Speech Kashmir Solidarity Day Feb 2024
As-Salaam-Alaikum friends and colleagues. Thank you for asking me to participate on this panel. I feel extremely honored to be here.
As many of you know, almost everything I share on panels like this one is based on what I have personally lived through and which has made me what I am today. That sometimes gives me a very different vocabulary, one that is often more emotional and often quite angry. This anger is often reflected when I meet with lawmakers and think tankers about their double standards in Washington. Most recently, I have been handing out a brochure created by IPRI and called “Shining Ugliness: A Catalogue of Fascist Bharat’s “Incredible” Crimes. It is an excellent compilation of Modi India’s dirty deeds and one everybody must see. I believe it is time for everybody to get as angry as I have been for years.
Therefore today I must talk about the growing threat of Hindutva Extremism and how it has promoted discord and conflicts in South Asia and affected countries. I have been trying to wrap myself around this topic for the past two days because it is so crucial to talk about it now and especially in the context of Kashmir which has been the experimental lab for other places India is currently coveting. I am of course speaking in the backdrop of the recent inauguration of the Babri Ram temple. The destruction of the centuries old mosque by Hindutva zealots which caused the death of thousands of Muslims in the ensuing riots. Now it appears that 9 more mosques are already on the radar of the RSS, and evidence is being collected that the sites had also been Hindu temples. In Kashmir there is now talk about the Shah-e-Hamadan Masjid and paintings of an ancient temple on that site have already been circulated.
I moved to India shortly after 9/11. I had opposed the War on Terror, and I felt it was as good a time as any to say Goodbye to the US. Over the years, the same impressions India has been creating about itself in the West had led me to believe that I was going to be safe ideologically from what was unfolding in many other parts of the world. I had fully bought the story of it being a secular democracy, based on Gandhian philosophy, and meaning no harm to anybody, neither friend nor foe. I of course knew very little about internal or regional conflicts at the time. I had also blissfully ignored some early signs of Hindutva mobilization amongst the Indian diaspora in the US while raising money for the BJP.
It was a crude shock for me upon arrival to find an India that had just dispatched most of its troops towards the border with Pakistan in the wake of the Parliament attack. Shrill, patriotic, and war mongering frenzy was surrounding me everywhere with crowds hoping India’s nuclear arsenal would finally teach Pakistan a lesson. Of course the same happened after Pulwama which led to the Balakot attack inside Pakistan. It was impossible to ignore the strong communal undertones in the ranting and raving. Meanwhile, many of us were questioning the true intent behind the Parliament attack with some suggesting that it may have been orchestrated by Indian agencies so India could formally join the War on Terror.
Then I traveled to Gujarat while finishing up some work I had worked on before I left the US. There I witnessed genocidal conditions after communal riots had broken out and thousands were slaughtered by Hindutva zealots with Modi at the helm. It was very much the way I had always imagined the Kristallnacht in Germany which of course was the beginning of the Holocaust and the extermination of almost all of Europe’s Jews. This is something Hindutva zealots and the RSS never tire to describe as “the Germans having had the right idea,” but of course meaning Muslims and not Jews. To this day I will never be able to accept that one of the architects of the gruesome pogrom is the much-coveted Prime Minister of a country that is now a strategic partner of the US.
This was also the first time that I felt this all-pervasive anger in the streets of India. The anger that gets suppressed for short periods of time only to explode at the slightest of triggers, and often ending in communal riots of one sort or another. I witnessed this anger day after day in the neighborhood I lived in, whether it was directed towards Dalits, Muslims, people from the Northeast, or even animals. Often the anger turned into rape, committed by gangs of young men, and this is something most foreign and all Indian women feared whenever out at night or moving about in more deserted places.
Later while working on tribal issues in Assam, I saw how the RSS had spread out everywhere, attempting to convince tribals, who were mostly Buddhists, that they had actually been Hindus all along. There I first saw demographic change systematically planned and implemented by the Indian State and its agencies. In predominantly tribal areas where Schedule 6 of the Constitution had guaranteed tribal autonomy, Nepalis who had served in the Indian Army were resettled in huge numbers so the districts would no longer meet the demographic thresholds to be considered tribal majority. Of course throughout Assam and other parts of the Northeast religious hatred towards Muslims was constantly being stirred up, with all Muslims being portrayed as illegals from Bangladesh, and most recently leading to the segregation of Muslims and others considered foreigners in concentration camps built for those not able to prove their citizenship. Meanwhile Hindutva zealots, the RSS, and religious hatred increasingly reign supreme in an Assam and most recently Manipur two places that used to be proud of its own language, unique culture, and diversity.
