Following is an excerpt from the epilogue of the just-released paperback edition of Sumantra Bose, Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict.
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The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act of August 2019 was a hammer-and-axe assault. It not only obliterated the vestigial remnants of Article 370 and eliminated Article 35A, but liquidated and dismembered the state of Jammu & Kashmir. This onslaught from above is unprecedented in India’s political annals.
The approach the Act embodies seeks to radically redefine the parameters of the Kashmir question not only in the domestic arena but also internationally. Under Narendra Modi, the BJP’s Kashmir policy is an extreme form of unilateralism.
I have revisited all three regions – Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh – multiple times since the new order unfolded five years ago. Besides the Valley, I have toured such locales as the Rajouri district of the Jammu region and traversed through the Kargil and Leh districts of Ladakh.
Across the three regions, it is difficult to find people who are not unhappy with the post-August 2019 regime. Those bitterly disillusioned include the Buddhists of eastern Ladakh and large sections of Jammu Hindus. The Ladakhi Buddhists have long realised that the new dispensation represents the opposite of the recognition and empowerment they wanted. They are now ruled by a UT bureaucracy staffed by officials sent from New Delhi; the protection afforded by Article 35A to their land rights, job prospects and the cultural and environmental integrity of their habitat has ended; and their elected district-level government, in operation in Leh since 1995 (and Kargil since 2003) has been rendered ineffectual and irrelevant by the superimposed UT administration.
Cover of Kashmir at the Crossroads. Photo: Picador India.
Apart from a Hindu nationalist fringe, Jammu Hindus are unhappy with the loss of statehood, the absence of any representative institutions and bodies, and the rule of bureaucracy staffed mostly by non-J&K officials. Youth fret over the loss of job entitlements, and traders, transporters and hoteliers worry about the future of local businesses and entrepreneurship in the face of an influx of big capital from the Indian metropole.
In short, there is broadly based and nearly universal discontent with the post-August 2019 regime that cuts across regional, social and political divides.
The message from the 2024 Lok Sabha election is clear. There are few takers for the Modi government’s approach in the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh, and the Jammu region’s Hindu majority is increasingly divided on the matter. The BJP won both the (Hindu-majority) parliamentary constituencies in the Jammu region. But the 2019 victory margins were drastically reduced: from 303,000 to 135,000 in Jammu and 357,000 to 124,000 in Udhampur.
It is still too early to determine if Modi’s relative flop-show in the LS election represents a bad stumble from which recovery is possible, or whether it signals the beginning of the end.
In the first scenario – of a BJP-led coalition government helmed by Modi steadying itself and pressing on until 2029 – there is little if any prospect of positive change in Kashmir. Modi is constitutionally incapable of changing his authoritarian style of functioning. All indications are that he intends to run his third government in the same autocratic, leader-centred mode as before, with the cabal of two – he and Amit Shah – calling the shots.
But this will be difficult to pull off. The BJP has suffered a bloody nose if not a mortal injury by losing its parliamentary majority, the Modi personality cult no longer looks unassailable, and the opposition spectrum – even if disparate and fragmented – is bolstered in numbers and confidence.
The other scenario is that Modi and Shah are unable to arrest the slide and the Modi era unravels. If the BJP does badly in the Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand elections this year, the rickety government will suffer a further blow. Then the BJP faces challenging elections in Delhi in early 2025 and Bihar in the autumn. If a downward spiral is confirmed, the situation of the third Modi government could become precarious.
But even a beleaguered BJP-led government is unlikely to ‘bend’ on Kashmir. The Kashmir policy under implementation since August 2019 stems from an ideological belief system and any retreat would amount to back-pedalling the Hindu nationalist creed. Perhaps even more important, Modi and Shah have immense personal and political capital invested in their Kashmir ‘solution.’
What if an alternative coalition government consisting of the BJP’s opponents comes to power in 2029, or possibly earlier? That too would not lead to any dramatic turn for the better in Kashmir. For one, the BJP would remain in play as the major opposition party – and indeed the nation’s single largest party – and pounce on any real or imagined ‘climbdowns’ and ‘concessions’ to agitate furiously against the return of ‘appeasement politics’ and pandering to terrorists and Pakistan. A non-BJP government would be naturally wary of this.
But that is not the only reason to not expect much from a change of government in New Delhi. The erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir has been subject to a permanent state of emergency since the 1950s, with draconian laws in operation and carte blanche to the police and military. This regime was established quite early in Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure as prime minister and its toxic effects were compounded by the actions of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi.
