The only elections held in Kashmir occurred on the Indian side. In 1951, the secular National Conference swept to power with all seventy-five seats in the constituent assembly (thirty-five were kept symbolically vacant for representatives from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir) in the state’s first ever elections. Appointed prime minister in Hari Singh’s emergency administration after the war, Abdullah had promulgated a radical redistribution programme that put Congress leaders elsewhere in India to shame. In a state where a small—mostly Hindu—coterie owned thousands of acres of land, he put the ceiling on individual landholdings at twenty-three acres. (Hari Singh, a crusty impediment to reform, was invited to Delhi in 1949 and never saw Kashmir again. Replanted in Bombay, he died in a wallow of monstrous self-pity, unrepentant to the end for his administration’s role in the massacre of Muslims in Jammu, mourned beyond his bereaved family only by Hindu bigots.)
In his stirring inaugural speech to the first freely elected assembly of the people’s representatives of Kashmir in 1951, Abdullah laid out the choices before Kashmiris. India’s commitment to ‘secular democracy based upon justice, freedom and modern democracy’, he explained, negated the ‘argument that the Muslims of Kashmir cannot have security in India, where the large majority of the population are Hindus’. ‘The Indian Constitution,’ Abdullah said, ‘has amply and finally repudiated the concept of a religious state, which is a throwback to medievalism, by guaranteeing the equality of rights of all citizens irrespective of their religion, colour, caste and class.’ Pakistan, on the other hand, ‘is a feudal state’ and its ‘appeal to religion constitutes a sentimental and a wrong approach’, because ‘Pakistan is not an organic unity of all the Muslims in this subcontinent. It has, on the contrary, caused the dispersion of the Indian Muslims for whose benefit it was claimed to have been created.’ He reminded those who spoke of independence ‘that from 15 August to 22 October 1947 our State was independent and the result was that our weakness was exploited by the neighbour with invasion’.
Abdullah’s speech was more than a litany of pros and cons. No leader of Congress—not even Nehru—had ever delivered a more eloquent defence of the secular nationalism of India or a more astringent confutation of the self-serving segregationism of Jinnah and his sybaritic sponsors. But Abdullah’s rejection of Pakistan was also a reminder to India that secularism was the non-negotiable condition of Kashmir’s place within India. Kashmiris, as he said, ‘will never accept a principle which seeks to favour the interests of one religion or social group against another’.11
The sentence was aimed then at Pakistan. It applies now to India.
India’s self-definition as a secular state was not contingent on the presence of Kashmir within its fold. India’s inclusive nationalism, unlike Pakistan’s exclusionary variant, was self-supporting: it was validated by the existing religious multiplicity of the land—India was home to 25 million more Muslims than West Pakistan—and did not require an additional legitimating garnish. The origins of India’s entry into Kashmir were beyond legal and moral reproach. But having acquired Kashmir, India’s capacity to hold on to what became the only Muslim-majority state in the Union was elevated by Nehru—who felt a special attachment to the place because it was his ancestral homeland—into a test of the republic’s secular identity. ‘Kashmir’, he told parliament in 1953, ‘is symbolic as it illustrates that we are a secular state’ with which ‘a large majority of Muslims of [their] own free will wished to be associated’.12 Having thus mortgaged its self-esteem to Kashmir, India became obsessively fixated on retaining Kashmir. The destruction of democracy and democratic institutions which began in the rest of India after Nehru’s departure was inaugurated in Kashmir by Nehru himself.
After Nehru, Congress did to Kashmir what it did to every other state, but the consequences there were graver because Kashmir was unlike any other state in the union. In 1988, a substantial segment of Kashmiri Muslims, seething from the rigging of elections orchestrated by Congress the previous year, demanded independence for a state whose autonomy had progressively been eroded by a succession of Indian governments. The brazenness with which returns were doctored would have made a dictator wince. It was an affront to Kashmiris’ intelligence, a devil-may-care display of contempt for their dignity.
The purely indigenous strand of the movement for Kashmiri independence appeared and fell by the wayside after a burst of ecstatic violence and retaliatory massacres. The cause, born of a just rage, was almost instantly hijacked by the vultures in Pakistan, who supplied arms, trained young men in terrorist camps on its soil, and diverted the veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan to Kashmir. Hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims were cleansed from the valley at gunpoint as the call for an Islamic union with Pakistan eclipsed the clamour for freedom from India. India responded with extraordinary brutality, turning Kashmir into the most militarised zone on the planet and granting its troops total immunity from prosecution. Torture, murder, rape, mutilation, mass arrests became common tools of coercion.
Terrorism began to ebb in Kashmir in the 2000s. In the face of frequent mass protests, India spent a decade ploughing money into the state—Kashmir is the largest recipient of government grants in the union—and holding transparent elections in the hope of winning back the hearts and minds of the people. But what the Kashmiris have seen they cannot un-see. Every generation carries in its bones a deeper trauma than the one before it, and India is now confronting a generation—a young, articulate, politically conscious, religiously perfervid generation—formed in the troubles of the 1990s. An acknowledgement of their torment, an apology for causing it and a commitment to accountability by India are imperative, if inadequate, for the rift to heal. But in the age of Modi, that is unthinkable. He campaigned on a reckless pledge to hold a debate on the future of Article 370—an entrenched and practically unrepealable provision of the Constitution that is the legal basis of Kashmir’s union with India—and then detonated the moral basis of India’s claim on Kashmir by initiating the Hinduisation of the state.
