India’s Modi meets with Kashmiris

SRINAGAR, India — India’s prime minister held a crucial meeting with pro-India politicians from disputed Kashmir on Thursday for the first time since New Delhi stripped the region’s semi-autonomy and jailed many leaders in a crackdown.

No major decision was announced after the meeting, as many Kashmiri leaders said they reiterated their demand that New Delhi reverse its 2019 changes.

Experts say the meeting was meant to ward off mounting criticism at home and abroad after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in August 2019 downgraded the region’s status, split it into two federal territories — Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir — and removed inherited protections on land and jobs for the local population.

Since then, Indian authorities have imposed a slew of administrative changes through new laws, often drafted by bureaucrats, that triggered resentment and anger as many likened the moves to the beginning of settler colonialism. Modi has called the changes overdue and necessary to foster economic development and fully integrate Kashmir with India.

Muslim-majority Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, which both claim it in its entirety. Rebels have been fighting against Indian rule since 1989. Most Muslim Kashmiris support the rebel goal that the territory be united either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

Modi chaired the meeting in New Delhi attended by the Himalayan region’s 14 political leaders. India’s powerful home minister, Amit Shah, and New Delhi’s administrator in the region, Manoj Sinha, also attended.

Among those invited were Kashmir’s former three top elected officials: Farooq Abdullah, his son Omar Abdullah, and Mehbooba Mufti, who was a regional coalition partner of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party for nearly two years after the 2016 state elections.

Despite being pro-India and seen by many in Kashmir as New Delhi’s collaborators, Shah last year labeled them a “gang,” while some others called them “anti-national elements.” Some senior ruling party leaders also dubbed them political untouchables who were rendered redundant by the 2019 decision.

The three were among thousands arrested and held for months in 2019. They have criticized India’s policies in Kashmir and formed an alliance with four other parties to fight them, calling them “spitefully shortsighted and unconstitutional.”

The alliance spokesman, Yousuf Tarigami, told reporters after the meeting that they did not get any concrete assurances from Modi and Shah, although they “heard our concerns, demands and aspirations.”