ezra klein
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show.
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Hey, it is Ezra. Im thrilled today to have this fantastic conversation from my colleague at Times Opinion, the co-host of Matter of Opinion, our cousin podcast, Lydia Polgreen, on one of the other foreign affairs stories weve wanted to cover more and that deserves a lot of attention, which is rising illiberalism in India.
15 years ago, I moved to New Delhi as a correspondent for The New York Times. It was a heady moment. After years of uncertain growth, the country seemed primed for a kind of rapid economic expansion that could vault its billion-plus people out of poverty, just as China had. But unlike China, India was a boisterous beacon of democracy, secularism, and freedom. India today has fulfilled a lot of the promises I heard when I was there.
It became the worlds most populous country this year. According to the World Bank, Indias economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. The country even hosted the G20 in September.
At the same time, theres been a clear erosion of democracy. The state has stoked violence against religious minorities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his administration have silenced both critics and independent institutions. And Indian government officials have been linked to two assassination plots against Sikh activists in Canada and the United States, a pretty stunning diplomatic scandal that puts new stress on Indias relationship with the West. So looking back in 2023, its clear that India has risen, but not quite in the way we necessarily expected.
So I asked Pratap Bhanu Mehta to walk me through what has happened to Indian democracy and what it means for the rest of the world. Mehta is a professor at Princeton University. He has written widely on political theory and is the author of The Burden of Democracy. He has a regular column at the Indian Express, where he makes sense of Indian and global affairs.
We talked back in early October, but I think his insights have only become more relevant. As always, you can email the ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Heres Pratap Bhanu Mehta.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, wonderful to be here with you.
Thank you very much, and its wonderful to see you as well.
So its been a while. I lived in Delhi from 2009 to 2013. And in that time, you were really an indispensable guide for me in trying to understand the extraordinary place that is India. Im just curious. Hows life for you in India these days?
Well, theres never a dull moment in India, thats for sure. You know, its a clich about India that you always experience India as a paradox. And I think the paradox of this moment is clearly Indias political significance, economic significance, cultural creativity is kind of as vibrant as ever. On the other hand, the signs for Indian democracy are looking very ominous indeed. I coedited a big Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. I have to say now, when I go to class, I say I cannot tell you what the Constitution of India is.
I cannot tell you if you go with a habeas corpus case to the Supreme Court whether it will be heard. I cannot tell you when opposition politicians are being targeted by the government for tax reasons, they will actually get the same fair relief from the Supreme Court. So there is a sense of dread about where this democracy is heading, and I think we have to register both of those kind of emotions at the same time.
Were going to talk a lot about democracy. Its a sort of line that we all hear, India is the worlds largest democracy. Its been a democracy almost without interruption since its independence. That sort of uniqueness and boldness of the experiment I mean, you cannot visit India and not be profoundly moved by what is being attempted. I mean, Im wary of exceptionalism, but I think never in human history has a more ambitious experiment in coexistence through government by common consent been attempted.
So maybe a good place to start is just to ground us in some history. Tell me a little bit about the history of India as a democracy, and what India has had to learn from being the worlds largest democracy.
Look, I mean, Indian elections were probably more important to us than religions. And I think they still remain. I mean, theres a certain kind of vibrancy, a sense of diversity, dealing with difference. And I think Indias nationalist movements greatness was that it actually recognized that the only way you could hold India together was if it was a product of widespread consensus across religions, across communities, across castes, across classes.
I think that was, in a sense, I think its instinctive grasp of what democracy is. So one story you can tell about Indian democracy is that a lot of the constituent parts or groups in society dont actually have to be democratic. I mean, they can be internally sometimes quite intolerant. They can be quite conservative. And yet, the balance of social power amongst groups, amongst castes, regions, is such that no single group or no single identity can hope to dominate without generating some kind of resistance and backlash.
And we always used to say that Indias politics was fated to a certain kind of centrism precisely for this reason, that there wasnt going to ever be a single identity force that could command sufficient power to be able to govern India as a whole. In fact, the joke used to be that any party that governed India would have to look like the Congress Party, or maybe a better version of the Congress Party.
The Congress Party was the party that was started by Mahatma Gandhi. And just give us a little bit of the history of the Congress party.
Well, it was actually started by officially, its founder is A.O. Hume. But its Mahatma Gandhi that actually gave the party its modern form. He converted that party into a mass movement, and really, of extraordinary proportions. What he managed to do, I think quite significantly, was not just forge a mass movement, but create an imagination of modern India where each of its constituent parts would find its fullest expression.
