ISOLATED, BITTER

AND SUICIDAL IN KASHMIR

INDIA’S RECKLESS DECISION
OPENS A NEW OPPORTUNITY FOR
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
TO RESOLVE THE OLDEST PENDING
DISPUTE AT U.N. SECURITY
COUNCIL AGENDA

YFK - International Kashmir Lobby Group

For feedback on this document, or to contact the authors, please call us on
+92 51 229 10 88,
or email us at
[email protected]

YFK acknowledges the copyrights of all companies, organizations, and logos contained in this document. All
material belongs to the individuals, companies, and organizations as indicated on relevant pages. All material
used in this document is compiled for public awareness and is not for commercial purposes.

Editor Logistics
Ahmed Quraishi Zaman Bajwa

YFK Publications. All Rights Reserved © 2020

ISOLATED, BITTER AND SUICIDAL
IN KASHMIR
India’s Reckless Decision Opens
A New Opportunity For The
International Community To
Resolve The Oldest Pending
Dispute At U.N. Security Council
Agenda
By AHMED QURAISHI
Representative, World Muslim Congress
Executive Director, YFK - International Kashmir Lobby Group

India's credentials as a responsible member of the international community face a serious challenge in 2019.
New Delhi, long seen as possible anchor for stability in Asia, plunged the region and the world in a territorial
and religious dispute under the shadow of a nuclear war.
India did this by taking a blunt unilateral action in Kashmir on Aug. 5, revoking autonomous rule in a sensitive
region, and inviting Indian citizens – a billion of them – to throng Kashmir to buy land and turn 12-million
Kashmiris into a minority. And since India is predominantly Hindu while Kashmir is predominantly Muslim,
this is a recipe for a Bosnia-style genocide that would drag in nuclear-armed neighbors Pakistan and China.
The crisis is compounded by a telephone and internet blackout, a curfew, and nearly a million Indian soldiers
patrolling the streets of Kashmir. The curfew has led to shortages in food and medicine. The crisis is so
sudden that it caught regional and big powers by surprise. They were busy in talks with Iran, trade wars and
deals, and the situation in Hong Kong and Lebanon. Pakistan and the United States were busy in an Afghan
peace deal, marking a shift in the relations of the Cold War allies. The surprise Indian escalation in Kashmir
means Islamabad might get distracted in Afghanistan, and so might Washington, and President Trump's
2020 reelection bid might be impacted negatively if tensions further escalate. Pakistan, the decades-old
agbearer of Kashmiri right to self-determination, has made it clear it will not allow India to annex Kashmiri
territory and push Kashmiris out as refugees.
The Indian action has drawn unprecedented global reaction. This is likely the rst time that Indian leaders nd
themselves at the receiving end of a global backlash, a situation they did not experience at any time since
India became a country out of British colonies in 1947.

WHY INDIA DID THIS

This is a stunning fall from grace for a country that was expected to play a role commensurate with its size,
and where liberal values were supposed to foster a tolerant, constructive view of the neighborhood and the
world. Instead, India is undergoing the birth pangs of a violent, segregationist, fascist ideology based on a
twisted version of Hinduism, otherwise a peaceful religion, that targets Christianity, Islam, and India's own
underprivileged class of untouchables, the Dalits.

Page 01
Behold the latest version of India: the world's largest democracy is embroiled in the world's largest military
curfew1 and communication blackout, with no phones, internet, and outdoor movement for more than eight
million residents in Kashmir. This international dispute, simmering since 1947, is the world's oldest pending
conict at the U.N. Security Council, preceding even the Palestinian-Israeli conict, which hogs more
headlines but is probably not as urgentas Kashmir at this stage,both politically and in terms of the
2
humanitarian crisis.

