Independence, Defence and Resistance
An Entangled History of Kashmir and Modern India
In Quantum Mechanics, Entangled Particles are inextricably correlated and share spatial proximity that their quantum state cannot be independently described, and action as spin, polarization and momentum on one affects the other. Similar to this is the history of Kashmir’s independence, defence and resistance entangled with Modern India, that an independent study is flawed.
Kashmir has a heart-rending history of dissents, and has gone through numerous recurring tragedies resulting in human-shaped blots of oppression, yearnings and mourns on the grounds, over the mountains and in the clouds. It has emerged through violent external affairs and internal struggles that shaped Kashmir’s political subjectivity. After the Mughals, the region was ruled by the Afghans (1753–1819), Sikhs (1819–46), and the Dogras (1846–1947) vehemently. Hindus suffered when a Muslim ruler ruled Kashmir, and Muslims suffered when a Hindu ruler ruled. But on a coherent level, it is always Kashmiris (dissents) who have suffered.
Since 1947, India and Pakistan have been locked in the conflict over Kashmir. By the time the British came in and colonised the majority of the Indian subcontinent, they made bonds with the princely states in colonial India. Kashmir, like a few others, was a princely state. At the time of partition, all princely states were given some leeway to declare the nation their territories chose among India or Pakistan. Albeit, the British-ruled territories were partitioned based on geographical contiguity and religious demography. However, several princely states resisted and chose to be neutral and autonomous. Maharaja Hari Singh, then the ruler of the Dogra dynasty in Kashmir, wanted to be Independent. In the presence of a Hindu ruler in Muslim-majority states, several anti-Hindu, anti-oppression riots broke out. Many Muslim-supported parties came into existence due to the oppression and exorbitant taxes he imposed on the people of Kashmir.
Similar to Kashmir, disputes arose in the Hindu majority with a Muslim ruler state Junagadh. After months of struggles, a plebiscite was conducted post-annexation by the Indian Government where The Nawab aligned with Pakistan but 99% of the people chose India. And finally, the Hindu-majority state of Junagadh became a part of the Republic of India. With enough infuriation, Pakistan inherently presumed the reversed situation of Junagadh, the Muslim-majority state of Jammu Kashmir as its territorial part and signed a standstill agreement with Kashmir. However, India denied signing the agreement. A series of efforts were made by Pakistan to accede Kashmir. Violent bloodshed broke out. But Maharaja Hari Singh refused to join Pakistan. Jinnah-led troops, pro-Pakistan rebels and militants funded by Pakistan started invading Kashmir and inciting riots and unrest. Ignorance strengthened the attacks, and it got up to an extremely violent stage that Hari Singh had to flee from Kashmir valley to Srinagar. To save the Kashmir and its people, he sought help from India in staving off the invasion. Later, Kashmir acceded to India and signed the instruments of accession (without the consent of the Kashmiris? It was not a democracy by then; it was a dynasty), which was formulated as late Provisions in Indian Constitutions and with the special status, Kashmir became a part of India. This status guaranteed that Kashmir would have independence over everything but communications, foreign affairs, and defence.
Due to the treaty, India maintained its defence, communication and foreign affairs status in Kashmir as per the Provisions, and sent its troops and military to fight the pro-Pak militants and terrorising agents. Elections were held in the state. The Jammu Kashmir Constituent Assembly was created to draft the Constitution for the state. But the conflict ‘a country within a country’, ‘two flags one nation’ was always awake. [Many incidents took place in the days Of Kashmir’s Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah. Another Indo-Pak war and Kashmir lost the Prime Minister and President title to be replaced by the Chief Minister. Both India and Pakistan signed the Shimla Agreement, which recognized the ceasefire line of 1949 as the Line of Control (LoC) as mentioned below. Thus began an official bilateral issue.]
