On September 5, another Lok Sabha election in India had to be held for six seats in Indian-Occupied Kashmir (IOK). This is what The Times of India said about it: ‘The pitifully low turnout for Sunday’s Lok Sabha polls in the Srinagar constituency of Jammu and Kashmir is a far more eloquent indicator of what the people of the Valley feel than the distribution of votes totted up by the candidates standing for elections”.
Since the population of IOK mostly lives in the Valley, it doesn’t matter that the turnout in Ladakh was 70%. Indeed, only 11.8% of the registered voters of IOK voted, including those who did so under the point of bayonet. This means that New Delhi has once again failed to prove that the people of Kashmir want to live in India.
Unfortunately, however, the Western powers whose support Pakistan needs to resolve the Kashmir dispute have been inclined to accept Indian claims about electoral results. Thus, in 1996, the West appeared “satisfied” by the 41% turnout “arranged” by the India security forces in IOK, thereby seeming to accept the Indian argument that the people of Kashmir were under duress from the “militants sent in by Pakistan” rather than from over 700,000 soldiers dispatched by India. The evidence of coercion by Indian forces was blithely ignored.
In the event, the Kashmiris voted with their feet in 1998 when the turnout dropped to 30%. But, once again, the UN Security Council ignored the fact that elections in the presence of a hostile and coercive Indian army could not be called “free”. Therefore this time round the campaign of the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) has been more effective, delivering a turnout that recalls the pre-1990 elections which the Indian commentators concurred in calling a “farce”.
Nonetheless, the Indian “consensus” remains that “the Kashmiris don’t vote because of the threat of the militants sent in by Pakistan”. Therefore Indian political commentators refuse to accept the validity of the APHC’s insistence that elections to the Lok Sabha are no longer a substitute for what the Kashmiris really want: the right to a decision on whether they want to stay with India or not. Regrettably, the world press has concurred with the Indian view that “there are deep fissures in the APHC which is not a representative Kashmiri body”.
Following the recent electoral farce, however, the world may be obliged to take a fresh look at what is really happening in IOK. The truth of the matter is that the APHC has succeeded in convincing the Kashmiris that the elections stage-managed by India are not for them. Thus it is no longer sufficient to register the Indian protest that the “electorate was intimidated by the secessionists”. The high-water mark of “militancy” in Kashmir was 1993. After that there has been an internationally recognised downturn in it. By this measure, the turnout in IOK should have steadily climbed, but it has not, suggesting that IOK is irrevocably estranged from India. Furthermore, the strength of India’s “security forces” in IOK has increased. The internationally recognised figure of Kashmiris killed by them in 20,000, although the figure quoted by APHC is double that. A report filed by a Washington Post reporter on the eve of the recent elections noted that no Kashmiri Muslim interviewed was inclined to vote in the polls. Almost everyone had had a close relative either killed or savagely tortured by Indian troops.
This is where the truth lies. Neither the “secessionist” APHC, nor the “militants sent in from Pakistan” are responsible for the decline in the turnout. It is the alienation of the people that is now sending out a strong message. The problem is that Pakistan has lost credibility in the world as a champion of Kashmiri rights. Its “moral support” line is no longer taken seriously after the Kargil Operation.
But the world has a “moral obligation” to defend a benighted people forced to defy an army they cannot defeat. That is why it is no longer enough to tell India and Pakistan to sit down and talk”. Indeed, if international morality keeps on bending to accommodate India, it will tempt India to “supply” the final “solution” to the Kashmir dispute: kill the Kashmiris till no one is left to vice protest.
This is the kind of solution Milosevic tried in Kosovo and this is the solution sought by the Indonesian army in East Timor. But history shows that real solutions swept under the carpet for expediency come back to haunt the international system. And it should not be forgotten that even though Kashmir may be too distant and too tucked away in the mountains to destabilise the world, it has the potential to seriously destabilise South Asia in palpably new way, negating state sovereignties and state frontiers. Therefore the Security Council must think beyond its “bilateralising” strategies and grasp the nettle of Kashmir under the UN Charter without worrying whether the final solution favoured by the Kashmiris fails to fully please or appease both India and Pakistan.