Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Kashmir last week for his first visit since the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019. A mammoth crowd, numbering upwards of a lakh, braving the chilly winter, gathered inside and outside the Bakhshi Stadium in Srinagar to listen to him. Such a turnout has been unimaginable since terrorism reared its head in Kashmir about 35 years ago. But as the guns fell silent, the people started speaking; and, as the terrorists stopped prowling, the people started moving freely.
The abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution liberated Kashmir from the fear of guns, bombs, stones, hartals, shutdowns, and curfews. It exorcised the ghost of lurking secession and the apparition of another Partition. History will remember 5 August 2019 as Yaum-e Azadi—Liberation Day—of Kashmir, because it marked the end of a long and deathly night, and the beginning of freedom and peace. Earlier, a prime minister’s visit to the Valley was accompanied by internet shutdown, hartals, terror attacks, clashes, stone-pelting, pellets, and bullets. Nothing of the sort anymore. Modi has saved Kashmir and put it on the path of progress.
Article 370 was the Indian equivalent of the Berlin Wall—in fact, it was more pernicious. While the Wall was a physical barrier, the Article was an ever-widening psychological gulf. What seemed like a political expediency was actually an ideological insinuation of religious separatism. Essentially, Article 370 amounted to constitutional recognition of the Two-Nation theory, and instituted among Kashmiris an indelible sense of self-alienation, which couldn’t but nurse the sentiments of secession.
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Kashmir’s lost years
The reasoning in favour of Article 370 was the same as the one behind the Partition of India. Implicit in it was the recognition that the Muslim-majority Kashmir couldn’t logically be a part of India. It would most naturally be a part of Pakistan, or an independent country. And if history and geography made its inclusion in India inevitable, then it should assume the paraphernalia and regalia that mark the sovereignty of an independent nation. And so, Kashmir had its own Constitution, its own flag, and its own legal codes. So much so that the laws enacted by India’s Parliament began with the unseemly caveat that they didn’t apply to Jammu and Kashmir. Its chief minister was designated as prime minister, and the writ of much of the Constitution of India didn’t run there. No wonder, while a Kashmiri set out for Delhi or Mumbai, he would likely say he was going to India, as if Kashmir wasn’t India.
What Syama Prasad Mookerjee had so graphically called ‘Ek Desh Mein Do Vidhan, Do Pradhan, Do Nishan’ (two constitutions, two prime ministers and two flags in one country) had effectively turned Jammu and Kashmir into a state within a state, not in the sense of a country’s province, but an imperium in imperio, with a shared sovereignty.
One may ask, would the 70,000 Kashmiri lives, the flower of its youth, be lost to insurgency if an ideological atmosphere—one that made people think their demand was just another step in the linear progression from the tenuous tie of Article 370 to complete secession—hadn’t been created? Article 370 wasn’t a bond that would have bound Kashmir with the rest of India; it was a bend that would have made it break away. Kashmir lost three decades to a war against itself. With thousands of hartals and curfews, it’s hard to get an estimate of the number of lost years, when Kashmir was closed to the world and the world was closed to it.
The only beneficiaries of Article 370 were the handful of dynasties created by the dynamics of the ‘special status’—the Aristocracy of Collaborators, who, like all collaborators, remained congenitally treacherous to both the sides, the Indian state and the people of Kashmir. This oligarchy of dynasties, with just two families alternating at the apex, kept swinging like a pendulum, from loyalty to treason. They kept the people out of the political process, used them as cannon fodders in their recurrent seditious upheavals, and fattened on the funds that New Delhi kept pumping to appease them.
With the abrogation of Article 370, a churning has begun in the Kashmiri society, which will throw up a new class of organic leaders who understand that their destiny is Indian, and that the age of blackmailing New Delhi with threats of insurgency and secession is over.
We may pause here to ponder whether the legend of rigged elections in Kashmir would acquire mythological proportions if the Election Commission of India had jurisdiction in Jammu and Kashmir from the beginning. Article 370 didn’t allow the ECI into the state, and it opened the way for the “prime ministers” of J&K to institutionalise rigging of elections to the extent that, eventually, it came to be cited as a justification for insurgency. By the time the ECI’s sway was extended to J&K, the political culture had been irredeemably perverted.
The surreptitious evisceration of Article 370, as undertaken during the Secular Raj, was not going to integrate Kashmir any better while profuse homage continued to be paid to the supposed inviolable sanctity of the Article. Until its provisions remained operative, in howsoever attenuated a shape, it would keep inciting secession, for it was mainly an ideological device and a psychological trigger. Therefore, it needed a surgical excision—strike, if you may—to root it out lock, stock and barrel.
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The remaining citadel
Article 370 might have been specific to J&K, but its ideological import found resonance among Muslims all over the country. Even those from far-flung states such as Kerala or Karnataka regarded it as a ‘Muslim issue’, and wished that it stayed forever. And why not? After all, it was one of the mainstays of identity politics—the others being the Muslim Personal Law and the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).
The Muslim Personal Law needs to go if Muslims of India are to be integrated in the national mainstream. Much like Article 370, the personal law too has been a charter for imperium in imperio, a state within a state, with a sphere of juristic autonomy, where the Indian state would have no jurisdiction, that is, the Parliament wouldn’t have the power to legislate in the matter, and the courts would be bound by the opinions of the muftis of the respective sects. These personal laws are primitive, regressive and outright misogynistic. Even ulema recognise that all is not well, and have been paying lip service to the need for reform.
But the Muslim intelligentsia and the Left and liberal intellectuals, in order to postpone it indefinitely, have been insisting that the reform should come from within the community. They know it too well that reform-from-within is a chimera, which would never become a reality, and that’s precisely the reason why they have been pretending to pursue it. The pre-2014 political system, which is down but not out, would implode, and the “secular” parties would become redundant if the political divide between Hindus and Muslims, which is what the Muslim Personal Law is, were to be removed. It would rob them of their vote bank. Like Article 370, the personal law has also created its own Aristocracy of Collaborators, which keeps betraying the country and the community while feeding on both. On the one hand, it keeps the community on the warpath by telling them that the personal laws are divine and, therefore, immutable and inviolable; on the other, the Aristocracy keeps extorting appeasement subsidies from the government by making false promises of reform from within.
The same Aristocracy of Collaborators has been controlling the AMU as the last citadel of the Muslim political power. It’s Aligarh Muslim University only in name; in reality, it’s Ashraaf Muslim University run as Allah Miyan’s University. The Indian state gave them so much latitude that they didn’t feel the need to take stock of the institution’s role in propounding the Two-Nation theory and the Pakistan movement. In about eight decades since Independence, the university has neither been through a nationalistic reformulation of its institutional narrative nor could it shed its Muslim ghetto character. Shortly, the Supreme Court is going to pronounce judgment on whether AMU qualifies for minority status. Regardless of the judgment, the government must revamp the university’s administrative structure thoroughly to make it an institution of excellence in real sense to justify the huge money spent on it.
As Kashmir has been liberated from Article 370, so should the rest of Indian Muslims from the Muslim Personal Law and the Aristocracy of Collaborators at AMU.
Do we have ‘Modi ki Guarantee’ on this?
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Prashant)