Prem Shankar Jha 
Sometime in October, I became aware that the Oxford Union was holding a debate on the motion ‘This House Believes That Kashmir Should Be An Independent State’. What had brought it to my attention was a refusal by Vivek Agnihotri, the maker of the film Kashmir Files, that he had put up on the internet. Agnihotri was within his rights to refuse, but the tone of his reply, which was belligerent and defensive, was an implicit admission of defeat. The Union had then asked a second speaker from India, a member of the pro-BJP ‘Chanakya Forum’, who had apparently first accepted and then withdrawn from the debate.
Knowing that refusal to engage in a debate is an implicit acceptance of defeat, I volunteered to join the debate to oppose the motion. My offer was immediately accepted. The Oxford Union paid neither my air fare to England, nor my hotel bill at Oxford. Both were paid by me, because I felt that my country needed to be defended against allegations made by organisations sponsored by the very country that had turned Kashmir from a little bit of heaven on earth into the first circle of hell.
The following is the full text of my speech, slightly edited for style and clarity, given at the Oxford Union on November 14, 2024 on the motion, ‘This house believes that Kashmir should be an independent state.’
§
Those who have spoken in favour of the motion have talked about independence for only the Indian part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. I am sure this house will agree that whatever we decide, whatever solution we recommend, should apply to the whole of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, because it was the whole of this state that had acceded to India. I see that none of them have proposed independence for their part of the Kashmir state. My response will therefore be confined to the Indian part of Jammu and Kashmir. I will leave it to the House, to judge its relevance for ‘Azad’ [i.e. Pakistan-occupied] Kashmir.
It is my belief that the people of Kashmir are entitled to freedom. But Independence, more specifically the creation of an independent state, will not give them the freedom they desire and is their right. On the contrary it could lead to a different, and worse, form of servitude.
Let me illustrate this by highlighting the difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘independence.’
The demand for freedom is a demand for control over our lives – over how we wish to live, the freedoms we wish to enjoy, and whom we wish to worship. It is a personal demand and the desire for it is as old as time. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt in the 13th century BC to make them free to live as they wanted to. Slaves in America pined for freedom not to return to Africa but to acquire the rights that free American men and women enjoyed.
Freedom is a birthright of individuals, and families. It has no territorial connotation. Independence, on the other hand, relates not to control over our lives, but to control over territory.
The motion we are debating implicitly assumes that independent statehood is a necessary requirement for freedom. This idea is not only simplistic but, in the chaotic world that is being created by the convergence of decolonisation with economic globalisation, it is rapidly becoming the opposite of the truth.
The proof is all around us. For the people of most of the new nations of the world, independent statehood has led not to freedom, but to one or other form of servitude. When I speak of servitude I am referring not only to their country’s economic servitude to other larger nations, which is pervasive but does not impinge directly upon their everyday lives. I am speaking of the servitude that dominant economic, linguistic, religious, or tribal majorities in these countries have imposed upon their people, and especially minorities.
To understand the profound misgivings that the proposal for creating an independent state of Kashmir arouses in me you only need to remember the tribal war, stoked by copper mining conglomerates using hired European mercenaries, that broke out after independence was achieved by the former Belgian Congo; or the civil war that broke out in Angola immediately after it gained its independence from Portugal, or the Hutu massacre of the Watutsis in Rwanda. In none of these countries did independence bring freedom to their people. Instead it brought poverty, and death.
The only true guarantee of freedom within a nation is a vigorous democracy.
All the members of the United Nations are independent countries. But how many are democracies, even in name? Here are a few observations:
The UN began with 51 charter members. By 1958, the number had risen to 82. By 2011 its membership had risen to the present 193 countries. Nearly all the post-colonial members started out as democracies. But how many were able to sustain it? The answer is that in 2010, only five of the 61 states that joined the UN between 1958 and 1975 had been able to do so.
Very few in the following wave of decolonised countries have succeeded in staying democratic. When I asked on Google how many of the present members of the UN are democracies the answer I got was: “There isn’t much information about how many UN member states are democracies, but here’s some related information…”
The United Nations requires only sovereignty, not democracy as a precondition for membership. How low democracy stands in its concerns can be judged by a finding published by Ideas International, an intergovernmental organisation that supports democracy worldwide, on September 26 this year. It estimated that democracy had ranked 27th in the issues discussed that the UN between 2015 and 2023!
So let me repeat once again: Independence is not a prerequisite even for peace, let alone freedom. On the contrary, far too often in the past three quarters of a century it has become a prelude to tyranny and genocide. There is one going on even as I speak.
Then why do we keep conflating freedom with independence?
The answer is that our minds have been moulded into this belief by the era of the nation state in which we were born, and are still living. Nation states require clearly defined territories over which their governments have total control. They are not natural entities, but have been created by a ruthless suppression of feudal forms of rule, through war.
