Kashmir: "India will not attract the wrath of the international community"

As India prepares to celebrate its national holiday on August 15, Jammu and Kashmir and its people live with the sound of boots. Since the decision of the Narendra Modi government to revoke the autonomy status of that part of Kashmir it controls, a lead screed has fallen on this region, where communications are cut off and travel restricted by controls and coverage. lights. This explosive situation, especially because of the liabilities with neighboring Pakistan, hardly yet to attract the commitment of the international community

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"For the international community, this revocation is simply a matter of Indian domestic policy," said Olivier Guillard, Asia research director at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (Iris), interviewed by France 24. "The State of Jammu and Kashmir is recognized as part of India, no one disputes its existence, and the decision to revoke autonomy does not apply to Kashmir as a whole, but only to the Indian side. of the region."

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, on August 8, simply called for "maximum restraint" between the two neighboring nations, which shared Kashmir territory after their independence, and since then have committed three wars, two of which are about this region. He said he was "concerned" about the "restrictions" imposed in Jammu and Kashmir, "which may aggravate the human rights situation". The US State Department, while "keeping a close eye" on the situation, is careful not to take sides, noting that New Delhi has ensured that its measures were exclusively in "an internal matter" to India.

For India, a domestic affair

An "internal affair" was, moreover, the justification put forward by Indian diplomacy in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Indian ambassador to Pakistan and the suspension of bilateral trade relations in retaliation at the end of the autonomy of India. Province.

"My friends, I am convinced that we will be able to liberate Jammu and Kashmir from terrorism and separatism with this form of organization, and I am convinced that the people of Jammu and Kashmir after defeating separatism will progress. to new hopes and aspirations, "said Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his first speech since the revocation of autonomy, calling this measure" historic ".

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New Delhi explains that this particularity has hurt Kashmir's economic development, which he wants to fully integrate with the rest of the country. The autonomy status, the Indian government emphasizes, forbids individuals from outside the territory to buy land, invest in it or settle there. A brake on the economic development of the region.

Pakistan wants to internationalize the crisis

Pakistan, on the other hand, refutes this view of the crisis as a simple Indian domestic affair.

After calling for a fight against this decision in the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court, Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan did not hesitate to compare the silence of the international community with the passivity against the Germany of the 1930s.

"The curfew, repression and imminent genocide of the Kashmiris in India's occupied Kashmir takes place exactly according to the ideology of the RSS [an ultra-nationalist Hindu movement with paramilitary methods, Ed.] Which was inspired by the Nazi ideology ", tweeted Imran Khan. "There is an attempt to change the demography of Kashmir by ethnic cleansing, and the question is: will the world look and be conciliatory as it was with Hitler?"

I am afraid of this RSS ideology of Hindu Supremacy, like the Nazi Aryan Supremacy, will not stop in IOK; It will lead to the elimination of Muslims in India and eventually lead to targeting of Pakistan. The Hindu Supremacists version of Hitler's Lebensraum.

However, "Pakistan has international image problems and has a hard time enforcing its opinions. [...] It lacks credibility," said Michael Kugelman, of the Washington-based think tank Wilson, interviewed by France 24.

Part of Pakistan's international wait-and-see attitude can be explained by the country's ambiguous attitude towards certain Islamist groups in the past. The support that New Dehli was able to exploit against Pakistan, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, and those of Bombay in 2008. Faced with this, India presents itself on the contrary as "the largest democracy in the world. world "besides being the world's seventh largest economy, with the market opportunities that flow from it.

"The world powers value their partnership with New Delhi because India is a huge market and they do not want to scuttle this relationship," says Kugelman.

For China, "All that hinders India is good to take"

Aware of his country's lack of influence, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi traveled to Beijing on the weekend of August 10 to plead his case. He assured himself of China's support for mentioning the Kashmir case before the UN Security Council.

"All that hinders India is good to take," says Olivier Guillard. "China and India are two neighboring nations and strategic rivals, they have a border conflict liability that ended with a defeat of India in 1962. Finally, China stands up for the Pakistan and the Kashmiris, because she feels involved in this issue: a small part of the region is under its domination. "

Attentive to the diplomatic weight that China can exert, India has been keen to defuse the situation. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar also traveled to Beijing to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, and reiterate his government's position.

The decision to withdraw Kashmir's special status of autonomy "does not constitute a new claim to sovereignty, does not change the cease-fire line between India and Pakistan, and does not change the current line of control the border between India and China, "he said, referring again this decision to a simple domestic matter.

Events that will not move the lines?

Since the revocation of autonomy status, several events have taken place in Kashmir, Pakistan but also in capitals and major western cities where the Kashmiri diaspora who fled the conflict is very present. A mobilization that could intensify in the coming week as several procachemiris groups have already called for a major demonstration in front of the High Commission of India in London for the Hindu National Day, August 15.

"The few hundred people we saw in front of the embassies of India abroad is small format.There is no chance that such a small mobilization move the lines," said Olivier Guillard. The tension between Pakistan and India can be expected to continue, as the Kashmiris continue their demonstrations. But Narendra Modi will not move. It is not 300 people demonstrating in front of the UN that will make him change his mind in view of the broad support of his Indian electorate. "And the director of research at Iris concludes:" India is not going to attract the wrath of the international community ".