So for example, he was a political genius. Each state had a linguistic unit which then became the basis for how India dealt with the language question later on. We created this brilliant compromise that there would be an official link language, English. Aspirationally, Hindi as a kind of national language, but each state would be able to use their own language, so Tamil, Bengali, so on and so forth, you know, Malayalam.
And it avoided the fate of so many post-colonial countries that experienced civil wars or got divided on the basis of language. And I think that really was an extraordinary political innovation. It was an anticolonial movement, but it was an enormously cosmopolitan movement in its aspirations, founded in a much more authentic conception of rights, free expression, recognizing individuality and dignity, and a pursuit of politics through nonviolent means, which is not an insignificant contribution in the context of so many postcolonial movements.
I mean, India was one of the few nationalist movements that avoided both the extremes of left violence and the extremes of right violence. And I think thats Gandhis extraordinary contribution. I think one of the remarkable things about the Indian nationalist movement, when I compare it to other nationalist movements, is it is a movement for self-determination, but it has very little resentment against the idea of the west.
In fact, I sometimes feel that our post-colonial moment now carries much more of a sense of resentment than our anticolonial nationalist movement did.
Its interesting, because for me as a correspondent, I moved to India from West Africa. I had been raised in East Africa, and had spent my childhood in West Africa as well, so I had this deep sense of India as this kind of beacon of what a large, polyglot, multireligious, multiethnic nation could be. And its worth just dwelling for a moment on the violence and difficulty of Indias birth. It was born out of the partition of the British Raj. It was a colony of Britain at the time.
Can you just talk a little bit about how these ideas came out of that experience of the horrors of partition?
Im glad you raised the issue of partition, which is I think one of the most decisive events in modern South Asian I think history. India always thought it could be the exception to the European experience. The process of the formation of nation states everywhere, including in Europe and North America, has been an extraordinarily violent, exclusionary, and majoritarian movement. There is almost no exception to this, I think.
And the aspiration of the nationalist movement was that, look, can we forge a new kind of identity that doesnt repeat the mistakes of Europe? Now, partition was the first shock to this aspiration, because in some senses partition was premised on something like the European idea of a nation state, there must be some single identity that actually binds the nation. In the case for the demand for Pakistan, its the idea of a kind of Muslim homeland in South Asia.
And so in that sense, Pakistan actually came as a deep shock to that nationalist project. I mean, that image of Gandhi in a sense grieving at independence because he saw Indias independence as a failure. It was born out of violence. He saw it as a rebuke to that extraordinary project that the nationalist movement had tried to create. And it would have been very easy for Indias founders to have said, look, India has been already divided on religious grounds. Let us complete the task of partition, declare India a Hindu state.
And yes, Muslims can live here. But we should be absolutely, no doubt, that the logic of partition is actually the creation of a Hindu state in India.
And Muslims are the largest minority, but theyre very significant, right? I mean, what is the percentage proportion between Hindus and Muslims in India?
Its a very sizable minority. Youre looking at about 200 million people. And I think what is remarkable is that despite partition, they actually, I think, continued with that project of trying to create an Indian exceptionalism. I think Jawaharlal Nehru he was the Indias first prime minister, and really, in some sense, the founder of Indias democracy in some ways.
I think the two deep ideas that he had, if you read his books like Discovery of India and stuff so one was this idea of India as a palimpsest of all of the worlds civilizations. India is a Hindu country, its a Muslim country, its a Christian country. Its an Asian power, but its also an Enlightenment country. And that phrase he uses over and over, India as a palimpsest on which every civilization has left a mark, but a palimpsest which has then transformed each of those civilizations and made it into its own.
I think that was a kind of a deeply philosophical and I think profound orientation to India. But second, I think at a more practical level, that India has such cross-cutting diversity that if you privilege any basis of identity as the basis of nationhood, what you risk is a great deal of violence, expulsion, and bloodletting. So I think in a strange way, partition actually just reinforced the idea. Even what remains of India cannot flourish and survive unless it says, we are going to create a kind of nation state thats very different from anything else that has happened in the world.
Yeah. You invoked Nehru, and I think one of his most famous and historic phrases speeches is the Tryst with Destiny speech. What do you think was Indias tryst with destiny, and what is it today?
Right, so the first and most important one was actually overcoming poverty, and the extraordinary levels of human misery and oppression that this society had internally experienced, particularly through the institution of caste.
