India - Public Meeting: Indian Racism and the Subjugation of Oppressed Nationalities in the North-East

The Right to Self-Determination including secession: The Case of Kashmir!

The body long lost, the eyes shut in history.
The fingerprints of the traces lost in the dust of history.
Where did the flesh and the bones go?
Where did the eyes lose their shine?
The dreams once dreamt, the rhythm of life vanished,
Vanished is the existence, vanished from the very facing history
And they turned out to be history, the unspoken, the unnamed history.
--- From a banner of ‘Association of Parents of Disappeared People’, Kashmir

The most militarized zone in the world, Kashmir stands for a nation with obliterated history and unthinkable state terror for the past more than 6 decades. The Indian ruling classes have always tried to portray Kashmir as an 'inalienable part of India'. They have consistently denied their internationally committed promise, and guaranteed by as many as 18 UNSC resolutions, to let the Kashmiri people exercise a plebiscite. Even geographical misrepresentation has not been spared, and India has been showcasing a false map to the world which erases the LoC that splits Kashmir territorially and administratively. Kashmir as a nation therefore remains occupied mostly by India and partly by Pakistan and China. Overshadowed by the jingoist sentiments whipped up through multiple means, research on Kashmir is highly censored and reporting grossly restricted. Even internationally reputed journalists like David Barsamian, filmmakers like Udi Aloni, scholars like Richard Shapiro have either been deported from Kashmir or denied visas lest they bring out the reality of the brutalities of the Indian occupation of Kashmir.

As opposed to the official ‘history’ repeated ad nauseam in statist accounts, Kashmir was never a part of India. Amongst the many obliterated facts regarding the history of J&K, one that stands out is the fact that even in August 1947 Kashmir did not accede to India. During the colonial period, it was one of the largest princely states among the 572 ruled by Hindu Dogra elite [feudal chieftains and princely overlords] through whom the British extended their control in the region. After the partition of the sub-continent into two separate two-nation states, it was once again the opinion of Maharaja Hari Singh (the last of such overlords), and not the people of Kashmir, which was instrumental in the accession of Kashmir to India. In fact Maharaja‟s previous PM Ram Chander Kak was removed by him on the advice of Gandhi as he supported independence. Same was the case with many other officials and intellectuals who preferred independence. Later Prem Nath Bazaz a renowned Kashmiri Marxist intellectual, who supported accession to Pakistan, on the grounds of cultural and geographical ties, was exiled by the Indian backed regime of Shiekh Abdullah. The extension of colonial control through this mechanism had resulted in intensified feudal exploitation in the region against which the people of Kashmir rose up in revolt several times. It was in the midst of one such revolt in 1947 that the Indian ruling classes very cavalierly extended their control to the region. In 1947, the residents of Poonch who formed a formidable regiment under the British Army were systematically unarmed by the Dogra state and massacred at a big level aided by the Indian army. Some 200,000 Muslims were killed and many more “disappeared” or were forced to migrate. It was then that these people, seeing no other means, attempted to liberate Kashmir from Dogra-Indian combine and rose up in an armed rebellion for independent Kashmir. Hari Singh sought military help from first the Raja of Patiala and then from India to suppress this rebellion known as the Poonch Rebellion. On 26 October, 1947, the Indian state's military forces entered Kashmir for the first time to suppress this rebellion one day before the so-called ‘accession’ was signed. Even at that time, the then Indian Prime Minister Nehru stated that the people of Kashmir would be given a right very soon to decide their future through a plebiscite. In a broadcast from New Delhi on 2nd November 1947, Nehru said, “We have declared that the fate of Kashmir is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given, and the Maharaja has supported it, not only to the people of Kashmir but to the world. We will not, and cannot back out of it. We are prepared when peace and law and order have been established to have a referendum held under international auspices like the United Nations. We want it to be a fair and just reference to the people, and we shall accept their verdict. I can imagine no fairer and juster offer.” (Govt. of India, White Paper on J&K, Delhi, 1948, p.77)

Ever since this forcible ‘accession’, the history of Kashmir is a history of false promises and repeated betrayals of the Kashmiri people’s aspirations. In 1947, the Indian state installed the comprador government under Sheikh Abdullah and at the same time incorporated article 370 in the constitution to grant the Kashmiris some minimal autonomy as a substitute for plebiscite and self-determination. However, the developments there after even rendered this minimal autonomy invalid as the central government repeatedly intervened directly to stifle all voices of self-determination. Even its own loyalists like Sheikh Abdullah were not spared by Nehru and co. who arrested him for treason in 1953. After his arrest, the Indian state installed Ghulam Muhammad Bakshi who once in power declared Kashmir to be a permanent part of India. Successive rigged elections were held under the viral surveillance of the army in 1957 and 1962 with no opposition allowed. Sheikh Abdullah was finally released by Indira Gandhi in 1973 at the cost of a compromise deal with her to integrate Kashmir completely to India and the offices of President and PM were renamed as Governor and CM. Sheikh Abdullah for his complete betrayal of the aspirations of the Kashmiris had to face the wrath of the Kashmiris whose collective anger by this time knew no bounds. Once again in 1983 another government was overthrown in a coup by the Indian state which this time around installed another puppet by the name of Ghulam Mohammad Shah. It was however the elections in 1987 which were the major turning point in the history of Kashmir's on-going struggle for freedom. Several candidates who contested the elections seeking the mandate for plebiscite under the banner of Muslim United Front (MUF) were thrown behind bars after they won these elections, and known loyalists like Farooq Abdullah installed in their place. In all these decades, it was the will of a select few compradors from Maharaja Hari Singh to Ghulam Mohammad Bakshi and Sheikh Abdullah and his clan and not the aspirations of the people that determined the history of the region. And all of these betrayals convinced the people by the late 1980s that there was no other way forward but to take the struggle to a more assertive and militant form, even if it means taking up arms.