Several internal and external attacks came out between India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir. Pakistan was infuriated at its peak and They took over much of western Kashmir as a result of repeated intrusions. Indian troops fought and pushed them back and, the matter was raised by Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in the United Nations where a mediation took place. Wherever the respective countries’ militaries were at that time, a LOC was declared. Ergo, the rest of the world depicts an impartial view of the territorial regions divided by the LOC. The side of the LOC is under the Indian administration as India and under the Pakistan administration as Pakistan.
The Partition of 1947 created decades of unrest and insurgency situations in Kashmir. People decided their fate by the boundaries. Kashmiris never wanted to be a part of India but an independent country. With mounting anger and resentment against India, the majority of people in Kashmir supported Pakistan and rebelled back in the form of stone-pelting protests against the Indian military forces which were there to secure them from the militants and extremists. Pakistan supported these riots and violence. In the summer of 1990, a poster in Urdu was pasted outside the home of Kashmiri Hindus which instructed the families to leave the valley or die. Months later, a violent eruption of militancy and separatist insurgency forced Kashmiri Hindus to abandon their homes and the exodus of Kashmiri Pandit incidents (including ethnic cleansing, killings and rapes) happened. “An estimated 100,000 (other data says 400,000) Hindus left the valley after the start of the insurgency”, writes Al Jazeera. The Hindu minority in Muslim-majority Kashmir shrank from an estimated 300,000–600,000 in the late 1980s to 19,865 by 1998. Today, there are fewer than 3,400 Hindus in Kashmir. Others say the number is around 2,400. It was the most atrocious, catastrophic and inhumane crisis to ever have happened in the history of J&K and India.
After that incident, in the Kashmir valley, the Indian counterinsurgency war continued. The armed violent groups in Kashmir proliferated. Pak-sponsored terrorist Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) speeded up the training of cadres, brain-washing local groups in Kashmir and equipped them with weapons. In 1999, Kargil war happened due to infiltration of Pakistani troops into Indian administrative Kashmir. India won the Kargil war, but situations became alarming. Pakistan started terrorising Kashmir over its infuriation and supported the groups Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) to operate in Kashmir. Since then, infiltrations into controlled regions, attacks and causalities continued on both sides and have become the norm. Many Kashmiris, and Indian soldiers have lost their lives during the terrorist evacuation process. It’s never enough in Kashmir to remember the tragedies of lost lives in Uri, Pulwama, Doda massacre and in so many other terrorist attacks and scroll the screen sitting far away from the site with a heartful of grief and respect each passing day. It needs to end NOW.
I have friends from Baramulla (Kashmir) and Jammu both. They both study in Indian institutions. One day I asked to both, “What does it feel like studying in Indian Institutions?” “It’s better than the others”, they both replied. But you would be amazed to know that the thinking of both on the Indian administration is exactly opposite to the other. So, I believe that a majority of people in Jammu Kashmir is happy with this abrogation of Articles 370 & 35A.
There were solid reasons to understand why the scrapping of the Articles was a prerequisite for the harmony of the state, the security of women and children and, most importantly, the future of Kashmir. The US is almost tired of fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan where it has spent over billions of dollar on it in the past decades. President Trump stated that he’d bring the US military back to America and make a deal with the Taliban which certainly has not happened yet. However, a Part of the Taliban prevails in Pakistan so the US will try to align its soft politics towards Pakistan to make deals with the Taliban. In favour, Pakistan would surely ask the US to vote on Kashmir against India and set the Taliban’s next mission to invade Kashmir. Albeit there has never been any straightway war between India and the Taliban, but who knows the future.