This is the undergirding system of people being born into a particular community, and that forming a social hierarchy.
Absolutely, a social hierarchy which you could not escape, a social hierarchy that was in some senses deeply oppressive, and particularly if you were at the bottom end of that social hierarchy Dalits, untouchables, as they used to be called in those days, the bottom 20 percent. It really would rank up there with slavery. I mean, we can always kind of nuance these comparisons intellectually, but theres just no getting around what a moral abomination it was.
So in some senses, the Indian state was embarking for the first time on this project of saying, look, we need a model of development that can overcome the tyranny of this compulsory identity that is called caste. And so I think this idea, which is embodied in the Indian Constitution, of the idea of liberty, equality, fraternity, in conditions that otherwise were deemed to be inhospitable to them, India gained universal suffrage at a moment where it was one of the poorest countries in the world.
So if you look at levels of economic development at which countries get universal suffrage, India gets it at the lowest level of economic development. It was one of the least educated countries in the world. And yet, this enormous hope that through constitutional politics, you could actually overcome the scourge of poverty and at least social inequality.
I think the second thing that I think is very remarkable to me about the Tryst with Destiny speech in the Indian constitution, in the preamble to the Indian constitution, is God knows Nehru and the founding generation fully understood that God, history, and identity matter to Indians. I mean, you cant imagine this country in some senses without a deep religious and spiritual engagement, without deep contestation over history. And identities proliferate. I mean, people wear them on their sleeves. But that in order for these identities to flourish, in order for that cultural heritage to come alive, it was very important that the political social contract not be burdened with the weight of God, history, or identity, so people dont feel that they have to be benchmarked to a single identity or axis of loyalty.
So yes, God will flourish, but gods will flourish. I mean, you know, Indias idea of secularism wasnt that religion would be marginalized. It would be that it would be put on a basis of individual freedom, such that all communities and all groups could enjoy it.
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Just looking at the past few years, and you see the way in which India is sort of meeting this kind of Tryst with Destiny right, India is by most accounts now the most populous country in the world, outstripping China. The economy, the G.D.P. expanded by 7.8 percent last quarter. India hosted the G20, a very important gathering of global leaders. And youre seeing India kind of step up to its place on the global stage.
But its happening at a time when the sort of internal contradictions and tensions is, I think, really coming to bear. So maybe this is a good time for us to turn to Narendra Modi and spend some time talking about who he is, where he came from, and maybe focus on a couple of key moments. And I think one key moment for me, certainly, is the 2002 riots in Gujarat.
So I think the three most important things to bear in mind about Narendra Modi, who is an extraordinary political figure I mean, just as an analytical proposition, you dont have to endorse his politics to recognize what a transformative figure he has been. So the first, most important thing is that he is a member of, and had much of his political and cultural upbringing, in an organization called the R.S.S., the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which was founded in the 1920s.
And the R.S.S. has had one core objective, which is the creation of a Hindu political consciousness, that India has been subjugated to what they call a thousand year period of slavery. They regard even Mughal India, for example, as a period of slavery. And their political commitment is to create a form of Hindu consciousness and identity such that Hindus are never subjugated again, and have a political state, an instrument of their own.
So this straightforward political objective has been Narendra Modis, in a sense, guiding star. Everything he does in some senses flows from realizing this political objective, even economic policy, right? Making India an economically developed nation is in some senses part of an instrument to achieve this objective. I think the second thing about him, which I think in the Indian context is remarkable, is hes a completely self-made politician and leader.
Biographically, hes from Indias less privileged castes, and had absolutely no privileges, either economic, social, or political that usually mark the political careers of so many Indians. And what this allowed him to do was two things which are really quite central to his success. One is to produce a kind of instinctive identification with large masses of people. The political party represents the Bharatiya Janata Party used to be accused of being largely an upper caste party of privileged traders, privileged Brahmins.
He single-handedly transformed that party into a party that has a much wider social base now. He managed to run, and still runs on this plank, that what kept India back, particularly over the last 20, 30 years, was the fact that India was being ruled by something like a dynastic ancien regime. The Congress Party was dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family in some ways. And so when he speaks of corruption, hes not just referring to the fact that there might have been monetary corruption.
Hes actually just referring to the fact that Indian democracy had acquired the characteristic of being something like a closed club, and he has in some senses opened the gates of this politics to ordinary Indians, to languages they speak. So for example, hes a very gifted orator in Hindi. The B.J.P. is much more comfortable in the vernaculars than the Congress Party is. So he could represent that old complex as a privileged elite with a narrow social base against whom his kind of persona stands.
