[Akeel Bilgrami, the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, is a public intellectual and a distinctive voice in contemporary philosophy. His four books (Belief & Meaning; Self-Knowledge and Resentment; Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment; and Capital, Culture, and the Commons) and many published papers testify to his ability to forge within a single, coherent framework, analytic epistemology, moral psychology, and a critical and constructive political philosophy that is deeply informed by history and political economy. In this email interview, he reflects on issues that are deeply relevant not just to India but across the world.]

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Muddasir Ramzan: Tell us a bit about yourself as an intellectual. How do you see yourself and how would you like to be defined?

Akeel Bilgrami: I’m not sure I’d like to be defined. And I am wary of the label “intellectual”. What is true is that I don’t have any other talent. I love literature, especially poetry, I love music and listen to it each day with great pleasure, but I have no talent for literary writing or for producing music. Since whatever limited ability I have for intellectual and philosophical reflection is something I constantly exercise—I can’t seem to help doing so—there may be some grounds to call me an intellectual, but I am reluctant to assume any such label.

For two reasons. The first is that the label is used to talk of the “intellectual class”, which for the most part, in the places I’ve spent any time of my life, has been an elite class. Every university I’ve been associated with has mostly trained its students to eventually join that class. This is part of what the students’ protest in Europe and the US in the 1960s was about, which got nowhere. None of this should be surprising—not only because the class of people who go to the kinds of universities I have been to tend to be from the upper and middle classes but because the entire “testing” culture by which admissions are filtered has constructed a notion of “intelligence” and “intellectual” ability that is geared to serve the interests of capital. In the West, this has been done gradually over a century or so, and as you know, it is now pervasive in India, too.

The second reason is that almost all intellectual life in the academy has become quite cynically professionalised. When I first started studying philosophy, it was called a “subject”. At some point, I found myself in a “discipline”. And then, by some sinister alchemy, I am now supposed to be a member of the philosophy “profession”. All these transformations are anti-intellectual. Well, the notion of discipline need not have been. It has had an interesting history, and you can see how the notion might have some real point in the face of certain kinds of charlatan pressures put on universities. But, despite this, the notion of discipline can generate a guild mentality that cramps independence of thought and intellectual creativity. As for “profession”, there is nothing to recommend it. Ideas are not pursued in “associations”; careers and their rewards are advanced in and through them. There is, in any case, something jarring about mixing ideas with professional organisations. I remember, walking around in London the first time and seeing a sign on a building that said “British Humanist Association”. It seemed comical to me: to think that something like humanism needs an “association”.

MR: What has influenced your political critiques of external, coercive forces—be they colonial, secularist, or economic? How did your thinking evolve?

AB: Through my graduate school years and while I was writing Belief and Meaning [first book], I really was not thinking about political issues very much at all. The work that is a little more relevant to what I write on political issues in recent years is my second book, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, which is about normativity, rationality, freedom, and autonomy, and the first-person point of view. These themes in philosophy do border on the issues in political philosophy that have concerned me in recent years, but in the book itself, I did not draw out those implications, as I have done in subsequent writing on politics and political philosophy.

Noam Chomsky found my arguments and conclusions in Belief and Meaning sympathetic and wrote a review that brought me over the next few decades into fairly close touch with him on a lot of different issues, initially on questions of language and mind, and somewhat later about politics. I would say he and Davidson [Donald Davidson, Bilgrami’s PhD supervisor at the University of Chicago] had the most influence on my early thinking in philosophy of language and mind.

I also have learnt much from talking with my colleague Isaac Levi at Columbia and over the years with philosophers like Bernard Williams, John McDowell, Crispin Wright, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, and Quentin Skinner.

Edward Said was a colleague and close friend, and he first drew me out of my intense focus on philosophy of language and mind and provided the stimulus that made me return to my much earlier preoccupation with politics and political philosophy. We taught a graduate seminar, each year for three or four years before he died, on a range of topics. His influence on me is most evident in my essay on “Occidentalism” in my book Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment.

