Occupied Kashmir will become Vietnam for India: former Indian Chief Justice

Former judge of Indian Supreme Court, Justice Markandey Katju has said that India has sowed the seeds for large-scale guerrilla war in occupied Kashmir by stripping the territory of its special status.

According to details Justice Markandey Katju who has also served Press Council of India as its chairman in an article in international magazine The Week said, “A time comes to speak the truth, and I suppose that time has come and it is I who will have to bell the cat. So here it is: Kashmir will soon become what Vietnam was for the French and the Americans, Afghanistan for the Russians, and Spain for Napoleon.”

Those who are today gloating over their ‘great victory’ of abolishing Article 370 will soon wake up to a nightmare once body bags start coming back in large numbers from Kashmir, like what the Americans saw return from Vietnam, he added.

Markandey Katju said that a full-blown insurgency, like that in Vietnam, is bound to emerge soon, and then body bags will start coming back.

He further added “An army can fight another army, it cannot fight the masses. A tiger can kill an antelope, it cannot kill a swarm of mosquitoes. Napoleon realized this in Russia (read Tolstoy’s War and Peace), and General Westmoreland in Vietnam.”

No doubt, we have half a million military and paramilitary forces in Kashmir, but how do they fight an enemy who cannot be seen, who moves in the shadows, who is nowhere and everywhere? Former Indian judge questioned.

He said that  India have created a situation where large-scale guerrilla war is bound to emerge, and the guerrilla has the advantage of surprise, using hit-and-run tactics, and deciding the place, time and duration of the attack and also of their swift withdrawal.

“Where all this will end no one can say. But, one thing can be said for sure: We are in for the long haul in Kashmir,” he said.