Revolutionary Socialist Movement
The recent killings of 25 tourists and a guide in Pahalgam, Kashmir, represent yet another episode in a decades-long struggle against the region’s colonial occupation. While we mourn the tragic loss of life, we refuse to allow this incident to be weaponised to justify further state violence. The bloodshed in Kashmir is not an isolated act of ‘terrorism’ but the inevitable consequence of India’s brutal military rule, its systematic dismantling of Kashmiri rights and the deliberate stoking of Hindu majoritarianism under Modi’s authoritarian regime.
Occupation, Annexation and Settler Colonialism
Since the illegal revocation of Article 370, in 2019, Kashmir has been transformed into an open-air prison under what can only be described as a military occupation. By revoking the Article, the Indian state not only stripped Kashmiris of their autonomy but systematically dismantled all democratic rights, imposing a suffocating military lockdown that continues to this day.
Reports on the ground reveal an intensification of ethnic cleansing policies, with over 85,000 domicile certificates issued to non-Kashmiris – a blatant attempt at demographic engineering designed to permanently alter the region’s political character. This mirrors Israel’s playbook on the West Bank in Palestine, where occupation is maintained through land seizures, population transfers and institutionalised apartheid.
The current crackdown following the Pahalgam massacre – including the bulldozing of civilian homes, the extrajudicial killing of a ‘terrorist’, and mass detentions – represents an escalation of this colonial project. According to Indian media reports, security forces have conducted night raids across multiple districts, arbitrarily detaining hundreds of Kashmiris under draconian laws like the Public Safety Act (PSA) that permit detention without trial for years. Entire neighbourhoods have been razed under the pretext of ‘anti-terror operations’, leaving families homeless in what amounts to collective punishment.
These methods, perfected since the 2019 Pulwama attacks, have seen thousands disappeared into India’s torture chambers, routine internet blackouts used as weapons of control, and a documented pattern of extrajudicial killings falsely labelled as ‘encounter deaths’. Far from bringing ‘normalcy’ as claimed by the Modi regime, this brutal repression has only deepened Kashmiri alienation and resistance. The cycle of state violence and armed response reveals the fundamental truth of all colonial occupations: that no people will forever accept subjugation without struggle.
The Indian state’s own actions – from demographic manipulation to mass repression – prove it understands Kashmir not as an integral part of India, but as hostile territory to be pacified through military means. This is the reality behind the rhetoric of ‘development’ and ‘integration’ – a colonial occupation whose violence inevitably begets further resistance.
Warmongering and the threat to the Indus Water Treaty
The Indian ruling class, in its usual chauvinist frenzy, has responded to the Pahalgam attack not with justice but with collective punishment. The Modi government is now threatening to suspend the Indus Water Treaty, a reactionary move that would weaponize water access against Pakistan.
Meanwhile, India has increased its ceasefire violations and troop deployments along the Line of Control (LoC), risking a broader war. This escalation fits into a global pattern of aggression under right-wing strongmen—from Trump’s threats of ‘fire and fury’ to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The rise of such leaders has emboldened regimes like Modi’s to act with even greater impunity, using nationalism as a smokescreen for their failures.
In response, to India’s measures, the Pakistan government has announced a halt to its trade with India and threatened to retaliate against the expulsion of Pakistani citizens from India by reciprocal measures. Along the border Indian and Pakistani armed forces are already engaged in combat, even if currently ‘only skirmishes’. While both nuclear powers want to contain the conflict, they play with fire, raising nationalist and chauvinist sentiments on both side – which of course also serve to obscure their own reactionary policies and inner political struggles.
India’s complicit media and politicians incite racism
The Indian corporate media, a loyal propaganda tool of the Modi regime, has sunk to new depths – with some commentators openly demanding the razing of Kashmir ‘like Gaza’. This genocidal rhetoric mirrors the dehumanisation of Palestinians by the Israeli state and media. The parallel is no accident; Kashmir has been an Indian colony for decades, with the Indian state increasingly utilising apartheid-like policies, mass surveillance and military terror. These unchallenged calls for ethnic cleansing prepare fertile ground for the nurturing of fascist tendencies amongst the Indian ruling class and petit-bourgeoisie.
India’s entire political class – from the BJP to the so-called ‘secular’ opposition – stands guilty of complicity in Kashmir’s occupation. The Congress Party, architect of Kashmir’s original betrayal, now contents itself with tepid criticisms while accepting the occupation as a fait accompli. While the Communist parties (CPI and CPI-M) formally opposed the revocation of Article 370, they have utterly failed to oppose India’s occupation on the basis that it is combating ‘Islamist extremism’, thus exposing their reformist bankruptcy.
Regional outfits like AAP, BSP, and TMC have either cheered the annexation outright or acquiesced with mealy-mouthed protests, revealing their anti-Modi posturing as pure theatre. Even parties posing as defenders of minorities – the DMK, NCP and others – have tacitly endorsed the military crackdown and colonial demographic engineering.
This cross-party consensus lays bare the truth; Kashmir’s oppression is not merely the BJP’s project, but the Indian state’s foundational crime. The opposition quibbles only over the manner of occupation, never its legitimacy. Revolutionary socialists must reject this rotten parliamentary farce entirely and forge an independent workers’ movement that answers to no Delhi establishment – whether saffron or ‘secular’.
