India has launched military strikes in nine areas of both Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The BBC reported that:
According to Pakistan, three different areas were hit: Muzaffarabad and Kotli in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and Bahawalpur in the Pakistani province of Punjab.
Pakistani officials have said that 26 people have been killed, with 46 more injured. Al Jazeera reported that:
A Pakistani military spokesman had earlier told the broadcaster Geo that at least five locations, including two mosques, had been hit. He also said that Pakistan’s response was under way, without providing details.
In Punjab, missiles hit a mosque in the city of Bahawalpur, killing a child and wounding two civilians, the military said.
India has claimed that the strikes were targeted in areas that are part of:
terrorist infrastructure.
Israel’s genocide against Palestine has followed a remarkably similar pattern of bombing civilians while they sleep, targeting mosques, killing children, and then claiming that the whole operation was to combat terrorism.
India’s coloniality
This similarity, however, is no coincidence. Academic Hafsa Kanjwal sets out how India’s relationship to Kashmir is firmly one of settler colonialism:
When the British ruled the subcontinent, they sold Kashmir to the Dogras, Hindu chiefs from the nearby region of Jammu, in the aftermath of the first Anglo-Sikh War in 1846…Unlike most princely states, Jammu and Kashmir was one of the few where the religious identity of its ruler was different from those of the majority of its subjects. The Dogras were Hindu, while more than three-quarters of the people in the state were Muslim.
Just as Israel’s domination over Palestine has roots in British colonialism via the Balfour Declaration, so too do the contemporary politics of Kashmir originate with British and Indian coloniality. Kanjwal argues:
Kashmir is India’s colony. The exercise and expansion of Indian territorial sovereignty, especially in Kashmir, is a colonial exercise. The exercise of Indian power in Kashmir is coercive, lacks a democratic basis, denies a people self-determination, and is buttressed by an intermediary class of local elites or compradors.
However, this domination can only be understood within the context of Global North colonialism:
But it is also colonial because India’s rule in Kashmir relies on logics of more ‘classical’ forms of colonialism from Europe to the Global South: civilisational discourses, saviourism, mythologies, economic extraction and racialisation. As with all imperial or colonial forces, India has sought to rule over Kashmir through subjugating its people and trampling their rights.
Kashmiris are subject to arbitrary detention, travel bans, and broad state censorship by Indian authorities. Meenakshi Ganguly from Human Rights Watch said:
Kashmiris are unable to exercise their right to free expression, association, and peaceful assembly because they fear they will be arrested, thrown in prison without trial for months, even years.
Settler colonialism
A 2024 UN report found that a “staggering” number of Palestinians are held by Israeli authorities in Israeli detention. Just like Israel, India has also blamed a fight against terrorism as justification for structural violence against native populations.
As well as a pattern of subjugating Muslim natives whilst claiming to be fighting terrorism, India and Israel also share fascist ideologies. Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, is in step with Zionism in a perhaps unexpected manner. Academic Vikram Visana explains, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is founded on Hindutva:
Devised in the early 20th century, the politics of Hindutva insist that the country’s national identity be built around those who consider only India’s geography sacred. Muslims and Christians, whose holy sites lay in the Middle East, were therefore considered second-class citizens.
And:
Hindutva doesn’t stop at India’s borders. Hindu nationalists have used the ongoing conflict in Gaza to vilify other Muslims globally. BJP troll farms have spread disinformation and anti-Palestinian hatred online, and Hindu nationalist groups in India have organised pro-Israel marches.
In other words:
To Hindu nationalists, some Zionists were engaged in a project to reclaim their holy land from a Muslim population whose religious roots in the region were not as ancient as their own.
India: leveraging US power?
Both Hindutva and Zionist ideologies are based on purging a holy land from Muslim savages. And, it is that figure of Muslim savages that has a powerful currency in Israeli and Indian culture of Muslims as an uncontrollable, animalistic, Other. Journalist Azad Essa explains how the connecting factor for contemporary iterations of Zionist and Hindutva ideologies is a tussle for US imperialist support:
The Indian American lobby—or, more accurately, the Hindu nationalist lobby—literally modeled itself on organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as they looked to replicate their methods in hustling for influence over the US government.
Essa concludes that:
Ultimately, Hindu nationalists have tried to align Indian interests with US power—and given the silence in the media and among US lawmakers about the rise of Hindutva, the occupation in Kashmir, and the attack on India’s minorities, including Muslims and Christians, I’d say they have been pretty successful.
India’s latest attacks on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir are yet another attempt to continue the persecution of Kashmiri Muslims. Any similarities to Israel’s mode of operation in Palestine are further evidence of Hindu nationalist ideology built on Islamophobia and colonial domination. And, as with Palestine, the US’ alignment with Indian interests will likely be the difference between life and death for Kashmiris.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.