Fatah stands in resolute solidarity with the just and internationally recognized struggle for self-determination of the people of Kashmir.
The Indian state’s repression in Indian-Occupied Kashmir (IOK)—from house raids enforcing VPN bans, to mosque surveillance (on top of the existing police state), to book bans, to Kashmiris being dragged on the streets or shot with pellets for participating in a Muharram procession, to Friday prayers being banned, to Kashmiri Muslims being deemed “suspicious” for their identity, to Kashmiri women being mass raped by the Indian army, to Kashmiri men, women, and children being tortured and killed by the Indian army—exposes the fundamentally coercive and oppressive nature of its rule, enforced through militarization, constant surveillance, and systematic violence.
Under the present phase of intensified occupation, Kashmir is subjected to a regime designed to crush popular resistance and permanently deny the Kashmiri people their right to determine their own future.
This repression must be understood within the broader framework of Indian nationalism and its evolution into an openly reactionary project under Hindutva. While the BJP represents a more explicit and aggressive articulation of Hindu nationalism, we categorically reject the liberal myth that the Indian National Congress stood worlds apart from the BJP in its treatment of Kashmir.
The Congress party itself repeatedly relied on coercion, emergency powers, and communal calculations, often teetering on Hindu nationalist terrain while laying the structural foundations of occupation and repression.
Indian nationalism, contrary to the persistent delusions of both the Pakistani and Indian “left” and the liberal milieu, has never been genuinely secular; it has consistently subordinated the Muslims of IOK to majoritarian ideology and upper-caste Hindu domination.
The Kashmiri freedom struggle is therefore not merely against a particular government or party, but against a historically entrenched system of oppression sustained by Indian nationalism and imperialist support.
Yet much of the South Asian left treats the Kashmiri struggle as nothing more than a “Pakistani army narrative”, dismissing it wholesale and thereby denying the existence of an authentic, mass movement.
For over a century under the Dogra Dynasty, Kashmiri Muslims endured conditions strikingly similar to those faced (albeit less “officially” on paper) by Indian Muslims today: cow slaughter was banned, the call to prayer was prohibited, and Muslims were treated as second-class citizens.
What Muhammad Ali Jinnah feared for the Muslims of British India after the British withdrawal was, in many ways, already the lived reality of Kashmiri Muslims under a Hindu nationalist monarchy.
Collapsing an entire people’s resistance into the machinations of state rivalries exclusively, as South Asian lefts often do in the context of Kashmir (and only Kashmir), erases popular agency and, in practice, aligns with the logic of the oppressor. Crucially, the “both-sidesism” that the Pakistani left occasionally offers the Kashmiri people is, at best, a hollow and ahistorical gesture; at worst, it serves the same logic as the Indian oppressor.
For Marxists above all, the task is not to deny struggles that do not conform to preferred ideological forms, but to conduct a concrete analysis of concrete conditions.
Dissent, in the Leninist sense, means breaking with dominant state narratives and liberal common sense alike—not substituting them with a cynical negation that mistakes cynicism for critique.
History makes clear that genuine liberation is never bestowed by the oppressor, nor secured through appeals to liberal democracy.
The resistance of the Kashmiri people constitutes an integral part of the global struggle against imperialism and the advancing tide of fascism, and therefore demands principled solidarity from all revolutionary and genuinely progressive forces.