August 25 – Massive protest marches continue to challenge the fascist Indian occupation of Kashmir.
Since late July, the Indian government has moved tens of thousands of additional troops into Kashmir. This was already the most heavily militarized region in the world.
Kashmir has been on lockdown with curfews and military violence. Atrocities include the use of pellet guns that have blinded civilians, among them children. Communications have been cut off. There have been mass arrests across the state.
British imperialism divided India from Pakistan in 1947. Since then, capitalist rulers of India, Pakistan and China have fought over Kashmir. This conflict has always been a convenient prop for these governments to distract their population from economic issues.
A war in 1962 between India and China led to China’s occupation of the eastern part of Kashmir. This area is administered by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is a crucial part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Water: A Strategic Resource
Often overlooked is the strategic importance of Kashmir in India-Pakistan water wars. Pakistan is entirely dependent on the Indus river and its tributaries.
The Indus river originates in the Tibetan Plateau in China. It passes through Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) before entering Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and then heading southward to meet the Arabian Sea at Karachi. All five tributaries of the Indus originate in IOK.
The 1960 India-Pakistan Indus Water Treaty has held through the wars of 1965 and 1971. This treaty gives control of the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab rivers to Pakistan and the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej to India. However, India is the source of all the major rivers on which Pakistan depends entirely.
India and Pakistan also share access to the Indus basin aquifer (a rock formation that holds groundwater). Half of Pakistan’s agricultural water supply comes from this aquifer. Because of population pressure, and the fact that the Indian and Pakistani governments only meter the power required to pump water out of the aquifer and not the water itself, this aquifer is well on its way to depletion.
Global warming is accelerating and the trans-Himalayan and Himalayan glaciers are melting faster. Monsoons are becoming increasingly unreliable. Thus, control of Kashmir’s water and hydroelectric potential will be of increasing leverage in capitalist conflicts.
Communism will have no nations. Workers will collaborate globally to make the best use of scarce resources like water to benefit the masses. Today ICWP is organizing on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. Comrades in Pakistan are reaching out to workers from China. Our party is the nucleus of a communist world without borders or capitalist exploitation.
Fascist Attacks and the Geopolitics of Exploitation
The northern part of Kashmir is strategically important to China’s BRI, including the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The Karakoram Highway that links China and Pakistan runs through this terrain. It allows Chinese goods to travel to the Arabian Sea.
Chinese and Pakistani capitalists have begun to exploit their occupied parts of Kashmir. Indian capitalists have not been able to do the same because a provision of Article 370 in the Indian Constitution prevents non-Kashmiris from buying land in Kashmir.
Fascist Indian Prime Minister Modi just cancelled Article 370. Indian Occupied Kashmir is now split into two union territories, giving complete control to the Central government of India. Indian capitalists like Ambani of Reliance Industries hardly blinked before announcing plans to “develop” Kashmir.
Sharpening competition between Indian and Chinese imperialists has led India’s fascist government to intensify attacks on Muslims. This is not only in Kashmir but also Assam, which borders China. The Indian rulers plan to deny citizenship to Indian Muslims living in Assam. Their plans for “ethnic cleansing” would replace Muslims with Hindu migrants from other countries.
Indian capitalists’ exploitative “development” of Kashmir and Assam could allow India to participate in the CPEC, and thereby in BRI. This, while maintaining a facade of opposition to China and the BRI in line with an increasingly unreliable US.
Meanwhile, the Indian military has established a regime of increased brutality in IOK. It’s similar to the Israeli treatment of Palestine. It is supported by an increasingly Hindu-nationalist population fed on a mythology of Hindu victimhood at the hands of Muslims.
Kashmir’s plight is a perfect example of the brutality of global capitalism that invents and exploits historic fissures between sections of the working class to drive them apart.
As climate change and capitalist crises intensify, only communist revolution can prevent what is happening in Kashmir from becoming the norm across the world. Only communism can guarantee a peaceful future for the planet.