The Kashmir Question: Against Terrorism
Dear Naoise Oboyle
I wish to challenge the statements and presumptions that you feature in your pages on the Kashmir Question. I assume that you are a honest person who will not tell lies deliberately, and so I would like to show that these statements and underlying presumptions are false, with the hope that, after seeing the refutations and verifying the facts, you will correct these statements.
Yours truly,
Prakash Mascarenhas, Bombay, India.
General Directory
Kashmir's Muslim majority should have been incorporated into Pakistan after the British withdrawal from India. Despite the wishes of the population for an independent state India claims sovereignity and maintains the largest occupation force in the world...
Refutation: On what basis is it to be presumed that the Kingdom of Jammu & Kashmir was to be incorporated into Pakistan?
Index
Tensions between Hindus and Muslims were extremely high when Britain withdrew from their most populated colony in 1947. In a bid to protect the Muslim minority, who feared persecution and preferred to rule themselves, the colony was divided into two states, Pakistan and India, with majority Muslim states to join the former and majority Hindu states to join the latter. However, despite a Muslim majority and a desire of the people to be incorporated into Pakistan, the Hindu leader declared Independence and when the people rose against him called on India to intervene.
The UN brokered a deal between India and Pakistan in 1948 involving a referendum, but due to continuing Indian military presence and the upsurge in militant activity this has been impossible.
Refutation: Kindly specify legal documents that state that "majority Muslim states were to join Pakistan and majority Hindu states to join India." As a matter of fact, with the lapse of English paramountcy, the states became Independent entities, and were specifically told that. They had no obligations whatsover, in written law, towards either India or Pakistan.
Furthermore, the statement that Pakistan was created "in a bid to protect the Muslim minority, who feared persecution and preferred to rule themselves..." As a matter of fact, at no time during the English rule or immediately prior to that, when the Muslims ruled India for some near eight centuries, were they persecuted by the Hindus; on the contrary, they always brutually persecuted the Hindus and others. Pakistan was created, not to protect the Muslims, but because Muslims everywhere in the world deny, following their religion, their duties to their homeland and affirm that they constitute a separate nation, the Muslims.
When British India was partitioned, Pakistan was created by being carved out. India did not come into being in 1947. That is the most absurd thought possible. India is millenia old and a natural civilization. Pakistan is an artificial creation, born out of treason - a falsehood and a lie.
Naoise, let me ask you, if one of your compatriots adopted Islam does he cease to belong to his original ethnic group and become member of a new? If this were true, then, for those who keep on changing their creedal allegiance, and there are some such, their nationality also keeps on changing all the time. Now is this not absurd? If it is absurd for your ethnic group, is it not also absurd for India? It is a fact that all men of goodwill will recognize that Pakistan is an act of evil, an act of treason and secession. Why, the Confederates had a better title to secede from Lincoln's USA then the Indian Muslims, and yet, Lincoln refused to recognize the rights of the Confederates to secede! Ditto for the Soderbund of Switzerland. Why then, is what is wrong and unjust for America or Switzerland, or any other country, just and acceptable for India?
Tell me, if both India and Pakistan came into being in 1947, why is it that only Pakistan had to make an application to the UN for membership, while India continued as before? Do you understand legal principles? Do you know what is a 'successor state' and why the UN treated independent India as the successor state of its founding member, the English East Indian Empire, but not Pakistan?
You claim that the referendum was not held because of India's non-co-operation. Have you checked your facts? The UN, in its first resolution, required Pakistan to withdraw, and after that India would demilitarize (not withdraw, because the UN recognized India's claim of administration) and conduct the referendum. Pakistan did not comply. The UN then passed a second resolution that permitted Pakistan also to merely demilitarize, not withdraw. However, Pakistan did not comply, again. Pakistan wants the referendum only in the parts that are under Indian control.
You keep on affirming that Pakistan has behaved with honour towards the territory and its people, and India dishonourably. Now, when a person states something that are contrary to the known and verified facts, then either he is a shameless liar or is misinformed. At this moment, I will not presume that you are lying.
Pakistan intervened and invaded the state, claiming to assist its citizens in liberating themselves. Let us see how Pakistan has behaved vis-a-vis this principle.
Pakistan has erected a part of the territory it seized into a nominally sovereign state, Azad Jammu & Kashmir. A much larger part has been summarily annexed, without even the pretence of a referendum of popular wishes, to constitute its Federally Administered 'Northern Areas.' Yet another part has been gratuituously gifted to Communist China without even the pretence of consulting the people of the territory in its control. So much for Pakistan's much vaunted love of plebiscites.
You state that the people of Kashmir desire to be free from India, and that is true. It is also true that the Indian Army and other forces, in fighting to prevent a secession, invasion by Pakistan and annexation to Pakistan, have committed atrocities - none of which, by the way, are any where even near approaching in magnitude and scale to the Rape of Baramulla, when the Pakistanis raped Kashmiri Muslim and Hindu women, European women and Christian nuns on a mass scale during the original invasion of 1947.
None of these atrocities however justify secession. The Secessionist movement preceded these atrocities.
The real cause of the Secessionist movement, as with the Pakistan movement, was and is not some ethnic dispute, but a treasonable refusal by Muslim members of the same ethnic group to remain together with their compatriots, demanding instead to be constituted into separate provinces and independent states merely because they are Muslim.
Therefore, I make to you and your friends who support the cause of Kashmirian secession this challenge: put your money where your mouths are, and sign the petition that I have drawn up, at Petition for Peace In Kashmir, and passing it on to your respective governments, pressure them to enact it into law and to have it passed as a Convention in the UN.
If your countries pass this principle, that Muslims have the natural right to secede and form their own new countries merely because they are Muslims, and therefore not members of their original ethnic groups, into law and make it a UN Convention, so that it becomes binding on all, and so that it becomes the law in your countries, then, and only then will India withdraw unconditionally from Kashmir, leaving it to decide its own fate.
What do you say, are you up to this challenge?