Five Years After Article 370, J&K Continues to be a Tragic Saga of Control and Erasure

Aug 05, 2024

By Anuradha Bhasin

Five years after Jammu and Kashmir was robbed of its special status, sliced into two units with the diminished status of Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, Narendra Modi returned as India’s prime minister for the third time. Within days, there was an indication of what this would mean for the erstwhile state, where the government had effectively exercised systemic and coercive control since August 5, 2019. His dwarfed status in the parliament was no barrier.

The prosecution of internationally acclaimed author Arundhati Roy and former law professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain under anti-terrorism laws for decade-old speeches signaled the first troubling escalation of New Delhi’s stranglehold on Kashmir. This action set the tone for other institutions including academic spaces to crack down on the K word that is out of sync with the government’s one commandment rule: Nothing negative about Kashmir will be allowed in written or oral form. Last week South Asia University took disciplinary action for a research proposal on Kashmir’s ethnography that quoted Chomsky’s unflattering remarks.

Such intolerance to criticism about Kashmir gives a feeble hint of what the people living within its territory, the entire erstwhile state included, grapple with on a day-to-day basis. A heavy-handed approach to free speech and political opposition that began in 2019 continues across Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, and exists in its most unadulterated form in the Kashmir Valley.

Frozen turbulence

The scale can be gauged from a recent order issued by the Jammu and Kashmir administration run by New Delhi’s points man, lieutenant governor, which virtually encourages government officials to criminalise complaints by whistleblowers against them. The order states that if complaints against officers are “found to be fraudulent”, all assistance will be given to the officers to prosecute the complainants. In short, the government officials will adjudicate on the genuineness of any complaint against their colleagues, and they will sit as a jury to judge their own acts of omission and commission. There will be no judicial oversight in a region where judicial processes have already become tardy and slow, barring some rare exceptions.

In July, three prominent lawyers — Nazir Ahmed Ronga, Ashraf Mir and Mian Muzaffar — under the draconian Public Safety Act. This followed the detention of senior lawyer Mian Qayoom on Babar Qadri murder charges. Authorities simultaneously blocked elections for the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association, suspended since India’s 2019 revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy, exposing a systematic assault on legal representation and civil liberties in Kashmir where dissent and criticism have already been stamped out under systemic repression exercised through arrests, detentions, raids, interrogations, repeated verifications, job terminations and attachment of properties on frivolous pretexts.

In inverse proportion to the staggering number of arrests, the number of lawyers willing to challenge the detentions legally has drastically reduced. The recent arrests ensure that guided by the fear of reprisal, the lawyers will be even more hesitant to take up cases of political prisoners and habeas corpus petitions or other cases that challenge the state.

In the last five years, the government has already made sweeping arrests including of journalists, lawyers, political activists, and civil society activists under PSA, terror charges, money laundering, and other cases, with chilling effects on media and any democratic discourse.

Such detentions coupled with panoptic surveillance that maps every individual through overt and covert verification processes and interrogation cements fear in the minds of the rest, instilling a silence that is frozen in the turbulence of the time.

Briefly broken amidst the hectic parliamentary polls and articulated through brisk voluntary voting, the silence, engendered by fear remains one defining characteristic of Kashmir. The civil society has retreated into the shadows. Human rights violations and breach of democracy are insulated from scrutiny as human rights defenders like Khurram Parvez languish in jails and the rest are exhausted by a continuous cycle of interrogations and routine verifications. Journalists have almost stopped doing critical stories, writing about human rights or even basic civic amenities. Information has been buried under covers of secrecy that are imposed through repetitive reprisals.

Willful ignorance and its dangerous portents

The virtual death of journalism highlights the biggest casualty of the post-2019 actions as information has slipped into a black hole, making knowledge about Kashmir absent. Journalists have disappeared and invisibilised the larger masses they usually report about, leaving a void that is filled by ignorance, promoting delusions about the most volatile part of the country. Delusional thinking is not only disempowering, but also destructive in many ways. Willful ignorance is even more dangerous.

Signs of this destruction are already beginning to unravel.

In striking contrast to the delusional over-confidence of the Indian government and its narrative of normalcy, there is an uptick in terrorism, which not only continues to simmer in the region’s epicentre – the Kashmir Valley, but there’s also a spillover to the otherwise calmer region of Jammu. Apart from civilian casualties and selective killings, since 2021, 49 soldiers have lost their lives in 33 terror-related incidents in Jammu province, highlighting the unsustainable and disproportionate loss of the security forces.

