Indian Prime Minister Modi is attempting a bold political stroke intended to extinguish the spirit of Kashmir’s independence and is utilizing some strategies that might strike the American observer as being more than a little familiar:
Internally, Modi’s bold re-designation of Kashmir as a union territory with a legislature is a dream fulfilled for Indian nationalistic sentiment which never accepted the compromise provisions in the Indian Constitution under Articles 370 and 35A, wherein Muslim-majority Kashmir had been allowed a parallel Constitution with a flag of its own. State governments in Kashmir had powers over law enforcement, residence and property rights. Central laws had no validity in Kashmir unless the local legislature approved them.
In effect, the autonomous status turned Kashmir into a ghetto with a mentality of uniqueness and distinctness from the rest of India. It strengthened the nearly seven million Kashmiri Muslims’ feeling that they are not Indians but a different nationality who deserve to keep Indians out of their paradisiacal enclave except as visiting tourists….
Over time, the halfway house existence of Kashmir as a state within India and yet a nation that does not emotionally belong to India failed to meet both India’s objectives and Kashmiri Muslims’ aspirations. Waves of anti-India uprisings and insurgencies, supported from across the border by Pakistan, kept Kashmir burning. Autonomy had become a slippery slope for separatism, jihadist extremism and alienation of Kashmiri Muslims from the rest of India.
Modi’s bet is that by corralling Kashmir under tighter central government control, he will marginalise the secessionist politicians there, open Kashmir up for the return of Hindu Kashmiri minorities who had been ethnically cleansed by jihadists in the late 1980s, and alter the demographic mix in Kashmir through settlement of Indians of all religious and ethnic backgrounds.
Since autonomy backfired, Modi is saying ‘enough with appeasement’ and aiming for assimilation and complete integration of Kashmir. Demographically, the idea is to dissolve Kashmiri separatism in a sea of Indian nationalism through the intermixing of populations, blunting the sharp edge of separatism that comes from lack of ethnic heterogeneity in the Kashmir Valley, where 97 percent of the population is Muslim…. Modi’s determined push for total absorption of Indian Kashmir into India proper presents an existential challenge to the long-entrenched Pakistani strategy of fanning alienation of Kashmiri Muslims against India. If Kashmiri Muslims are reorganised and no longer grouped together as an exclusive ethnic entity, Pakistan will find it a lot harder to foment the flame of self-determination.
Modi is redefining the very meaning and identity of ‘self’ in Kashmir, a process that will take years and decades, but whose endpoint will be dilution of pro-independence and pro-Pakistan affiliations in the reshuffled Kashmiri society of the future. Kashmiri Muslims may become further alienated from India as a result of this makeover, but Modi is calculating that, in years to come, they will no longer be numerically so dominant as to stymie Indian sovereignty.
Demographically dissolving a nation through the intermixing of populations and ethnic heterogeniety just sounds so very… 1965?
Anyhow, this strategy will almost certainly lead to war in Kashmir. And elsewhere.