Five Years After the Abrogation of Its Autonomy – The Diplomat

On August 5, 2019, the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the abrogation of Article 370, which had provided the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with a measure of autonomy, and Article 35A, which conferred special property rights on domiciled residents of the state. Besides, Jammu and Kashmir was split into two union territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh – and brought under New Delhi’s direct rule.

For decades, the abrogation of Article 370 has been a key item on the agenda of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Hindu nationalists have long argued that this constitutional provision prevented J&K from becoming a fully integrated part of the Indian union, kept separatist aspirations alive, and stoked militancy and terrorism. “Article 370 and 35A have given nothing but secessionism, terrorism, nepotism and widespread corruption on a large scale to Jammu Kashmir,” Modi said on August 8, 2019, in an address to the nation, justifying his government’s decision.

The decision to scrap J&K’s autonomy evoked different responses in the Jammu and Kashmir regions. The Kashmir Valley was opposed to New Delhi’s unilateral decision, and protests erupted.

To prevent the mobilization of mass protests, the government put dozens of Kashmir’s political leaders under house arrest in the days preceding the announcement of the decision and in the months that followed, thousands of political activists and journalists were arbitrarily arrested. Internet was shut down for months on end and public gatherings were banned.

The response south of the Pir Panjal mountains, in Jammu, was different. The region, which has long supported the BJP’s mission of revoking Article 370, erupted in celebrations.

Explaining the celebratory mood in the Jammu region, Zafar Choudhary, a Jammu-based political commentator and founding editor-in-chief of the J&K-focused news portal The Dispatch, said that Jammu “has felt discriminated against by the Kashmiri political elite for decades. Although the Jammu Praja Parishad agitation of the early 1950s, which contributed to the ideological relevance of the Bhartiya Jana Sangh (the BJP’s forerunner), subsided following the dismissal and detention of Sheikh Abdullah, then J&K’s prime minister, Jammu continued to seethe in anger.”

The feeling of being discriminated against persisted. Consequently, when the Modi government revoked J&K’s autonomy and made it a union territory, Jammuites saw it as a step towards correction of the power imbalance between the Jammu and Kashmir regions. It was seen as paving the way for “decisive disempowerment of Kashmir. Therefore, jubilation in Jammu in 2019 was natural,” Choudhary said.

Spreading Militancy

Following the abrogation of Article 370, the Modi government claimed that the move would deal a blow to Kashmiri separatism. As a fully integral part of India, Indian laws and rules would apply to J&K and its governance would improve. With improved security and non-Kashmiris able to own land in J&K, investment would pour in, boosting the economy and opening up job opportunities. This, in turn, would lead to youth taking up jobs rather than picking up guns to fight the Indian state.

However, five years after the Modi government scrapped J&K’s autonomy, few of these promises have even approached fulfillment.

With regard to the security situation in the Kashmir valley, the threat of militancy is “more or less under control,” Srinagar-based journalist Sawfat Zargar told The Diplomat. In post-August 2019 Kashmir, “there are no hartals, shutdowns, or stone-pelting demonstrations.” The number of militant attacks too has fallen in the valley, he added.

Indeed, according to data cited by The Hindu, there were 126, 103, and 29 militant attacks in Kashmir in 2021, 2022, and 2023, respectively. This figure dropped to just five between January and July of this year.

However, the decline in militant attacks in Kashmir has been accompanied by an increase in attacks in the Jammu region, which was declared militancy-free in the early 2000s.

“As security forces began achieving dominance over militants in Kashmir valley,” Choudhary said, “the Jammu region faced some high profile, never-seen-before terror attacks, mainly targeting security forces.” Forty percent of the security forces killed in militant attacks in J&K in recent years were in the Jammu region.

So, what explains the shift in militants’ focus from Kashmir to Jammu? Some have attributed this to the success of the government’s heightened counter-terrorism operations in Kashmir since 2019. “Terrorists shifting focus from Kashmir to [Jammu] is [an] indication that they are under pressure in the Valley,” Jitendra Singh, BJP member of parliament representing Udhampur constituency in Jammu told reporters on June 12. “The way they are being pressurised [by security forces] in Kashmir, they were compelled to shift their focus [to Jammu] but they will not succeed here,” he said.

Others believe that this is part of the strategy of militants to fight the Indian security forces in a geographic terrain that favors them. The Jammu region is mountainous and thickly forested. The geographic terrain provides “excellent cover for militants operating here. They can survive for months on end without being detected,” a retired army officer, who participated in counter-insurgency operations in Jammu’s Doda district in the late 2000s, told The Diplomat. Search operations in Jammu are a “nightmare,” he said, recalling the long treks over several days that security personnel have to undertake to reach militant hideouts.

Zargar observed that militants are now moving deeper into southern Jammu and staging attacks in areas considered pro-BJP bastions.

