Calling the bluff of Pakistan lobby

KS Team

The "Knoxville News-Sentinel" of the U.S.A. carried on February 5, 1995, a story by Mr. B.J. Cutler, Foreign Affairs Columnist of Scripps Howard News Service, castigating India, for on Muslims in Kashmir and the U.S.A. for "condoning India's crimes against humanity"

Prof. S.L. Pandit, who contributes frequently to the columns of 'Koshur Samachar', wrote to the "News-Sentinel" repudiating point by point the "mistaken notions and statements" of Mr. Cutler. Mr. Cutler's story and Prof. Pandit's reply are reproduced hereunder in full for information of KS readers:

The Story:

Politicians and bureaucrats in New Delhi and their well-wishers in the United States are fond of referring to India as the world's largest democracy.

In theory, India is democratic. It holds elections, and often they are not rigged. People get arrested and sometimes receive fair trials-after rotting in jail from five to 10 years. Feudal landowners sometimes let the lower castes go to the polling places.

But for the 5 million Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir state, the only state in mostly Hindu India with an Islamic majority, the nation is less than a quasi-democracy. It is a large concentration camp.

When the subcontinent gained independence from Britain in 1947 and broke into India and Pakistan, New Delhi persuaded the Maharajah of Kashmir, a Hindu, to join India. His subjects were to vote on their future at a later date.

A much later date. Though a 1949 United Nations resolution called for a plebiscite, one hasn't been held yet.

The reason is simple. If New Delhi let the Kashmiris say what they wanted, they would choose to join Muslim Pakistan or to be independent.

Apologists for India's imperial policy say that if Kashmir was allowed to leave, other separatist-minded states like Punjab, Assam and Tamil Nadu would also seek to go free.

This sounds like Boris Yeltsin's rationale for bombing Chechnya into a gravel pit. If he did not "destroy Chechnya in order to save it," other non- Russian parts of the empire would try to slip the Kremlin's yoke.

In any case India's security forces are committing widespread atrocities against the Kashmiri people and they are not being held accountable by world opinion.

Perhaps there is a reason India gets a free ride in Washington. It has moralised so long and loudly about America's misdeeds-Vietnam, Cuba, the treatment of blacks in the South-that the administration fails to see democratic India as the equal of dictatorial China in violating human rights.

Since 1989, when Pakistan-backed Muslim militants rebelled in Kashmir, between 10,000 and 20,000 persons have been killed. Most of them were civilian victims of the brutal, trigger-happy Indian Border Security Forces.

Brian Brown, a lawyer for the human rights organization Freedom House, reports that "those forces routinely torture, kidnap and rape innocent Muslims with impunity, and the Jammu and Kashmir police have been stripped of any real power to investigate the crimes."

For its part, the human rights group Amnesty International estimates that 715 Kashmiris have been tortured or shot to death while in government custody since early 1990,

"The number of Kashmiris who have died in custody has reached alarming proportions," it said.

During the entire Cold War, India was a diplomatically client state and arms customer of the Soviet Union. Since Moscow's decline, Washington has allowed India to slither to its side and is busy signing military and trade agreements. Little is said about human rights.

Last month India marked its national day with a grand reception at its embassy in Washington. The guests, with broad smiles and hearty handshakes, included Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Defence Secretary William Perry, Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary.

Did it occur to them that their friendly presence indirectly condoned India's crimes against humanity? Of course not.

The Reply:

Column on India, Muslims needed some clarifications

Editor, The News-Sentinel:

By chance I came to read a column (by BJ. Cutler), "India's atrocities on Muslims ignored," in the Feb. 5 edition of your newspaper.

suppose I may claim to know as much about Kashmir as is humanly possible for one who has spent most of his working life there and whose countless generations of ancestors had been living in peace in the valley in spite of recurring periods of turmoil from the 15th century to almost the present day.

Hence, I should like to draw the attention of your readers to a few mistaken notions and statements made in the column referred to above:

As a native Kashmiri, I do not claim to hold any brief for the unfailing and unbroken correctness of the governments in New Delhi and in Srinagar in dealing with the Muslims of the state. But it is altogether wrong to assert that the accession of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was manipulated between the Maharaja and New Delhi in October 1947.

In fact, this action was precipitated by the incursion of utterly undisciplined hordes of frontier Pathan tribesmen into the valley and that their indiscriminate orgies of killing, looting and rape could be turned back only after the Indian armed forces were flown into the territory following the legal accession of the state to India by the Maharaja.

Pakistan, having initially denied any complicity in these raids, could not, only a few months later, conceal from the visiting members of the United Nations commission the presence of their regular forces in the fighting.

When finally a United Nations sponsored cease- fire was accepted by both India and Pakistan by January 1949, it was proposed to hold a plebiscite after the Pakistani troops had completely vacated the state. Following years of fruitless negotiations, this basic premise could not be realised.

The current turmoil unleashed towards the close of 1989 is sponsored by Pakistan, and a large number of the so-called militants are not Kashmiris but foreigners of diverse groups using the vast resources of sophisticated weapons dumped into Pakistan by the United States government to counter the use of military force by the U.S.S.R. against the Afghan people.

The present situation in Kashmir is a very unhappy one for most Kashmiris, involving casualties of innocent civilians and causing senseless destruction on a vast scale of both private and public property by the militants. If the Indian authorities had planned to resort to the sort of ruthless action undertaken by Russia in Chechnya, one may wonder why they have waited more than five years to do so.

Finally, I wonder how many educated Americans know that not only practically all the non-Muslim minorities but also a considerable number of peace-loving and secular-minded Kashmiri Muslims have been driven out of the valley to seek security and shelter in other parts of free, democratic and secular India.

A displaced Kashmiri living in New Delhi

The News-Sentinel grants an exception to our policy of running only signed letters. We have the name and address of the letter-writer, but we are withholding his name to protect his family in India. - The Editor

(KS readers may also like to know that Prof. Pandit is scheduled to deliver half-a-dozen lectures at the Department of History of a leading educational institution in Wheeling, WV, U.S.A. about Indian Heritage and its current problems. Knowing Prof. Pandit's scholarship and vast study one can confidently hope and pray that he succeeds in correcting adequately the perceptions that his educated audiences might have about India and Kashmir.)

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Courtesy: June 1995 Kosher Samachar