Mazhar Javed
Amid the conundrum of daily chores, if one has the luxury of solitude and peace, it is worthwhile to reflect on the experiences of bygone years, events along the road of history that brought the world to where it stands today.
It is also worth building pictures in our minds of what we have learnt in history lessons, seen in museums or heard from rare personal accounts of people who went through historical experiences.
History is certainly better felt than read. And to feel history, living in South Africa is like living in an open book. The apartheid era in South Africa was the period when the rest of the world was witnessing a wave of decolonisation and shedding a colonial order that had dominated the world for centuries.
In the short span of a few decades after World War II, the world saw the independence of several dozen countries in Asia and in Africa, which later came to be known as the “Third World”. Ushering in that process of independence was the recognition and granting of the right to self-determination.
Many during those times saw the denial of the right to self-determination, disenfranchisement and discrimination as a challenge, not only to the affected societies, but to humanity as a whole. They were right: nobody is free until everybody is free.
With the end of the apartheid era in South Africa in the early 1990s, generally it was felt that the world had moved away from its colonial past and imperialistic tendencies. I wish it were so, but sadly, it wasn’t. Serious challenges remained, and they still remain. They remain in Palestine; they remain in Kashmir. For sure, there is a need to be on guard against the resurgence of colonialism and imperialistic mindsets.
Last week, August 5, marked exactly three years of Indian action to revoke Article 370 of its Constitution, which related to the Special Status to the disputed territory of Jammu Kashmir.
This needs to be seen in the context of the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination, which they possessed as part of the partition of India in 1947 and was duly endorsed by the UN, including by India itself.
We recall several UN Security Council resolutions of the 1940s and 50s, stating that the future of Jammu Kashmir is to be determined by the wishes of the people of Jammu Kashmir, ascertained through a plebiscite.
Article 370 meant, inter alia, that non-Kashmiris could not buy land or settle there. The revocation of this article has lifted these restrictions, opening the door to altering the demography of this disputed territory by allowing non-Kashmiris to buy land and settle there.
Since the future of Jammu Kashmir is to be decided according to the wishes of “the people of Jammu Kashmir” through a plebiscite, the Indian action to revoke this article clearly violates both the UN Security Council resolutions as well as international law.
Following that illegal decision, India has geared up its policies to disenfranchise Kashmiri Muslims in a manner similar to the ones followed by Israel against the Palestinians, or policies akin to the apartheid era in South Africa.
In March 2020, India changed the rules for obtaining Jammu Kashmir domicile. According to the new criteria, Indians who had resided or served or studied in the occupied territory for a given number of years were entitled to Kashmiri domicile.
Millions of such domiciles have been issued so far. Foreseeing a demographic flooding, the late Kashmiri Freedom leader, Syed Ali Geelani, pointed out that India might be creating a “settler colonialism”. He wasn’t wrong.
The so-called “Delimitation Commission” constituted by India in March 2020 to redistribute electoral seats in the occupied territory was another attempt to disenfranchise and marginalise Kashmiri Muslims who constitute a majority there.
The commission recommended six additional seats for Jammu, a Hindu majority area with 44% population (of the occupied territory), and only one to Kashmir – a Muslim majority area, with 56% of the population. The stepping up of the disenfranchisement policies is crystal clear.
The legitimate struggle for the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination is being suppressed by India with a brutal hand. Since 1990 the Indian Occupation Army has martyred over 100 000 Kashmiris and raped more than 11 000 women.
For many years now, Indian Occupied Jammu Kashmir has been the most densely militarised place in the world, with 900 000 uniformed security personnel on the ground, teethed with draconian laws.
The title of a 2019 Amnesty International report eloquently summed up the situation there. It read: “Tyranny of a Lawless Law: Detention without charge or trial under the Jammu Kashmir Public Safety Act”. Reports of unmarked mass graves surfaced in 2006.
That conclusively disclosed the fate of thousands of Kashmiri youth who had disappeared over the years. The European Parliament called for independent and impartial investigations into these reports.
The infamous pellet guns which have been used by the Indian forces against unarmed civilians have permanently blinded hundreds of Kashmiri youth.
So much for human rights violations to suppress the freedom struggle. The Jammu Kashmir dispute is fundamentally about the denial of the right to self-determination by India, and the Kashmir Freedom struggle, a struggle for that legitimate right.
History teaches its lessons the hard way, with wars, blood, pain, humiliation and erasure.
That is what history books teach us. In my opening sentence, I talked about the need to reflect on the experiences of the past.
Closing this write-up, I would say it is even more important to foresee where the world is heading to and what role we, as part of the international community and as citizens of a global village, can play in making course corrections that the direction of history might require.
Pretoria News