Daily Times

“Dil nyith ratytham goshe

Vwolo mayani poshe madano

You stole my heart and stole away

Come back, my lover of flowers

(Habba Khatoon)

The fairy tale of Kashmir is harking back to its empyrean peace but is not getting back its lovers of flowers. Habba Khatoon’s above lament straddles centuries but captures well the anguish of the present generation of Kashmiris where the staccato fire of the lethal guns intones the funeral dirge of the flower of its youth, being mercilessly cut down by the Indian machine guns. 800000 Indian troops armed to the teeth are cocking a snook at the world community’s categorical asservation of the political rights of the people of Kashmir. The UN Resolutions 38,39, and 47 were the seminal resolutions that categorically confirmed the need for self- determination of Kashmiris through a UN supervised plebiscite. When the Indians hemmed and hawed to wriggle out of their commitments another UN Resolution number 80, encapsulating the ideas of Canadian mediator General McNaughton, was mooted that called upon both India and Pakistan to withdraw their forces to enable the UN to conduct a fair Plebiscite.

Indians rejected each one of the above initiatives while fooling the naïve Kashmiri nationalists like Shiekh Abdullah who fell hook, line and sinker for the Indian ruse in the shape of Article 370, conferring a special status upon Kashmir outside Indian Union pending a final resolution of the conflict. After three wars the Simla Agreement between the two countries in 1972 also retained the relevance of past UN Resolutions despite the dominant flavor of bilateralism. It was another UN Security Council Resolution i.e 1172 after the nuclear tests by both countries in 1998 that called for a serious dialogue amongst both countries to remove the root causes of conflict. The UN urge for removal of the root causes of the conflict that could lead towards a nuclear Armageddon in the region, also apparently fell on deaf ears as India persisted with her obdurate stance on Kashmir.

It is time the US realized that the cost of a humanitarian catastrophe and a possible nuclear holocaust could far outweigh the gains of geopolitical one upmanship being encouraged in the region

All pretence of a fair deal to Kashmiris however was finally dropped in a horrid denouement of the Kashmir Act when Indian government revoked Article 370 illegally annexing the Kashmir state in the Indian Union. For a world apprehensive of such blatant violation of international law the act elicited a surprising apathy. The reason was the geopolitics of the region. India the main violator was the darling of the West due to its counter China fetish. The two main tectonic shifts in geopolitics of this age i.e shifting of the global political and economic power from West to East and the resurgence of Asia led by China drive the US led Western block’s policies vis a vis India. Small wonder then that the annexation of Kashmir was treated with such levity while the annexation of Crimea by Russia was mourned as an humanitarian crime.

Pakistan’s geostrategic importance was clearly stated by the founder of the nation quoted in an op-ed by Margaret Bourke White in following words; “Pakistan is the pivot of the world as we are placed on the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves”. Quaid e Azam’s prophetic words have proven true as the world led by the leading global powers is making every endeavor to get control of the region that connects South Asia with Middle East and Central Asia enabling China to flex its big economic muscle in defiance of the Western dominated old economic world order. Pakistan while being mindful of her geostrategic importance has always set great store by the inclusivity, equality and peaceful coexistence of the nations around her as well as in the distant continents. Contrarily Indian state has steadily moved away from the Gandhian non violence and Nehruvian liberal internationalism towards Hindutva exclusivism.

The slow descent of India into a rabidly intolerant Hindu State modeled on the ideas of Savarkar, an ideologue of religious exclusivism has resulted in rise of Hindutva ideology, a virulently hateful creed that celebrates human inequality on the basis of religion and accident of birth. Prime Minister Modi is leading a nation of billion plus Indians pell mell into the hateful inferno of communal disharmony. Despite 17 active insurgencies and a war of liberation in Kashmir State the Indian government has the temerity to annex a territory that is under watch of UN Resolutions. The blind hatred being generated by such policies of Modi led BJP government is fanning the fires of separatism inside India which might come to haunt Modi in future. A once secular country is now conferring the highest award of India i.e “Bharat Ratna” on the RSS godfather i.e Savarkar. Arundhati Roy , one of the brave voices of sanity in India, writes in New York Times that “Modi’s action in Kashmir has a whiff of colonialism in the air.”

After dissolution of Article 35 A, the Indians could now purchase property in Kashmir altering its demography and financial ecology. As per Arundhati Roy, “their recurring nightmare of being swept away by a tidal wave of triumphant Indians wanting a little home in their sylvan valley could easily come true.” Nothing could capture the travails of the incarcerated denizens of the fair valley better than her words i.e “the loudest sound, however, is the deathly silence from Kashmir’s patrolled, barricaded streets and its approximately seven million caged, humiliated people, stitched down by razor wire, spied on by drones, living under a complete communications blackout.” The Indians hardly understand that they are under the sway of a religious fascism the likes of what the world saw under Nazi rule.

Nazism and Indian BJP Hindutva creed are almost the same having even the same salutes and same symbolism. And the world does not realize the power of the irrationality emanating out of a Hindutva drunk religious fascist like Modi who having a finger on the nuclear button talks of attacking Pakistan, another nuclear country with such insouciance merely to divert attention of his population from internal governance failures. And all that is happening because the global powers view the Kashmir tragedy from the lens of “China-Containment” policy. A new Cold War is being spawned by calling China as the “central threat of our times” by US Foreign Secretary Mike Pompeo.

While seven million Kashmiris suffer a savage repression entering 190th day the world community still looks askance helplessly at USA. It is time the US realized that the cost of a humanitarian catastrophe and a possible nuclear holocaust could far outweigh the gains of geopolitical one upmanship being encouraged in the region. It is time the world community cautioned India to stop human rights violations in Kashmir and desist from externalizing its domestic failures in the shape of war rhetoric. It is time for Indians as well as the world community to know that if Kashmir bleeds, so shall the regional and global peace.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST and a security analyst