Recently hinting at revisiting trade deals with India, newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney sees Canada’s trade relationship with the country as based on a “shared sense of values.”
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which proselytizes a fascist platform known as ‘Hindutva.’ The platform has turned an ultranationalist vision of a Hindu ethnostate into policy. In August 2019, Modi’s government abrogated Article 370, which protected the semi-autonomous governance status of the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir and had allowed the region to have its own constitution. Indian military and paramilitary forces swiftly and brutally occupied the region.
Despite years of appeals to hold the Indian state accountable for crimes against humanity, Canada continues aiding and abetting the Indian state through political, economic, and military support. Still, Carney has expressed potential for this relationship to grow and Indian media has been eyeing Carney’s election as signalling a “reset in ties” since the diplomatic blowback to the assassination of Khalistan separatist activist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil.
Kashmir is rich in critical minerals and sits in a strategic point in the Himalayas for northeastern India. Not only does it border with Pakistan, but also the militarized and remote state of Ladakh on the mountainous border with China. Decades of human rights abuses conducted by the Indian state with absolute impunity have only intensified. Indefinite detentions, torture, and disappearances are favoured tools of the state. Censorship and surveillance reign under weaponized anti-terrorism law.
“In both Kashmir and Palestine, rape is used as a weapon of repression,” said Robert Fantina, activist and author covering apartheid policy for over two decades. Drawing a parallel to the Israeli state, he described how the Indian government “performs an ‘investigation’ which nearly always exonerates the perpetrator.”
“Most Canadian government officials seem content to overlook brutal repression, unspeakable human rights violations and blatant violations of international law, as long as those crimes are committed by an ‘ally’,” Fantina said.
Dean Accardi, historian of politics and religion in South Asia and assistant professor of history at Connecticut College, explained that Indian authorities routinely exploit incarceration as a tool of repression. Journalists like Aasif Sultan and Irfan Mehraj, and human rights activists like Khurram Parvez formerly with the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, can be illegally detained for years.
“Canada’s own principled commitment to civil and human rights and its ongoing economic and military relationships with India oblige Canadian attention and responsibility in India’s activities in Kashmir,” Accardi added.
There’s a lot at stake. Two-way trade between Canada and India was valued at $8.55 billion last year, with $111 million invested in India through Canadian pension funds.
Long-time Canadian peace activist Karen Rodman of Just Peace Advocates has seen Indian occupation in Kashmir firsthand. A human rights observation delegation in December 2019 brought her to the Line of Control and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps around Muzaffarabad. This breathtaking sliver of land in the Neelam Valley is part of Azad Kashmir, a region controlled by Pakistan and a relic of the 1947 partition of India. Some people have been exiled here from Indian-occupied Kashmir for over three decades, since Indian forces intensified campaigns against the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front and other insurgent groups seeking complete autonomy in the late 1980s.
Upending the region’s relative independence in August 2019, India once again launched a military siege on Kashmir that month, imposing a curfew and a sweeping communications blackout. Leading up to Canadian elections that October, over four thousand protesters in Toronto alone were united by the chant of Azadi (freedom), calling for Indian state accountability and dignity for Kashmiri people. But Rodman has seen Canadians’ engagement and solidarity build, spark, and fizzle out.
In the wake of the siege in 2019, activists met with Liberal and NDP candidates with a sense of wary hope as the human rights crisis in Kashmir drew global attention. Over the following year, the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development was lobbied to review Kashmir’s human rights situation.
“For the first time in twenty years, Kashmir was actually mentioned in Parliament,” Rodman said.
Though the Conservatives have long enjoyed domestic Hindutva alliance, calls for India to lift curfews, release 13,000 abducted children, and withdraw nearly a million troops from Kashmir even found support among their MPs.
Then, the #ivotekashmir campaign was launched in 2021, seeking to garner the support seen by solidarity movements for Palestinian human rights. Amnesty started and stopped a Canadian campaign. Rodman described early support from the Bloc Québécois but hasn’t seen the same level of engagement this year, saying “they’ve been silent so far in this election.”
This year, Just Peace Advocates, who work in alliance with South Asian grassroots activist organizations, demanded visibility for Kashmir amid the snap election, Canadian foreign policy that pressures India to respect human rights and an “end to systematic campaigns of arbitrary detention and collective punishment through raids and property expropriation.”
The human rights crisis in Kashmir is rapidly devolving. Last week, on April 22, Kashmiri militants allegedly backed by Pakistan launched a terrorist attack on tourists in the Pahalgam region killing at least 27 civilians. The Indian state authorized “operational freedom” in response to the attack, troubling a region where Indian forces already exercise impunity. Indian forces have since demolished the houses of alleged militants and detained over 1,500 people. With reported engagement between Indian and Pakistani troops, Kashmiri civilians are firmly in the crossfire of escalating regional conflict.
Kashmiri human rights have been treated as a politicized flash-in-the-pan to garner electoral support rather than as an issue of unconscionable violation of human rights and international law. Neglect of legitimate concerns and a deepening humanitarian crisis only contributes to further disenfranchisement. With Carney now elected into office, however, Canadian activists are pushing for democratic Canadian foreign policy that puts the dignity and integrity of human life over profit.
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