Indian Administered Kashmir

[Heid the Ba]

Modi has pulled Indian Administered Kashmir's special status and is trying to assimilate it into the rest of India. The province is in lockdown with mobile phone and internet access shut down. Local politicians are under house arrest. As it is the only Muslim majority province there have always been safeguards over land ownership so only Kashmiri from within a district could own land in that district. Those safeguards have now gone. Add in the change to the terror laws last month allowing individuals to be declared terrorists not just organisations and you might find that some of those under house arrest get denounced and their assets seized. Those assets could then be sold to Hindus from outwith Kashmir. Pakistan is going nuts. Thanks Mountbatten, you cunt.

[Arneb]

I was wondering if things were really as going as beastly stupidly as I thought they were. Apparently, they are. I heard the Pakistani Prime Minister say yesterday, if we go all-out on this, where is it going to lead? It's two atomic powers, after all. But his seems to be quite the minority position.

[Heid the Ba]

Imran Khan is actually a sensible guy but a lot of his parliament and population aren't.

[Lance]

Let 'em nuke each other to hell! Who will miss a billion and a half brown people?

[Lianachan]

It’s pretty fucked up, and....

Thanks Mountbatten, you cunt.

.... is a wonderful summary.

[Heid the Ba]

The longer version is that Mountbatten wanted to be Governor General of both India and Pakistan after Partition but Jinnah wouldn't hear of it. Jinnah, quite rightly, thought Mountbatten favoured India. In revenge for this Mountbatten ignored the recommendations that Kashmir be part of Pakistan and included it in India. All this despite, or perhaps because, Nehru was knobbing Mountbatten's missus, a fact he was well aware of.

What are white and travel over an Irish loch at a hundred miles an hour?
Mountbatten's plimsolls!

[Heid the Ba]

Oh, and it is Friday prayers today, just before the start of Eid. Because why wait until a less inflammatory time.

[Arneb]

What are white and travel over an Irish loch at a hundred miles an hour?
Mountbatten's plimsolls!

[Мастер]

What are white and travel over an Irish loch at a hundred miles an hour?
Mountbatten's plimsolls!

I believe this is a reference to Mountbatten being blown up while boating in Ireland.

[Heid the Ba]

Indeed.

[Arneb]

Oh thank; I could have seen that myself, but only after reading the Wikipedia article.

[Heid the Ba]

As a joke it goes back to the time of the bombing, it's odd what we laughed at then.

[Richard A]

It is indeed a remarkable trait of the British that we make jokes about such things. Another one was "How do we know Lord Mountbatten wore dandruff? They found his Head and Shoulders on the beach." But although Mountbatten did make an almighty screw-up of the handover of British India - another one was to create one country out of two territories hundreds of miles apart, whose people shared a religion but sod all else - I'm not sure he can be entirely blamed for Kashmir. Nehru became Prime Minister of a country whose national anthem to this day describes "Bharat", India, as comprising provinces including Sindh. (The excuse is that it was written decades before Partition, but if Germany can rewrite its national anthem so it no longer claims external territories, one would have thought India could have done the same by now.) But anyway, Nehru set about reuniting as much as he could of India by military force - Goa, still a Portuguese colony in 1947, was one example, Kashmir was another. But at least both were given a degree of autonomy - Kashmir we've discussed, Goa was combined with two other former Portuguese colonies similarly "liberated" and made a state in its own right rather than simply incorporated into then then Bombay State. All in Kashmir was far from sweetness and light and Pakistan has often tried to come to the aid of the Muslim Kashmiri population (although whether it also had other motives is of course another matter!) and a degree of autonomy was all Kashmir was ever given. But then came Modi, a politician for whom Hinduism is a core part not only of his identity but of that of India as a whole. I see direct comparisons between him and Erdogan. (As an aside, what both are doing to their countries' universities is another parallel.) Both the Indian and the Turkish Republics were created as secular states and Modi and Erdogan had a respective major problem with that. So as Erdogan has sought explicitly to Islamise Turkey, so Modi has worked tirelessly to turn the secular republic that Nehru, for all his faults, founded into a Hindu state. And a Muslim-majority Kashmir does not fit with that. I suspect his ideal outcome would be for the Kashmiris to flee to Pakistan, but both they (at least for the moment) and Imran Khan have other ideas.

[Arneb]

Oh dear, I actually laughed at that Head and Shoulders joke. Too much Riesling, I guess.

Just as a nitpick, we didn't rewrite our national anthem, we just declared it to consist exclusively of the third verse of the Lied der Deutschen. The on that doesn't contain the controversial stuff. Unity, the Rule of Law, and Freedom, that only makes claims to ourselves, not to anyone else.

[Heid the Ba]

it isn’t all on Mountbatten; but he spoke for the king so his voice carried weight. He browbeat Radcliffe when it came to the boundaries and he always took Nehru’s side. Both of Nehru’s parents were Kashmiri Hindus so of those pressuring Hari Singh, the Maharajah of J&K, the two main ones were pushing him towards India.

[Heid the Ba]

Oh dear, I actually laughed at that Head and Shoulders joke. Too much Riesling, I guess.

We’ll make a Scot of you yet.

[Heid the Ba]

I think we can all agree that we are on the side of anyone who carries a banner stating Abrogation of Article 370 is not acceptable to us

[Heid the Ba]

Imran Khan is accusing the west of appeasement.

[Richard A]

Oh dear, I actually laughed at that Head and Shoulders joke. Too much Riesling, I guess.

Just as a nitpick, we didn't rewrite our national anthem, we just declared it to consist exclusively of the third verse of the Lied der Deutschen. The on that doesn't contain the controversial stuff. Unity, the Rule of Law, and Freedom, that only makes claims to ourselves, not to anyone else.

I never knew that - I always thought that verse came into being in (or in the run-up to) 1949 as part of the new Federal Republic.

[Мастер]

One of my Canadian friends rewrote the Canadian anthem.

Oh Canada! Our home’s on native land!

[Arneb]

I never knew that - I always thought that verse came into being in (or in the run-up to) 1949 as part of the new Federal Republic.

Oh yes, it was there all along, in the original written in 1841 by Hoffmann von Fallersleben on the island of Helgoland, when it was still British and no-one could foresee that Germany would unite 30 years later... The Weimar Republic, at the behest of Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat first President of the Republic, had all three verses as the National Anthem, when it was still pretty much unthinkable that "Deutschland über alles" could actually mean Germany should try to subjugate everyone else. It was the Nazis that turned the interpretation around, using only verse one, followed by that vile concoction written in shit, the Horst-Wessel-Lied.

[g-one]

One of my Canadian friends rewrote the Canadian anthem.

Oh Canada! Our home’s on native land!

That's how some of us sing it, no 's' though. I think there are t-shirts available.

[Richard A]

Oh I love that! A bit like the t-shirt I saw in Arizona with a picture of Native American warriors with the caption, "The real Department of Homeland Security. Fighting Terrorism since 1492."

[Blue Monster 65]

Those ^ are quite popular, actually. It always strikes me as funny to see a caucasian wearing one. I don't think they get it.

And yes, I am caucasian. A middle-aged one, actually. The root of all evil.

[Lance]

It always strikes me as funny to see a caucasian wearing one. I don't think they get it.

Can't it be a showing of sympathy and understanding? Of course, if you're wearing it with your MAGA hat then maybe not.