Woodrow Wilson Center expert says: India’s sudden Kashmir move could backfire badly

by Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Michael Kugelman of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center, has warned that Indian Prime Minister Narenra Modi’s sudden move in Kashmir could backfire badly.

“Sure enough, on Aug. 5, India announced that it plans to revoke Article 370, a constitutional clause dating back to 1949 that gives Jammu and Kashmir its special autonomous status. The scale of this move cannot be overstated. Abrogating Article 370 represents a major tipping point for an already fraught dispute—and it could easily backfire on India,” according to Kugelam.

Writing in the Foreign Affairs, Kugelam argued that the Kashmir problem has not been solved by removing the Article 370 but “on the contrary, it’s just gotten a lot more complicated—and potentially a lot more destabilizing”.

“The repeal of Article 370 is fraught with risk. “India is unilaterally altering the territorial status of a highly disputed territory that is, per square mile, the most militarized place in the world. Something has to give, and New Delhi understands this—which is why it implemented a draconian lockdown before the announcement,” Kugelam said adding:

“For many Kashmiris, Article 370 had more symbolic than practical meaning, given that the longstanding and repressive presence of Indian security forces had undercut the notion of autonomy. Many Kashmiris face daily restrictions on their freedom of expression and movement, along with the constant risk of rough treatment from security personnel. Still, for many Kashmiri Muslims, the dominant group in Jammu and Kashmir and the victims of what they regard as an Indian occupation, the revocation of Article 370 is a nightmare scenario, because it brings them closer to an Indian state that they despise. Most of them want to be free of Indian rule.”

In Kugelam’s view it’s easy to understand New Delhi’s decision to remove Kashmir’s autonomous status.

“Two recent developments probably pushed the government to act now. The first was U.S. President Donald Trump’s offer to mediate the Kashmir dispute. The second is a rapidly progressing Afghanistan peace process, facilitated to an extent by Islamabad, which could lead to an eventual political settlement that gives the Taliban a prominent role in government. Each of these developments strengthens Pakistan’s hand. Making a dramatic move on Kashmir enables New Delhi to push back against Islamabad. It also sends a strong message to Washington about New Delhi’s utter lack of interest in external mediation.

Kugelman also cited domestic reasons for Modi’s move: “Domestic politics are also at play. A big-bang, early term move from the newly reelected BJP is sure to attract strong support from its rank and file, and such backing can blunt potential disillusionment and unhappiness down the road if the government struggles to ease India’s growing jobs crisis. Indeed, it may not be a coincidence that the party, during its previous term, stepped up its Hindu nationalist policies—another surefire way to attract support from its base—after it struggled to carry out an oft-promised economic reform agenda.”

For now, a major question is how key players will respond, Kugelman says by adding: So long as New Delhi maintains its security lockdown in Kashmir, unrest is unlikely. But if that grip is loosened, violence could ensue—suggesting that the lockdown could remain in place for an extended period. Then there is Pakistan. Islamabad’s immediate priority will be to step up its longstanding campaign to get the Kashmir issue on the global agenda and to get the world to condemn India’s policies.

There is also the risk of further social turmoil once those outside Kashmir, following the repeal of Article 370, are allowed to acquire land, Kugelam believes. “For many Kashmiri Muslims, the fear is that this influx of Indians will eventually change the demographics of the Muslim-majority region and exacerbate communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims.”

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America 

The largest Muslim community in the world is being politically isolated

ASHIQ C.K.

Even politicians of a more neutral tone were also heard asking their Muslim followers to take off their taqiya cap and hijab if they wanted to appear in campaign rallies.

With only a few months away from the general election, India, which holds the largest Muslim minority and is the third largest Muslim population after Indonesia and Pakistan that constitutes 14.2% of the 1.35 billion population of the largest democracy of the world, has been politically orphaned. The battle lines are drawn for the upcoming general election as it was the case in 2014, between the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the right-wing Hindu party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the supercentenarian Indian National Congress-led opposition party of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Recent legislation that has been ratified by both houses of Indian parliament, brutally dominated by the BJP led NDA, levels the battlefield, to say for the least,  totally oriented in direct line with upper-cast Hindus of the country. No political party hesitated to take a political stand in passing those bills which go vocally against the will of minorities, and especially against the Muslims of the country.

