Ambassador Naghmana A. Hashmi

The end of World War II saw the process of decolonization gather stream and the emergence of new states started in earnest. However, in almost all regions the departing colonial powers, especially the British, left behind unresolved territorial and border issues that have plagued the concerned states and regions for over seven decades, blocking their progress and socioeconomic development. These unresolved issues have also compromised the security and peace of the relevant regions with the specter of unrest and war ever present.

The problems of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) and Palestine also have their genesis in this policy and date back to 1947 when the nation states of Pakistan, India, and Israel were established. This year scars the Kashmiris and Palestinians who are still suffering and yearning for freedom and for the realization of the right to self-determination.

Palestinians have been dispossessed of their territory with millions forced into exile. The Muslim majority Kashmir was unlawfully handed over by the unpopular Hindu ruler without the legitimacy of popular vote to the Indian state on October 26, 1947. The United Nations (UN) resolution of 1948 calls for a plebiscite in Kashmir, which was never facilitated by the Indian state. Therefore, Israel and India both initiated the colonial occupation of Palestine and Kashmir which has continued even after the lapse of seven long painful decades for the two oppressed peoples. Both India and Israel are thus occupiers and have usurped territories belonging to their rightful inhabitants.

The people of both these regions have suffered prolonged and oppressive occupation marked by the systematic and serious violations of international human rights bordering on genocide. Both the peoples of Palestine and Kashmir were promised self-determination by the UN in 1948. The Palestinians have not yet attained their state and the Kashmiris have not yet had the opportunity to vote on their preference to either become part of India or Pakistan.

The failure of the UN to enforce its decisions relating to Palestine and Kashmir have directly resulted in the instability of South Asia and Middle East, leading to military conflicts in both these regions. There have been several major military conflicts in the Middle East in the past seven decades and many smaller skirmishes that can be linked in to the failure to provide a homeland for the Palestinian people. Similarly in South Asia, the failure of the UN to provide the right of self-determination to the people of Kashmir has led directly to two major wars between India and Pakistan and the continued struggle by the Kashmiris in IIOJK to free themselves of the yoke of occupation by India. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in these conflicts and millions have been injured. The toll on civilian infrastructure and people’s lives is incalculable.

But death and devastation are not the only consequences of the failure to resolve the question of self-determination of the Palestinian and Kashmiri peoples. Stunted economic growth and lack of economic opportunities and development are the natural results of these unresolved national questions along with the brutal policies of the occupiers. In Palestine, the economy of the West Bank has basically stagnated over the past three decades as the Israeli government has fenced in the Palestinians with the infamous and illegal apartheid wall and with a system of Jewish-only settlements and roads, choking the participation of West Bank Palestinians in the Israeli and other Middle Eastern economies. In IIOJK, the negative economic consequences of the illegal occupation are likewise dire. On top of the indignity of brutal occupation, poverty, unemployment, and the lack of economic opportunity has further aggravated the situation.

As the Palestinians and Kashmiris continue to resist an occupation which has been emboldened by the world’s silence to transform into a settler movement, the Indian and Israeli governments are actively involved in altering the population balance in the occupied territories. Both regimes, led by Hindutva and Zionist ideologies, are conducting what is simply blatant demographic engineering in the Kashmir Valley and Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) by settling more Hindus and Jews in those respective territories, stroking the flames of anger even further.

In attempts to harness more control over both regions and create justifications for occupying those lands, both India and Israel have moved settlers who are not of the majority religion or ethnicity into the occupied territories. Successive Israeli governments have established, maintained, and expanded settlements and their infrastructure in to the Palestinian occupied territory. In order to allow the establishment of those settlements, Israel has extended its domestic legal jurisdiction into occupied Palestine. It has violated the narrow remit it has as an administrator by replacing the jurisdiction of Palestinian courts with Israeli military courts and has transferred its own population into the territory.