Questions are being asked nation-wide why this is happening and as usual the television news channels with glee abandon a performative theatre of outrage and misplaced assumptions. It would be too much to expect them to interrogate the causes that have been cloaked in secrecy for five years.

If they did ask the right questions, they would know that the escalation in militancy is a culmination of the multiple failures including misplaced counter insurgency strategies, the muscular governance model and the inability to mend fences with the neighbours. It is simply not only about a ‘mischievous enemy across the border’.

The Modi-led government has invested India’s huge military apparatus in maintaining tight surveillance and systemic but low-key repression to control the civilian population in Kashmir. The resources meant for security have been arbitrarily misallocated, providing a perfect fertile ground for militants to exploit and making the intelligence networks fragile and compromised, leaving the security forces blind to the emerging threats.

By redeploying security troops from Jammu province to the Chinese borders, following the incursions in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley, the otherwise comparatively calmer Jammu region has been dangerously undermanned. The militants are using these vulnerabilities to infiltrate from across the Line of Control on the western side and engage in targeted killings of civilians or use the mountainous dense forests to engage the security forces in exhausting gun battles with a fair degree of success.

The myopic obsession with internal control of the erstwhile state’s 14 million people has left security of the troubled region vulnerable, with wider geopolitical ramifications. Provoked by the redrawing of Jammu and Kashmir’s boundaries and India’s assertions of reclaiming the Chinese occupied territory, China has already seized 2,000 square kilometers in Ladakh. Meanwhile, the fragile ceasefire with Pakistan lacks the diplomatic groundwork necessary for sustainable peace. Pakistan’s internal pressures and China’s growing military support create a volatile cocktail that can ravage the region with relentless violence.

Wallpaper of tourism and development

Add to this, the fear, panic and long pent-up distress of the people pushed to the edge by ill-planned actions of the government that can no longer be wall-papered by the rosy pictures of brisk tourism and development. These happy narratives, by the way, feature tourists, corporate investments, and projects that hang like castles in the air. Erased, the residents of Jammu and Kashmir serve at best as a blur in the backdrop.

Much worse, both models are unsustainable as they impose huge risks on the Himalayan region’s fragile ecology and promote loss of livelihoods. While water and other resources are being mined beyond the capacity, tunnels are being bored through the mountains contributing to threats of landslides, loss of lives and homes.

Tourism is leaving behind ecological footprints with reckless dumping of mineral water bottles and plastics. New tourism focus areas are losing their pristine glory to unplanned concretisation and vehicular mobility that these areas cannot sustain the burden of. The development model has promoted change of land-use of seismic proportions, converting agricultural lands, orchards and forests into barren lands or roads. Preference to outsiders in business contracts and industries, as well as in offering large land banks on lease for investments is leading to escalation in unemployment and loss of livelihoods.

The government touts its Smart City initiative as a beacon of progress, promising increased efficiency and safety. However, the reality is far grimmer. The Smart City projects in Srinagar and Jammu have offered widened footpaths and shrinking roads, synthetic tiling of walkways without planned drainage, wasteful concretisation of back lanes and smart electricity meters that neither check frequent power outages, nor check inflated billing.

The positive narrative on Jammu and Kashmir, that camouflages these aspects, is told through propaganda channels of the government or lap-dog media. The story is not told by its people who are reduced to objects under control, robbed of all agency. They whisper when the state’s grip slightly relaxes, once in every while, and go back into their shells when it tightens its grip. Community conversations in one of the most politicised areas of the world have been de-politicised, mutual trust has been reduced to a naught.

People are afraid to speak freely even in private. They go about their normal business quietly and in submission, wary that their every move is scrutinised in the region that has effectively become a police state. Text messages and social media posts are monitored as if these are radio-active material, with dissenters swiftly taken to task. The region has vanished in the cyber space, in media and in public space. What exists is a mere skeleton of itself.

Trauma is at an all-time high, leading to severe mental health disorders and drug addiction. How does the region whose every inch is mapped by security forces and where every citizen has been put under the surveillance scanner and live under the watchful eye of an authoritarian regime become a haven for drug smugglers and mafia? Who would dare to question?

Resistance by other means

A palpable sense of fear and hopelessness permeates the erstwhile state. As the people’s spirits are crushed under the weight of constant surveillance and control, there are occasional moments of resistance by another means.

