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Yet another assault on Kashmir - Chitralekha Zutshi

8/14/2019

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Picture
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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Balraj Puri: an appreciation, by Chitralekha Zutshi

1/5/2015

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One of Jammu and Kashmir's commanding intellectuals, Balraj Puri (1928-2014), died in the year just ended. The distinguished historian Chitralekha Zutshi offers her personal reflections on his life and achievements:

Picture
Balraj Puri


When I heard that Balraj Sahab had passed away this past August, I was overtaken by sadness, and also a pang of regret. I had plans to visit Jammu in November with the intention of spending some time with him, learning more about the entangled politics of the state of Jammu and Kashmir since 1947.  In my experience, his was the most clear-headed and refreshingly honest voice on the subject. I had met him only once, in 2010, and although in frail health, he was lucid about the state of politics in Jammu and Kashmir. He told me that Kashmir’s politics was a prisoner of its past; it could not move forward until the intertwined interpretations about its history—both distant and recent—that define its political discourse in the present, could be disentangled.  Truth was an incessant casualty in the process.  With his death, I had lost my chance to learn more, but more importantly, we had lost someone who always told the truth regardless of how bitter it was, or how negative the consequences for himself.


"we had lost someone who always told the truth regardless of how bitter it was, or how negative the consequences for himself"


Fortunately, Balraj Sahab was a prodigious writer and has left behind a plethora of writings. He wrote on everything from Indian federalism to Communism in Kashmir to Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, and much, much more.  When I read his writings, I am struck by the simple yet potent logic he brought to bear on all his analyses. And these analyses were not merely academic for him; indeed he sought to put them into practice to solve the problems he saw plaguing the state.  Two issues underlined Balraj Sahab’s politics over the years: re-centering the position of Jammu within the state of Jammu and Kashmir by allowing for regional autonomy, and the development of a healthy opposition within the state, which he saw as the basis of a democratic politics.

In pursuit of both causes, Balraj Sahab often clashed with the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference.  An early member of the political party from Jammu, drawn to its progressive politics of land reform and economic equality, Balraj Sahab recognized that the party was overwhelmingly centered in the Kashmir Valley. If the party was to become truly representative, then Jammu and its people had to be given due representation within it, and by extension, a say and stake within the politics of the state. This could be achieved, in part, through a platform of regional autonomy, which allowed for all the constituent units of Jammu and Kashmir to function and develop equally well without encroaching on each other.

The second, related issue on which he spent his lifetime crusading was that, for democratic institutions to become functional and entrenched, the National Conference/Congress combine could not be the sole political voice within the state. J&K needed an opposition party or parties to challenge the dominant political players and to allow democracy to take root in the state. This was why he was a dedicated member of the Praja Socialist Party and refused to allow the party to be merged with the Congress.  

Although he ran foul of the National Conference as a result of his politics (he was expelled from the party), Balraj Sahab spoke out vehemently against the Indian state for imprisoning its leader, Sheikh Abdullah, in 1953 and then intermittently until 1975.  He incessantly mediated between Nehru and Abdullah and later between Abdullah and Indira Gandhi to bring about a rapprochement between the Kashmiri leader and the Indian center. He recognized that J&K was the true test of Indian democracy and secularism against which India’s democratic systems, its human rights record, and its record at preserving communal harmony would be measured. I daresay that he died a disappointed man in this respect, although not a pessimistic one, campaigning and writing for the truth until the very end.    

I felt the huge void left by Balraj Sahab’s passing when I made my way to Srinagar and then Jammu in October and November. What was striking about him, I realized, was that he was universally respected.  Political ideologues from across the political system admitted, rather wistfully, that he had always been right, that the political aspirations of the people of all the constituent parts of Jammu and Kashmir needed to be represented for the Kashmir tangle to be untangled.  I wish he was still around, to help us make dispassionate sense of the recent election results in the state and what they foretell about its future.
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