Pretty faces, ugly policies

Global community supporting India as it turns a blind eye to continuing efforts at asserting regional dominance

It is an uncomfortable truth that the world’s silence at India’s continuing efforts to assert its illegal claims to the region amounts to tacit support. There is a reason that no US President before Donald Trump was willing to move the US embassy in Israel to Jeruselum — despite US support for Israel being an open secret, they did not want to officially recognise Israel’s claim to the disputed city. Similarly, most countries and their leaders avoided traveling to Kashmir — both Indian-Occupied Kashmir and Azad Jammu and Kashmir — in official capacities to avoid creating the appearance that they were taking sides in the dispute.

While Miss World contest is not ‘official’ business, it is a massive TV event with a global audience that would allow India to use a ‘soft power’ approach to erase the dispute from common knowledge and make its illegitimate claims seem like established facts. Unfortunately, it will be unsurprising if anti-Muslim governments in India and elsewhere paint any Pakistani opposition to the event as being about the women, rather than the venue. For this reason, Pakistan — which does not participate and thus cannot boycott the event — needs to tread carefully when reaching out to the international community to either boycott the event, or demand relocation to another part of the country.

But tact is not the only problem. Just as Trump’s change opened the floodgates for other anti-Palestinian governments to move their embassies to Jerusalem, the recent decision by the US and several other countries to bet on India as a counterweight to China has had a knock-on impact on their Kashmir policies. Although only a handful of countries vocally supported the Pakistani position — that Kashmir already is, or should be, Pakistani territory — most countries agreed on the need for a plebiscite guaranteeing the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination. But even fewer countries are making that demand now, since everyone else is more worried about propping up India, giving New Delhi free reign to trample Kashmiris.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 31^st, 2023.

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