Indian Exploitation of Kashmir Through the Phenomenon of Terrorism: A Case Study

The genesis of conflict roots back to the exploitation of the Muslim majority by the Hindu rulers from1846 on-wards. Conflict broke out between India and Pakistan in 1947 as India took the matter to the UNSC which decided on a plebiscite to determine the will of the people. After the initial agreement, India slowly deviated to portray Kashmir as her internal issue. Having failed to suppress Kashmiri sentiment, India tried to crush resistance through brutal laws enacted in the garb of combating terrorism. In the process, it unleashed the worst form of state terrorism against the Kashmiri masses through a process of huge military deployment, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, rapes and intimidation. This article makes an attempt to understand how the Indian state, used terrorism as a weapon to obfuscate, mask and in fact change the nature of a pure struggle for the right of self-determination to tag it as terrorism.