A house for a god

On December 6, 1992, a horde went and demolished a historical edifice of Babri Masjid. Top echelons of BJP/RSS led the horde. In that melee on that infamous day hoodlums participating in the demolition molested women reporters. When one of the reporters complained to Vajpayee and Advani, they both laughed, offered her sweets and asked her to enjoy the day.

That day was not just of pulling down of the Babri Masjid, it sent the whole country into an infamy from which it never recovered. It created a class of hoodlums, who could not engage in living through any normal means and down the road, they became scaffolds of heinous structure of the Modi machinery. Godhra and the brutality unleashed in its aftermath in Gujarat had its origin to that infamous day. For Modi that was an opportunity to put the country on the road to bring further ruin. 

Those, who abetted and instigated the demolition of Babri Masjid never, faced a reckoning and instead their support among Hindus of India, transformed by hefty doses of mythology on national television, grew exponentially. The god instead of being a concept became a person, who needed to be sheltered in a temple at the exact spot where a heritage building had stood for centuries.

Even after pulling down the structure, they would not let go of the land because their god needed a magnificent structure on the stolen ground. The Allahabad High Court in its sanguineness indulged in a generosity and gave a part of the land to Muslims. Nevertheless, they wanted whole of it with Muslims conveniently shoved away. The Supreme Court of India agreed with them. Only those judges might be able to tell the applied jurisprudence, if any. With the aggressors and usurpers rewarded and the aggrieved party, the Muslims humored with a promise of a land somewhere far off, so as not to offend the god in the proposed grandeur temple. 

In addition, that original architect of the strife, Lal Advani still reports to the court investigating the demolition. Probably that court did not get a memo; the rule of law is no more the law of the land in India. These days it is easy to fall prey to sympathetic emotions towards Advani if one did not remember his cynical politics that changed India from a plural society to an openly parochial land and the trail of bloodshed he had left in the trail. 

That now all has become academic which despised scholars can use for their future theses and papers. Modi is all set to lay a foundation stone of the temple that would house their god. The Nepalese prime minister might have doused them by a claim that their god was actually a Nepalese. Given their current predicament with neighbors, in lieu of Modi's friendship with Trump, India might not be in a position to launch an attack on Nepal anytime soon. 

The day chosen for the foundation stone ceremony for the temple coincides with the day when India deprived Kashmiris the remnants of the autonomy and dismembered the state itself in 2019. That most certainly is not a coincidence rather an out loud message of Hindu hegemony.

India straddling hubristic abyss

On August 5, it will be exactly one year since India brazenly foisted a legal heist on the state of Jammu and Kashmir and its people to take away remnants of constitutionally guaranteed autonomy and the state itself broken into two inferior appendages. The Indian government played a legal sleight of hand, which without a judiciary rendered subservient by the Modi regime, would not stand a legal scrutiny in any land with a functional system. The article 370 of the Indian constitution had manifested the only link between the state and the union and had guaranteed autonomy to the state through restrictions on the powers of the union government. Modi government used article 367 to narrowly reinterpret the constitution to do away the requirement of the consent of the state constituent assembly, which did not exist, to make article 370 inoperative through the subsection (3) using the governor as the state authority for consent, despite being an appointee and representative of the union government and not of the state. The human made laws unlike laws that govern the nature can and are subject to capricious violations. History is fraught with lawless persons using power to subvert the rule law, flout norms, and established conventions.

Indian government rode roughshod to dismantle the state on the strength of its brute majority and brutal use of its security forces. Fearing popular revolt and reprisals, Indian government, in the preceding days, had surreptitiously reinforced its forces in Kashmir, which already had the dubious distinction of being the most militarized region in the world. One day prior to that fateful morning, they enforced an unprecedented clamp down with incarceration of the entire seven million inhabitants of Kashmir, who for next five months were deprived basic amenities and means of communications. People could not mourn the deaths of their loved ones nor could they pray in the traditional mosques. The arrest of 20 to 30 thousand people without any legal grounds compounded the forced endurance of dark winter months in complete isolation. Those arrested included the politicians who for decades had been running the charade for India. They even kept the former chief minister of the state, Farooq Abdullah incarcerated under an archaic public security act for over eight month and the highest court in India denied basic habeas corpus petition moved on his behalf. Even a year later, the outside communication in Kashmir remains at the mercy of the Indian authorities. Whether Kashmiris can travel outside India, depends at the whims of security control personnel at the Indian airports. 

The initial act of doing away the autonomy and dismemberment of the state was only a part of asserting Indian hegemony over the state; the real goal had always been turning Kashmir into a settlers’ colony. That operation began in earnest with appointment an inferior officer to preside over the new rudimentary union territory and exclusion of locals from policy making at all levels. Ever since, a spate of consequential executive orders without a semblance of legislative approval to temper the existing laws with impunity have become a norm with singular and ultimate goal of demographic engineering of the region.  