It’s hard to avoid geopolitics when Kashmir is in the middle of three nuclear and largest army countries where the frontiers are controlled by the respective countries. So, geopolitics certainly mattered. As per United Nation Commission of India and Pakistan (UNCIP), Kashmir is a bilateral issue of India and Pakistan, but China has been seen raging Kashmir issue to the UNSC to convert it into a trilateral conflict but it has failed all the times. The expansionist China that has been instigating tensions in the area and attempting to grab territory while on the other, the extremist and militant Pakistan is invasive through militants and supporting the terrorism in Kashmir. The hatred and internal diversions of Kashmiri people towards India are ensuing fast. If India would not have scrapped the Articles, the territorial wars in the next five years would torment the heart of the Kashmir. And the demanded autonomy would be stabbed to death. Neither countries are showing any behaviour towards the independence of Kashmir. The amendment of Articles 370 and 35A of Indian Constitutions stoked the pro-Pakistani and Islamist militants to the extent that Pakistan yesterday released a new map which claimed the entire Jammu Kashmir, Ladakh and Junagadh region as its territory on its self-determination. In POJK, on this very day as “black day”, they have incited many protests and false narratives, and that’s what they have been doing since the day they conflicted the very regions. It means that Pakistan never cared for the Kashmiris people but the land so they eradicated the UN resolution 47 of the impartial plebiscite.
Article 370 was always a temporary provision, it was never intended to continue forever. One nation cannot have two flags and two Constitutions. There are certain people, including several intellectuals, activists and writers, who believe that the abrogation of 370 was a militant Hindutva expansionist ideology of the government to conquer Kashmir. But they forgot to mention that Kashmir has not only the Muslims but the Hindus, Sikhs and Jains also. We also see the false narratives, red pilling sarcasm and posters on the Indian military and the government coming out brazenly as a sign of weakness or powerlessness from the people supporting Pakistan and Kashmiri rebels. A part of Kashmir is certainly not with us but was never and will never be with us because they see the Indian government as their enemy no matter what they do and don’t. As long as the average Kashmiri identifies himself as a Kashmiri and not an Indian, there would never be a complete end to this internal war. A part of Kashmir still wants independence and autonomous. With the Art 370 and 35A, Kashmir was never independent. And as per Instruments to accede, it’d never be independent. In the presence of Provisions, that allowed Kashmiris to act independently, receive benefits from Pakistan and deny a relationship with Pakistan when it benefitted them and in the end stating that they are Indians. This has destroyed the polyphony of Kashmir. Even Pakistan never accepted these Provisions until it was revoked completely. Now that their hereditary privileges are all but eroded, it is but natural for them to grizzle and protest.
It’s been a year of the eradication of Sections 370 and 35A. It’s evident that this year is a tough ongoing crisis for the entire world due to the pandemic. So, it’s not a very sure thing to have an opinion on what good or bad resulted in the abrogation of Articles. But as an Indian and liberal, I always have supported the scrapping of Articles because no government and people are going to do well in Kashmir if not the Indian government and Indians, and Kashmir without good governance would become the proxy sites like Yemen, Syria and Afghan in next few years. And we as a citizen of this country can fight, teach and guide the India Government to behave how ideally and respectfully it should in Kashmir. The government needs the guidance not a revolution against them. Make our facts clear that we fighting against the scrapping of Articles or the policies implemented in Kashmir by the Indian Administration. If an apple tree does not provide you with good apples, you should not cut the tree off the roots but nourish it with the ingredients and proteins it needs. Our vague and incomprehensible fight misleads the Indian norm and the administration.
I believe that the India administration needs to be transparent, coherent and careful that it is not, with its strategies on Kashmir. Justice Markandey Katju writes, “Due to the ill-conceived and short-sighted policies of the Indian governments towards Kashmir for decades, and particularly after the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, almost the entire population of Kashmir is today alienated and bitterly hostile to India. Napoleon realised this in Russia and General Westmoreland in Vietnam. No doubt, we have half a million military and paramilitary forces in Kashmir, but how do they fight an enemy who cannot be seen, who moves in the shadows, who is nowhere and everywhere?” The unclear policies of the government have incited an ideological war inside the country where one part is in favour of government while other opposes it, blindly both. You can’t instil peace and harmony in Kashmir if the citizens of your country are not aware of your agendas and politics. The Country is being demoralised and destabilised among the ideologies. It’s losing its virtue, inheritance, culture, history every passing day. A kind of hatred and certain rebellious ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of this generation in the name of Nationalism, Patriotism, Religiosity and Human rights. And above this, this war is waged by the far-left/right ideologues. This subversion is subtle and unnoticed in this ideologically-driven fog. And it’s not just in India, the current stage of the US is a fair example of an ideological war. Unfortunately, this all is happening in the year of US presidential Election. But the chaos is not random, it is sustained.
