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Humiliating Kashmir is part of Modi’s plan to remake India | Kapil Komireddi

The abolition of the region’s special status is another stage in the PM’s Hindu nationalist project, says Indian writer Kapil Komireddi

the Guardian

The solidification of the cult of Modi has been accompanied by an aggressive erosion of the legal and constitutional foundations on which the Indian republic stands. Last week the government arrogated to itself powers to designate individuals as terrorists. Presumption of innocence, legal representation and the right to judicial appeal – everything that distinguishes a civilised democracy from an autocracy – is severely restricted. Muslims and other minorities, favoured quarry of the lynch mobs emboldened by the regime, will be the principal targets of the new measures.

Lest there was any doubt, Amit Shah, Modi’s dreaded enforcer and the minister responsible for law and order, clarified in parliament that “urban Naxals” – a label that encompasses everyone from leftwing intellectuals to rootless cosmopolitans sceptical of the Modi regime – “will not be spared”.

Organised political opposition to Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata party is being meticulously wiped out. July ended with the collapse of a coalition government in Karnataka, one of the few states where the BJP was not in power, after opposition legislators dramatically switched sides and joined Modi’s party.

Now August has begun with the partition and abolition of the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir – which acceded to India in 1947 on the assurance that it would be granted special constitutional safeguards – by a presidential decree. Kashmir is now under the thumb of the union government, and the region’s elected leaders have been thrown in jail. Communications, including land lines, have been cut off. Ordinary Kashmiris have no means of speaking to the rest of India. The most monumental redesign of Delhi’s constitutional arrangement with India’s sole Muslim-majority state, hatched in secrecy, occurred without a debate in parliament.

Modi’s willingness to take the risk was no doubt dictated by the reward. He has in one stroke ground down and humiliated Kashmiris, and held them up as an example to other Indian states, a demonstration that nobody is immune from his untrammelled authority. The termination of Kashmir’s special status is simultaneously a culmination of a longstanding Hindu nationalist yearning to domesticate the region’s dissenting Muslim majority and a successful test case for the project to remake the entirety of India in accordance with Modi’s ideology. What has happened there will be repeated elsewhere. A spike in militancy or even an outbreak of hostilities with Pakistan can only boost the fortunes of a leader who, presiding over a decelerating economy, has little to offer besides demagogy.