[rad-green] What’s happening in Kashmir looks a lot like Israel’s rule over Palestine

*https://www.972mag.com/kashmir-india-israel-palestine-occupation/14273/
<https://www.972mag.com/kashmir-india-israel-palestine-occupation/14273/>+972
Magazine                 August 12, 2019*





*What’s happening in Kashmir looks a lot like Israel’s rule over
PalestineBy revoking autonomy from Kashmir, Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi is taking a page straight out of the Israeli playbook.By Abdulla
Moaswes*

[image: A soldier guards the roadside checkpoint outside Srinagar
International Airport in Jammu and Kashmir, India, January 2009.
(Jrapczak/CC BY-SA 3.0)]
A soldier guards the roadside checkpoint outside Srinagar International
Airport in Jammu and Kashmir, India, January 2009. (Jrapczak/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The last few weeks have seen a sharp escalation in tensions in the
Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi
revoked the territory’s long-standing autonomy, putting it on lockdown and
plunging the region into chaos.

India has ordered all tourists and religious pilgrims to evacuate the
territory, while sending in tens of thousands of armed soldiers and
shutting down virtually all telecommunication networks. These soldiers join
an occupying force estimated to number within the hundreds of thousands in
what is already considered the most militarized place on earth.

India’s oppression of Kashmiris, however, cannot be seen in a vacuum. Over
the past decades, the country’s growing ties with Israel have created a
situation in which the the oppression of Kashmir is linked to Israel’s
treatment of Palestinians.

The Indian occupation of Kashmir and the establishment of Israel in 1948,
which resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians,
began only months apart from one another. In July 1949, two years after
India and Pakistan declared independence from British rule, the two
countries signed an agreement to establish a ceasefire line, dividing the
Kashmir region between them. Indian rule in the territory has led to
decades of unrest.

Although the Indian presence in Kashmir never amounted to settler
colonialism like in the Palestinian case, where a large proportion of the
existing population of the region was expelled and replaced by a settler
population, India has maintained a heavy military presence in the area and
has acted as a police state vis-à-vis Kashmiri civilians and politicians.

Kashmiri solidarity with the Palestinians can be traced as far back as the
1950s and 60s, when the Kashmir liberation movement sought to align itself
with other anti-imperialist struggles abroad. It was also during this
period when India first established relations with Israel. Although then
Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru publicly championed the Palestinian
cause, he permitted the opening of an Israeli consulate in Mumbai in 1953.
The consulate gathered information on India’s Evacuee Property Laws, which
served as a model for Israel’s Absentee Property Law, a legal instrument
that allowed the state to expropriate land belonging to Palestinian
refugees.

The late stages of the Cold War saw a dramatic improvement in
Indian-Israeli relations. In 1992, under the premiership of Narasimha Rao,
a member of the Indian National Congress, India and Israel established
normal relations, with India opening an embassy in Tel Aviv in January. Two
main factors explain this development, both of which are related to the
outbreak of the First Intifada against Israel’s occupation as well as armed
insurrection in Kashmir against Indian rule in the late 1980s.

The first reason stems from the decline of the Soviet Union, which forced
India to search for a new supplier of arms and military technology. Israel,
whose flagging economy at the time necessitated entering new markets,
represented an ideal partner. The relationship was further strengthened
when the U.S. imposed sanctions on arms sales to India after the latter
conducted nuclear tests in 1998. Those sanctions resulted in India becoming
Israel’s largest client for arms and military technology, a legacy that
persists until today.
[image: PRES. EZER WEIZMAN REVIEWING AN INDIAN ARMY HONOR GUARD DURING AN
OFFICIAL RECEPTION AFTER HIS ARRIVAL IN NEW DELHI FOR AN OFFICIAL STATE
VISIT TO INDIA. Former Israeli President Ezer Weizman walks past the Indian
Army Honor Guard during an official visit to the country, December 30,
1996. (Sa'ar Ya'acov/GPO)]
Former Israeli President Ezer Weizman walks past the Indian Army Honor
Guard during an official visit to the country, December 30, 1996. (Sa’ar
Ya’acov/GPO)

