Pluralism: The Traditional Hallmark of Kashmir

By Ghulam Nabi Fai

ccun.org, January 27, 2008

 

India's gruesome record in Kashmir is far worse than the records of the Federated Republic of Yugoslavia in Kosovo, Indonesia in East Timor, and Russia in Chechnya, all of which provoked international outrage and more. An iron-fisted military rule has prevailed in Kashmir, featuring a staggering 700,000 soldiers and paramilitary personnel. Human rights atrocities against non-combatants are commonplace. Every neutral human rights organization that has surveyed Kashmir, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, has reported a chilling number of extrajudicial killings, rapes, torture victims, abductions, arbitrary detentions, and crimes of arson, plunder, and custodial disappearances. All peaceful political dissent has been and is being ruthlessly suppressed.

On October 27, 1947, I reminded the Maharaja, although divested of power, pleaded for Indian military intervention to rescue his tottering regime. India responded with brigades and contrived a bogus instrument of Kashmiri accession to her sovereignty (a villainy exposed by British scholar Alistar Lamb). Then, India raced to the United Nations Security Council to champion a Kashmiri self-determination plebiscite conducted by the United Nations after demilitarization of the territory. The Security Council endorsed mutually reinforcing plebiscite mandates, which India has defied for more than 60 years because she knows Kashmiris will never vote in her favor. The irony of the fate is that Mr. Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of Great Britain would like India to be the member of the Security Council whose resolutions have been blatantly violated by India right from 1948.

Kashmir holds the infamy as the most dangerous place on the planet. The 61-year-old conflict in that disputed, divided, devastated, and illegally occupied territory is the bone of contention of the nuclear confrontation in the region of South Asia.

The traditional hallmark of Kashmir of religious pluralism and amity and an aversion to the doctrinaire should be emphasized. Its four major religions - Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism - have flourished side by side for centuries. Kashmirs religious groups live in neighborhoods together; they work together; they socialize together; they celebrate and mourn together; they are a model of religious harmony and ecumenism. Kashmir is emphatically not a conflict between Muslims and Hindus; it is a conflict between self-determination and an occupying colonial-type power.

The lives and hopes of Kashmiris should not be snuffed out by a "might-makes-right" approach to international relations and morality.

Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Executive Director of the Kashmiri American Council/Kashmir Center