Politikkommentar: The Kashmir Issue & Sabre-Rattling (Satis Shroff)

The Kashmir Issue: Indo-Pak Sabre-rattling (Satis Shroff)

 Pakistan celebrates Independence Day amid Kashmir crisis reported CNN recently.

 Pakistan is prepared to "fight to the end" over Kashmir if necessary, Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Wednesday during a speech from the Pakistani-controlled part of disputed Jammu and Kashmir.

PM Khan, who was in Kashmir to mark Pakistan's independence day, accused India of trying to marginalise and radicalise the region's Muslims. He also called New Delhi's move to strip Indian-controlled Kashmir of its autonomy a "strategic blunder" by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Khan's address comes a week after India's parliament deliberately voted to reclassify the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir  as a union territory, allowing New Delhi greater authority over the country's only Muslim-majority region.

Tension is increasing between India and Pakistan ober the eternal Kashmir issue. 

What's the reason? 

The territory is one of the world's most dangerous flashpoints. Claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan, it has been the epicenter for more than 70 years of an often violent territorial struggle between the nuclear-armed neighbors. Pakistan's PM Imran Khan declared himself a pacifist during his speech from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, saying he believed in dialogue.

"I don't want war but it's clear now that they don't want to talk," he said. "War will not help us at all."

"We will fight to the end if it comes to that. To the very end. And at the end of that path, Kashmir will be independent," Khan added.

Khan said he had information that India was planning a "false-flag operation" in Kashmir. "We know, the army knows it. We are prepared," he said.

We have to think about the consequences of a nuclear backlash for both India and Pakistan, as well as the radioactive clouds to float to neighbouring countries. If it will be the ' end for Pakistan'  it will also mean a heavy loss for Hindoostan. The former Indo-Pak wars were fought with conventional weapons but this time Pakistan might be obliged to use the nuclear deterrent and arsenal. This nuclear element in the equation makes the consequences extremely destructive. There are many Indian followers of the BJP, RSS and PM Modi who give the impression you've been doped and duped by patriotic Bollywood films much like the patriotic division of Goebbels in the Third Reich. India should wake up to the reality. When patriotic Hindus curse the terrorists in Kashmir and say 'Jai Hind' in the same breath, it reveals the blind patriotism involved. I trust that the educated Indians will learn to be objective and read between the lines of the government statements and those of populist politicians. Reading serious newspapers, and not fake news issues by BJP, RSS and PM Modi, will bring light to the issues facing the vast Indian subcontinent.

Alas, most of the Indians live in the villages of India which are Hindu in character and have an ear for promises of ‘Hindustan hamara hai’ (Hindustan is ours, Jammu and Kashmir too, at the moment). PM Modi dreams of a Land of the Hindus, ignoring the diversity in the constitution, because it suits his political purpose.

The Kashmir issue can be resolved only bilaterally in accordance with the Shimla Agreement of 1972 between India and Pakistan, and through peaceful means, as cited in the UN Charter. This Agreement explicitly says that the final status of Jammu and Kashmir is to be settled by peaceful means.

So it is advisable for both PM Modi and PM Imran Khan to refrain from drastic, escalatory steps that could affect the status of Jammu and Kashmir.

What India has done is to carry out a unilateral act by trying to change the status of Jammu and Kashmir to that of  an Indian Union Territory to be controlled by the Central Government in Delhi, as was the case in Sikkim. Whereas the indigenous Lepcha population of Sikkim were outnumbered by the Nepali settlers, the population by Jammu and Kashmir is predominantly Muslim. About 96.4% of the population of the Kashmir Valley are Muslims, followed by Hindus (2.45%) and Sikhs (0.98%) and others (0.17%) Shias live in the district of Badgam, where they are a majority. The Shia population is estimated to comprise 14% of the state's population.

In order to correct this lopsidedness in the population statistics, Delhi has made a clever move to grant rights to Indian citizens to buy land in their side of Kashmir. Looking into the latest UN data, the approximate population of India in 2019  is 1,350,438,098. The population of India is rising at an alarming rate and this is why the country is known as the second most populous country in the world after China.

This is reminiscent of the population migration policy introduced in Tibet by the Peking in which Han Chinese were allowed to migrate to Lhasa and Tibet, with the result that within a short time the Tibetans were outnumbered in their own country. As in the case of Sikkim, a direct control from the Central Government in Delhi would mean a great deal of financial support and development possibilities for impoverished Jammu and Kashmir, which have been ignored by the Pakistanis on their sector of the two states.

Way back in 1948 a UN-mandated commission was set up to help resolve the Kashmir dispute and a plebiscite was recommended in the state to determined its final status but nothing happened.

Let us see what happens. Peace, Frieden, om shanti!