Although the Muslim population of India traditionally forms a notable chunk of the Congress party’s vote bank post-independence, the community started deserting the party after the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 and the lack of attention in addressing many Muslim issues that were rampant during 1980s, especially issues pertaining to the required legislation for safeguarding the personal law of Muslims based on Sharia law. By that time, regional parties had been inviting low-cast Hindu leaders into politics in order to showcase ample representation in the political scene of the nation, like the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the Rashtriya Janata Dal Party. They have successfully coaxed the Muslim community out of their respective regional politics, masquerading as their saviors to ensure at least a political survival. 

The last four and half years have been a difficult time for the Muslim community in India in regards to the ruling BJP, mainly because of the growing feeling of being second-class citizens, alien and unwanted. The BJP has been, to an extent, successful in putting into practice the modus operandi of their hate strategy towards Muslims that resulted in an alarming number of mob lynching and cracking down on Muslim entities throughout the country. In line with the ruling BJP, the opposition party of the Indian National Congress also opted to tread the same way, but softly and delicately. The result was that it caused unrepairable hurt and despair to the Muslim masses who had previously always enjoyed a moderate consensus within the Indian National Congress Party.

The Muslims of the INC were sidelined during this tenure. Senior leader and opposition leader of the party in the upper house of the parliament Mr. Gulam Nabi Azad lamented a few weeks back of being unwanted in party campaigning for state elections due to his Muslim identity, and in addition to that, media reports state that Mr. Ahmed Patel, who contested from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Gujarat state, was asked to abstain from making public appearances during campaigns for the party because the INC was worried of the counterproductive results and unhappiness of middle-class Hindu voters. Even politicians of a more neutral tone were also heard asking their Muslim followers to take off their taqiya cap and hijab if they wanted to appear in campaign rallies.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced the new strategy of nefariously abandoning Muslim matters by not paying an iota of attention towards the issues pertaining to the very existence of the community, considering them as nonexistent in his world. During his campaign for the general election of 2014, he went to an extent of stating that Muslims are tantamount to invisible. Instead of contesting this strategy of the BJP and its Prime Minister Modi, the opposition Congress started emulating this winning strategy of the BJP in state elections. Since then, the visibility of Muslims started deteriorating in the electoral process and reached an all-time new low in the political history of the country. The ill-intended policy of the INC of deliberately neglecting Muslims could be the last nail in the coffin of Muslim politics in India.

In the latest move by the government of India, and in an attempt to harness the upper-cast elite Hindus who dominate almost all facets of Indian society, the ruling BJP introduced two new bills in a recently concluded parliament session in a bid to create job reservations for the economically backward upper-cast people, which the government hopes will ensure more votes in their favour. Despite the fact that this bill vocally harms the interest of already struggling Indian Muslims and will make their path to social empowerment even more difficult, the Congress party cast its votes in favour of this bill and eventually got it passed. Instead of contesting such a bill in Parliament, the Congress party became part of a big electoral ploy that may ensure the end of Indian Muslims’ recuperating measures in the country.

Muslim political parties, small in size and number, consistently fail to make inroads into the fortress of regional parties and lack the willingness to go beyond the interest of its leaders caught in the fear of provoking their “secular” counterparts. Until or unless these Muslim regional political parties come up with more realistic strategies of representation that give shape to a new model for Muslim politics in the country, the world will sit and watch how a community is being devastatingly orphaned and made politically irrelevant. 

Not just a Muslim issue

Jawed Naqvi

INDIAN actor Naseeruddin Shah was trolled and threatened last week for expressing a reasoned view that religious intolerance and growing mob violence posed a mortal threat to the secular state. Naseer’s is a mixed marriage like several other actors and ordinary folk. Like him, his Hindu wife and their children keep a low premium on religion. He says it is his nightmare that the children could be surrounded by a mob one day and asked to state their religion.

For worrying that a growing number of people in India cared more for cows than human beings, Naseer was told to go to Pakistan. But these days everybody who stands up to the majoritarian view is told to go to Pakistan, including occasionally Rahul Gandhi.

In a speech to celebrate 100 days of his party’s rule in Punjab, Prime Minister Imran Khan made a passing reference to Naseer’s discomfort with the current state of Indian democracy. For the record, Imran was speaking passionately about returning to Pakistan’s minority communities their stolen rights as equal citizens. That’s when he cited the example of the Indian actor’s angst over what was going wrong in his country.