Up until now India had hoped to stall Kashmir peace

talks and ride out the conict. As smaller parties,
Pakistan and Kashmir cannot force India to come to the
negotiating table without possibly instigating a war,
which nobody wants, especially Pakistan. New Delhi
uses this stalemate to its benet to perpetuate the
conict instead of resolving it

For all its international stature, Indiais unable to maturely resolve a territorial dispute with a smaller neighbor.
Kashmir has not been resolved mainly because Indian leaders will not sit down with Pakistan and work
around an impartial U.N.-supervised referendum where Kashmiris can decide their future.
Up until now India had hoped to stall Kashmir peace talks and ride out the conict. As smaller parties,
Pakistan and Kashmiris cannot force India to come to the negotiating table without possibly instigating a war,
which nobody wants, especially Pakistan. New Delhi uses this stalemate to its benet to perpetuate the
conict instead of resolving it.
But the specter of a nuclear war around Kashmir, and the inability of Indian leaders to resolve the conict with
Pakistan forced the international community last month, on Aug. 16, to intervene. The U.N. Security Council
held its rst formal meeting on Kashmir in more than 50 years.
This stunning setback for Indian diplomacy should have been met in New Delhi with introspection and a
review of India's policies in Kashmir. Instead, India protested international community's “interference” in the
3
conict , in a move reminiscent of Milosevic after Bosnian genocide and Saddam after Kurd massacres.
More worryingly, the term 'The Final Solution's increasingly being used by Indian government ofcials,
politicians, and journalists4, often coupled with denunciation for Kashmiris who have been protesting Indian
military occupation for decades.

1
India's Troops Keep Kashmir Cut Off From The Outside World, Rachel Martin &Saaliq Sheikh, NPR, Aug. 16, 2019
2
‘Why Kashmir Is More Urgent Than Israel-Palestinian Conict’, Ahmed Quraishi, medium.com

Page 02
India's global position on Kashmir is so tenuous that the Ofce of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
released U.N.'s rst-ever report5 on Kashmir, in June 2018, detailing disturbing patterns of Indian abuses that
have normally been associated with dictatorships and not a democracy. For example, the U.N. report refers to
alleged sites of mass graves, and to a case of overnight mass gang-rape by Indian soldiers of women of all
6
ages in two Kashmiri villages in 1991 . The report described Kashmir as “one of the most militarized zones in
the world,” quoting a gure between 500,000-700,000 Indian soldiers. This number has jumped in July and
August 20197. Some Kashmiri sources give an estimate of up to 900,000 Indian soldiers cramming the
besieged State of Jammu & Kashmir.

“BJP bachelors are now excited because [Indian

annexation of Kashmir] will now enable them to marry
white-skinned Kashmiri women.” – BJP legislator
Vikram Saini, in a viral video after India ended Kashmir
autonomy on Aug. 5, 2019.

th
AUGUST 5 : INDIA'S LAND GRAB,
A HIGHWAY ROBBERY, IN KASHMIR

Just to understand the scale of what happened, imagine that an army in a democracy lays siege to a
neighboring unarmed territory, locks down more than eight million people, cuts off internet, telephones, and
imposes a strict curfew, while its own legislators sit in the capital to pass a law legitimizing the land grab. And
then the prime minister of the aggressor country condently announces that the besieged neighboring people
have welcomed the siege, welcomed the communication blackout, welcomed the lockdown, and the land
grab.
This in a nutshell is what India has done in Kashmir on Aug. 5, 2019.

3
Indian ambassador to UN slams international interference over Kashmir, AFP, Aug. 16, 2019.
4
'Has Modi found Final Solution to Kashmir?'By K. B. Ganapathy, Star of Mysore, India.
5
Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir
from June 2016 to April 2018, and General Human Rights Concerns in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and
Gilgit-Baltistan; 14 June 2018, posted at www.ohchr.org
6
Kunan & Poshpora.
7
'ON THE BRINK India 'sends 10,000 troops to Kashmir' after dramatically scrapping 'special status' of the
Muslim-majority region', Patrick Knox, The Sun

Page 03
The initial celebrations in India have now given way to brooding over the barrage of international criticism and
bad press. Unwittingly, Prime Minister Modi has infused a new life into Kashmir Conict and turned the global
media spotlight on India. Unfortunately for India, this coverage has now expanded beyond Kashmir to include
the rise of Indian religious extremism, the Hindutva ideology of Mr. Modi and his B.J.P. party, which
researchers liken to the Nazi ideology. The Kashmir crisis has led to fresh questions on the meteoric rise in
mob-lynches across India targeting a range of victims, including anyone who eats beef. Today, Indian
cyberspace is full of hand-made cellphone videos showing Hindutva mobs lynching minority Indian men8,
mostly Muslims, for refusing to recite Hindu religious lines, or for suspicion of consuming beef.