One of the most consequential rules included alterations in the requirements for being a permanent resident of the state, a law in place since the Dogra rule in the state-ironically, introduced at upon the pleadings of Kashmiri Hindus at that time fearing an influx from neighboring province of Punjab. With those alterations in place, the unrepresentative authorities started generous issuance of domicile certificates to anyone claiming to have lived in the place for 15 years and as per media reports that has minted over 30,000 new residents including many retired army personal. Barring a few restrictions, most of the jobs in Kashmir are now open for everyone from India with devastating economic consequences down the road. Coupled with those developments, plundering of the resources of the valley remains high on the agenda of the virtual colonial administration in Kashmir in the form of opening mining operations that could also bring in the ecological ruin to the pristine valley. That was always high on the Indian agenda where people of Kashmir do not figure much but a visible demonstration of Indian dominance does.

That could not be clearer than before with Indian government being hell bent on sending potentially COVID-19 infested pilgrims and laborers to Kashmir. The pilgrimage was conveniently cancelled and non-locals taken out of the state last year prior to removal of the state autonomy and start of incarceration of Kashmiris. With the pandemic enveloping the entire world and the conditions in India itself bordering on dire, the hubristic insistence on going ahead with pilgrimage and sending laborers to the valley can be only conceived as an act of bioterrorism being unleashed on Kashmir. That would mark an addition to the catalogue of atrocities that the population in the valley has endured under occupation. 

India might be running high after having dismembered and dominated Kashmir for now, the unfolding events portend unraveling of the shortsightedness of the Modi regime in the end. Besides its ludicrous response to the pandemic where projections indicate infected cases in India toping 3.5 million by October, the relations with countries in the immediate neighborhood are in total shambles. Indian parliamentarians might have jumped over one another to support the government in changing the status of the Jammu and Kashmir state, the changed status of Ladakh region and reclamation of Aksai Chin did stir the Chinese giant from its slumber. It declared its earlier agreements with India on un-demarcated border in the region as void and pushed its army further into the territory held by India. If the history of Sino-India war were any guide, India would be pricking China at its own peril. Then, acts carried under hubris and deceit come with an expiry date beyond which those only lead to ruin both nationally and internationally. Only if the Modi government had someone to understand the abyss that it straddling but some analyst pointed that India never had a government like this completely bereft of intellectual power.

India against its liar-in-chief

The past months in Indian politics have proved to be an eon; suddenly the all conquering and all-powerful Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has been reduced to his pitiable caricature. The tidal wave against him was accurately captured by a headline in the Asia Times, “Indians rise up against their liar-in-chief”. Only last May, Modi had led his party to an unprecedented second consecutive victory in elections to the Indian parliament. It is now easier to state that with that benefit of hindsight that the thumping majority mandated to him in the last election had in it scripted his downfall as that victory had come laced with an unbridled hubris.

 

The second term also marked the formalization of a central role for his lieutenant of undisputedly dubious character, the Amit Shah, who until then had been operating outside the government as the president of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Once inside the government the duo of Modi-Shah, of Gujarat mayhems of 2002 fame wasted no time in embarking on social engineering on a diverse Indian society. They were emboldened by the fact they could muster hitherto denied majority in the upper house of the Indian parliament through increased BJP numbers and cravenness of many members of the opposition parties.

 

Their first assault was reserved for Kashmir, the only Muslim majority state in the India union with a disputed status. Shah piloted a bill in the Indian parliament and through a quintessential legal sleight of hand neutralized the article 370 of the Indian constitution, which had guaranteed the autonomous status to the state. The Indian government even went ahead and dismembered the state and reduced it into two inferior appendages of the union government. Together with that act the Indian government unleashed an unprecedented repressive regime in Kashmir involving indiscriminate arrests, tortures, complete isolation of the local population and deprivation of access to communications, health services, education and in the process inflicting a lasting damage on the local economy for nefarious reasons or un-reasons. Kashmir and its status as the Muslim majority state had always stuck as a sore point for the Hinduvta ideology driven Modi government.

 

While act on Kashmir drew sharp condemnation with pronounced denunciation from International media, the Indian population for most part remained ambivalent, disingenuously combining their disapproval with their profusions for the integrity of India. It might be added that the Indian excesses in Kashmir had predated the Modi government in India. Indians didn’t realize at that time, for Modi-Shah, Kashmir was just start of an experiment on social engineering, they had to move on to their next targets, the Indian Muslims. Once again it was Amit Shah in his avatar as the union interior minister introduced a bill called Citizen Amendment Bill (CAB) that was duly approved by the both houses of the parliament and rubber stamped into an act by the Indian president, despite illegality, immorality and obnoxiousness written all over it.

 

Innocuous sounding act made provisions that persecuted persons from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh can be made Indian citizens provided they are not Muslims. Indian constitution has the word ‘secularism’ in its preamble and the other articles of the constitution clearly state that there can be no discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation. The ominousness of the act becomes accentuated when read together with the intended national register for citizens (NRC). With a law already in place that declares that all non-Muslims are by default Indian citizens, onus falls on 1.7 million Indian Muslims to prove their citizenship. Ultimate aim remains for them to make Muslims second-class citizens or more like after passage of Nuremberg laws, Nazis had declared Jews while still subjects of the German state were no longer citizens with full rights.   

