai attacks, there is every reason to believe that its failure effectively to crack down on the country’s jihadi network, and its equivocation with figures such as Hafiz Muhammad Syed, means that atrocities of the kind we saw last week are likely to continue.

India meanwhile continues to make matters worse by its ill-treatment of the people of Kashmir, which has handed to the jihadis an entire generation of educated, angry middle-class Muslims. One of the clean-shaven boys who attacked CST railway station – now named by the Indian media as Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amin Kasab, from Faridkot in the Pakistani Punjab – was wearing a Versace T-shirt. The other boys in the operation wore jeans and Nikes and were described by eyewitnesses as chikna or well-off. These were not poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the villages, brainwashed by mullahs, but angry and well-educated, middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively.

If Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is the most emotive issue for Muslims in the Middle East, then India’s treatment of the people of Kashmir plays a similar role among South-Asian Muslims. At the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the state should logically have gone to Pakistan. However, the pro-Indian sympathies of the state’s Hindu Maharajah, as well as the Kashmiri origins of the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, led to the state passing instead to India – on the condition that the Kashmiris retained a degree of autonomy.

Successive Indian governments, however, refused to honour their constitutional commitments to the state. The referendum, promised by Nehru at the UN, on whether the state would remain part of India, was never held. Following the shameless rigging of the 1987 local elections, Kashmiri leaders went underground. Soon after, bombings and assassination began, assisted by Pakistan’s ISI which ramped up the conflict by sending over the border thousands of heavily armed jihadis.

India, meanwhile, responded with great brutality to the insurgency. Half-a-million Indian soldiers and paramilitaries were dispatched to garrison the valley. There were mass arrests and much violence against ordinary civilians, little of which was ever investigated, either by the government or the Indian media. Two torture centres were set up – Papa 1 and Papa 2 – into which large numbers of local people would ‘disappear’. In all, some 70,000 people have now lost their lives in the conflict. India and Pakistan have fought three inconclusive wars over Kashmir, while a fourth mini-war came alarmingly close to igniting a nuclear exchange between the two countries in 1999. Now, after the Mumbai attacks, Kashmir looks likely to derail yet again the burgeoning peace process between India and Pakistan.

Kashmir continues to divide the establishment of Pakistan more than any other issue. Zardari might publicly announce that he doesn’t want to let Kashmir get in the way of improved relations between India and Pakistan, but Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is officially banned, continues to function under the name of Jama’at al-Dawa, and Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed continues openly to incite strikes against Indian and Western targets. At one recent meeting, he proclaimed that ‘Christians, Jews and Hindus are enemies of Islam’ and added that it was the aim of the Lashkar to ‘unfurl the green flag of Islam in Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi’.

Sayeed also proclaims that the former princely state of what he calls ‘Hyderabad Deccan’ is also a part of Pakistan, which may explain the claim of responsibility for the attacks by a previously unknown group named the Deccan Mujahideen. It is clear Sayeed appears to operate with a measure of patronage from the Pakistani establishment and the Zardari government recently cleared the purchase of a bulletproof Land Cruiser for him. When Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was yesterday asked on Indian TV whether Pakistan would now arrest Sayeed, he dodged the question answering: ‘We have to recognise that there are elements in every society that can act on their own.’

In the months ahead, we are likely to see a security crackdown in India and huge pressure applied to Pakistan to match its pro-Indian and pro-Western rhetoric with real action against the country’s jihadi groups. But there is unlikely to be peace in South Asia until the demands of the Kashmiris are in some measure addressed and the swamp of grievance in Srinagar somehow drained. Until then, the Mumbai massacres may be a harbinger of more violence to come.

• William Dalrymple’s Last Mughal won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Crossword Indian Book of the Year prize.

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Undeclared curfew imposed in occupied Kashmir

November 24, 2008
The News International, Nov 23, 2008
SRINAGAR: The authorities in occupied Kashmir have been continuing to keep the Chairman of All Parties Hurriyet Conference (APHC), Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and other Hurriyet leaders including Maulana Abbas Ansari, Agha Syed Hassan Al-Moosvi, Fazl Haq Qureshi and Bar President, Mian Abdul Qayoom under house arrest and resorting to strict measures to thwart the March towards Ganderbal.