NO LAUGHING MATTER:
THE INDIAN DREAM
OF “MARRYING WHITE-SKINNED KASHMIRI
WOMEN”
The fear in Kashmir today is that the Government of India will push thousands of poor Indian citizens and
families to move into Kashmir, to buy properties and take up Kashmiri jobs, which until now have been
reserved for Kashmiris. Religious extremists in Mr. Modi's party have gone to the extent of encouraging Indian
9
men to move to Kashmir “to marry white-skinned Kashmiri women.”
10
More than eight million people are currently under siege in Kashmir by the Indian army, with probably the
largest enforced curfew and communication blockade in the world in recent memory.
This is the worst time in the 72-year history of Kashmir Conict. Recently, a son waited for his mother to
emerge after a hajj ight at Srinagar airport, only to be told she passed away and was buried in Saudi Arabia.
11
The family could not be informed because of the communication blackout imposed by India.
“At the end of October, Jammu and Kashmir will cease to be a state of India,” says Sumantra Bose, who uses
this dramatic line at the start of an article for BBC, an analytical piece that makes for amazing read.
Bose is a professor of international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics (LSE). His
12
distinguished piece is titled,‘Has India pushed Kashmir to a point of no return?’
Bose compares Modi’s move in Kashmir to Milosevic’s cancellation of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, which
later led to civil war and genocide:
“What the BJP government has done is akin to what Serbia's Milosevic regime did in1989 by unilaterally
revoking Kosovo's autonomy and imposing a police state on Kosovo's Albanian majority. But the BJP
government's approach to Kashmir goes beyond what Milosevic intended for the Kosovo Albanians:
subjugation,” Bose writes.

8
'Dalit man lynched in Gujarat: How India is grappling with violence', Gopi Maniar, India Today, 21 May 2018.
9
'BJP Bachelors Can Now Marry White-Skinned Kashmiri Women, Says MLA After 370 Move', News18.com, Aug. 7, 2019
10
Up to eight million Kashmiris live in the Kashmir Valley, the part of the State of Jammu & Kashmir under a strict curfew
and communication blackout starting Aug. 5, 2019, which partiallycontinues when this report was published on 5 Sept.
2019.
11
Communication blockade in Kashmir: Deaths go unattended in Valley sans phones, by Fayaz Wani, The New Indian
Express, 26 Aug. 2019.
12
Viewpoint: Has India pushed Kashmir to a point of no return? BBC News, 13 Aug. 2019.

Page 04
Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, has gone a step further. He has warned the world that Modi and
his Hindutva ideology is like Nazi ideology and that appeasement could lead to war and genocide in Kashmir
13
and South Asia . Mr. Khan garnered global headlines by comparing the Indian prime minister to Hitler. Khan
went on to write a compelling article in the New York Times, making the case for international intervention in
14
Kashmir.

Interesting that none of the P-5 members entertained

India's requests to cancel a formal Security Council
meeting on Kashmir on Aug. 16, which went ahead
despite Indian objections. This was “a big deal,”
according to Richard Roth, a longtime U.N.-watcher

PRESIDENT TRUMP'S HISTORIC

STEP ON KASHMIR
15
U.S. President Donald Trump's offer to mediate Kashmir conict between Pakistan and India marked a
turning point. For starters, no American president has come out so strongly in favor of resolving Kashmir
dispute. The premise is simple: the failure of parties to take basic steps toward de-escalation and conict
resolution means international intervention is inevitable.
The offer was an important step in establishing that an international approach is now required to end this
long-running conict. Jack Rosen, president of American Jewish Congress, has called for an active
American role in this regard. “Those negotiations — given the scale and gravity of the Kashmir issue — must
be mediated and multilateral. Indeed, until President Trump's offer to mediate, the dispute has festered as a
bilateral standoff,” he wrote.16
The arguments for an American intervention to settle this seven-decade-long conict are strong. Writes
Rosen, “We have forged trading and security alliances with both India and Pakistan over the decades. Each
country has a large diaspora in the United States. While nuanced diplomacy has ensured that the United
States has not faced a zero-sum game between the two, it is time the United States use its moral and strategic
leverage to get both sides to the table to address the issue of Kashmir once and for all. There are humanitarian,
legal and security interests in such intervention.”