The second reason is based on the convergence of the logic that Israel and
India employed in suppressing popular resistance in the occupied
territories and armed insurrection in Kashmir, respectively, highlighting
issues of security, counterterrorism and the threat of Islamic extremism.
In 1992, then Indian Defense Minister Sharad Pawar admitted to
Indian-Israeli cooperation on issues of counterterrorism, including
exchanging information on so-called terrorist groups, national doctrines,
and operational experience – in other words, strategies, methods, and
tactics of occupation and domination. This lead to a shift in India’s
position on Palestine, which began mirroring Israel’s insistence that
Kashmir was primarily a matter of Indian domestic concern.
Between Zionism and Hindu nationalism

Relations between India and Israel grew even closer with the rise of the
Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1990s. The BJP, which today is led by Modi,
adheres to the political ideology known as Hindutva, or Hindu Nationalism.
The history of Hindu nationalists’ affinity with Zionism is well documented
by professor Sumantra Bose of the London School of Economics, who traces it
back to the 1920s when Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the father of
Hindutva, supported
the creation of a Jewish state
<https://theconversation.com/why-indias-hindu-nationalists-worship-israels-nation-state-model-111450>
in
Palestine. The BJP and other Hindu Nationalists have since become obsessed
with replicating the Zionist project in turning a constitutionally secular
India into a Hindu ethnocratic state.

Many of the BJP’s aspirations and policy proposals for Kashmir are
imitations of extant Israeli practices in Palestine. Key among these is the
desire to build Israeli-style Hindu-only settlements in Kashmir as a way of
instigating demographic change. For example, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS), a non-state volunteer Hindu paramilitary volunteer group to
which the BJP are affiliated, have long desired the repeal of the state
subject laws that have maintained the demographic make-up of Kashmir
<https://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/article-35-a-the-agenda-behind/>
.
[image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi get their feet wet at Olga Beach, just 60 miles north of the
Gaza Strip. (Kobi Gideon/GPO)]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi speak at Olga Beach, just 60 miles north of the Gaza Strip.
(Kobi Gideon/GPO)

These changes are clearly inspired by the Israeli settlement model, as
expressed by BJP lawmaker Ravinder Raina, who, in 2015, stated that the
government of India will use its army to protect Hindu-only settlements in
Jammu and Kashmir
<https://zeenews.india.com/news/jammu-and-kashmir/kashmiri-pandits-needs-a-secured-zone-in-kashmir-bjp_1576258.html>.
This type of securitization and protection would entail an expansion of the
security apparatus that already restricts the flow of life for most
Kashmiris, using them as a pretext to justify a new level of domination and
intrusiveness.

Aside from the parallels in policy objectives, the discourse used by
supporters of the current regime in India resemble old Israeli refrains.
Both Israel and India claim to be exceptional democracies, despite their
treatment of large swaths of populations under their control. Additionally,
both Zionists and Hindu Nationalists argue that the existence of many
Muslim countries in the world necessitates a Jewish and Hindu state,
respectively. This perpetuates the lie that Palestinians and Indian Muslims
can supposedly live elsewhere, yet choose to live in Palestine and India
only to antagonize Jews and Hindus.

Meanwhile, the variety of tactics used by India to control the civilian
population of Kashmir strongly resembles
<http://research.gold.ac.uk/26272/1/Akanksha%20Mehta%20%26%20Gabriel%20Varghese.pdf>
those
used by Israel in Palestine. These include, “arbitrary arrests,
extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances, curfews, collective
punishment, administrative detention, torture, rape and sexual abuse, the
suppression of freedom of speech and assembly, house demolitions, and so
forth.”
Decades of solidarity

The bond of solidarity that exists between Palestinians and Kashmiris runs
deep, and can be traced as far back as the 1960s, when protests erupted in
Kashmir over Israel’s behavior around Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque, resulting
in deaths and curfews. Since then, Kashmiri solidarity with the Palestinian
cause can be loosely understood as having gone through three, relatively
overlapping stages.

