have nose-dived this month as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi listed Kashmir along with Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan as places where Muslims are brutalized by occupiers. The Indian government sent two very public signs of its displeasure. First, it summoned Iran’s senior diplomat in New Delhi to a dressing-down. Then, India abstained at the UN when a resolution criticizing Iran’s humanrights conduct came up for a vote. In the past, India has always supported Iran by voting nay on those critical resolutions. But India did not go so far as to vote for the resolution. There have been critical editorials in the Indian media, but, on the whole, the reaction to Khamenehi’s remarks seemed remarkably subdued considering how sensitive the issue of Kashmir is inside India. There was no sign India was even thinking about moving in the camp that regularly criticizes the Islamic Republic. Kashmir is a majority Muslim area that was ruled by a Hindu prince when India and Pakistan were created in 1947. The Hindu prince took Kashmir into Hindu India rather than Muslim Pakistan, a decision that has produced six decades of strife and bloodshed. After the 1979 revolution, the new Islamic Republic often held demonstrations on behalf of Kashmiris. But fairly quickly, Tehran decided it wanted good relations with India and Kashmir simply disappeared from official rhetoric. It would occasionally be mentioned by some lowerranking official or a cleric who wasn’t clued in, but the establishment just decided to ignore Kashmir except when there was an especially violent eruption it could not ignore. Therefore, the decision by Khamenehi to mention Kashmir earlier this month was a stunner. He did not speak at any length about Kashmir. He merely mentioned it in a list of troublespots that he gave in his annual message to pilgrims attending the hajj in Saudi Arabia. Khamenehi said, “Today, the major duties of the elite of the Islamic ummah [community] is to provide help to the Palestinian nation and the besieged people of Gaza, to sympathize and provide assistance to the nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Kashmir, to engage in struggle and resistance against the aggressions of the United States and the Zionist regime.…” It wasn’t clear why Khamenehi suddenly chose to add Kashmir to a list where he had long ignored Kashmir. Some speculated this represented a change of policy, but there appears to be no reason for Iran to choose to be confrontational with India now. Others suspected it was an error by an aide who drafted the annual statement for Khamenehi, perhaps a new employee who didn’t understand the policy. Still others thought Kashmir was included because this was a message to pilgrims and would be distributed to Pakistani pilgrims as well as Iranian ones. Analysts will now be scouring future statements by Khamenehi to see if Kashmir is mentioned again or quietly dropped when he next goes through the litany of areas of the world where Muslims must defend Muslims. The normal list is usually quite constrained, limited to Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Pakistan is sometimes mentioned now as Iranian rhetoric often portrays it as partly occupied by the American military. But just as Kashmir is normally not mentioned so as not to offend India, so Chechnya goes unmentioned so as not to offend Russia, Kosovo goes unmentioned so as not to offend Serbia and Russia, and Xinchiang’s Muslims go unmentioned so as not to offend China. So, too, the oppressed Muslim minorities in Burma and Thailand go unmentioned in the Islamic Republic, while one obscure Christian minister who spoke of burning Qorans, but never did, still gets extensive coverage in Iran’s state media. India’s Foreign Ministry said it had summoned Iran’s senior diplomat, Reza Alaei, to hear its “deep disappointment” over Khamenehi’s remarks. New Delhi called them “an impingement of territorial integrity and sovereignty.” As for the shift at the UN, the Foreign Ministry said only that India decided to abstain this year “after due deliberation.” A source at the Foreign Ministry told the Press Trust of India that Khamenehi’s Kashmir comment was a factor in the decision to abstain. However, the source also made clear that India was not contemplating any overall shift in policy toward Iran. The source said the two countries have cultural links and share a similarity of views on many issues. The source also said that whenever India raises Kashmir with Iran, Iranian officials say the regime there believes Kashmir is an internal matter for India. That is not the view of Pakistan or the Islamic world as a whole, however. Lower Iranian officials have occasionally criticized India over a particular eruption in Kashmir. For example, in October Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast complained of India’s police suppression of Kashmiri violence over the American minister’s Qoranburning threat. What was significant about Khamenehi’s remarks was that they came from Khamenehi himself and they applied to the core issue of Kashmir as a part of India and not just one isolated police action.
