#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA
India’s Kashmir clampdown continues four years after Article 370 abrogated
The 2019 move heralded a slew of policies by the ruling BJP government to tighten New Delhi’s grip over the disputed region.
The 2019 move heralded a slew of policies by the ruling BJP government to tighten New Delhi’s grip over the disputed region.
An Indian paramilitary trooper stands guard along a street in Srinagar
[File: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP]
Published On 5 Aug 2023
Saturday marks four years of India scrapping the special status of Indian-administered Kashmir, New Delhi’s most far-reaching move against the disputed region in seven decades.
The abrogation of Article 370 of India’s constitution that granted the region partial autonomy in 2019 heralded a slew of policies by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to tighten New Delhi’s grip over a region also claimed by its nuclear-armed neighbour, Pakistan.
Residents and critics slammed the move in India’s only Muslim-majority region as the BJP’s bid to impose “settler colonialism” aimed at changing its demography and land ownership patterns and depriving Kashmiris of their livelihoods.
Earlier this week, India’s Supreme Court began hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the BJP’s 2019 move.
But people in the valley say they have little hope anything will change.
Anxieties over land ownership
Article 370 barred outsiders from settling permanently or buying property in Indian-administered Kashmir.
However, a domicile law introduced in 2020 permits anyone who has lived in the region for 15 years or studied there for seven years to apply for a domicile certificate, entitling them to apply for land and jobs.
The policy proposes the provision of five marlas of land (.031 acres) and the construction of houses under the Prime Minister Housing Scheme-Rural – a government initiative to provide housing to the rural poor.
In another measure, the federal rural development ministry allocated a target of 199,550 new houses in the region for the financial year 2023-24 for people belonging to the economically weaker sections (EWS) and low-income groups in the region.
Kashmiri activists and politicians have raised suspicion over the schemes, accusing the government of a “deliberate ambiguity” over who the beneficiaries will be.
“[…] the wide discrepancy between figures for the landless and housing allocation raises suspicion. According to official figures, there were 19,047 landless people in the region in 2021,” said a report released on Thursday by the Forum for Human Rights in Jammu and Kashmir, a civil society group advocating for the rights of the people in the region.
“Presumably the allocation of 199,550 new houses … will cover urban migrants, including labourers, street vendors, and rickshaw pullers. According to the Jammu and Kashmir Housing Board, however, any citizen of India who migrated temporarily or permanently, for employment, education, or a ‘long-term tourist visit’, would be eligible to apply. If the affordable housing policy is implemented, it would lead to the inclusion of around a million people,” the report said.
Mehbooba Mufti, the former chief minister of the region, accused the government of “importing poverty and slums to the region under the pretext of providing housing to homeless individuals”.
“There is total disempowerment of the locals, whether it is in land or jobs,” Mufti told Al Jazeera.
‘The situation is bad’
A year before India scrapped the region’s autonomy, its elected legislative assembly headed by Mufti was dissolved in 2018.
Since then, the region is being ruled by the federal government through its hand-picked administrator as the regional pro-India political parties demand fresh elections.
Mufti accused the government of adopting policies aimed at “disempowering” the local residents and “being driven by a desire to increase their [BJP] vote bank, thus leading to a change in the demographic makeup”.
Mufti said the last four years were “full of surveillance and raids by investigative agencies”.
“Economically also, the situation is bad. Except for showcasing the so-called tourism, whether it’s the fruit industry or any other industry, they are killing it. With such surveillance, no one can express or talk,” she said.
But Altaf Thakur, spokesperson for the ruling BJP in Indian-administered Kashmir, claimed tourism is at an all-time high and for the first time, an international event such as a Group of 20 (G20) meeting on tourism took place in the region earlier this year.
“There is no strike, no stone pelting, no anti-national slogan is being raised. Kashmir is on the way to peace progress and prosperity,” he told Al Jazeera.
The government justifies its 2019 move by saying it ended a decades-long era of “stone-throwing protests”. The region’s administrative head Manoj Sinha says the BJP regime will establish peace in the region “rather than buy it”.
Crackdown on free media
Press freedom in Indian-administered Kashmir has seen an unprecedented crackdown since 2019.
