The following text is based on a presentation given at a public meeting of No War But The Class War in Sheffield in June at the height of the Pakistan-India confrontation over Kashmir. The immediate threat of war in that arena has receded but the causes which brought on the crisis have not gone away. Given the general global decline of capitalist profitability and the threat this poses to the social peace for any ruling class the threat of new crises and wars remains very real. Not only are the two governments weak (Musharraf's dictatorship is seen as a US puppet against Muslims whilst the BJP government in India has unleashed a wave of Hindu fundamentalism which has already led to the deaths of thousands), but they possess enough nuclear weapons to create between them something like 1000 Hiroshimas. The consequences of a nuclear war in South Asia would thus have a global impact. Ideologically too the ruling classes of the advanced capitalist countries are preparing us for nuclear war. As generals talk glibly of "surgical nuclear strikes" or "tactical" nuclear weapons we are being encouraged to accept that there is such a thing as a "smart" nuclear technology. The images of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki walking down the street with their melted skin trailing behind them have obviously receded into ancient history for these technophiles. As the speech also makes clear there is only one way in which this threat to humanity will be eradicated. It will not be done by the property-owning classes who currently govern us. Only a class which has no property to defend, which stands only for human existence can put an end to a society which threatens us all. We, the working classes of the planet still, have a world to win.

Background to the Current Stand-off

Sandwiched somewhere between the Jubilee celebrations and the World Cup, the stand-off between two nuclear armed powers which has been likened to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 received scant attention from the press.

With the US and Britain advising their nationals to get out and the UN planning to evacuate its workers from India and Pakistan while Russia acted as mediator, it is evident that the possibility of a fourth war between Pakistan and India and the third over Kashmir was being taken seriously. The first, in 1947-48, took place immediately after partition. While the ruling Maharajah was making up his mind which state to join, Pakistan cut off supply routes and moved in troops to the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir. Ever since the UN brokered ceasefire Pakistan has held on to the area west of the line of control.

The second war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir was in 1965, following the Sino-India war of 1962, itself a dispute about territory - this time Tibet - that also involved Pakistan and Kashmir. [In 1959 Pakistan ceded a portion of Hunza territory to China, later confirmed by a 'boundary agreement' of 1963, that allowed China and Pakistan to establish a strategic road link through the Karakoram Highway. China itself had occupied over fourteen and a half thousand square miles of the Ladakh region and built a road before India noticed.]

Today India accuses Pakistan of fostering terrorist insurgents. Pakistan accuses India's military forces of brutality and intimidation against Muslim Kashmiris. Both charges are true. Both states regard Kashmir as theirs and both use the on-running dispute as a diversion from internal dissension. It's no accident that the conflict has heightened as the political stability of both states is being tested: India has seen the decline of the Congress Party and the rise of Hindu communalism; the ousting of Bhutto and the PPP [Pakistan People's Party] has been accompanied by the growth of fundamentalism in Pakistan. The present conflict goes back at least a decade when India imposed direct rule on Kashmir after the army killed 38 people during separatist protests in Srinagar. The situation went largely unnoticed by the Western media until foreign tourists began to be kidnapped by unheard of Islamic groups (e.g. al-Faran) but by 1999 both sides were on the brink of war as India launched an offensive against Pakistan-based infiltrators which did not prevent the killing of thirty-five Sikhs by gunmen in Indian-controlled Kashmir during Clinton's visit in March 2000. In November 2000 India did call a ceasefire for Ramadan. This was extended but then called off in May 2001 prior to talks with Musharraf and ended in stalemate.

For India's rulers Kashmir is important because it legitimises its claim to be a tolerant, secular state (a reassurance to its own Muslim population which until recently outnumbered Pakistan's). It is also vital for the Indian state to be able to demonstrate the impossibility of separatism to the numerous secessionist movements which threaten it. "The entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of the Indian Union," Indian Foreign Minister, Inder Gujral made clear in 1997. For Pakistan, on the other hand, its very origins as the state which would provide a home for Muslims in 'the land of the pure' - whose name is based on the initials representing Punjab, Afghans, Kashmiris and Sind - meant that the annexation of Kashmir (especially the Kashmir valley with its Sunni Muslim majority) was always liable to be a permanent preoccupation. Whipping up anti-Indian feeling would prove a useful diversion from internal problems.

Nuclear Powers but Not Rogue States

One reason why this obscure dispute takes on significance for us all today is that both states possess nuclear warheads. [India since its 'peaceful nuclear explosion' in 1974 - following on China's 1964 first nuclear weapons' tests - and Pakistan during the Eighties when it imported nuclear-related material from China.] Both states conducted provocative nuclear tests alongside the border in 1998. Today, apart from the million troops lined up on that border, Pakistan is reported as having about 30 nuclear warheads for its various missiles which have been tested lately and which have a range of between 600-2,500km - and thus a capacity to strike just about anywhere in India; India meanwhile has about 100 nuclear warheads. Pakistan, with a predominantly Muslim population and ruled by a military which intermittently toys with full 'Islamisation' and implementation of sharia law, has a first strike nuclear position. India, officially the world's 'biggest democracy' but for the past decade ruled by a right-wing coalition led by the fanatical Hindu communalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party - which campaigns under the slogan "one people, one culture, one nation", which sanctioned the provocative demolition of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 ⁽¹⁾ and which is behind the anti-Muslim pogroms still being carried out in Gujarat with thousands dead and homeless - reserves the right to retaliate with nuclear strikes. Despite its "no-first-use" policy, India's Defence Minister George Fernandes declared that India could use "all" the weapons in its arsenal should war break out. Pakistan, meanwhile, refuses to disavow first-strike capability. During all this Western intelligence agencies reported an unusual amount of activity at nuclear weapons bases in both countries. Yet neither state forms part of President Bush's 'axis of evil' in the US war against terrorism and neither Pakistan nor India is counted as a 'rogue state' by the US.