The appearance of calm in Kashmir began to crack in the second year of Modi’s term in office, with the execution of Burhan Wani. An advocate of independence from India, Wani was a militant who lived by the gun. His exhortations for ‘azadi’ from India, uploaded to the internet, expanded his reach to a vast new audience. In his last video, he called on Kashmiri officers to turn their weapons on India. He was hunted down and killed by the armed forces, who branded the operation the ‘biggest success against militants’ in decades. A twenty-one-year-old with a social media following had become the greatest nightmare for one of the most formidable security forces in the world, but not because he had the capacity to kill in large numbers. Wani’s power lay in converting people to his cause. And the men of his generation, unable to reconcile themselves with India, were receptive to his message.13
There was a public outpouring of grief to the news of Wani’s death. A hundred thousand men and women marched behind his funeral cortege. Within days, Kashmir was paralysed by civil unrest. Dozens of protesters were killed by Indian forces. There were as many funerals for the dead, and every funeral occasioned a new protest, then fresh funerals, then more protest … India, having imposed a curfew, initiated a ‘non-lethal’ crackdown. In practice, this meant firing ‘pellet guns’ at crowds of protesters. The ‘pellets’, loaded with lead and designed to penetrate the soft tissue of the body, mutilated and blinded hundreds of Kashmiris.
Since 1996, elections have been seen as the measure of Kashmiri allegiance to India. Kashmiris queuing to vote have routinely been heralded as proof of Indian nationalism’s triumph. So what did the absence of voters in the by-election of April 2017 in Srinagar suggest, if not the near-total death of the appeal of Indian nationalism? Only 7 per cent of the electorate voted. The poor showing was put down to violence. But when the vote was held again in thirty-eight polling stations the following week, voter turnout dropped to 2 per cent. In all, 702 people turned up to vote. Not
a single vote was cast in many of the polling stations.14 Voices in the government immediately blamed threats by Pakistan-backed separatists for the dismal turnout. But this excuse was a non-starter: the power of the separatists to disrupt elections was no match for the capacity of India’s security apparatus to maintain order.
One Kashmiri who did defy the threats to cast his vote, a young man called Farooq Ahmad Dar, was picked up by the Army as he was returning home, tied to the bonnet of a jeep, and paraded through the streets as a ‘human shield’ against young Kashmiris pelting stones at security forces. Dar was finished with India that day.15 The officer who stamped on Dar’s dignity instantly became a hero to Hindu nationalists, who rushed to his defence. Only three years before this squalid spectacle, Kashmiri voters had come out in impressive numbers, and the BJP, which swept the Hindu-dominated Jammu region, formed a coalition government headed by the pro-India Peoples Democratic Party in Kashmir. But Modi’s inability to play the junior partner paralysed administration. And just when the state needed a stable government, the BJP pulled the rug from under the alliance and dissolved the government. At the end of 2018—the deadliest year in the state by the government’s own records16—Kashmir was placed under President’s Rule, removing even the pretence of representative government.17
To identify the failings of India is not to exonerate its adversaries. Pakistan has played a thoroughly ruinous role in Kashmir. Its quest for that state is tied up with the identity crisis that has crippled Pakistan since its birth. The rationale behind Pakistan’s foundation—that Muslims and Hindus could not coexist in one nation—was impeached when India refused to become a Hindu state and gave itself a secular Constitution. As long as Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state, remains part of the Indian union, Pakistan’s self-conception as the authentic home of India’s Muslims—the reason for its existence—will remain unfulfilled. But the Pakistan that was invented in 1947 ceased to exist in 1971.18 What conceivable moral right did the rump state that clung on to the neologism ‘Pakistan’ have to cast itself as the defender of Muslim destiny after having perpetrated the worst atrocities ever committed against a predominantly Muslim population in what is today Bangladesh? If Pakistan was motivated by a sincere impulse to emancipate Kashmiris, it would not have signed away to its paymasters in China, as it did in 1963, large chunks of Kashmir over which it had no sovereignty.19 Over the past three decades, Pakistan has created, trained and armed militants in the Valley. It has treated Muslim Kashmiri human beings as weapons delivery systems.