Since last month, nearly a dozen journalists from the region writing for international publications have told Al Jazeera they received emails asking them to surrender their passports for being a “security threat to India”, or face action.
Three journalists from the region are currently jailed outside Indian-administered Kashmir under stringent laws, including the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
Security restrictions on reporting and travel have made the job of a journalist difficult. Many journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Sanna Irshad Mattoo, have been barred from travelling abroad.
“The freedom to report is increasingly getting restricted. For example, too many stories on human rights issues will inevitably bring allegations that you have an anti-national agenda,” a 31-year-old Kashmiri journalist told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity since he feared reprisal from the government.
“We have seen reporters facing summons, raids, detentions, no-fly-lists, and now passport seizures. So it automatically narrows down the scope of our reporting,” he said.
The journalist said conflating critical journalism with being anti-national hobbles the ability to gather information and report truthfully.
“No official wants to be seen as speaking to someone who is anti-national. It looks like journalism – unless it is devoted to praising the government or limiting criticism to potholes or lack of sanitation – is being criminalised.”
‘Break the Kashmiris’
At least 50 government employees in Indian-administered Kashmir have been terminated from their services since 2019 on vague charges of being a “threat” to the security of the state.
The law under which the termination was done allows the government to fire its employees without providing an explanation for it.
Meanwhile, unemployment in the region stands at 18 percent – nearly twice the national average – despite promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the government will “end the miseries of the youth”.
“Even if one protests over unemployment, it could be considered anti-national,” Muhammad Saqib, a 28-year-old engineering graduate, told Al Jazeera.
Mohamad Junaid, a Kashmiri anthropologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the United States, told Al Jazeera India has enforced a “blanket silence” in Indian-administered Kashmir.
“Order after arbitrary order is autocratically issued and implemented to disempower, dispossess and break the Kashmiris,” he said.
“Not a single law passed in the last four years has had inputs from the Kashmiri population whose lives these laws are meant to radically alter.”
Published On 5 Aug 2023
Saturday marks four years of India scrapping the special status of Indian-administered Kashmir, New Delhi’s most far-reaching move against the disputed region in seven decades.
The abrogation of Article 370 of India’s constitution that granted the region partial autonomy in 2019 heralded a slew of policies by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to tighten New Delhi’s grip over a region also claimed by its nuclear-armed neighbour, Pakistan.
Residents and critics slammed the move in India’s only Muslim-majority region as the BJP’s bid to impose “settler colonialism” aimed at changing its demography and land ownership patterns and depriving Kashmiris of their livelihoods.
Earlier this week, India’s Supreme Court began hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the BJP’s 2019 move.
But people in the valley say they have little hope anything will change.
Anxieties over land ownership
Article 370 barred outsiders from settling permanently or buying property in Indian-administered Kashmir.
However, a domicile law introduced in 2020 permits anyone who has lived in the region for 15 years or studied there for seven years to apply for a domicile certificate, entitling them to apply for land and jobs.
The policy proposes the provision of five marlas of land (.031 acres) and the construction of houses under the Prime Minister Housing Scheme-Rural – a government initiative to provide housing to the rural poor.
In another measure, the federal rural development ministry allocated a target of 199,550 new houses in the region for the financial year 2023-24 for people belonging to the economically weaker sections (EWS) and low-income groups in the region.
Kashmiri activists and politicians have raised suspicion over the schemes, accusing the government of a “deliberate ambiguity” over who the beneficiaries will be.
“[…] the wide discrepancy between figures for the landless and housing allocation raises suspicion. According to official figures, there were 19,047 landless people in the region in 2021,” said a report released on Thursday by the Forum for Human Rights in Jammu and Kashmir, a civil society group advocating for the rights of the people in the region.
“Presumably the allocation of 199,550 new houses … will cover urban migrants, including labourers, street vendors, and rickshaw pullers. According to the Jammu and Kashmir Housing Board, however, any citizen of India who migrated temporarily or permanently, for employment, education, or a ‘long-term tourist visit’, would be eligible to apply. If the affordable housing policy is implemented, it would lead to the inclusion of around a million people,” the report said.
Mehbooba Mufti, the former chief minister of the region, accused the government of “importing poverty and slums to the region under the pretext of providing housing to homeless individuals”.
“There is total disempowerment of the locals, whether it is in land or jobs,” Mufti told Al Jazeera.
