On June 14, 2018, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a groundbreaking report on the human rights situation in Kashmir, which was one of the first international documents that recommended the Indian government to “fully respect the right of self-determination of the people of Kashmir as protected under international law.” The Indian government, the opposition party, and mainstream Indian media outlets collectively dismissed the report as a biased attempt to undermine Indian sovereignty, the standard argument used to defend a decades-long institutionalized process of oppressing Kashmiri people in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. India’s systematic and structural suppression of the Kashmiri resistance movement is a deliberate effort to manufacture a national consensus that supports the government’s repression of Kashmiri political will and aims to further the country’s foreign interests by presenting a touched-up image of a politically united and territorially concrete India to the rest of the world.
The commonly narrated version of the Kashmir issue pitches it as a bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan, with roots in the British colonial administrative structure in pre-independence India. The standard government argument draws heavily from a 1935 colonial law that allowed princely states like Kashmir (semi-autonomous dominions within colonized British India) to determine their own political futures after partition. They were given three choices: accede to India, accede to Pakistan, or become independent. The situation’s complexity heightened in October of 1947, right after the Partition, when Pakistan sent a handful of tribesmen into Kashmir in an effort to coerce its ruler, Hari Singh, to capitulate to Pakistan. Hari Singh, who had been leaning towards independence, was not militarily capable of withstanding Pakistani aggression. He had no choice but to sign the Instrument of Accession with India in order to secure Indian military assistance against Pakistani infiltration. The war ended with the splitting up of the former princely state of Kashmir into two zones, separated by what is now the internationally recognized boundary between India and Pakistan — the Line of Control (LOC). “Azaad (independent) Kashmir,” on the left, went to Pakistan, while the state of Jammu and Kashmir, to the right of the LOC, became part of India. Hari Singh’s signature on the Instrument of Accession is at the heart of India’s 70-year-old claim that Kashmir, all of Kashmir, is an “atoot ang” — an integral part of India.
Contrary to the Indian government’s portrayal of the issue, the Kashmir conflict is more than a mere bilateral border dispute, with roots in a dated colonial-era law. For starters, the Indian-administered part of the region, the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, isn’t nearly as unified as claimed. This state is made up of three distinct regions — Jammu, Ladakh, and the Kashmir Valley — each having a distinct ethno-religious composition and political orientation. Jammu and Ladakh are relatively peaceful zones, mostly made up of non-Muslim populations that identify with the political goals of the Indian majority. The Kashmir Valley, on the other hand, is largely populated by Muslims who feel that their rights of self-determination have been stifled by the repressive Indian mainstream. Since 1989, this rift between Kashmir Valley and the rest of India has deepened, for that was the year that marked the beginning of the ongoing Kashmiri insurgency, and of the Indian army’s subsequent ruthless suppression. This violence within the Indian administered portion of Kashmir, which has intensified since the 1989 insurgency, is often misconstrued as an extension of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947. This is a direct consequence of the deliberate misrepresentation of the Kashmir dispute as a 70-year-old bilateral feud between India and Pakistan, perpetuated by the repressive Indian state structure and its military counterpart. It is nothing more than an attempt to paint a false image of a terroristic self-determination movement, allegedly sponsored by a hostile neighbor, pitted against the ideal of nationalistic homogeneity that India has been striving for since independence.
This false contextualization of the insurgency as an India-Pakistan dispute may be the reason for the domestic and international ignorance of the military rule in Kashmir and the humanitarian crisis it has spurred. Military occupation of the state has been in place since 1990 in order to contain the wave of insurgency that swept across the Kashmir Valley in 1989. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1990 (AFSPA), the Indian Army has been granted complete impunity to act as it pleases, in an effort to combat terrorism in the region and wipe out all radical Islamist elements from the Kashmir Valley. For instance, Article 4(a) of this act empowers armed personnel to even kill civilians at their discretion:
“(…) if he [armed personnel] is of the opinion that it is necessary so to do for the maintenance of public order, after giving such due warning as he may consider necessary, fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person (…)”
Almost all Kashmiri activists who demand azaadi, or independence from India, are labeled as terrorists by the Indian government and written off as Pakistani spies. In the last 28 years, nearly 50,000 people have been killed in the conflict while approximately 8,000 have fallen victim to a military tactic known as “enforced disappearances,” in which an individual is arrested and then disappears for a long period of time without any physical trace. And yet, the Indian government hasn’t sanctioned civilian prosecution of a single armed personnel in all these years, including those charged with cases of sexual violence, which should have little to do with their right to maintain law and order in Kashmir. Thus, through the deliberate obfuscation of the line between terrorism and legitimate resistance, and through granting sweeping powers of impunity to law enforcement officials in Kashmir, India has paved the way for state-sponsored human rights violations on an unprecedented scale. All of this is a manifestation of India’s effort to constantly conflate the internal resistance movement in Kashmir with a historical bilateral conflict, and therefore justify military atrocities against innocent civilians on the grounds of national security.