And in the last 20 years or so, I’ve learnt a lot about political economy from my friendship and fairly constant discussions with Prabhat Patnaik. I’ve also benefited from conversations with my colleague Joseph Stiglitz. But one should never underestimate the instruction one has got from one’s peers during one’s student days. I benefited enormously from conversations, especially with Carol Rovane, whom I met in Chicago as a graduate student and who is now my colleague at Columbia, and others as well. Then, of course, there are one’s own students. Students force one to be clear, to make one’s tacit assumptions explicit, and this makes for better thinking and writing.

MR: A recurring critique in your scholarship targets the misuse of the words “reason” and “rationality”. Could you elaborate on this?

AB: There are two ways of thinking of “reason”. One is to restrict talk of reason to a very “thin” sense, restrict it just to deductive rationality (this is what is codified in formal logic), to inductive rationality (that is, to the codifications of inductive logic or, better, to the codifications of confirmation theory which lays out when empirical hypotheses are confirmed by the evidence and to what extent) and maybe some minimal claims in decision-theory. Such thin rationality is possessed by every adult human being, indeed even measurably before adulthood is reached. Without such thin rationality, no one could get through a waking day, leave alone a working day. We are constantly exercising these forms of thin rationality in the course of a day (even if we have no idea of their formal codifications that I mentioned).

But the notion of rationality is also wielded in a “thicker” sense, and then one has to be careful, because in its thicker usage being rational is now aligned with being right in a wider sense, and therefore it is open to much more contestation, contestation that cannot be resolved by appealing to precise formal rules of logic.

I was basically contesting the use of “reason” as it came to be deployed in this thick sense in the social and political economic sphere in the modern period. Just to give you a couple of examples: It is this sort of thick notion which was deployed when it was said by European colonists in America that native indigenous populations lacked “reason”—obviously this use of the term was going beyond the “thin” notion of reason which I outlined above, since these native populations certainly possessed that. Or another example can be found: when it was said that it is unreasonable or irrational to think that there were spiritual or metaphysical conceptions of nature which provided obstacles to taking from nature with impunity for human “material” progress. (By the way, a vivid use of this deplorable latter use of the term “reason” can be found in a speech by P. Chidambaram, when he was a Cabinet Minister, berating those who were protesting [against] land grabs for corporate projects. I quote him and his misuse of the term “reason” at length in my essay “Gandhi and Marx” in Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment.)

In that and other essays, I look at popular religion in many parts of the world which, by contrast, unblushingly embraced a thick irrationality in this sense, violating such a thick notion of “reason”. If there was more of such irrationality, we would not be suffering the dire environmental crisis we are in.

MR: Could you elaborate on “secular enchantment”? How does it allow us to move beyond the debilitating stand-off between religious fundamentalism and militant atheism?

AB: What I meant by the term “secular enchantment” is this. Many who for centuries thought nature was enchanted, thought so because they conceived of nature as, in some broad sense, sacralised. For instance, Bhakti, some Sufi world views, and other popular religious world views. But when such sacralised conceptions of nature came to be denied in the modern period, there was an illicit extrapolation from a denial of a divine presence in nature to a denial of all value properties in nature.

This last, further, denial is entailed by the thesis of “disenchantment”, as I use that term—the equation of nature with what the natural sciences study. Given that equation, not only is God exiled from nature (in the way that Newtonianism had done), but—by what I am saying is an illicit inference—value and meaning is evacuated as well. Why? Because the natural sciences don’t study value.

Hence, disenchantment—by an illicit extrapolation—goes further than desacralisation. And it is not surprising that this should have happened at a time when it was quite widely assumed that the source of all value is divine.

Why do I call it an illicit extrapolation? For an obvious reason. There is no good reason to think that whatever generates scepticism about a divine presence in nature must also carry over to a scepticism about the presence of value or value properties in nature. So, the idea of “secular enchantment” is suggested by the fact that increasing secularisation, that is, increasing scepticism about religion, may give rise to a) a denial that all value has its source in the divine, and b) a denial that nature is sacralised, but neither a) nor b) entails a third and further denial—the denial of the claim that nature is “enchanted” in the sense that it contains value, contains value properties. This latter claim is what I called “secular enchantment”. It is secular because it makes no reference to the sacral or to the divine. And it is enchantment because value properties are not studied by natural science.

