India’s state of siege in Kashmir continues

Wasantha Rupasinghe

With the blessing of India’s Supreme Court and the staunch support of big business and virtually the entire opposition, the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government continues to subject Jammu and Kashmir to an unprecedented security lockdown and communications blackout.

Since August 5—for the last 69 days—the 13 million residents of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) region have been denied all cell phone and internet access. Tens of thousands of Indian army troops and paramilitaries remain deployed in cities, towns and villages across J&K to brutally suppress any anti-government actions, and to police curfews and restrictions on people’s movements whenever and wherever they are imposed. Security forces have detained thousands of people without charge, including boys as young as 9 years old, while steadfastly refusing to provide any accounting of the number of detained, their names, and current whereabouts.

This state of siege was implemented to enforce the BJP’s August 5 constitutional coup. Without warning, let alone any consultation with Kashmiris, the government stripped J&K of its special semi-autonomous constitutional status by presidential fiat, and then downgraded and bifurcated what had been India’s only Muslim-majority state. Henceforth, J&K is to be governed as two Union territories, effectively placing the region under permanent central government trusteeship.

Modi’s assault on J&K has multiple reactionary objectives. These include strengthening India’s hand against neighbouring Pakistan and China, and whipping up chauvinism and bellicose nationalism to energize the BJP’s Hindu supremacist activist base and intimidate and divide the working class under conditions of a deepening economic crisis and mounting social opposition.

Government officials claimed that “normalcy” would be quickly re-established in J&K. But long before the security lockdown entered its current tenth week, they stopped giving any clear indication of when cell phone and internet service will be restored or those detained without charge released. Modi’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, who personally supervised the initial phases of the stage of siege from Srinagar, J&K’s largest city, has cynically said that the lifting of the cell phone and internet restrictions “depends on” Pakistan ceasing to use these networks to send “signals” to “operatives.”

For decades, the Indian establishment and especially the BJP has presented the popular alienation from Indian rule in J&K, and the separatist insurgency that has convulsed the region since New Delhi brutally suppressed the protests that erupted in response to its rigging of the 1987 state election, as entirely attributable to the machinations of Pakistan.

The reality is the communications blackout, like the state of siege as whole, is driven by the Indian authorities’ fear of mass popular opposition.

So isolated is the government, that it has detained hundreds of Muslim pro-Indian J&K politicians and activists, including three former Chief Ministers and the leading cadre of the J&K National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party.

Notwithstanding the government crackdown and the complicity of much of the media, numerous reports have emerged documenting massive human rights violations by Indian security forces acting at the behest of Modi and the BJP government.

At the end of September, a team of five women’s rights activists who visited J&K between Sept. 17 and 21 published a report, “Women’s Voice: Fact-Finding Report on Kashmir,” providing evidence of numerous instances of arbitrary state violence, including night-raids and torture.

The report said Indian authorities had arrested an estimated “13,000 boys” in J&K since August 5. “Boys as young as 14 or 15 are taken away, tortured, some for as long as 45 days. Their papers are taken away, families not informed.”

The report adds, “Women in villages stood before us with vacant eyes. ‘How do we know where they are? Our boys who were taken away, snatched away from our homes.’”