And I think the third thing about him, which I think goes back to I think his days in Gujarat, is in Gujarat he acquired the reputation for both being an effective administrator on the one hand. And the second thing, of course, he was known for is his conduct during the 2002 Gujarat riots.
What happened in these riots?
This is very contested. And I think one has to go back to the late 80s, early 90s, where the Bharatiya Janata Party, which Mr. Modi presents, launched a agitation for reclaiming what they called was the site of the birthplace of Lord Ram, where a mosque had been built in the 16th century. And the B.J.P.s demand has been that this should in some sense be returned to the Hindus.
And they created a mass movement. Now, what that mass movement did was that it in a sense created pockets of Hindu-Muslim tension all across India, because in some senses, these rallies were quite aggressive. They really were signposting the fact that a Hindu movement was arriving to claim India for Hindus.
One of the results of that mass movement was the tearing down of the Babri Masjid.
This mosque in Ayodhya.
Yeah, Ayodhya. Now, this movement was actually trying to collect volunteers, and collect actually, literally, bricks from different parts of India to take to Ayodhya as a kind of symbolic gesture of building you know, these be used to build temple. Now, as this movement is going on and tensions are on the rise, a train in Godhra was set on fire. And roughly around 50 of these volunteers that were going to Ayodhya were killed. This immediately set off a set of now what the B.J.P. would call retaliatory violence.
This violence was directed at Muslim residents in Gujarat.
Absolutely, and about 2,000 people died. And it was absolutely gruesome violence. I mean, it really its just its just very hard to describe.
Yeah, neighbors set upon neighbors.
Neighbors set upon each other. Now, his role so there is a range of positions on this. One, of course, holds him directly responsible for instigating the retaliatory violence. There was a commission of inquiry. And for what its worth, that commission of inquiry absolved him of that charge. I mean, thats again, for what its worth. But we do know in India that if the state is committed to stopping violence, it can actually stop it fairly quickly.
You can bring the law enforcement agencies out. The army can be called out. And I think the political question mark over Narendra Modi, whatever you think may be the direct instructions he may or may not have given, is that this was clearly a massive abdication of responsibility on part of the chief minister of the state. This violence could have been stopped, and there is no excuse no excuse, no matter how deep the passions run, no matter how widespread the desire for revenge is.
There is absolutely no excuse for the scale of violence that actually took place in Gujarat. The fact that he was accused of fomenting this violence by the Congress Party, he had been denied a visa to the United States until he became prime minister, I think that convinced him that the entire world is a kind of gigantic conspiracy out to get Hindus.
I mean, and that conspiratorial mindset is actually very, very central to the B.J.P. and R.S.S. thinking about the rest of the world, that somehow there has been this global conspiracy since, I dont know, maybe 900 A.D. to keep Hindus as a political community down. And the fact that people were accusing him of fomenting this violence was just another element in that conspiracy, so it was completely turned on its head.
And I hate to say this, but there is a sense in which I think there was a significant number of Hindus who began to radically subscribe to this much more radical and aggressive message, that the B.J.P. was going to be much more aggressive in protecting Hindus, if you want to put it charitably, or aggressively targeting minorities. I think that message went out loud and clear from that Gujarat experience, the sense that violence can pay long term dividends for Hindu nationalism as a movement.
It became a central plank of the B.J.P.. I mean, till 2002, there always used to be this sense that you could not win a national election only with the votes of Hindus, that somehow youd always have to stitch a broad coalition. I think Narendra Modi managed to convince his party, and that has been their electoral strategy, that they could come to power only with Hindu votes. And in fact, you could actually increase your share of Hindu votes, consolidate a Hindu constituency, if you were to clearly send a signal that you were going to politically marginalize Muslims.
But then 2009, theres another election. This is the moment that I land in India. And I think youre right that this fire has been lit around Hindu nationalism, but at the same time, there was this sense that India had a teetotalling economist as its prime minister, that Indias tryst with destiny is about to be fulfilled. It felt like a moment. And the thing that I remember particularly was a sense that these sectarian divides felt much less alive.
One of the first stories that I did was I actually went to the city of Ayodhya, where the Babri Masjid mosque was. And it was striking to me how the temperature at that place was basically just room temperature, and you had this kind of too busy to hate India moving forward. Were joining the global economy. Were you know, and that was very much the vibe when I got there. And there was a sense that Narendra Modi, no chance he could be prime minister. The guy cant even go to the United States.