Ladakh has been a little more vocal where mounting acute distress found voice in the sustained agitation of March 2024. Unheeded, it once again shows signs of resumption.

All three regions of the erstwhile state exhibited their resentment in recent elections. Though Jammu’s two seats went to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), their victory margins were vastly reduced. In Ladakh, an independent triumphed and the BJP finished last. In Kashmir Valley’s three seats (one including the Pir Panjal belt of Jammu province), the BJP did not have the stomach to field candidates. It instead backed proxies, all of whom miserably flopped and lost their deposits.

Despite sops to the Paharis and aggressive BJP campaign in Rajouri and Poonch, the party’s proxy candidate could bag only 1.42 lakh votes of the 5.22 lakh Pahari votes in Rajouri-Anantnag constituency.

The rout of the old regional dynasts — Abdullahs and the Muftis — is an indication of the deadly anger of the public, which rejected not just the BJP and its proxies, but also the old guards that are seen as one-time collaborators. The Engineer Rashid factor, though one of the most enigmatic phenomena of the times, shows that if given an opportunity, the Kashmiris would throw their weight behind hardliners and those with no strings attached. The BJP may hope to cash in on by breaking the political homogeneity of the Muslim majority areas, particularly the Valley. But what would be a long-term impact of a political churning that is less organic and more manipulated?

The pigmy version of the new Modi government knows that the BJP has no electoral opportunity in the region and that is why the region remains disenfranchised. Ladakh will no longer have legislative representation. Its perfectly functional model of hill councils has been disrupted and usurped by bureaucratic control.

Jammu and Kashmir will have an assembly, if and when, but with the limited powers of a Union Territory. Over and above this, the new rules stipulate that the Lieutenant Governor will have oversight over all matters and services including transfers and postings, reducing the assembly to a rubber stamp. Yet there are no signs of revival of the J&K legislature, even with all its wings clipped.

Though elections, a major prerequisite of representative democracy, is a normal process, last year the Supreme Court set September 30, 2024 as deadline for elections. Is the time ripe for that promised La-La Land? Few days ago, the Election Commission laid the deadline of November for assembly polls in three states — Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand — but merely hinted that elections in Jammu and Kashmir are “due soon”.

Everyone is in a tizzy over the imminence of the election with speculative reports, quoting unnamed sources, about a prospective Election Commission visit to the region on August 8. There is no official word yet other than the vague term ‘soon’ appended to holding of elections, which people are tired of hearing for years. Even elections are a closely guarded secret. Like a coup d’etat, they will be sprung upon people at a chosen time and moment which is ‘soon’.

How does one define ‘soon’? How does one qualify ‘soon’ in Jammu and Kashmir which last witnessed assembly polls in 2014 and has not had a local government since June 2018? Even the country’s apex court did not see a sense of urgency and immediacy when it adjudicated on the matter last December.

An integration so unique

For years, Jammu and Kashmir was the only state that successive governments felt duty-bound to label as an ‘integral part of India’ every now and then, perhaps, as a way of reassurance. A vehement votary of one nation, one constitution, one symbol, uniform codes, one election, one language, one food, one law and one system, the Modi government boasts that it made Jammu and Kashmir an integral part of India in 2019.

Despite the BJP’s brag about bringing parity in laws, Jammu and Kashmir retains draconian laws like the Public Safety Act that can be weaponised to keep anyone out of circulation, and other archaic laws are being especially revived. It is also the only region that is singled out to keep even the pretence of democratic process in abeyance for posterity. Against the nation-wide freeze on delimitation of constituencies, it was the only region singled out to conduct the delimitation of tumultuous proportions, leading to a brutal gerrymandering of boundaries. This integral part of India is ruled not by representation but by domineering control.

Under the new system, any prospective election, if at all, cannot empower the people as the reins of control would remain in the hands of New Delhi. However, the absence of election reveals that this authoritarian regime is unwilling to cede even an iota of symbolic power to the locals.

It perfectly aligns with the irreversible, rather deepening, policy of control, subjugation and humiliation of Jammu and Kashmir’s 14 million people that began on August 5, 2019. They don’t only not matter. They have been erased.

Anuradha Bashin is Executive Editor of Kashmir Times, Senior JSK Journalism Fellow and author of A Dismantled State: Untold Story of Kashmir After 370.