In a letter dated 11 September 1951 to the UN representative, Pandit Nehru wrote, ‘The Government of India not only reaffirms its acceptance of the principle that the question of the continuing accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir to India shall be decided through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite under the auspices of the United Nations, but is anxious that the conditions necessary for such a plebiscite should be created as quickly as possible.’
2 January 1952
As reported by Amrita Bazar Patrika, Calcutta, on 2 January 1952, while replying to Dr. Mookerji’s question in the Indian legislature as to what the Congress Government was going to do about the fact that one-third of Kashmir’s territory was still held by Pakistan, Pandit Nehru said, ‘It is not the property of either India or Pakistan. It belongs to the Kashmiri people. When Kashmir acceded to India, we made it clear to the leaders of the Kashmiri people that we would ultimately abide by the verdict of their plebiscite. If they tell us to walk out, I will have no hesitation in quitting. We have taken the issue to the United Nations and given our word of honour for a peaceful solution. As a great nation, we cannot go back on it. We have left the question for final solution to the people of Kashmir, and we are determined to abide by their decision.’
7 August 1952
In his statement in the Indian Parliament on 7 August 1952, Pandit Nehru said, ‘Let me say clearly that we accept the basic proposition that the future of Kashmir is going to be decided finally by the goodwill and pleasure of her people. The goodwill and pleasure of this parliament is of no importance in this matter, not because this parliament does not have the strength to decide the question of Kashmir but because any kind of imposition would be against the principles that this parliament holds. Kashmir is very close to our minds and hearts, and if by some decree or adverse fortune it ceases to be a part of India, it will be a wrench and a pain and torment for us. If, however, the people of Kashmir do not wish to remain with us, let them go by all means. We will not keep them against their will, however painful it may be to us. I want to stress that it is only the people of Kashmir who can decide the future of Kashmir. We have not merely said that to the United Nations and to the people of Kashmir: it is our conviction, and one that is borne out by the policy that we have pursued, not only in Kashmir but everywhere. Though these five years have meant a lot of trouble and expense, in spite of all we have done we would willingly leave if it were made clear to us that the people of Kashmir wanted us to go. However sad we may feel about leaving we are not going to stay against the wishes of the people. We are not going to impose ourselves on them by the point of the bayonet’.
31 March 1955
In his statement in the Lok Sabha on 31 March 1955, as published in the Hindustan Times, New Delhi, on 1 April 1955, Pandit Nehru said, ‘Kashmir is perhaps the most difficult of all these problems between India and Pakistan. We should also remember that Kashmir is not a thing to be bandied between India and Pakistan but has a soul of its own and an individuality of its own. Nothing can be done without the goodwill and consent of the people of Kashmir.’
24 January 1957
In a statement in the UN Security Council, while taking part in a debate on Kashmir at the 765th meeting of the Security Council on 24 January 1957, the Indian representative, Mr. Krishna Menon, said, ‘So far as we are concerned, there is not one word in the statements that I have made in this council which can be interpreted to mean that we will not honour international obligations. I want to say for the purpose of the record that there is nothing that has been said on behalf of the Government of India which in the slightest degree indicates that the Government of India or the Union of India will dishonour any international obligations it has undertaken.’
Tariq Ali
Afterword: Not Crushed, Merely Ignored
In early July 2010, a Kashmiri lawyer rang me in an agitated state. Had I heard about the latest tragedies in Kashmir? I had not. He was stunned. So was I when he told me in detail what had been taking place there over the previous three weeks. As far as I had seen, none of the British daily papers or TV news bulletins had covered the story; after I met with him, I rescued from my spam box two emails from Kashmir informing me of the horrors. I was truly shamed. The next day, I scoured the press again. Nothing. The only story in the Guardian from the paper’s Delhi correspondent – it was given a full half-page – was headlined: ‘Model’s death brings new claims of dark side to India’s fashion industry’. Accompanying the story was a fetching photograph of the ill-fated woman. The deaths of (at that point) eleven young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-seven, shot by Indian security forces in Kashmir, weren’t mentioned. Later I discovered that a short report had appeared in the New York Times on 28 June and one the day after in the Guardian; there has been no substantial follow-up. When it comes to reporting crimes committed by states considered friendly to the West, atrocity fatigue rapidly kicks in. A few facts eventually percolated through, but they were likely read in Europe and the US as just another example of Muslims causing trouble, with the Indian security forces merely doing their duty, if in a high-handed fashion. The failure to report on deaths in Kashmir contrasts strangely with the overheated coverage of even the most minor unrest in Tibet, leave alone Tehran.