And the B.J.P. seemed like they were nowhere. And you know, Congress was ascendant. And boy, were we wrong. So walk me through what happened. How did Modi go from being an international pariah to prime minister of the worlds largest democracy?
I think, as I said at the beginning of the show, this sense we had of a kind of India fated to a certain kind of centrism actually made all of us complacent that a force like Narendra Modi, or at least a very radical Hindu nationalist ideology, could never be dominant. Or if it even came to power, it would have to ally with other kinds of groups to moderate its stance. So I think what happened post 2009 is, I think, a bunch of things.
So the first is, of course, the 2009 financial crisis globally, which is a pivotal moment in democracies across the world, because India was growing at 8 percent. And it was a nice place to be, youre growing at 8 percent, the state was getting enough resources to begin to build out a slightly more ambitious welfare state, something Narendra Modi has then sought to accelerate. And yet, what the 2009 financial crisis did, at least in the Indian context, was two things.
One, it actually did expose the corruption at the heart of that growth regime. Lots of projects suddenly seem unviable to people. And there is an anti-corruption movement which kind of paved the way for saying, look, this old regime, this ancien regime headed by the Congress, this coalition government. It may have done us some good, but now it is a corrupt, tottering regime. India has a moment, an opportunity here, but it is actually frittering it away because of a weak government.
In fact, the slogan Narendra Modi used was policy paralysis. So in 2014, he ran largely on this plank. Im going to overcome this paralysis. Im a strong, decisive leader. Look at my record in Gujarat. And he ran against plutocracy, but plutocracy in this very generalized sense. This is a kind of old corrupt ancien regime. And like, I think, politics elsewhere, it was the implosion of the alternative, the internal implosion of the Congress Party that created much more of the space, that somehow it had lost this will to fight, this will to govern. There was very little communication, very little mass mobilization. It just had lost all the kind of ABCs of political mobilization.
The second thing that I think happened, and this may take some explaining, but I actually do think it is important so the B.J.P.s primary base is in north India. It has now expanded, so it is a genuinely pan-Indian party. But its core political support is drawn from north India, and particularly the largest state in North India, which is Uttar Pradesh, which is the size of Brazil, I think, in terms of population, or something.
In north India, English does remain a language of privilege. So Hindi and the vernacular languages are important, but they are the languages of culture. They are the languages of the past. They might be the register of emotions, in some ways. We might kind of curse each other in Hindi. [LAUGHS] But the language of the future is English.
If you want to get access to social privilege and if you want to get access to the production of knowledge, and particularly future knowledge, science, technology, medicine, law, you have to have English or at least be fluent in it. And our education system actually produced large masses of students, young people, who are kind of linguistically stranded.
Theyre linguistically stranded in the sense that theyre fluent in the vernaculars, but actually will find it difficult to compete in the cutting edge of English, that we have a form of language competence that does not make us full participants in this privileged social structure. What it has done is that it made it very easy to mobilize this kind of resentment against an entrenched elite.
When you were in Delhi, you went to Khan Market a lot, Im sure. I mean, its a great place to hang out with bookshops, coffee shops
Restaurants. yeah.
Mr. Modi frequently uses this phrase, I stand against the Khan Market gang. Its a brilliant piece of political communication because everybody instinctively recognizes that it refers to the narrow social privileges of an elite. And so I think what he was able to tap into, apart from his kind of caste identification, is that I actually stand for something that is much more authentic and connected. Our heritage, our languages do not just have to be about the past.
Now quite what he does with his education policies is another matter. But I think that sense of, I think, ressentiment, that India was being governed by a small, exclusive elite, I think he managed to give that voice and expression very powerfully. And because of his uniqueness in some sense as a politician, his own biography, his own extraordinary communicative skills, I think he was in a sense able to tap into that.
And I think more than the specifics of Hindu nationalism, its this particular trope that I am rescuing India from a small, elite out of touch that I think still resonates very powerfully.
Yeah, and I think its not just an elite thats out of touch, its an elite that is looking outward. And theres something about the sort of return to the vernacular thats saying, no, no, no, the real strength of India lies within. And we will engage with the rest of the world on our own terms.
So Modi gets elected in 2014. His first term, to my mind, as I followed it, seemed mostly to be focused on these economic issues. There were some cultural issues focusing on hygiene and toilets. I mean, what a lot of people maybe dont know about India is that the lack of clean water and access to toilets is a huge public health issue, holding people back in a lot of ways. There were a lot of just sort of fundamental development issues that he focused on.
