The current Kashmir crisis involves at least two nuclear powers – India and Pakistan. And it threatens to escalate quickly. But just as Israel’s oppression of people in occupied Palestine started long before 7 October 2023, India’s oppression of people in occupied Kashmir started long before 22 April this year. It’s a “forever war” with deep roots in noxious colonial rule, resource conflict, and the power games of global superpowers. And we need to understand these three points of context a lot better in order to avert nuclear disaster.
1) British colonialism set the divisive ball rolling
Much as the shameful and messy final days of British colonialism helped to bring death and destruction to Palestine, they also paved the way for a similar situation in Kashmir. Because Britain didn’t just hand Muslim-majority Kashmir to repressive Hindu rulers (without consulting the Kashmiri people) in the mid-1800s, as part of its ‘divide and rule’ policy to foster religious friction. It also allowed Kashmir’s regime, during the disastrous partition of ‘British India’, to pull the region into Indian control when it should have joined Pakistan (according to the logic of religious division). Anti-Muslim massacres and large-scale ethnic cleansing and displacement followed.
Britain was quick to leave the newly independent nations to deal with the consequences of its colonial meddling. Its implementation of partition was catastrophic (much as it was in Palestine), either by design, incompetence, disinterest, or a toxic mixture of it all. This caused immense suffering for millions of people. And it left behind a strong legacy of conflict, division, and instability. The subsequent wars between India and Pakistan, often over Kashmir, were very much the spawn of this colonial shambles.
The UN has consistently called for a plebiscite to allow Kashmiris to decide their own fate. India has rejected these calls. When resistance against Indian occupation in Kashmir increased from 1989, the occupiers responded by disappearing thousands of people and killing tens of thousands. There were also “mass permanent settlements of outsiders” in the region, and some have called the situation an “ongoing genocide“.
2) A battle for Kashmir’s water amid climate breakdown
Pakistan has an important border with China thanks to the part of Kashmir under its control. But India has something potentially even more precious within the part of Kashmir it occupies: the water that flows from the Himalayas down into (mostly) Pakistan, which is becoming less stable as a result of global warming. Back in 2016, the BBC was already talking about potential “water wars” between India and Pakistan as a result.
Natural resource wealth in Kashmir, of wood and minerals in addition to water, makes it an important asset for any government. But India in particular, home to a growing population currently standing at 1.4 billion people, has a huge water crisis. And that threatens its economic future. As the International Centre for Sustainability has said, “water is the ultimate resource war of the 21st century“.
Highly controversial Hindu-nationalist leader Narendra Modi made a big power play in this arena in 2019 when he stripped away the limited autonomy of Indian-occupied Kashmir. This was a provocative and pivotal change in the “world’s most militarized zone“, whose importance was underplayed in Western media. According to Kashmir scholars, it marked an intensification of an annexation plan that had been decades in the making.
Serious abuses followed as Modi sought to consolidate the land grab. These included “unlawful killings“, gender-based violence, attempts at cultural erasure, the arming of Hindu militias, “Indian soldiers prominent on the streets 24/7“, and “house raids and arbitrary arrest” of dissenting voices. Despite being a warzone and site of intense repression, though, the Indian regime pushed tourism in the area too.
3) The global neoliberal-nationalist alliance
India initially remained independent (but left-leaning) during the Cold War and stood alongside anti-colonial movements around the world. Pakistan, on the other hand, fell quickly into the US anti-communist camp, with its autocratic regimes receiving significant military aid as a result. This lucrative alliance severely undermined secular progressives and empowered ultra-conservative elements in the country, helping Pakistan to build nuclear weapons. The reality the US had fostered eventually led to increasing tensions between Pakistan and Washington in the early 21st-century, pushing Pakistan closer to China as a result.
India, meanwhile, became more attractive to the US as it moved towards neoliberalism in the 1990s. And under Narendra Modi, this has only intensified, alongside increasing inequality, “nutritional deprivation”, and authoritarianism to hold dissent at bay.
With Donald Trump in particular intensifying a new cold war with China and India having its own issues with China, an increasing US-Indian strategic alliance is in the making (helped by a toxic neoliberal-nationalist affinity). And ignoring the crimes of India’s occupation forces in Kashmir is part and parcel of such an alliance, much as US support for Israeli occupation forces is in Palestine.
In Britain, meanwhile, establishment tool Keir Starmer overturned his predecessor’s solidarity with Kashmir when he became leader of the Labour Party, quickly cosying up to Modi’s regime.
Without justice, there will be no peace in Kashmir
As tensions rise between the nuclear powers in South Asia, it’s clear that, even if India and Pakistan avoid war, a lasting peace will not come without: meaningfully addressing the decades of injustice in Kashmir; fostering respectful diplomacy that can help to deal with the challenges increasingly presented by climate destruction; and working to overcome the deeply engrained ethno-religious division nurtured by British colonialism. Western powers taking the side of another ultra-nationalist occupying power, out of cynical self-interest, will only make matters worse.
Featured image via the Canary