 

That perhaps proved a line crossed too far by the Indian government and for the first time a revolt erupted against the Indian government. Only time will tell how far that revolt can stem the creeping viciousness that Modi led government has wrought on the Indian society and played havoc with every Indian institution that had been vanguards for maintenance of rule of law. Those institutions be it of judiciary, education, finance, social sciences have been subjected to frontal attacks by Modi government with fundamental aim of debunking all checks and balances in order to foster an agenda of divisiveness and hatred. Nothing else can exemplify better than a morally bankrupt and indisputably illegal Indian Supreme Court ruling on the land dispute involving Babri Masjid, where those who in contravention of law indulged in demolition were rewarded with the land. But then that was a part of in progress anti-Muslim agenda.

 

While in its first term the Modi government due to constrained majority in the upper house of the parliament could not start tinkering legally with the social fabric of the country, it didn’t mean they did not act. Instead Modi outsourced that task to the army of his hoodlums. That is when people were lynched for eating beef or transporting cattle or for simply being Muslims. Intellectuals, who caused inconvenience or questioned their motives were either killed or arrested on flimsy pretexts. Big question remains why would anyone be surprised with what has happened or is happening under a government led by Narendra Modi with a life long record of deceit and hatred.

 

It would also be foolish for forget origin of Modi from the cauldron of communalism, bigotry and hatred. His ascent in Gujarat as the chief minister was through deceit and chicanery and his continuation was predicated on the killings of over two thousand Muslims under his watch in the riots that he instigated and then withheld deployment of security forces. Amit Shah, while a state minister in Gujarat under Modi was arrested on the charges of extortion, kidnapping and murder. Those are the people now shepherding India, whom people in the last elections voted with gusto for that very reason. Otherwise, the economy that they had promised never materialized or rather the Modi government has run Indian economy into mud and Indian reputation all over the world at its nadir.

 

While the revolt that has started against the thuggish government in its attempt to alter the basic character of country has many promises but it would be foolhardy to discount the machinations of rogues like Modi and Shah. Within the global context these are strange times with demagogues and rogues holding power in place far afar. Maybe 2020 brings in the much needed course correction! 

-Rajiv Kumar

Background of Babri Masjid dispute and expectations

It was on 22nd December 1949 when thugs of Hindu Mahasabha, following a conceited plan succeeded in planting an idol in the Babri Masjid in Ayodhaya. Through thoroughly duplicitous mechanics in connivance with a partisan district magistrate and an ambivalent congress government led by Gobind Ballabh Pant, they created a semblance of a dispute, when there was none. 

The structure had a been a mosque for centuries and it never was a temple; it was never disputed. The temple was located outside the mosque and both existed in complete harmony for centuries, though the lunatics of hinduvta always made attempts to take over the structure at different times. 

But on that night they sent Abhiram Das into the mosque with an idol when guarded by a compliant policeman and next morning they created a mass frenzy by pretending a miracle. They executed their nefarious act after hatching that plan for years. 

Then they waited another forty years  before thugs led by Advani and company launched a final assault on that historical monument and brought it down along with it the social fabric of the society. India must feel safe now, as those who planned that deceit in 1949 and created mayhem in 1992 are now ruling the country.

And then there was the Allahabad High Court judgement:

Gloating over one issue has never been so nuanced. Nevertheless, the court verdict on Babri Masjid enchanted almost all, though the motives and reasons being different. It was being shrouded under the adulation of wise, just, appropriate and enlightened, as it ordered the site be divided between the litigating parties and everything over to the next round for grinding in the Supreme Court. 

Was the verdict wise, just, appropriate and enlightened? What about those who perpetrated the horrendous crime by organizing mobs and inciting them into frenzied pulling down of the historical monument through deceit and stealth? 

The structure may or may not have been built at the site of a pre-existing temple but when thugs went to work on that dark day of Indian history it was a monument they pulled down along with pride of once tolerant and secular country. 

Do they get to build the temple at the site and feel vindicated for not only pulling down an edifice but also for bringing down the entire fabric of the society for once and all? 

What happens to those law enforcement officials whose dereliction of duty on that dark December 6, 1992 caused mayhem on that day and the days and years to follow? Does anybody remember that the despicable violence in Gujarat was a consequence of the demolition through an incitement that is anathema to Hindu tolerance and way of life? 

How about the dissenting judge who thought mosque was built against tenets of Islam? What were the clinching evidences or was the judgment allegiance driven like the notion of native origin of Aryans? And most importantly, what about those thuggish leaders who participated in planning the mayhem for whom the divinity had only one meaning? Do they get to celebrate their acts of unpardonable commissions? 

Will it be likes of Advanis, Katiyars and Tagodias, who in reality should be behind the bars, leading the construction of temple at the site granted by the court? For years before and after committing the crime against the entire Indian nation, they had been operating on a single agenda of converting the psyche of Indian masses through doses of religious intolerance. And succeed, they did. That brought them closer to the power and they used that to hilt through rewriting history and playing havoc with the psyche of Hindu middle classes while maintaining the façades of occasional farce tolerance. 

The judgment had left nothing to gloat and in effect reflected the creeping decadence and deep abyss where the criminal perpetrators get a feeling of vindication and seekers of justice even hesitate to express dissent for the fear of retribution.

That was still a time of some hope that now stands completely obliterated under the regressive Modi regime. Lest anyone expect a just decision from the Supreme Court of India that in recent times on Kashmir even deigned to hear habeas corpus petition, a very foundation of a civil society. India is already groping in darks with vultures ruling the roost.