But it seems to me that it wasnt until he was re-elected, that his government was re-elected in 2019, that you really started to see the claws come out. And youve written, I think, quite powerfully on the governments policy in Kashmir, because there was a very sharp change. And Ill quote you: The B.J.P. thinks its going to Indianize Kashmir, but instead what we will see is potentially the Kashmirization of India.
So tell me about what happened in Kashmir, and what you meant by that idea, that Kashmirization of India?
Right, gosh. So you know, Kashmir has historically been one of the deepest failures of Indian democracy. So when India became independent, there was a whole bunch of princely states that had to take the decision of whether to accede to India, whether to accede to Pakistan, or potentially even remain independent. I mean, most of them werent viable, but at least in theory, that was an option. Now, Kashmir was one of the last holdouts.
It had a Hindu Raja, but its population was majority Muslim but interestingly, one of the most secularized and led by a radical leftist, Sheikh Abdullah. And Pakistan decided to force Kashmirs hand by actually invading Kashmir. And India said it could help only if the maharaja signed an instrument of accession joining India, and Kashmir joined India. Pakistan never recognized the legitimacy of that accession, and theres a long history of Pakistan fermenting active terrorist and militant violence in Kashmir for much of the 20th century.
And this just to put a fine point on it, I mean, this Himalayan province, one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Ive been there many times, and its extraordinary. But youre talking about a flashpoint between two nuclear armed countries, Pakistan and India. And its a very explosive situation. I mean, I just wanted to underscore how tender and fragile the status of Kashmir is.
It is. And unfortunately, I think it was also a failure for Indian democracy. Kashmir also had special status in the Indian Constitution. According to the terms of accession, the Indian state was going to conduct Kashmirs foreign policy. Thered be a minimum set of common laws, but Kashmir was supposed to have a great deal of autonomy in terms of governing its own affairs.
But unfortunately, I think the Indian states relationship with Kashmir got securitized very early on. I mean, every political protest, every kind of political dissension was being looked at through this prism of, are they really kind of covert secessionists in place, right? Kashmir is the only state in India where there was a sense that the elections were not entirely free and fair. Its constantly interfering in elections. It is putting Kashmir, internally, under a state of siege.
Pakistan is actively, in some senses, fomenting violence and terrorist groups, even when it was open for tourism. It became an immensely militarized place, about half a million troops guarding kind of Kashmir security checkpoints. There was a great sense of siege about Kashmir.
Yeah, and its this place, theres this beautiful lake. And people stay in houseboats, and youve got the amazing Himalayan skyline. But there was this sense that you were stopped and asked for identification constantly. Flying in and out of the airport, you felt a sense of surveillance. And this is for an outsider. For my many Kashmiri friends and particularly journalists, this sense of being surveilled and having your rights curtailed was really, really powerful. And so what did Modi do in 2019?
So one of the R.S.S.s planks, the organization that Modi belongs to, was that if you actually wanted the integration of Kashmir into India, Article 370 had to go. That would be a constitutional statement that Kashmir is a part of India, just like any other part. And it would also send a signal to Pakistan that we are not even thinking that this is disputed territory. I mean, just forget about it. And this has been part of B.J.P.s manifesto forever.
I mean, so at one level there was no surprise. I mean, I think we just never took them literally in some ways, right? So what they did was they basically revoked Article 370 and on the grounds that Kashmir needs to be a state like any other state in the Indian Union, no special privileges. And the governments view was, we are going to restore administrative order so we are going to clamp down on militants, we are going to attract investment by creating law and order.
And to be honest, it has had mixed results. I mean, the government can claim that at least the outbreak of violence has not been as bad as many had feared many of us had feared, actually. But it still remains the case that there are still pockets of militancy. And there is still a significant clampdown on civil liberties, on reporting on Kashmir, on the free movement of journalists in Kashmir. If you are in a journalist in Kashmir, you really have an impossible task ahead of you.
Even outside of Kashmir, most Indian mainstream papers will not carry stories critical of whats happening in Kashmir. Now, what I meant by the Kashmirization of India I mean, partly of course its a column that was a sort of cri de coeur kind of provocation. But unfortunately, I think the grain of truth in this was that what the government was trying to demonstrate in Kashmir was that a strong, repressive surveillance state was going to be the more effective means of integrating Indian citizens into the state, rather than a faith in democracy, pluralism, and open society.
Link:
Opinion | India Is Transforming. But Into What? - The New York Times