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.