According to Kashmir Media Service, the call for the March has been given by the Jammu and Kashmir Coordination Committee on the occasion of holding of 2nd phase of shame polls by the occupation authorities in six constituencies of Ganderbal and Rajouri districts.

Except these constituencies, undeclared curfew has been imposed in the entire Kashmir Valley and roads leading to Ganderbal have been sealed.

Heavy deployment has been made in Srinagar and other major towns of the Valley. All roads leading to Ganderbal have been sealed with barbed and razor wires and barricades.

The police and paramilitary personnel have been forcing people to remain indoor and patrolling the deserted streets to foil any attempt by Kashmiri people to assemble for the march.

In view of strict restrictions imposed by the authorities and a general strike called by the Coordination Committee, all shops and business establishments are closed.

The residents complained that security personnel are not allowing them to come out of their houses.

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POLITICS-INDIA: Separatists Battle Moderates in Kashmir Polls

November 24, 2008


By Athar Parvaiz |  Inter Press Service


SRINAGAR, Nov 23 (IPS) – India’s Jammu and Kashmir state votes Sunday for the second round of staggered, seven-phase, provincial elections that have pitted separatists against mainstream political parties.

The voting follows violence on Saturday in Baramulla town, 55 km north of Srinagar, where police shot dead two young men participating in demonstrations to promote a separatist-sponsored boycott of the polls.

Separatist political parties have been appealing for a boycott of any electoral exercise until there is a resolution of the Kashmir issue, whereas mainstream political parties are encouraging people to participate in the formation of a government that can negotiate a political settlement.

“More than the government formation these elections are seen as an open contest between the mainstream politicians and separatists who stand locked against each other over the issue of participation or nonparticipation,’’ noted political commentator Mohammad Sayeed Malik told IPS.

“These elections have two strands; one is the wider one involving politics surrounding the Kashmir issue, and the other involves a struggle for power wherein mainstream political parties are contesting for government formation,” he added.

Several separatist political leaders who were running anti-election campaigns have been detained by the government. These leaders include Shabir Shah, Yasin Malik, Nayeem Khan, Ghulam Nabi Sumji and others. Apex separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Farooq were repeatedly put under house arrest and there have been frequent curfews to thwart anti-election programmes.

While most separatist leaders favour independence from India, some advocate merger with Muslim Pakistan. Separatist politicians and militant groups are opposed to the polls because they believe that elections could strengthen India’s claim over the Muslim-majority territory.

Lying dormant for years, separatism received a shot in the arm about three months ago through a controversial land transfer by the government to a Hindu shrine, triggering regional and communal clashes in the state and revived the freedom movement in Kashmir.

In July, the state was put under direct central rule after the elected government collapsed over the land row amidst mass street demonstrations and clashes with security forces that left some 50 people dead.

Elections were announced in the immediate aftermath of this controversy, though after considerable dithering. Many voices cautioned against holding elections in the state at a time when it was reeling under regional clashes and a renewed freedom sentiment.

In the end, India’s Election Commission, which has a reputation for fairness, went ahead and announced a schedule for the Nov. 17 – Dec. 26 exercise.

It was expected that the polling percentage would be low given the complex setting in the state and the repeated calls for a boycott of the elections. However, the first phase on Nov. 17, covering the three constituencies of Bandipore, Sumbal and Gurez, showed an impressive 65 percent voter turnout.

“This is mainly because the space for mainstream political parties has been increasing ever since the 2002 assembly elections,” says Sayeed Malik. “Political discourse in Kashmir has changed after those elections. Presently there are many common points between the mainstream and separatist politics — both regard Kashmir as a dispute though they have their varied perspectives on it.”

The mainstream political parties in Kashmir are now openly advocating for the resolution of Kashmir issue and maintain that they are only participating in the elections for governance. “We are simply contesting elections for governance; Kashmir issue needs a resolution and the separatists are fighting for that,’’ says former chief minister of the state Farooq Abdullah.

Abdullah’s National Conference (NC), which has ruled the state for about three decades, has unveiled an exhaustive manifesto. “It is for the first time that the NC has come out with an elaborate election manifesto or vision document in which the party talks about the need for the resolution of Kashmir issue through its greater autonomy formulation,’’ says Gul Mohammad Wani who teaches political science in Kashmir University.

