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Kashmir and the eternal motte and bailey of the soyjeet mind
Yesterday, terrorists, muslim terrorists, killed innocent tourists in Kashmir. They asked people their names, checked if they were circumcised or not, to ensure that the people killed were Hindu. The reaction to this news has been predictable. The right wing or the boomer wing wants more state control and will be fine with 24/7 mandatory survellance of every cell phone whilst the online soy left is back to its motte and bailey games. You can check places like /r/librandu, /r/kashmiri and /r/vaushv for takes there where people cannot openly celebrate it, so they have to resort to calling religions bad. "Religions are bad, we must all be atheists". This is thinly veiled, though I am not coming out of my hiatus to link to an unfortunate tragedy or point out logical fallacies.
Kashmir has been unstable since its independence due to being run by a tiny Hindu population and a large Muslim underclass. Indian independence meant that the feudal states would be disbanded and democratic elections would replace the ruling class. This meant death for Kashmiris. The place was on the brink of collapse, only saved by Jamwals, a nearby Rajput clan, literally buying it from the Brits and allowing Kashmiri Pandits breathing space. Both groups are upper caste, the highest two varnas and made up nearly all of the Hindu population of a muslim place.
This bit of history is important to understand recent attacks. Kashmir, at one time, was a place with quite a few Buddhists. Kashmir Shaivism, the local religious sect of Hinduism, was not on bad terms, and plenty did convert, unfortunately post post-Islamic invasions, you saw Muslim populations rise via conversions. The higher caste Hindus there, the Brahmins, the Kashmiri Pandits, were facing active persecution, and the religion itself was nearly dead. Until the State was established.
Jamwals were mercenaries from the neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, and very likely descendants of the same stock as me, as once claimed by the current King. Shaivism and the Kashmiri Pandits were saved, but things would get worse. The largest displacement started in 1991 with the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from Srinagar and since then, they have been living in various parts of the nation, unable to ever go back to Srinagar.
The underclass actively resented the ruling class. Unlike Buddhists, muslims did not like Hinduism and seeing a minority that is responsible for every single thing good about your culture that can whip you at any time did not sit well with them. 1947 offered a break with Pakistan, a nation formed simply to support the rights of Mujeets (muslim pajeets) and quasi socialists like the INC, led by a kashmiri pandit in Nehru being squarely against the Dogra Dynasty. The problem India now faces is that the people who were displaced can never return unless you allows Kashmir to escape the laws of India.
The Indian state is a nanny state, whilst Americans can own guns and even hunt, anything beyond a knife will get you felony charges. Given that the state runs on explicit bioleninism, this meant that Islamic ghettos here become no-go zones. Police officers do not enter these ghettos, and you would find azaan playing in the background in most Indian cities simply because people live in secluded places. Kashmir today is that ghetto, but instead of 5-10 percent of the population, it's closer to 99.
India can never allow its citizens the right to own guns and rule a piece of land with any amount of sovereignty, this act actively delegitimises the state. Having a place next to you where people lead better lives with actual freedom would raise questions no one wants to answer. Kashmir will keep getting worse, the area will get more militarised, the mujeet youth will take up anti hindu activities more as they get less options for the future due to economic collapse and Indian state will intrude furhter into the lives of ordinary citizens.
My own biases are quite apparent. I came to this place a broken man. I was 20, and I was sure that my life would collapse sometime soon. I was able to change my ways this year due to my discovery of Kashmir Shaivism(not a Kashmiri btw). My family itself has personal ties or at least used to have ties with the Dogra Dynasty's current head and also the muslim ruling class and their last popular chief minister, whom I will not name for privacy concerns. The locals will always hate the Hindus, the leftists here do that too, they are just too cowardly to admit that they do too. Motte and Bailey was my favourite slatestarcodex post, helps explain a lot of what I grew up seeing.
What are the escalation probabilities on this?
You can't fight Pakistan for the same reason you don't pick fights with a pig. Pakistan doesn't point a gun towards you. Pakistan points a gun and its own head and threatens to shoot. Every Indo-Pakistani war was started by Pakistan, because India has nothing to gain from it.
War doesn't work, because war creates unpopular deaths for India while creating martyrs in Pakistan.
Economic retaliation doesn't work because Pakistan has no economy to speak of. Resource bottlenecking doesn't work because they are already on the verge of famine. Anything more will mean civilian deaths.
Full decoupling does not work because we have long borders. The US can't enforce a border with Mexico, and that's all flat land. Imagine trying to maintain a border up in the Himalayas. Don't even get me started on their nukes.
The failed state of Pakistan is a nuisance past redemption.
If Pakistani leadership stopped to think for a second, they'd realize that India is their natural trading partner. Afterall, these trade routes go back millennia. Karachi is clearly aching for maritime trade with India's west coast. Lahore is 30 miles from Amritsar. Faisalabad is 100 miles from Amritsar.
Geographically, Pakistan's urban areas hug India in the same way Canada's hug the USA. Can you imagine if Canada arbitrarily decided to have zero trade ties with India. Yes, Pakistan is client state to China and could trade with them. But China is too far. Beijing is closer to Anchorage than it is Islamabad. After 100 years of poisoning the well, I am aware that India-Pakistan peace is broken for good. But, what a waste.
Agree with everything 100 percent. Will add that Pakistan as a nation is so much worse than India. They take the worst parts of their neighbors and mix in enough resentment leading to the tendency to pick a fight no matter the cost.
Even if it means that they get their teeth kicked in, they would take that deal if it means chipping their neighbors nail. My main gripe is not Pakistan, though. At some point, India and the upper castes in particular have to come to terms with demographic shifts. You simply cannot let electoral democracy play out in a place that has always been a minority rule.
Pakistan is beyond one's abilities, but with Kashmir is effectively Pakistan for most Indians. These issues will spring up as ghetto dwellers get to bear weapons, while people living in gated societies do not. India needs to actually own Kashmir, and that cannot happen if the apparatus and values running it are Indian.
The Indian army is a big unit and it's fairly competent despite the occasional scandals and bureaucratic red tape. Kashmir takes up more resources than any part of India, and people who join the armed forces get stationed there at least once in their lives. That place needs to be truly reclaimed and that requires interventions that go against the beliefs of 1947.
And for a while they were doing good. India was a languishing in socialist democracy (hindu rate of growth) and a Bangladesh was still finding its feet as fledgling nation. In the 20th century, Pakistan was in a better place than India or Bangladesh. In the 90s, they nearly doubled India in GDP-PPP/Capita terms.
Even as a badly run but stable nation, Pakistan has a lot to offer. It has tons of rare earths. Pakistani-Kashmir is heaven on earth. Punjabi river systems are well-suited for industrialized agriculture. I would much prefer for Pakistan to thrive as nation of 250 million people, than this clown show they've been running.
Before 1990, their marginal economy was possibly propped up by the US against soviet afghanistan and soviet ally india.
With the china trade war and the war in ukraine, everyone’s talking about rare earths these days, but imo they are insignificant. The entire global market is 12 billion dollars, that’s like 20 times less than the copper market, 250 times less than the oil market. People have a strategy game view of resources, where if you don’t have them in your territory in the beginning, you’re screwed. In reality, if their price rose to significance, everyone would dig in their garden and find rare earths.
FYI, your link doesn’t work in “It's so overt that Pakistan's defense minister almost let the mask slip off. “
Also Pakistan was included in the first wave of outsourced western manufacturing, before China was a big player in that. A lot things that are now made in China were made on Pakistan. That’s mostly gone to China now.
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