Soulless democracies

Democracies in the West took a long time to brew and evolve with foundations based on oeuvre of philosophical underpinnings with many convulsions and wrong starts and restarts before being established firmly. Even after centuries of those traditions, the established democracies become lacking upon challenges from lawless groups and individuals and require unstinted vigil and firmness of institutions to withstand those vagaries. Those democratic ideals when transposed to the third world remain complete in letter but seem to be utterly devoid of spirit, which uniquely gets lost in transport. India, which is dubbed as the world’s largest democracy is perhaps a paradigm of a governing system only in letter, utterly devoid of a democratic soul where the rule of law is recklessly used for creating lawlessness and enforcing domination by its majority.

 

Nothing exemplifies that better than the manner India has used or rather misused its laws to collectively punish the over 7 million population of Kashmir for defying its hegemony.  Since August 5, 2019 when the Indian government in a unilateral illegal move dismembered the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the entire population of the valley has been under a siege cut off from the outside world and without access to basic amenities like healthcare, education and communication. There is an incessant arbitrariness including indiscriminate arrests aimed at intimidation of the population for submission to the whims of Hindu majoritarian government of the Prime Minister Modi. While the government has bandied out the number of those arrested between one and three thousand, Pervez Imroz of the Coalition of Civil Liberties in Kashmir has put the number of those arrested up to 20-30 thousands. Indiscriminately arrested persons range from politicians of the so-called mainstream parties who until the other day had been running Indian show in Kashmir to under-aged children. Those rampant detentions in both rural and urban areas happen without due any process or record.

 

The current Indian government may have exceeded all limits in its devious use of rule of law to intimidate the entire population of Kashmir without any provocation; yet all successive Indian governments, right from the time when the state entered into a temporary accession with the Indian union in 1947, have used legal processes to punish the dissenting political entities in Kashmir without any compunctions. Sheikh Abdullah, the first Prime Minister of the state, who was instrumental in aligning of Kashmir with India, was duly discarded, arrested in 1953 and subsequently slapped with so-called Kashmir conspiracy case, which was duly dropped as a matter of political expediency. The different governments might have surreptitiously eroded the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the state; the legal protections under the Indian constitution never became available in Kashmir. Even Kashmiris tried in Indian courts have been treated peculiarly with most famous case being that of Afzal Guru who as per the Supreme Court itself for lack of hard evidence was handed over the death sentence to satisfy the collective conscious of the country.           

 

That sentence, itself revulsive and against legal norms, paled in comparison to the manner in which Afzal Guru was executed in 2013 in complete secrecy without even the decency of notifying his family. His family in Kashmir received a letter in post two days after his execution. Kashmiri politicians and activists throughout have been victims of Machiavellian machinations of different Indian agencies with different cases slapped against them in attempts to tame and make them toe the Indian line. The former chief of an Indian spy agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), Amar Singh Daulat, had detailed in his memoirs the sordid games India played in Kashmir to maintain Indian control.  India throughout ran Kashmir through its intelligence and other agencies notwithstanding the veneer of an orchestrated political charade. Modi government since its start in 2014 has turned those agencies into potent weapons of vengeance to be used against Kashmiri separatist leadership even before the fateful August 5, 2019. 

 

Indian government and its agencies, shielded from the fact that the top Indian court has deviously refused to heed the habeas corpus law, have put separatist leadership including octogenarian Syed Ali Shah Geelani in Kashmir in a state of permanent incarceration for almost eternity. The Supreme Court even refused to entertain the habeas corpus petition filed against the arrest of Farooq Abdullah after the government invoked infamous public safety act (PSA), a decision called palpably wrong by the noted jurist A. G. Noorani. Those legal luxuries of habeas corpus are beyond the reach of Kashmiris incarcerated without any formal arrest and are political thorns in the eyes of the Indian government. It is the case of a younger separatist leader, Yasin Malik that has taken an ominous portent with Indian intelligence agency having drudged out a three decade old case against him.

 

Although the cases in courts in India move notoriously slow except when political expediency hastens the judicial velocity. As was the case with Sanjiv Bhatt, a dismissed police officer in Gujarat who had vocally implicated Modi, the then chief minister in the state at the time of infamous riots against Muslims in 2002. From his arrest, to framing of a murder case against him and to sentencing to a life imprisonment, everything happened in a virtual blink. Similarly from a usual arrest of Yasin Malik under the public safety act to booking by the Indian National Agency and his lodging in the Tihar jail in a three old decade case has all the hallmarks of revengeful ill intentions of the Indian state. While the Indian government since August 5, 2019, has humiliated the mainstream politicians in Kashmir, it is for the separatist leaders like Yasin Malik, who from the start refused to accept the Indian occupation of Kashmir, that it must be devising an expedient legal methodology to do away the inconvenience without a due process. That luxury of due process has never been afforded to Kashmiris by India while smothering their aspirations and now the entity of the state as well at the altar of a majoritarian dominance.

