India’s Looming Ethno-Nationalist Catastrophe
In the long list of enemies maintained by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of India (BJP), the Muslims of the northwestern state of Kashmir have always held a special place. The only Muslim-majority state in India, and one guaranteed notional autonomy under Article 370 of the Indian constitution, Kashmir is routinely depicted by the right-wing Hindu BJP as the ungrateful beneficiary of Indian munificence, accepting endless sops while returning the favor with acts of terrorism and support for Pakistan.
The BJP on Monday announced in unilateral fashion that it would dissolve Kashmir’s special status and divide the state into two parts, one of which is to be ruled directly from Delhi. The proclamation was accompanied with a curfew in the state that included the house arrest of prominent Kashmiri leaders, the severing of all internet, cellphone, and landline connections, and the deployment of thousands of additional troops in what is already, with nearly a million soldiers, one of the most militarized regions in the world.
While Kashmiris remain completely disconnected from their family and friends, their civil liberties suspended, supporters of the Hindu right have been quick to signal their delirious joy, sometimes from very far away. “I have woken up in NY to the best news of my life about Kashmir,” blowhard actor (and husband to a BJP politician) Anupam Kher wrote on Twitter, making sure in his tweet to thank God, the Indian government, BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Modi’s sinister consigliere, Home Minister Amit Shah.
This is not the first time that the Hindu right, led by Modi, has unleashed mass suffering in pursuit of its vision of Hindutva, an India that is largely or even exclusively for the Hindus. In 2002, when Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, a pogrom against Muslims left nearly a thousand dead and turned many more into refugees. Since Modi’s tenure as prime minister began in 2014, and especially since being handed a second term in resounding fashion earlier this year, such violence has percolated through the entire nation, provoking lynchings, assassinations, rapes, beatings, imprisonments, and constant abuse on airwaves and social media by Modi’s cheerleaders.
The BJP’s hatred of Muslims is an inheritance from its century-old parent organization, the cultish paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; the chief of the RSS in the 1940s, M.S. Golwalkar, argued that Muslims were India’s Jews and that Hindus needed to manifest a “race spirit” similar to that of the Nazis. Now, BJP’s targets have expanded to include not just Muslims, but anybody critical of Modi, the party, and Hindutva.