Similarly, India has remained an occupying power over the territory since 1947 with no legal title to Jammu and Kashmir. Two provisions in the Indian constitution, Article 370 and Article 35A, retained Kashmir’s autonomy and recognized its special status. Article 370 was added to India’s Constitution in 1949. It allows Jammu and Kashmir to have its own constitution, a separate flag, and independence over all matters except foreign affairs, defense and communications. This autonomy has been greatly eroded in practice over recent decades. Taking inspiration from the settlement policy of Israel, India also unlawfully annexed Jammu and Kashmir by rendering it a Union Territory on August 5, 2019, to be directly ruled by the Central Government, an act that is in violation of the international law. The revocation of Article 370 extends key provision added under it – Article 35A. This gave special privileges to the permanent residents, including state government jobs and the exclusive right to own property in Jammu and Kashmir. It was intended to protect the state’s distinct demographic character as the only Muslim-majority state in India and preserved the rights of the ‘permanent residents’ of Kashmir from displacement and any attempts to change the demographics of the state.

India has also passed domicile laws allowing non-locals to permanently reside and buy property and land in Jammu and Kashmir, as well as adding Hindi as an official language proposes to change the demographics of the state entirely. In doing so, India is transferring its own civilian population into the occupied territory in violation of Article 49 by creating a favourable legal and factual framework for settlement. The Modi government has also proposed Kashmiri pandit (Hindu) settlements in Jammu and Kashmir as well as soldiers’ colonies for retired members of the Armed Forces. These proposals have been described as rendering explicit the ‘colonizing aim’ of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). There is no doubt that the revocation of Article 370 and Article 35A are violations of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and unlawful keeping in view the disputed nature of the territory.

The international law is clear that forced evictions are not permissible. Principle 6 of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement guarantees all humans the protection from arbitrary displacement from their homes or places of habitual residence. They are also in violation of Article 11 of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that guarantees the right to an adequate standard of living which includes housing, and in violation of Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits the building of illegal settlements.

The settlements, both in the occupied territories of Kashmir and Palestine, are not of a temporary nature. They do not benefit the peoples of Palestine and IIOJK and do not serve the legitimate security needs of the occupying power. Furthermore, the settlements depend on large-scale appropriation and destruction of private and state property of the original residents. These settlements are therefore created with the sole purpose of permanently establishing Jewish-Israelis and Hindu-Indians on the occupied land. This unlawful appropriation of property by an occupying power amounts to ‘pillage’, which is prohibited in The Hague Regulations and fourth Geneva Convention.

These occupations have persisted with impunity, with Israel and India both promoting the false terrorism narrative against the occupied and oppressed peoples. As Israel commits more actions and India becomes more like a colonial power, there is only one option left which international law needs to facilitate – that of the right to resist. It is believed that the international law not only recognizes armed struggle against occupation, but specifically endorses it. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 37/43 entitles an occupied people to resist occupying forces by all lawful means. It reaffirms “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

A key question in both the Palestinian and Kashmiri contexts is whether international law allows subjugated peoples the right to resist an occupation. Traditional international law has been seen as silent on the issue, in that it does not forbid the civilian population from committing acts of resistance, but leaves the occupying power free to punish those acts. However, this classic interpretation has been challenged by the rise of the right to self-determination. Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that “All peoples have the right to self-determination”, the right to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development”.

It is interesting to see how India’s policy towards Israel has evolved and changed during the last seven decades and how it draws inspiration from the Israeli tyrannical policies and tactics to tighten its own grip on IIOJK.

Ironically, while India has taken Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians as a framework in regards to the subjugation of the people of Kashmir along with being an ardent supporter of Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, their leaders were once supporters of Nazism and Hitler’s policies against the Jews. Speeches made by Savarkar during 1937-1942 as the president of Hindu Mahasabha – the period during which he commented on Indian foreign policy – as collected by Italian researcher Marzia Casolari, reflect his adulation for Hitler. He is believed to have said, “The very fact that Germany or Italy has so wonderfully recovered and grown so powerful as never before at the touch of Nazi or Fascist magical wand is enough to prove that those political ‘isms’ were the most congenial tonics their health demanded.”