Now, you also asked about the dispute between religious fundamentalism and militant atheism. I am not sure that dispute is relevant to the point I’ve just made about what is meant by “secular enchantment”. But if it is relevant, then it is only because these so-called militant atheists are not keeping quite different kinds of questions distinct. It is true that some of them, sometimes, make that illicit extrapolation I’ve just mentioned (and claim that the very idea of nature is to be equated with what the natural sciences study), and when they do, they deny the possibility of what I call “secular enchantment”.

But, for the most part, contemporary militant atheism targets “creationist” claims, and I assume that is what you had in mind by “religious fundamentalism”, a fundamentalism which takes the Bible’s claims to be literally true and therefore subscribes to the myths of creation. But, you see, here there is a very important, even if elementary, distinction to be made. The contemporary religious fundamentalist’s claim of creationism is very different from the claim that denies disenchantment. Creationism, as it is propounded today anyway, seeks to answer a question which, at least on the face of it, might be thought of as a scientific question about the causal origins of nature and matter and animal and human life, etc. And the atheists deny the creationist’s answer to that question on the grounds that it is not supported by evidence.

But the claim that denies that there is nothing in nature that is not countenanced by the natural sciences is not a claim in science; it is not a scientific claim. No science contains the proposition that science has exhaustive coverage of nature. Therefore, to deny that proposition is not to make an alternative scientific claim. What is being denied is a philosopher’s proposition about science and nature. And, as Wittgenstein once said of some other proposition, it is so absurd that only a philosopher could have made it.

So, the distinction I am insisting on is that these militant atheists are saying two quite different things: on the one hand, they are saying that a claim seeking to answer a question within science is false, and on the other hand, they are saying that all questions about nature are science’s questions. And I’m denying the latter when I suggest that the idea of secular enchantment is plausible. (Indeed, I think the view that nature contains value properties is innocuously true, and I have tried, in my work, to give a fairly rigorous argument for why one must consider it true.) But whether it is true or not, the underlying point is that the entire question of whether it is true or not, is not a question in science. It is a philosophical issue. So, when and if someone like Dawkins (one of your militant atheists) denies what I take to be necessarily and innocuously true, he is not doing so in the name of science, he is not doing so as a scientist, he is doing so on his own time, as a philosopher, and a bad philosopher at that, in my view.

MR: In “What is a Muslim?” you argue that assertions of religious identity are often political claims against marginalisation. While powerful, could this diagnosis inadvertently downplay the role of genuine theological belief or faith? How do we separate the political from the theological in specific cases?

AB: In that essay (and others), I am very much focussed on the notion of identity as it is poised to generate a very specific kind of politics, what has come to be called “identity politics”. And what I am trying to do is give the term some rigour to bring out how the notion of identity—properly understood in these terms—creates a lot of trouble for liberal political doctrine and liberal polities.

So, I am not using the term “identity” in a loose sense or even in a purely philosophical sense. It is identity as it surfaces in politics that concerns me, in particular the way that the cultural and religious commitments that constitute one’s identity play a role in the moral psychology of groups to make a real difference to politics.

The example of identity I discuss at length in the essay is, as you say, a religious example: Muslim identity. That essay was written immediately after the fatwah against [Salman] Rushdie in 1989. As I understand the term theoretically, people with a certain religious identity, say, Muslim identity, are a smaller class of people than people who are Muslims. So, suppose we assume what you say in your question: that to be a Muslim is to have Islamic “theological belief or faith” (your words). But in my view, not everyone who has that theological belief or faith has Muslim identity. In other words, not all Muslims (in the sense we are assuming) have Muslim identity. Why not? Because, though it may be necessary to have “theological belief or faith” (to use your expression) to have Muslim identity, it is not sufficient. According to my understanding, to have Muslim ‘identity’, one must, over and above having Islamic beliefs:

a) hold those beliefs (and I would add values) in a certain way, what I call the “Ulysses and the Sirens” way, which I won’t elaborate now because it involves some slightly complicated formulations. The idea behind those formulations is to capture a very deep sense of commitment that those beliefs have in one’s life, which may affect one’s political behaviour.

