At the start of 2018, the army’s Corps Headquarters in Kashmir’s Badami Bagh began a steady fortification. The Corps command claimed an additional ten feet of civilian land on either side of the road that leads to the highway, reinforced the space between concrete the walls with a high barbed-wire fence and buttressed the garrison with gaily painted gates, fences and ironic slogans. It was puzzling, even suspicious, because the more than (conservatively speaking) half-million strong security forces claimed to have decimated the two hundred-and-fifty-odd poorly armed and untrained rebels the year before.
“Why are they so afraid of us?” asked my Kashmiri co-passenger as we drove on the road between the two walls separating Kashmir’s civilians from the territory occupied by the Corps HQ. “We hardly had the arms and ammunition to breach the cantonment at the height of militancy.”
The answer to this question is provided by an extraordinarily well-chronicled and distressing essay in The Wire (January 4, 2019) by an anonymous Kashmiri journalist. The account is a thick history of the policy that animates the tactic of no negotiations and a policy of relentless killing for the past year. The former BJP Union Minister and MP, Mr. Yashwant Sinha, concedes the point but calls it “quelling”. But that’s a quibble.
“When all is said and done,” writes the anonymous journalist in succinct explanation for this trend, “…[the] Kashmiri people have broadly refused to take part in the sort of nation-building that the Indian state has fostered after 1947.” The comment challenges the yawning gap between the theory and practice of India’s professed ‘secularism’ and ‘pluralism’. The writer’s second rationale for the tactic contains a chilling acuity: “…what prompts young boys into militancy does not stem from a grand strategic calculus, for which the blueprint comes from across the border. Rather, it is the traumatic encounter of people with the military apparatus of the Indian state which drives recruitment [into armed rebellion].”
Put otherwise, young Kashmiris, ill-trained and poorly armed, are inviting certain death to avoid the indignity of the military rule that defines their existence. As I have asked in this column earlier: how is this leap to death in a supposed “democratic” and “liberal” India different from the self-immolation of Tibetan Buddhists in an indicted “dictatorial” and “repressive” China?
The observations of the anonymous writer are intellectually sober, anthropological in method and politically grounded. They speak to the effects of the brutal presence of India’s armed forces in Kashmir, which is but one institutional instrument of the Indian state. There are signs, however, that the central government is pursuing its authoritarian and unapologetically militarist mindset on a wider canvas. The BJP-RSS combine’s deep electoral losses in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Rajasthan have not sobered its unapologetically literalist, puritanical and muscularly Hinduist nationalism. It continues to march to its ideological tune because authoritarian rulers are not known to adopt a consultative approach or care for international opprobrium. They consolidate power. It does not bode well for Kashmir in 2019.
In a recent statement, a member of the Central Government is reported to have said that “India [is the] most tolerant country in the world”. In the face of the lynching of numerous members of minority communities since 2015 and other atrocities towards its own citizens – reported or not – the statement exhibits a combination of denial and delusion that has removed the government of India from reality. The greater the concern as the person making this claim, Rajnath Singh, is considered a “moderating” influence in the BJP government and is the Minister for Home (or internal) Affairs, so directly accountable in the emboldening of India’s growing mobocracy. Such Trumpian pronouncements of propaganda are alarming in a region that is already volatile in interstate relations; but, in the socially conflicted and territorially disputed ‘issue’ of the State of J&K, it telegraphs a dangerous delusion.
Closer home, in the J&K state, there are alarming developments being initiated in Ladakh or ‘tolerated’ (an ironic word in the context of the subject of today’s column) in Jammu by the interim administration under the governor. In Leh District, despite the resignation of the BJP’s stalwart from his parliamentary seat and the party, the governor is intent on currying favor for the BJP with the district’s population by granting them a meaningless “cluster university”. It is speculated that he did this to nullify the stinging criticism of the party by its erstwhile and popular Member of Parliament, Thubstan Chhewang. In doing so, the governor further polarizes the already divided tiny population of the District and, indeed, Ladakh in its entirety.
Meanwhile in Jammu, despite the recent vicious communalist propaganda of some saffron-clad advocates of militant Hinduism belonging to the Dharam Sabha, the executive governor has neither taken any action nor spoken out against the organization. The people of the state will be forgiven if they surmise that this is in preparation to build an advantage through polarization of the state electorate for the state’s assembly elections, which is due in the next six months.
Speaking of the state assembly elections, it is overdue after the fall of the dysfunctional PDP-BJP coalition more than seven months earlier. Elections were deferred by scuttling government formation. Then, once past the constitutionally mandated period, the state was skillfully steered towards President’s Rule. Meanwhile, the limited powers of the administration, headed by the governor, have been stretched to make structural changes that are the domain of an elected legislature. It is precisely to avoid such usurpation that the powers of an unelected executive of the state administration are curtailed by law, such as they are.
The governor has been accused of “acting in haste”, but in Kashmir the actions are seen, validly, as a Machiavellian maneuver to keep Delhi in the saddle; at least until the Lok Sabha elections and probably beyond, especially if the BJP finds its political hold on the country diminished six months from now. Thus, using the J&K state’s governor as proxy, the BJP will potentially continue to exert influence in the state structurally and electorally. It is important to remember here that if the BJP loses its mandate in India’s general elections, it will still have managed to keep its finger in the J&K pie, which has been a critical symbol for its radically Hinduist nationalism since 1947.
All politics, as the adage goes, is local. In the circumstance, the J&K State is poised to continue its downward spiral whether the BJP wins or loses in the Lok Sabha elections. Towards this the present incumbent of Raj Bhavan knows how to consolidate power, which is the aim of authoritarian rule.
In the interests of the J&K state, and Kashmir particularly, it would be incumbent on all political persuasions, the resistance included, to ensure that President’s Rule is not extended in the state. If 2019 is anything like 2018 and rolls into 2020, it could prove a catastrophic burden of legacy not just for the peoples of the J&K state, but for the two billion peoples of South Asia.