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Kashmir under lockdown: 'a prison sentence without the pronouncement'

8/21/2019

A Kashmiri academic who wishes to remain anonymous has sent KashmirConnected this account of the lockdown in the Kashmir Valley and thoughts on the scrapping of Kashmir's special status in the Indian constitution.

Srinagar's Lal Chowk during the lockdown - photo: Economic Times

“So how are you feeling about all this?”, asked a friend about the abrogation of Article 370 and the unprecedented security lockdown in Kashmir by the Indian government on August 5, 2019. I could not come up with a coherent answer. I had spent two days in an ATM queue in order to get enough cash to buy air tickets to fly out of Kashmir with my kids (debit and cards don’t work because of the network has been shut down) followed by half a day of waiting at the airport because of flight delays (no phones work so you can’t call the airport to check your flight status). And this was a relatively good day - the previous five days we weren’t allowed to move out of our house by armed Indian paramilitary men. I couldn’t get medicine for my four-year old who had a chest infection, supplies were running out and from day 3 on, we had no electricity. Most of my friends and neighbours - activists, trade union leaders and mainstream politicians - had been arrested and since the jails in Kashmir were all full, more than seventy had been sent to a prison in Agra, India. No contact with the outside world - it was basically a prison sentence without the pronouncement.

How does one describe such a catastrophic chain of events adequately and objectively, especially if one is caught up in it? All I could say at the time was that it was a Holocaust by other means - a State-led attempt at the erasure of an identity, a body of rights and citizenship; the attempted erasure of a community’s place in the world.

People who don’t know much about Kashmir wonder what warranted this sudden and unilateral revocation of a Constitutional provision that has allowed the people of Jammu and Kashmir to have their own Constitution, flag and the right to define its own citizenship with rights and privileges for nearly 70 years? The answer is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (India's ruling party led by Narendra Modi) majoritarian agenda of homogenizing India after the pattern of an idealized Hindu past. Coming to power with a huge majority in the national elections in May 2019 has meant for the BJP the overt execution of its covert ‘Hindutva’ (anti-minority) agenda. The Indian Muslim who had hitherto been ‘othered’ and lynched with chilling regularity by Hindu extremists across the northern states, is now facing a State-led assault on her rights and citizenship. The abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir and the National Register of Citizens that is externing hundreds of Assamese Muslims as ‘illegal immigrants’ are two sides of the same coin.

Police in Kashmir confronting protesters, December 2018 - photo: Wikimedia Commons

But because Kashmir is a potential nuclear flashpoint, it gets the international attention that Assam does not. Which is why, after having their rights taken away, the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir were cut off from the rest of the world by the longest, most comprehensive communications blackout by a democratic regime in the history of the modern world. The Indian government basically enforced a brutal invisibilisation of Kashmiri expression after it dismembered the Kashmiris’ legal right to exist by their own definition. It was insult and injury heaped on too close together to be distinguishable.

What rankled most was that the beaming Indian Prime Minister told the Kashmiris in a televised broadcast, that the mutilation of their state and identity was, ‘for them to progress at the same rate as the rest of India’. It was the White Man’s burden- repackaged as the Brown Man’s. Except it wasn’t.

As figures from an Indian statistical survey show the erstwhile state is ahead of the national average in most Human Development Indicators:-

Even in terms of education, where the Princely state of Kashmir started far behind the rest of the country, it does better than the national average in literacy figures for both men (89 %) and women (69 %) against the national figures (85.7% and 68.4% respectively).

When comparing indicators across states the most striking fact is that Jammu and Kashmir has one of the lowest levels of poverty in India -10.3 per cent when the corresponding figure for India is 21.9 per cent [1]. It also has the highest percentage of people who have their own houses (96.7%) after Bihar (96.8%) [2]. Life expectancy at birth in Jammu and Kashmir (72.6 years) is again higher than the national average (68.8 years), even after the conflict that prevails.

This narrative of ‘accelerated development’ being pushed by the Indian government is not supported by facts at all. Instead it has been constructed to deflect international outrage over the government’s legal and security moves that have exacerbated a three decades old conflict and destabilised a region that is a potential nuclear flashpoint.