Going as far as expressing their admiration for the Nazi regime and using Hindutva as a doctrine to deny the Indian Muslims of their civil rights, both ideologies are based on their concept of a nation that is religiously homogenous and all those not following the same religion are relegated to second tier citizens and non-members of their nation.

Immediately after independence, India sought friendlier relations with the Arab states and aligned itself with the third world Non-Aligned Movement, viewing Israel as a proxy of Western imperial powers. Indeed Gandhi himself believed that the Zionist state was a colonial enterprise. In November 1947, the Indian delegate to the General Assembly argued for a national Arab-Jewish state in Palestine and voted against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine which involved splitting the country into a larger Jewish state and a smaller Arab state.

India also became the first non-Arab state to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974 and later became one of the first countries to recognize the state of Palestine in 1988.

However, India’s approach changed after the end of the Cold War when its leaders rethought their global strategy. In 1992, India and Israel opened their first bilateral diplomatic missions and started a transactional relationship, primarily cooperating over military and technology contracts. Since then, the countries have found mutual areas of interest, namely in intelligence sharing and countering terrorism. In the years since Modi’s election, the two countries have become ever closer with reports that Modi is trying to ‘de-hyphenate’ the Israel-Palestine issue in order to create ties with Israel. In the years since Modi’s election, the two countries have become ever closer with reports that Modi is trying to ‘de-hyphenate’ the Israel-Palestine issue in order to create ties with Israel.

India and Israel have not only drawn closer but are outdoing each other in their horrendous policy of the subjugation of Muslims in IIOJK and Gaza. It would not be wrong to say that Hindu BJP nationalists have drawn inspiration from Zionist Israel and have taken a page out of the policy book of Israel for converting IIOJK into a living hell. India’s policy of forcefully terrorizing the population through innovative harassment measures, brute force, and systematically altering the demographics is a reflection of Israel’s policy in Palestine.

It is therefore not surprising that Modi and Netanyahu are close personal friends. On his visit to Israel in 2017, Modi was warmly welcomed by Netanyahu with the words, “Prime Minister Modi, we have been waiting for you for a long time, almost 70 years… We view you as a kindred spirit.” The two nations are passionate about their brutal occupations of Kashmir and Palestine.

The India-Israel alliance is often described as a full-blown romance, but the ongoing brutal persecution of the Kashmiris and Palestinians has made this a bloody affair for decades. India has continuously increased the purchase of arms from Israel. India is one of Israel’s biggest arms exports clients, spending billions of dollars since the 1960s to import weapons and technology from Israel. Indian police forces have also been receiving training in Israel in the recent years in newer and more brutal techniques to subjugate the unarmed Kashmiris in an effort to break their spirit.

It may be recalled that Modi was denied a visa to the U.S. in 2005 for his alleged responsibility over the mass murder of Muslims during the Gujarat riots. His nickname, the “Butcher of Gujarat”, comes from that 2002 event. He can now add the title of the “Butcher of Kashmir” to his name – even though that title fits previous Indian Prime Ministers as well. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like his predecessors, can be named the “Butcher of Palestinians” as he presided over the brutal bombing of Gaza in 2014 that killed 2,100 Palestinians, a third of them being children.

With the rapidly emerging geoeconomic and geostrategic realignments and the heightened competition between China and the USA, Asia, particularly South Asia, once again finds itself in the eye of the storm. With India now securely lodged in the Western camp and its strategic and economic interests aligned with the USA, it remains to be seen if any meaningful pressure can be put on India on the issue of IIOJK.

The writer has served as an Ambassador to China, European Union, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland. She has also authored and edited several books including Magnificent Pakistan, Pakistan-China All Weather Friendship, and Lost Cities of Indus.
E-mail: naghmanahashmi40@gmail.com

Published in Hilal Magazine