THE past five years have witnessed a steady and relentless rise in the brutal suppression of the resistance in Kashmir, with little difference in the treatment of militants and civilians. Despite widespread criticism of the indiscriminate and frequent use of shotguns that disperse “pellets” over a wide horizon, security forces have continued the vicious attack against civilians and militants. The tiny metal balls moving at a high speed render children blind, speckle faces and blotch bodies with ugly patterns.
Parallel to these actions, the government has unapologetically declared that it is not interested in dialogue, while paradoxically dispatching an “interlocuter” who has literally faded both in body and in memory. It was a move to appease the “international community”. But, contradictorily, the government also made it a point to reject, ignore or deny reports of organisations such as the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, even as the local and globally recognised Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) has been tenaciously documenting evidence on human rights violations by security forces for decades.
Already empowered by laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and the Public Safety Act (PSA) which suspend civil rights, the current government took it a step further by emboldening the security forces. This was done by remaining silent in the face of even the most obvious violations of the rights of Kashmiri students living outside Kashmir who were vilified and beaten after several incidents. What is the difference between laws that empower soldiers with extra-legal powers and emboldening them? Empowerment gives the armed forces legal cover, emboldening gives their actions an off-the-books moral legitimacy.
Will the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) convincing win in the Lok Sabha election change this pattern of behaviour? It is quite unlikely. But some Kashmiri politicians have inexplicably speculated that the BJP’s margin of victory may induce it to start talks. Yet others have proposed, equally puzzlingly, that a delegation of party representatives should meet the Prime Minister to apprise him of the dangerous situation in Kashmir. Yet others have pinned their hopes on the impact of fear stoked in Western capitals after the Pulwama attack. When fear dominates, we grasp at straws.
There is also a mood of defiance, because by now the Kashmir street is sufficiently educated politically to not pin its hopes on an infusion of benevolence in the government’s Kashmir policy or the impact of “international opinion” on it. The average Kashmiri knows it is not going to be easy. Greater centralisation, which sparked the rebellion that began 30 years ago, is now an invigorated theme in the BJP, as indicated by the newly elected government’s proposal to upgrade the position of the National Security Adviser (NSA) to Cabinet rank. The new government at the Centre has also appointed the BJP’s most efficient wielder of power, Amit Shah, as the Minister for Home Affairs. Both these positions are not just crucial to Kashmir, they have been the very drivers of the BJP government’s Kashmir policy for the past five years.
A weak Indian legal system is yet another hazard for Kashmir. In an extraordinary development, four former justices of the Supreme Court of India were forced to hold a press conference not long ago to voice their concerns for Indian democracy because of encroachment on the judiciary’s independence. Such a judiciary does not give confidence to Kashmiris in the face of several prominent BJP politicians, opinion makers and minions advocating the abrogation of constitutional provisions (such as Article 370 and Article 35A) that govern the State’s compact with India. The considerably weakened and tarnished reputation of the Election Commission of India (ECI) after the Lok Sabha election is another concern, given the imminent Assembly election in the State.
All the above circumstances show that the BJP’s policies and actions in the past five years have clearly demonstrated that it considers the Kashmir dispute a civilisational one between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, discards any charade about the need to consult the people of the State, and unapologetically argues a territorially irredentist claim to Kashmir and, indeed, the State of Jammu and Kashmir in its entirety. This ideology supersedes its domestic political pacts, foreign policy, and ethical tethers, political or otherwise.
Centralisation of power
Meanwhile, it would do well to remember that the political mess in the State for the past 70 years is the result of the unrelenting centralisation of power, the hollowing out of the institutions of State that protect Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy, and an ambivalent respect for the rule of law under non-BJP governments. That is what resulted in the armed rebellion 30 years ago, at the cusp of historical developments worldwide. The BJP-led Central government has doubled down on this history to put in place an unapologetically hard-state face, greatly centralise power, ignore any kind of autonomy and be immune to criticism or conciliation, as demonstrated by the treatment of its naïve political partner, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), in forming the dysfunctional and lopsided coalition government in the State between 2014 and 2018.
The strategies available to Kashmiris to counter this formidable arsenal of the BJP are limited, to put it mildly. But failure at this juncture in the State’s modern history could be fatal for Kashmir, given the BJP’s civilisational zealotry. The first immediate opportunity that presents itself is the pending Assembly election. In this context, a boycott call will be suicidal for all constituents of the State. It can possibly be avoided by forging a unity first within Kashmir and then with the rest of the State to present a united front of an instate combination of parties to form the next government. It is an uphill battle, given that New Delhi has scored its greatest success by diffusing and factionalising the State’s polity. But there is a small window of opportunity that can facilitate an advantage for the State. The new government at the Centre faces the slightest of dilemmas in determining the timing of the Assembly election. Too long a delay in holding the election may give time to the factions in, and the regions of, the State to question the plans to abrogate its constitutional provisions and enable unity. Elections held too soon, on the other hand, may not give the BJP enough time to consolidate its position through money power in Kashmir itself, where it has become dangerously ambitious, thanks to the ineptitude of the PDP.
A second chink in the BJP armour is international opprobrium. The final days of Modi 1.0 witnessed greater—indeed unprecedented—international criticism than any other Indian government for its human rights violations and its dangerous play after the Pulwama blast. It was a catalyst that made the Pakistan government look like the adult in comparison with, and more temperate than, its Indian counterpart. While authoritarian governments are not wont to care about external criticism, it appeared to sober the BJP because global censure would have negatively influenced the economy. International concern is heightened by the fact that upheavals in South Asia could easily involve China, which would then make the already fragile geopolitics of the world even more so.
The dispute over the State is a result of historical idiosyncrasies, legal ambiguities and political inequity, in that order. Historical idiosyncrasies have largely remained unaddressed partly because of a lack of articulation, partly because of shifts in geopolitical paradigms and, in part, because of the success of India’s overwhelming state propaganda. But, if the BJP’s utterances are anything to go by, the indecisiveness of past governments towards the rule of law and the institutions of state are less of a constraint for it. That “national security” as an issue appears to have trumped, in the Lok Sabha election, the BJP’s failure to keep its promises of improvement in employment generation, fiscal distress and small farmer devastation is an indicator of what its supporters value. Will the BJP stay within the ambit of the laws that govern the Union’s relationship with the State? For Kashmir, the answer to that question is the most worrying part. The legal dimensions of the dispute are overtly and noisily threatened by the BJP—Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) family almost every day. The unease in Kashmir is not that it cannot be responded to legally, but the probable reaction of its youthful resistance, should the BJP choose to abrogate these laws. So far, the response of Kashmir’s youths has been ferocious. The response to something that threatens their future could be worse.
Just how much worse is best expressed with an analogy. For the past few years Kashmiris have experientially and instinctively grasped the message of the great American dissident, James Baldwin, who wrote in 1966: “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American negro finds himself, is to simply surrender self-respect.” The same reasoning can be applied to Kashmir in the context of bigoted laws that are designed to repress freedom of expression and of thought itself. The challenge for the BJP government will be to avoid confrontation based on the clarity of this logic, given the implementation of a dangerous zero-sum game that it insists on rolling out.
Siddiq Wahid is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, a historian focussing on central Asia and Tibet, and a Kashmiri political activist.
