Best of luck for India to reach there goal, but look at this what Steve Cohen has to say about you guys..
<Clearly, the Pakistan government is supporting or tolerating intolerable groups, sometimes quite cynically, but the Indian government was not a Lockean paradise for Kashmiris for many, many years.> Steve Cohen
Dear Dr. Cohen,
In an earlier Online Talk you said (w.r.t. to Kashmiri militants) "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". How far are you willing to carry this linguistic and moral relativism? Would you apply it to the case of Timothy McVeigh, for instance? Why not provide an objective definition and apply it rigorously.
In my view a freedom fighter is a person fighting to establish a free state (i.e. a state which recognizes and protects individual rights, as defined by John Locke). By this definition the Kashmiri militants cannot be called freedom fighters because they are trying to establish or merge with an authoritarian Islamic or semi-islamic state. Your comments please?
Puneet Bhandari
Dear Puneet:
I like your distinction. However, is murdering a child or an innocent justified when one wants to establish a free and democratic state? How many innocents can be murdered and still have the ends (establishing a free, democratic state) justify the means (murder). In the abstract, I am a Gandhian, and abhor political violence, but I recognize that mankind is also a tragic animal, and must, at times, do immoral or unpleasant things.
As for the Jehadis in Kashmir, I would distinguish between the Kashmiris who feel (with some justification) that they live under Indian oppression—this view is shared by most objective Indian observers of the situation—and the terrorist tourists, who have no moral or personal stake in Kashmir. But some of these groups, like the Americans who fought on the allied side before we entered WW2, believe they are fighting for justice.
Perhaps the real evil is practiced by the politicians and intelligence agencies who use the idealistic young who are willing to die for a "cause", and who then cynically sell them out later. Clearly, the Pakistan government is supporting or tolerating intolerable groups, sometimes quite cynically, but the Indian government was not a Lockean paradise for Kashmiris for many, many years. India is the world's largest democracy, but has its flaws (like other democracies). The problem is not labels, but how people are treated. |