On 11 June 2010, the Indian paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force fired tear-gas canisters at demonstrators, who were themselves protesting about earlier killings. One of the canisters hit seventeen-year-old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo on the head. It blew out his brains. After a photograph was published in the Kashmiri press, thousands defied the police and joined his funeral procession the next day, chanting angry slogans and pledging revenge. The photograph was ignored by India’s mainstream press and celebrity trivia–obsessed TV channels. Shortly after that, the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, and several other towns were put under strict military curfew. Whenever the curfew was lifted, however briefly, young men poured out onto the streets to protest and were greeted with tear gas. In most of the province there was an effective general strike for several weeks. All shops were closed.
An ugly anti-Muslim chauvinism accompanies India’s violence. It has been open season on Muslims since 9/11, when the liberation struggle in Kashmir was conveniently subsumed under the War on Terror and Israeli military officers were invited to visit Akhnur military base in the province and advise on counter-terrorism measures. The web site India Defence noted in September 2008, ‘Maj-Gen Avi Mizrahi paid an unscheduled visit to the disputed state of Kashmir last week to get an up-close look at the challenges the Indian military faces in its fight against Islamic insurgents. Mizrahi was in India for three days of meetings with the country’s military brass and to discuss a plan the IDF is drafting for Israeli commandos to train Indian counterterror forces.’ Their advice was straightforward: Do as we do in Palestine, and buy our weapons. In the six years since 2002, New Delhi had already purchased $5 billion worth of weaponry from the Israelis, to good effect.
Demonstrations against Indian security forces escalated in early June 2010, when it was revealed in the extra-alert Kashmiri press that three young men – Mohammed Shafi, Shahzad Ahmad Khan and Riyaz Ahmad – had been executed in April by Indian army officers. A colonel and a major were suspended from duty, a rare enough event, suggesting that their superiors knew exactly what had taken place. The colonel claimed that the young men were separatist militants who had been killed in an ‘encounter’ near the Line of Control, the border between Indian-controlled and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. This account is regarded by local police as pure fiction.
A letter from Amnesty International to the Indian prime minister sent in 2008 listed the country’s human rights abuses in Kashmir and called for an independent inquiry, claiming that ‘grave sites are believed to contain the remains of victims of unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other abuses which occurred in the context of armed conflict persisting in the state since 1989. The graves of at least 940
persons have reportedly been found in 18 villages in Uri district alone.’ A local NGO, the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (IPTK), states that extrajudicial killings and torture are a commonplace in the valley and that Western institutions don’t even try to do anything about it for fear of damaging relations with New Delhi. The figures provided by the IPTK are startling. It claims that the Indian military occupation of Kashmir ‘between 1989–2009 has resulted in 70,000+ deaths’. The report disputes claims that these killings are aberrations, but on the contrary are part of the occupation process, considered ‘acts of service’, and lead to promotion and financial reward (a bounty is paid after claims made by officers are verified). In this dirty and enduring conflict, more than half a million ‘military and paramilitary personnel [more than the number of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan combined] continue to act with impunity to regulate movement, law and order across Kashmir. The Indian state itself, through its legal, political and military actions, has demonstrated the existence of a state of continuing conflict within Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.’
Public opinion in India is mute. The parties of the left prefer to avoid the subject for fear that political rivals will question their patriotism. Kashmir is never spoken of, and it has never been allowed to speak. With its Muslim majority, it wasn’t permitted a referendum in 1947 to determine which of the two countries, India or Pakistan, it wished to be part of. In 1984, when Indira Gandhi was the Indian prime minister, I asked her why she had not taken advantage of the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 (when Kashmiris had watched with horror how the Pakistan army treated their co-religionists) and allowed a referendum then. She remained silent. I pointed out that even Farooq Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, was convinced that India would win if a democratic election were held. Her face clouded. She said, ‘He’s completely untrustworthy.’ I had to agree, but her refusal to contemplate the Kashmiri self-determination promised by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was troubling. These days, the very suggestion seems utopian.
The Abdullah dynasty continues to hold power in Kashmir and is keen to collaborate with New Delhi and enrich itself. I rang a journalist in Srinagar and asked him about the current chief minister, Omar Abdullah, a callow and callous youth whose only claim to office is dynastic. ‘Farooq Abdullah’, he told me, ‘is our Asif Ali Zardari when it comes to corruption. Now he’s made his son chief minister so that he can concentrate on managing his various businesses.’ The opposition isn’t much better. Some Kashmiris, the journalist said, call Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the effective leader of the opposition, and his cronies ‘double agents. That is, they are taking money from Pakistan and India.’ He is the twelfth ‘mirwaiz’, or self-appointed spiritual leader of the Muslims in the Kashmir Valley, and is adept at playing both sides. ‘Mirwaiz’s security outside his house is provided by the Indian state,’ a friend in Srinagar told me. ‘His wife is Kashmiri American, he lives very comfortably (without any source of income), and he is engaged in secret talks with India, news of which is constantly leaked. Furthermore, he also makes an annual pilgrimage to Pakistan to keep that channel open as well. He hangs out with “separatists” in Kashmir who are open to being used by both India and Pakistan, for a good price, of course. The Indian authorities do not have to do much to crush Kashmiris while there are people like Mirwaiz. So, all in all, our leadership is working against us. India has always used this to its advantage.’
