India: Exerting direct rule over Muslim Kashmir
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken a “decisive and bold” step in Jammu and Kashmir, said R.K. Arora and Vinay Kaura in the Economic Times (India). Modi’s government sent tens of thousands of troops to the restive Himalayan state and preemptively detained hundreds of Kashmiri leaders before announcing last week that it was revoking Article 370 of the Indian constitution. That article granted Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, significant political autonomy and barred nonKashmiris from taking land or jobs there. Jammu and Kashmir—home to about 12 million people, some 70 percent of whom are Muslim, and 30 percent Hindu—will now be downgraded to a union territory, effectively ruled directly by New Delhi. And its mountainous region of Ladakh—which has a population of 300,000, almost equally divided between Muslims and Buddhists—will be carved out and turned into a union territory. The new arrangement “makes strategic sense.” It fulfills a campaign promise of Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, and it will enable India to finally quash the Pakistan-backed Islamist separatist insurgency that has been simmering in Kashmir for decades.
The Kashmir problem has its roots in the British colonial era, said Salil Tripathi in India’s LiveMint.com. When Britain divided the subcontinent in 1947 into Hindu-majority India and Muslimmajority Pakistan, Pakistani militants tried to intimidate the independent kingdom of Kashmir into joining their nation. Kashmir’s maharaja asked India for military assistance, and India agreed, but only after “Kashmir signed an accession treaty.” Now Pakistan controls about a third of the region, and India the rest. The two countries have since fought three wars over Kashmir, and Indian security forces have committed numerous “grave human rights abuses” against pro-separatist Kashmiris, including mass rape and extrajudicial executions. Hindus have also been victims, said Deepti Misri and Mona Bhan in AlJazeera.com (Qatar). Islamist militants began a bloody rampage in 1989 that drove some 500,000 Kashmiri Hindus from the state. Those exiles are now cheering a possible return home. But non-Kashmiri Hindu nationalists are also celebrating, hopeful that Modi will launch a settler project designed “to transform India’s only Muslim-majority state into a Hindu-majority one.”
This is a betrayal of democracy, said Navnita Chadha Behera in The Hindu (India). Kashmiri Muslims have had their self-rule stripped from them “on legally shaky ground.” Jammu and Kashmir is now an “open-air prison,” with a curfew and no phone or internet access. The mosques were closed even on Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest days in Islam. After the curfew is lifted, Kashmiris will be subject to the whims of New Delhi, with “no space for dissent.” Prepare for “another intifada,” said Muhammad Amir Rana in Dawn (Pakistan). Kashmiris will resist, perhaps violently, and because Pakistan is “morally and politically bound to support the Kashmiris,” we will be drawn in. “Pakistan-India tensions could at any time turn into conventional warfare.”