On the contrary, Pakistan is the lynchpin in America's war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and terrorism, just as it was the main conduit for arms to the Islamic jihad groups when the Taliban were encouraged by the US in its proxy war against Russia in Afghanistan. Crossing the border into Pakistan was a principal escape route for the Islamic militias and swelling support for Taliban amongst Pakistani population was implicitly sanctioned by US and encouraged by the government. Now that same government has been told by its US master to cut off all support to Taliban and similar outfits, prosecute and imprison those who previously were given free reign and applauded. Musharraf, US poodle that he is, is obediently trying to carry out this difficult policy reversal: made all the more difficult by the fact that this includes a clampdown on the Islamic militias waging war and terrorist attacks across the line of control in Kashmir. [India claims 3,000 militants.] These too have always enjoyed Pakistani government sanction and support. Withdrawing this support means destabilising its own hold on power and creating further opposition from its own population and within the army. The opposition to Musharraf which has greatly increased, first by his support for the US against the Taliban and then by the crackdown on previously legitimated Islamic militants and terrorist groups, is now further sharpened by the - at least verbal - policy of condemning the Islamic terrorist groups which are active in Kashmir and whose ranks have been swelled by the return of militants from Afghanistan. In other words, the US' own policy is undermining its key ally in the region and has directly contributed to the heightened tension between India and Pakistan.

India started positioning its troops on the Pakistan border and threatening to attack Pakistan-based terrorist bases after a suicide attack by Islamic militants on its parliament last December which killed 14 people. At the root of the December 13 attack was Kashmir. The two terrorist organizations responsible [according to India], Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, oppose Indian "occupation" in Kashmir. Both are on the U.S. list of terrorist organisations. The tension markedly increased in May after 34 soldiers and family members were killed in Jammu by Pakistan-based militants and then an attack on a police station in Doda which killed three Indian policemen. Though the BJP government has been fond of anti-US posturing (in a similar way as a Le Pen) it was quick to side with the US war against terrorism after September 11th, seeing the opportunity of getting US support against Pakistan-based incursions into Kashmir. As we know, however, the war against terrorism is not a fight against terrorism in general but a cover for US realpolitik as it pursues its aim of securing its own position as the world's dominant power. It was only during the first week in June that the US - in the shape of Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state - obliged Musharraf to give an assurance that the suspension of cross-border infiltration would be "permanent" and "irreversible" and that he would do everything in his power to avoid war. The assurances, however, are qualified: they are to be "consistent with the honour and dignity of Pakistan" for no-one knows more than Musharraf just how limited his power has become. The US for its part has its own agenda. Its offer to 'assist' India in monitoring the Line of Control that divides Kashmir would secure an open US military presence, not just for its immediate war against al Qaeda and securing Afghanistan's border to control the flow of Islamic militants, but at the heart of central Asia.

What's It Got To Do With The Working Class?

Beyond the obvious, albeit rather serious, threat to our existence a conflict like this one has nothing to do with the working class who have no interest in supporting either India or Pakistan. There is no 'lesser evil' and certainly no progressive force for socialists to even conditionally identify with. Obviously we can have no truck with reactionary Muslim fundamentalists and the pro-Pakistan separatists such as Hizbul-Mujahdeen any more than with the BJP or any of the Hindu communalist parties. No War But the Class War is not interested in accommodating reactionary elements who stand in the way of a clear perspective of a unified class response to capitalism and its warfare. Unlike the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] and the self-styled Stop the War Coalition therefore, we have no need to avoid debate on 'Islamic fundamentalism' for the sake of a spurious 'united front' of Christians, Muslims, pacifists and supposed socialists who never mention that word ⁽²⁾. The Stop The War Coalition does include people who genuinely want to end war but they are being misled by its low-profile leaders who have a different agenda. STW is more about building the SWP by stealth than it is about opposing capitalism (another word it avoids using except when trying to latch on to the anti-globalisation movement) and its drive to war.

Nowhere is this clearer than on Kashmir. Alex Callinicos, a leading SWP luminary explained their position in Socialist Review April 2002. After calling the Stop the War Coalition "the best example of a united front", he then says how clever the STW campaign was not to deal even-handedly with US imperialism and "Islamic terrorism", adding:

There have been attempts to get the STW to broaden its programme by, for example, campaigning against the danger of war between India and Pakistan. Any such move would split the coalition wide open, since many of its Asian supporters take different positions on the Kashmir question.

