The US interests in job markets and cheap labour have taken precedence over the internationally realized need of addressing the Kashmir issue not realizing its own strategic compulsions vis-à-vis the volatile situation in the region, writes Abdul Majid Mattu

The great-power attitudes towards Kashmir continue to remain cast in the same mould today when there is an unprecedented resistance in Kashmir, as they were when there was none. One well known reason for this is the swinging of the ideological pendulum between the moralism of great powers and their interest with the supply of Oil and cheap labour and markets for investment and goods. The new doctrine of a World Order has made the market the arbiter of collective destinies. And a natural and inevitable result is the drying up of human sympathies and dismissal of the moral narratives of a struggle.  

Another closely related factor is that America has always viewed with suspicion any movement that seeks to change an existing dispensation unless that change is perceived to be necessary for a defined American interest. It does not care to probe the historical forces behind a people's struggle and refuses to distinguish a genuine struggle from a contrived one. America's criteria for bestowing significance on any situation, event or process is that it should either originate from the West or be seen as posing a direct challenge or threat to a major interest of the West.

Yet another important factor is that we are confronted with a global politics of non-conviction in the garb of pragmatism. The notion that injustice to people is inherently destabilizing is foreign to the mind-set that currently governs world affairs. The marginalization of the U.N.O has left us with no centre of reflection where the long view could be developed. In the sphere of international relations, with hardly any common notion of collective good, justice loses its obligatory character and also its relevance if the small space that has been created for it is not scrupulously and adequately guarded. That space comprises (a)the carrying out of international agreements; (b)refraining from the use of force against a whole people; and (c) recourse to International Court of justice or mutually accepted arbitration on issues between countries  which are subjects of controversy. The Kashmir issue touches all these principles.

President Obama’s just concluded visit to India has to be viewed in the backdrop of these factors. Notwithstanding his statement that the dispute over Kashmir is a long standing one, there was little to suggest that the need for its resolution by India and Pakistan before America would endorse the former’s membership of the U.N.S.C, the very organization whose resolutions on Kashmir have been ignored by India in utter disregard of the United Nations Charter. The US interests in job markets and cheap labour have taken precedence over the internationally realized need of addressing the Kashmir issue – this, not realizing its own strategic compulsions vis-à-vis the volatile situation in the region.

(Abdul Majid Mattu can be mailed at majid.mattu@yahoo.in)

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