05.06.2002

Overthrow the warmongers

The current confrontation over Kashmir between India and Pakistan represents the most serious threat of nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Over a billion people live in its shadow: some estimate that up to 30 million people could be wiped out if the two countries were to fire off their entire nuclear arsenals at each other. Given that these two countries have fought each other in three major wars (twice over Kashmir - in 1947-48 and 1965) since the end of British colonial rule, the situation is extremely ominous. Both governments are now at least partly in the hands of people who have a bigoted, theologically-driven hatred for the other side - fundamentalist hinduism in India; the military dictatorship in Pakistan, which originally came to power on the backs of powerful islamic fundamentalist factions in the military and intelligence apparatus. If you look at the current international body politic, in the aftermath of the attacks in the US last September 11 and the ensuing 'war on terrorism' - cited as a justification for rampant militarism by every unsavoury reactionary regime from Sharon's Israel to Musharaf's Pakistan, to Vajpayee's India - the situation appears much worse. With the 'victory' of the US forces in Afghanistan, backed by Britain and with Pakistan dragooned in under threat of itself being the object of American retaliation, the current paradigm of international politics is that the appropriate response to insubordination by subject peoples is to bomb the hell out of them. The 'war on terrorism' provides - in the name of preventing mass destruction - an ideological justification for such mass destruction. It is this heady brew of an ideology - manufactured by US imperialism after its long-time support for ultra-reactionary islamist forces against 'communism' blew up in their faces with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - that, having been exported around the world, now threatens a local Armageddon on the Indian subcontinent. Kashmir is, or ought to be, a democratic question of the first order for the masses of both India and Pakistan. But the threatened disaster could well render the demand for self-determination of that nation a secondary issue. In an armed confrontation between the Indian and Pakistani reactionary military/clerical cliques, the issue at stake would not be simply an end to oppressive Indian (and indeed Pakistani) rule in Kashmir, but more importantly the self-preservation of the ordinary working class and peasant populations of the entire subcontinent. It would pose point blank the need for the overthrow of both reactionary regimes on a programme that would of course necessarily include the liberation of Kashmir from national oppression: the right to found a new Kashmir nation-state if the population so chooses, including those areas currently incorporated into both India and Pakistan. Given the majority muslim population of Kashmir, at present that would result in a muslim-dominated state. However, that does not mean that Marxists are obliged to give any support to the reactionary, islamic fundamentalist forces that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have undeniably been funding and arming in Kashmir. As comrade Farooq Tariq of the Labour Party Pakistan explained at a meeting in London earlier this year, "The overwhelming majority of Kashmiri masses are in support of independence, but the fundamentalists of Pakistan, sponsored by the ISI, have tried to change the direction of the national liberation movement - wanting to give it the colour of religion. They want to pose it as a movement of muslims against hindus rather than a movement of Kashmiris against the occupation of both Pakistan and India" (quoted in Socialist Outlook February). Such forces are the death of any national liberation struggle - in fact they threaten to unleash a communal conflict that could easily lead to an enormous slaughter of the largest muslim population in the world - in India proper - as well as bearing responsibility for the threat of nuclear war. As Kashmiri writer Muzamil Jaleel spelled out in a moving and illuminating article a few months ago, "For India, the future of Kashmir is non-negotiable - it is an 'integral part' of the country, the only muslim majority state in the union and thus a cornerstone of its democracy and secular credentials. For Pakistan, Kashmir is also important because the majority of its population is muslim - it is Pakistan's 'jugular vein', and an unfinished task from the subcontinent's partition in which Pakistan was born as a home for Indian muslims. "With these claims on Kashmir, both countries have choked the voice of Kashmiris. The Indian government has reacted with an iron fist, deployed large numbers of security men and turned Kashmir into one massive jail. "Pakistan's hands are not clean either. When hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris came out in support of the separatist movement in 1990, Pakistan's lust for Kashmir's land was exposed. It hijacked the separatist movement, painted it with religious fundamentalism and introduced pro-Pakistan and later jihadi groups to ensure it enjoyed absolute control. "Within years, Kashmir turned into yet another battlefield in the pan-islamic jihad and its warriors as well as its leaders were now made up of non-Kashmiris whose agendas transcend the demand for self-determination. In the process, the genuine political struggle for the