b) and holding them in that way must also have a certain broad function in one’s life—and the example of the function I focussed on was that it can provide certain kinds of fulfilment or certain kinds of strength and comfort that are not provided by the social, cultural, and political context we happen to inhabit at particular places and times; contexts in which one feels a very debilitating sense of defeat and powerlessness due to a colonised past or a neo-colonised present.

So, I am certainly not denying that those who have “a theological belief or faith” in Islam are Muslims, only denying that they have Muslim identity just by virtue of having those beliefs and faith. They also have to exemplify a) and b) to have “identity” in the sense I intend by that term.

Now, there is a further question that can be raised, which is not the question you asked me but can be seen as related. I think that people like Dawkins and Dennett and Sam Harris (your “militant atheists”) are, in a very tiresome and hysterical way, focussed on the wrong sort of issue. Their obsession with showing that theological and religious belief is unscientific and, therefore, irrational misses out on the fact that religion today is often more deeply about practices than about belief.

Let’s take a simple practice such as attendance at church on a Sunday. Churchgoing in the heartland of the US is very pervasive, with huge numbers attending. By comparison, church attendance fell hugely in Europe over much of the 20th century. (I was once in a church in Paris on a Sunday because I wanted to sit peacefully for a while and look at some beautiful stained glass. There were only three people there.) What accounts for the difference? I think one answer might well be that, over a century, what the Church used to provide for ordinary people in Europe began to be provided by trade unions and gatherings in union halls. (Indeed, as you may know, the labour movement in England, for instance, grew out of certain non-conformist religious movements, such as Methodism.) Conversely, churchgoing in the US increased after labour organisations were slowly undermined over the second half of the last century.

What all this may show is that ordinary people seek sources of community and solidarity (a human urge not generally sufficiently provided by family life), and they get it where they can: the Church being one such place. By obsessing about the irrationality of religious and theological belief, atheists miss out on this other aspect of religion.

If something like that is true, then that might be an example of what you are asking in your question: am I downplaying the role of theological belief? Well, I suppose I am. Your atheists are overplaying the role of religious and theological belief. And that misses the social and political depth of religion and sees it too much as a matter of propositions to put one’s belief in.

MR: Could you elaborate on your claim that “ordinary Muslims”, by and large, are “deeply conflicted”?

AB: Let me give you an example. Muslim populations in many parts of the world include jihadi Islamist groups, often making absolutist claims for Islam. They are sometimes (slightly misleadingly) labelled “fundamentalists”. But they are almost always a small minority. Most Muslims in these populations hold no such views. That would suggest that there are conflicting conceptions of Islam’s relevance to public and political life in these two segments of populations.

Now, what has been of interest to me is the fact that those much larger numbers of ordinary Muslims (those who have no absolutist views) nevertheless are often not openly critical in public of the more militant Islamist groups. (That suggests to me an internal conflict within ordinary Muslims). I’ve tried to diagnose this “silent majority” stance as coming not from fear of any kind, but a kind of understandable (even self-respecting) attitude that is an expression of a sort of defensive mentality, a response arising from feelings of resentment against an external enemy responsible for their colonial past and a neo-imperial interventionist presence even after decolonisation (Western corporate exploitation, Western invasions and embargoes, and other Cold War attitudes that the West has shown towards Islam in the past few decades).

Most ordinary Muslims don’t criticise the “jihadi” Islamist groups because they feel that if they did so, they would be letting the side down against an external enemy, a long-standing enemy of their historical past and abiding in new forms in the present.

