At the time, when the Modi government decimated the very existence of the Jammu & Kashmir state in one stroke, it would be obvious to the even most novice that that was just a beginning.
Two years later, with the benefit of hindsight, that hardly seems to be an epiphany. Not only has the state ceased to exist, but the demographic engineering through sleights of so many hands has already proceeded to almost an irreversible level.
The representation of the locals in the bureaucracy has been reduced to a bare minimum, with all plump and powerful positions occupied by the representatives of India. The Indian government has embarked on a well-thought scheme of looking across Kashmir as if people didn't exist.
Every single day there are slews of bureaucratic fiats, chipping away the equities of Kashmiris without even pretending otherwise. The lack of resistance has been achieved by hoisting the plethora of fears, fear of everything, fear of job loss, fear of imprisonment, fear of privacy, fear of life.
If history is any indication, even the most fearsome regimes have crumbled, and the most oppressed people have always found a way out through resilience. Those who know Kashmir and Kashmiris are aware that if there is anything in plenty, that would be the peoples' resilience.
One year after taking away the freedoms in Kashmir, Modi donned a dead animal on his head to slay the remnants of secularism and plurality in India through a garish foundation laying ceremony for a temple on stolen land. Only if they understood the retribution that awaited them in the form of deaths and destructions just months later.
Modi would do well to remember the tyrants in history and the ends that awaited them.