But this narrative is failing to find enough support outside India simply because of the enormity of the detentions and the draconian security measures the government has executed in the Kashmir valley. A population of 8 million people are restricted to their houses by 0.5 million troops, 4,000 political leaders (both mainstream and separatist) trade union leaders and activists are under arrest and all phone lines, mobiles and internet services for the entire region have been disabled.

The government has tried to defend these actions saying they are all in the interest of security but as Amartya Sen argues “That is the classic colonial excuse. That’s how the British ran …(this) country for 200 years.’’ The BBC, Al Jazeera and Reuters have been covering the blackout and the effect it has had on people’s lives, especially access to food and medicines. Even academic publication like the Lancet have written about the effect the restrictions have had on medical and emergency services, and the resultant effect on mental health.

With street protests continuing in the valley and Kargil, it is unlikely that the curbs on public liberty will be lifted anytime soon. But, until then, as Martin Luther King said “in the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”.

[1] Press Note on Poverty Estimates in India based on the 68th Round of NSS (2011-12) data on
Household Consumer Expenditure Survey, March 19, 2012, Planning Commission, Government
of India, p.7

[2] Census of India 2011

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How Indian is Kashmir? - Andrew Whitehead

8/19/2019

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Earlier this month, the Indian government removed the special constitutional status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. At the same time, the government announced that that the state was to be cut in two and that both parts would be turned to Union Territories, largely governed from Delhi. Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only state where Muslims are in a majority. It has been fought over between India and Pakistan ever since independence in 1947, and for the past thirty years has endured a separatist insurgency which has claimed, according to the conservative estimate given by the Indian government, at least 42,000 lives. This was the biggest change in its constitutional status since the 1950s.

Support for the move extended well beyond the ranks of India’s governing Hindu nationalist BJP – and what opposition there was focussed on the manner in which the changes were introduced more than the measures themselves. In the state itself, Hindu-majority Jammu and largely Buddhist Ladakh – both of which are content being part of India and resent the association with rebellious Kashmir – broadly endorsed the changes. But in the Kashmir Valley, overwhelmingly Muslim and the heartland of the Kashmiri language and culture, the move was greeted by a sullen fury and despair.

Map of the former princely state of Jammu + Kashmir - areas under Indian control in lilac, under Pakistan's control in green and under China's control in yellow. The thick red line delineates the Kashmir Valley. Creative Commons - University of Texas

The autonomy promised in Article 370 of the Indian constitution has been greatly diluted over the decades but Kashmiris valued it as a symbol of their identity. The message from Delhi to the seven million people of the Kashmir Valley now seems to be: you are Indians, whether you like it or not! And most Kashmiris don’t like it.

Ahead of the announcement, the Indian authorities imposed an extraordinary range of security measuresacross the Kashmir Valley to pre-empt protests and unrest: tens of thousands of additional troops were sent there; tourists and Hindu pilgrims were told to leave; schools and colleges were ordered to close; public gatherings were banned; freedom of movement was curtailed; the internet and both mobile and landline phone connections were switched off; and hundreds of people were arrested, including the leaders of constitutional political parties who have at times allied with the BJP. Kashmir was locked up and sealed off.

KASHMIR’S ACCESSION TO INDIA

The Kashmir crisis arose from a botched independence settlement when Britain pulled out of India in 1947. Jammu and Kashmir was a vast area stretching from plains north of Punjab deep into the Himalayas, and with no common thread beyond being part of the same princely state. It was up to princely rulers to decide whether to accede to independent India or to the explicitly Muslim nation of Pakistan. Three-quarters of Jammu and Kashmir’s citizens were Muslims; the ruling family were Hindus. The maharaja dithered but – his hand forced by an invasion of Pakistani tribal fighters – he eventually signed up with India and an airlift of Indian troops successfully defended the Kashmiri capital from the invaders.

