India is shooting itself in the foot in Kashmir

NEW YORK: As each week goes by, India’s crackdown on Kashmir deepens. Not content with cutting phone lines and the internet, detaining top political leaders and imposing a curfew which has now lasted three weeks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has reportedly imprisoned thousands of Kashmiris, including businessmen and students as well as human-rights activists.

This suppression of an ethnic-religious minority has met with mass acclaim in India. One has to go as far back as Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic to recall a similarly ecstatic upsurge of vengeful nationalism.

As the Economist puts it, “India’s press and television channels are jumping up and down and cheering.” Many Indian journalists have joined social media trolls in assaulting Western outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times for reporting Kashmiris’ anger and disaffection.

Near-unanimous backing from India’s media seems to have emboldened Modi’s government. Last weekend, it prevented a delegation of opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, from visiting Kashmir.

Such impunity reveals just how extraordinarily complete Modi’s success as India’s pied-piper is, how irresistible his tunes. He and his followers draw additional encouragement from the fact that most foreign governments are too distracted by domestic challenges to pay attention to events in Kashmir, and that Pakistan’s strident campaign to isolate India diplomatically has failed.

Still, as the situation of Kashmiris deteriorates, India’s well-wishers should ask: Has Modi, while accumulating untrammelled power for himself and fellow Hindu nationalists, irreparably damaged India’s claims to be a rational and stable democracy?

Coverage of Kashmir in the international media has been uniformly critical of the Indian government, partly provoked by its demonstrably false assertions, echoed by India’s media, that things are “normal” in Kashmir. Front-page pictures of heavily armed soldiers on empty Kashmiri streets make clear the region is effectively under military occupation.

Modi’s version — that he is advancing economic development in Kashmir — is either not in sight or looks patently deceptive as writers, academics and journalists, often from the Kashmiri diaspora, educate global audiences about their history and fate.

It might be easy to mock these critics as irrelevant and powerless. But they emerge at a crucial time, when even many hardened observers of Indian politics and economy are questioning what kind of leader Modi is.—Courtesy Bloomberg