‘The situation is bad’
A year before India scrapped the region’s autonomy, its elected legislative assembly headed by Mufti was dissolved in 2018.
Since then, the region is being ruled by the federal government through its hand-picked administrator as the regional pro-India political parties demand fresh elections.
Mufti accused the government of adopting policies aimed at “disempowering” the local residents and “being driven by a desire to increase their [BJP] vote bank, thus leading to a change in the demographic makeup”.
Mufti said the last four years were “full of surveillance and raids by investigative agencies”.
“Economically also, the situation is bad. Except for showcasing the so-called tourism, whether it’s the fruit industry or any other industry, they are killing it. With such surveillance, no one can express or talk,” she said.
But Altaf Thakur, spokesperson for the ruling BJP in Indian-administered Kashmir, claimed tourism is at an all-time high and for the first time, an international event such as a Group of 20 (G20) meeting on tourism took place in the region earlier this year.
“There is no strike, no stone pelting, no anti-national slogan is being raised. Kashmir is on the way to peace progress and prosperity,” he told Al Jazeera.
The government justifies its 2019 move by saying it ended a decades-long era of “stone-throwing protests”. The region’s administrative head Manoj Sinha says the BJP regime will establish peace in the region “rather than buy it”.
Crackdown on free media
Press freedom in Indian-administered Kashmir has seen an unprecedented crackdown since 2019.
Since last month, nearly a dozen journalists from the region writing for international publications have told Al Jazeera they received emails asking them to surrender their passports for being a “security threat to India”, or face action.
Three journalists from the region are currently jailed outside Indian-administered Kashmir under stringent laws, including the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
Security restrictions on reporting and travel have made the job of a journalist difficult. Many journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Sanna Irshad Mattoo, have been barred from travelling abroad.
“The freedom to report is increasingly getting restricted. For example, too many stories on human rights issues will inevitably bring allegations that you have an anti-national agenda,” a 31-year-old Kashmiri journalist told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity since he feared reprisal from the government.
“We have seen reporters facing summons, raids, detentions, no-fly-lists, and now passport seizures. So it automatically narrows down the scope of our reporting,” he said.
The journalist said conflating critical journalism with being anti-national hobbles the ability to gather information and report truthfully.
“No official wants to be seen as speaking to someone who is anti-national. It looks like journalism – unless it is devoted to praising the government or limiting criticism to potholes or lack of sanitation – is being criminalised.”
‘Break the Kashmiris’
At least 50 government employees in Indian-administered Kashmir have been terminated from their services since 2019 on vague charges of being a “threat” to the security of the state.
The law under which the termination was done allows the government to fire its employees without providing an explanation for it.
Meanwhile, unemployment in the region stands at 18 percent – nearly twice the national average – despite promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the government will “end the miseries of the youth”.
“Even if one protests over unemployment, it could be considered anti-national,” Muhammad Saqib, a 28-year-old engineering graduate, told Al Jazeera.
Mohamad Junaid, a Kashmiri anthropologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the United States, told Al Jazeera India has enforced a “blanket silence” in Indian-administered Kashmir.
“Order after arbitrary order is autocratically issued and implemented to disempower, dispossess and break the Kashmiris,” he said.
“Not a single law passed in the last four years has had inputs from the Kashmiri population whose lives these laws are meant to radically alter.”
AL JAZEERA
Durdana Najam
August 05, 2023
The writer is a public policy analyst based in Lahore. She tweets @durdananajam
Trump’s time in Washington is marked with three important decisions.
The first decision relates to Afghanistan, where the US had been engaged in one of the longest wars in history. Twenty years of mostly macabre presence did little to persuade the Afghans to shelf their traditional tribal warfare scheme of things in the national interest. The Afghan Taliban refused to comply with nothing less than the US exit from their country. Trump agreed to the quest with an argument that it was for the region to take care of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan and not a country that resided thousands of miles away.
The second decision relates to Israel. Washington recognised Jerusalem — a disputed territory between the Jews and the Palestinians — as Israel’s capital, upending seven decades of the American foreign policy. It coincided with the US-propelled decisions of the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco to recognise Israel as a part of the Middle East.
