Tale of Two Kashmirs and One Deafening Silence

One doesn’t quite know what the loquacious National Conference patron, Farooq Abdullah, intended to convey with his recent remarks about Pakistan internationalising the Kashmir issue and keeping it alive “even though with wrong intentions,” but they come at an odd juncture when Pakistan is caught in a web of mismatched rhetoric and action.

The BJP took a dig at Farooq, calling his remarks ‘seditious’. BJP is accustomed to churning out some reactionary bluster every time Kashmir is mentioned, especially when it is appended with international attention. But something is intriguing about this season’s reflexive backlash, as intriguing is the Indian state’s response to other occasions of Pakistan choosing to rake Kashmir internationally – at the UN General Assembly and more recently Pakistan’s observance of ‘Black Day’ on Kashmir accession day.

India, too, responded with its old script: ‘terrorism’ and ‘matter of sovereignty’. Both sides adhering to the use of old, worn-out words and phrases seems like it is business as usual. Only that it isn’t. Something has changed drastically, and almost nobody wants to say so, even as a mirror lies shattered and cracked open before us.

The Shahrag Strangled

For decades, Pakistan has built its international case on Kashmir around human rights. Its diplomats catalogued enforced disappearances, custodial killings, communication blackouts and the use of draconian laws against dissent in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Islamabad proclaimed the region as its ‘shahrag’ (jugular vein) and claimed the moral high ground on Kashmir.

Since June, that claim has collapsed on Pakistan’s own side of the Line of Control. On June 5, authorities in Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir (PaJK) banned the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) under anti-terrorism law. Hundreds of activists were detained, some missing in custody. Islamabad shut down internet and mobile services across the territory. Sedition cases followed, and foreign media were told to leave.

Much worse, security forces have opened fire on protestors in Rawalakot, killing 90 people, the latest to add to the toll is an eight-year-old boy. All of this played out as elections went on like serious business in other parts of PaJK. While JAAC avers those killed and detained are peaceful protestors, Pakistan uses India’s traditional pretext to stonewall criticism on human rights - ‘terrorism’. Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Asif, even went to the extent of equating protestors with ‘enemies like India’.

A state that has spent nearly eight decades presenting itself as the guardian of Kashmiri aspirations and championed human rights on the eastern flank of the Line of Control looks like a mirror image of how it has been portraying India all these years.

On Kashmir, both sides of the LoC look like long-lost twins – blackout, firing, detentions and the violence of words – ‘sedition’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘India-backed’.  It’s the same toolkit Pakistan has spent decades condemning across the Line of Control. Not to forget, the JAAC’s demands are not even anywhere near secession. It wants the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for refugees who live elsewhere in Pakistan, an end to elite privileges, and cheaper flour and electricity. These are questions about who governs the territory and for whom.

While Islamabad blissfully goes about its business of backing secessionist calls on the eastern side of the LoC, it brutally crushes on the western side even the basic aspirations for civic and democratic political rights.

Even more baffling: nobody on the Indian side wants to talk about it.

Method in Madness

Going by the traditional rivalry between the two states, this was a golden opportunity for India to seize and trumpet about. Barring some loud criticism in occasional press briefings, some media-managed discourses that, at best, frame PaJK crisis as a ‘territorial one’, as ‘Indian land under illegal occupation’ where people and their human rights don’t matter.

The restraint may stem from a reason: to internationalise human rights in one part of Kashmir is to concede that the international community has standing in Kashmir. That is the door India has spent decades bolting.

Interestingly, Pakistan followed the same logic in reverse in 2019. When India revoked Article 370, dissolved the state of Jammu and Kashmir and split it into two Union Territories, Islamabad protested. It downgraded diplomatic ties, suspended trade, secured a closed-door consultation at the Security Council and delivered a fiery speech at the General Assembly. But the criticism was momentary – like a customary entry in the ledger.

Pakistan was caught in the predicament India is today. Any sustained campaign might have invited scrutiny of its own arrangements with Gilgit-Baltistan’s long constitutional limbo and ambitions of exerting more control over PaJK’s politics and resources.

Is it coincidence or convergence? Neither government is inclined to make human rights the measure of Kashmir policy, barring some tokenism, because that holds up the mirror to both. Both share an interest in control.

In Srinagar and Muzaffarabad alike, local politics has been hollowed out. In one case, a state was demoted to Union Territories governed largely from Delhi. In the other, a legislature includes seats elected from outside the territory, which help Islamabad-aligned parties hold power. On both sides, counter-terror law has become the default response to dissent.

Could there be a tacit understanding? There need not be a deal for there to be an understanding. Two states that agree on almost nothing appear to agree, in practice, that the people of Kashmir need to be controlled more. Whether it is the discordant noise at the UN, Pakistan’s ‘Kashmir resolution’ chant, brought out occasionally like a family heirloom, and India’s ‘normalcy’ declaration, it is meant for consumption of global or domestic audience, not the people of the region.

A world that has moved on

More striking still is how little the rest of the world seems to care. There was a time when Kashmir reached the table at international forums because of human rights, through UN reports, European parliamentary resolutions and congressional hearings. That moment has passed.

It is not for lack of trying. Kashmiri diaspora in the US was successful in pushing for congressional debates in 2019 but that is now buried history. There’s not even a feeble attempt to follow it up. Britain is home to a large community with roots in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, much of it from Mirpur, and around ten MPs share that heritage. Since June, they and others have secured a Westminster Hall debate, an early day motion, a question in the House of Lords and a letter to the Foreign Secretary signed by scores of MPs. There have been protests outside the Pakistan High Commission in London and in other cities with large presence.

The UK government’s answer was that it was monitoring developments closely, was concerned, encouraged peaceful dialogue and advised against travel. That’s a British way of parrying a question. The US under Trump speaks from both corners of its mouth or turns its back. The European powers are disinterested.

The reasons are not a lack of respect for civil liberties but strategic equations. Pakistan is a security partner that Western capitals are reluctant to unsettle. India is a vast market, a prospective trade partner and a strategic counterweight against China. Kashmir is a small fragment of territory where India, Pakistan and China meet, with a door onto Central Asia. It matters as geography. Its people, however, don’t.

Two kinds of distress

The silence covers two different crises. In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the crisis is acute and volatile. In Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, it is chronic even as it appears calmer. There is growing anxiety over new domicile rules and demographic change, over the loss of protected rights to jobs and land, and over control of resources. All of this is happening in a fragile Himalayan landscape strained by climate change and by roads, tunnels and dams built faster than the mountains can absorb them.

The symptoms differ, but the condition is the same: decisions about Kashmir are made far from Kashmir, by governments that are not accountable to the people of the region.

The world prefers to look away. International relations today run openly on transactions, not principles. Even in the past, morality was always applied selectively to Kashmir. Now it is hardly applied at all. Even that pretense is now fully discarded.

But shutting one’s eyes to a problem does not make it disappear. It only postpones a calamity. Anger and despondency are reaching a zenith on both sides of the LoC. It is only a matter of time before that triggers an eruption. Even as its form remains unknown, the consequences may be perilous, and the dangers could well spill beyond South Asia. The world is watching, but it prefers not to. And that’s problematic.