Print Email. Background Very early last month, Prime Minister Modi of India announced that he would abrogate Article of the Indian Constitution, which accorded Kashmir special privileges, removed the territory of Ladakh from its hyphenation with the state of Jammu and Kashmir and made Jammu and Kashmir a union territory.
Comment In his impassioned plea in the New York Times , dated 30 August, Mr Khan made several claims, some of which do not entirely align with the facts. Web: www. Plebiscite to decide future The same percentage backed the holding of a referendum to decide the future status of the Muslim-majority region, the survey, published in The Washington Post last week, said.
Based on the responses, I think it's safe to assume that many among the Kashmiri youth would prefer at least some autonomy Yelena Biberman from Skidmore College, the US Many who would like to see the region remain independent of both nations believe that the plebiscite, in its current form, might not adequately address popular aspirations.
More from News. World powers press for Libya elections but disputes remain. Why are giant conglomerates falling out of fashion? Qatar has no plan to normalise ties with Syria: Foreign minister. Most Read. Poland-Belarus border: What you need to know about the crisis. Americans keep quitting their jobs in record numbers. The last decade of resistance has been characterized by secular, democratic opposition to the policies of the Indian state, a reality that goes against all of the mainstream propaganda that Kashmir is another front in the war on terror.
The second contribution the book makes has to do with the staggering scale of violence that the Indian state perpetrates against the Kashmiri population the condition of the Pakistani-administered section, while poor, is not nearly as bloody.
Part of the reason that Kashmir is so brutally repressed is because the Indian state is now governed by an ideology that requires the fiction of a massive security threat in order to justify exorbitant expenditures on its military and police forces. This fiction is propped up, as Chatterji argues, by an ideology that amalgamates Hindu chauvinism, neoliberalism, and authoritarian statecraft. The result has been the wholesale criminalization of even the mildest form of public protest.
Most recently, the police filed sedition charges against the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education for showing a man in blue carrying a stick under the Urdu letter zoi for zaalim oppressor. The police have charged everyone affiliated with the book with criminal conspiracy, defamation, and provocation with the intent to breach peace, since the innocuous depiction was assumed to be a police officer.
The unfortunate reality in Kashmir is that it is extremely similar to Palestine, where the indigenous population lacks the necessary social force to repel the violence of occupation forces and are thus forced into taking part in the opportunistic diplomacy of larger states around them.
But just as the Palestinians have allies in the surrounding states, the Kashmiris have allies in both Pakistan and India who have no interest in occupation, in fact whose lives would immediately be improved if both Pakistan and India were to stop spending Himalayan sums on security personnel and instead spend money on eradicating poverty. The Indian and Pakistani working classes have common enemies—their own states—and the end to the occupation in Kashmir will only be the result of their unified struggle.
This, though, is only the slightest of criticisms; the spirit if not the explicit argument of the Arab Spring runs throughout this entire book. Skip to main content. Asia and Pacific. Review by Snehal Shingavi. India controls around 45 percent of the former princely state, Pakistan around a third and China the rest, a largely uninhabited slice of high-altitude desert.
People in 10 Indian and 10 Pakistani cities were also interviewed. Indians were keener to keep control of the region than Pakistanis -- 67 percent of urban Indians think it should be ruled from New Delhi, against 48 percent of Pakistanis who wanted Islamabad to take full control, according to the poll.
Another 47 percent of Pakistanis said they supported independence for Kashmir.
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