The decision to accede to India was also supported – at the time – by the maharaja’s most vociferous opponent, Sheikh Abdullah, a radical Kashmiri nationalist. The accession crisis was accompanied by a popular political mobilisation in Kashmir from which Sheikh Abdullah emerged as the key figure. At the same time, India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir. That resulted in an informal partition of the state – though the larger part came under Indian control, including all the Kashmir Valley.India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised that Indian troops would withdraw from Kashmir once the invasion threat was banished and that there would then be a plebiscite about the region’s future. Neither promise was kept. But India did refer the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations – and to this day there are UN military observers in both sides of Kashmir, though to no practical purpose.

What became Article 370 of India’s constitution – giving Jammu and Kashmir special status and, on paper at least, considerable autonomy – was endorsed by India’s Constituent Assembly in October 1949 with little debate and no opposition. It was part of a political accommodation intended to make Kashmir comfortable within India – a goal which was never fully achieved. The unilateral tearing up of this special status is seen by many Kashmiris as the end of any aspiration in Delhi to rule Kashmir by consent. For Hindu nationalists, who resent a special status based in part on Kashmir’s Muslim identity, the goal has been to integrate Jammu and Kashmir fully into India – though it’s difficult to see how the revocation of Article 370 will in itself promote development or end terrorism, as the Indian government has claimed.

Sheikh Abdullah, after a few years in power in Srinagar, started talking up the prospect of an independent Kashmir – and that led in 1953 to his dismissal on Delhi’s orders and imprisonment. Ever since then, Delhi has repeatedly interfered in the governance of the state. The rigging of state elections in 1987 was a trigger for the separatist insurgency which erupted two years later – which was also armed, financed and encouraged by Pakistan.

In 2006, Pakistan’s military ruler, General Musharraf, came up with a four-point peace plan for Kashmir, which proposed that both India and Pakistan settle for control of the regions they currently hold and allow a measure of self-governance. The Indian government was keen to take this further – but Musharraf lost power before any substantial progress was made.

For Kashmiris, many of whom hanker for independence, Pakistan’s initiative raised concerns that again the future of their homeland was being decided without their active involvement. And that’s also why there’s such anger in the Kashmir Valley about the scrapping of Article 370. Once more Kashmiris have been denied any agency in how their region is governed. What we don’t yet know is how – once the curfew and other restrictions are eased – that anger will be expressed.

This article was first posted on History Workshop Online and is reposted here with their kind permission.

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Yet another assault on Kashmir - Chitralekha Zutshi

8/14/2019

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The Jamia Masjid in Srinagar, overlooked by Hari Parbat fort

The newly re-elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in India has finally taken the step of removing the special status of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), which it has enjoyed since 1949 through Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. Also noteworthy is that Jammu and Kashmir has been stripped of its status as a state and partitioned into two union territories – Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh – ruled directly by the central government. While the former has been promised a legislature in the future, the latter will remain without one.

These measures have been enacted with great speed and without even a semblance of consultation with the J&K leadership or debate in the parliament. And their gravity is evident in the fact that the Kashmir Valley has been under military lockdown since just before the announcement was made.

Article 370 was enshrined into the Indian Constitution as a means to guarantee the autonomy of J&K within the Indian Union. Like all princely states – as it was at the time of Indian independence in 1947 – J&K acceded to India only in the three subjects of Defence, External Affairs and Communications.

Most of the other princely states were integrated beyond those subjects over the next few years, but in part because J&K was disputed territory, and in part because its leadership negotiated for autonomy during the constitutional talks, Article 370 allowed it special privileges. One such privilege was the establishment of its own constituent assembly, which had the power to frame the state’s constitution as well as to make the decision about whether J&K wanted to accede to India in any further subjects.

That the BJP would decide to eliminate Article 370 in all but name is not surprising, since it had led a movement against the state’s special status in the 1950s during the party’s earlier incarnation as the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, and it has been consistently against the Article ever since. This movement had far-reaching consequences and eventually led to the downfall of J&K’s first government – the one that had negotiated its special status – in 1953. Subsequent state governments were willing to join hands with the central government to erode the Article over the following years, which has nonetheless remained a powerful symbol of the pact between India and one of its constituent units.

