By Fareed Khan
A
year ago this week the world became a more dangerous place, caused by India's actons India did in the autonomous Muslim majority state of Kashmir, at least the part that it controls. On that day Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi stripped
the state of its legal and constitutional autonomy, and through his actions
said to Kashmiris that they had no say in the way they were to be governed. The actions elicited outrage from Pakistani
Prime Minister Imran Khan and from protesters the streets across the country.
For
more than 70 years Kashmir has
been a flashpointvI for India and Pakistan.
It is a conflict that has largely been ignored by the rest of the world, except occasionally when the conflict flares up and it catches the world’s
attention.
Canadian
journalist and author Eric
Margolis said in his 2002 book War
At the Top of the World, that Kashmir is the most dangerous region in the
world, and that if nuclear war war was
going to break out anywhere in it would be in Kashmir between India
and Pakistan. Both nations have tactical nuclear weapons in the region pointed at
each other, meaning if a nuclear exchange were to happen people on both sides of the line of control would have little warning.
On
August 5, 2019 Narendra Modi’s fascist BJP government poured gasoline on the
fire in Kashmir when it unilaterally rescinded Article
370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, thereby revoking the sovereignty of
a people who never accepted Indian control of their nation in the first
place.
These
two provisions were the foundations on which Kashmir acceded to join India
after colonial India was partitioned by the British,
and it gave Kashmir’s legislative assembly the power to define who were
"permanent residents" of the state.
As the only Muslim majority state in India these two constitutional
provisions were key to preserving the identity and culture of the Kashmiri
people.
The decision by the Modi government
was labelled as illegal
because it was done unilaterally without consultations with the state
government of Kashmir. In addition, it
was illegal under Indian
law which requires more than just executive authority to change the Indian
constitution. Along with these
unprecedented actions India also imprisoned the leaders of Kashmir without
charge, disarmed the state's security forces and police, imposed a
communications lock down of the state's phone system, internet and social media,
instituted a state-wide curfew thereby making Kashmiris prisoners in their own
homes, and started arresting Muslim activists and politicians. In addition, there have been reports of Indian security forces torturing Kashmiris who have been imprisoned for many years, something
which is likely to continue as India increases its stranglehold on the Muslim
majority state.
A year
later, there are approximately 600,000
Indian soldiers and security personnel in Kashmir to control the population of
12 million Kashmiris. That is a ratio of
one soldier for every 20 civilians, and it describes what is a defacto police
state in Kashmir where human
rights don’t exist, where people are arbitrarily arrested and disappeared, and where
torture of prisoners is routine. These
are clearly the actions of a repressive, criminal government that cares little about the
welfare of Kashmiri Muslims despite what Modi has said about wanting to
improve the lives and economic opportunities of everyone in Kashmir.
What
Modi did ishould not be surprising given the record of his government
and its campaign of persecuting and brutality targeting India’s Muslims since
he first came to power. In truth,
what he did was an exercise in authoritarian power and demonstrated that democracy
and the rule of law in India is now a complete sham as demonstrated by the
escalation of state violence and terror against India’s only Muslim majority
state.
But
Modi’s actions shouldn’t be surprising given the history of India’s occupation
of Kashmir, and the brutality they have inflicted on the Muslim population of
that region for many decades. This
decision was the culmination of seven decades of oppression, persecution and
political manipulation by India. It was
also another slap to the face of the United Nations which has passed multiple
resolutions concerning Kashmir, including Security
Council Resolution 47 which was adopted on April 21, 1948 and called for
the Kashmiris to determine their own future in a plebiscite. By undertaking this action India has
set the stage for creating facts on the ground in Kashmir that will make it
near impossible for Kashmiris to determine their own future short of some type
of outside intervention to force a peaceful solution. The strategy that India has adopted is in fact
very similar to what Israel
has been doing to the Palestinians for over 70 years, and it isn’t surprising
given the close ties that have developed between the fascist governments in
India and Israel since Modi became prime minister.
However,
there may be a small avenue of hope to put pressure the Indian government, and
it lies in the hands of those that choose to invest in justice for the people of
Kashmir. That hope lies in the UN’s Genocide
Convention, to which both Pakistan and India are state
parties. Pakistan or any other
nation could use this seminal UN treaty to bring India before the International
Court of Justice in The Hague. If
successfully prosecuted a case under the Genocide Convention would not only
shame India and force it pay reparations to Kashmir, it could also force India
to allow Kashmiris to determine their own future, as India agreed to do in 1948
under Security Council Resolution 47.
Under
Article 2 of the Genocide Convention “genocide” is defined as any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
An offending party need only commit one of the following acts to be
guilty of committing genocide. These
acts include:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group; and
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group
to another group.
The likelihood of genocide occurring was so high that the organization Genocide Watch issued an urgent alert, warning of the potential for genocide in Kashmir in the days that followed India's rescinding of Articles 370 and 35A, while some human rights scholars and jurists argue that India’s actions already constitute genocide under Articles 2a, 2b, and 2c of the Genocide Convention. If political will were mustered, any state party to the Convention could file a motion to hold India accountable, signalling a critical opportunity to address the ongoing crisis.
A military resolution to the Kashmir dispute is unthinkable, as even conservative estimates suggest that a conflict between India and Pakistan could spiral into a nuclear exchange, killing over 20 million people instantly and potentially claiming up to 125 million lives globally in the ensuing nuclear winter. The catastrophic stakes demand that both nations abandon militarized approaches, as the cost of such a confrontation would be apocalyptic for the region and the world.
For over seven decades, India’s actions in Kashmir—marked by violations of UN Security Council resolutions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions—have perpetuated a cycle of suffering and injustice. During that time the Kashmiri people have endured relentless oppression, their voices silenced, and their rights trampled. A new path, grounded in the legal framework of the Genocide Convention, offers hope for accountability and change. The world cannot continue to stand by as Kashmiris suffer. Urgent, decisive action is needed to restore their human rights and secure a future of peace, justice, and dignity for a people too long ignored and forgotten.
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2020 The View From Here. © 2020 Fareed
Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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