Sovereignty explained

There is no doubt Kashmir is driven into a political storm.  People offer remedial answers by instantly stepping back in contemporaneous history and surface poignant moments like changing of Muslim Conference to National Conference, assuming thereby that at crucial hour the chief architects of Kashmir’s make over in 1947 would have backed out from their ambitious strategy, aware of deficient public support.  Most other commentators blame internecine warfare between local governing parties and their deficiencies.  Each populist egotistical party enjoyed self-indulgent power at the expense of eroding political fabric.   Self-determination is a political instrument that is the oxygen of governance in modern times and because it is neither made a point of discourse nor made the prime objective for effective and lasting governance, a commentary on this sanctimonious remedy and some salient contours of this instrument are explained.  An awareness of self and free will in all the people to be governed stands like a rock facing fatalism or predetermined destiny.

  In 1916 it was Lenin who enunciated the primacy of people and their rights of governance followed by President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 point agenda for self-determination and his address to Congress in May 1917 makes Kashmir’s case understood.  He said ‘No peace can last or ought to last which does not accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.  Ask people in a referendum how they wish to be governed and not who sits in their ministerial chambers?  Wilson declared that Self-determination is the capstone of peace, applicable to Kashmir and ignored at the peril of the administration. 

   

Unfortunately India made its rejectionist policy on self-determination in Jammu & Kashmir clear before international community on many occasions.  In official forums like the 1088 General Assembly meeting on  5 Feb. 1964 India’s envoy Mr. M.C. Chagla reiterated the policy saying ‘ I wish to make it clear on behalf of GoI that under no circumstances can we agree to plebiscite in Kashmir because any ( reference to self-determination ) today by definition questions integrity of India .  We cannot tolerate 2nd partition of India on religious grounds that will destroy the very basic secular character’.  Self-determination versus State Sovereignty is debated at length in discourse widely referenced in literature but some salient fragments are worth restating.    Exercise of State sovereignty that forms the basis of Indian stand has been analyzed and found to reside in two component parts the people or popular sovereignty and the State or government position on sovereignty.   In other words sovereignty is a compound doctrine that is best understood by examining the relationship between the sovereignty of the State  as a territory and the sovereignty of peoples, i.e., the sovereignty of nations.   While a sovereignty-exercising State can be a totalitarian regime, it can also be a democratic one in which the sovereignty of the people confers and controls the sovereignty of the State as per the tenets of law as agreed by all member states including India.    

December 14, 1960 the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples thereby recognizing the sovereignty of a subjugated people against a colonial power.   In this declaration, the approving United Nations members stated that all peoples have an inalienable right to complete freedom that includes the exercise of their sovereignty, and the integrity of their national territory. 

Even though exercises of sovereignty can be the source of violation of fundamental human rights,  they can also be equivalent to expressions of fundamental human rights.   Therefore, in some instances sovereignty and its exercise can be crucial to the protection of human rights because it can be an expression of how individuals and the communities put into practice those elements of self-determination that are constitutive of human rights. A sovereign nation is a community of people who exercise shared values concerning human dignities that shape and direct the particulars of their communitarian self-determination.  Consequently, an attack on the legally acknowledged rights of families in Shopian to live in peace and the interminable violations in all districts of Kashmir now widely circulation in world forums paves the way for the erosion of human bondage between the peoples of the two nations. 

Enforcements and peremptory sanctions and human rights violations perpetrated against  part of a citizenry population are in effect encroachment on sovereignty itself and counter-productive of any solution envisaged for now or future.  Taking wisdom from what US Secretary of State Francis Fukuyama celebrating triumphalism at the end of Communism said , ‘We are not condemned to live forever in the realist world of inevitable conflict’ let us also think in realistic terms how right to self-determination can be delivered to the masses all across all parts of the beleaguered and divided erstwhile  state of Jammu & Kashmir. 

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