14/06/2024
“On Sunday, Indian right-wing political commentator Anand Ranganathan called for an “Israel-like” solution in Kashmir, saying: “Israel has catered for its people who were hard done by. We haven’t. Despite that there may never be a solution because of the ideology of the people who hate Israelis and Hindus.”
Horrified by the mention of an “Israel-like” solution amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, many decried the remarks as a clear call for genocide against Muslims in Kashmir.
Ranganathan replied on X that he was not calling for genocide, but rather to prevent another genocide by “rehabilitating the victims, making settlements, fighting terror, securing borders”. The victims … are the Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmir’s minority Hindu population.
Some right-wing political commentators in India falsely refer to the tragic departure of Pandits from the valley as a “genocide”, weaponising their experiences to further demonise Kashmir’s Muslim-majority population.
Kashmir and Palestine … share a common source: British colonisation.
In Palestine, this resulted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a “national home for the Jewish people” on Palestinian lands. In Kashmir, under the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, the British sold the territory to a Hindu warlord, resulting in the brutal suppression of the Muslim-majority population.
The freedom struggle in both contexts predated the monumental events of 1947-48, when both regions were subject to a partition. The UN partition plan in Palestine affirmed Israeli settler-colonialism, while the partition of the Indian subcontinent resulted from the inability of the two primary parties in British India to agree on power-sharing after the departure of the British.
The “births” of India and Israel also meant the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through the Nakba and Kashmiris through the Jammu massacre. Palestine and Kashmir were among the earliest issues debated in the newly formed United Nations.”
