Arundhati Roy enjoys more credibility than India’s government or military. Her analysis on India’s occupation of Kashmir has exposed what the Indian military, politicians and media have been hiding for decades: the collective Indian crimes against Kashmiris.
India’s most famous novelist meets with the husband and brother of two Kashmiri women raped and killed by Indian Army soldiers. All major Indian newspapers warn Roy of imminent arrest on sedition charges.
India’s relation to Kashmir is not about Kashmir. Kashmir’s aversion to being subsumed by India is not reducible to history. India’s military governance penetrates every facet of life. The sounds of war haunt mohallas. The hyper-presence of militarization forms a graphic shroud over Kashmir: Detention and interrogation centres, army cantonments, abandoned buildings, bullet holes, bunkers and watchtowers, detour signs, deserted public squares, armed personnel, counter-insurgents, and vehicular and electronic espionage.
A desperate India is cooking up another ruse: It wants Pakistan to send its foreign minister to shake hands with his Indian counterpart in New York so that New Delhi could demoralize Kashmiri protesters and tell them Pakistan approves of Indian genocide in Kashmir. Islamabad must not give this photo-op to New Delhi. Instead, it should exploit Indian desperation in occupied Kashmir.
The foreign ministers of member countries of Organization of Islamic Conference met in New York and reaffirmed OIC’s principled support to the people of Jammu and Kashmir for the realization of their legitimate right to self-determination in accordance with the relevant United Nations resolutions and aspirations of the Kashmiri people.
Forget India. They don’t have a case on Kashmir anyway. But is Pakistan’s case getting weaker because Islamabad is out of sync with Kashmir’s new generation of freedom fighters?
Forget AfPak. It’s more about AfKash, Afghanistan and Kashmir. That is the key if President Obama wants to turn Afghanistan into a victory. Pakistan cannot press a button to stop the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan from resisting America-Karzai-warlords who sidelined them and kept them out of power in Kabul. The anti-India actions in Kashmir are also not a Pakistani creation. They will continue, fester and invite reaction from Kashmiris and Pakistanis on Pakistani soil unless resolved. Desperate US policymakers shouldn’t listen to smugly Indians who claim they know the region better than anyone else and have come up with this bogus anti-Pashtun policy in Afghanistan. They misled the Soviets in the 1970s and now they are misleading the Americans.
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