Photo: Indian soldier in Kashmir, 2009. Credit — Jrapczak/Wikimedia Commons
On Aug. 14, Indian government forces killed two people in the Indian-controlled Kashmir region. The killings were the latest in a cycle of large, and at times violent, protests met by state forces using
firearms. Each police shooting has led to subsequent demonstrations of up to tens of thousands, and then more killings by the police.
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stated his willingness to grant autonomy to the
people of Kashmir. Singh has called for calm and declared his readiness to negotiate with any force in Kashmir, so long as it is within the context of the region remaining under Indian control. At the same time, Singh has deployed thousands of additional troops, and regional authorities have re-imposed a
strict curfew in Srinagar and most major towns of the area. The key demand of the demonstrators is an end to Indian control over Kashmir, either to form an independent state or to become part of Pakistan.
Over the decades, the human toll of the conflict has been huge. Since the beginning of the recent round of protests in June, at least 57 people have been killed. Going back to the late 1980s, over 68,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by Indian police and military.
India is a country with a large diversity of nationalities and religions, as well as remnants of the caste system. Hindus constitute the majority of the population, with Muslims and Sikhs being sizeable minorities, alongside Buddhists, Christians and others. There are approximately 138 million Muslims in India, constituting over 13 percent of the population. The entire Kashmir region, some of which is Pakistani-controlled, has a total population of over 13 million, about 8 million in the Indian-controlled state of Kashmir and Jammu. In Kashmir and Jammu, Muslims constitute 74 percent of the total population, Hindus 24 percent and Buddhists less than 2 percent. In Kashmir Valley, Muslims constitute over 95 percent of the population, and Hindus only 3 percent.
Religious conflicts class-based
Religious conflicts are class-based. In modern history, religious conflicts can be traced to the colonizers’ efforts to consolidate their rule and prevent the colonized people from uniting against their real enemies—the colonizers. Even today, when the formerly colonized countries have gained nominal independence, imperialist countries continue to promote ethnic and religious conflicts to maintain their neocolonial control.
The conflict of Kashmir, in the context of India’s colonized past, is a direct result of forces set in motion by the British Empire. Britain colonized India for over 200 years, plundering its resources and pushing
millions of people into abject poverty. Britain was able to turn the Indian subcontinent into the jewel in the crown of its empire due to its military superiority, made possible by its more advanced industry. But Britain, a small country, needed more than just military might to subjugate the people of a huge country with several times the size and population of its own. So the British Empire mastered a divide-and-conquer strategy early in its bloody colonial history.
Britain consciously promoted conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. It divided India into small, easily manageable chunks. Some regions were given the status of “princely states,” where the British installed maharajas (princes). In exchange for safeguarding colonial rule, the maharaja would earn the right to exploit the peasants and toiling masses and enjoy the protection of the colonizers.
A common tactic of the British
A common tactic implemented by the British in the administration of these “princely states” was installing Hindu rulers in majority Muslim areas and Muslim rulers in majority Hindu areas. This tactic had two concrete benefits for the British. First, it would create a false enemy for the populations—the people of the other religion. Additionally, it guaranteed the loyalty of the local ruler. Being hated and despised by the majority of the population made it impossible for the local ruler to double-cross the British and go independent. His survival depended on outside support.
This power configuration was not unlike what exists today with relation to the modern state of Israel. U.S. imperialism can rely on Israel more than any of its other allies/clients in the Middle East, because, amid a sea of oppressed Palestinians and Arabs, the very survival of this colonial settler state is entirely dependent on imperialist sponsorship.
In 1846, through the Treaty of Amritsar, the British sold part of the state of Lahore, which they had
invaded, to a Hindu maharajah by the name of Gulab Singh. Thus, the state of Kashmir was formed. Having been ruled by a Muslim empire for centuries, a strong majority of the population of the territory was Muslim. Maharajah Gulab Singh purchased the newly created “princely state” by paying the British 7.5
million rupees. Predictably, conflict between Muslims and Hindus ensued, resulting in periodic clashes.
In 1906, Mohammed Ali Jinnah founded the Muslim League, a Muslim nationalist party that was to develop close ties with the British. At the height of India’s anti-colonial struggle, when tens of thousands of Congress Party members were in prison, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, the Congress Party refused to fight on the side of their colonizers in World War II. But Jinnah’s Muslim League joined the British.
Following World War II, decades of Indian anti-colonial struggle made it impossible for the declining British Empire to hold on to their colony. Breaking up India was the next best thing for them, especially since a part of it could be ruled by Jinnah, someone they controlled.