Given Jammu’s demography – unlike the predominantly Muslim Kashmir valley, Jammu’s population is a religious and ethnic mosaic comprising Hindus, Muslims, Gujjars and Bakarwals among others – an attack has the potential to set off communal violence.

According to former J&K Police Chief S.P. Vaid, those carrying out attacks in Jammu are “not ordinary militants. They are highly professional and well-trained… They are Afghan war veterans and they are being pushed into J&K [by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] to carry out terror attacks and disturb peace in the region.” They are well equipped and “are using U.S.-made M-4 rifle and Chinese armor-piercing bullets,” Vaid added, describing the situation in the union territory as alarming.

Thus while militant attacks in Kashmir may have declined since 2019, militancy appears to have expanded, even ballooned into the Jammu region. And security forces are up against a far more formidable challenge from battle-hardened militants operating there.

Soaring Unemployment

On the economic front too, the Modi government’s promises to create jobs and attract investment in J&K are yet to materialize. Unemployment in the union territory stands at 26.6 percent compared to the national average of 6.1 percent.

There have been many announcements of schemes and plans to attract investment but not much has changed on the ground, Zargar said, arguing that construction of flyovers and cobbled streets or beautification of a stretch of road in Srinagar and improved street lighting cannot be called “development.”

A post-2019 achievement that the Modi government has been trumpeting is the boom in the tourism sector. India’s junior Minister for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told parliament recently that the sector “has recorded an annual average growth rate of 15.13 percent during the last three years.” Over 10 million tourists are said to have visited J&K in the first six months of this year.

However, a boom in tourism will not have a major impact on J&K’s economy, as it contributes to only 7-8 percent of the state’s GDP, Zargar said. He added that agriculture and horticulture, the mainstays of J&K’s economy, are floundering. J&K’s apple industry has been in deep trouble over the past five years, Zargar said, as India is importing cheaper apples from Afghanistan and these are flooding the Indian market.

Fatigue and Hopelessness

Over the past five years, the Indian state has ridden rough-shod over the rights of Kashmiris. Several hundreds of people have been arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), an anti-terror law, for trivial reasons, and the Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law that empowers the state to detain a person without trial for two years. Between 2020 and 2022, 947 cases were registered under the UAPA in J&K. This made up 36 percent of all UAPA cases registered across India, according to official data. Besides, the courts have been “more or less reluctant to give bail in these cases as the state has criminalized any kind or semblance of resistance or reaction to state policies,” Zargar said.

“This has had a chilling effect on journalists as well as ordinary people,” a professor at Kashmir University told The Diplomat on condition of anonymity. “People prefer to remain silent. But they are seething with anger against the Indian state but particularly against the BJP.”

Zargar pointed out that over the past five years, almost daily “some order or the other that disempowers Kashmiris” is issued by the government. If in the past an unpopular law was enacted or a person was forcibly disappeared or killed in custody, it would trigger protests, stone-peltings, and shutdowns. That has now stopped. “Nowadays, only the mainstream politicians react to such events. So, we hear their rhetoric but the people are not voicing their opinions or concerns,” he said.

The mood is one of “fatigue and hopelessness,” Zargar said, adding that Kashmiri Muslims feel that “the current dispensation is hellbent on disempowering them and their Kashmiri Muslim identity.” They fear that like Indian Muslims, they too have been marginalized and silenced by the Modi government.

In Jammu too, there is disappointment. Over the past five years, the hopes of Jammuites have been dashed. The initial years after the 2019 decision, “were of excitement,” Choudhary recalls. However, “over time, the perceived disempowerment of Kashmir didn’t translate into any special empowerment of Jammu. There is nothing even in symbolism to showcase Jammu’s gain. However, Kashmir is back in prominence in every manner, including development initiatives and political attention. Jammu looks angry once again.”

Way Forward

In December 2023, the Supreme Court of India upheld the Modi government’s decision to abrogate J&K’s autonomy. It gave its stamp of approval to the repeal of Article 370, and declared the unilateral decision as “constitutionally valid.”

In an article published in The Hindu after the apex court verdict, Modi said: “I have always wanted to work to alleviate the suffering of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.” Articles 370 and 35(A) “were like major obstacles.”

These “obstacles” have been removed. However, the people’s suffering has not waned. Rather, the government’s actions have deepened some of their problems.

While delivering the verdict, the apex court mandated the holding of assembly elections in J&K by September 2024. One of the judges of the five-member bench recommended the setting up of an “impartial Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to investigate human rights violations by state and non-state actors in J&K since the 1980s.

Will Modi use the fifth anniversary of the repeal of Article 370 to announce the restoration of J&K’s statehood and a firm voting schedule for free and fair assembly elections? This would be a first step, albeit a small and long overdue one, to give the people of J&K the power to rule themselves.

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from The Novum Times