The presidential order that extends all provisions of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir, thereby negating Article 370, has also rendered unconstitutional Article 35A of the constitution. This article had been introduced into the constitution through a 1954 presidential order, made possible under Article 370, which gave the J&K state legislature the right to define permanent residents of the state, as well as to delineate their rights and privileges. In effect, this article prevented outsiders from settling in and buying property in the state.

The BJP’s explanation for its move is that the special status has prevented the state’s economic development and thus encouraged disgruntlement among the local population. By this logic, the BJP is acting no differently to earlier governments at the centre, which have thrown economic aid at J&K in the hope that its population will be pacified.

But this has not solved the underlying political grievances of the Kashmiri Muslim population, which has felt increasingly disenfranchised in and alienated from India, precisely because of the centre’s high-handedness. The insurgency against the Indian state, which began more than thirty years ago, continues to rage and is likely to strengthen as a result of this latest incursion by the centre. It confirms what Kashmiris have known for decades – that for India, Kashmir is no more than a colony; a territory devoid of people.

So it is difficult to understand how the BJP expects development – if that is even possible under such conditions – to resolve India’s Kashmir problem. Perhaps its gambit is what Kashmiri Muslims have been fearing for a long time; namely, to circumscribe the Kashmiri Muslim population itself.

This has now become a possibility with the abrogation of Article 35A and the ability of non-residents to buy property and settle in the union territory. This will ultimately alter its demographic composition from being a Muslim-majority to a Hindu-majority region. It is the major reason that Pakistan has registered protest against this move, because its claim on the region will cease to be valid if Jammu and Kashmir no longer has a Muslim majority.

Ultimately, the assault on J&K’s special status and statehood is an assault on the idea of India as a secular, plural and federal polity itself. It reveals the much larger project of the BJP, which is to turn India into a unitary, Hindu nation-state.

India claimed Kashmir in 1947 as a Muslim-majority state precisely to prove its secularism. And its special relationship with J&K was one of the many ways in which India constitutionally integrated different regions and their peculiar demands into its federal structure. That consensus is now relegated to the past and has been replaced by the muscular, militaristic idea of India as a centralised Hindu nation. Regardless of the legal challenges to these particular measures against J&K, that idea is here to stay.

This article was first posted on Asia Dialogue - it is reposted with their permission and that of Dr Zutshi

Chitralekha Zutshi is a Professor in the Department of History at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.

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Why India Owes Kashmir Independence by Zareer Masani

8/10/2019

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Jawaharlal Nehru with Minoo Masani, 1945

My memories of Kashmir go back to the 1950s and my childhood, when my father, Minoo, and his close friend, Jayaprakash Narayan, led a small but highly vocal campaign to remind their former colleague, Jawaharlal Nehru, of his promise of a plebiscite in Kashmir and to demand the release of its most popular leader, Sheikh Abdullah. Although Abdullah, dubbed Sher-e-Kashmir by Nehru himself, had been his friend and ally against the erstwhile Maharaja Hari Singh, Nehru had allowed his own sentimental attachment to Kashmir, the home of his ancestors, to overcome his political scruples. The result had been the imprisonment of Abdullah for eleven long years, from 1953 to 1964, while Kashmir was governed by a combination of corrupt stooges, rigged elections and military occupation.

I remember learning from Father that a plebiscite, initially promised by India, meant a free vote, under UN supervision, in which the people of Kashmir could choose among India, Pakistan and independence. Father explained that the same majoritarian principle on which we had annexed the Muslim-ruled princely states of Hyderabad and Junagadh meant that we should allow the Muslim majority population of Kashmir, not its Hindu Maharaja, to decide its fate. The Congress had decreed that sauce for the Muslim goose wasn’t sauce for the Hindu gander, sending in a military force in its so-called police action against the Nizam of Hyderabad, while doing much the same in Kashmir, supposedly to ward off Pakistani infiltrators.

The unofficial justification that emerged in supposedly secular Congress circles was that Kashmir, as India’s only Muslim-majority state, was a symbol of our secularism, as opposed to Pakistan. By a curious logic, the same secularists, led by Congress Muslims, explained that Indian Muslims would be massacred by Hindus if we surrendered Kashmir. What had previously been admitted as a disputed territory, whose people deserved self-determination, had suddenly become an inseparable part of our Indian Union.

