The whole of Jammu & Kashmir has been burning these past three months. Dozens of people have lost their lives in the course of police and army firing on demonstrators in Jammu and in the Kashmir Valley in the past few weeks.

Passions have been aroused over the Amarnath yatra land acquisition controversy. At the same time, people have given vent to their grievances and feelings of discrimination through mass protests.

In the Kashmir Valley, people have been languishing under the brutal army rule for decades. For the past five years, the Congress led government at the centre has been making out that “normalcy” has been restored and that people of the Valley have been made to submit and have accepted their forcible integration into India. The events of the past three months have shown what a big lie this is. Today lakhs of people in Srinagar and other parts of the Valley are participating in protests, condemning state terrorism, demanding the opening of trade to Pakistan occupied Kashmir through the Srinagar Muzaffarabad road and Azadi – freedom and independence. 

In the Jammu region, the people have come out on the streets opposing the discrimination they have felt in the past 60 years, as part of the state of Jammu & Kashmir, and as part of India. At the same time, Congress and BJP are busy whipping up hysteria among the people of Jammu, against the people of the Kashmir Valley, blaming the people of the Valley for the problems of the people of Jammu. Simultaneously, all over India, the BJP has been systematically inflaming communal passions over the Amarnath yatra land acquisition issue.

Who is responsible?

Who is responsible for the present situation in Jammu & Kashmir? Who is responsible for the communalisation of the polity all over the country at this time? Clearly, the Indian ruling class and its main political parties, the Congress and BJP are squarely responsible for this state of affairs.

Elections in Jammu & Kashmir are due in a month’s time. But more importantly, state assembly elections are due in major states in North India before the end of the year, and general elections are due early next year. The two main parties of the bourgeoisie are deliberately and cynically setting Jammu & Kashmir on fire with an eye on these elections. They want to paralyse and disorient the people and divide the polity between themselves. Both parties see possibilities of using the situation to their own advantage.  This is the reason they are inflaming the situation.

The Amarnath yatra is not the problem. Neither are the people of Jammu or the Kashmir Valley the problem. Despite the state terrorism and violence that has characterised  Kashmir valley over the past many years, one thing was clear — the people of Kashmir had no problem with the Amarnath yatra and lakhs of pilgrims from all over India have made this yatra every year, with full support of the people of the Kashmir Valley.

Political agenda of the ruling class

The Indian ruling class has a political agenda behind systematically upgrading the Amarnath yatra in the past four years. This up gradation has not only impinged on the economic interests of people who have traditionally been involved in servicing the pilgrims, it has also involved forcible taking over of land and extending the duration of the yatra to two months. All this has snowballed into resentment in the Kashmir Valley

What is this political agenda? For 60 years, the Indian ruling class has refused to address the concerns of the Kashmiri people, including their demand for self determination. Kashmir has been turned into an army camp, and tens of thousands of Kashmiri women have been raped and Kashmiri people murdered by the armed forces. In these conditions, the ruling class wants the Amarnath yatra to be a grand symbol of the occupation of Kashmir by the Indian state, the colonisation of Kashmir by the Indian state, for the “benefit” of the people of India of the Hindu faith. It wants support for the occupation of Kashmir from the masses of ordinary religious minded people all over the country, who are not aware of the pain and suffering of the Kashmiri people under the savage rule of the armed forces.  This is the reason the plan was hatched to take over land along the yatra route and convert the yatra and the route into a showpiece and symbol of the Centre's rule over Kashmir. When the people of Kashmir opposed the land takeover, this was immediately used to carry out massive attacks on the Kashmiri people, including spreading the lie that the Kashmiri people were opposed to the yatra.

The brutal and forcible occupation of Jammu & Kashmir by the Indian armed forces against the will of the people, is unacceptable. The people of Kashmir have been consistently asserting their right to self determination, including and upto secession. Over the years, the Indian ruling class has revealed that it is only concerned about the beautiful land of Jammu & Kashmir and its military strategic importance, and not about the people. This is the case in all the three regions of Jammu & Kashmir — the Kashmir Valley, the Jammu region, and Ladakh. At the same time, the ruling class has cynically tried to divide the state on regional and religious lines, through its political parties like Congress and BJP.

Jammu & Kashmir is a region of strategic importance, situated at the nodal point of Pakistan, India, Tibet and Central Asia. The partition of India was accompanied by the partition of Jammu & Kashmir, which the people have never accepted. The Anglo American imperialists for long used the Kashmir problem to set India and Pakistan against each other, and to pressurise India. In recent years, as part of the strategic agreement between US and India, US has decided to affirm the line of control dividing Jammu & Kashmir between India and Pakistan as the defacto border. In other words, US has stopped its talk of supporting self determination for Kashmiri people. US has also pressurised Pakistan into dropping its open claim to that portion of Kashmir which is under Indian control.

In this situation, the Indian ruling class thinks it can drop even the pretence of addressing the problems of the Kashmiri people and can ride roughshod over their sentiments and concerns. This is one of the reasons it has no problems with the inflaming of passions over the Amarnath yatra — it is cynically confident that its strategic interests will not suffer.

There can be no denying that the Kashmiri people are victims of oppression and discrimination at the hands of the central state. The people of the Jammu region are also victims, in their own way, victims of oppression and discrimination by the central state. They have been fed the lie that allegedly the source of their problems is the Kashmiri people. They must reject this lie. Like the British did during the colonial era, the Indian ruling class has pursued the policy of setting people of one region against another, one caste or religion against another, one nation against another. The working class and people must not fall victim to this policy.

The enemy of all the peoples of India is the Indian ruling class and the central state under its control. This ruling class is pursuing its imperialist agenda by exploiting and oppressing all the peoples, and smashing their unity. All the peoples of India must unite around the demand for a fundamental reorganisation of the Indian Union, as a voluntary union of nations and peoples, which will be of benefit to each and every people, and protect them from imperialist marauders. The rights of each constituent people and nation, including the right to secede from the union, must be enshrined in the law of the land and made enforceable.