Daily Times

Narendra Modi’s speech at Delhi’s Red Fort on the 70th anniversary of India’s independence and the bloodied partition has amounted to nothing but rubbing salt in the wounds of the Kashmir youth and workers who have again and again risen to fight Indian occupation and tyranny. In his rambling, 94-minute speech Modi quixotically ventured too far when he declared, “People of Balochistan, Gilgit and PoK (Pakistan- occupied Kashmir) have thanked me a lot in past few days, I am grateful to them.” This was incredulous even for someone like Modi.

The people of Balochistan, Gilgit, Kashmir and other parts of Pakistan are going through the same exploitation, misery and grind as those in Modi’s India. Poverty, misery, extortion of human labour and oppression is more or less the same wherever capitalism exists. Modi’s slander is not only a venomous assault on their struggles’ but its tantamount to get them labelled as traitors by their oppressors.

In the Indian-occupied Kashmir, the revolt of the Kashmiri youth has defied Indian imperialist hegemony and state brutality. While Modi was making his quixotic speech, the unarmed Kashmiri youth were being confronted with live bullets at the hands of the police and paramilitary forces. On the so-called Independence Day another four young people lost their lives, and many were wounded in this fight against state oppression, taking the death toll in the on-going unrest in the Valley to more than 65. Thousands have been wounded and 100s blinded, including women and children, by pellet guns fired on peaceful demonstrators. Despite this brutality unrest is not abating as curfew has remained in force for more than 40 days in the valley. Life has become unbearable and paralysed. Schools, colleges and private offices remained closed, while attendance in government offices was very thin and public transport remained off the road. Internet and mobile services have remained suspended.

The Hindu communalists in power in the so-called secular India are fuming at the resilience and on-going upsurge of the oppressed masses in Kashmir. This so-called “tough love” at the hands of the security forces has the opposite effect. Instead of breaking the resistance it further intensifies it, and morale of the occupation forces is at its lowest ebb. The state administration has broken down in large swathes of Kashmir. In the South the situation is becoming more alarming with the constabulary abandoning a number of police stations, taking off their uniforms and sitting at home. Some of these policemen, in fact, have been seen joining anti-India protests, as if to prove their loyalty with the larger movement.

Ajoy Ghosh writes at Scroll.in, “There is virtually little administration in several parts of the south… With the Mehbooba government virtually abdicating its responsibilities and Central forces nowhere in sight, the state seems to have gifted azadi to large parts of South Kashmir… In the north, which has far greater presence of the army and para-military forces, there is a semblance of central authority, but even here the local police and civil administration is conspicuous by its absence… The Jammu and Kashmir police have virtually ceased to exist in the Valley… Ministers and legislators belonging to the PDP and the BJP dare not move around freely in the Valley anymore. Most of the BJP legislators have retreated to their homes in Jammu, while the PDP legislators are ensconced in their highly guarded official bungalows in Srinagar afraid to visit their constituencies.”

Mehbooba Mufti herself is reported to have limited her public appearances even in Srinagar after a bitter experience a fortnight ago while visiting a women’s college during an examination when parents of students booed her away. While attempting to unfurl the Indian tricolour on the Independence Day it fell off the post and flopped to the ground. The coalition government of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in utter disarray in the aftermath of the uprising. The hostility between the two is palpable. The chief minister meanwhile is reportedly in a state of emotional distress. The 20-month old PDP-BJP government has dramatically lost public support and control over the administration in the Valley.

The uprising of 2016 is strikingly different from the 1990s as this new generation of Kashmiri youth are more defiant and daring. The confidence and courage seems new. They are more closely linking the socioeconomic emancipation with the national liberation. The kind of aspirations these youth have cannot be materialised in any of the rotting capitalist states of the subcontinent. Hence this resilient struggle and sacrifices of the people are having a huge impact on the beleaguered and oppressed masses of the whole region. This upsurge in Kashmir can act as a catalyst in a not too distant future in igniting a mass inferno of class struggle. The wound that the British had inflicted on the body politic of this ancient civilisation with partition and conflict in Kashmir to continue imperialist plunder and capitalist coercion can paradoxically turnout to be the nemesis of imperialist stranglehold, and the atrocious rule of the native reactionary ruling classes.

The much-glorified Modi’s BJP regime is flailing on Kashmir. Modi’s vulgar and slanderous rhetoric will not help him an iota. The ordinary people of Balochistan, Gilgit and PoK as elsewhere in the region are fighting for their emancipation from tyranny of class and state oppression. Modi represents an ideology and system that is the cause of the plight of the masses. The struggles going on in different parts of this South Asian region have to support and encourage their class brothers in other parts to overthrow and annihilate this system. The people of Pakistan and India cannot get a respite within the confines of the existent capitalism in both countries. To put an end to poverty, misery, disease, terrorism, wars, bloodshed and deprivation the oppressed classes of the South Asian subcontinent have a collective battle to fight and the class war to win.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com