The Kashmiris have always been underprivileged on basic human rights i.e. Right to Education, HealthCare, Freedom, Awareness due to the monotonous occupational conflict, unrest and territorial skirmishes of Kashmir. The revoked Articles made me highly sceptical about how it has decimated the ‘women and children development’ and reinforced the hereditary overt misogyny and separatism for decades. The revocation also ensures that the women rights of “permanent residential” status married to non-J&K people and so her child’s, lingers in Kashmir. So, Abrogation is gender-neutral. Due to the restriction by Articles 370 and 35A imposed on Indian Constitution, all the amendments regarding Human Rights have been suspended by J&K assembly to implement in J&K. Kashmir has Muslims as majority and Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Christian and many other religions as a minority, but there are no Provisions on minorities status in J&K assembly. There were no Provisions to abolish Child labour, Child marriage and safety of minorities. Right to Education policy for any 6 to 14-years-old child passed by Indian Constitutional Assembly was repudiated and rejected by J&K Constitutional Assembly. The presence of the Provisions has always favoured the egocentric politics and defended the politicians, never the Kashmiri people. Many leaders like Farooq, Mufti who always have talked about the integrity of India and Kashmir but under the cover of Articles, the corruptions and crimes in their regime have always intensified. Now they have kept their dirty politics dead-quiet after the successful revocation of Articles. The former chief of Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, Syed Ali Geelani has quit his formal position within Jamaat-e-Islami evident to an end of his 70-years-long separatist political career. Kashmir needs good governance, anti-corrupt leaders to diminish the splotches of cruel leadership and imperialist oppression and to upsurge the human right values and inclusive culturalism. Jammu and Kashmir is now a temporary Union Territory (UT) under Indian Constitution which in future after the de-escalation of terrorism, intrusions, infiltrations, and establishment of peace, harmony and humanitarian values, will be transformed into a federal State. Finally, after decades of struggles, the government’s projects and corporations have been set up to power the education sector, economic opportunities, supportive developments & infrastructures, job growths, good healthcare to the Kashmiris and to make sure that no one faces the dearth of the basic human rights ever again and live all-inclusive and prosperous. New medical and engineering colleges are being established with special scholarships to support the minorities and weak economies. Centre administrates the territory which ensures that no veritable treachery happens due to the local political leaders and separatists destroying the amity of Kashmir and merits of Indian Constitutional sanctity. If we look back in the timeline, due to the restrictions imposed by Articles 370 and 35A on Indian Government, the rebels and the corrupt politicians in Kashmir have gone haywire. The loot, violence, brain-washing, terrorism and hatred were spiralling up at an unprecedented rate. The Indian militaries all the way have fought and evacuated the terrorists from many regions in Kashmir. According to Sumantra Bose in his book, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, in the past 27 years, more than 40,000 (44,567 South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) estimates, 70,000 Hurriyat estimated and more than 100,000 Jammu and Kashmir coalition of civil society estimated) people (including civilians, security personnel and militants) have died since 1989 in Jammu and Kashmir. The numbers have never lowered down.
I really hope that the integration of J&K with India is underway towards the economic progress and rubbing-out of the infiltration and attacks on the sovereignty of Jammu and Kashmir. I believe that the aides of terrorism have been downvoted and people will have freedom if their acts are not found suspicious. On a larger scale, to incentivize Indians especially, the native Kashmiri Hindus, who were harshly thrown out of their houses and forced to migrate which even made Kashmir an anti-Hindu region, to move into Kashmir to help Kashmiri norm to learn to live together with other Indians — traders, businessmen, poor construction workers. But there should not be any colonial war against the Kashmiris.