The Left’s failure is most damning – claiming to oppose Modi while refusing to mobilise workers against occupation, lest they alienate their petit-bourgeois base. Despite their criticisms of the constitutional changes in 2019, they have never supported the right of Kashmir to self-determination, nor have they ever mobilised significant forces in solidarity with Kashmir. This failure to support the right of small nations to self-determination is the Achilles’ heel of the so-called Communist parties.
No justice, no peace: the logic of asymmetric resistance
Oppressed peoples, when denied all peaceful avenues of resistance, often resort to asymmetric struggle. The Indian state has flooded the part of Kashmir it administers with 900,000 troops to control a population of just 12.5 million. Along with its torture chambers and its puppet administration, India therefore bears full responsibility for the cycle of violence. The Pahalgam attack, like the Pulwama bombing before it, must be understood as the bloody symptom of occupation – not its cause.
The response to the Pahalgam incident by mainstream left organisations, like Pakistan’s Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM) led by Farooq Tariq, exposes the fatal limitations of liberal ‘anti-terrorism’ politics. By beginning their analysis with condemnation of the attack rather than India’s occupation, they unconsciously adopt the Indian state’s framework – treating colonial violence as legitimate ‘security’ while framing resistance as criminal. This moralistic approach, shared by much of the Pakistani liberal left, refuses to acknowledge the fundamental truth that armed attacks in Kashmir are not the cause, but the consequence of occupation.
While we unambiguously oppose attacks on civilians, revolutionary Marxists understand that simply condemning violence without beginning with an opposition to its root cause – India’s military occupation in this case – makes one complicit in the cycle of repression. Calls for ‘peace’ and ‘dialogue’ within the framework of Indian sovereignty objectively reward the aggressor, the occupying force, as they demand Kashmiris surrender their right to resist before negotiations even begin. This mirrors the bankrupt ‘two-state solution’ rhetoric applied to Palestine, an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable: the coloniser and the colonised.
Against this liberal capitulation, we advance a proletarian internationalist position:
- Unconditional opposition to India’s occupation as the prerequisite for any progressive solution
- Active solidarity with Kashmiri resistance, while arguing for working-class methods of political struggle.
The working class needs neither the Indian state’s brutal occupation nor the Pakistani military’s cynical instrumentalisation of Kashmir. Our weapon is class struggle – building bridges between Kashmiri resistance fighters, other oppressed nations in South Asia, and the Indian, Pakistani and other South Asian workers who have no stake in their rulers’ wars.
The way forward: class struggle against occupation
The ruling classes of both India and Pakistan have cynically exploited Kashmir as a nationalist wedge to divide workers and peasants across the subcontinent. While Delhi maintains its brutal occupation in Kashmir, Islamabad’s military establishment uses the Kashmir cause to mask its own oppression in Balochistan—where leaders like Mahrang Baloch face the wrath of the state for standing up against enforced disappearances and state violence. Neither state offers liberation; the Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisies alike serve only their own interests, pitting oppressed peoples against each other while collaborating with global imperialism.
The solution lies not in choosing between these reactionary states, let alone the false ‘hope’ of a war between them, but in revolutionary internationalism. The working classes of India, Pakistan, Kashmir and of all oppressed nations in the region share no stake in these conflicts – their true enemies are Modi’s Hindutva chauvinism, the Pakistani military’s authoritarian rule, and the capitalist system that profits from their division. Only through united struggle can they break the chains of occupation, caste, and exploitation.
We demand:
- An immediate end to India’s occupation of Kashmir!
- All foreign troops out of Kashmir!
- Repeal of the domicile laws – stop ethnic cleansing!
- Restoration of all democratic rights in Kashmir, including the right to self-determination!
- No to suspension of the Indus Water Treaty – water is a right, not a weapon of war!
- Down with the warmongering Indian media and state propaganda!
- For a free, democratic and socialist state of Jammu and Kashmir that is part of a Socialist Federation of South Asia – break the chains of capitalism, caste and imperialism!
The revolutionary path: from immediate demands to workers’ power
The only path to lasting peace lies not in appeals to the existing states, but in their revolutionary overthrow and the establishment of workers’ democracy. Yet this historic task requires more than abstract slogans – it demands concrete transitional struggles that expose the limits of bourgeois rule while pointing towards socialist revolution.
We pose immediate demands that challenge state power and lay the basis for dual power:
- We call upon workers to form militias to defend local neighbourhoods against military operations in Kashmir
- We call upon soldiers and rank and file police to refuse repressive orders in Kashmir
- We call upon workers to form tribunals to try perpetrators of state violence
- We call for factory occupations against the production of war materiel
- We call for cross-border workers’ solidarity networks to break nationalist barriers
These struggles reveal the bankruptcy of both the Indian and Pakistani states, while developing the self-organisation of the working class. But to coordinate this resistance and give it revolutionary direction, we must build a revolutionary workers’ party – one that unites the exploited and oppressed under a programme of internationalist revolution. Only such a party can systematically link economic and democratic struggles, provide strategic leadership in moments of crisis, and prepare the working class to replace capitalist states with workers’ states based on workers’ councils and militia.
The road is long, but the alternative – endless cycles of state violence and nationalist division – is intolerable. For revolutionary socialism! For a workers’ South Asia!