Another related example of internal conflict is this. Some Muslim women may suffer at the hands of their men in patriarchal Muslim households. But many of them also suffer side by side with their men against external forms of subjugation of Muslims (whether in India under Hindutva tendencies or in West Asian countries under invasions, embargoes, etc). And the latter phenomenon makes it very difficult for Muslim women to address the former phenomenon by constructing a broadly feminist resistance to their patriarchal Muslim societies.

The modern feminist in the West often shows no understanding of this difficulty arising from these conflicted positions of women in these countries, and the West’s own imperialist role in bringing it about. (If this is less true now, it is because of hard and honourable recent work by people like Wendy Brown and Lila Abu-Lighod.)

MR: The hijab, the crucifix, and other religious symbols have become flashpoints in debates about secularism from France to India. How would your framework for understanding the “politics of identity” analyse these controversies? Are they about faith, or are they better understood as political claims against marginalisation?

AB: I think we need a distinction between secularism and secularisation. Secularisation is the name of a very general social and ideational process of transformation—loss of belief in God and decrease in religious practices. Secularism is a more specific doctrine about the polity, demanding that religion ought not to have direct influence in the political domain. I elaborate on this in my essay “Secularism: Its Content and Context” in my book Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. What France did when it banned the hijab in certain public places is a bit like the sort of thing that happened (much more extensively) in Kemalist Turkey. It is state-enforced secularisation. That is something over and above a state committed to secularism.

MR: What are your perspectives on Islamophobia, political Islam, and multiculturalism?

AB: That’s too many questions in one. Let me just say something about multiculturalism and make a small point about Islamophobia. (My essay “What is a Muslim?”, the essay on Rushdie, and the essay on “Occidentalism” are all on political Islam.)

Multiculturalism is a doctrine distinct from secularism. Multiculturalism first arose in Europe some centuries after secularism, and partly because those who sought multiculturalism felt secularism was not adequate to address the issues they were facing. The doctrine was formulated in the wake of the long-term effects of the post-war (Second World War) migration to European nations that were reconstructing their economies and had lost manpower due to the war. Immigration was allowed (indeed sought) from their erstwhile colonies.

As this migration grew over the decades, they [migrants] found not only that they were doing the most menial jobs but that they suffered from quite acute racial hostility and xenophobic attitudes. In the crucible of this experience, immigrant populations found comfort and a sense of autonomy and dignity in their religious cultures and began to demand that their practices be accommodated to some extent even in the legal domain, as exceptions to the secularist laws of the European modern.

What is interesting is that Europe’s liberal secularists in recent years have often joined with right-wing nationalisms against such multiculturalism. Secularism has become a stick with which to beat multiculturalists. In fact, this is why multiculturalist philosophers like Charles Taylor have tried to redefine secularism as itself a kind of multiculturalism—to take away that stick.

Here I am not talking of Taylor’s large book A Secular Age, which is not about secularism at all, but about secularisation. But he has written various articles on secularism, trying to redefine it as multiculturalism, that is, a position of neutrality and equidistance between different religions rather than as a sort of effort to keep religion out of the political domain. (Under Taylor’s influence, that is now also being said by many political theorists in India, who want to claim that secularism in India is really different from secularism in the West, that it is a kind of multiculturalism because all it claims is that there be neutrality and equidistance between different religions and religious practices.)

But I’m not sure that this is a theoretically reputable move on Taylor’s part. It may be more theoretically honest to say that sometimes secularism does bad things. But people don’t like to do that. There is a certain halo around certain words and “secularism” is one of them. They would rather redefine it than retain its definition and criticise it. Gandhi never did that and that is why in the context in which he was writing in the early part of the 20th century, he was never very enthusiastic about secularism. (I discuss these issues in my contribution to the Oxford Companion to Indian Philosophy, edited by Jonardon Ganeri.)

About Islamophobia, there is obviously a lot to be said, and I couldn’t possibly do so here. But let me say just one word about Islamophobia as it is practised by states. Let’s look at the US. It is quite wrong to think that its government is comprehensive in its Islamophobia. After all, its government has for decades been in bed with the most repulsively politically reactionary Islamic state in the world: Saudi Arabia.