“However, in the vision document much space has been given to development and governance issues probably for separating conflict-resolution from governance.”

The other main political party in the state, People’s Democratic Party (PDP), has also come out with an election manifesto in which it has talked about issues ranging from self-rule to the concept of a loose sovereignty and the need for development in the state.

“Broadly speaking, the regional political parties have sharply positioned themselves on several important and critical issues facing the state ranging from good governance to conflict resolution,’’ says Wani.

According to him parties like the NC and PDP have enough stakes in these elections. “NC lost power to the PDP and Congress [combine] in the 2002 elections after ruling the state over decades. So it would be keen to get back to the seat of power. Should it fail to do so, it faces the danger of disintegration,” Wani told IPS.

“Similarly, the PDP, which is a nascent political party and fancies itself as a viable alternative to the NC, badly needs to perform better in these elections for its political survival,” Wani said.

Wani says that the stakes are even higher for the Congress which is a pan-India party. “Congress’s victory or defeat in Kashmir is likely to influence its performance in the parliamentary elections in India next year. So the party is fairly cautious and has, in its election manifesto, not gone beyond the need for decentralisation of power and overall development in the state.”

Smaller parties, apart from laying focus on a resolution of Kashmir issue, have emphasised the need for relaxation of the live border with Pakistani Kashmir, setting up of a commission for disappeared persons and building a consensus in India regarding the Kashmir issue.

The stakes for Kashmiri separatist leadership are also high. “More than anything else, the separatist leadership has its political legitimacy and reputation at stake. They badly need good response from people about their election boycott calls; should people ignore their appeals, it would be quite precarious and embarrassing for them,’’ says political analyst Noor Ahmad Baba who teaches in Kashmir University.

Till the other day, the equation was tilted in favour of the separatists, but after the good turnout of voters in the first phase it looks as if people may participate with enthusiasm in the remaining phases as well.

“It would not be fair to criticise the separatists if people come out to vote. After all, they were not allowed to campaign against the elections and most of them have been put behind bars under false pretences,’’ said human rights activist Showkat Sheikh.

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Terror Indian Poll in Kashmir: A Vote for Independence

November 19, 2008

Dr Abdur Ruff Colachal, Nov 19, 2008

The larger world is quite unimpressed by the Indian polls in Kashmir by keeping the terror military threat more active. Unlike the great powers around, Kashmiris could be easily fooled by India and its agents in and around country by keeping them under its terror control and feeding false promise of freedom and development and also democracy to them. But Kashmiris have voted for both re-independence and development and they have hinted they would not like to antagonize India after achieving freedom from hegemonic India.

In view of prevailing mood of the Kashmiris seeking complete re-independence from occupier India, Indian poll action in JK on Nov 17 does not reflect the realities, though India keeps asking the USA and other powers to take note of the changing realities to accommodate its concerns. The state elections are being staggered over seven phases to allow authorities to mount a huge security operation to contain the freedom movement’s anti-poll campaign. In the first stage of elections, voting has been held in ten of the 87 state assembly segments.

India used force against the anti-poll campaign by the freedom leaders and tries to reduce the impact of the freedom struggle started form the Muzaffarabad March where several freedom strugglers including a major leader were killed by Indian terror forces. Indian agencies have made the poll possible as it feared international shame if polls are not held. Indian media is focused on the very conduct of polls. Turnout in the 10 seats contested across Jammu and Kashmir state was above average, but as expected by India. More surprising perhaps was a turnout of 59 percent in three seats contested in the Kashmir Valley, up from around 55 percent in the same seats in 2002. Previous elections have seen freedom fighters threatening violence to enforce their call for a boycott, and Indian soldiers trying to coerce people to vote. This time the freedom fighters did not resort to anti-state terror measures and said they would not interfere.

On the eve of the polls, the Indian government arrested and tortured freedom leaders and activists and terrorized the Kashmiris to vote. By conducting polls against the will and wishes of the freedom loving people and the freedom fighters by police and military threats, India has in fact killed democracy in Kashmir. The freedom fighters resisted from counter-force and the polls were “thus peaceful”. Four freedom activists and two army men were killed in two separate encounters on poll day in the State while another soldier was abducted after a gunfight in Poonch.

