Digging Graves
By Kamal K M
20 July, 2002
Countercurrents.org
India and Pakistan are again digging up graves. Whether they are doing it for for the people of Kashmir, as they have been doing it for the last 55 years, or for the civilians of India and Pakistan at large is not yet clear. War cries are in the air; threat of a nuclear war is looming large over the two nations. It is a moment of realization for the sober minds.
Who really need a war? The right wing BJP government which came to power in the 1999 elections with coalition support was slowly shedding its secular mask and showing its ugly face of communal fascism and this culminated in the Gujarat Pogrom.
Whenever fingers of accusation were turned against the BJP government, tension was created at the border. Remember Tehelka expose,and there was tension at the border. Then came the coffin scam, soon there was the December 13 Parliament attack.
From January 2001, the Ayodhya temple issue was raised. The Government allowed the movement to grow despite warnings and culminated in the crisis of March 2002 when the Government specifically supported the foundation ceremony. Then there was the Gujarat Pogrom and now we have a war like situation again. Writing on the wall is very clear, political leadership will not hesitate to go to war.
Indian political leadership is reeling under the ignominy of Gujarat violence, which is still going on inspite of the condemnation of the incidents by international community and by the sober minds of the country. The violence were fascist in nature, targeting muslim community and its business establishments. About 2,000 people have been killed. Government responded with contempt the demand by the opposition to dismiss the Gujarat government led by Narendra Modi.
War is the easiest tool to suppress the voices of democratic dissent. This is a time tested political tool in the subcontinent. Whenever political establishment of either country goes through a political crises the hoax of war is raised and the voices of dissent are blown away by the officially created hysteria of war and jingoism.
It is not different this time too. But in India what they are trying to hide is something bigger than the war itself. It is fascism which showed its ugly face recently in Gujarat that they are trying to hide.India have a Prime Minister who resembling the third Reich leadership stated that "Wherever there are Muslims they do not want to live with others". The end result was that the fascist experiment in Gujarat has become a no news and the WAR has become the NEWS.
The same Prime Minister was recently seen on TV on two occasions. These two incidents were remarkable for the two extremely different kinds of emotions expressed by Mr. Vajpayee. Both the situations were quite similar. The victims too had the same type of complaints to make. Both had lost their loved ones. First incident was Vajpayee listening to the complaints of Muslim victims of the Viswa Hindu Parishat sponsored Pogrom in Gujarat. There we saw a prime minister sitting calmly in a chair, with a tinge of disinterestedness, listening to the wailing women. The second incident was Vajpayee visiting the victims of the May 14 attack on Indian military camp, in a Jammu hospital. There we saw a visibly moved prime minister vowing to take revenge and calling on the nation to get ready for a war. In the first incident the victims were unwanted elements whom a covert fascist regime did not want to acknowledge and in the second incident the victims were the 'victims' whom the state wanted to acknowledge, protect and celebrate.
And War. Whose war is this? I don't think that it is in the interest of the people of Kashmir, India or Pakistan. Does India and Pakistan have a moral or political right to go to war over Kashmir? If we observe the events from the signing of Kashmir treaty in 1947 October 27 by which Kashmir joined India, to the August 7, 1952 speech by prime minister Nehru in U N General assembly, it becomes clear that at that time India never claimed that Kashmir was an integral part of India. In that speech Nehru agreed to abide by UN resolutions on Kashmir and agreed to conduct a plebiscite and this promise was never kept and the Indian leadership down the years act as though there were no such resolutions or no promises were made to the people of Kashmir. Acording to these same resolutions Pakistan were to withdraw their troops from occupied Kashmir and conduct a plebiscite.
Now what the two countries do in Kashmir is simply terrorise the people of Kashmir. India is denying the Kashmiri people even their democratic right to question their right to freedom. If Pakistan terrorise Kashmiri's with Jehad groups, India terrorise them with its security forces. We can call one jehad terrorism and the other state terrorism. For the people of Kashmir there is not much to choose between them. Kashmir has become the theater of action for the hate politics that came to define the relationship between the two countries after the trauma of 1947.
What India is doing in Kashmir is a mimicry of what US hegemony is able to perform the world over. US hegemony has made it clear to the whole world that they do not need anybody's sanction to terrorise the world and nobody has the right to question them. They have proven it over and over again, latest being the shameless support of Israeli aggression in Palestine. If the whole world criticise the Nazi germany for the Jewish genocide of the second world war, no body dare to critcise USA for the nuclear bomb attack in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The whole world put the blame on the Nuclear Bomb!!! That's the kind of truth the USA has been able to manufacture through a docile media and neo-colonist hegemony.
What we now see in Kashmir is a bad copy of the American practice reenacted by India. India have done it before in the freedom struggle of the Bangladesh and they are doing it now in Myanmar. Kashmir is the extreme case. In this aggression on the lives of Kahmiri people, there is no outcry by the International community who shed their tears profusely on East Timor.
War or no war, the fascist machinery in India is working overtime to put into effect their fascist agenda. They have now raised the hoax of war to deflect attention from the genocide in Gujarat. With war or war like situation, it would be much more easier to suppress the voices of democratic dissent and when these voices are sufficiently crushed and laws like TADA or POTA are passed, the fascist machinery would start functioning again. Then we can expect much more systematic pogroms in a larger scale than we saw in Gujarat. As Arundhati Roy put it " India would become a tomb and smell like a crematorium"
(The author is a student of Film and Television Institute of India,Pune)