The first of these stages, which began during the 1960s, saw the Kashmiri
Plebiscite Front first cast India as an “imperialist state” that rejected
the Kashmiri right to self-determination. In doing this, the Kashmiri
liberation movement aligned itself with similar global causes, including
the Vietnamese struggle against the United States, the anti-apartheid
struggle in South Africa, and the Palestinian struggle against Israel.
Kashmiri scholar Mohamad Junaid writes that Palestine “became an evocative
metaphor among Kashmiris to describe their own condition, reflecting an
incipient fear of ethnic cleansing, land dispossession, and an
ever-tightening architecture of the occupation.”
[image: Indian security forces used tear gas to disperse thousands of
pro-independence demonstrators following Eid al-Adha prayers in Kashmir,
September 2, 2017. (Tasnim News Agency/CC BY 4.0)]
Indian security forces used tear gas to disperse thousands of
pro-independence demonstrators following Eid al-Adha prayers in Kashmir,
September 2, 2017. (Tasnim News Agency/CC BY 4.0)

The second stage, which began during the 1980s, saw the basis of solidarity
take on a more religious character. This period coincided with the Afghan
Jihad against the Soviet Union, which indirectly led to the rise of armed
Islamist resistance groups such as Hamas in Palestine and
Hizb-ul-Mujahideen in Kashmir. Rather than the discourse of solidarity
being based largely in the language of anti-imperalism and nationalism, it
became characterized by concepts of jihad and Islamic solidarity. This
trend was further strengthened during the 1990s with the rise of the BJP,
which led to an increase in communal tensions and insecurity surrounding
Muslim life in India.

The third and current stage of Kashmiri-Palestinian solidarity comes as a
response to the growing ties between India and Israel. It has no longer
become accurate for Palestinians and Kashmiris to view Israel and India as
simply analogous oppressors — many now view them as partners in occupation.
As has been demonstrated by the transnational Palestinian response
<https://www.instagram.com/p/B006KBTg5Xq/> to the recent events, solidarity
with Kashmir has taken on an increasingly more practical importance.
An instrument of surrender

The revocation of Articles 35A and 370 paves the way for Indian presence in
Kashmir to further mirror Zionist presence in historic Palestine, since
this allows the Indian state to rule Kashmir directly without the need for
Kashmir’s state legislature, which was also recently abolished.
Furthermore, it facilitates the execution of plans to alter the demographic
make-up of Kashmir by allowing Indians from across the country to purchase
property and settle there under the protection of the Indian military
presence, just as the demographic make-up of the West Bank continues to be
altered with the construction of Jewish-only settlements.

The Kashmiri state legislature and its main politicians, Omar Abdullah and
Mehbooba Mufti, have long acted as middlemen who manage the natives on
behalf of the occupying power, facilitating the occupation in much the same
way as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas does in the West Bank. Just as
Edward Said once referred to the Oslo Accords
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after> as “an
instrument of Palestinian surrender,” many Kashmiris regard the 1975
Indira-Sheikh Accord as a betrayal of past liberation movements. The Accord
allowed previously popular Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah to become the
chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir in exchange for forfeiting the
longstanding Kashmiri demand for self-determination.
[image: Indian police in Kashmir confront protesters December 2018. (Tasnim
News Agency/CC BY 4.0)]
Indian police in Kashmir confront protesters December 2018. (Tasnim News
Agency/CC BY 4.0)

With the unprecedented change of Jammu and Kashmir’s legal status from a
special status state to a union territory without a legislative assembly,
India’s colonial domination over the contested region will only become more
overtly coercive in representing Indian interests. This is a crucial
development to be observed closely by Palestinians who live in areas where
the Israeli occupation is currently facilitated by the Palestinian
Authority.

As things move forward, it is increasingly clear that the colonial
processes in Kashmir and Palestine will become further interdependent on
one another. What Israel does in Palestine is likely to happen in Kashmir,
and what India does in Kashmir is likely to happen in Palestine. In aiming
to dismantle Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, it is essential to
observe its global consequences, for it is highly likely that these
interdependent processes will require a multilateral confrontation.

<https://www.972mag.com/kashmir-india-israel-palestine-occupation/14273/#_ftnref8>*Abdulla
Moaswes is a Palestinian lecturer in media studies and the social sciences.
He is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and
the University of Exeter and his research focuses on transregional linkages
between the Middle East and South Asia. Follow him on Twitter @KarakMufti.*

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