This may have theoretical lessons for how we use moral-psychological terms like “phobia” when talking about politics. Is this psychology exemplified by states or only human subjects in the population? And if by states (such as the US), then can it properly be called a “phobia” if it is practised against one state (Iran, say), but not another (Saudi Arabia)? Wouldn’t such selectivity suggest that it is really in the realm of strategy, and if so, can it be properly called a “phobia”? Is phobia the sort of thing you switch on and off?

MR: The situation in Kashmir is often analysed through legal, political, and humanitarian lenses. How would you frame the central philosophical conflict or crisis of values at its heart? What does it reveal about the nature of the modern Indian state and its conception of sovereignty?

AB: Let me speak at greater length on this subject, not only because I realise it is of special interest to you as a Kashmiri but also because it is a subject on which people don’t like to speak very much. I am going to just repeat what I’ve said in other places. Still, for the reason I just gave, it is not a subject one should avoid speaking out on.

As you know, the subject has become conspicuous again after the abrogation of Article 370, an entirely unconstitutional action. The elementary and well-known facts about the abrogation’s anti-constitutionalism are roughly as follows. These articles formulated the provisions of autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir. Though there was some mention of the temporary nature of these provisions in the understanding of those who crafted the Indian Constitution in 1949-50, it was also explicit that they could only be overturned with the endorsement of the regional Constituent Assembly.

Now, of course, it is in the nature of constituent assemblies that they are dissolved by their own will once their work is done. And when in December 1956 and early 1957, the Kashmir Constituent Assembly was dissolved, it was on an understanding on the part of the J&K politicians that the Constitution adopted had been made into a stable and abiding arrangement between the Centre and the State, with features of autonomy in place. There was a general and explicitly stated understanding that this abiding arrangement could in the future only be reconsidered and amended by the regional legislators.

It was this understanding that was pre-empted by the BJP government’s sleight of hand of first declaring President’s Rule in Kashmir and then making the reconsideration (and abrogation) turn on the legislators at the Centre, where the BJP has a sufficient majority. And, in the short term, if not the long, control via President’s rule is crucial too, so that the normalisation of this cancellation of autonomy proceeds apace without the noise of democracy.

The curious thing is that the question of autonomy has been moot for a long time. In most respects, autonomy has been more or less a merely formal provision once the military occupation of Kashmir got consolidated decades ago. De facto, there was not much autonomy. So, the question arises, what was the point behind removing it formally, removing its de jure status?

The long-term point of the move has to be understood by relating it to other aspects of the BJP government’s policy formulated around this period, such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the infamous National Register of Citizens (NRC). As you know, the former was intended to permit residency for non-Muslims who are said to be seeking refuge from oppression in neighbouring Muslim-majority nations. The NRC, which was focussed on the north-eastern region, de-registers those (and their descendants) in the population of Assam, for instance, who lack legal documents and electoral roll status going back to the early 1970s.

The ones, in the end, affected by this are going to be Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh because Hindu and other refugees will be accommodated by the CAA. So, the NRC and CAA together amount basically to a pincer movement to change the demography of the north-eastern region, one arm of the pincer de-registering Muslims and Hindu immigrants, the other arm restoring Hindu immigrants to citizenship, leaving the Muslims alone reduced to second-class status. It is a formal version of ethnic cleansing. It is not killing people of a certain community, but declaring them to be second class, freezing them out of citizens’ rights and benefits. Leave the killing to lynch mobs and others who feel sanctioned by this BJP government to do violence on the ground.

The Kashmir move is similarly part of this transformative demographic plan. The abrogation of the formal aspects of autonomy now allows Hindus to purchase land in Kashmir (shades of the Israeli precedent can be detected here) and will also change the electoral complexion of the Valley in favour of the BJP. This will not happen, of course, if Hindus from outside Kashmir feel it is not a safe place to move to. So military occupation must be normalised to make it feel safe (again, the Israeli antecedent is obvious).

