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No war over Kashmir!

Atal Behari Vajpai, the Hindu chauvinist Indian premier and Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf are threatening the desperately poor peoples of the subcontinent with enormous suffering and destruction.

In partitioned Jammu and Kashmir weeks of heavy exchanges of artillery fire have forced at least 25,000 villagers to flee the border areas and resulted in an unknown number of deaths amongst the civilian population. A million troops face one another along the so-called line of control.

Indian warships patrol the approaches to Pakistani waters. Warplanes, tanks and missile batteries are ready for action in what is already India’s biggest-ever military mobilisation. Millions of landmines have been laid along the border.

The reasons for this enormous waste of resources and the bloody chaos which war will bring are integral to the whole drive to globalisation and the establishment of a unilateral US “empire” and its cover for this, the “war against terrorism".

Over the past three years Vajpai has been opening India up for US and EU multinational corporations and the full destructive effects of neo-liberalism. The working class and the urban and rural poor are hardest hit. Consequently Vajpai’s party, the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), suffered heavy defeats in recent state elections.

As opposition has mounted to its free market policies the BJP has had recourse to fomenting deadly communal hatreds. The BJP glories in its determination to privilege Hindus and discriminate against the other religious minorities. BJP militants were directly responsible for the bloody rioting in the state of Gujarat where 900 people, mainly Muslims, were killed.

As a result Vajpai’s shaky coalition faces disintegration and near annihilation at any ensuing national election. Add to this the enormously increased tension in India’s one Muslim majority state, Kashmir – a state held against the will of its people within the Indian federation – and the full scale of the potential explosion in the present situation is clear.

Washington is desperately worried that an Indo-Pakistan war would undermine its military operations in Afghanistan. This could lead to a revival of the Taliban and al Qa’ida resistance and destabilise the entire region, threatening US economic penetration of India and the long term looting of central Asia’s vast oil reserves over the coming decades.

On the Pakistani side an equally reactionary constellation of forces to the BJP coalition is hard at work. Pervez Musharraf has no democratic credentials. He is a wretched puppet of the USA’s war to impose its will on Afghanistan. But at the same time within his military regime the Pakistan security forces, the ISI, continues to facilitate Islamist Jihadis (holy warriors) getting into Indian-held Kashmir.

Since 1989 armed Jihadi groups such as Lakshar-e-Taiba and Harkat-al-Mujahideen have attacked the Indian military in a war that has cost the lives of at least 30,000 people. In an attack in Jammu and Kashmir on May 14, 34 people died at Kaluchak near Jammu. The attack by Pakistan based Islamist Jihadis on the Indian parliament in New Delhi last December was a massive provocation aimed at provoking the present slide towards war.

Such actions open the Pakistani military regime to charges by India of fostering terrorism. Pakistan’s promised crack downs on “cross-border terrorism"- whilst violating democratic rights in Pakistan- have never been applied to the part of Kashmir ruled by Islamabad. Thus Vajpai can paint his war moves as part and parcel of the war against terrorism.

There is little doubt that much as the majority of Kashmiris resent Indian oppression they do not welcome annexation by Pakistan or a Taliban style Islamist regime. The movement for independence launched in 1989 by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was for a secular state independent of both its giant neighbours.

Indeed the Jihadis have repeatedly attacked militants and leaders of the Kashmiri independence movement. Indian army actions have also hit Kashmiris hard. The demand for self-determination and, if freely and democratically expressed, independence, is a progressive demand which all socialists should support- against Indian and Pakistani annexationists. Neither country’s “religious” or “historic” claims should override the views of the people of Kashmir.

A war between Pakistan and India would be a totally reactionary war on both sides. It would be a war not for the defence of the national rights of the Kashmir people but for the retention or extension of territory by two states which have never allowed the Kashmiri people the right to any sort of uncoerced self-determination.

The workers and peasants in India and Pakistan should mobilise now to stop their ruling classes from starting a criminal war which will serve only the interests of their exploiters. But if a war starts the workers’ movement must use every means to make sure it ends in the overthrow of the ruling classes who have brought misery and destruction on their own people.

Revolutionaries on both sides – in the event of war – must raise the slogans, down with Vajpai and Musharraf and their military and religious-chauvinist regimes. Freedom for Kashmir-all Indian and Pakistani troops out of Jammu and Kashmir. For all imperialist troops out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Only workers’ power in India and Pakistan can lay the basis of a socialist federation of all the states of the region

Unfortunately the workers of India and Pakistan do not have a revolutionary leadership that could undertake such a policy. In the name of “fighting terrorism,” the Congress Party, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) have rallied behind the Hindu chauvinist BJP.

The CPI spokesperson, Ajay Chakravorty, demanded that Pakistan should be punished and the CPI-M leader in parliament, Somnath Chatterjee, avowed that his party had always backed the government in the “fight against terrorism” and would continue to do so. This is treachery.

The right-centrist Labour Party of Pakistan on the other hand limits itself to pacifist appeals rather than saying clearly that social revolution is the only way the workers and peasants can disarm the warmongers or establish lasting peace.

The acute crisis of revolutionary leadership across the whole subcontinent shows the burning need for a new revolutionary international to rally forces to a programme of class independence and proletarian internationalism, as well as to mobilise struggle around the world against globalising capitalism – imperialism, the real initiator of war and misery.

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