Kashmiris protest ongoing crackdown in Kashmir.

India’s ultra-right prime minister Modi has staged an overnight coup abolishing Kashmir’s statehood and autonomous status, cutting all its communication links and flooding it with occupation troops, writes Roger Silverman in Britain. 

Relic of British imperialism
Like Palestine, Kashmir is a living mangled relic of the crimes of British imperialism, which wantonly promoted internecine communal hatred (just as also in Ireland and wherever else

Netanyahu and Modi
Just as British imperialism used divide and conquer from Palestine to India, so today the bigoted inheritors of that policy meet on friendly terms.

it set foot) in order to “divide and rule”. When Britain was forced to abandon its rule over the Indian subcontinent, it made sure that its departure, as in Palestine and Ireland, was marked by a brutal partition and a consequent orgy of bloodletting whipped up by Hindu and Muslim gangsters and demagogues. 

The proof of the guilt of the British raj for this bloodbath is that the massive revolution which shook the entire subcontinent in 1946 was an explicitly united anti-communal movement waged in defence of the leaders of the “Indian National Army” – a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh – who were put on a show trial. The popular response was a

Nor should Americans forget that the supposed “peace candidate”, Tulsi Gabbard, is also an Islamophobic bigot and supporter of Modi.

prolonged tsunami of strikes, hartals, and armed uprisings. The Indian Navy ratings threw their British officers overboard and trained their guns on the financial and administrative headquarters of imperial rule in Bombay (Mumbai). The British were forced to flee for their lives, and in the process they spitefully and willfully lit the fuse for a gigantic communal bloodbath.

Pakistan an invention
Muslim communal politicians had actually invented Pakistan as an artificial construct by arbitrarily linking the states where they had a majority; the K in Pakistan actually stands for Kashmir. But Gandhi and Nehru were anxious to promote India as a secular entity, and it suited that masquerade to include a Muslim-majority state in post-partition India. That left the Hindu princely ruler of Jammu and Kashmir some margin to bargain cleverly for special protected status, playing off the two sides.

On that basis, India was content to grant certain concessions: a degree of autonomy, a separate flag, a ban on settlement from beyond its borders so as to guarantee its demographic identity… And it is those limited rights that have now been brutally torn up by the rabid communal gangster Modi – a man who literally has blood on his hands, a monster who is actually dripping with Muslim blood from his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat. This coup unilaterally depriving Kashmir of its (albeit already limited) autonomy and its statehood is almost comparable to Hitler’s annexation of Austria or Czechoslovakia.

Kashmiris protest ongoing crackdown in Kashmir.