 

 

A Continued Saga of Betrayal in Kashmir: an update

Kashmir was locked up on the night of August 4, 2019, cut out from the world and turned into one big prison guarded by over 700,000 Indian troops reinforced significantly preceding that fateful August 5, 2019 when it took Amit Shah, the Indian union home minister, a little over seven minutes to strip away the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the state and dissolution of the state itself and turning it into two inferior appendages of the Indian federal government. The move was duly rubber stamped by both houses of the Indian parliament aided by significant defections from the ranks of opposition parties, and the myopic people of the country fed on the diet of narrow rabid Hindu nationalism went on celebratory dizziness.

 

Days and weeks before, in Kashmir there was a foreboding sense of an intrigue in works. Sending additional troops to an already the most militarized zone in the world and ominous evacuation of all non-locals, tourists, pilgrims, students, and laborers didn’t make sense unless one where to imagine the worst. All those assurances by the state governor, prior to the day, like all promises made by Indian representatives in Kashmir from the inception, turned out to be patently dishonest, deceptive and out-rightly false. Deception has throughout defined the Indian behavior towards Kashmir right from the time when the then ruler of the state was forced to sign an instrument of accession with the Indian union in 1947 that allowed Indian forces to enter Kashmir. The instrument of accession had provided for explicitly temporary provisions of very limited relationship between the state and the Indian Union subject to a final status to be decided by the people through a referendum.

 

That temporary accession was forced in the wake of tribal raid on the state mainly in reaction to the inhumane ethnic cleansing in Jammu province at the instigation of the Dogra ruler of the state that changed the demography to the disadvantage of Muslims of the region. The article 370 of the Indian constitution manifests the only link between the state and the union, with former having its own separate constitution. Extension of Indian laws, beyond those agreed, over the state or any change to the article 370 would require an approval by the state constituent assembly that had dissolved itself in 1958. Though, successive Indians governments through legal deception played havoc with that autonomy of the state but none had been foolhardy until the rabid rightwing Modi government. They through their historically steeped ignorant arrogance and a contrived vision of a Hindu India seem to have followed the dictum ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ to indulge in a legal heist without being aware of the ultimate costs of that sheer stupidity.

 

The article 370 and autonomy guaranteed to the state through it, entitled “Temporary provisions with respect to the State of Jammu and Kashmir” restricts powers of the Indian government over the state. To overcome those limitations, the Indian government played legal sleight of so many hands that those moves would not stand the legal scrutiny, if the Indian institutions including the judiciary had not been hollowed out by the Modi regime. They used article 367 to narrowly reinterpret the constitution with respect to the state to do away the requirement of the consent of the state constituent assembly, which does not exist, to make article 370 inoperative through the subsection (3) using the governor as the state authority for consent, despite being an appointee and representative of the union government and not of the state.

 

Had the government been confident about what its representatives have been blurting out since August 5, 2019 that the measures were for the benefit of the people, then why would be entire population of Kashmir incarcerated and that legal fraud forced down the throats through high-handed measures aimed at intimidation? A few basic facts merit unbiased perusal with one fundamental being that the act of accession never ever attained credence, acceptance, or legitimacy within Kashmir, which coupled with an ugly haste for dominance and forced assimilation only hardened local attitudes against the Indian state and its true intention. The first major inflection point came when the Indian government embarked on its first illegal measure in Kashmir. On August 9, 1953, Sheikh Abdullah, the then prime minister of the state was dismissed on the orders of the Indian government through the office of the head of the state. That besides an act of betrayal and deception also lacked any legal sanctity. After his dismissal, Sheikh Abdullah spent next twenty years in and out of various prisons; the Indian rule since then in the state had all but consistency of an orchestrated charade.

 

The staged democracy in the state was maintained through liberal dole outs, predetermined phantom elections using Indian intelligence agencies as major conduits, which to keep things under control bribed, and propped local politicians and then spied on them. The state politicians maintaining charade for India were handsomely compensated but never trusted. Successors of Sheikh Abdullah after his 1953 dismissal ran state through allegiances, patronages and brutality and Indian governments surreptitiously instigated the overt and covert process of erosion of the autonomy of the state through salami tactics of one at a time. All those acts of duplicity on the part of Indian government did nothing but harden the attitudes of the local population that perceived those measures as acts of aggression against the people. Nevertheless, it would be still some time before the state descended into all engulfing violence that consumed all sections of the society. That would take a few more acts of arrogant stupidity on part of the successive Indian governments.

 

Through changed geopolitics in early 1970s, Sheikh Abdullah entered into an agreement with the union government of Indira Gandhi that brought him back to power in the state, an act that latently tarnished his legacy forever. Indian government after having learned nothing from its recurrent misdeeds repeated what would turn out to be a humongous blunder with consequences that would result in destructions and deaths. After the death of Sheikh Abdullah in 1982, his son Farooq Abdullah became the chief minister of the state who won a big mandate in the elections that he had called in the following year. It was at that point when nationalists in India started calling for the dismissal of Farooq Abdullah government. Indira Gandhi obliged them by sending to the state a divisive figure, Jagmohan as the governor. He wasted no time in engineering defections from the ruling party in the state and installed an illicit government and subsequently assumed full powers once that puppet alliance failed.