The main driver of this change has been the inexorable expansion of markets which has been driven by advances in technology. These have steadily increased the minimum size of the market needed for their efficient use, from the city states of the 15th century, to the nation states of the 18th to 20th centuries, to the global market of today.
Nation states have required protected markets, in which infant industries can develop free from the threat of competition. That has required them to create sharply defined frontiers, to restrict, if not ban the import of foreign products, and create barriers to the entry of foreign labour. The capacity to create and maintain these protective walls, has therefore become the yardstick of freedom.
Today, despite the fact that globalisation has begun to destroy these protective walls, the identification of freedom with territorial sovereignty continues to dominate our minds. We have therefore forgotten how violent the creation of nation states has actually been. In country after country throughout Europe, it has subordinated regional languages, dialects and customs to a single “national” language.
Age-old cultural practices, and even religions, have been forcibly homogenised and those who have resisted this, have been identified as irredeemably alien and been ‘ethnically cleansed’. I would therefore like to ask the house about the kind of independent state they would like Kashmir to become.
What do Kashmiris really want even after 14 years of police rule?
Despite 34 years of interaction with Kashmiris from every walk of life, I do not feel qualified to give any definitive answer to this question. As I have pointed out earlier, it certainly isn’t the kind of independence Kashmiris in Indian Kashmir want.
This was made abundantly clear by two opinion polls carried out in Jammu and Kashmir, by MORI [editor’s note: now known as Ipsos] and Gallup, Europe and the US’s most respected polling agencies.
The MORI poll of 2004 was commissioned by a British organisation headed by Lord Avebury, called the Friends of Kashmir. I think to their surprise it showed that almost no one in any part of Indian Kashmir wanted the state, or any part of it, to merge with Pakistan. 61% of those polled said they felt they would be better off politically and economically as Indian citizens. Only 6% said the same about Pakistani citizenship. 33% said they “did not know”.
Its other, more significant, finding was that 81% the respondents in Jammu and Kashmir wanted ‘the unique cultural identity of Kashmir,’ i.e its Kashmiriyat, to be preserved in any long-term solution’. Even In Srinagar, the epicentre of the Kashmiri uprising, 76% were of this view.
The core of Kashmiriyat is its form of Sufi Islam. There are five variants of this in Kashmir: the Naqshbandi, the Qadri, the Suhrawardi, the Kubrawi and the Rishi. None of these come even close to the brand of Sunni-ism advocated by the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is now the form of Islam encouraged in Pakistan.
Sufism is derived from Sunni Islam, but it came to India from Iran and not Arabia. It is therefore not only different in important respects but is intermixed with practices adopted from Hinduism, to make the conversion of Hindus easier.
Since its first abortive attempt to annex Kashmir through an invasion in 1965, Pakistan has spared no effort to annex Indian Kashmir by other means. These have been the source of the misunderstanding and distrust of Kashmiriyat in India, especially but not only, by the present government.
In the 2004 MORI poll the respondents cited their goals as follows
- 86% wanted free and fair elections to elect the people’s representatives;
- 87% wanted direct consultation between the Indian government and the people of Kashmir;
- 86% wanted an end to militant violence in the region ;
- 88 % wanted the government to stop the infiltration of militants from Pakistan, across the Line of Control.
- Finally, and not at all surprisingly, 93% of those polled wanted economic development of the region to provide more job opportunities and reduce poverty.
The MORI poll’s results came as a shock to its promoters, so a second poll, with a larger sample size was organised in 2009-10 under the auspices of Chatham House, Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. Its results were very similar to those of the MORI poll of 2004. But for Indians its most welcome finding was that in the four most militancy affected districts of Kashmir valley in India only 2.5 to 7.5% said they preferred becoming citizens of Pakistan.
According to the poll, the vast majority of those polled wanted ‘Independence’. But the polling was not done in English. The respondents would have used the word ‘azadi’. But azadi and its companion demands, “khud mukhtari“ and “nizam-e Mustafa,” do not have the connotations that the English word ‘independence’ has. Azaadi and khud mukhtari are demands for the right to make one’s own decisions and choose one’s way of life. These could be for oneself, one’s family, tribe, religious group or nation. Nizam-e Mustafa is the right to live by “the order of the Chosen One” – in the case of Muslims, by the dictates of the Prophet.
All three are expressions of the way people wish to live. They are what the late professor Isaiah Berlin of Oxford University defined in his celebrated essay on Two Concepts of Liberty, as Positive freedoms, i.e the freedom to control oneself, to act rationally and choose responsibly. As the 2004 MORI poll showed, none of these were demands for the separation of Kashmir from the rest of India.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.