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Press Release, 5 August 2020
Kashmir Caged: One Year Since Arbitrary Abrogation of Article 370
National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements
5th August, 2020 marks the first anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which took away the political autonomy of the only Muslim majority state in the country, severely jeopardized the future of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, and struck a massive blow to Indian federalism. While the government is busy claiming the ‘positive impact’ of the move in terms of ‘success in the war on terror’, ‘development of the state and integration with India’, the reality is quite different.
The step last year was marked by an unprecedented communication blockade, huge increase in militarization and surveillance, curbs on the media, and arrest of political leaders & human rights activists. The combined effect of these was a severe downturn in economic activity, leading to untold hardships for the people of the valley. Once the pandemic started, the additional lockdown meant inadequate access to medical facilities and covid-related information, which in turn complicated the already existing mental health issues caused by the enforced isolation. Far from facilitating ‘integration’, the move has alienated Kashmiris from India more than ever.
Article 370 is a constitutional recognition of the conditions mentioned in the Instrument of Accession that the ruler of Kashmir signed with the Government of India in 1948. The Schedule appended to the Instrument of Accession gave the Indian Parliament power to legislate for Jammu and Kashmir on only defence, external affairs and communications. Kashmir is not the only state for which there have been special provisions put in place either during the early years of the republic or later. Under Article 371-A, Nagaland has a special status, and no Act of Parliament is automatically extended to Nagaland unless its legislative assembly so decides in matters of the religious or social practices of the Nagas, Naga customary law and practices, ownership and transfer of land and its resources. BJP’s tampering with special provisions specific to regions is integral to the Hindutva project of one nation, one religion, one culture.
Concerning Jammu and Kashmir, Article 370 had been tampered with right from its inception, in both letter and spirit. By the Presidential Order of 1954, almost the entire Indian Constitution (including most constitutional amendments) was extended to Jammu and Kashmir. Ninety-four out of 97 entries of the Union List applied to Jammu and Kashmir even before the abrogation last year. Politically, there is a long history of betrayal of the Kashmiri people by successive Indian governments. The plebiscite promised at the time of accession was never held, and the Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah was imprisoned for 11 years.
Democratically elected governments in Kashmir have been dismissed and elections rigged to put in place pro-India governments. Once the repeated betrayals led to the rise of militancy, Kashmir has faced brutal military oppression – rapes, murders, disappearances and constant surveillance. The mass rape at Kunan Poshpora, the hanging of Afzal Guru to satisfy the “collective conscience” of India for the 2001 Parliament attack (despite only circumstantial evidence of his involvement), and the pellet gun attacks in the first term of the Narendra Modi government, are blots on the India-Kashmir relationship. Despite these betrayals, Article 370 helped to retain the fragile historical specificity of the relationship.
While mainstream Indian academia and even sections of civil society have not adequately stood up for the rights of the Kashmiri people, the media and the culture industry have objectified Kashmiris and misrepresented the India-Kashmir equation. The courts have often betrayed the Kashmiris too. The abrogation of Article 370 was blatantly unconstitutional. 370 could not have been deleted without the consent of the Kashmiri people. Yet, Indian courts have failed to strike it down. At present, 23 petitions challenging the abrogation are pending in the Supreme Court. Over the last one year, petitions have challenged the constitutionality of the restrictive orders suspending internet, tele-communications and movement. While Indian courts have accepted that bars on free speech and movement would violate fundamental rights, these bars have not been struck down!
Jammu and Kashmir, alongside Ladakh, now stare at an uncertain future, and so does India. The revocation of Article 35-A alongside Article 370 threatens to open Kashmir up to large scale land acquisition by the Indian Army and by big corporates in the name of ‘security’ and ‘development’, thereby undoing the historic land reforms of 1950, which helped retain the socio-economic indicators of J&K higher than many other states in India. The isolation, restriction, surveillance and state repression show no signs of ending.
The suspension of the political rights of the people of Ladakh is also unacceptable. As far as India is concerned, not only is the move a blow to the federal imagination, it also threatens to de-stabilize the geo-politics of the region and the whole of South Asia in turn. Alienation of a whole people in a region which is ridden with border conflicts does not bode well for the future of India’s much-emphasized “national security” concerns.
National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements salutes the resilience and resistance of the people of Jammu and Kashmir and stands in unflinching solidarity with them.
We unequivocally condemn the moves of the current dispensation which has brutally eroded the political autonomy and long-standing aspirations of the people of the region.