On July 18, 1947, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, relinquishing Britain’s hold
over India, but also partitioning India along religious lines. India’s majority Muslim provinces were to become part of Pakistan; majority Hindu provinces part of India.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan was formed under Jinnah’s rule. The partition, of course, was not motivated by Britain’s concern for the rights of India’s Muslim minority. It was a means of weakening what was to become the independent state of India. The partition caused the largest migration in human history, with 17 million people fleeing across the newly formed borders in both directions to escape the accompanying ethnic violence.
Under the terms the British set for the partition, the rulers of the 550 “princely states” would each get
to choose which state their area would join, India or Pakistan. Of course the decision was strictly the ruler’s, not that of the population. Kashmir, situated just between India and Pakistan, was one of the largest “princely states.” At the time of the partition, the ruler of Kashmir was Maharajah Hari Singh, a descendent of Gulab Singh, who had “bought” Kashmir from the British. While Singh was still uncommitted and considering independence for Kashmir, the first of several wars between India and Pakistan over Kashmir broke out.
Pakistan sent its military into Kashmir, followed by India’s military deployment by airlifting its forces.
Facing the possibility of complete loss of power if Pakistan were to succeed, Singh decided to join India on the condition of Kashmir being an autonomous state. By the end of the war in 1948, India won most of the territory. The Indian government promised that the fate of Kashmir would ultimately be decided by a referendum—which has not been held to this day. Over the years, even the autonomy of Indian-controlled Kashmir has faded away, and this is what the current prime minister is promising to reinstate.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, India, a country that had been one of the leaders of the
non-aligned movement, shifted to the right. Economic nationalism, championed by the Congress Party for decades, gave way to the implementation of neoliberal policies of privatization and cutting government services. The right-wing Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party won the most votes in India’s elections. The BJP promoted a Hindu nationalist ideology to battle public discontent against its neoliberal economic policies, thus diverting the anger of Hindus against Muslims. The BJP is no longer in power today, but anti-Muslim chauvinism has become a fact of life in Indian politics. Several large-scale massacres, often
aided by the police, have taken place against Muslims.
The crisis of Kashmir is a living example of the inability of the capitalist class to resolve ethnic conflicts, even its progressive factions fighting imperialism for independence in oppressed countries. Gandhi and the other leaders of the Indian independence movement, while not national chauvinists, failed to implement policies to create unity between Indians of all nationalities. The fact that Jinnah’s Muslim League gained popularity and turned toward British imperialism to improve its position against the mostly Hindu Congress Party was a reflection of this fact.
Religious and ethnic conflicts not natural and inevitable
Religious and ethnic conflicts are not natural and inevitable phenomena. When communities are not provoked and set up against one another, they live in peace and harmony. Only under capitalism are ethnic conflicts inevitable. Socialist countries have managed to address the national question successfully, despite having been invaded, or constantly under the threat of invasion, by imperialist states.
The Soviet Union turned the vast czarist Russian Empire, the “prison house of nations,” into a country
where people of dozens of different nationalities lived harmoniously. With the overthrow of the Soviet Union, ethnic massacres promptly resumed. Following WWII, the Federated Republic of Yugoslavia united Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and several other nationalities on the basis of socialist ownership of the means of production. With the partial return of capitalism to Yugoslavia—the implementation of the IMF/World Bank austerity measures in the 1980s and 1990s, Yugoslavia was engulfed in a bloodbath of heart-wrenching ethnic massacres. Of course, a big part was played by the imperialist funding and promotion of chauvinistic political forces among each of the nationalities.
Although often shrouded in religious or nationalistic language, the root cause of religious and ethnic
wars is not strict adherence of different communities to religious dogma or nationalistic mythologies. Fighting for survival, working people are forced to engage in a relentless competition for gaining access to resources—land, water, housing and so on. Bourgeois-national forces, no matter how progressive, are by nature unable to call off this competition. They do, after all, represent the interests of a faction of the bourgeoisie, not just against imperialism, but also against their own country’s working class. And no sector of the capitalist class can be indifferent to the pursuit of resources and markets.
In contrast, by dispossessing the capitalist class and through public ownership of the means of production, socialism lays the material basis for the elimination of national conflicts. The capitalist class promotes national conflicts to prevent the unity of the working class and oppressed masses. The socialist state has no interest in doing that and every reason to promote solidarity among people of different
nationalities. With society’s resources rationally allocated through a planned economy, the material basis for the competition of different peoples is removed.
There is a long, hard struggle ahead, but the working people of India will ultimately win victory, not by scoring wins against oppressed people of other nationalities and religions, but by uniting in a struggle against imperialism and their own capitalist class.
