In an orchestrated constitutional coup on 7 August 2019 the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Government in New Delhi stripped the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir of all vestiges of autonomy and the so-called special status by scrapping Article 370.
In a Shakespearean fell swoop, ll shreds of prestige were brazenly snatched by dissecting the state into two Union Territories. Fearing fierce resistance and bloodshed as a consequence, Indian security forces imposed an unprecedented lockdown including placing its leaders under house arrest and shutting down internet and telephone services. This continues as of writing of this piece – 02 September 2019.
Behind the noises of integrating Muslim majority Kashmir into the Indian mainstream, lurks the dangerous demagogic idea and the larger Hindutva conspiracy of reducing it to a minority thereby denying them their inalienable right to self-determination and informed political choices.
Writing for BBC Professor Sumantra Bose of LSE says that ‘what the BJP government has done is akin to what Serbia’s Milosevic regime did in 1989 by unilaterally revoking Kosovo’s autonomy and imposing a police state on Kosovo’s Albanian majority…. to ensure subjugation’. Tim Stanley of The Telegraph (London) and many parliamentary groups and civil rights movements around the world echoed similar fears.
The constitutional route BJP Government took to abrogate Article 370 and divide Jammu & Kashmir is fraught with serious legal and political consequences which do not portend well for those states that do not show compliance with the dictates of the ruling party.
Voicing his grave concern in Indian Parliament on 5 August over this India’s former Home Minister P Chidambaram said: “You are dismembering a state. You think you are doing it to Jammu & Kashmir mischievously interpreting the constitutional provisions will not apply to any other state? All that you will have to do is to dismiss an elected government, dissolve the state legislature, promulgate President’s rule, declare parliament to be the state legislature for the time being and divide that state…… You do not realize what you are doing? The same resolution, the same provisions, the same methods can be applied to any other state. What you are doing today sends very wrong signals to the rest of the country’. Chidambaram called it the darkest day in the history of independent India.
Although this move has received support from a majority of the political parties; it is owed to the overwhelming anti-Muslim mood in the country assiduously cultivated by the right-wing forces over last six years, to whose wrong side these parties do not wish to be seen.
Besides, the Gramscian assertion that hegemony is constructed through the power of attraction of the leading group and also through compromises and concessions aimed at the conscious rallying of auxiliary forces appears fully applied by the Modi government.
These auxiliary forces are the smaller political parties whose leaders live under constant threat of Enforcement Directorate for their corruption cases and therefore, have no choice but to acquiesce.
BJP has carefully created the essential condition of hegemonic politics by coercing consent of the auxiliary groups so as to give an impression of a national consensus over its various legislations and schemes aimed at progressing its Hindutva agenda through schemes and programs that are expressly directed against Muslims and minorities albeit wrapped in velvet gloves.
This agenda alludes to the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Dibdin’s Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.”
Such is the existing environment in India today where you ought to fall in line with the majoritarian thinking. Liberal democracy is dead. Chidambaram wondered ‘whether BJP would have done a similar thing had Kashmir been a Hindu majority state?’ Thus, in striping Kashmir of its special status, BJP has fulfilled the dream of its founding father late Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who ardently advocated the abolition of Article 370 and died in detention in Srinagar in 1953.
The past five years in Kashmir have seen unprecedented bloodshed, death and destruction. People are deliberately made to feel helpless as part of a strategy to frustrate them to the extent that their enthusiasm and energy to seek secession diminishes.
BJP’s policy to wear them out like the proverbial beaver who decided to shed his testicles which the hunters believed had medicinal value, and thereby opt to live a little longer albeit submissively would never succeed in Kashmir because Kashmiris are no beavers. Moreover, the BJP Government in Delhi would do well to heed the advice of the great son of Kashmir, Pandit Kalhana, who said in 1149: “Kashmir may be conquered by the force of spiritual merit, but not by the force of soldiers.” Echoing similar sentiments Asaduddin Owaisi, an MP from Telangana cautioned that Kashmiris are very clever people and the mistake of taking them for a ride like this would have disastrous consequences.
The future remains insecure and dark, although Mr. Modi in a nationally televised address on 10 August tried to assuage the hurt feelings of Kashmiris and assured them a better future through national integration. But this does not appear cutting any ice with the Kashmiris who remain locked up and incarcerated for over a month now.
How long would such an incarceration continue? Only the future will tell. A couplet from legendary revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz aptly sums up the current predicament of the Kashmiri people:
“Having chosen their standards from the battlefield,
Millions of lovers would pour forth”.