The Biden administration has ratcheted up weapons supplies to India’s quasi-fascist government as part of a dangerous anti-China policy
In early February, the U.S. State Department approved nearly $4 billion in drone sales to India, adding to the $20 billion worth of U.S.-origin defense material the U.S. had sold to India since 2008.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said afterwards that “the U.S.-India defense partnership has seen significant growth over the past decade,” noting that the sale of 31 MQ-9B SkyGuardian aircraft made by General Atomics “offered significant potential to further advance strategic technology cooperation with India and military cooperation in the region.”
The Biden administration has sought to court India as part of its efforts to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region, while prying it away from Russia. Biden called the U.S.-India relationship “the defining partnership of the 21st century,” while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that our countries’ ties are “shaping lives, dreams, and destinies.”
Farhan M. Chak’s recent book, Nuclear Flashpoint: The War Over Kashmir (London: Pluto Press, 2024), shows that many of the lives and destinies are being shaped in horrific ways.
This is particularly true of the Muslim majority in Indian-occupied Kashmir, one of the most militarized spaces on the planet, which has become a nuclear flashpoint as Modi’s government intensifies tensions with Pakistan and China.
Chak is a visiting faculty member at Georgetown University and Secretary General of Kashmir Civitas, an organization committed to the emancipation of Kashmir.
Several of his family members were killed in the 1947 genocide in Kashmir perpetrated by the Hindu Dogra family, which was installed by the British and would not cede power peacefully following the demise of the British Empire and the formation of the independent nations of India and Pakistan.
Kashmiri Muslims trace the beginning of their occupation to the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar signed between the British East India Company and Raja Gulab Singh, the chief of the Dogra family, in which all of Kashmir was sold for the paltry sum of 7.5 million rupees without the population’s consent.[1]
The Dogras were given military support by the British to sustain their rule over the Muslim Kashmiris whom they treated as slaves. In return, the Dogras promised the British overlords the cannon fodder their imperialistic endeavors required.
After the signing of the Treaty of Amritsar, the last indigenous sovereign ruler of Kashmir, Yusuf Shah Chak, a direct ancestor of Farhan M. Chak, was imprisoned and poisoned to death.[2]
In early 1931, a rebellion erupted after a Hindu police officer was charged with desecrating the Holy Quran, forcing the British to send three companies of armed troops to support the suppression of the rebellion by the Dogra rulers.[3]
The violence served as a prelude to the 1947 genocide where Chak has estimated that between 237,000 and 500,000 Kashmiri Muslims were killed.[4] Afterwards, two new political entities—India and Pakistan—were created, with parts of Kashmir incorporated into both.
In October 1947, Kashmiris fought with Pakistani irregular forces in liberating Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan from the Dogra. When Dogra ruler Maharaja Hari Singh appealed to India for military support, they formed an alliance on the condition that Singh would yield the Muslim majority state of Kashmir to India, which has controlled much of them ever since.[5]
Kashmiris, however, do not see Indian control as legitimate because the Maharaja was an imposed ruler placed over Kashmir by British madate, not the indigenous people who were never consulted.
The Indian government’s entire narrative today in legitimating their rule in Kashmir rests on their armed intervention being a consequence of a “tribal invasion by Pakistan” that they supposedly defended India against.
However, Pakistanis were well within their rights to try to liberate the oppressed Muslim people of Kashmir, who had been subjected to genocide and have been heavily persecuted ever since.
Significantly, Indian troops who participated in the genocide had been stationed in Kashmir before the “Pakistani tribal invasion,” and a Hindu Prime Minister was removed and then imprisoned after he vocally opposed Kashmir’s accession to India.[6]
Objective analysts today refer to India’s position in Kashmir as one of “unlawful occupation” going back to the 1940s.[7] Chak estimates that, over the last 30 years, nearly 100,000 Kashmiri Muslims have been killed by Indian occupation troops.[8]
The current Indian government led by Narendra Modi promotes a mythic historical narrative while attempting to tighten its rule over Kashmir and Hinduize it.
Modi is a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has ruled India since 2014.
When Modi was governor of Gujarat in the mid 2000s, he was banned from entering the U.S. over religious violence that he helped to incite.
A criminal complaint filed in an Australian court charged Modi with ordering police to stand aside and allow Hindu mobs to rampage across Muslim-majority areas, resulting in the deaths of about 2,000 people and the destruction of the homes and businesses of 20,000 Muslims.
As India’s Prime Minister, Modi has furthered discriminatory policies against Muslims while helping to transform Kashmir into what Chak calls an “open air prison” reminiscent of Gaza pre- and post-October 7.
Chak reports on forced conversions and land thefts by the Indian government, and “cow vigilantism,” where BJP supporters roam the Kashmiri countryside searching for those whom they claim are unlawfully slaughtering cows who they steal from and then lynch.[9]
Some BJP officials have openly called for ethnic cleansing along the Israeli model in Gaza.
The reputable NGO Genocide Watch, led by Dr. Gregory Stanton, has issued two genocide alerts for Kashmir. Muslim rights are being systematically violated there through extrajudicial killings, unlawful arrest, torture and forced displacement.[10]
The final chapter of Chak’s book addresses India’s growing anti-China alliance with the U.S. and the danger of a war with China breaking out.
A June 2020 border clash leaving 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers dead could portend greater conflict if Modi continues to “tether India’s geopolitical horse to the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy.”[11]
According to Chak, India was better off when it adopted a policy of strategic autonomy in which it sustained good relations with both the U.S. and China and cleverly tried to play each country off the other to maximize India’s advantage.
In a devastating move for Sino-Indian relations, Modi’s India has become part of the Quad, an anti-China alliance with Australia, the UK and Japan, while carrying out more military exercises with the U.S. in proximity to China’s border.
These measures, combined with India’s aggressive drives into Kashmir in violation of Pakistani and Chinese claims there, have greatly increased regional tensions and the threat of nuclear conflagration since India, Pakistan and China are all nuclear-armed powers.
On a state visit to Washington in late June, Narendra Modi was given the red-carpet treatment and feted at a gala dinner attended by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
Most of the gala guests were probably unaware of the horrific atrocities being carried out in Kashmir, as they have gone largely unreported in the U.S. media and are rarely publicized by human rights NGOs or by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which primarily spotlights human rights abuses by U.S. enemies.
With a flush supply of U.S. weapons and no public outcry, Modi has carte blanche to do whatever he wants; a shame for Kashmiris and others living in the region who would bear the brunt of an all-out war that is slowly being provoked by the U.S.
-
Farhan M. Chak, Nuclear Flashpoint: The War Over Kashmir (London: Pluto Press, 2024), 48. ↑
-
Ibid., 42. ↑
-
Ibid., 58, 59. ↑
-
Ibid., 71. ↑
-
Ibid., 108. ↑
-
Ibid., 109, 110. Kak was replaced by an ally of the Maharaja. ↑
-
Ibid., 111. ↑
-
Ibid., 168. ↑
-
Ibid., 117. Chak also details how the Indian government’s Hinduization campaign in Kashmir has included changing of the names of schools and removal of Muslim officials from any positions of authority. One Sikh woman who married a Muslim was forced to annul her marriage and marry someone else, while the Muslim man was imprisoned. ↑
-
Chak, Nuclear Flashpoint, 128, 144. ↑
-
Ibid., 148, 156. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
