Anuradha Bhasin
Since 1947, when Kashmir acceded to India, the distance between New Delhi and Kashmiris has been marked by mutual suspicion and a large trust deficit. Over decades, New Delhi eroded Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy and manipulated its local politics. New Delhi has also viewed Kashmir only through the prism of security, resulting in an ultra-nationalist gaze on the region. In India-administered Kashmir, this has crystallised into a deeply embedded sense of betrayal linked to the historical dispute over the territory. But despite the unhealed wounds and the apprehensions of forced demographic change in India’s only Muslim-majority territory, Kashmiris felt, from time to time, hope for the possibility of a settlement of the Kashmir dispute.
These hopes began to recede when the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government assumed power in New Delhi in 2014, and they faded much faster when the BJP entered into a coalition with the regional Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2015 to rule the state of Jammu and Kashmir. To the dread of Kashmiris, the right-wing BJP made sudden inroads in the state via the consolidation of the Hindu vote bank in Jammu province.
With Modi at the helm since 2014, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP, has realised one of its oldest ideological ambitions – the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which recognised Jammu and Kashmir’s unique past, endowed it with special status and protected the exclusive rights to land and jobs of the people of the erstwhile state. Moreover, the subjugation of Kashmiri people has increased manifold in the last decade of Modi’s rule, and the tyranny of the state and the military has become more sophisticated.
Even as the number of military cantonments in the territory has increased, locals have been marginalised in businesses and jobs. Termination letters are handed to Muslims on the mere suspicion of a family member of theirs having connections with militant groups, and their properties are attached – seized by local authorities for the ostensible reason that the owners do ot hide or move evidence elsewhere – on the same grounds. Men officially deemed to be terrorists are killed in encounters and their bodies confiscated so that they are denied decent burials. People can be detained, their houses raided and their passports suspended. A reign of terror has been created in which Kashmiris are numbed with a sense of impotence and also reeling with a fear that forbids even a whisper of protest.
The RSS’s pet project
The RSS – in its many offshoots like the Praja Parishad and the Jana Sangh and also its many other affiliates – has not only run concerted campaigns for the complete integration of Jammu and Kashmir with India, but has also called for changing the demography of the territory to shift it towards Hindu domination. The protection or removal of Article 370 was never simply an emotive issue for either Kashmiris or for the Hindu right wing. For Kashmiris, the provision was always crucial to retaining their autonomy and way of life. For the RSS, removing it was an ideological commitment tied to the emotive appeal Kashmir has for Hindu nationalists, as well as a means to disempower Kashmir’s Muslim majority.
The BJP’s desire to integrate Jammu and Kashmir with the rest of India always stemmed from the idea of ending its special constitutional privileges, thus creating an existential crisis for the residents of the state, particularly Muslims. But, even when the BJP first came to power, constitutional experts such as A G Noorani, Faizan Mustafa and Rajiv Dhawan still believed that the safeguards granted to Jammu and Kashmir could not be removed constitutionally. However, the BJP systemically demolished constitutional protections by first seizing power in the state, then marginalising its Muslim majority and finally disenfranchising the entire population.
Using political power in a militarised setting, the BJP began to make inroads into administrative and civil spaces, strengthening its cadres and marking its presence in constituencies in which it had little control till 2014. The political narrative within the state was increasingly infused with shades of saffron, especially in Hindu-majority areas. For example, cow vigilantism, which was growing across the country after 2014, also found its way into the state. In January 2018, when an eight-year-old Muslim girl from the Bakarwal community was raped and killed to instil fear among nomadic Muslims in Jammu’s Kathua district, the Hindu right wing threw its support behind the accused men based on their religion.
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Such Hindutva-tainted developments exacerbated the alienation that Kashmiri Muslims felt from the Indian administration. They were excessively disappointed after the PDP agreed to enter into a coalition with the BJP. The PDP, a largely Kashmir Valley-centric party, had emerged as the single largest party in the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly election of 2014, when the valley had supported it on the slogan of keeping Hindu nationalism out of the state. The coalition agreement triggered a rise in both street protests and armed resistance, which spiralled out of control after the killing of a militant commander, Burhan Wani, in 2016. The Indian government responded with brute force, including the use of pellet guns that blinded hundreds of people, including children.
In 2018, the BJP withdrew from its alliance with the PDP and the central government in New Delhi imposed governor’s rule in the state. Taking advantage of the state being directly controlled from the Indian capital, the BJP penetrated deeper into the civil, political, social and economic landscape of Jammu and Kashmir. Meanwhile, the central government escalated the militarisation of the state so as to have even more control and surveillance over the local population. The BJP’s characteristic hyper-nationalistic chest-thumping legitimised this clampdown on Kashmiris in the eyes of the rest of India.
In national discourse, the subjugation of Kashmir was always normalised. Since 2014, everything from the ruthless stamping out of political opposition, strict curbs on the media and the enlargement of the military’s footprint in the territory has been seen as justified. Kashmir has remained, in the national consciousness, a piece of strategic territory crucial to the integrity and sovereignty of the country. The RSS-schooled BJP leaders are adept at putting out this narrative, which erases the people of the region, and they add a further spin. The BJP has successfully presented itself as a messiah protecting India’s honour in Kashmir, while branding everybody else, including its domestic political opponents, as the enemy.
In February 2019, ahead of the last Indian general election, 40 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force died in a suicide bomb attack in the Pulwama district of India-administered Kashmir, allegedly due to bad security lapses. Instead of questioning the BJP’s claims of protecting Indian interests, driven on at least in part by the Pulwama attack, the Indian electorate voted the party back to power with an even greater mandate than in 2014. When Modi returned to power, it did not take him long to demolish Article 370. On 5 August 2019, the home minister, Amit Shah, announced in parliament the dismantling of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The state’s special constitutional status was undone and the state itself dismembered into two halves – Ladakh on one hand, and Jammu and Kashmir on the other – with both demoted to the status of union territories. Shah claimed that the move would end terrorism. Modi said he was heralding a new era of development in Kashmir.
In reality, an enraged Kashmir was silenced by stringent official restrictions and a communication ban, under cover of which mass arrests took place and people were denied basic amenities including health care. The congratulatory commentary in mainstream media and social media across India, which skirted the unprecedented suppression of Jammu and Kashmir’s people, was a vindication of the BJP and RSS’s long-held ambition. The Modi government’s triumphalist tone was one of a conqueror for whom neither the Kashmiris nor their rights were material. It became evident that all that mattered was Kashmir’s subjugation, as it served the purpose of consolidating the BJP’s vote bank in the rest of the country.