However surprising the turnout in Bandipora, voters in this picturesque Township insist their vote should not be misconstrued as “the vote against the movement”. Not just voters but the contestants also sought to reiterate that they did not seek vote in favour of any ideology but “exclusively for development. At least 42 people were shot dead by police when hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims took to the streets this year shouting “Azadi” (freedom).

Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said the people are yearning for revival of the golden era of governance that the state had witnessed under the stewardship of Mufti Sayeed between 2002 and 2005. PDP says the people have decided to teach the National Conference, a pro-Hindutva party, a lesson for the power-hungry politics of deceit practiced by the party over the years and they came out in large number yesterday to do so

State Terror and Violations

Human rights and poll monitor groups are not spared by the forces. Those who had gone to monitor the “freeness and fairness of polls” are behind the bars. Prominent human rights activist Parvez Imroz, the president of Coalition of Civil Societies, was beaten and arrested by police at Bandipora. Bar association struck its work in high court and other courts here in protest against the beating and arrest of Imroz. That apart – the man has been of late been in news for his Coalition’s interest in monitoring elections in Jammu and Kashmir and India has been focused on his torture and silence.

Important here is the history of detentions that Imroz has faced in the past. Since 2002, J&K CCS has been monitoring elections in the state. Their 2002 Assembly election report and later the 2004 parliamentary election report was not taken well by the powers-that-be because it contained several references to how the police and the Army had coerced people to vote. Significantly, the coalition even lost one of its volunteers during the 2004 elections when the vehicle, in which she was traveling, was targeted in a mine blast. Kurram Pervez lost his leg in the accident. He had to get it amputated. The leader of human rights campaign in the valley, he has long been espousing the cause of the voiceless especially those killed in custody and those who disappeared over the past several years of conflict in the valley. Very recently, Imroz’s house was under attack from people who are yet to be identified and punished.

They voted for Re-independence

Independence is a separate issue from the need for a better life, which a good administration can provide. While it is too early to draw firm conclusions from Monday’s first stage in a seven-part election across a very diverse state, the turnout in parts of the mainly Muslim Kashmir Valley was a surprise for separatists who had heatedly called for a boycott. This year has seen some of the biggest anti-India protests in the Kashmir Valley since an insurgency began in 1989, but a 70-year-old man said they wanted to cast their ballots even though they had taken part in protest marches

A good turnout at the start of Indian Kashmir state elections may mean freedom fighters don’t want to cause death to Kashmir by Indian terror forces under guise of tackling the opposition by the ‘separatists’. In fact of late freedom leaders showed inclination for Kashmir development while gaining freedom back from India. However, talk of democracy is something neither Kashmiris nor Indians know for sure. For Kashmiris it is state terrorism that is shown to them as democracy. An effective poll mechanism of promising life and development of Kashmir along with pressure tactics have brought a lot people to vote for a new government, but they say in voice that they don’t vote for India.

If Hindu-terrorists are harassed by the state, the Hindutva forces come to their rescue. Breaking his silence over the Maharashtra anti-terror squad (ATS) probing the September 29 Malegaon bomb blasts that killed six persons, Lok Sabha Opposition leader LK Advani on 17Nov expressed “shock and outrage” over the way Sadhvi Pragya was “physically and psychologically tortured and abused in obscene language by her interrogators.” Advani should not realize the way the Muslims of India and Kashmir are being ill-treated by Indian forces and jail authorities. This is main reason how Kashmir poll was peaceful so far.

Illegal Indian Polls

Current Indian poll in JK is ilegal and immoral. The chairmen of Hurriyat factions, senior freedom leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said that the sanctity of elections have been lost in presence of 7 lakhs troops. Reacting to the statement of authorities that 55 per cent people voted in first phase of election, Geelani said that the claim of free and fair elections ‘is a sheer joke’. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference which had called for a boycott, questioned the official figures and said free and fair voting was impossible in the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops. But more mainstream political parties appeared to have won some listeners by arguing that the need to choose good government that can build roads and improve civic amenities would not necessarily undermine the independence movement. Many voters said they still wanted independence as firmly as ever, but experts said a successful election across Kashmir would give the state and central government the chance to offer better governance and defuse the independence movement to some extent.

