INDIA

J&K: Directionless Flailing

A decade ago, Harvard economist Lant Pritchett described India as a “flailing state”, and the present regime’s actions in the wake of the Pulwama attack appear geared to spectacularly validate this assessment. In overnight raids, some 130 persons, principally from the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu & Kashmir, including its chief, Abdul Hamid Fayaz, as well as Hurriyat leader and one-time terrorist of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Yasin Malik, have been arrested in the intervening night of February 22 and 23.

While details of the arrests are still unavailable, it is unambiguously the case that those who have been identified are all committed to the separatist-Islamist extremist agenda and ideology. Malik, moreover, should have been in jail decades ago for his role in numberless deaths inflicted by the JKLF under his leadership, including the murder of four Indian Air Force personnel and another two women in 1990. Nearly three decades after the chargesheet was filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation, naming Malik and a number of other prominent JKLF cadres, the case has gone nowhere, and the current regime has done nothing to fast track proceedings.

Indeed, a number of those arrested should long have been in jail for fomenting hatred and violence, as well as for financing terrorism. But these are not the charges on which they have been picked up. Instead, what we have is a ‘crackdown’ and the night-time knocking on the door that can only erode India's growing legitimacy in the global debate on Pakistan-backed terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The current rash of arrests will be seen as ‘political detentions’, in the absence of clear and evidence backed action for terrorist finance, incitement and other specific offences, and will add an undeserved aura of sacrifice and martyrdom to those who have been picked up by the Security Forces, and will easily be twisted by India’s adversaries as acts of indiscriminate overreaction and repression, even as they feed the sense of victimhood within the Valley. It is significant that, in 2017 and 2018, the National Investigation Agency had carried out several arrests (also described in the media as a ‘crackdown’) relating to specific charges of terrorist funding, but there was no significant reaction by political leaders or in the street. Condemnation of the current spate of arrests has, however, been enveloping in the Valley.

Like much of what has followed the Pulwama outrage, the mass arrests are weakness masquerading as strength. Worse, in an environment of growing mutual distrust and of collective vilification directed against the Kashmiris, conspiracy theories are now rife in the Valley, that the arrests and significant augmentation of Force (a 100 companies of Central Paramilitary Forces have been deployed, adding to the already massive presence of Forces in the Valley) is a prelude to some intended mischief by the Centre, particularly with a view to scrapping Article 35A. The Supreme Court will be hearing a case in connection with 35A on Monday, February 25, 2019.

Worse, targeted low grade violence directed by ‘nationalist’ vigilantes against the Kashmiris in other States, largely with no determined state response, has forced thousands to abandon their colleges, universities and jobs across the country, to flee back to the Valley in fear. While there are some heartening stories regarding the support these distraught victims of communal polarisation have received from individuals and some organisations – most prominently Sikh groups in the Punjab – there was no evidence of any strong steps by the Centre to prevent such excesses, or to ensure effective protection for Kashmiris wherever they were. Eventually, it was necessary for the Supreme Court to step in and order the States to protect Kashmiris, as well as to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs to reiterate its earlier advisories to all states to ensure the protection of life and properties of people of Kashmiri origin.

The current spree of arrests in Kashmir are mistimed, misconceived and will certainly prove counter-productive. They are part of a continuous process of regression in Jammu & Kashmir that is intended to project the optics of a ‘strong state’, but that is, along with rising jingoism, hyper-nationalism and the drumming up of the threat of war and military action, no more than a desperate effort to save face in the absence of a considered and sage strategy of response.

Ajai Sahni
Publisher & Editor, Second Sight