All this is known well to people with an honest understanding of what underlies the abrogation. But it needs to be constantly repeated in public. It cannot remain esoteric knowledge. It must be brought to public light and kept constantly in public awareness and attention. The task of journalists and a wide range of humane activist organisations today is to keep hammering away, informing the public, including internationally, to mobilise opinion and eventually seek redress by all means possible, including appeals to international law and to human rights provisions in the UN declaration.

The success of that, of course, depends on the willingness of states to listen to these international bodies. Many states unblushingly refuse to do so. India, on Kashmir, is one such state. Israel is another. Sri Lanka (on the Tamil question) is yet another. But still, one cannot ignore the importance of keeping the issues alive. The fate of Palestinians, Kashmiris, Tamils in these nations depends on the issues being kept alive despite the states in question working assiduously to make the issues go away by working to normalise occupations, curfews, illegal detentions, surveillance, etc. People might come alive in protest when there are spectacular atrocities like the quasi-genocide in Gaza, but in the routines of normalised cases, they tend not to do so. Thus, intellectuals and journalists and we all have special responsibilities to keep the issues alive.

The public has also to be kept informed to counter the brazenly false claims and fallacious arguments that are in the air, thanks to the Hindutva propaganda on Kashmir. For instance, many people I know, who have no Hindutva commitments, repeatedly say that Kashmiri autonomy, as articulated in 370 and 35A, is an anomaly, and it is about time it was ended. This is something they would not say if they knew the history. So, it is important to give accurate accounts of the history in public forums, not just in scholarly locations. Why was (and is) Kashmiri autonomy important? In what ways are the sentiments of Kashmiri people ignored? For a democracy to work and to make proper decisions at the ballot box, you have to be informed, and the role of the press and other public fora is indispensable for that. We owe it to the Kashmiri people.

It is crucial for the rest of us in India to think not from the point of view of the sarkar’s interests but from the point of view of the desires of the region’s population. Let me give you an example. I was once seated next to a high-level adviser to Indira Gandhi, P.N. Dhar, at a dinner because his wife was a good friend of my sister’s. This was in the early 1990s when all sorts of abominations were being perpetrated by the Indian military presence and there was tremendous resistance. We got to talking of Kashmir. I pointed out that the militant Islamic element in Kashmiri resistance was a creation of the Indian government in order to undermine the secular JKLF [Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front], which was so influential then. He did not deny it and said, in fact, that things were so bad that “the Valley is gone”. I distinctly remember those words. What do you mean, I said, quite surprised. “We should just hand it over to Pakistan,” he said. My surprise turned to shock. “Why?” I asked, “What sort of solution is that?” His answer was memorable: “Because if we don’t give it to Pakistan and give it to the Kashmiri people, we will set a precedent for the north-east to make similar demands.” That’s how the sarkar thinks. What the people want is not important, it is the state’s interests alone that decides matters.

All this speaks directly to the part of your question about sovereignty. The obvious issue is the remarkable amount of centralisation of state authority in post-Independence India. It has never been more centralised than it is now, not even in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi was riding roughshod over constitutional niceties. Paradoxically, the BJP emerged in strength soon after the Emergency was overturned, a period marked by greater coalitional politics and regional assertion in politics.

But since 2014 it has gradually shifted the balance to the Centre—on several fronts: on the religious front by stressing a Hindu Rashtra, on the linguistic front by seeking to make Hindi dominant, and on the economic front by, among other things, the imposition of GST. This last is not surprising since big capital has always favoured centralisation, and never has big capital been more influential in shaping government policy than the present, although the tendency began under Manmohan Singh’s Congress in the 1990s. So, to sum up, what happened in Kashmir is only the most spectacular and vivid exemplification of this increasingly determined centralisation of state power.

[Muddasir Ramzan is an academic and writer from Kashmir who focusses on contemporary Muslim writing, 20th and 21st century fiction, and South Asian literature, with special emphasis on Kashmir studies and postcolonialism. His debut novel will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026. Courtesy: Frontline magazine, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.]