 

The ill-fated installation of Jagmohan as governor not only disrupted the politics of the state when it barely had started to look pseudo-normal but he also damaged the basic fabric of the society in Kashmir. Despite all political upheavals, syncretic traditions in Kashmir, which made the place unique, never lost their sheen. Jagmohan in his capacity as governor through selective communal patronages played a big role in disruption of that fabric of harmony leading to further alienation of the local population. Further disaster came through ill-fated alignment of Farooq Abdullah, leader of the National Conference and the then Indian ruling party Congress in the state elections of 1987 that doomed the place to an eternal violence. Farooq Abdullah an inherently weak politician, given to an easy life, was loath to hard political fight; thus, to remain in power he chose to align himself with the national ruling party despite knowing the intrinsic hatred that people harbored for India. Anticipating the looming defeat at the hands of opposition Muslim United Front, the ruling coalition resorted to massive rigging in the elections that included incarceration and torture of representatives of the opposition party. That act of deliberate heinousness brought in the violence and disaster in Kashmir that no one would have ever imagined.

 

Some vested groups try to portray that Kashmir fell to Islamic violence but nothing could be farther from truth. The militancy took over Kashmir because of Indian blighted myopia. Left to no other recourse, youth in Kashmir were left with no choice but to pick up guns to fight Indian tyranny. Pakistan did provide arms and logistic support, which would come at a cost. Kashmir, thereafter, was never same again. At the very start of the violent rebellion 1989, the Indian state proved to be utterly clueless and fragile, it collapsed to a degree that it failed to provide stability or security to anyone. The most disastrous response from the Indian government came through reappointment of Jagmohan as the state governor in January 1990 with complete charge as the state government had resigned in protest. Jagmohan, true to his distorted beliefs, started his term by unleashing brutality through security forces with use of live ammunitions on protesting masses that resulted in several massacres until even the Indian government had enough. Nevertheless, Kashmir remained engulfed in a near-war in 1990s with causalities running into tens of thousands. The acts of brutalities were committed without any compunction and Kashmiris subjected to continuous subjugation by Indian security forces with documented catalogues of tortures, excesses, extrajudicial murders, forced disappearances, rapes committed against the civilian population.

 

The Indian government once again started charade of electoral politics in late 1990s using brutal tactics to force people into participation but it never even deigned to seriously address the issues that had caused lost times and lives. The struggle against Indian domination in Kashmir gradually changed from armed insurrection to peaceful unarmed protest. But Indian security forces maintained their vehement unreformed brutal zeal in dealing with unarmed protestors. That was apparent to the entire world in 2008, 2010 and again in 2016. Brutality in 2016 marked a new low, the Indian security forces introduced use of pellet guns to quell peaceful riots that has left protestors maimed and blinded; despite, the apparent heinousness of deploying such weaponry against unarmed civilians, Indian authorities have refused even to contemplate any discontinuation.  

 

Politics took a curious turn in 2014 when the Peoples Democratic Party entered into a coalition with the rabid communal party of Modi to form the state government only to be ditched by the latter when time was ripe to play another fraud on Kashmir. Armed with a bigger majority than before in the Indian elections of 2019, the Modi government has done away with legal niceties. The human made laws unlike laws that govern the nature can and are subject to capricious violations when lawless persons become in-charge. Modi steeped in the fundamentalism of extreme right wing ideology was never going to bothered by constitutional restrictions. To overcome legal restrictions, Modi and his wily protégé Amit Shah have coopted the Hindu population to smother the rule of law. The constitutional coup by the Indian government vis-a-vis Kashmir far from culmination rather marks the first step of their cherished mission of humiliating and subjugating the population of Kashmir into submission for having ‘denied’ the inalienable of India over the province or specifically right over the lands and lakes of that pristine valley.

 

If past more than 40 days are any indication that mission is already in progress. Where in the world would be incarceration of the entire people an acceptable norm and to have them deny the right to access to the outside world, health care, or even the right to mourn their dead? Politicians, lawyers, labor leaders, activists and even journalists doing jobs have been subjected to indiscriminate incarcerations, with many shifted to hostile prisons outside the state. Every move of the people is being scripted to the detail, with Imams in local mosques being told the sermon they could or could not use. Those living outside Kashmir are desperate to know the welfare of their folks back home and the reckless statements from imprudent Indian officials only add to those desperations and strain credulity. The state governor is said to have stated on record that only terrorists use internet and mobile phones. The truth is in their hearts they have actually declared all Kashmiris as terrorists; how else can they explain mass incarceration and denial of basic rights even to the people who until very recently ran show for India in Kashmir? They did not spare 81 year Farooq Abdullah, who until the other day would shout his Indian-ness.

 

The challenge remains for Kashmiris how to counter the legal fraud that India committed in Kashmir? The only silver lining, though very thin and faded, is that the excessive hubris of the Indian government has once again pushed Kashmir and its perennial abuse by India on to the world stage. International media to the considerable consternation in Indian circles is relentlessly covering the Indian moral bankruptcy and its brutal inhumane lock up of the entire Kashmiri population. Now would be the time to maintain that coverage through continued exposure of Indian excesses and its dubious propaganda. India might try to portray a hunky-dory picture of Kashmir nothing can be farther from truth. Besides inhumane treatment of the people, the Indian actions have destroyed the economy of Kashmir and jeopardized livelihoods. If those are not acts of brutality then what else those could be?