In the second half of the 2000s, a Congress-led government missed an opportunity to take forward a Kashmir peace process whose foundations had been laid by Atal Behari Vajpayee, whether out of strategic caution or an intrinsic conservatism (or both). It would be naïve to expect any change of outlook and practice from the latest generation of the Nehru family. As for the one-state regional parties which would populate any non-BJP coalition government, their leaderships – also comprised of proprietary families – are largely absorbed with petty agendas. These limited, myopic politicians typically have little or no understanding of nor any serious interest in Kashmir.
These caveats aside, the Kashmir ‘solution’ crafted by the Modi-Shah government does have an element distinctive from past Indian governments. Those governments, regardless of their political colouring, focused on a strategy of control of Kashmir, using a variable mix of coercion and manipulative tactics. The Modi-Shah approach is much more ambitious and drastic. It sought to erase Kashmir as a political question by denying that it has any political context or content and reducing it to simply a problem of unruliness (stone-pelting) and terrorism (insurgency), to be eradicated through an iron-fist policy.
This is the most extreme securitisation of a political conflict that is possible. It entailed the criminalisation of all political positions on Kashmir – including pro-Indian ones – barring one, the Hindu nationalist view. I summarised the fallout in an August 2022 interview: ‘What has resulted is a strange limbo, a complete paralysis of political processes. The institutional framework for such processes has been liquidated, and normal politics at the grassroots throttled by fear and persecution … The central issue in J&K is precisely the restoration of normal politics – with all its flaws and defects, as is the case everywhere in India. But that is not something the Centre’s strategy can permit, without [risking] derailing the entire strategy.’
The Union Territory government about to be elected in J&K will be toothless as UT assemblies and executives have very limited powers even when directly elected as in Delhi and Puducherry, and subject to central authority through the Lieutenant-Governor. In J&K, the UT government will be even weaker due to the clout of the bureaucracy, the army, and the rest of the security apparatus.
But even such an inherently limited exercise restores some degree of political contestation and contention: i.e., normal politics. That is why it has taken five years and a Supreme Court directive. The central government has sponsored a gerrymandering exercise to increase the representation of the Hindu-majority areas of the Jammu region in the UT legislature, but given the results of the Lok Sabha election, a BJP-controlled UT assembly and government looks unlikely.
Since the 1950s, Indian central governments relied on the collusion of the Kashmir Valley’s ‘pro-India’ political elites – the local, Srinagar-based establishment – who ran client state governments and helped control the restive populace. The client governments traded in the pelf and patronage resources being in office brought to gain supporters and votes. The approach unveiled in August 2019 cut the ground from under the feet of these clients – above all the Abdullah family, and also the Muftis – by dispensing brutally with their services.
Left orphaned and redundant, the dispossessed Kashmiri dynasts are desperate to retrieve their patrimony, but that will not be easy. Their middleman role may have been permanently undermined, even if the Modi-Shah approach of dealing with the Valley without recourse to local clients proves unsustainable.
The Modi-Shah government has moved the goalposts and altered the parameters of the Kashmir question in a manner that will be difficult to undo. But in the event of a non-BJP coalition government replacing the one still led by the duo in 2029 – or optimistically, earlier – there are two matters on which an alternative government could act, if it finds the courage to do so.
Jammu & Kashmir’s print and digital media, vibrant until 2019, has been decimated since then by an avalanche of repression. Restoring media freedoms in J&K is both possible and essential. Second, large numbers of political detainees incarcerated since 2019 or even earlier continue to rot in prisons, many outside J&K. Among them is a member of the eighteenth Lok Sabha. Their cases must be examined, and the practice of detaining and holding prisoners under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and the J&K Public Safety Act (PSA) must be curtailed.
The world is experiencing acute economic and geopolitical turmoil. Wars are raging in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, with the focal points in Ukraine and Palestine. The crime of genocide, perpetrated by a sovereign state, Israel, has returned to haunt international politics and humanity. Conflict in Asia involving China and the United States is no longer a remote prospect.
In such a grim global context, any escalation of the Kashmir conflict and a subcontinental crisis on the lines of 1999 and 2002 – and very nearly in February–March 2019 – is in nobody’s interest. But make no mistake, the simmering cauldron of Kashmir remains highly flammable. There have not been large-casualty insurgent attacks in Kashmir after February 2019, nor have there been significant Kashmir-related terror incidents in India in recent years, as in Mumbai in November 2008. But it would be a mistake to think that these risks no longer exist – they do. The danger of escalation triggered by a major insurgent or terrorist strike is present and real.
The conflict’s geostrategic environment is equally worrying. Of the two volatile frontiers, the Line of Control has been relatively quiet since 2021, but there is no guarantee it will stay so if the India–Pakistan relationship remains in a deep freeze. Meanwhile, the military face-off with China ongoing since 2020 on the Line of Actual Control continues with no end in sight.