The following resolution was adopted at the 3rd Congress of ISL and is reproduced here in full:
The British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent took the form of direct rule over the territories of British India, and indirect rule over 565 princely states and feudal estates. Jammu Kashmir was one of these princely states. Its formation as a single political unit was made possible by the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, through which the British Empire transferred control of the Kashmir Valley and recognized Dogra sovereignty over territories already conquered or later consolidated by force, inaugurating a regime that ruled without the consent of the region’s diverse populations.
The extension of Dogra authority over Jammu, Ladakh, Poonch, and regions later administered as Gilgit Baltistan was not the result of voluntary association, but of military conquest, coercive administration, and imperial backing over the decades that followed, producing a highly uneven and contested political formation.
At the time of the imperialist, religious-based partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the other princely states were gradually incorporated into the two newly created states, Pakistan and India, without consulting the will or consent of their populations. However, due to armed and popular uprisings against autocratic rule in various regions of Jammu Kashmir, and due to the expansionist ambitions of Pakistan and India, the region was divided into two parts after the first India–Pakistan war. To this day, the peoples living in Jammu Kashmir have not been granted the right to decide their own future.
At present, Pakistan and India occupy parts of Jammu and Kashmir and both claim the entire region, while China also occupies some areas and lays claim to others. Internationally, the issue of Jammu Kashmir is portrayed as a territorial dispute between Pakistan and India. For more than seven decades, both states have repeatedly exploited this issue to whip up religio-nationalist war hysteria, suppress mass movements, and divert the attention of their working people from their real problems and the burning class antagonisms within their societies.
The conflict in Jammu Kashmir is not simply a dispute over territory, but a crisis rooted in the unresolved political futures of multiple peoples with distinct historical experiences, identities, and political aspirations. These include Kashmiri political formations in the Valley and parts of Poonch and some other parts of Pakistani Occupied Jammu Kashmir, as well as distinct regional and cultural identities in Jammu, Ladakh, and Gilgit Baltistan, whose relationship to Kashmiri nationalism is neither uniform nor identical.
We therefore demand full withdrawal of all occupying forces from Jammu Kashmir and the recognition of the unconditional right of all people of the former princely state to freely determine their political futures, including the right to secession and association. A free, independent, secular, socialist Jammu Kashmir, based on a voluntary federation of all its regions is the only solution that can liberate the peoples of this region from slavery and exploitation.