Daily Times

A new spate of violence and brutal state repression erupted this week in the Kashmir valley occupied by Indian army, resulting in the killing of four including a woman. Another protestor was killed in police firing in Kupwara on Wednesday. The victims were protesting against the alleged assault of a schoolgirl by an Indian soldier in Handwara. According to The Indian Express, the police and army will find it difficult to avoid responsibility for the killing. A curfew was imposed in Handwara and Srinagar in wake of the mass outrage at this heinous crime. Hundreds of masked Kashmiri protesters poured on to the streets and threw rocks and bricks at Indian policemen amid tear gas smoke during a protest in Srinagar. Handwara residents stormed the bunker on Tuesday after the news of molestation spread. Several Kashmiri groups had called for a general strike on Thursday and anti-India protests on Friday.

However, the army always ends up being shielded by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). This Act grants virtual immunity to members of security forces from prosecution for alleged human rights violations. The current chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti’s late father, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was the Union minister for home affairs when in 1990 the AFSPA was enacted by the Indian parliament. Meanwhile, Mehbooba, the first woman chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, is busy calling on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and cementing the PDP-BJP alliance. Irrespective of the gender, religion or nationality of these rulers the conditions of the Kashmiri masses deteriorate with the crises of the system and the state.

Jammu and Kashmir has been in the throes of an insurgency and revolt against Indian occupation ever since the tragic partition in 1947. However it was in 1989,when the first Kashmiri Intifada erupted with mass revulsion to this oppression and exploitation. The Mughal Emperor Jahangir called Kashmir “paradise on earth”, and today, this paradise is drenched in blood. Jawaharlal Nehru, a Kashmiri pandit, loved his ancestral home. To Nehru, Kashmir was like “a supremely beautiful woman whose beauty is almost impersonal and above desire…its feminine beauty of rivers, valleys, lakes and graceful trees. Time and time again during the struggle for freedom he had gone home to contemplate the hard mountains, precipices, snow-capped peaks and glaciers, with cruel and fierce torrents rushing down to the valley below.” However, after the so-called independence the state created by Nehru and other native Hindu and Muslim politicians of the elite at the behest of British imperialism have repressed and brutalised the millions they rule.

The Kashmir issue is the by-product of a reactionary and bloody partition. The British imperialists, with their flawed policy of divide and rule, made certain that some major issue was left behind to ensure continued hatred and strife in the subcontinent. For the last 70 years, the rulers of India and Pakistan have exploited Kashmir in order to perpetuate their misrule. Kashmir has become a festering wound on the body of the Indian subcontinent. There have been three major wars and endless rounds of negotiations, dialogue and debate, yet the Kashmir dispute remains unsolved. It is worse than it was at the time of independence, and with the passage of time, it has become more convoluted and bloodier.

The reality is that the ruling classes on both sides of the divide do not want to and indeed cannot resolve the dispute. Its resolution will remove the main external contradictions that they have use consistently and meticulously to quell internal dissent. The problem now is that the Kashmir issue erupts periodically with a vengeance as a spanner in the works of the elite politicians and diplomats. The burgeoning economic crisis in the subcontinent has forced certain sections of the ruling class time and again to end these conflicts and put more resources into the economy to save it from a total collapse. While hard-line sections and the deep states consider the continuation of hostilities in Kashmir and its status as an external conflict as a means of their survival, financial plunder and warmongering for their socioeconomic interests.

The Indian and Pakistani rulers are threatened by the struggle of the common people of Kashmir. Although the struggle may not go on with the same intensity, it will continue. The vast majority of the common people of Kashmir as elsewhere come from the deprived toiling classes and have made enormous sacrifices in this struggle. They are the ones who have suffered the most. More than 65,000 people have been killed in the last three decades by state and non-state terrorism. The conflict has created more than 100,000 orphans. Hundreds of suicide cases are reported annually, 77 percent of which involve women. Every family in the Kashmir Valley has been touched by this tragedy.

The options from national independence to autonomy have failed to materialise due to the catastrophic crisis of the socioeconomic system that dominates the subcontinent. Wars and peaceful settlement under the UN or imperialist control has failed. The tactics of armed struggle have not succeeded in defeating the stranglehold of the heavily armed bourgeois states of the region. Against this background, a much more radical option for the solution of the Kashmir conflict is needed. The reality is that nothing less than a revolution can free Kashmir from the hegemony of imperialism and the poverty, misery, exploitation and plunder of the oppressive classes of the region. The frequent resilience of the youth, students, women, workers and peasants of Kashmir shows that the struggle against the Indian and Pakistani states and the leaders of the puppet Kashmiri elite can and shall be won. This struggle ultimately is the struggle for a socialist Kashmir. In spite of the heroic role of the Kashmiri people in the past 70 years, the movement has been the victim of the ideological and programmatic confusion of its leadership and has not progressed much further.

Only the oppressed classes of India, Pakistan and other countries of the subcontinent and beyond in a buoyant class struggle can give the necessary and decisive support to the liberation struggle of the Kashmiri oppressed masses. This means that the struggle for the liberation of Kashmir has to be linked to the class struggle. To carry through a socialist revolution is the task of a class not a national petit bourgeois…to create a voluntary socialist federation of the toiling masses of various nationalities and to sustain and develop it is also a task of a proletarian vanguard. Bloodshed and violence was never a part of the culture, tradition or historic identity of Kashmir. This occupation and repression is not the destiny of the Kashmiri people. Paradoxically, a victorious socialist revolution in Kashmir can put an end to this oppression, poverty, misery, deprivation and violence, and become a beacon for the working classes and the oppressed peoples across frontiers.

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