Assadist ‘geopolitical analyst’ Vijay Prashad has spoken & written several times in the past few years about India’s occupation of Kashmir. For some reason, he is seen as an authority when in fact his track record & statements about Kashmir express not so much equivocation as evasion of the issue of colonialism & self-determination. Without once exhibiting any familiarity with the Kashmiri struggle, with Intifada, he’s against the occupation & calls for dialogue between India, Pakistan, & China. At no time does he call for the immediate withdrawal of all Indian troops nor does he ever call for self-determination for the Kashmiri people. As he presents it, Kashmiris are bit players in a territorial dispute, in a larger ‘geopolitical’ dispute.
In an August 2019 interview on RT (before Putin formally endorsed India’s lockdown of Kashmir), the interviewer made a smarmy imputation suggesting the 1977 bombings in Britain were by terrorists trained in Kashmiri Al Qaeda camps. He then asked Prashad, “What is the Al Qaeda dimension to this?” Prashad acknowledged that the majority of Kashmiris have nothing to do with Al Qaeda & then said terrorism is a problem that ‘has to be taken in a very narrow way’, that ‘it’s a police & security problem’–whatever that means. He went on to say the majority of Kashmiris ‘have since 1948 sought some sort of dispensation that allows them to lead ordinary lives’. The ‘some sort of dispensation’ he refers to, so clearly spelled out by Kashmiris, is self-determination & azaadi. Is that so hard for him to say because he does not agree with it? Is he as lost on Kashmir as he is on the Syrian Arab Spring & the US-NATO war in Afghanistan which he said was to ‘bring democracy to Afghanistan by ejecting the Taliban’?