Keith Jones
India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is mounting an unprecedented military-security crackdown in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region to quell popular opposition to the patently illegal changes that it has made to the region’s government and relations with the central government.
In what is tantamount to a constitutional coup, the BJP government issued a presidential order early Monday morning stripping Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), India’s only Muslim-majority state, of the special semi-autonomous status it has had since independent India’s constitution came into force in 1950. It then ordered J&K bifurcated, hiving off the sparsely populated but strategically important Ladakh area, and proclaimed that Ladakh and the remainder of J&K will henceforth comprise two Union Territories, with significantly diminished powers. In effect, J&K has been placed under the legal-political thumb of New Delhi and its stridently Hindu communalist government.
Underscoring the BJP government’s reactionary antidemocratic aims, these changes were conceived in secret and implemented by stealth, in a conspiracy orchestrated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his henchman, Home Secretary Amit Shah, and the country’s president, Ram Nath Kovind, himself a long-time cadre of the far-right Hindu chauvinist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), together with the most senior members of the state bureaucracy and the army and intelligence agencies.
Not only were the people of Jammu and Kashmir not forewarned and their elected representatives not consulted about the impending changes. India’s so-called supreme law was modified behind the backs of the entire population, including the most senior leaders of the opposition and the BJP’s own allies in the governing National Democratic Alliance. To provide a pseudo-democratic cover for this conspiracy, the BJP subsequently had parliament pass two motions endorsing the changes to J&K’s constitutional status, borders and government, but even then debate was limited to just a few hours.
Kashmir under a state of siege
In the weeks prior to Monday’s coup, the BJP government poured tens of thousands of additional troops into J&K under the pretext that Pakistan-supported anti-Indian insurgents were poised to launch a major strike.
Since Monday, the J&K region has been subject to a military-security lockdown that is unprecedented even within the context of the anti-Indian insurgency that has convulsed the region and exacerbated Indo-Pakistani tensions since 1989.
Indian authorities have cut off all internet, cell and landline phone and regular television service. Schools have been shut down, and much of J&K has been placed under Section 144, a British colonial criminal code provision under which all gatherings of four or more people are illegal. At least a hundred prominent political leaders, including the foremost spokesmen of the traditional pro-Indian section of J&K’s Muslim elite, have been arrested. These include two former J&K chief ministers—People’s Democratic Party leader Mehbooba Mufti and J&K National Conference head Omar Abdullah—and the chairman of the J&K People’s Conference, Sajjad Gani Lone.
An eye-witness report published yesterday by the pro-BJP Indian Express gives a chilling description of the current situation in Srinagar, J&K’s largest city: “The (Kashmir) Valley’s connection with the inside and the outside world has been cut… Residents are not allowed outside their neighbourhoods. The administration hasn’t issued curfew passes to even its own employees, and security personnel don’t accept government IDs as passes.
“The press isn’t welcome. Most of the TV crew that have flown in are parked in a 1-sq-km area of Zero Bridge in the city... [M]ost government buildings, schools, colleges, courts have been occupied by paramilitary forces flown from outside the state… Roads are closed … and daily essentials are drying up across homes.”
The three authors of the Indian Express report acknowledge that those to whom they have been able to speak, including government employees, are overwhelmingly opposed to the Indian state’s actions and fear that they are aimed at “changing the demography of Jammu and Kashmir” so as to “reduce the share of Muslims in the population.”
The geostrategic and domestic aims of Modi’s constitutional coup
The BJP government’s assault on Jammu and Kashmir has multiple aims.
First, it is meant to signal that New Delhi is determined to bring a quick end to the Kashmir insurgency on its terms, and that, to do so, it is ready to dispense with legal-constitutional norms and intensify the “dirty war”—replete with “disappearances” and summary executions—which the Indian state has waged in J&K for the past 30 years.
A second, related aim is to strengthen New Delhi’s hand vis-à-vis both Pakistan and China. The “constitutional strike” the Modi government has mounted on Kashmir complements the air strikes it ordered deep inside Pakistan in late February, ostensibly in response to a Pakistan-supported terrorist attack. That strike and a subsequent retaliatory Pakistani air raid on J&K brought South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed powers the closest they have been to all-out war since 1971.
By “fully integrating” J&K into the Indian Unions—despite its internationally recognized status as a disputed territory—New Delhi is announcing that it will no longer entertain Pakistan’s calls for J&K’s status to be part of any “peace dialogue” between Islamabad and New Delhi.
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