The pervasiveness of India’s homogenized political view on Kashmir cannot be better highlighted than through India’s reception of the first-ever UN report on Kashmir published this summer. The report asks the Indian government, in no uncertain terms, to recognize the Kashmiri right of self-determination and comply with its obligations under international human rights law. The Indian media, including prominent “liberal” journalists like Burkha Dutta and Shekhar Gupta, the Opposition party (the Congress) in the Parliament, and the right-wing Hindu nationalist regime in power, all claimed that the report was a biased attempt by the UN to justify Pakistani terrorism in Kashmir and delegitimize the Indian army’s “heroic feats” in the region. The hasty dismissal of a groundbreaking UN project was challenged by a prominent leader of the Indian Communist Party (CPI(M)), Kavita Krishnan, in her article titled “India’s Panicky Response to the UN report on Kashmir.” Krishnan argues that this report is a mere invitation to the Indian government to deconstruct the artificial bilateral narrative of the Kashmir insurgency as a conflict between India and Pakistan, and recognize the Kashmiri people as the key players and stakeholders in the dispute. Ironically, even the CPI(M) manifesto claims that Kashmir is an integral part of India.
This homogeneity of mass opinion on Kashmir is far from organic. Through the politicization of education and tourism, the glorification of a ruthless army, and the state-controlled narrative of an anti-state movement, the Indian government controls Kashmir as well as the national discourse on Kashmir with an iron fist. This domination is a structural and systemized effort towards the creation of a national consensus on the Kashmir azaadi movement and the Indian government’s right to suppress it. It is also an imposition of the state’s definition of certain political terms upon its people. In such a society, where nationalism is venerated, any criticism of the army is unpatriotic and anything that questions state policies is “anti-national.” Throwing stones at military tanks is terrorism, while sympathizing with stone pelters is sedition. Conversely, as Anther Zia, a Kashmiri political anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, points out, all you need to do to prove your patriotism to India is to embrace the phrase “Kashmir is an atoot ang of India.” As she describes, this is “the mother of all gold standards for proving one’s patriotism in India.”
One of the ways in which the Indian state exercises its iron fist in velvet glove policy on controlling the narrative on Kashmir is through the curation of highly political terms that are defined according to India’s national interest. These controversial terms are normalized through their institutional usage, such that the Indian population is completely desensitized to their subjectivity. “Kashmir” is one such term, hammered into the India national consciousness as a relic of the country’s bitter loss to Pakistan in 1948. The palpable difference between the Indo-Pakistani bilateral dispute and the internal Kashmiri insurgency, which are both associated with the term “Kashmir,” is unknown to the average Indian citizen. The Indian education system, starting at the primary school level, reinforces a map of India that includes all of the former princely states of Kashmir, including the part in Pakistan, as rightful parts of India. That “Azaad Kashmir,” popularly known as POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir in India), never belonged to India except on paper does not feature in classroom conversations. But that’s hardly the worst part. The average Indian is ignorant of the distinction between the insurgency for azaadi in the Kashmir Valley against the ruthless military occupation and the Indo-Pakistani border dispute over the former princely state. This ignorance is fuelled by Indian state propaganda that pitches the self-determination movement in the valley as terrorism instigated by Pakistan.
It may appear surprising that in a vibrant democracy known for its robust press, independent judiciary, and pluralistic parliament, a resistance movement as long and as bloody as the Kashmiri strife for azaadi doesn’t have a place in the national discourse. In the past, individual efforts by judges, lawyers and parliamentarians to repeal the AFSPA on humanitarian grounds have been defeated by structural and bureaucratic pressures, never amounting to significant reform. How is it that all of these supposed checks on institutionalized executive power cater singularly to a state-manufactured national interest? Even in Israel, a state characterized by relative political homogeneity when it comes to policymaking concerning occupied Palestine, the right, left and center disagree on the occupation and settlement building activities in the West Bank. On the issue of Kashmir, however, India lacks a comparable political diversity. The state has been so successful in creating and perpetuating a public opinion favorable to its embedded interest in Kashmir over the last 70 years, that its policy of oppression regarding Kashmiri self-determination has gone virtually unchallenged for decades, setting in stone the claim that all of Kashmir is an ‘atoot ang’ of India.
India’s policy on Kashmir is a structured and systematized effort to denigrate pro-azaadi separatism in the Kashmir Valley while extolling a homogenized nationalistic identity that is based on collective popular sympathy for state repression of Kashmiri resistors. Normalizing state-sponsored military violence against civilians, redefining questionable political terms, and overriding standard checks and balances of executive power are only some of the institutionalized methods used by India to mold a national consensus that places India’s territorial integrity over Kashmir’s right to self-determination. This absolutism, not only over a people, but also over their agency, is nothing short of a despotic, dictatorial, and illegitimate exercise of state power that is irreconcilable with the democratic values at the heart of the Indian statehood. It is time for India, a country born out of a 200-year-long anti-imperial struggle, to recognize the stark parallels between the suffering it inflicts upon the Kashmiri people and the oppression it faced under British colonial rule, and thus to rethink the Indian mainstream’s approach to dealing with Kashmir.
Photo: India Kashmir Violence