The Zardari government is silent on the issue of Kashmir and there was little media reaction in Pakistan to the summer 2010 killings. For the ruling elite, Kashmir is just a bargaining counter. ‘Give us Afghanistan and you can have Kashmir’ is the message currently emanating from the bunker in Islamabad. Zardari, it’s worth recalling, is the only Pakistani leader whose effigy has been burned in public in Indian Kashmir (soon after becoming president he seriously downplayed Kashmiri aspirations). The Pakistani president and his ministers are more interested in business deals than in Kashmir. This suits Washington perfectly, since India is regarded as a major ally in the region and the US doesn’t want to have to justify its ally’s actions in Kashmir. Pakistan’s indifference also suggests that Indian allegations that the uprisings in Kashmir were triggered by Pakistan are baseless. Not long after 9/11, Pakistan virtually dismantled the jihadi networks it had set up in Kashmir after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Islamabad, high on the victory in Kabul, had stupidly assumed that it could repeat the trick in Kashmir. Those sent to infiltrate Indian Kashmir were brutal and mindless fanatics who harmed the Kashmiri case for self-determination, though some young people, tired of the patience exhibited by their elders, embraced the jihad, hoping it would bring them freedom. They were wrong.
As Indian politicians stood on the battlements of the Red Fort in Delhi to celebrate Independence Day in August 2008, Kashmiris began a mass campaign of civil disobedience. More than a hundred thousand people marched peacefully to the UN office in Srinagar. They burned effigies, chanted ‘Azadi, azadi’ and appealed to India to leave Kashmir. This movement was not crushed. It was merely ignored. Nothing changed. Now a new generation of Kashmiri youth is on the march. They fight, like the young Palestinians, with stones. Many have lost their fear of death; they will not surrender. Ignored by politicians at home, abandoned by Pakistan, they are developing the independence of spirit that comes with isolation, and it will not be easily quelled.
8 July 2010
The dead are:
11 June: Tufail Ahmad Mattoo, 17, killed in tear-gas bombardment in Srinagar.
19 June: Rafiq Ahmad Bangroo, 24, beaten by members of the Central Reserve Police Force near his home in old Srinagar on 12 June, died of his injuries.
20 June: Javed Ahmad Malla, 26, died when mourners, returning from Bangroo’s burial, attacked a CRPF bunker, causing its occupants to open fire.
25 June: Shakeel Ganai, 17, and Firdous Khan, 18, killed when the CRPF fired at protesters in Sopore.
27 June: Bilal Ahmad Wani, 22, died following CRPF fire in Sopore.
28 June: Tajamul Bashir, 20, killed in Delina; Tauqeer Rather, 15, killed in Sopore.
29 June: Ishtiyaq Ahmed, 15, Imtiyaz Ahmed Itoo, 17, and Shujaat-ul-Islam, 17, died after being shot by police in southern Anantnag.
5 July: Muzaffar Ahmad Bhat, 17, died in CRPF custody in Srinagar.
6 July: Fayaz Ahmad Wani, 18, shot by the CRPF during Bhat’s funeral procession in Srinagar; Yasmeen (Fancy) Jan, 25, the first woman to die, killed when a bullet hit her as she watched events from a window in her house; Abrah Ahmad Khan, 16, killed during protests over Wani’s death.
About the Authors
Tariq Ali is a writer and film-maker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics – including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome – as well as the five novels of the Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London.
Hilal Bhatt is a Kashmiri journalist.
Angana P. Chatterji is a Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies. Her work focuses on South Asia. She is the co-convenor of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir and the author of Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present. She lives in California and in India, where she was born.
Habbah Khatun was a sixteenth-century poet. Born a peasant in the village of Chandrahar in Kashmir and known as Zoonie, she became the wife of Sultan Yusuf Shah, ruler of Kashmir, and took the name Habbah Khatun.
Pankaj Mishra is an Indian writer whose work focuses on literature and politics. He is the author of a novel, The Romantics, and several non-fiction books, including, most recently, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. His essays have appeared in many publications, and he is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of
Books and the Guardian.
Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and activist. She has written screenplays and a novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Since then she has produced several collections of essays on politics, including, most recently, Broken Promises.
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom Page 13