unification of Kashmir and the demand of the people that they should be allowed to decide their own future was forgotten" (The Observer February 10). We are for the right to self-determination of Kashmir - both Indian and Pakistani Kashmir - meaning the right to a unitary, separate state if the population so desires. There should be a plebiscite of the entire population of both parts of Kashmir to determine if this is in fact the popular will. Indeed, the masses of India and Pakistan need to fight their own governments to demand the free organisation of such a plebiscite - this must involve the removal of the repressive forces of both occupying states from Kashmiri territory. The existence of a real movement for Kashmiri nationhood, in the aftermath of the flagrantly undemocratic ceding of Kashmir to India by its aristocratic ruler, Maharajah Hari Singh, at independence in 1947, and the ensuing wars resulting in its partition between Pakistan and India, testifies to the immediacy of this perspective. Indeed, it testifies to the sinister nature of political islam that the hijacking of the Kashmir national movement by such people enables hindu chauvinists in India to portray the Kashmir liberation struggle as a threat to ordinary hindus, as well as providing a tool for reactionary cliques in Pakistan to justify their own denial of Kashmiri nationhood in the name of pan-islamism. However, in the context of the threat of war between Pakistan and India, both reactionary and oppressive powers, socialists have to carefully distinguish more than ever between that aspect of the Kashmiri movement that is genuinely for national and democratic aims, and that component which is subordinated to the political designs of the islamists. The latter are objectively acting as agents of both the Indian BJP government and the Pakistani fundamentalists - the potential butchers of the Indian and Pakistani masses. It is in the interests of the Kashmiris, as well as the people of the entire region, for Kashmiri liberation fighters to turn their fire against these provocateurs of nuclear war just as much as against the Indian occupation forces. Indeed, it is not unprecedented for socialists to refuse to support proclaimed 'liberation fighters' whose aims are in reality subordinated to those of larger oppressive powers. In a situation with some real similarities, Lenin wrote during World War I of the reactionary aims of some Polish nationalists: "'But we cannot be in favour of a war between great nations, in favour of the slaughter of 20 million people for the sake of the problematical liberation of a small nation with a population of perhaps 10 or 20 millions!' Of course not! And it does not mean that we throw complete national equality out of our programme; it means the democratic interests of one country must be subordinated to the democratic interests of several and all countries "¦ "However, take Poland's specific conditions in place of these general arguments: her independence today is impractical without wars or revolutions. To be in favour of an all-European war merely for the sake of restoring Poland is to be a nationalist of the worst sort, and to place the interests of a small number of Poles above those of the hundreds of millions who suffer from war ... To raise the question of Poland's independence today, with the existing alignment of the neighbouring imperialist powers, is really to run after a will-o'-the-wisp, plunge into narrow-minded nationalism and forget the necessary premise of an all-European or at least a Russian and German revolution "¦" (VI Lenin, 'The discussion on self-determination summed up' CW Vol 22, pp345-50). And that is the key - in the current situation, the liberation of Kashmir is only possible through the struggle to overthrow the two reactionary regimes who oppress Kashmir - as well as their 'own' masses at home in India and Pakistan. The palpable threat of nuclear war only underlines the stark alternative - socialism or barbarism - that ultimately confronts the entire population of the globe - not just the Indian subcontinent. Socialists and communists in the advanced countries must do all we can to build solidarity with those working class and progressive forces in both countries who are struggling against the fundamentalist reactionaries. The decay of the nationalist bourgeoisie and its one-time 'progressive' pretensions into the kind of naked bigotry, obscurantism and incipient barbarism that now dominates subcontinental politics half a century after decolonisation only underlines the fact that that genuine liberation and permanent social progress is not possible under capitalism. A struggle for real democracy, for the rights of all the myriad nationalities of the subcontinent through voluntary federation, for the complete secularisation of society, for the liberation of women, for real social and economic progress, is more necessary than ever. It cannot be separated from the struggle to overthrow the so-called national bourgeoisies themselves - whose venality and ability to combine the most advanced, destructive technology of the modern age with a recrudescence of the worst kind of semi-medieval and obscurantist reaction has come together in such a dramatic way to produce the sheer insanity of the current crisis . Ian Donovan No war over Kashmir Mass protest outside Downing Street. Human chain against war and communalism. Saturday June 8, 11.30am to 2pm, Whitehall, London SW1. South Asia Solidarity Group: 020 7267 0923.