The third decision relates to the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act 2019. The law abrogated Article 370 and brought Kashmir under the direct control of India. The decision led to one of the longest lockdowns in Kashmir history, exacerbated by the Covid-19 lockdown.
All these decisions have had implications for regional and global peace and stability.
Ever since the annexation of Kashmir with India and the hasty, unprepared and unplanned exit of the Americans from Afghanistan, terrorism has returned to the Pak-Afghan borders with the ramification of spreading its wings farther into India and other neighbouring countries. The indifference exhibited by the international establishment is reminiscent of the hasty departure of the US from Afghanistan in 1989 that eventually led to international terrorism culminating in the felling of the twin towers and the attack on the Pentagon —the symbols of capitalism and the US defence power.
There is a similarity between the issue of Kashmir and Israel.
Under a senseless partition plan and an arrangement that backed Nehru’s proposal rather than that of the ailing Jinnah, Kashmir, the largest Muslim area aligned with two borders with Pakistan, was given to India.
The state of Israel is a story of usurpation. The Balfour agreement carved a place for the wandering Jews in Palestine without the latter’s consent. Once the French and the British left the Middle East and South East Asia, the conundrum built in the geographical demarcation became nastier. Not that peace is not welcomed; however, peace brokered against the will of the natives has a short shelf life.
Today is the fourth anniversary of India’s forced annexation of Kashmir — the application of force does not stop at that. It was the beginning of the never-ending cycle of BJP-led reforms, targeted at altering the demographics of Kashmir to axe the premise on which the issue of Kashmir — a Muslim-majority state — rests. One after another, the Kashmiri leadership has been pushed to the wall and incarcerated. The latest in the series was an attempt to execute Yasin Malik by commuting his life imprisonment into death sentence.
Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, which measures the health of democracies based on a comprehensive database, has categorised India as an “electoral autocracy” along with El Salvador, Turkey and Hungary and predicts India’s democracy falling to a new low.
It began with the election of Modi as India’s prime minister, now in his ninth year of rule. India has changed manifold under his rule. What once was a secular, socialist republic has transformed into a theocratic Hindu state, leaning on police and the militarised RSS to prosecute people on the other side of the ideological line.
On the frontline are Muslims. Despite evidence declaring Modi the insinuator of the Gujarat program that killed almost 2,000 Muslims, the so-called human rights champions in the West have failed to implicate him. BBC did try to do that through a documentary, but like many other international media and human rights organisations like Amnesty, the BBC office in Delhi was ransacked. Before becoming the prime minister, Modi was banned from entering the US. Now he is its geo-economic poster boy.
Modi is the darling of India’s business community. The essence of this love affair is apparent from Oxfam’s 2023 report, which shows that the top 1 per cent of India’s population owns more than 40 per cent of total wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent (700 million people) has around 3 per cent of total wealth. That makes India, according to Indian author Arundhati Roy, “a very rich country of very poor people”.
Instead of bringing actual reforms, the BJP government has built a false narrative about peace in Kashmir. The decision to hold G20 environmental meeting in Jammu and Kashmir was taken to prove that the valley and its adjutant areas were safe for tourists. However, deploying India’s elite National Security Guard, including its counter-drone unit and marine commandos, to help police and paramilitary forces secure the event venues said it all. China and Saudi Arabia refused to attend the huddle, with the former questioning India’s right to hold such an event in disputed territory.
According to the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, the entire valley has been turned into a Guantánamo Bay prison.
Recently the BJP allowed the Shia community, for the first time in 30 years, to take out processions on the 10th Muharram. The permission was welcomed with a pinch of salt because of the high security, creating a sense of awe and fear among the participants.
India’s insistence on painting the issue of Kashmir as an indigenous matter is a smokescreen that would eventually bust as more skirmishes like Manipur emerge, exposing India’s brutal handling of freedom of expression and right to live.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 5th, 2023.
The writer is a public policy analyst based in Lahore. She tweets @durdananajam
Trump’s time in Washington is marked with three important decisions.
The first decision relates to Afghanistan, where the US had been engaged in one of the longest wars in history. Twenty years of mostly macabre presence did little to persuade the Afghans to shelf their traditional tribal warfare scheme of things in the national interest. The Afghan Taliban refused to comply with nothing less than the US exit from their country. Trump agreed to the quest with an argument that it was for the region to take care of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan and not a country that resided thousands of miles away.