Deeply disturbed by the true nature of the Hindu state in so many different parts of India, I had grown much disenchanted with the country long before moving to Kashmir. There of course I lived through ten years of absolute terror committed on the people by the Indian state, a communalized army, and the military occupation. Most of you know about the atrocities being committed there because they have now been relatively well documented by activists, and because Pakistan has been speaking about the human rights violations at every possible forum for years. I could talk for several days about what I witnessed personally, and some of the people I knew who have been killed or tortured. All of it has been going on for decades, but for much of the past it had raged as more of a political than a religious dispute.
The nature of the dispute changed completely when the BJP under Modi came to power both in Delhi and in IIOJK in 2014. All over sudden the lives of Kashmir Muslims were no longer worth preserving under any circumstances. And this is an important point to make. With Modi assuming power and with such a majority of the vote, it was not only a government having changed. It was an entire nation becoming fueled by lethal Hindu majoritarian aspirations, almost from one day to the next. It was the ordinary people, like it had been ordinary people in Gujarat, who were now baying for the blood of Kashmiris. It was everywhere, on television, in print editorials, and in the behavior of troops on the streets of Kashmir. Pakistan was no longer just a troubled neighbor but a place that needed to be defeated once and for all, so that Akhand Bharat spanning every nook and corner of the entire subcontinent could be restored. Kashmiris were attacked throughout India, Muslims were lynched at the mere suspicion of having slaughtered a cow, Hindutva terrorists were released from prison with some being elected to Parliament. It felt like a deadly Saffron tidal wave. In Jammu which had already become radicalized and heavily dominated by the RSS since the uprisings of 2008, Hindutva flag marches through neighborhoods with majority Muslim populations were organized. The marchers were fully armed with swords and trishuls. And of course the history books were being rewritten, describing the Valley of Kashmir as the original abode of Hindus with Muslims being nothing but an aberration.
All of it finally culminated in the illegal annexation of Kashmir by India in August of 2019 and the abrogation of articles that had guaranteed at least some measure of autonomy for the Kashmiris. Most importantly it afforded some protection for their religious and ethnic identities. Now we were witnessing the implementation of new land laws aimed to accelerate ethnic flooding by Hindus and more than likely resulting in Muslims of the region becoming a minority. This of course had already been successfully done once in Jammu in 1947 when the Maharaja’s troops and Hindu fanatics slaughtered up to two hundred thousand of Jammu’s Muslims and drove out just as many, making it a Hindu majority region. Today it is being done through administrative action instead of slaughter.
How then could Pakistan, a legal stakeholder in the Kashmir dispute, ever be unaffected and remain uninvolved? After unilaterally altering the entire region by turning the former state of Kashmir into Union Territories directly ruled by Delhi, even China reacted militarily to protect its interests from an expansionist India that feels no longer bound by any bilateral agreements. Disturbingly, night after night, Indian channels debate the need for India to take over Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan, both of which India claims as its own territory per a parliamentary act. And the entire Hindu nation is cheering on a government that promises that it will conquer what belongs to India at the earliest, with defense analysts and generals saying the army is merely waiting for the orders.
And now comes the detailed dossier prepared by Pakistan and proving India’s sponsorship of terrorist activities inside its country and most recently in Canada and the US. Anybody having lived in India and especially Kashmir and following the activities of Indian agencies throughout the region would never ever doubt any of what has been presented in the report. After years of witnessing what these agencies are capable of in Kashmir and then blaming it all on its neighbor in its never-ending propaganda war against Pakistan, there is no doubt in my mind that all of it and much more is the absolute truth.
Lastly and most importantly for my present context in the US, closely watching RAW’s growing number of RSS and anti-Pakistan linked think tanks and advocacy groups in Washington, I am only just beginning to understand the challenge India’s hybrid war against Muslims, Kashmiris, Pakistan and others represents to all of us on every level and the need to strike back when and where it counts.
Hindutva was always there from the very beginning of independent India. What is new is the ever-growing marriage of Hindutva Extremism with intelligence agencies and both acting in tandem to create havoc throughout the region and now in the West. And at the root of it is both a majoritarian and an expansionist philosophy envisioning a South Asia dominated by India and more specifically Hindus. It is a fictional historical claim not dissimilar to that of the Nazis who spoke of creating a Lebensraum for the German race, or the Zionists who use the bible as the moral justifications for expansion of territory. And nobody seems to care enough again.
With all this in mind, I feel the time for trying to strike a balance while speaking about regional tensions and the Kashmir dispute is gone. In fact, it seems unconscionable to me when South Asia Departments in Washington are trying to do that. There is a right and a wrong, and one must choose. Watching what is happening in India and Kashmir silently or without intervening is criminally enabling.
I urge Pakistani and Kashmiri activists to keep compiling facts and figures for all of us to use so we can present the correct narratives about India to the world. Too much of the history of the region was written by the occupier and those drunk on Hindutva supremacy fantasies. It needs to be exposed and stopped now.
Thank you.
Writings from the Abyss 