My first visit to Kashmir was with both my parents way back in the summer of 1961, when we stayed at the beautiful Lake Palace Hotel and were wined and dined by its Oberoi family owners. Mother ordered carpets, made to exquisite Persian designs, from Srinagar’s foremost carpet workshop, while I bought myself smart jade cufflinks, made by local craftsmen. Kashmir still had ample tourism and flourishing handicrafts, and the countryside with its wonderful lakes, mountains, flowers and Chinar trees was safe enough for us to picnic wherever we chose.

I was a teenage fly on the wall as Father, then leader of the recently formed Swatantra Party, had friendly talks with Kashmiri luminaries like the Mirwaiz Farooq and leaders of the imprisoned Sheikh Abdullah’s Plebiscite Front. Their desire for independence from both India and Pakistan was loud and clear, and the corruption and unpopularity of the Indian-imposed quisling regime of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed were unmistakable wherever we went. Kashmiri self-determination was even then far too unpopular in India for Father to get it officially adopted by his Swatantra Party, so he made it clear publicly that this was his personal view, not the party’s.

I remember well the euphoria in our home in 1964 when Nehru, weakened by his disastrous China War, gave in to persuasion and protest by Father and JP, released Sheikh Abdullah and sent him off to Islamabad to negotiate a settlement with Pakistan’s President, Marshal Ayub Khan. Ayub had demonstrated his good intentions by keeping Pakistan out of India’s China War, so we didn’t have to fight on two fronts, and Nehru was suitably grateful.

It looked like the fifteen-year-long Kashmir dispute, the main bone of Indo-Pak contention, was about to be resolved and Ayub was about to visit Nehru. Father had himself already met Ayub and been impressed by his friendly feelings towards India, and so was my maternal uncle, Rajeshwar Dayal, then Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan.

I remember Sheikh Sahib coming to dinner at our Bombay home, accompanied by his faithful lady friend, Mridula Sarabhai, and my prurient, teenage fascination with their relationship. Seeing masculine Mridula in her Pathan clothes, I needed little convincing that their friendship was platonic. And then came a sudden thunderbolt from the blue. Nehru, apparently indestructible, suddenly suffered his second, fatal stroke and died. Abdullah was genuinely grief-stricken at the loss of his old friend and opponent. The tripartite talks with Ayub stalled, and India and Pakistan drifted towards their 1965 war.

As Bombay observed wartime blackouts, with very sporadic Pakistani bombing, I tried to argue the case for Kashmiri self-determination with jingoistic fellow students at Elphinstone College. I was told to go and live in Pakistan. The specious Indian response about our broken plebiscite promise was that it was conditional on Pakistan withdrawing from Azad Kashmir. Pakistan naturally responded that India should simultaneously withdraw from the Valley, but India refused any such solution, even under UN supervision.

Kashmir meanwhile resumed some semblance of normality after the Indira-Sheikh Accord of 1974, with a state government led by Sheikh Abdullah, who had been overwhelmingly voted in by the first free elections in two decades. It looked as though there would at least be some provincial autonomy, under our Constitution, which guaranteed Kashmir special status, and most important of all, prohibited buying of property by non-Kashmiris. This was an important safeguard, since we imperialistic Indians had already swamped Goa, reducing their indigenous populations to minorities in the territories we swallowed up.

My next visit to Kashmir was in 1987, as a BBC producer with my distinguished colleague Mark Tully, to cover the state election, generally regarded as a turning point in radicalising Kashmiri Muslims. Abdullah had passed on, but his son Farooq and Farooq's mother, Begum Abdullah, were leading the main regional party, the erstwhile Plebiscite Front, renamed the National Conference. It was an open question whether their commitment to secular regional autonomy would satisfy the more militant Hurriyat leaders and the Mirwaiz on the one hand, or the Centre on the other. The prospect of a settlement with Pakistan, revived at Indira and Bhutto’s Simla Summit, had again evaporated, thanks to resurgent chauvinism on both sides.

