Over Time and Then All at Once

On the second of August 2019, there was a sudden announcement — tourists and non-local workers in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir were ordered to evacuate the state due to a terrorist threat.¹ The same day, the Indian government mobilized 38,000 new troops in the Kashmir Valley. For a place that had witnessed both militant and state violence since the late 1980s, the sound of military boots was nothing new. But as the state went under a communications and media blackout over the next two days, local Kashmiris sensed that something was different. 

Map of Kashmir region, November 2019 (Wikimedia Commons).

The state government had already collapsed a few months before and President’s Rule (direct rule of a state by the central government) had been imposed.² Amid the flying rumors, Satyapal Malik, the governor at the time, reassured opposition leader Omar Abdullah that no plans to dilute the state’s autonomy were afoot.³ Yet, on the morning of August 5, 2019, the Indian government issued a presidential order announcing that Article 370 of the constitution would be inoperative henceforth. In plain terms, this meant that Kashmir’s special status as a legally autonomous state within the Indian Union was over.⁴

Not only were Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy taken away, but also their existence as a state. The state was partitioned into two centrally administered “union territories,” one comprising the region of Jammu and Kashmir, and eastern region of Ladakh. On the same day, nearly all prominent Kashmiri political leaders were put under house arrest and a curfew imposed.

A panoramic view of the high-altitude desert of Ladakh.

Outside the valley, however, many were celebrating.

India’s hyper-nationalist media went into overdrive, cheering Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government for their bold move. They were joined by a significant number of their supporters in the streets and on social media, excited by the prospects of being able to purchase land in the former state and marry “gori” (fair-skinned) Kashmiri women.⁵ In his speeches, Modi justified the government’s move and argued that Article 370 was responsible for both the lack of development and the prevalence of terrorism in the state. Modi also promised that Kashmir’s statehood could be restored sometime in the future, once Jammu and Kashmir was free from terrorism and secessionism.⁶ In other words, the suspension of civil liberties was justified as a means to control a rebellious frontier by reframing their promised constitutional right into a “carrot” that needed to be earned.

The original “carrot” that was presented to Kashmiris however was Article 370 itself. In October 1947, the state had acceded to India on the condition that the will of the people would be ascertained once Pakistan-back invaders were expelled from the area. At the time, Nehru enjoyed friendly relations with Sheikh Abdullah, the most prominent political leader in the state and the head of its largest political party, the National Conference. Nehru and Abdullah’s close ties gave the Indian government some confidence in securing the consent of the populous and Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley. In the face of military and diplomatic stalemates, however, the state was de-facto partitioned between Indian and Pakistani-controlled areas. As a result, the three parties — India, Pakistan, and the National Conference — shifted their efforts towards securing the areas under their control and dithered on holding and honoring a plebiscite to determine Kashmir’s final status. Article 370 thus emerged as a compromise solution — Jammu and Kashmir would have special status within the Indian Union, but would be relatively autonomous in legal matters.⁷

A view of the resort town of Gulmarg in the winter.

The application of Article 370 was a mixed success. On the one hand, it allowed Sheikh Abdullah to carry out a bold land redistribution policy, under which a lot of Kashmiri peasants (the majority of whom were Muslims) became landowners. The autonomy provided by the article also meant that certain marginalized communities, including immigrants from West Bengal and members of the Valmiki caste, were barred from land ownership. Similarly, women from the state who married outsiders were barred from inheriting property, and progressive legal reform such as the decriminalization of homosexuality in India was not applicable within the state.⁸

