Revolutionary Socialist Movement
Tensions between India and Pakistan have risen dramatically in the last days. The two countries are at the brink of war.
After the Pahalgam attack by reactionary Islamists, in which 25 tourists and their guide were killed, the governments, media, the ruling classes and their parties of both India and Pakistan entered a vicious round of accusations, sanctions and counter-sanctions against each other. On 6 May, this escalated into military confrontation when India launched missile attacks on Kashmir and Pakistan, in which 26 people were killed and 46 injured according to the Pakistani government. Spokesmen for the Pakistani military report that their retaliatory measures killed 10 people in Kashmir and shot down 5 Indian warplanes and 2 drones.
According to the Pakistani National Security Declaration, India has declared war and, according to the UN Charter, Pakistan reserves its right to respond in ‘self-defence’. Whilst India claims that its attacks were ‘surgical’ strikes against ‘terrorists’ and their families, its government’s spokespersons announced that the military would be ‘ready to retaliate if Pakistan escalates’.
Although the rulers of both countries probably prefer to contain the tension and military exchanges within certain limits, the prospect of a full-scale war between the two nuclear powers remains a real danger.
Both claim that they are defending themselves against an aggressor. In reality, the ruling classes of both countries use this claim to obscure the reactionary nature of their struggle over the possession of Kashmir.
The Indian state claims to fight ‘terrorism’, but in fact the ultra-reactionary Modi government is the colonial oppressor of Kashmir, denying its people any element of self-determination. The Indian ruling class promotes anti-Muslim racism, women’s oppression, the caste system and their gangs of Hindu nationalist thugs, to keep the Indian working class divided and oppressed. The threat of war with Pakistan aims to mobilise the people to rally behind the government.
The Pakistani government is not less hypocritical. It claims to defend Kashmir, but itself has tried to crush the mass movement there over in recent months. It too denies the right of self-determination of the national minorities in Pakistan, whether in Kashmir, Balochistan or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It denounces the Modi government for using ‘terrorism’ as a pretext to oppress the Kashmiris, while deploying the exact same pretext to justify the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees.
On both sides the bourgeois parties have rallied to the national defence. Whether government or opposition, all parties have made clear that workers and the oppressed can expect no resistance to the march to war from the bourgeoisie.
But so too have the misnamed Indian communist parties, CPI/CPI(M), revealed themselves, once again, to be social chauvinists and lackeys of their own bourgeoisie. These traitors to the international working class are the mirror of their counterparts in Pakistan like the Haqooq-e-khalq party.
A war between India and Pakistan will be utterly reactionary on both sides. The working class and oppressed peoples in both states must rally their forces against the escalation into all-out war which would unleash a catastrophe for the workers and peasants, soldiers and civilians, Hindu and Muslim, in India, Kashmir and Pakistan.
To prepare the people for war, the ruling classes are inflaming tensions and inciting nationalist, chauvinist and racist hatred between the peoples. All this is preparation for the crushing of national liberation struggles, attacks on working conditions and jobs, the signal for capitalists to plunder and enrich themselves, while workers and the poor get unemployment, poverty—or a bullet as their reward.
We call on all organisations who have taken a clear stand against the reactionary war hysteria in Pakistan and India, including the Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign, Jammu Kashmir National Student Federation, and the Revolutionary Students Front, to unite in mass action against the war in the workplaces and on the streets.
We condemn the war which is being imposed against the will of the oppressed people of Kashmir; we support the resistance of the Kashmiri people to occupation; we recognise their right to self-determination, and stand for an independent and self-governing socialist Kashmir, as part of a voluntary federation of South Asian workers’ republics. As in Kashmir, so we oppose the oppression of national minorities in Pakistan and India.
The working class, trade unions, youth and women’s organizations must oppose the war aims of sides. Such a struggle can and must be linked to a struggle to tear up the roots of the system that is based on exploitation, oppression and conflict between nations: capitalism and imperialism.