Mark and I stayed at the Lake Palace Hotel, which, to our dismay, had declined into crumbling elegance, no longer a showpiece and playground for the Oberois. We were also struck by the general decline in the surrounding Srinagar economy. Tourism, traditionally Kashmir’s staple, had fallen off drastically, discouraged by chronic Indo-Pak border skirmishes, which had also spilled over into the beginnings of Islamist terrorism among Kashmiris themselves. Their desperation had been increasingly fuelled by the bullying and violence of India’s Border Security Force and occupying Army, made up mostly of Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus, who were openly contemptuous of Kashmiris and insensitive to their feelings.

The decline was evident in the poor quality of the handicrafts now on offer, the loss of traditional weaving skills and the evaporation of valuable cash crops like saffron, apricots and walnuts. Most tragic of all was the disappearance of what used to be called ‘Kashmiriyat’, a unique culture of pluralistic, non-sectarian tolerance and assimilation. This was undoubtedly India’s greatest crime against the Kashmiri people, and its victims were inevitably Hindu Pandits, who had co-existed happily with their Muslim neighbours for a millennium. They were now attacked and mostly expelled from their homes in the Valley, much as the Muslim minority had been ethnically cleansed from Jammu.

The state now veered for the next three decades between rigged elections, corrupt and unstable governments, Islamist terrorism and Governor’s rule. This was much the situation inherited by the BJP and its Hindutva brigades from the ostensibly secular, but almost equally chauvinistic, Congress.

Arguably, if anyone could have negotiated a settlement with Pakistan of the Kashmir dispute, it was a Modi Government with impeccable Hindu credentials and a politically unassailable position. It might not have been difficult to make a case that Kashmir is in no way either strategically or economically necessary to our sprawling Indian Union. On the contrary, we have poured public funds into bankrolling a corrupt, client political class in Kashmir, and then protecting them from their own constituents with our military and police forces. Militarily, it remains a huge defence burden on us to defend, with its narrow land border with India cut off for several winter months. An independent Kashmir, with its neutrality guaranteed by the UN, might, on the other hand, have been a valuable buffer state between us and Pakistan, much as Nepal and Bhutan are between us and China. Culturally, even the most casual visitor to Kashmir would realise how alien India is to its language, culture and national identity, especially in our current Hindutva incarnation.

Instead, our BJP masters have chosen to declare all-out war on Kashmiriyat, stamping out its constitutional status by presidential decree and hoping to suppress opposition by blanketing the state with our military. This is an option that would have been unthinkable under either Nehru or Indira Gandhi despite their chauvinism on Kashmir, and closely mirrors China’s swallowing of Tibet. What is even more astonishing is the absence of the kind of defence of Kashmiri rights that my father and JP mounted in the 1950s and 1960s. With a couple of honourable exceptions, the self-appointed, liberal guardians of Indian secularism have remained conspicuously silent on Kashmir.

As a historian, I can only advise our current Hindutva masters that Kashmir will be too bitter a pill for even them to swallow. Kashmiri identity, dating back a millennium, has been forged into irreversible nationhood by our Indian chauvinism, a process which autocratic constitutional changes cannot reverse. Instead, what we have achieved is to turn the world’s most tolerant Muslim country into a hotbed of Islamist terrorism, which will continue to torment our military and any settlers we try to import for generations to come.

It’s a terrorism which could easily develop cross-border links with the Afghan Taliban in neighbouring Pakistan and with disgruntled Muslims elsewhere in the subcontinent. While our BJP masters have undoubtedly held the high moral ground in their championship of Muslim women’s rights, and especially the abolition of triple talaq, their assault on basic Kashmiri human rights is a war they will never win and one we could have done without, given the major economic challenges ahead of us.

Zareer Masani is a historian and broadcaster. This article was first posted on the website of the magazine Open and is reposted here with the kind permission of Zareer Masani and Open.

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Kashmir under lockdown: 'a prison sentence without the pronouncement'

How Indian is Kashmir? - Andrew Whitehead

Yet another assault on Kashmir - Chitralekha Zutshi

Why India Owes Kashmir Independence by Zareer Masani

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