An infamous hotbed of separatism and sectarian violence, this region in the Indian Subcontinent has plagued peacemakers for over 70 years. One side decries the military occupation of their nation, while the other maintains that it is necessary as a defense against islamic terror. Today we’re going to look into which side, if any, is on the side of liberty in this Kashmir edition of springtime of nations.

Kashmir had been part of the Hindu and Buddhist world for centuries, until it became gradually islamized under the Shah Mir dynasty in the 14th century. Sikandar Shah, the 6th sultan of Kashmir, started to impose more forceful measures, implementing heavy taxes on non Muslims and coercing Brahman priests to convert. Later the Mughal empire would conquer the area and bring it under the control of their centralized empire in 1589. As the Mughals declined the Afghan Durrani took their place in the 18th century, until they themselves were driven away from Kashmir by the Sikh Empire in 1819. The Sikhs were the first non Muslims to rule the area in centuries, and like the Muslims they passed laws to oppress religious outsiders. The Muslim call to prayer, the adhan was banned, heavy taxes were implemented, and cow slaughter now carried the death penalty. The Sikhs intensified the international trade of the Cashmere shawl, for which the region is now famous. After the First Anglo-Sikh war the British East Indian Company created a puppet state in Kashmir and combined it with neighboring Jammu in 1846. After the Indian revolt of 1857 the East India Company was replaced by the British Imperial Government itself. 

Under the British Raj, Kashmir had a prince the Maharaja who was Hindu, and most important offices were occupied by Hindus. This was despite the population of Kashmir being heavily Muslim. The first large-scale attempt to protest this discrepancy was in 1931, when soldiers massacred a large protest by Muslims. This led to the formation of the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference the next year, and the beginning of what could be called Kashmiri Nationalism. As part of the development of Nationalist and Independence movements all over India, the Muslim Conference split into an Indian unity National Conference and a Muslim Conference in the 40s. By then Muslim Indian Nationalists had begun to propose a Muslim majority independence state after British rule to be called Pakistan. The K in Pakistan referred to Kashmir.

In 1946 communal violence between the Muslims and Hindus in British India was intensifying, with thousands of people dying in riots in India’s largest cities. The British Prime Minister Clement Attlee had decided it was time for the British to finally leave India, and sent the Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten to draw up a plan that would divide India between a Hindustan and the proposed Pakistan. Like the Partition of Palestine in the following year, this Partition plan of 1947 left much to be desired and ethnic cleansing of populations outside “their” partition lines were truly barbaric, with hundreds of thousand if not millions of people dying by violence and just as many dying in their escape from areas outside “their” ethnic lines, fleeing their homes with whatever possessions they could carry. Kashmir presented a problem for the British, being Muslim majority, but Hindu ruled, and the Maharaja refused to pick a side, preferring independence. The Muslim Conference, covertly supported by Pakistan instigated the Pooch rebellion where Muslims in the princely state tried to take over the government and unify it with Pakistan. When the tribal militias floundered, the newly formed Pakistan and Indian armies clashed over the region in the First Indo-Pakistani War 1947-1948. Among the thousands of soldiers killed in the conflict, hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Hindu civilians were killed by military and paramilitary forces as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign by both sides. When the UN brokered truce was signed in 1949, Pakistan had solidified control of about a third of the former Kashmir and Jammu state, with the majority Muslim remainder being controlled by India.

The UN truce dictated that a plebiscite would determine whether Kashmir and Jammu would join either India or Pakistan, but the two factions have never agreed on a roadmap towards the election. For a brief time in the 50s there was hope of rapprochement, however the cold war intervened, and the Indian Prime Minister Nehru would not accept a plebiscite after the US started backing and supplying Pakistan in 1954. After a failed Pakistani attempt to incite the Kashmir Muslim population to rise up in 1965, a major war between the two countries occurred in 1965, killing thousands of troops on both sides. Through this and other smaller conflicts between India and Pakistan, Kashmir has been occupied by a large Indian army presence many Kashmiris resent as foreign invaders, and many terror acts have been carried out against the troops. Including Indian army and border troops, police, Kashmiri civilians and militants at least 50,000 people have died in Kashmir since 1989 in this long brewing low intensity conflict. In an attempt to clamp down on the violence, the Indian government dissolved the Kashmir legislature in 2018 creating a “union territory” directly administered by the Indian central government. Not only that, but they severely curtailed the civil liberties of Muslim activists and political leaders in the former state, now territory, placing the most prominent under house arrest.

Indian attachment to this obscure region is based on religious beliefs about the Himalayan foothills. The activity of Muslim invaders centuries past was wrong, but without deeds to land seized, Hindus who want to control the territory cannot claim any right of return as the Palestinians in the levant can. So instead they make recourse to what Franz Oppenheimer referred to as “the political means”, that is, force. The Indian occupation of Kashmir has been costly. Many Hindu nationalists justify the human cost both for Hindus and innocent Muslims as a sacrifice to bulwark India against the shadow of Muslim terror. However, the terrorists who carry these attacks out use the Indian occupation as very effective propaganda for recruitment, just as they use American occupation and attacks in the middle east. An independent Kashmir would probably be a puppet of Pakistan. However, as the one majority Muslim state (or rather, former state!) In India, the inhabitants have a right to a fair plebiscite to decide which master they would rather have. Anything else would be a betrayal of the principles of self-determination that this channel holds sacred. Jai Kashmir! And may 1000 flowers bloom!