Despite the appearance of calm, a quiet war is afoot in the Kashmir Valley. The disputed border region tucked away in the northernmost Himalayas has been the epicenter of violent militancy and contested relations between India and Pakistan going back over seven decades. Now New Delhi’s latest effort to establish “peace and normalcy” in the Jammu and Kashmir region has muzzled even the most fearless and vocal of Kashmiris.
The crackdown has its origins in the abrupt revocation in August 2019 of Article 370, which provided the disputed area with a degree of semi-autonomous rule. In addition, New Delhi bifurcated the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir state into two federally administered territories—Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. But if the move has pacified the once-restive region, it is “the peace of the graveyard,” as one local teacher told WPR. “If you don’t allow anyone to speak, to write or to protest without facing detention, it is as good as being alive in a graveyard.”
An extraordinary level of state surveillance and intimidation goes into imposing this collective silence. Fundamental rights of free speech have been suspended, and any dissenting voices, online or offline, are now legitimate targets. In an act of self-censorship, newspapers now eschew critical reporting or opinion pieces that challenge New Delhi’s official narrative. Some journalists have been charged with unlawful activities and placed on a no-fly list, preventing them from flying abroad. Sharing or liking social media posts critical of the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, government can result in imprisonment. Academics, teachers, government employees, businesspeople and human rights activists—all have been subjected to police raids and detention for acting against the interest of the state.
On Dec. 28, Home Minister Amit Shah directed security agencies to keep up the campaign to dismantle elements of what he called a “terror ecosystem” detrimental to the well-being of Kashmiris. The campaign has shown little sign of abating.
If silence and subdued resistance are the government’s goals, the campaign has worked, if only partially. After all, the powerful pro-Pakistani separatist leadership, which has long sought independence from New Delhi’s rule and spearheaded armed militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, has been largely decimated. Yasin Malik, chief of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, or JKLF, was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 2022 for funding terrorist activities. Then hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who was under house arrest, died at the age of 92, his body buried in haste by the armed forces to prevent mass protests. The new head of the separatist All Party Hurriyat Conference, Masarat Alam Bhat, has been imprisoned since 2015, while its chairman, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, is under strict house arrest.
Popular rage and resentment against the Indian state—which these separatist leaders exploited—frequently expressed itself in the form of pelting security forces with stones, general strikes, anti-government protests and even violent terrorist attacks. All of these activities have now halted, however. Schools, banks and shops that separatists routinely forced to shut down now function more regularly. The national flag, once prohibited from public display due to strong anti-India sentiment, is now ubiquitous. Tourists are thronging to the picturesque valley in record numbers. Even cease-fire violations by Pakistan at the Line of Control, once frequent, have been at their lowest in years.
The prospects of relative stability have drawn several foreign investors, particularly from countries of the Persian Gulf. The economic benefits are yet to trickle down to benefit Kashmiris themselves, but the government claims that $465 million has been invested in a range of industries, including infrastructure, information technology, health, handicrafts, hospitality, agriculture and the food-processing sectors. Indian businesses are also eying Kashmir to scale up industrialization. The developments to lure investors are ambitious: all-weather roads and tunnels connecting Jammu and Kashmir; the world’s tallest railway bridge spanning the Chenab River; improved flight connections to New Delhi; and a spate of new hydro-electric projects to boost power supplies.
According to locals, the false sense of peace created by improvements in Kashmir’s economy and security landscape belies the stark reality on the ground.
Yet according to locals, the false sense of peace created by improvements in the economy and security landscape belies the stark reality on the ground. In an echo of the region’s history of jihadist insurgency, militancy has resurfaced with targeted killings of civilians. As many as 14 Kashmiri Pandits and Hindus were killed in the Valley immediately after the abrogation of Article 370. In the first week of 2023, six Hindu civilians were gunned down in cold blood in the usually peaceful Rajouri district of the Hindu-dominated Jammu region. Since 2019, an estimated 115 civilians have been killed.
“Kashmiri Pandits and other minorities were fiercely protected by the civil society groups, politicians and like-minded people from the majority Muslim community,” Sanjay Tickoo, president of the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, or KPSS, advocacy group, told WPR. “This wall has collapsed, due to the harsh measures taken by the BJP regime after repealing Article 370.”
Tickoo is among a small group of 800 families that remained in the valley in the 1990s, after militants ordered Pandits to leave, causing an exodus. He now blames the BJP’s repressive policies for turning Kashmir into an open prison and increasing the wedge between Kashmir’s Muslims and minority populations, making the Pandits a scapegoat.
A legal and political vacuum in Jammu and Kashmir has only deepened anxiety among inhabitants. A number of Indian laws were extended to Jammu and Kashmir after the repeal of the special status. Most notably, laws related to citizenship and land were altered to allow any Indian national to settle in Jammu and Kashmir, raising fears of demographic changes. Against this backdrop, the targeting of Hindu civilians can be read as a warning to outsiders not to settle in the Kashmir Valley.
Those changes have also ruffled feathers among Hindus in Jammu who initially supported the BJP’s move to do away with the special status. They now suspect the new policies and laws are more likely to benefit “outsiders” in terms of landing jobs and business investments than the locals. The Jammu Chamber of Commerce and Industry marked the first anniversary of the abrogation in 2020 with a complete shutdown, accusing the BJP government of putting Jammu “on sale” by making it easier for outside businesses to purchase land and open shops in the region, to the detriment of local traders.
Meanwhile, local politicians, many of whom were confined to lengthy house arrest immediately after abrogation, have been sidelined, creating a vacuum where there once was a bridge between the local population and the government in New Delhi. The Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly, too, has sat dormant since it was unexpectedly dissolved in 2018. Mohammed Yousuf Tarigami, spokesperson of the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration, a coalition of regional parties opposed to the BJP, accused the BJP of postponing assembly elections, which should have taken place in 2022, due to uncertainty over voters’ preferences and fears it might not win. The abrogation of Article 370, he added, was supposedly enacted in order to foster greater democracy in Jammu and Kashmir, but ironically has left it as the only territory in the country where “citizens are denied constitutional rights and the democratic pillars stand suspended.”
After the abrogation of Article 370, the boundaries of Jammu and Kashmir’s electoral districts were also redrawn, ostensibly to reflect new population shifts in future assembly and parliamentary elections. The exercise yielded an additional six seats in the Jammu region, where the BJP emerged as the single largest party in the 2014 Assembly election, and only one extra seat in the Kashmir Valley, where opposition to the BJP is concentrated.
Anuradha Bhasin, a journalist and author of “A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370,” believes the motive of the exercise “was to demote the status of Jammu and Kashmir as India’s only Muslim-majority state.” A key strategy of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda is to install a Hindu chief minister in Jammu and Kashmir, which has always been politically represented by a Muslim. But Bhasin is skeptical that even this will help the BJP’s cause once elections are held, given that “roughly 65 percent of Jammu and Kashmir’s population is Muslim and 35 percent is Hindus.”
Locals equate the BJP’s current treatment of Kashmiris to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The denial of political aspirations and restrictions on basic rights have created pent-up anger among the youth and a fertile ground for radicalization of the next generation of militants. The coerced calm cannot last, Kashmiris warn, and the inevitable blowback—in the form of the familiar cycle of militancy, violence and insecurity—will likely erupt in the not-so-distant future.
Shweta Desai is an independent journalist and researcher based in Mumbai.