Some Observations

One does not clearly know if the current governor Vohra has difference of opinion over the poll show when he met the big bosses in New Delhi recently, but as an appointed agent of New Delhi as governor of JK, he still continues to work for Indian case in JK by ensuring the poll at any cost by using the terror forces taking positions street by street.  It was a common knowledge that the occupying Indians would go all about presenting a pro-India image for the watching world and with the waste resources wasted on poll machinations in JK, the task would not have been a total flop given a sort of neutral posture adopted by the freedom leaders. But the trend would fast change.

US president-elect Obama’s passion for a free Kashmir must have given the Kashmiris and their freedom leaders a fresh boost in pursuing their goals in non-confrontational manner. But, the unexpected turnout in 10 assembly constituencies that went to polls on Monday has given a boost to the pro-India so-called “mainstream” parties. Each party in JK wants to claim some credit for the polls. They believe massive participation of people will set a trend for the rest of the polling, especially in Srinagar and will give a confidence to candidates as well as voters. That is the joke being played out by New Delhi’s strategists, quit tragically, if not pathetically.

Does it all mean that India would not surrender sovereignty back to Kashmir in a peaceful manner? Does it mean Kashmir is permanently under Indian brute control? As a mark of support for Kashmir vote for re-independence, six mini trucks carrying goods from Pakistani Kashmir crossed the border in Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir.

However, it is quite clear that Kashmiris have voted not for Indian terrorist-rule in Kashmir, but, on the contrary, to get rid of India oppression and gain freedom. Kashmiris have showcased their strength once again in making the vote as a declaration for gaining independence from India. India should read the message quite correctly and not to day-dream about keeping JK under its terror custody forever!

Kashmir Freedom seems to be fast approaching!

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Posted in Commentary, Human rights, imperialism, India, Islam and Muslims, Kashmir | Leave a Comment »

Indian-controlled Kashmir:Kashmir votes as separatists protest, urge boycott

November 18, 2008

Protesters, police clash as polls open in Indian Kashmir amid separatist boycott call

AIJAZ HUSSAIN
AP News

Nov 17, 2008 12:26 EST

Large crowds voted in some towns in Indian Kashmir on Monday while protesters clashed with police in others as state elections began amid boycott calls by Muslim separatists.

The elections — to be held in phases over more than a month in an attempt to avert violence — come after some of the worst protests against Indian rule in the country’s only Muslim-majority state and a crackdown on separatist leaders who oppose the polls.

“You can’t have free and fair elections in the presence of hundreds of thousands” of occupying forces, said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a key separatist leader who has been under house arrest for three days.

Separatists say the elections will only entrench New Delhi’s hold on the troubled Himalayan region.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, where most people favor independence from India or a merger with Pakistan. The region is divided between the two countries and both claim it in its entirety.

Despite the calls for a boycott, long lines of voters stretched around polling booths in several towns north of the capital, Srinagar.

Overall, about 55 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots Monday, said B.R. Sharma, the state’s chief election officer.

But it varied from district to district. In many Muslim-dominated areas, turnout was so low that paramilitary soldiers and police outnumbered voters.

In Bandipore, a town 40 miles north of Srinagar, police fired tear gas at dozens of protesters, local police official Mohammed Yousuf said. Two people were detained and one was injured, he said.

More than 30 separatist leaders who called for an election boycott have been detained in recent days under a law that allows police to hold people for up to two years without trial.

The recent pro-independence demonstrations were the largest in Indian Kashmir in two decades. They were met with a tough crackdown by government forces, and at least 48 people were killed.

The elections are being staggered to allow the government to deploy thousands of security forces in each area.

Police said they feared more unrest, particularly from militant separatist groups, although insurgents have vowed not to use violence to enforce the boycott. Campaigning was mostly peaceful.

Militant separatist groups have been fighting since 1989 to end Indian rule. The uprising and subsequent Indian crackdown have killed about 68,000 people, most of them civilians.

Source: AP News

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Posted in India, Kashmir, War Criminals | 2 Comments »

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