Populist normalisation under Hindu nationalism, particularly from the aspiring urban classes, continues to provide Mr Modi with formidable support. Not since Indira Gandhi has any Prime Minister enjoy to the power and authority that Narendra Modi currently does. But 2020 is not 1975. The populism harnessed by strongmen today is not the same as the protests from below faced by rulers yesterday. Yet the intertwined shadows of populism and authoritarian hanging over democracy in the present invite us to pay attention to the challenges faced in the past.
Our autocratic rulers incite pent up anger and a sense of humiliation to fuel right wing nationalist insurgencies against groups depicted as enemies of “the people” to shore up the authoritarian power and suppress dissent. To turn the current political landscape is related to shifts associated with neoliberal capitalism.
The very idea that your control is infinite over the masses, is the sole reason behind your destruction. This is just a beginning, karma’s holographic structure will be well illustrated. You can’t always go to the bed peacefully after betraying the masses. Stains have a effect.
The controversial move to withdraw Kashmir’s special legal status fulfilled a longstanding goal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party to yoke the disputed northern territory more closely to the rest of India.
As part of the announcement, India said it was reorganizing the state known as Jammu and Kashmir, which includes the disputed Kashmir valley. The state would be downgraded to a union territory, giving New Delhi far greater control over its affairs, including authority over the local police.The sparsely populated region of Ladakh would be carved into a separate union territory, a move likely to be welcomed by the area’s residents, most of whom are Hindu.
The “special status” granted to the state through Article 370 allows the state to have its own Constitution – that is why elections to its legislative assembly are held once in six years, unlike other states where they are held once in five years.
Kashmir was likely to be rooted ultimately, but manner in which it got eradicated especially after illegitimate house arrest and violence, questions a lot about the supposed democracy of India. This article should have been automatically lapsed rather than using a muscular force of eradictating it. Kashmir should have been made developed so that the kashmiris consider living in India as literally beneficial and eventually the existence of this bill would have been made primitive.
But, the exact opposite happened. With minorities been attacked, communalism increased, lynchings genocides normalized India is paying the price of hatred.
The manner in which the BJP government has changed the status of Jammu and Kashmir by rendering Article 370 ineffective and bifurcating the state is revealing its true character.
This is a state for whom the only currency that matters is raw power. This is a state that recognises no constraints of law, liberty and morality. This is a state that will make a mockery of democracy and deliberation. This is a state whose psychological principle is fear. This is a state that will make ordinary citizens cannon fodder for its warped nationalist pretensions
.The narrative supporting a radical move on Kashmir is familiar. Article 35(a) was a discriminatory provision and had to go. Article 370 was not a mechanism for integration but a legal tool for separatism. The Indian state, despite the horrendous violence it has used in the past, has never had the guts to take a strong stand on Kashmir. The radicalisation within Kashmir warrants a crackdown. The treatment meted to Kashmiri Pandits has never been recompensed either through justice or retribution.
Revoking this article was a scar for our nation. We gave a direct response to jinnah after 72 years. In 2019, we did such communally polarized nonsense. This showed where we are heades. It is also a collective shame , that kashmir issue was still there in 2019, wheras it should have been solved.
Independent India has seen the creation of new states from older ones — Jharkhand frm parts of Bihar & Bengal, Uttarakhand UP in the north. UT like Goa have become states, but this is perhaps the first time a state & its residents have simply been imagined out of existence.
Tourist arrivals in Kashmir fell after the Centre abolished its semi-autonomous status on August 5, 2019, and followed this with a communication clampdown in anticipation of unrest. While security restrictions were relaxed amid heavy troop deployment, the internet shutdown has yet to be lifted after nearly six months.
Having said before also Azad Kashmir is a paradise of utopian dreams. This is not just a statement but a stiff truth. Our ignorance of hiding from this truth for the sake of pseudo-nationalism is the fundamental root cause of totalitarian destruction.
Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir – Prisoners in Indian-administered Kashmir have been subjected to abuse and torture, including “water-boarding, sleep deprivation and sexualised torture”, according to a report by two rights bodies, till today.
It is classic illustration of the normal & peaceful destiny of Kashmir. I hope all those ‘elite’ liberals who supported the govt’s move on name of national interest realise that India is beyond demographics, it’s an ideology, but it has been pillaged.:-(
All lines of communication are shut down, thousands of troops deployed, &public assembly forbidden.Delhi lays out J&K’s abbreviated future,the Kashmiris are silenced;&in this silence we see the demise of democracy..
Although the ban on postpaid mobile network was lifted after over two months on October 14, prepaid phones, SMS and internet services remain banned for more than four months and counting.
The communication blackout created an information black hole in Kashmir. The local press bore the brunt of the blockade. It’s functioning was crippled. Its coverage of how the clampdown affected people’s lives was severely curtailed or suppressed.
After August 5, all prominent local dailies started publishing fewer print copies, with barely four to eight pages. Distribution was also limited due to the shutdown and restrictions imposed by the government. The ban on landline telephones, which was lifted in phases only after a month or so, and mobile telephony, including leased line and broadband internet connections at local newspaper offices, further curbed news gathering activities. Flow of information from the districts was choked as editors and their correspondents were cut-off form each other.