Leaving aside the sleight of hand which makes out that a multi-class alliance of all sorts of reactionary forces is the same thing as a united front of the working class, what the good professor fails to tell us is that the "different positions" we should not offend are bourgeois nationalist ones. This kind of intellectual smokescreen to disguise anti-working class positions is reminiscent of the convenient arguments used by some of the state capitalist Left parties in India, who hold that the current Indian state is an 'anti-imperialist' power by virtue of its legacy as the 'democratic', supposedly progressive, Congress Party side of the India/Pakistan partition. The truth is that both countries are firmly within the world capitalist nexus. Both are battling economic crisis, pursuing the 'privatisation' and opening up of markets path, and unable to provide civilised levels of existence for the major part of their populations. Pakistan remains one of the world's poorest states with vast inequality of wealth. Meanwhile India, despite its 'emerging market' of 300m people with an annual income equivalent to more than $20,000 (making it very attractive for Western capitalist investors), still has the world's largest number of poor people in a single country. Of its nearly 1 billion inhabitants, an estimated 350-400 million are below the poverty line and more than 40 per cent of the population is illiterate.

The Option Of 'Real' National Liberation For Kashmir Does Not Exist

In the epoch of imperialism, when capitalist relations of production and exchange universally dominate, formal political independence might be a useful mask for the local ruling class to hide behind but - and this is even more obvious with post-cold war 'globalisation' - it cannot be a means of achieving economic development for the 'nation' as a whole. For, wherever it is, the 'nation' in question is made up of social classes with conflicting interests where the self-interest of the local capitalists at no point coincides with the interests of the population as a whole. For the wage labourers and dispossessed from the countryside, or the oppressed rural poor who still live under semi-feudal conditions (the subsistence peasants in hoc to big landlords; the sharecroppers and landless labourers living on the edge of starvation; sometimes even rural labourers employed by cash crop farmers) the prospect of an independent political state does nothing to alter their material conditions of life. Kashmir is yet another example of how there is nothing progressive about modern national struggles: Much less than avoiding the impact of global capitalist relations, there is no prospect today of a healthy, local capitalism breaking down the surviving remnants of pre-capitalist socio-economic injustices and creating a thriving economy where the working class can build up its strength in a similar way to that of the European working class in the late 19th century. Indeed, it is significant that one of the best-known groups which is nominally fighting for national self-determination for Kashmir independently of either Pakistan or India - the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front [JKLF] - is entirely Muslim. Gone is the enlightened ideal of the historically rising bourgeoisie: the notion of a secular nation state of individual citizens with equal rights before the law ⁽³⁾. In the era of the decay of capitalism 'national liberation' is now the banner of backward religious bigotry, not a focus for unifying progressive social forces but for communal strife and the diverting of wage workers and other potentially anti-capitalist elements from their real interest: the fight against capitalism whatever local form it takes.

No support for either Pakistan or India; nor for any Kashmiri so-called national liberation struggle.

We call for workers in India and Pakistan to demonstrate their united opposition to the conflict and any war that breaks out.

The meeting endorsed these resolutions and agreed to try and contact workers in India and Pakistan with the message which we reprint below.

Kashmir Crisis

To all workers' groups and organisations in India and Pakistan struggling against war:

Sheffield No War But Class War meeting on June 11th 2002 sends its greetings of solidarity. We are assisting in every way we can to fight the drive to war by the ruling classes of both India and Pakistan. We support all efforts to unite Pakistani and Indian workers in the real fight - against the capitalist property system which drives humanity to war.

Workers have no country and our task, wherever we are, is to step up the fight at home. If we don't stop capitalism in its tracks we will have a world to lose, since a war in Kashmir between two nuclear powers would have desperate consequences for us all.

Against capitalist barbarism there is no alternative but international working class struggle for revolution!

(1) A train carrying Hindu activists to the disputed religious site of Ayodhya was firebombed by a mob, killing 58 of the activists. Several days of revenge attacks by Hindus against Muslims followed in the state of Gujarat, killing over 700. A further 2000 or so were killed in the nationwide communal rioting that broke out over the destruction of the mosque.

(2) On the contrary, the nature of this modern-day Islamic revival and the reasons for it should be discussed and clarified amongst supporters of NWBTCW lest rejection of religious bigotry be confused with racism.

(3) Like many classical 'nation states' Jammu and Kashmir is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious area: Jammu, in the south west, has a Hindu majority with a minority of Muslims and Sikhs, though many left after 1948; Punjabi and Dogri spoken. Ladakh, the largest area, has a minority of the population which comprises Buddhists, Shia Muslims, nomadic pastoralists; Ladakhi or Bodhi are spoken. Gilgit, strategically placed on the border of Pakistan's North West Frontier province,contains the Hunza kingdom still controlled by the Aga Khan and mainly Ismaili Shias. Baltistan - south west of Gilgit and northwest of the vale of Kashmir and Ladakh - ­contains the pass linking Kashmir to Ladakh. Balti is spoken. Kashmir Valley - the majority are Sunnis but with a significant Hindu minority of Pandits (Brahmins). Kasmiri spoken.