 

Rajiv Kumar

Continued saga of deception in Kashmir

Kashmir was locked up on the night of August 4, 2019, cut out from the world and turned into one big prison guarded by over 700,000 Indian troops reinforced significantly in the days preceding that fateful August 5, 2019 when it took Amit Shah, the union home minister, a little over seven minutes to strip away the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the state and dissolution of the state itself and turning into two inferior appendages of the Indian federal government. The move was duly rubber stamped by both houses of the Indian parliament aided by significant defections from the ranks of opposition parties, and the myopic people of the country fed on the diet of narrow rabid Hindu nationalism went on celebratory dizziness.

Days and weeks before, in Kashmir there was a foreboding sense of an intrigue in works. Sending additional troops to an already the most militarized zone in the world and ominous evacuation of all non-locals, tourists, pilgrims, students, and laborers didn’t make sense unless one where to imagine the worst. All those assurances by the state governor, prior to the day, like all promises made by Indian representatives in Kashmir from the inception, turned out to be patently dishonest, deceptive and out-rightly false. Deception has throughout defined the Indian behavior towards Kashmir right from the time when the then ruler of the state was forced to sign an instrument of accession with the Indian union in 1947 that allowed Indian forces to enter Kashmir. The instrument of accession had provided for explicitly temporary provisions of very limited relationship between the state and the Indian Union subject to a final status to be decided by the people through a referendum.

That temporary accession forced in the wake tribal raid on the state mainly in reaction to the inhumane ethnic cleansing in Jammu province at the instigation of the Dogra ruler of the state that changed the demography to the disadvantage of Muslims of the region. The article 370 of the Indian constitution manifests the only link between the state and the union, with former having its own separate constitution. Extension of Indian laws, beyond that agreed, over the state or any change to the article 370 would require an approval by the state constituent assembly. Though, successive Indians governments through legal deception played havoc with that autonomy of the state but none had been foolhardy until the rabid rightwing Modi government. They through their historically steep ignorant arrogance and a contrived vision of a Hindu India seem to have followed the dictum ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ to indulge in a legal heist without being aware of the ultimate costs of that sheer stupidity.

The article 370 and autonomy guaranteed to the state through it, entitled “Temporary provisions with respect to the State of Jammu and Kashmir” restricts powers of the Indian government over the state. To overcome those limitations, the Indian government played legal sleight of so many hands that those moves would not stand the legal scrutiny, if the Indian institutions including judiciary had not been hollowed out by the Modi regime. They used article 367 to narrowly reinterpret the constitution with respect to the state to do away the requirement of the consent of the state constituent assembly, which does not exist, to make article 370 inoperative through subsection (3) using the governor as the state authority for consent, despite being an appointee and representative of the union government and not of the state.

Had the government been confident about what its representatives have been blurting out since August 5, 2019 that the measures were for the benefit of the people, then why would be entire population of Kashmir incarcerated and that legal fraud forced down the throats through high-handed measures aimed at intimidation? A few basic facts merit unbiased perusal with one fundamental being that the act of accession never ever attained credence, acceptance, or legitimacy within Kashmir, which coupled with an ugly haste for dominance and forced assimilation only hardened local attitudes against the Indian state and its true intention. The first major inflection point came when the Indian government embarked on the first illegal measure in Kashmir. On August 9, 1953, Sheikh Abdullah, the then prime minister of the state was dismissed on the orders of Indian government through the office of the head of the state. That besides an act of betrayal and deception also lacked any legal sanctity. After his dismissal, Sheikh Abdullah spent next twenty years in and out of various prisons; the Indian rule since then in the state had all but consistency of an orchestrated charade.

The staged democracy in the state was maintained through liberal dole outs, predetermined phantom elections using Indian intelligence agencies as major conduits, which to keep things under control bribed, and propped local politicians and then spied on them. The state politicians maintaining charade for India were handsomely compensated but never trusted. Successors of Sheikh Abdullah after 1953 dismissal ran state through allegiances, patronages and brutality and Indian governments surreptitiously instigated the overt and covert process of erosion of the autonomy of the state through salami tactics of one at a time. All those acts of duplicity on the part of Indian government did not nothing but harden the attitudes of the local population that perceived those measures as nothing but act of aggressions against people. Nevertheless, it would be still some time before state descended into all engulfing violence that consumed all sections of the society.  That would take a few more acts of arrogance stupidity on the part of successive Indian governments.

Through changed geopolitics in early 1970s, Sheikh Abdullah entered into an agreement with the union government of Indira Gandhi that brought him back to power in the state, an act that tarnished his legacy forever. Indian government after having learned nothing from its recurrent misdeeds repeated what would turn out to be a humongous blunder with consequences that would result in destructions and deaths. After the death of Sheikh Abdullah in 1982, his son Farooq Abdullah became the chief minister of the state who won a big mandate in the elections that he called in the following year. It was at that point when nationalist in India started for calling for dismissal of Farooq Abdullah government. Indira Gandhi obliged them by sending to the state a devise figure, Jagmohan as the governor. He was wasted no time in engineering defections from the ruling party in the state and installed an illicit government and subsequently assumed full powers once that puppet alliance failed.

