India scraps Kashmir’s special status and imposes lockdown

Plan for Muslim-majority state causes uproar and fuels tensions with Pakistan

New Delhi has abolished a constitutional provision that guaranteed special rights to Jammu and Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority state, in a move that reopens historic wounds inflicted at the founding of the modern Indian state.

When home minister Amit Shah, one of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s most trusted political confidants, announced the decision in parliament on Monday morning, he triggered an uproar in the legislature. He added that President Ramnath Kovind had already signed the executive order, making the constitutional change a fait accompli.

India’s abolition of Article 370 of the constitution is a reflection of Mr Modi’s unabashed Hindu nationalist agenda, centred on a strong state that will brook no challenges to its authority. It risks fuelling already heightened tensions with neighbouring Pakistan, which also claims Kashmir as its own. The two nations have fought three wars — and come to the brink of a fourth — over the picturesque Himalayan region.

Mehbhooba Mufti, a former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, said on Monday that the government’s “intention is clear and sinister. They want to change the demography of the only Muslimmajority state in India, disempower Muslims to the extent where they become second-class citizens in their own state.” Later that day, Ms Mufti was taken to jail, along with Omar Abdullah, another former chief minister of the state.

Along with the constitutional change, Mr Shah announced the political reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir, which will be downgraded from a fully-fledged state into a union territory.

That change will give New Delhi far more political control over the restive region and its governments, including direct control of the local police, who will answer to New Delhi rather than a locally elected state government. The government also plans to hive off the high-altitude Ladakh region to form another separate union territory.

In anticipation of the outrage caused by the decision, Kashmir residents were put on lockdown early on Monday morning, barred from leaving their homes, and with internet, telephone and cable television services cut off.

Tens of thousands of extra troops and paramilitary police have also been dispatched to maintain order in the region, already one of the most heavily militarised in the world. Additional forces were being airlifted in on Monday by the Indian air force.

More than 20,000 Indian and foreign tourists were also evacuated from the region over the weekend, while schools and colleges have been ordered to close indefinitely.

The move was “a total betrayal of the trust the people of Jammu and Kashmir had reposed in India when the state acceded to it in 1947,” Mr Abdullah said before being sent to jail.

He added: “The decision will have far-reaching and dangerous consequences.”

Even as Kashmiris were confined to their homes, Bharatiya Janata party supporters expressed jubilation at news of the removal of special protections for Kashmir, which the Hindu nationalist party had long considered an impediment to the region’s full integration with India.

“Separate status led to separatism. No dynamic nation can allow this situation to continue,” Arun Jaitley, the finance minister in Mr Modi’s previous administration, tweeted. “A historical wrong has been undone today.”

But the government’s move is likely to face legal challenges from critics, who argue that Kashmir’s special protections cannot be scrapped by a mere executive order. Mr Abdullah said his Kashmirbased National Conference party was already prepared to challenge the presidential order, which he called “unilateral, illegal and unconstitutional”.

The ending of Jammu and Kashmir’s special rights and protections reopens the wounds of one of Indian history’s most dramatic episodes: the accession of the former princely state, with its Muslim-majority population, into Hindu-majority India, rather than Muslim-majority Pakistan at the end of British colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent.

When it joined India in 1947, the state’s Hindu ruler agreed with Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister, that Kashmir would maintain special rights to protect the local population from a potential influx of outsiders.

These rights were then enshrined in Article 370 of the constitution, which allowed the state government to reserve special privileges — including the right to buy land, hold government jobs and receive state welfare benefits — to those that it defined as permanent residents of the state.

In practice, it prohibited any outsiders from buying property in the region, a ban that the BJP believes has held back the state’s economic development, by deterring industrial investments.

A Pakistan foreign ministry official condemned the decision. “After what has happened in the Indian parliament, India has shut the door on peacefully resolving the Kashmir dispute.”

Kashmiris are also still deeply scarred from a decades-long separatist insurgency that was backed by Pakistan, and claimed nearly 45,000 lives, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Additional reporting by Stephanie Findlay and Jyotsna Singh in New Delhi and Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad