Parochial road to destruction

Prior to August 5, 2019 there was a foreboding of an intrigue at work in Kashmir. Thousands of extra security personnel were being deployed to a place that is already one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world. That coupled with selective tweezing out of all non-Kashmiris, tourists, pilgrims, students, and laborers alike added to the uneasiness among the locals, notwithstanding the assurances of the state Governor. He along with the other minions of his administration, with the state being under president’s rule, kept on reiterating that people should not pay any attention to the ‘alleged’ rumors until that morning when the union Home Minister announced the stripping away not only the constitutionally enshrined autonomy but also doing away with the entity of the state and reducing it into two emerging entities as the appendages of the federal government.

 

It is difficult to know but not hard to imagine the reaction of the population in Kashmir, whose incarceration started on the eve of that fateful day and they remain in that condition to this day, stripped of not only their autonomy and the state but also their connections to the outside world. Reports coming out from the place suggest elaborate security procedures have resulted in redrawing of the zones with the generous use of concertina wires minimizing the local interactions. Virtually people have been forced to suspend their biology till the administration hopes them to accept the fait accompli. While it is painful to imagine the sufferings of those requiring immediate medical attentions, such conditions in general lead increased stress levels in general population.

 

Kashmir had been under virtual siege starting in 1989 after decades of myopic policies of the Indian establishment. As I personally remember, those days as a faculty member in Kashmir University, every waking hour would be characterized by a gnawing pit in the stomach and a wish that India had not so messed up the place. Since then Kashmir had seen marked increases in the cases with psychiatric and mental health issues that must have only aggravated under the current conditions of incarceration and isolation. The Lancet, one of the premier medical journals in the world has raised the concerns about the consequences of fear and uncertainty in Kashmir in an editorial in its latest issue. In the editorial the issue of over 50 000 deaths since the start of insurgency since 1989, besides the gross human rights violations by state security forces and armed groups including sexual violence, enforced disappearances and acts of terrorism have also been raised. The immediate concern remains the well being of the people currently held in complete incommunicado, irrespective of the political leanings, which must be further lending to the helplessness and stress.

 

In a related development, another reputed medical journal, the BMJ in its editorial has raised similar concerns about medical emergencies in Kashmir based on a letter from 18 physicians across the India who have warned that the grim situation ‘had led to a blatant denial of the right to healthcare.’ They also raised concerns about the consequences of the total unending clampdown. The Lancet has earlier also waded into the issues of health and safety in conflict zones around the world. It famously published seminal studies on the adverse health consequences of the Iraq war, where it showed precisely death of at least 116 903 Iraqi non-combatants and more than 4800 coalition forces over 8-year course. It was somehow reaction to the editorial on Kashmir situation that drew an illogical response from Indian medical fraternity including its premier body, the Indian Medical Association that penned a letter to the editor “withdrawing its esteem of the Lancet”.

 

Scientists objecting to facts presented in a scientific journal on the basis of nationalist tribal political leanings not only represent a disappointing trend but a downright dangerous one. History is fraught with examples when scientists shook forsake their learnings and scientific truths for the sake of nationalism and identity politics only to lend to eventual disasters. Scientific facts are not bound by tribal and nationalist sensibilities; the nations that understand those simple facts are those who forge ahead with inclusive welfare of the society. Parochialism only ensures a road to destruction.

Rajiv Kumar 

'The others' in Fascism

The first principle of fascism is to make people 'the others'. 'The others' can try no matter how hard and ingratiate themselves but 'the others' can never become them. If they start considering 'the others' as them, then the entire fascist project will flounder. Invented crisis and siege are what fuel their fascism.

In Kashmir, the fascists didn't have problem with avowed separatists, They were already designated enemies. it was the loyalists whose proximity was contentious so they had to make them 'the others' and told loudly that they will never be them. Where was the problem? It's their religion that made even loyalists 'the others'.

Things should have been clear when a highly erudite, civilized and cultured patriot like Hamid Ansari was made 'the other'. Loyalists in Kashmir were just small fries.

Hannah Arendt could have explained it better.

A fascist makover

The man, who used disingenuous schemes to oust his predecessor from his own party and then used his office to foment, ignite and incite the worst riots against Muslims in the country went on to use that notoriety to tighten the stranglehold on the state in parallel with running a mafia like government indulging in extrajudicial methods to eliminate any potential rivals or to implicate the officials who dared to stand up to him, ultimately conned overtly communal population of the country to put him power at the center and brazenly used that power to empower worst of the worst and played havoc with education and research with precedent given to obscurantism; inflicted the pain on the most vulnerable through cruel and ill intentional demonetization; damaged reputation of the country through hair brained policies in managing external affairs; almost started a war against nuclear powered neighboring country for which masses fed on mescaline of crude nationalism rewarded him with even bigger mandate; then he went to use that affirmation to emasculate Kashmir by decimating it into an inferior status and incarcerating the entire population, separatists and nationalists alike, in a naked aggressive attempt to humiliate and subjugate it under majority as a step on the road to make the entire country a one nation state that never existed in a text book template to give the country a fascist makeover in which he co-opted his willing enablers who have gladly forsaken any sign of humanity and civility and instead donned the uniform of naked crudeness and aggression. Anything for fascism.

Legal fraud in Kashmir

Preceding August 5, 2019 that will add to the burgeoning catalogue of dark days in Kashmir, there was a foreboding sense of an intrigue in works. Sending of additional troops to an already the most militarized zone in the world and more ominously the very selective evacuation of tourists from everywhere in Kashmir in midst of a pilgrimage season didn’t make sense unless one were to imagine the worst. And with stripping away of not only the autonomy enshrined in the Indian constitution but also the entity of the state, what the extremist right wing Indian government did was worse than the worst. 

Armed even with a bigger majority than before in the elections of May 2019, the Modi government went around surreptitiously to commit a legal fraud to render the article 370 of the Indian constitution that governed the relations between the union and state and article 35a that protected the state from alien incursions through purchase and employments ineffective. They went even one step further by decreeing the nullification of the existence of the state itself by its bifurcation into two and downgrading the status of the two emerging entities into that of appendages of the federal government. All this was done after incarcerating the entire population of Kashmir through strictest enforced curfew by armed to the teeth Indian security forces supplemented by concertina wires. People in Kashmir have been forced to suspend their biology till India consolidates its grip on the region.

Prior to the day when the Indian government issued that draconian decree and presented to the Indian parliament for rubber stamping, a kind of fatalism had taken hold in Kashmir. People in general refused to contemplate such a possibility as they believed too much, which now turned to be a completely misplaced, in the provisions of the Indian constitution. The truth has been that the successive Indian governments have used those very constitutional provisions to strip away the autonomy and freedoms using salami tactics of one at a time. The adherence to constitutional guarantees and rule of laws are subject to the very acceptance by the people who are in power. Those human made laws unlike laws of nature can and are subject to capricious violations if lawless persons become in charge.

Modi steeped in the fundamentalism of extreme right wing ideology was never going to be the one bothered by constitutional restrictions. To overcome those legal limitations, Modi and his wily protégé Amit Shah coopted the Hindu population of the country into  the project of smothering the rule of law. The announcement of the decision about abrogation of the Jammu and Kashmir as an entity was greeted by celebrations by the Hindu majority. Even the opposition parties in the parliament barring a few individual exceptions were tepid in their objections to the changes that were  brought in by the government. The opposition parties actually saw defections from their ranks as some figures rushed in to congratulate the government for the measures to strangulate the entire population of Kashmir.

The constitutional coup by the Indian government vis-a-vis Kashmir far from being a culmination rather marks the first step of their cherished mission of humiliating and subjugating the population of Kashmir into submission for having defied the inalienable right of India over the province or specifically right over the lands and lakes of that pristine valley. Their next logical step would be to jig electoral boundaries to give an ascendency to Jammu region over Kashmir followed by attainment of a majority for the Hindu right wing in the assembly of now an inferior territory to be ruled directly by diktats from the Indian capital. In historical terms, the step is akin to arrest of Yusuf Shah Chak instead of being treated sovereign by the Mughal Emperor Akbar. Since that time Kashmir has been unable to throw off the yolk of foreign occupation-domination.