None of those truths, however, negate the other truth: India’s moral claim to Kashmir is now threadbare. Kashmiri separatists who labelled India a ‘Hindu state’ could once be dismissed as chauvinists. And India could credibly argue for Kashmir’s place within its fold and promise a solution within the ‘constitutional framework’ because the religion of a majority of Kashmiris was irrelevant to full citizenship of the state. But now the separatists’ claim against India has nearly as much substance and weight as Sheikh Abdullah’s against Pakistan, while the argument of ‘inclusive nationalism’ deployed by Modi’s predecessors to persuade Kashmiri separatists to participate in elections is not available to him, a religious nationalist, and nor is it available to India under him. When Kashmiri Muslims look at India, what they see is a republic where Muslims are killed for eating beef, where Kashmiris are socially ostracised and physically brutalised by ordinary Indians for being Kashmiri, where the state grants licences to murderous Hindu vigilantes. There will come a time, if this continues, when mainstream pro-India parties in Kashmir will not be able to show themselves in public or make a case for remaining in India. An India that has ceased to be secular will have forever lost its moral argument in Kashmir.
Indian unity, even beyond Kashmir, is not divinely ordained. The founders recognised this and were consumed by the union’s fragility. But the persistent anxiety about India’s viability that haunted every prime minister dissolved in the solvent of the new wealth generated in the 1990s. Under Modi, the old divide between north and south has once again opened up. The Hindu-nationalist emphasis on Hindi has alienated non-Hindi speakers, especially in southern India.
To be a non-Hindi speaker in today’s India, Mihir Sharma has written, is ‘to deal with a hundred little humiliations’.20 These humiliations, compared to what the Kashmiris have endured, are really in the league of first-world problems. The trouble is not that Modi is antagonising the south. It is more serious than that: the south is imperceptibly inching away from the north, and Modi’s brand of nationalism is supplying a pretext for its acceleration.
The fault is not the north’s because the true source of the deepening division is not culture or language. It is wealth. India used to be lauded as an audacious experiment for being floated in a poor country, but the poverty may in fact have made it easier to bridge divides. An impoverished India was also a more malleable India. A wealthier India, not so much: new money has already torn communities apart and incubated new strains of mercenary attitudes that make the excesses of the pre-liberalisation era seem tame.
The south today is richer and more efficient than the north. And it is the ideas being seeded by the stimulus of those riches that pose perhaps the greatest threat to the Indian project. For the first time, the grievances of the south are anchored in the language of economics: their real complaint is not that they aren’t receiving enough from the union—it is that they are giving too much away. If this trend continues, one parliamentarian from Andhra Pradesh threatened, ‘all southern states might have to come together to form a separate entity’.21 (Contrast the absolute silence with which this threat of secession was received with the howling outrage in 2012, when Mustafa Kamal, a senior leader of Jammu and Kashmir’s National Conference party, upbraided Delhi for not bringing down troop levels in Kashmir and said, ruefully, ‘I feel our enemy is our own country, not Pakistan’. Kamal was crucified in the press and on TV for weeks.)22 Most states complain that they are not given much; southern states complain that the north is sucking up their wealth.
This is a fatal line of argument, and it should be nipped before it blooms. Contemporary politicians, from north and south, have responded to it with the vocabulary of technocrats—and in the aridity of their language can be detected a deep dread that this difference, which seems a trifling matter now, could explode in the decades ahead. If this crisis had come up forty years ago, or even during the reign of P.V. Narasimha Rao, the national leadership of India would almost certainly have responded by affirming the oneness of Indians—by reminding the cavillers that they are all children of India—but that is an argument Modi, headman of a narrow nationalism, cannot convincingly make. The south is not a victim—it never was—but Modi’s politics have supplied a convenient fig leaf for the deplorably self-serving parochialism of southern politicians. The dispute over the division of resources has passed unnoticed. But it will re-emerge again.
There’s nothing natural or preordained about Indian unity. Indian civilisation is antique; Indian unity is rare and recent. And it is far from clear that it can be supported by a radical departure from the conditions in which it was forged. Others have been here. If you were a citizen of Yugoslavia in 1988 as the great Marshal Tito—whose achievement is hardly remembered today—boarded the train in Pristina after touring Kosovo, it would not have occurred to you that that is where post-war Europe’s great experiment in multi-ethnic nationalism would unravel. Yugoslavs too thought they were special and supernaturally blessed until they realised they were not. And once the unravelling began, it was all over before people could catch their breath. Indira Gandhi once said that Yugoslavia was the one country most like India in the world. Today Yugoslavia exists only in the nostalgias of those who took Yugoslavia for granted. It was devoured by its own version of Modi, its own vengeful variant of Hindu supremacism.
India, the protest goes, is a democracy. But there is no commandment that democracies are everlasting. Even Britain, which united India a
nd is one of the oldest political unions on earth, is on the brink of disunion. It would behove us in India, seventy years old, to be humbler. India survives as a union because most people see themselves as Indian first. And those who do not can be persuaded to see themselves as Indian because Indian nationalism is not premised on religion, or language, or ethnicity. But the terms of that nationalism are rapidly fading into obsolescence. In Kashmir, India holds on to the territory but fears and despises the people. In the south, the people increasingly wonder why they should underwrite the north. And there is no politician—no Nehru, no Tito—who can make the case for India without appealing to some sub-identity or surrendering to those who do. India’s settled borders will remain the same for the foreseeable future. The union is not dissolving. Not yet. But the dynamite of division that has always existed beneath the surface has never seemed so primed for detonation as it does under Modi.
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