On February 14, a convoy of the Indian paramilitary police (CPRF) in Kashmir was targeted with a bomb-laden vehicle. 46 paramilitary personnel were killed. The bomber was identified in a video as Adil Dar, a 22-year-old youth from a nearby village. Claimed by Jaish-e-Muhammad, an Islamist terror group, this suicide attack was the deadliest single targeted attack on Indian security forces since the latest episode of the upsurge in Kashmir began in 1989. The immense coverage of this terror attack has completely eclipsed any news or analysis of the mass revolt against the occupation and repression perpetrated on the Kashmiris for generations. This incident once again illustrates how the ruling class uses such acts of terror to justify the brutality and exploitation that it has inflicted on the ordinary Kashmiri people. Individual terrorism and sectarian violence become tools by which repressive bourgeois states divide the people and crush popular movements with state terrorism. The subcontinent’s states have been fostering their respective religious fundamentalist groups for decades to serve their strategic and financial interests. Most of these sectarian groups are used to sabotage and undermine genuine national and class struggles.
Amid the hysterical outrage whipped up by the corporate media and with national elections coming up in April, Narendra Modi used jingoistic invective to promise a “jaw-breaking response”. After a similar terror attack in 2016, Modi had already conducted vengeful “surgical strikes” across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. This time, facing probable defeat in the coming national elections, the BJP’s far-right communalist regime is likely to go for an even more vicious reaction, thus creating a dangerous confrontation between the two nuclear-armed adversaries of the South Asian subcontinent. Relations between India and Pakistan have been increasingly jittery over the last few years. Political pundits on both sides of the Radcliff Line had been expecting a relaxation of these tensions following the impending Indian elections. While Pakistan’s deep state was signalling some possible thaw in relations, the Modi sarkar was behaving more adamantly – perhaps hoping for some similar terror incident which might give it a pretext to come out, guns blazing with chauvinistic rhetoric, to prop up Hindu bigotry and counter the impact of the devastating anti-worker policies that it has inflicted upon the oppressed classes in India during its five years’ rule.
After the attack, the Indian corporate media along with the politicians were quick to emphasise the Pakistani state’s relations with Jaish-e-Muhammad, the group claiming responsibility for the attack. Jaish’s leader is Masood Azhar, who was released from an Indian prison after Islamic terrorists had hijacked an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar demanding his freedom in 1999. After release, Azhar set up this religious outfit involved in sectarian and proxy terrorist acts. According to some reports, Masood Azhar is protected by the Pakistani deep state. In 2016, he opened a new headquarters for this group in his hometown Bahawalpur. India’s foreign ministry has issued a statement accusing the Pakistani regime of propping up Masood Azhar “to carry out attacks in India and elsewhere with impunity.” At the same time, Pakistan’s “close friend” China has obstructed Indian efforts to get Azhar included on the UN Security Council’s list of designated terrorists. However, the Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman condemned the attack but rejected ‘insinuations’ of any link to the Pakistani state.
The mass movement that erupted in Kashmir in July 2016 openly defied the subjugation by the Indian state and its military – the fifth largest in the world. The upsurge also refuted the corporate media’s portrayal of the movement as being religiously motivated. This struggle has been about the will and determination of Kashmir’s oppressed people to achieve their national, social, economic and cultural emancipation
The partition of the Indian subcontinent was the crime of the British imperialists in connivance with the native elites, political scions of the imperialist-grafted local ruling classes. After more than seven decades, the wounds of this bloodied partition are still festering. Kashmir was torn apart and occupied by the forces of both India and Pakistan. The promised plebiscite never took place and its resolutions still languish in the vaults of the UN. The ruling classes of the two adversary states use Kashmir as a political ploy and an external diversion to whip up nationalistic chauvinism and jingoistic rhetoric, suppress internal dissent and crush mass movements of youth and workers. It’s the ordinary people of Kashmir that have suffered the most. Despite the agony and misery inflicted upon them, they have refused to be suppressed and bravely defied the aggression and state terrorism by the Indian state. Their socio-economic and political predicament across the LoC in Pakistani-administered Kashmir has not been any better.
The mass movement that erupted in Kashmir in July 2016 openly defied the subjugation by the Indian state and its military – the fifth largest in the world. The upsurge also refuted the corporate media’s portrayal of the movement as being religiously motivated. This struggle has been about the will and determination of Kashmir’s oppressed people to achieve their national, social, economic and cultural emancipation.
An article on this uprising in Indian Express entitled “Sinking Valley” lays bare their situation: “Every element of Indian policy in Kashmir lies in tatters. The conflict seems to be going from a deep and violent conflict to a state where there seems to be a death wish all around. Security forces have no means to restore order other than by inflicting death. Indian nationalism is now more interested in showing machismo than solving real problems. There is an increasingly radicalised militancy with almost a touch of apocalyptic disregard for life. We are looking at a situation where our strategy of containment by force has failed, our political instruments are hollow, and there is a deepening death wish in the state. Kashmir is looking at an abyss.” (To be continued)
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign
Published in Daily Times, February 18th 2019.