Contrary to popular perceptions, this legal autonomy did not always translate into political agency. Successive presidential orders whittled down the range of legal autonomy provided under Article 370.⁹ From 1956 onwards, more than forty presidential orders were passed, which steadily increased the range of the central government’s responsibilities in the state, effectively eroding the state’s autonomy. Besides legal sophistry, there was also direct central government interference into the state’s politics. In 1953, Sheikh Abdullah, once a close ally of India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, faced charges of supporting secession at the behest of Pakistan. Later, in 1987, his son Farooq Abdullah won state elections that were rigged with the support of New Delhi. Despite a tumultuous equation with his father, Indian governments preferred him over the rising Muslim United Front, which they viewed as more dangerous. The message was clear — be on our side, and we will make things happen. The converse being — get too big for your boots like your father and you will be cut down to size. Abdullah’s rigged victory eroded whatever remaining legitimacy India enjoyed in the valley and subsequently gave rise to the armed militancy in the state which has continued since 1989.¹⁰

An army truck being towed on a road in Ladakh.

The growing militancy resulted in an increasing militarization of the Kashmir Valley by New Delhi. This led to numerous curbs on the civil liberties of the state’s people as well as grave human rights violations by the security apparatus, including extrajudicial killings, abductions, and sexual violence.¹¹ The cycle of violence also led to the expulsion of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley, as the minority community felt increasingly threatened by the religious overtones of the militancy.¹²

In the early 1990s, as militancy intensified in the valley, Hindu nationalism was on the rise in the rest of India. As the flag-bearer of hardline nationalism, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) advocated the end of Kashmir’s special status under the slogan of “one-nation, one-law.” The party viewed Article 370 as the root cause of terrorism, separatism, and the lack of economic development in Kashmir. To make their point further, in 1992, the BJP organized a flag-hoisting ceremony in the city of Srinagar’s Lal Chowk area. A photograph of the event shows a younger Narendra Modi struggling with the flagpole, surrounded by the party’s senior leadership at the time.¹³

The tantalizing colors of autumn in Kashmir.

During its first full-term government from 1999–2004, the restraint of coalition politics meant that the BJP paid mostly lip-service to the Article 370 issue. But in 2014 the party, under Modi’s leadership, secured a majority of seats in the national parliament for the first time. In a more surprising turn of events, in 2016 the BJP formed a coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir with the People’s Development Party (PDP), an unusual choice considering that the latter was often accused in right-wing discourse of being soft on separatism. Predictably, however, the alliance was an unstable one, and broke down in 2018 when PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti resigned as the Chief Minister.¹⁴

This was exactly the opportunity that the Modi government wanted — it used Mufti’s departure as a pretext to impose President’s Rule, which meant that it became constitutionally feasible to remove Article 370 with the consent of the state government, i.e., the central government appointed governor. Buoyed by an even greater victory in the 2019 national elections, this is precisely what the Modi government did on August 5th. Methodologically speaking, however, this was not much different from earlier erosions of Article 370 carried out by previous governments — it simply was the decisive nail in its coffin. What was genuinely surprising was the decision to erode Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood altogether.

In the two years since, it is unclear what has been achieved. In the union territory of Ladakh, an ecologically fragile region populated by Buddhists and Shia Muslims, the promised freedom from Srinagar has been replaced by fear of a more brazen control by the central government. Concerns about loss of identity, influx of outsiders, and environmental destruction abound as centrally-appointed bureaucrats have tried to impose neoliberal conceptions of development. Meanwhile in Kashmir, an atmosphere of normalized fear prevails as academics, journalists, and government employees avoid sharing their views over digital networks due to fears of being monitored and terminated from the workplace. Furthermore, local Kashmiris fear economic marginalization for two reasons. The first is that the loss of autonomy and statehood allowed outsiders, with greater resources, to compete with the locals. Secondly, there have been reports of the government deliberately damaging the rural economy in order to force Kashmiri youth to seek employment elsewhere. Locals argue that there is a political motive behind this — in 2016, rural Kashmir, with its relatively self-sustaining economy, was a hotbed of dissent against the state. Incentivizing the local youth to move out of the villages would be an effective way to neutralize the political strength of Kashmir’s rural areas.¹⁵

A boy praying in a monastery in Ladakh.