The second decision relates to Israel. Washington recognised Jerusalem — a disputed territory between the Jews and the Palestinians — as Israel’s capital, upending seven decades of the American foreign policy. It coincided with the US-propelled decisions of the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco to recognise Israel as a part of the Middle East.
The third decision relates to the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act 2019. The law abrogated Article 370 and brought Kashmir under the direct control of India. The decision led to one of the longest lockdowns in Kashmir history, exacerbated by the Covid-19 lockdown.
All these decisions have had implications for regional and global peace and stability.
Ever since the annexation of Kashmir with India and the hasty, unprepared and unplanned exit of the Americans from Afghanistan, terrorism has returned to the Pak-Afghan borders with the ramification of spreading its wings farther into India and other neighbouring countries. The indifference exhibited by the international establishment is reminiscent of the hasty departure of the US from Afghanistan in 1989 that eventually led to international terrorism culminating in the felling of the twin towers and the attack on the Pentagon —the symbols of capitalism and the US defence power.
There is a similarity between the issue of Kashmir and Israel.
Under a senseless partition plan and an arrangement that backed Nehru’s proposal rather than that of the ailing Jinnah, Kashmir, the largest Muslim area aligned with two borders with Pakistan, was given to India.
The state of Israel is a story of usurpation. The Balfour agreement carved a place for the wandering Jews in Palestine without the latter’s consent. Once the French and the British left the Middle East and South East Asia, the conundrum built in the geographical demarcation became nastier. Not that peace is not welcomed; however, peace brokered against the will of the natives has a short shelf life.
Today is the fourth anniversary of India’s forced annexation of Kashmir — the application of force does not stop at that. It was the beginning of the never-ending cycle of BJP-led reforms, targeted at altering the demographics of Kashmir to axe the premise on which the issue of Kashmir — a Muslim-majority state — rests. One after another, the Kashmiri leadership has been pushed to the wall and incarcerated. The latest in the series was an attempt to execute Yasin Malik by commuting his life imprisonment into death sentence.
Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, which measures the health of democracies based on a comprehensive database, has categorised India as an “electoral autocracy” along with El Salvador, Turkey and Hungary and predicts India’s democracy falling to a new low.
It began with the election of Modi as India’s prime minister, now in his ninth year of rule. India has changed manifold under his rule. What once was a secular, socialist republic has transformed into a theocratic Hindu state, leaning on police and the militarised RSS to prosecute people on the other side of the ideological line.
On the frontline are Muslims. Despite evidence declaring Modi the insinuator of the Gujarat program that killed almost 2,000 Muslims, the so-called human rights champions in the West have failed to implicate him. BBC did try to do that through a documentary, but like many other international media and human rights organisations like Amnesty, the BBC office in Delhi was ransacked. Before becoming the prime minister, Modi was banned from entering the US. Now he is its geo-economic poster boy.
Modi is the darling of India’s business community. The essence of this love affair is apparent from Oxfam’s 2023 report, which shows that the top 1 per cent of India’s population owns more than 40 per cent of total wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent (700 million people) has around 3 per cent of total wealth. That makes India, according to Indian author Arundhati Roy, “a very rich country of very poor people”.
Instead of bringing actual reforms, the BJP government has built a false narrative about peace in Kashmir. The decision to hold G20 environmental meeting in Jammu and Kashmir was taken to prove that the valley and its adjutant areas were safe for tourists. However, deploying India’s elite National Security Guard, including its counter-drone unit and marine commandos, to help police and paramilitary forces secure the event venues said it all. China and Saudi Arabia refused to attend the huddle, with the former questioning India’s right to hold such an event in disputed territory.
According to the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, the entire valley has been turned into a Guantánamo Bay prison.
Recently the BJP allowed the Shia community, for the first time in 30 years, to take out processions on the 10th Muharram. The permission was welcomed with a pinch of salt because of the high security, creating a sense of awe and fear among the participants.
India’s insistence on painting the issue of Kashmir as an indigenous matter is a smokescreen that would eventually bust as more skirmishes like Manipur emerge, exposing India’s brutal handling of freedom of expression and right to live.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 5th, 2023.
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