Six on Kashmir: ‘All of Kashmir is ours!’ With Modi’s new map of India, Hindu nationalists chart a bolder course; Kashmir profile and Timeline; Why Kashmir may see increased violence after the revocation of Article 370; Trump asks Imran Khan to reso
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“Kashmir is ours! All of Kashmir is ours!” they cried. Their voices echoed up the narrow street, which opened to a view of the cloud-draped Trikuta hills that Hindu pilgrims climb to worship at the Vaishno Devi temple, the second-busiest religious shrine in India.
“Victory for Mother India!” the men shouted in unison. “Brother Narendra Modi, our pride!”
Less than two weeks earlier, Mr. Modi, a leader steeped from childhood in a potent ideology of Hindu nationalism, had at a stroke redrawn the national map of India, ending the special status that had provided a measure of autonomy to a contested region with 12.5 million people who live between the Himalayas, the Karakoram Range and the Indus valley. His government stripped the national constitution of the provisions that had allowed Jammu and Kashmir its own flag, its own constitution and its own laws, placing it directly under New Delhi’s control."
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"1. J&K’s accession to India in 1947 was hurried and controversial
Prior to the 1947 partition, which established India and Pakistan as separate nations, J&K was a Muslim-majority princely state that was subject to indirect, rather than direct, rule under the British.
This troubled context led the Constituent Assembly of India to enact Article 370 in 1949; when the Indian constitution came into force in 1950, so did Article 370.
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"‘Kashmir is not the property of India or Pakistan,’ Nehru said in 1952. ‘It belongs to the Kashmiri people.’ But the far-right Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the BJP, has long insisted that ‘Kashmir belongs to India,’ and a succession of governments in Delhi have behaved as if it does for decades. To grow up in India is to grow up ignorant about Kashmir. And that such ignorance should persist in the Indian mind suits the RSS, which despises India’s secular constitution and our founding fathers: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Patel.
In 2016, three students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi were arrested and charged with sedition for taking part in a protest to commemorate the executions of two Kashmiri separatists and for chanting Kashmiri freedom slogans. The debate moved out of student unions into the streets, where public opinion was shaped by propaganda. The TV news portrayed any form of dissent as ‘anti-India’. In the streets of Kashmir, the army, emboldened by these opinions, became more brutal with protesters. They used ‘non-lethal pellet guns’ – i.e. shotguns loaded with lead pellets – on the crowds. They injured three thousand demonstrators, blinding almost a thousand people. Kashmir changed that summer. Many of the militants now fighting in Kashmir have PhDs. They took up arms only when everything else, including their education in India, had failed them.
We are all now encouraged by the government to have a ‘stand on Kashmir’. What they really want us to do is cheer on the Indian army. You are for the army or against it; either a Hindu nationalist or ‘anti-India’. The media pitted the army against every Muslim in Kashmir: civilians, militants and politicians. Even attending funerals in Kashmir was branded ‘anti-India’. Kashmir was depicted as costing us something: our money, our army, our patience. Six months ago, when a local boy blew himself up killing forty troops, Kashmiri men across India were beaten up in retaliatory attacks. So much of our time since 2016 has been spent being told by the media that ‘Kashmir is a problem’, we have finally become a society fully invested in finding a solution – no matter how bloody it may be.
"Aug. 5 also sounded the final death knell for India’s increasingly tenuous claims to be a secular democracy. In fact, the right-wing BJP’s project to remake India (not just occupied Kashmir) is neither secular nor democratic. Instead, the BJP envisions a future in which India’s long-suffering Muslims, Christians, lower-caste Hindus and other religious minorities and tribes are formally relegated to the status of unpersons.
Now, again, in pursuit of this fascistic vision, the BJP has set off a crisis with truly global implications, while making yet another victim out of the rules-based international order, human rights and the sovereign will of the Kashmiri people. This time, India will not be able to trot out the familiar boogeymen of “cross-border terrorism” and “Pakistan” to draw attention away from the ugly reality of its occupation and oppression in Kashmir.
But most of all, the rash and irresponsible actions of the BJP have also put South Asia on the brink of conflict for the second time in less than six months. Prime Minister Khan, who has made repeated offers of dialogue to India since assuming office last year, recently warned the international community of catastrophic consequences should India’s latest act of recklessness lead to conflict. This, he stressed, is the reality of any conflict between the two countries that are armed with the weapons that both India and Pakistan possess."
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