With the abrogation, the conflict ended up being a bilateral issue of Kashmir and the Indian administration, where both the Kashmiris and the Indian government should work together if they want any better of Kashmir. Most importantly, the government should not play any games with the people of Kashmir. Although I’m yet sceptical about the government’s transparency, I’m glad Art 370 is gone. But it’d be no use if it’s not intended to make Kashmiris life happy, better and prosperous. The future of Kashmir is in the dark and deceived at this present. They need to understand the help provided by India in education, healthcare and the economy. According to Joint Indo-Pak management institute study of Life Style in Kashmir and POK conducted jointly by Professor Dheeraj Sharma, director of the Indian Institute of Management, Rohtak and Professor Farah Arif, of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan says, “A whopping four out of five people in both the Ladakh and Jammu regions, and nearly seven in every ten in Kashmir stated they were happy with their lives, and believed life was better than it had been in their parents’ generation. Nearly three in four people were pleased with the governance of their region, particularly the educational institutions, healthcare facilities, infrastructure development and employment opportunities available to them. In Pakistan, on the other hand, every second person in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK), and four out of every five persons in Gilgit Baltistan reported that they were not satisfied with their lives and regime.”
Furthermore, I think the government should align its extensive policies to store faith, build trusts and secure the people of Kashmir, and not lie about it. India should priorities the human right values above any of the political, territorial or religious insurgencies and coherently work to save the future of women and youth in Kashmir. Month-long internet shutdown, imposed curfews and house arrests do owe the administration a proper explanation. If the government can’t share the policies with its people how on earth would they understand better governance and democracies? Democracy is a big word here.
Due to the pandemic, we are living under curfews and isolations for several months now, which makes us understand what it feels like to besieged under curfews over authoritative guidelines. But if we delve ourselves deeply, we also comprehend how important it also was to force people to make them sit inside their homes to save them from the disastrous damage this pandemic has erupted. Surely, there have been police brutalities and atrocities, domestic violence, casual difficulties, but not with those who understood and chose to follow the provided guidelines. There have been several causalities marked as the failures of right implementation of the guidelines that caused massive emigrations of migrants within Indian states, death by hunger and the situation became dire that people walking back to their homes died on the roads or got infected by the Virus. On these issues, the government needs to be held and criticised for the irreparable losses it caused. Furthermore, the government should learn that such damages won’t happen in future. Kashmiris should not suffer from their irresponsible and destructive policies. Hopefully, Kashmiris too shall stop focusing on its regional chronic “no-solution” issues like separatism, terrorism, and align themselves and walk together with its government to focus on building up the economy, providing jobs to the youth, better infrastructure and entrepreneurial opportunities and more tourism. Kashmir is a drop-dead gorgeous place with its rich and unique culture and cuisine and Kashmiris have the right to fight and preserve their culture and history but lawfully. By removing Article 370 and the special Provisions, it can hopefully become a mainstream state and participate equally in a rising economy.
“I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” — Voltaire
I, as an Indian, strongly condemn the bloodsheds happened in Kashmir in past years by either reason the external or internal attacks. And I mean it. I further believe that the only goal of the revocation of Sections 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution was to give Kashmiris the basic human rights similar to the other Indians that they have deprived of for centuries, but no special status to misuse the nationality and encourage terrorism in the world that has suffered the most terrible wars and threats in the history, anymore.
Faiz writes and I applaud,
“दिल ना-उम्मीद तो नहीं, नाकाम ही तो है
लम्बी है गम की शाम, मगर शाम ही तो है”
“the heart isn’t hope-less, after all…it is only helpless
the night of sorrow is (admittedly) long; but it is only a night…after all!”
Huge thanks to Shifali Gulati for her guidance and paraphrasing expertise.
….will keep updating and adding more authentic and validated incidents to this page.
