On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 01:02:33PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > > Giving up Kashmir would be dumb. > > The major negative, as I see it, is reduced machismo. There would be a > perception that whomever negotiated the deal had "given in", was > "wimpy", "rewarded terrorism", etc. All these seem like fairly silly > reasons to be worried, so far as I can tell. > You missed the other big negative: genocide.
Kashmir has been shown as a Muslim majority state in India. Now, if Kashmir goes away, it will be seen as support for the two nation theory, and the remaining Indin Muslims will have to content with the threat of being seen as people who will secede sooner rather than later, reducing the majority Hindus to a minority and then enforce Islamic law. The most obvious response to this would be to get rid of them, and the easiest way to do that is to simply kill them all. India has the second largest population of Muslims, and the slaughter would be ... horrible. You also have to look at the growing Muslim population in Europe who want different rules (see the Parisian riots, for example), and the hawks there will find support for a strongly anti-Muslim stance. Kashmir _is_ a matter of principle here. <snip> > Downing Street was not a native of those peculiar islands off the > European coast, and the Anglo-Saxon population of the "Empire" was > nearly completely disenfranchised. :) > Give it a couple of hundred years. Overpopulation is going to enforce migration out of this country, and Europe sounds like a good place to start with. Perhaps we might need to send some measles infected blankets along, but that shouldn't be a major problem ;). Devdas Bhagat
