by LAL KHAN
The elections for the Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) Assembly being held today is perhaps the most unrelated of issues plaguing the Kashmiri youth and the working people on this side of the line of control. The ruling elite neither has the resources nor the will to solve any of the burning problems the Kashmiri masses are inflicted with.
Power, perks, plunder, and of course corruption are the main incentives in the present day politics that dominate Pakistan and Kashmir. The campaign is based on sham haranguing and hollow rhetoric. The Kashmir issue itself, a chauvinistic tool of the Pakistani ruling classes — especially the religious and nationalist right — is also on the wane. The outcome of these elections will not deliver anything to the oppressed Kashmiris.
After 64 tumultuous years, the condition of the people of Azad Kashmir has not improved any more than that of their brethren in Indian-occupied Kashmir. A solution to the Kashmir dispute is further away today than it was in 1948. Even one of the wiliest politicians of the religious right, Maulana Fazlur Rehman admitted in his latest interview with Newsweek Pakistan: “Now the concept of winning Kashmir has taken a backseat…My own experience suggests that neither country is serious about Kashmir.”
The Maulana is evading the fact that they cannot solve this issue under the present geopolitical set-up and socio-economic system. However, they want to keep the issue alive as it suits the imperialists, the military, and the political elites in India and Pakistan. The issue is not only used as an excuse for a massive armaments build-up with huge profits for the imperialist-military-industrial complexes and the lucrative kickbacks the generals and the politicians get out of it. It is also an issue deliberately left by the British imperialists after a bloody partition to keep their stranglehold over the region through the instability that it continues to generate on the subcontinent. Their local stooges who came to power have also used it as a bone of contention to whip up national chauvinism, employed as a battering ram to suppress internal dissent and mass upheavals on a class basis. Hence, they cannot let go of this vital weapon of class rule in their arsenal.
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(Thanks to Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)