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India’s Looming Ethno-Nationalist Catastrophe

The decision to revoke Kashmir's special status is part of a ghastly—and popular—agenda for Delhi's hard-right Hindu government.

The New Republic

Against this backdrop of perpetual crisis, Modi has perfected the grand, autocratic gesture. In November 2016, he imperiled a sick economy by unilaterally announcing the cancellation of large-denomination rupee notes. This was allegedly done to curb the flow of untaxed income, a ludicrous claim, given the number of his cronies who sit in London and New York after defaulting on massive loans from government banks. The demonetization led to severe misery for a majority of the Indian population, wage laborers, and small traders who conduct their business largely in cash. It transformed everyday life by fiat, with long lines of desperate people outside banks, an eerie mirroring of voters queuing up outside election booths. But Modi’s gesture seized headlines and provided an intoxicating display of power, with the damage to the economy and misery visited upon the majority failing to dent Modi’s popularity. The BJP’s victory margin in last May’s election was even greater than when the party first took control.

Monday’s decision to dissolve Kashmir’s special status is copied from the same template: done suddenly at great cost to a large section of people, but certain to appeal to the Hindutva fanbase. The Hindu right has for decades stoked resentment about Article 370 and its special treatment of Kashmiri Muslims. (At a BJP rally in Kolkata many years ago, I heard a speaker tell the crowd that Kashmiris received subsidized mutton for a special price so low that it would not even buy dog meat in Kolkata.) Targeting Kashmir’s special status is also seen as a blow against the liberal elites who preceded the BJP in governance, and who supposedly lacked Modi’s requisite toughness in dealing with Kashmiri Muslims.

All of this is, of course, fake news. Kashmir, like other border territories absorbed uneasily into the Indian republic, has for decades been treated as a colony by liberal as well as right-wing Indian governments. It is disputed territory, and the special status promised in Article 370 only tells one side of the story. Another side is told by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a piece of colonial-era legislation, still in effect in Kashmir, that offers virtual immunity to security forces for all acts of violence. India’s military occupation of Kashmir has unfolded apace under this law, spurring massacres, disappearances, torture, rape, and the deliberate blinding of protesters with pump-action shotguns firing cartridges packed with hundreds of tiny “nonlethal” lead pellets.

As with Modi’s demonetization drive, the apparent suddenness of the decision to remove Article 370 and carve Kashmir up into two administrative units is contrived. The declaration was preceded by the announcement of two fall summits in Kashmir for prospective outside investors. What such investment in Kashmir will look like is easy to guess from a cursory glance at the rest of India: more trash, more cars, more pollution, more concrete, more aggressive Hindu rock music, and ever more ugly assertions of the race spirit that Golwalkar wanted Hindus to learn from Nazis. The BJP wants to allow its Hindu majoritarian supporters to expand into Kashmir. If it looks like settler colonialism, that’s because it is.