DR NYLA ALI
The people of Kashmir have tried, time and again, to translate themselves from passive recipients of violence, legitimated by legislations of the physically and psychologically removed parliaments of India and Pakistan, into subjects who recognise that they can exercise agency and take control of their destinies. They march forward with a refusal to allow history to be imposed on them, and attempt to take charge of their own social and political destinies. The confluence of religious nationalism, secular nationalism and ethnic nationalism create the complexity of the Kashmir issue.
Over the years, successive Congress governments of the Indian Union may have made attempts to highlight the purported illegitimacy of Article 370, but they have taken no serious measures to revoke it from the Constitution of India. Surprisingly, even the Hindu right-wing BJP, when it assumed power in New Delhi, avoided succumbing to the pressure put on it by its more fanatical cohorts to eradicate the special status enjoyed by the Muslim-dominated state of J& K. India’s policy vis-à-vis Kashmir was influenced by other variables. Pakistan’s formal political alignment with the United States of America motivated the Soviet Union, in the 1950s, to overtly support the Indian stance towards Kashmir. The Soviet premier Khrushchev made explicit his government’s pro-India position on Kashmir in 1955, when he belligerently declared in Srinagar, the heartland of the Kashmir Valley, that “the people of Jammu and Kashmir want to work for the well-being of their beloved country — the Republic of India. The people of Kashmir do not want to become toys in the hands of imperialist powers. This is exactly what some powers are trying to do by supporting Pakistan on the so-called Kashmir question. It made us very sad when imperialist powers succeeded in bringing about the partition of India. . . . That Kashmir is one of the States of the Republic of India has already been decided by the people of Kashmir.”
The explicit political support of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era bolstered Jawaharlal Nehru’s courage, and, in 1956, Nehru reneged on his earlier “international commitments” on the floor of the Indian parliament.
He proclaimed the legitimacy of the accession of Kashmir to India in 1947, which ostensibly had been ratified by the Constituent Assembly of J & K in 1954. Nehru’s well-thought-out strategy was deployed in full measure when the Soviet Union vetoed the demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir made at a meeting of the UN Security Council convened at Pakistan’s behest. It was in 1953 that Pakistan initiated negotiations with the USA for military assistance. Bakshi protested that “America might arm Pakistan or help her in any other way, but Kashmir will never form part of Pakistan.”. Nehru vehemently warned Pakistan and the US that, “it is not open [to Pakistan] to do anything on Kashmir territory, least of all to give bases.” He expressly declared that the agreement between him and the Pakistani Premier Mohammad Ali Jinnah regarding the Kashmir issue would change if Pakistan received military aid from the US.
Subsequent to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, India lost its powerful ally. India’s relations with the US reeked of distrust and paranoia at the time. This worsened when senior officials in the first Clinton administration questioned the legality of the status of Kashmir as a part of the Indian Union. The non-proliferation agenda of the US in South Asia actively undermined India’s proliferation strategy in the early and mid-1990s. Washington’s agenda was propelled by the fear that South Asia had burgeoning potential for a nuclear war in the future. The US adopted the policy of persuading both India and Pakistan to actively participate in the non-proliferation regime by agreeing to comply with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and to an interim cap on fissile-material production.
