Kashmir: nationalism & regional rivalry on the rise

On August 5, 38,000 paramilitary troops from India entered the “semi-autonomous” area of Kashmir, an open act of imperialist occupation. They were acting on orders from hyper-nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This is just the latest in a string of vicious attacks conducted by the BJP, which has dramatically ramped up anti-Muslim racism in the country. Recently it threatened to strip citizenship status from nearly four million workers in the Indian state of Assam, and deport them to Bangladesh (Slate, 8/9).
In service to the Indian capitalist ruling class, Modi and the BJP are desperately trying to consolidate control over resource-rich Kashmir at the expense of capitalist rivals in Pakistan and China. They have been emboldened by the tacit support of imperialists in the U.S. and European Union, who share an interest in slowing the advance of Chinese imperialism.
As with any conflict between rival capitalist bosses, the working class stands to suffer the most. Confronted with the poisons of imperialism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism, workers in Kashmir need to reject all capitalist political traps in favor of proletarian internationalism. As the international working class, we must unite in the communist Progressive Labor Party and organize a mass Red Army that crushes the capitalist class worldwide and builds a communist society to meet workers’ needs.
Economic, political crisis drive Indian fascism
For years, Modi and the BJP have sought to divide workers by fanning the flames of anti-Muslim racism. In 2015, a year after the party assumed power, India saw a 17 percent increase in religiously motivated violence (India Today, 2/10/17). In 2002, as chief minister of Gujarat state, Modi himself infamously presided over the massacre of more than a thousand Muslims at the hands of fascist mobs (Washington Post, 8/16).
India is the world’s seventh largest economy, home to a huge, productive working class and major industrial centers. But the contradictions of capitalism are provoking an economic contraction. Growth slowed to 6.8 percent in 2018 and to 5.7 percent in the last fiscal quarter. The automobile and real estate industries are in crisis (Economic Times, 8/21).
By exerting more direct control over Kashmir, the Indian ruling class sees an opportunity to reverse the economic slowdown. They hope to cancel a law blocking outsiders from buying property in the state, a potential land grab like the Israeli bosses’ racist seizure of territory in occupied Palestine. Although the population of Kashmir at present is majority Muslim, the Indian rulers’ takeover could drastically change the demographic to majority Hindu—a de facto and inevitably deadly ethnic cleansing (Foreign Affairs, 8/9).
The BJP also aims to take charge of Kashmir’s glaciers and rivers, including the Indus, which serves almost 270 million people (GlacierHub, 3/13). Control over fresh water equates to power in India, where lethal heat waves this summer rocked the country and killed dozens (New York Times, 6/13). As climate change threatens greater ecological destruction, the bosses’ fights over water will only become more deadly.
Inter-imperialist rivalry sharpens in South Asia
That the U.S. and EU made hardly a sound about the occupation speaks to their own internal divisions, but also to the rise of fascism on an international scale. The gutter racist politics of Modi and the BJP finds common ground with nationalist appeals from U.S. Klansman-in-chief Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and France’s Marine Le Pen.
The U.S. and European bosses’ tolerance of Modi’s aggression in Kashmir also reflects India’s strategic importance as a counter to rising imperialist power China. China has governed a portion of Kashmir since the early 1960s, and recently has pushed to expand its influence in the region. China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative has invested nearly $50 billion in the area (Foreign Affairs, September 2019).  
The Chinese rulers’ support for Pakistan, India’s chief regional rival, sharpens the inter-imperialist tensions. In 2016, the Chinese Overseas Port Holding Company opened a deep water port in the coastal Pakistani city of Gwadar in populous Balochistan Province, securing a 43-year contract for resource extraction. At least 22,000 students from Pakistan are now studying in China, a dramatic increase (The Diplomat, 1/24/18).  The Indian bosses’ racist anti-worker offensive in Kashmir aims not only to weaken Pakistani capitalism today, but also to prepare for a Chinese imperialist challenge tomorrow.
Although Trump’s erratic foreign policy has complicated relations here as elsewhere, the U.S. ruling class remains mostly aligned in backing India as a counterweight to China. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis paid diplomatic visits after India purchased a missile system from the Russian bosses (Bloomberg, 9/3/18).
While Trump and the domestically oriented capitalists he represents bear obvious political parallels to Modi’s racist nationalism, the  finance capital main wing of U.S. imperialism has nurtured close economic and military ties with the Indian capitalists for close to two decades, through the Barack Obama presidency (Foreign Affairs, September 2019).
Reject all capitalist misleaders, fight for communist revolution
Though treated as pawns in a power struggle between multiple nuclear-armed countries, workers in Kashmir have not taken their oppression and exploitation lying down. Since the start of the Indian military occupation in early August, the working class has regularly clashed with security forces and led marches and demonstrations in opposition. In the Soura neighborhood of Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, workers have put up barricades and armed themselves with stones (Al Jazeera, 8/20).
Unfortunately, the workers’ brave efforts risk being absorbed into the bosses’ reactionary movements. Local opposition parties, like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party, have vocally opposed the occupation. But these liberal reformers will never advocate for the destruction of capitalism and the dictatorship of the working class. Like all bosses, they seek to unite workers around the dead ends of nationalism and religion—the covers they need to exploit us in their own interests.
To truly advance to our own collective liberation, we need a Party that rejects all of the bosses’ deadly schemes: the international Progressive Labor Party. Building a mass PLP to organize communist revolution is the only way out of the disaster of capitalism. From Kashmir to Palestine, from Mexico to Tanzania—workers of the world, unite!