In keeping with the theme, Imran also discussed a bitter chapter in Pakistan’s history — usually a taboo with politicians — when an entire community of Bengali Muslims was wronged to the point that they could take it no more and broke away to form a separate nation. The only glue to keep a people together was justice. Denied, it led to the creation of Bangladesh, he said.

India’s lurch to the far right is more complex than a Hindu-Muslim binary and this could be important for Imran Khan to realise.

It was a statesman-like stock-taking speech replete with promises to correct Pakistan’s gross departures from Jinnah’s inclusive vision for the new nation. Imran alluded also to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s politics of intolerance and hate, something Indian writers too see as mirroring a path that Pakistan took and now apparently seemed ready to discard.

All Indians and everyone else should applaud Imran’s promise of a truer democracy for Pakistan because in our era of religious revivalism and the hate it spawns we are parched for good news. A cheerful Sikh supporter was seen applauding this part of Imran’s speech.

However, India’s lurch to the far right is more complex than a Hindu-Muslim binary and this could be important for Prime Minister Imran Khan to realise. The fight for secularism has Hindu and other non-Muslim stakeholders than is commonly understood. Gauri Lankesh and other leading rationalist opponents of Hindutva were murdered by religious bigots for standing up to the right-wing challenge. The good news for Naseer and his secular quest is that the hateful trolls have little or no effect on the grounded fight against Hindutva. The Dalit politics of Jignesh Mewani and Mayawati offers hope of a dramatic turnaround for India’s troubled democracy next year. Lalu Yadav, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav, Navjot Singh Sidhu, Rahul Gandhi, and the Marxists too, though they are confined to Kerala, would assure Imran Khan and Naseer alike that Indian democracy albeit on the back foot was up for a fight.

If Imran succeeds in recasting Pakistan as a thriving democracy it would certainly transform bilateral ties with India, and with other troubled neighbours too. He would perhaps then see that Naseer’s multicultural identity is a significant transition from the days of Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru when religion was so overbearing a factor that it became the basis for a bloody division of a people.

Imran wants to retrieve Jinnah’s vision of Hindus and Muslims living as equals in harmony with other communities in an inclusive Pakistan. In other words, Jinnah proposed for Pakistan what he once thought was possible in a united India. Why he lost faith in the Congress’s ability to sustain a secular nation may not be different from questions being asked in India today, albeit with the advantage of hindsight.

In an interview with Caravan magazine published in April, Naseer had acknowledged a worry that Jinnah had also expressed, and which Imran was prompted to recall too. “A polarisation out of a saffron inclination was always there,” Naseer told Rana Siddiqui Zaman in the interview. “We always knew about it— boo toh aati hi thi (the stench was present). But not so in the face as it is today.”

Why then did Naseer feel the need to publicly distance himself from Imran’s reference to his interview, virtually telling the Pakistan prime minister to mind his own business? What could be better than two countries competing to outdo each other to build inclusive societies?

There is a history to Indians and Pakistanis worrying for each other, as they should. There was a time when the entire Progressive Writers Movement in India joined comrades across the border fighting Gen Ayub Khan’s martial law in Pakistan. Fahmida Riaz held the view that it was only by joining each other’s battles that both people could overcome their respective adversities.

Sardar Jafri offered a similar view through several well-regarded poems, one of them quoted by Atal Behari Vajpayee in Lahore. Seen from this perspective there is nothing wrong in Imran Khan making the observation about Naseer, particularly so since he was primarily making a self-critical assessment of Pakistan’s own follies with denial of social justice and equality for all its people. Sardar Jafri was evidently less bothered about ultra nationalist trolls than people are today when he wrote: “Zamin-i-Pak hamare jigar ka tukra hai/ hamen aziz hai Dehli-o-Lucknow ki tarah/ Tumhare lahje men meri nava ka lahja hai/ Tumhara dil hai hasin meri aarzu ki tarah." (Your land of the pure is one with my soul/ My love for you is shared equally with my doting for Delhi and Lucknow/ We share the rich inflections of our languages/ The burgeonings of your heart are the cascades of my dreams.)

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.