The ill-fated installation of Jagmohan as governor not only disrupted the politics of the state when it barely had started to look normal but he also damaged the basic fabric of the society in Kashmir. Despite all political upheavals, syncretic traditions in Kashmir, which made place unique, never lost their sheen. Jagmohan in his capacity as governor through selective communal patronages played a big role in disruption of that fabric of harmony leading to further alienation of the local population. Further disaster came through ill-fated alignment of Farooq Abdullah lead National Conference and Indian ruling party Congress in the state elections of 1987 that doomed the state to an eternal violence. Farooq Abdullah an inherently weak politician, given to an easy life, was loath to hard political fight; thus, to remain in power he chose to align himself with the national ruling party despite knowing the intrinsic hatred that people harbored for India. Anticipating the looming defeat at the hands of opposition Muslim United Front, the ruling coalition resorted to massive rigging in elections that included incarceration and torture of representatives from the opposition party. That act of deliberate heinousness brought in the violence and disaster in Kashmir that no one would have ever imagined.

Some vested groups try to portray that Kashmir fell to Islamic violence but nothing could be farther from truth. The militancy took over Kashmir because of Indian blighted myopia. Left to no other recourse, youth in Kashmir were left with no choice but to pick up guns to fight Indian tyranny. Pakistan did provide arms and logistic support, which would come at a cost. Kashmir, thereafter, was never same again. At the very start of the violent rebellion 1989, the Indian state proved to be utterly clueless and fragile, it collapsed to a degree that it failed to provide stability or security to anyone. The most disastrous response from the Indian government came through reappointment of Jagmohan as the state governor in January 1990 with complete charge as the state government resigned in protest. Jagmohan, true to his distorted beliefs, started his term by unleashing brutality through security forces by use live ammunitions on protesting masses that resulted in several massacres until even the Indian government had enough. Nevertheless, Kashmir remained engulfed in a near-war in 1990s with causalities running into tens of thousands. The acts of brutalities were committed without any compunction and Kashmiris subjected to continuous subjugation by Indian security forces with documented catalogues of tortures, excesses, extrajudicial murders, forced disappearances committed against civilian population.

The Indian government once again started charade of electoral politics in late 1990s using brutal tactics to force people into participation but it never even deigned to seriously address the issues that had caused lost times and lives. The struggle against Indian domination in Kashmir gradually changed from armed insurrection to peaceful unarmed protest. But Indian security forces maintained their vehement unreformed brutal zeal in dealing with unarmed protestors. That was apparent to the entire world in 2008, 2010 and again in 2016. Brutality in 2016 marked a new low, the Indian security forces introduced use of pellet guns to quell peaceful riots that has left protestors maimed and blinded; despite, the apparent heinousness of deploying such weaponry against unarmed civilians, Indian authorities have refused even to contemplate any discontinuation.  

Politics took a curious turn in 2016 when Peoples Democratic Party entered into coalition with rabid communal party of Modi to form the state government only to be ditched by the latter when time was ripe to play another fraud on Kashmir. Armed with a bigger majority than before in the Indian elections of 2019, the Modi government has done away with legal niceties. The human made laws unlike laws that govern the nature can and are subject to capricious violations when lawless persons become in charge. Modi steeped in the fundamentalism of extreme right wing ideology was never going to bothered by constitutional restrictions. To overcome legal restrictions, Modi and his wily protégé Amit Shah have coopted the Hindu population to smother the rule of law.  The constitutional coup by the Indian government vis-a-vis Kashmir far from culmination rather marks the first step of their cherished mission of humiliating and subjugating the population of Kashmir into submission for having the inalienable of India over the province or specifically right over the lands and lakes of that pristine valley.

If past 35 days are any indication that mission is already in progress. Where in the world would be incarceration of the entire people an acceptable norm and to have them deny the right to access to outside world, health care, or even the right to mourn their dead? Politicians, lawyers, labor leaders, activists and even journalists doing jobs have subjected indiscriminate incarcerations, with many shifted to hostile prisons outside the state. Every move of the people is being scripted to the detail, with Imams in local mosques being told the sermon they could or could not use. Those living outside Kashmir are desperate to know the welfare of their folks back home and the reckless statements from imprudent Indian officials only add to those desperations and strain credulity. The state governor is said to have stated on record that only terrorists use internet and mobile phones. The truth is in their hearts they have actually declared all Kashmiris terrorist; how else can they explain mass incarceration and denial of basic rights even to the people who until very recently ran show for India in Kashmir?

The challenge remains for Kashmiris how to counter the legal fraud that India committed in Kashmir? The only silver lining, though very thin and faded, is that the excessive hubris of Indian government has once again pushed Kashmir and its perennial abuse by India on to the world stage. The coverage against the Indian moral bankruptcy and its brutal inhumane lock up of the entire Kashmiri population is being covered by international media to the considerable heartburns in Indian circles. Now would the time to maintain that coverage through relentless exposure of Indian excesses and its dubious propaganda. India might try to portray a hunky-dory picture of Kashmir nothing can be farther from truth. Besides inhumane treatment of the people, the Indian actions have destroyed the economy of Kashmir and jeopardized livelihoods. If those are not acts of brutality then what else those could be?

-Rajiv Kumar