We urge the Government of India and the country’s institutions including the higher judiciary to work towards restoring the special status of J&K, de-militarize the region and fulfil the old promises made by the Indian State to the Kashmiri people.
The true litmus test of India’s democracy, (or the lack of it), in many ways, lies in our respecting the democratic rights of the people of Jammu & Kashmir.
We call upon the citizens of this country to reflect on the history of brutality and betrayal in the region and stand with the people of the valley towards a peaceful and just future for them.
On behalf of NAPM: Medha Patkar and others.
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Press Release, August 6, 2020
We the People Remember — 365 Days of Violation of Constitutional Commitment to Our Sisters and Brothers in J&K
August 5, 2020 marks a year since the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A in Jammu and Kashmir, and the loss of its statehood. In effect, it is the first anniversary of the violation of our Constitutional commitment to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
How is this anniversary being marked officially? According to news reports, through an imposition of curfew in the Valley. This is a sad and ironic commentary on the promises of rapid and widespread ‘development’ made by the Centre last year. Instead, the people of Jammu and Kashmir have never suffered as deeply, nor felt as alienated from the Indian government, as they do today.
Unparalleled stringent security measures have been imposed, leading to untold hardships for people whom we have always maintained are an ‘integral part of India’. Equally, the loss of identity has meant an almost total disintegration and alienation of the hearts and minds of the majority of the people. Internet suspension, media censorship, no jobs, no tourism, no schooling and no access to even online learning, since even so-called easing of restrictions has permitted only limited 2G access: these are only a few examples of what people have to live with every single day. They also have to live with deep anxiety and depression; or anger and resentment.
A journalist who has long covered the region reports that this is, perhaps, the first time in living memory when all Kashmiris have turned away from New Delhi. Some serving members of the security forces, as also veterans, have often expressed their belief that there can be no military solution to the Kashmir question. A recent article entitled ‘Wounds Need to Heal’, by a former head of the CRPF, has reiterated this very strongly; and he calls for a restoration of its statehood, followed by elections. There is also exhaustion and fatigue among the security forces.
As for ‘We the people of India’: there have been many reports from fact-finding groups, covering the period before August 5th 2019, as well as the 12 months since. Virtually every report underlines the urgent need to restore statehood, release all political prisoners, resume basic economic activities and internet and communications, redress human rights violations and restart schooling, among the necessary steps to build confidence. Dialogue as a precondition to rebuild the fractured democratic polity is a unanimous recommendation.
Committed as we the undersigned are to the values of the Indian Constitution, we urge the Prime Minister and his team to immediately restore statehood and basic freedoms in Jammu and Kashmir, so as to create the best possible conditions for peaceful dialogue. This is the only way to reach out to the suffering people of Jammu and Kashmir; honour the promises made to them; and uphold the Constitution of India and all the Democratic freedoms enshrined therein.
In solidarity,
Statement signed by 78 concerned citizens.
The full list is available on India Cultural Forum website.
(Statement courtesy: India Cultural Forum.)
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The Jungle Ritual
Sankarshan Thakur, 5 August 2020
Most moments come to pass; some moments extend themselves in ways that they become annotations on eras. This day last year was such a moment, an oracular dissertation on why and how we had arrived at August 5, 2019, and what lay ahead. It was a moment that defined to humanity yet again the fatal error of confusing elections, even popular elections, with democracy. The latter is not always the consequence of the former, it can often be its casualty.
The dismemberment and downgrading of Jammu and Kashmir, the cold stripping and silencing of what used to be India’s prided crown, were decisions of a popularly elected government, the most handsomely mandated executive in decades. No element of those decisions was democratic — not the way they were arrived at, not the way they were effected. That said, Kashmir’s was a popular humiliation, a rapturously popular one, whose din drowned protest to a feebleness and eventually drained it; it was the popularity the hunter enjoys in a hunt over the hunted. That was the ritual of the rite, the jungle ritual of might is right. Nobody can rightfully complain they did not see it coming, the jungle cannot complain about itself. An elected jungle is still a jungle, it is decreed to live by its ways. That decree was popularly handed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi & Co in May 2019. It was a decree vastly different from the decree of 2014. Understanding the difference is the key to understanding what Modi’s formulation of New India is. It is a majoritarian formulation, not a democratic one.
