THE DANGER of an all-out war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is greater than it has been probably since the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war. This is the bitter fruit of the nuclear deterrence we were promised last year both by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vaipayee and his Pakistani counterpart. Nawaz Sharif. Yet again those who argued in both states against the obscenity of testing have been proved right, nuclear armament is not a guarantor of peace but a harbinger of war. But the very climate whipped up by the escalation of conflict in Kashmir makes driving this lesson home to a wider audience more difficult as chauvinism and jingoism are on the rise. Indeed it is with more than a glance to the domestic agenda that both nuclear testing and the escalation in Kashmir have been carried through by these two governments. For Vajpayee and his Bharatita Janata Party (BJP) the general election campaign this autumn will be fought, as all its political campaigns have been, on the basis of Anger and arrests as marchers in Kashmir protest at Indian rule a strong Hindu state - where mobilisation against the supposed Muslim enemy outside is a crucial counterpart to the deepening of communalism at home.
Meanwhile in Pakistan Sharif, who is gaining a near dictatorial hold on the economically crippled country with one of the most corrupt elites anywhere in the world, Kashmir may be a useful pawn in the domestic agenda.
The electoral verdict within Pakistan itself will, he hopes, be aided by his championing of Kashmir to placate militant Islamicists at home. He also hopes his destabilisation of Indian Kashmir will bring popularity with a wider layer, who may be distracted from the problems at home by militant action against the increasingly communal Indian state. As those who have fought against communalism and fundamentalism in both states have long argued, far from being real antagonists in fact Hindu and Muslim fundamentalism within the sub-continent have a deadly symbiotic relationship.
They feed off each other while undermining the prospect of organising against the poverty and corruption that blight the lives of the overwhelming majority of people in the sub-continent. and politics in the French Massif Central. discussion on ecology, feminism and lesbian/bisexual/gay liberation, the theme of this year's camp will be "Fighting for change - against the bosses' Europe, against the NATO bombs and Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, the Kosovars - for a different Europe of popular and socialist democracy".
For more details contact 0181 800 7460. Youth Summer Europe will gather for a week of partying As well as the regular streams of education and self-determination for