13
Pakistan's Imran Khan likens India's actions in Kashmir to Nazism, Helen Regan & Sophia Sai, CNN, 12 Aug. 2019.
14
Imran Khan: The World Can't Ignore Kashmir. We Are All in Danger. NYT, 30 Aug. 2019.
15
President Trump offered mediation, if both parties agree, at a summit meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan at the
While House, on July 22, 2019.
16
Why the U.S. must mediate Kashmir under a nuclear shadow, Jack Rosen, Washington Times, 2 Sept. 2019.

Page 05
On Aug. 26, on the sidelines of the G-7 summit meeting in France, Prime Minister Modi met President Trump
and made a strong public pitch against such an intervention and argued that India can talk to Pakistan and
contain the conict. Ironically, even here, the Indian premier failed to offer any concrete roadmap as to how he
will do this. Pakistan says the time for talking to India in a bilateral setting is over and that years of such
attempts have yielded no results. India wants to buy time, not resolve the problem.
But Mr. Modi faced questions from Mr. Trump and other world leaders at G-7 regarding Kashmir tensions. It is
interesting that none of the P-5 members entertained India's requests to cancel a formal Security Council
meeting on Kashmir on Aug. 16, which went ahead despite Indian objections. This was “a big deal,”
17
according to Richard Roth, a longtime U.N.-watcher.
Council members met for 90 minutes, without India and Pakistan attending. Some members felt that a
statement at this point would favor Pakistan and could escalate tensions. Others felt it the two countries
should try to resolve it bilaterally rst. There was no agreement on a Council statement to the press, “the
lowest-level of Council action,” said Roth. “Still, just dusting off the diplomatic cobwebs was by international
standards a big deal,” he wrote for CNN.
It is clear India is still counting on the goodwill of major powers to keep Kashmir off the international agenda.
And the powers appear willing to give India time to set its house in order and prove it can diffuse the situation.
But what is also clear is that the world is running out of patience when it comes to Kashmir conict and
thegrowing political and religious extremism in India. And then there are the theories that India is using
Kashmir for larger objectives, linked to Afghanistan and Trump's 2020 midterms. There are signs that India's
sudden escalation of tensions in Kashmir is linked “to the economic slowdown that India is currently facing
18
[…] it provides a much-needed diversion for the government,” according to a BBC report. There is also
some link to Afghanistan. Creating a distraction for Pakistan just when Islamabad is on the cusp of a major
peace push in Afghanistan jointly with Washington seems to serve Indian interests. Unstable Afghanistan
keeps Pakistan in turmoil, which suits many Indian leaders. Also, there are signs that India may not want to
see President Trump emerge from the midterm election stronger. Missing the Afghan peace bus is one way of
ensuring this. Another is the growing evidence that the Indian lobby in Washington is joining hands with
Trump opponents, including with likeminded foreign lobbies linked to JCPOA.

THE SOLUTION
The solution is simple: India must take a strategic decision to resolve Kashmir Conict and end the zero-sum
game with Pakistan.India can reverse or freeze its decision to end Kashmir autonomy, accept President
Trump's mediation offer, involve the UN Security Council, Pakistan and the Kashmiris, and pave the way to a
referendum. If Islamabad does not respond positively to these steps, then India can hold its neighbor
responsible. But it is not possible to endlessly delay dialogue and conict resolution on various pretexts.
Kashmir needs a “mediated, multilateral” solution, in the words of Jack Rosen.
India is at a crossroads in its modern history. It faces unprecedented and unexpected global isolation on
Kashmir. Not a single member state of the United Nations, and no major international news organization,
recognizes India's annexation of the disputed region. International academia and politicians are drawing
comparisons between Indian Prime Minister Modi and Milosevic, the mastermind of genocide in Bosnia; and
Hitler, who led the Jewish extermination, the Holocaust.
India has a chance to make things right. And it should start in Kashmir.

17
'UN Security Council has its rst meeting on Kashmir in decades’, Richard Roth, CNN, 1 Aug. 2019.
18
‘Article 370: What happened with Kashmir and why it matters’, Geeta Pandey, 6 Aug. 2019.

Page 06
Islamabad Main Office

House # D-82, Street # 15,

Upper Chattar Housing Scheme,
Muzaffarabad, Azad Jammu & Kashmir.
Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]