India’s Latest Assault on IIOJK Self-Determination

The recent remark of the Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha at the Passing Out Parade of Deputy Superintendents of Police (DSPs) and Police Sub-Inspectors (PSIs) at the Sher-I-Kashmir Police Academy (SKPA) Udhampur is an extremely disturbing sign towards India changing the narrative about Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The statement that any terrorist activity of whatever nature in J&K now would be considered as an act of war is not just a lip service but a provocative declaration that would only add fuel to the fire over Kashmir that has been raging since times immemorial. The Sinha has conveniently interchanged and confused the division between internal dissent, popular uprising and conventional war by calling such attacks acts of war therefore criminalizing the self determination of Kashmiri under international law as legitimate. India’s Latest Assault on IIOJK  This discourse in turn, is a danger since it allows Indian state and its security agencies to stamp out any political dissent and resistance against the state in the name of a much too broad and generic concept of warfare.

The controversial statement by the Union home Minister Manoj Sinha throws deep speculations on the current struggle of the people of Kashmir to pursue their right to self-determination by obliterating the boundary line between gun militancy and political protest. This broad generalization is convenient enough to make the Indian state evade the real causes of upheavals which are none other than the denial of simple human rights, political disenfranchisement, economic marginalization, and uncompromising state repression that Indian governance of the region has always been marked with over the decades. Labelling the whole range of Kashmiri resistance as act of war, the state deprives the Kashmiris of their right of self-determination as granted by various United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. It makes legal fights of political autonomy and democratic presentation a criminal act of sedition, punishable by the fiercest military actions.

When Sinha and the Indian state refuse to choose a tangible enemy in the purported war it only adds to the scare and the mass punishment unleashed on the Kashmiri people. Resting the emphasis on the ambiguous character and, technically, absence of the pronounced sense of view upon the sense of who and what is an enemy, this statement interprets every Kashmiri as a possible suspect contributing to the idea of the collective guilt discourse that would be lethal. This creates a climate of suspicion on behalf of everyone, that all ordinary civilians should be viewed, whether students, traders, farmers, journalists in the light of national security paranoia. This practice renders general surveillance, random arrests, searches of homes, curfews, suppression of civil rights under the pretext of war measures. The psychological effect on the Kashmiri people is huge: further suspicion of the state is increased, the ties between the population are destroyed, chances of either reconciliation or even peace settle even increasingly to the second plane. Instead of focusing on the political desire and identity of Kashmiri people, the positioning of the conflict between India and Pakistan as a war, by Sinha, induces a colonial discourse of dominance procedure, according to which the people who are governed are the beasts instead of being citizens with rights.

There is also the bellicose rhetoric of the LG as an admission of the fact that India is insecure over its possession of Kashmir. After 30 years of military occupation, brutal policies like the Special Armed Forces Powers Act (AFSPA) and complete cover of the state with close to one million security force personnel deployed in a region that only has a population of eight million people, the Indian state nevertheless fails to stamp out Kashmiri aspirations of living freely and with dignity. Such insecurity takes the form of actions to further militarize the region, to suppress opposition, and to exempt human rights violations by security forces by diligence “wartime necessity.” The statement by Sinha suggests that New Delhi wants to legalize its excessive use of force: extrajudicial killings, systematic torture in custody, enforced disappearances, and suppression of the civil society activism now have another excuse of an emergency in war. The repeated call of the so-called cross border interference goes counter to the truth of the indigenous insurgence by the Kashmiris who have demanded an autonomous state since 1947.This mode of deflecting the international spotlight on its internal calamities is included in New Delhi owing to its mania with accusing its neighbor, Pakistan, of all such unrest in Kashmir.

The notorious mass rape of Konan Prosphora, the legions of fake encounter killings, the forceful disappearances, or any of several heinous activities that occurred under the protection of impunity, Kashmir has a history of the worst being perpetrated by the Indian military in Kashmir. Sinha is therefore able to pressurize such abuse by invoking the lexicon of war and in the process makes it clear that traditional legal and constitutional protections are out of the window in Kashmir. When it comes to war, anything counts, as the dark logic behind the LG chilling statement. The militarized policies, such as curfews, monitoring, communication blockades, mass arrests, and political purges, that the city of New Delhi had used over decades have not been able to quell Kashmir. On the contrary, these policies have alienated and betrayed Kashmiris even more, leaving successive generations to believe that India is an occupying power but not a democratically. The revocation of Article 370 in August 2019, which made J&K lose its partial autonomy, and the forcible division of the state into two union territories deprived of popular support further testified to the New Delhi disregard regarding the demands of the Kashmiri population.

However, like history has already demonstrated time and again, no military power can take away the spirit of freedom in a people. This fact is attested to by the resilience of Kashmir struggle, which has gone against insurmountable odds. The declaration by Sinha will not establish peace, stability and security in the region but rather guarantee that Kashmir will forever be a volcano of discontent, ready to explode any day. This dangerous escalation needs to be urgently observed by the international community in general and the United Nations, in particular, as well as the powerful states and actors such as the United States, China, and members of the European Union. India should be told that the problem of Kashmir is not an internal security problem but an international conflict that has not been solved yet on the international front as accepted by the United Nations. The sustainable peace in South Asia can only be achieved through sincere, fair and honorable settlement of the Kashmir dispute in line with UNSC resolutions and democratic aspirations of Kashmiri people. To sum up, careless and incendiary statement of Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha is a serious blow to peace in Kashmir. The Indian state is jeopardizing an already sensitive conflict by criminalizing the whole Kashmiri people through war measures laws as if overnight the whole population became terrorists. New Delhi, however, does not seem to want political dialogue, reconciliation and respect of human rights and, in fact, seems to want to follow the route of endless militarization and suppression.