It is this marriage of state and capital that makes the past two years different from the previous seventy. Unlike previous years, when the state would use force or political manipulation to subdue dissent, the use of mass surveillance and economic precarity to discipline and depoliticize the population is more insidious. But the story goes beyond Kashmir — for similar notions of development and societal engineering are being applied elsewhere in India. From watering down privacy rights to the imposition of top-down developmental models on ecologically fragile areas, Kashmir is no longer the peripheral zone of exception, but rather the beta-version of what gets implemented in the mainland.

It is hard to miss the irony here. Many Indians celebrated the events of August 5, 2019, as the day Kashmir was “freed” from the ills of separatism and terrorism. What we probably failed to anticipate is that in freeing Kashmir, Indians might have colonized themselves. Or perhaps there is an even more frightening conclusion to all this — we knew what was going to happen to us, and we willfully went along.

All photos are by Parth Thakkar, a photographer based in Mumbai. His work can be accessed through his Instagram handle: @parth.thakkar10.

1. The state of Jammu and Kashmir included three territories under India’s control, namely, Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh. The Hindu-majority Jammu region occupied the southern portion of the state. The Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley (the most populous part of the state) is to the north of Jammu and has an alpine climate, while the Buddhist and Shia Muslim populated cold desert of Ladakh borders Tibet and Xinjiang. Pakistan controlled two regions of the state, namely Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) to the west, and Gilgit-Baltistan, which borders both Ladakh and the Kashmir Valley.
2. “President Rule J&K: After Governor’s Rule, President’s Rule Comes into Force in Jammu and Kashmir,” Economic Times, Dec. 20, 2018.
3. President’s Rule is a provision in India’s constitution whereby the union (central) government takes over the administration of a state due to exigent circumstances — political instability, collapse of law and order, war, or a natural calamity. The state is placed under the administration of the Governor, who is appointed by the central government.
4. India Department of Publication, The Gazette of India, August 5, 2019 (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 2019); “Article 370: India Strips Disputed Kashmir of Special Status,” BBC News, Aug. 5, 2019.
5. “‘Marry Fair Kashmiri Women Now’: BJP MLA after Article 370 Repeal,” Hindustan Times, Aug. 7, 2019.
6. Narendra Modi, “PM’s Address to the Nation,” Prime Minister’s Office, Aug. 8, 2019.
7. The parts of Jammu and Kashmir under Pakistan’s control were euphemistically rechristened as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (or Free Jammu and Kashmir). The region remains nominally autonomous, but is for all intents and purposes under the direct control of the Pakistani state, and most noticeably, its military.
8. A.G. Noorani, Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10–14. The then-state’s High Court, in a 2000 judgement, clarified that a woman does not lose her right to own land in Kashmir for marrying outside the state.
9. Noorani, Article 370, 10–14.
10. Praveen Donthi, “How Mufti Mohammad Sayeed Shaped the 1987 Elections in Kashmir,” The Caravan, March 22, 2016.
11. Cathy Scott-Clark, “The Mass Graves of Kashmir,” The Guardian, July 9, 2012.
12. As armed militancy arose in the Kashmir Valley after 1989, the region’s Hindu minority, known as Pandits, were subject to violence due to their perceived proximity to the Indian state as well as the majoritarian overtones of the separatist movement itself.
13. Kaveree Bamzai, “BJP Flag-Hoisting Ceremony in Srinagar Turns out to Be a Damp Squib, Militancy Gets a Boost,” India Today, Feb. 15, 1992.
14. Muzamil Jaleel and Basharat Masood, “BJP-PDP Alliance Break-up: Muscular Policy Won’t Work, J&K Not Enemy Territory, Says Mehbooba Mufti,” Indian Express, June 20, 2018.
15. Amit Julka, “Exceptional Laboratories: Kashmir, India and the Marriage of State and Capital — Asia Research Institute, NUS,” ARI Scope, Dec. 13, 2020.