Justice Weaponized: Why Injustice Wrapped in Religion Fuels the Fire in Kashmir and POK

Note: This article is an opinion piece based on interpretations and historical conjectures that align with the author's point of view.

Justice Weaponized: Why Injustice Wrapped in Religion Fuels the Fire in Kashmir and POK

Hindi Version: https://rakeshinsightfulgaze.blogspot.com/2025/10/blog-post_21.html

Some conflicts aren’t unsolvable; they’re intentionally left unsolved. Kashmir is one of them. Like Palestine. Like systemic racism. Like apartheid. At the heart of each lies a common thread: injustice, not just its presence, but its purposeful misuse to divide, control, and profit.

Injustice does not discriminate, but once it is dressed in religious or ethnic colors, it becomes a weapon that does. The world has seen this story before. When Jews were dehumanized in Europe, millions perished while the world rationalized it. When Blacks were enslaved, segregated, and brutalized for centuries, systems justified it as “order.” Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs all have suffered when justice was denied or delivered selectively. When one group’s pain is dismissed, when injustice is seen through a sectarian lens, it creates a moral blindness that paves the way for more bloodshed.

This is exactly how the conflict in Kashmir has endured, not because of people’s hatred, but because of political systems and elites that manipulate pain, wrap it in religious language, and feed it back to their own populations as a battle cry.

The Kashmir and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) conflict has persisted not because it can't be resolved, but because it continues to benefit those in power. On both sides. Pakistan’s deeply feudal structure uses Kashmir as a rallying cry while denying basic rights to its own people. India, for decades, enabled corrupt regional leaders in Kashmir who spoke the language of autonomy while practicing the politics of self-preservation.

These leaders, often from dynastic political families, exploited the grievances of their people to bargain with Delhi, while doing little to deliver education, justice, or opportunity on the ground. And when they invoked religion to explain injustice, they poisoned the well. Not just for Muslims. But for Hindus, Sikhs, and others who also call Kashmir home and have suffered some through targeted violence, others through displacement, alienation, and fear.

Once pain becomes communalized, people stop seeing each other as fellow victims of a broken system. Instead, they begin to believe that only their suffering is real, and that the suffering of others is either deserved or invented. That’s when mobs rise. That’s when bullets replace dialogue. And that’s when the fight for justice turns into a cycle of vengeance.

The consequences have been devastating. Militancy after 1989 was not just Pakistan’s doing. It was enabled by broken promises, internal misgovernance, and the strategic silence of those who should have acted earlier. And while many Kashmiris were recruited into separatist causes, many others, including Kashmiri Pandits, were driven from their homes, scarred for life by violence the system failed to prevent or condemn.

In 2019, when Article 370 was revoked, it triggered a fierce debate. But it also broke a political stranglehold. For the first time, entrenched elites could no longer claim moral high ground while delivering nothing. And many ordinary Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims began asking different questions: What if justice could be delivered without bias? What if identity didn’t determine your access to opportunity?

Wherever fairness has been applied, people have responded. Kashmiris, including former skeptics, have shown support for law enforcement and institutions not because they were forced to, but because they felt respected.

Across the border in POK, the situation is no better. The people are voiceless, used as props for a political narrative, denied rights, and promised a dream that never comes. They are not enemies; they are equally betrayed by power structures that weaponize their existence.

And while this continues, China has capitalized on the distraction. The Shimla Agreement of 1972 promised bilateral resolution. But decades of squabbling and misrule opened the door for a third party. China has now physically occupied parts of Ladakh and POK without firing a shot. While Indians and Pakistanis debate faith and flags, China is redrawing the map.

Who suffers? Not the elite. Not the feudal class. But the ordinary citizens are told to fight each other while their land, their future, and their peace are quietly stolen.

This is not just an Indian or Pakistani story. It’s a global one. Because everywhere injustice becomes politicized, someone profits, and everyone else pays. The poor, the marginalized, the forgotten, they all carry the cost of wars they never asked for.

The people of Kashmir are not asking for power. They are asking for dignity, the same dignity that Black Americans fought for in Selma, that Jews demanded after the Holocaust, that Dalits fight for every day in India, that Palestinians demand in Gaza. Justice has no religion. Neither does pain.

If any political system claims to represent its people, it must represent all its people. Equally. Without favor. Without excuse.

Because peace without justice is just a ceasefire, and when the smoke clears, the land and the soul of a nation may already be lost.