When retired Indian Supreme Court justice Markandey Katju said (in 2012) ’90-percent of Indians are idiots’ who don’t have enough brains in their heads to resist incitement to communal conflict, he was speaking from a position of stinking elitism & mendacity. Ninety-percent or more of Indians sustain brutal oppression, maliciously orchestrated by the state, because of caste, class, gender, religion. There’s no reason to go all mushy-brained or sentimental about the downtrodden who engage in violence against others but a well-heeled, well-educated Brahmin accusing them of idiocy is hardly an analysis of the problem worth taking seriously.
Katju is all over the place politically & for several months has been drawing a comparison between the US war against Vietnam & India’s occupation of Kashmir. That’s a problematic analogy because Vietnam had both regular forces & a guerrilla army experienced for 40 years in the war against French colonialism before the US invasion. Kashmir has no army & no guerrilla force except a handful of isolated, poorly armed & untrained operatives on the run. He opposes the occupation but his reasoning can hardly be called coherent. If you read Katju’s comparison, it lends itself to justifying the occupation, if not genocide, by claiming all Kashmiris will become guerrillas, that a “large-scale guerrilla war is bound to emerge.” Maybe he ought to take a closer look at the history of the Kashmiri struggle & stop making glib analyses based on prejudice.