The armed struggle for complete Azaadi from India erupted in Kashmir after all forms of peaceful struggles were repressed and ignored. The state repression by the Indian security forces also escalated to absolute fascist proportions. 800,000 paramilitary forces protected under the impunity of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) was deployed in Kashmir. In the following two decades, 100,243 people have been murdered while many simply "disappeared." At the end of 2010, more than 3000 bodies were unearthed from various unmarked mass graves spread around the valley containing bodies of people who were killed secretly by the army. However, the number of mass massacres perpetrated by the Indian army and para-military by open firing on people in Kashmir is mind boggling. Just to site a few glaring examples, on January 21 1990, 55 people were gunned down in Basanthbagh and Gawkadal in Srinagar by CRPF when 20,000 people came out in the streets to protest, defying curfew. Four days later on 25 January, 26 people were shot dead in Handwara town of Kupwara district. On May 21 in the same year, 70 people who were a part of a procession carrying the dead body of a prominent liberation leader were shot down near Islamia College of Srinagar. On 11th June 1991, the CRPF fired and killed 32 people in Chhotabazar Srinagar. On 6th January 1993, BSF killed and burnt alive 57 people in Sopore, and then razed down the whole town burning down a total of 72 structures. On 10 April, 1993, 47 people were burnt alive in Lal Chowk, Srinagar by BSF who razed more than 300 houses, shops and godowns. On 22 October, in Bijbehara BSF open fired on a procession killing 50 people. In 1998, once again on 8th August, 35 labourers were killed in Jammu by CRPF. In 2008, during the protests against land transfer to the Amarnath Yatra, the state killed 60 people including a senior Hurriyat Leader. In 2010, when people came out in the streets against the Indian occupation around 120 people, most of them youngster, were killed by the security forces. These are just few examples; the entire history of Kashmir is fraught with such brutal killings. More than 4000 women in Kashmir have been raped and molested by these occupation forces. On 23 February, 1991, around 80 women were gang raped by the Indian Army in Kunan and Poshpora villages. It is needless to say that the Indian state which actively orchestrated these massacres and rapes never booked a single perpetrator but kept giving them clean chits in the name of "national security" and "national integrity". Unspeakable torture, parading in the name of checks and raids, kidnapping, detention and harassment of people, curfew and pervasive surveillance defines the daily lives in Kashmir. Several torture chambers exist across Kashmir, where despicable crimes are committed against people who are arrested or illegally detained. Kashmir remains the most militarized zone in the world (even more militarized than Iraq and Palestine), and the state which administers the world's largest military occupation cannot call itself a democracy.

In India such massacres, rapes and the continued occupation of Kashmir are hardly talked about. Along with obliterating the history of the occupation, the Indian state apparatus has also craftily garnered a completely false image of the Kashmiri struggle to justify its brutal occupations. In media and films, the Kashmiri people's struggle is shrewdly portrayed as the handiwork of a "few foreign funded, Pakistan backed Islamic terrorists" who are trying to break "the sovereignty and the integrity of the India". The only 'concern' about Kashmir that is whipped up popularly among Indians by the communal fascist forces is the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989. What is not discussed even in this regard, is that this exodus was engineered by none other than the then Governor Jagmohan. Each and every parliamentary party also toe the same jingoist line of "national security" and "national integrity". At best for some of these parties, especially the parliamentary pseudo-left [represented by CPI/AISF, CPM/SFI and CPI (ML) Liberation/AISA] what is "disconcerting" is only the "excesses" and violation of "human rights" done by security forces under the impunity of AFSPA. Some of them do talk vaguely about "democratic rights" and "aspirations" while maintaining a calculated silence on what exactly is this democratic right. Are the Kashmiris fighting merely against state atrocities, and AFSPA, or are they also fighting for their historically denied right to self-determination? In their completely decontextualized discourse even about human right violations, most of the fundamental questions are side-lined. Why exactly does the state need to deploy 8 lakh armed personnel in the valley and why exactly does it need to provide impunity to its armed forces through AFSPA? It is because these armed forces have been deployed to crush the national-liberation struggle in Kashmir which continues to inspire the millions of people in the valley, despite all the state terror and brutalities. Every genuine Marxist-Leninist organization in history has firmly upheld this principle of people's democracy of supporting the right to self-determination of oppressed nationalities, which far exceeds the bourgeois "liberals", "social democrats" & pseudo-Marxists who never get tired of talking about "democracy" every time, but expose their majoritarian nationalism and chauvinism when it comes to this question.

DSU remains committed to the Leninist principle of standing by and strengthening the struggles of oppressed nationalities for national liberation, and their democratic right to choose their own collective destiny, even if that choice is for secession.