In the initial weeks of the clampdown and restrictions imposed after the revocation of Article 370, publication of local newspapers had to be suspended for several days. None of the prominent English and Urdu dailies of Kashmir could publish for five days from August 12.
What got published in prominent local English dailies was a reflection of the censorship and government pressure on the press. For example, Greater Kashmir, the largest circulated daily published from Kashmir, avoided publishing editorials on the emerging situation for months after August 5 when the government revoked the special status and bifurcated the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union Territories. There was little or no coverage of how people suffered in the weeks after the communication blockade and clampdown was imposed. Its edit page did not carry opinion pieces on the situation in Kashmir post-August 5. In fact, the paper was published without an editorial page for several days.
Since then Greater Kashmir has not published a single opinion piece in its edit page on the revocation of Article 370 and the subsequent clampdown in the valley. The only opinion piece it did publish, in the third week of the clampdown, argued, curiously, in favor of the revocation of the special status.
Apart from that day, leading articles, columns and editorials steered clear of commenting on the clampdown and the humanitarian crisis in the valley because of the communications shutdown. Instead it wrote and commented on “The Subtle Secrets of Nature (August 9), “Vistas’s of Botox Therapy in Medicine (August 17), “Macbeth and the Moral Universe (August 22), and “Poetry and Journalism” (August 23).
The authorities also snapped the broadband internet connection at Kashmir Press Club on August 5. This move meant that the over 200 club members belonging to the local journalists’ fraternity could not file their reports.
Later, limited internet facility was provided at a makeshift media centre set up by the government information department in a Srinagar hotel. The media centre was then moved to two small rooms of the information department where hundreds of journalists had to jostle for space to get a few minutes of internet access.
Internet facilities remain inadequate for hundreds of journalists and district reporters who can’t make it to the centre every day.
At times, the authorities also resorted to intimidation. On the night of August 14, Irfan Malik, a reporter with Greater Kashmir, was picked up by police from his home in South Kashmir’s Tral district and locked up in a local police station. After his arrest created a furore, he was released on August 17. No reason was given for his arrest.
You cannot live peacefully without your mobile phone for few hours, but expect an entire state (no longer) to do so for 203 days?
Hey, neoliberals and so called neutral journos, why are you not speaking up?
Have you forgotten?
On August 31, Journalist and political analyst Gowhar Geelani was stopped at New Delhi airport before he could board a flight. He was traveling to Germany to attend a conference.
Please do not forget kashmir amidst all these.
CAA_NRC_NPR are disasters.But,give equal attention to kashmir as well.Kashmir is being destroyed.There is severe destruction in Kash”.Intolerance which is a parasite has been acting as a catapulting edifice.
A few months ago, senior journalist and editor of an Urdu newspaper Ghulam Jeelani Qadri (62) was detained by police after he was picked up from his residence in Srinagar soon after he’d returned from office in the evening. Qadri was arrested in connection with a case dating back to 1992. He was released on bail the next day following a court appearance.
7,357 people, including stone pelters, miscreants, overground workers and separatists, had been taken into preventive custody after August 5
As many as 396 people have been detained in Kashmir under the Public Safety Act (PSA) since the scrapping of the erstwhile state’s special status on August 5 last year, the Union home ministry told Parliament on Wednesday.
These 396 people are among the 451 people in detention in the Valley, according to the ministry.
Junior home minister G. Kishan Reddy informed the Rajya Sabha that among those who have been booked under the PSA, a stringent law that allows for detention without trial for up to two years, are former chief ministers Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti.
Reddy said 7,357 people, including stone pelters, miscreants, overground workers and separatists, had been taken into preventive custody after August 5.
“The government of J&K has reported that in order to prevent commission of offences involving breach of peace and tranquility, activities prejudicial to the security of the state and maintenance of public order, cumulatively 7,357 persons including stone pelters, miscreants, overground workers, separatists, etc were taken into preventive custody since August 2019,” the minister said.
“Out of these 451 such persons are presently under prevention detention, which includes 396 persons under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA).”
Omar’s sister Sara Abdullah Pilot has moved the Supreme Court challenging the leader’s detention under the PSA as being “arbitrary”, “unconstitutional” and “actuated by malice”.
One of the charges cited to invoke the PSA against Omar and Mehbooba is their capacity to convince the “electorate to come out and vote in huge numbers even during the peak of militancy and poll boycotts”, sources in the home ministry said.
The world will not care about what India does in Kashmir. That seemed to be the key assumption of the Narendra Modi government (and its supporters) when it set out to change Kashmir’s special status and impose a communications blockade on the Valley. The belief was that India’s stature as a big market for weapons, goods and services would elicit no more than murmurs abroad – contracts always trounce ethics in a Realist universe, we are often told.
However, the state-enforced siege on the lives of the people of Kashmir began in the summer. It remains intact as the winter begins. Officially intended for the ‘protection’ of lives but actually designed to instill fear and submission, the siege has choked not just the freedom of expression, communication and association but also the economy. No aspect of daily life remains unaffected.
The populism latching on to the politics of winners and losers is to mobilize psychically potent resentments & anger against the “outsiders” responsible for the pain of the “people”.While, the true terrorists of democracy are the ones heading the country. People are of the opinion this was a revenge for what happened with the kashmiri pandits, but no, this was just a state sponsored persecution of the idea of India, just to establish the real intensity of the authority the government of India holds.
Radhika Barman 