Modi rode to power in 2014 on the weary spine of the UPA decade, its dissipated energies, its internal debasement and decay, its atrophied will, its palpable lack of mass connect; Modi seemed to embody all the happy contrasts. Modi’s endorsement in 2019, a bigger and resounding ratification, was earned entirely on his own speed. He had demonstrated the will and the potential for doing ‘what no other leader had been able to do in 70 years’. That’s open code for the establishment of Hindu majoritarianism. It has many layers to it, that code — from cow and beef lynch mobs and their celebration to “shamshan-kabristan” speeches to Othering for attire to the empowerment of Adityanath and Pragya Thakur to the denigration of Gandhi and the deification of Godse, the entire narrative of civilizational anger and avenging. Like Pulwama, followed by Balakot. That was the message that won Modi 2019. What has followed are merely consequences. The overriding mood of 2019 wasn’t for electing a democrat; it had been seduced by a demagogue and his diabolical promise. Everything that has happened since was written into the mandate.
I was in Kashmir on assignment from this newspaper this day last year. And this, briefly, is what happened.
At 12.26 am, I began writing a telephone text to my office: “Don’t know what the cabinet will decide in Delhi tomorrow, but the iron curtain is about to…”
My phone snapped. Like at the throw of some switch somewhere. The signal towers collapsed. Internet was gone. I ran down to the landline. Dead. I tried heading out, but there was nowhere to go. There were pickets and barricades, and soldiers frilled out around spools of concertina wires. Lockdown.
I may have never ever felt so shut out and so shut down. Not during the protracted military operations of the IPKF in northern Sri Lanka. Not during the many weeks I was on the frontier reporting the Kargil war. Not during the Tahrir Square uprising in Cairo. Not even during the darkest I have witnessed in Kashmir over the past decades.
All through the widespread eruption of armed militancy and the consequent flight of Pandits from the Valley in 1989-90, there was always the old reliable Post and Telegraph Office to carry your typewritten copy to for transmission.
This was not even censorship, not about what you could or couldn’t report. This was being cut out and left cold. We were lost to the world, cauterized from all that existed beyond. There was no recourse, nobody to turn to, nobody to tell we even continued to exist, breathe, eat, pray, bray.
This is how Kashmir was taken and was made to become “normal”. It beggared belief at the time that I considered myself the citizen of a democracy. It still does. I got out a few days later, but that could be of no solace to those I had left behind, fellow citizens so-called, who trade in the Indian rupee and, when required, produce an Aadhaar card or an Indian passport.
What democracy so utterly and absolutely deprives its citizenry? What democracy celebrates such violent dispossession of those it calls its own? What democracy stirs not a little finger to say, look, what’s happening is not right, you cannot do it to a people, not to those you call your own, not to those you sat and supped with till just the other day. What democracy rejoices in denying to others what it seeks to possess for itself? I shall go on pilgrimage to Amarnath but I shall piss on your walls on the way there. What democracy does that?
But that is what we have made of ourselves, that is what we voted for, that is what we invested in and installed in power — a majoritarianism. It’s misplaced to blame Narendra Modi & Co. They were clear and upfront with their agenda; it was all in their manifesto, the bold print, the fine print, what lay there to be read between the lines. This nation voted for what became the CAA, this nation voted for what is going to be the NRC, this nation voted, eyes wide open, for Narendra Modi, a man who likened a pogrom to the death of a pilla, or pup. It must live with the consequences and believe that at 50,000-plus infections a day, we are doing gloriously tackling the coronavirus and that there are no Chinese troops squatting on Indian soil. We should also believe that “goli maaro sa***n ko” is a patriotic cry and reading the Preamble to the Constitution anti-national. We should believe that habeas corpus is no plea to urgency over ensuring human rights, and that the lies of a salaried solicitor must always override the truth of what we can see, whether it is migrants walking thousands of harried miles home or an elderly gent protesting from behind a concertina mesh that he is chained when the world is being told he is free. We must believe the freedom of his chains because it is lies we chose.
We are about to be told more lies this day, in continuation of the consecration of crimes. This day is such a moment, when democracy appears a casualty of elections, not its consequence. Kashmir described how that happened and what it would lead to. It was a dry run on the tools and methods of subjugation, on the uses of lies and propaganda, on the subversion of institutions and integrity, on the populist derailing of democracy. Keep watching, there will be, I promise, much to watch.
(The author is Delhi-based National Affairs Editor of The Telegraph. Article courtesy: The Telegraph.)
