At Penpoint
- Where has internationalisation led anywhere?
Prime Minister Imran Khan will address the United Nations General Assembly today. It is a foregone conclusion that his speech will contain a passionate plea for the world community to bring pressure to bear on India to end the suffering of the Kashmiri people. That suffering actually began in 1931, when the Dogra Maharaja’s police fired on a crowd, killing 22. Partition was thus a single event, albeit a very important one, on the road. August 5, 2019 marks another such event, not just because India’s central government abolished Articles 25A and 370, but because it inducted about 70,000 more troops and put the whole state into lockdown. Apart from changing Kashmir’s relationship to the Centre, the government also split IOK into two union territories, thus managing the first downgrading of a constituent unit in the history of India after Independence (except perhaps for the creation of the Union Territory of Chandigarh out of pieces of Punjab and Haryana). Khan’s speech will thus be an expression of the diplomatic and moral support that Pakistan has pledged to give the Kashmiri people for self-determination.
Pakistan has not departed from its policy of following the international order in order to fight the Kashmir cause. However, though it has been on the UN agenda since 1948, the solution of a UN-supervised plebiscite has not happened. Will it happen now? It would be nice if a speech would do the trick, but that is not how the world works. It should be remembered that the 1948 resolution was an attempt to stop an Indo-Pak war, and a recognition that the core of the dispute between the two countries was Kashmir.
However, even then Indian obduracy ensured that the issue was not resolved; in short, that India remained an obstacle in the way of the Kashmiri people exercising their right of self-determination. Pakistan went to war again in 1965 over Kashmir, and almost did again in 1998 through the Kargil crisis, but the issue remained unresolved.
The jihadis battle-hardened in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s were tried in the 1990s, when the Afghan jihad wound down, but were unsuccessful in making India do more than pour more troops into Indian Occupied Kashmir, including the raising of a vast number of Rashtriya Rifles battalions specifically for Kashmir. Another component of the Indian strategy was to engage in fencing of the Line of Control (which divides the Kashmir state), the working boundary (which divides Pakistan from IOK) and the international border (which divides India from Pakistan).
All of that does not seem to have worked. However, the Indian Centre has not given up. It has jettisoned the agreement between Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, and Sheikh Abdullah, the Kashmiri leader, to have federal laws only apply to Kashmir (except for four subjects) with the consent of its legislature. The contrast is not between an oppressive BJP and an understanding, inclusive Congress. Congress was the architect of India’s Kashmir policy, and cannot be absolved (because of Motilal Nehru’s pre-Partition dickering with the Hindu Mahasabha) of pandering to the Hindu chauvinist constituency. The BJP would like to break the impasse by opening up Kashmir to outsiders, presumably Hindu extremists.
He probably got more comfort from President Trump, but his words meant nothing. His offer of mediation was more to prevent Pakistan and India from going to war against the other than anything else
Once the demography of the Valley is changed, the Final Solution can be applied. While Congress thought it symbolic of India’s secularism to have one Muslim-majority state, for the BJP, it is an insult. Just as Hitler was not willing to have a Jewish minority in his Reich, Modi (and the rest of the BJP) is not willing to have a Muslim minority in its Rashtra.
The Gulf Arabs who have lionised Modi so much on his recent visit have apparently not realised the nature of the threat. Hindu India has not been expansionist until now. However, now that it is, it would like to engulf its backyard. That backyard is partly Gulf Arab, partly Iranian. Pakistan comes in its path, and is its biggest obstacle.
It was perhaps unfortunate for Imran that Modi was also at the UN. His presence showed that the action in Kashmir had not caused him any embarrassment, or at least not enough for him to stay away. At the same time, he also had staged a ‘Howdy Modi’ event in Houston, which served a number of purposes, aimed at various audiences. To the world, it said that his government’s steps in Kashmir were acceptable. He also showed that he had more support than Imran, who had staged a similar event on his own visit to the USA in the summer. It also showed US President Donald Trump that Modi had clout with the Indian Diaspora in the USA. Having Trump on hand balanced out Imran’s meeting with him afterwards, where he appealed for US mediation. Already involved in two of the tangles the USA is involved, Kashmir and Afghanistan, Imran’s offer of mediation with Iran brought him into the third, and showed how much he wanted Pakistan to be relevant to the USA.
The appeal to the international community means that the Kashmir issue is ancillary to a Pak-India peace process. If Pakistan and India can be kept from fighting, the world can afford to ignore Kashmir until India agrees to talk about it. India will never agree, as one of its purposes was to keep outside influences out of the region: not just the Subcontinent, but the Indian Ocean littoral. India would be the regional hegemon in this view.
There has been some Pakistani anger at how Gulf Arab states have not reacted to the Kashmiri question according to Pakistani wishes. It must be conceded that they are perhaps preoccupied by the Gulf crisis involving Iran. At the same time, the crisis involving Israel exercises them, especially after Netanyahu’s pledge to annex the Jordan Valley. However, though Imran did visit Saudi Arabia on his way to New York, there is no indication that he got any comfort.
He probably got more comfort from President Trump, but his words meant nothing. His offer of mediation was more to prevent Pakistan and India from going to war against the other than anything else. Imran’s warning that a war between the two could go nuclear represents the limit Pakistan can go to in internationalising the issue, but it also shows that even the Holy Grail of internationalisation will not free the Kashmiris, whose misery is now well approaching the end of its second month.