British Sikh political analyst Jagdeesh Singh presents a devastating analysis of the how the Indian state has treated Kashmir culminating in today’s abrogation of Article 370 which granted a special status on paper but nothing on the ground.  There is no short-cut to the independence of Kashmir, argues the author.

IN THE LAST SEVENTY YEARS,  India has followed a relentless policy to kill, destroy, disempower, undermine, betray, subjugate the non-Hindu communities, cultures, territories, symbols, religions, peoples and institutions. The Bharatiya Janata Party with its massive Hindu supremacist mandate and raucous attitude is consolidating the Hindu totalitarian state, with full glare and fanfare.

The story of Kashmir is akin to the story of so many suppressed regions and nations within the mighty Indian state boundaries. India is a territorial prison to unwilling, unconsenting peoples.

Suffocate. Smother. Subjugate -these have been the buzzwords for the beleaguered people of Kashmir as too of Panjaab, Manipur, Nagaland, Tamilnadu and more.

Seventy years of mistreatment of Kashmir as an ‘autonomous’ state as enshrined in Article 370 of the Indian constitution as a pre-requisite for accession to India by all-powerful India, demonstrably and totally disproves the efficacy of any viable, credible or workable ‘federal’ autonomy status for Panjaab or any other state within the Indian political monolith.

Those in Panjaab, who through fear or opportunism still advocate only ‘autonomy’ for Panjaab and reject independence, after 70 years of a damning, devastating, failure of the grossly uneven, inequitable and wholly one-sided India – Panjaab relationship: are continuing to reduce Panjaab to a future of total domination and subjugation within one of the world’s most savage and draconian super-states.

Today’s scrapping of the superficial autonomous status of defiant Kashmir represents a major consolidatory action by the Indian state. Notably, it has been done in proximity to the great drama and headlines of the Kashmir Hindu Yatra and as we approach the annual bluster and rhetoric of 15th August. Undoubtedly, world governments and the United Nations will stand by silently and complicitous, as Kashmir is ravaged and savaged further. Perhaps, Kashmir is about to see some major military crackdown akin to June 1984. This appears to be a final onslaught on the outlying territories and nations which have dissented and resisted the Hindu-Indi monster so far.

Fanciful and vain hopes of some kind of autonomy and self-government within a ‘federal’ India, were totally destroyed in the Indian States’ gruesome, genocidal attempt at India’s final solution of the antagonising Sikh-Panjaab question in 1984. The remnant autonomy of Kashmir has now been stripped away entirely too. India as a unionist state has no interest in conceding autonomy, devolution, etcetera. Protagonists of ‘autonomy’ within India, feel an irrational, subservient need to maintain the singular Indian superstructure. They daren’t go beyond.

The dormant Hindu India, which has been evident from 1947 but disguised as ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ by its multifarious apologists inside and outside of India, is now coming to full, unstoppable, fruition. Hindu India is now exploding forth and consuming all in its steamrolling path.

The pro-India Abdullahs of Kashmir like their equivalents in Panjaab, are being proven as idiots and ever more defective.  They want Kashmir to remain stuck to India. They keep clinging to the Indian state. Kashmir is Kashmir! It belongs to no-one but itself! Kashmiri people have the full right to their independence through the exercise of the inalienable right to self-determination, notwithstanding the extremely poor and inadequate intervention of the United Nations and the international community.

Nobody has the right to rule over another! India is doing the exact reverse of what it says it was created for in 1947 – freedom from subjugation. India is perpetrating the same imperialism.

As concerned world citizens watch painfully and anxiously, today Kashmir has been formally and fully occupied by the Indian state. Stripped of all its rights, identity and autonomy. Kashmir, like Panjaab, Tamil Nadu, Manipur, Nagaland has now been officialised as an appendage of the Indian empire.