The Daily - The Crackdown on Kashmir

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

India has guaranteed a degree of autonomy to the people of Kashmir, a disputed territory between India and Pakistan, since 1947. Why did India unilaterally erase that autonomy this week? Guest: Jeffrey Gettleman, the South Asia bureau chief for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.Background reading: To Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, eliminating the autonomy of Kashmir was an administrative move. But to his critics, the decision was a blow to India’s democracy and secular identity.On Thursday, Mr. Modi addressed the nation about the decision against a backdrop of rising protests, mass arrests and escalating tensions with Pakistan.Read more about the roots of the crisis and what could happen next.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Since 1947, India has granted the people of Kashmir a set of protections that guarantee their autonomy. Jeffrey Gettleman on why India just erased that autonomy. It's Friday, August 9th. Jeffrey, tell me how you came to understand what was going on in Kashmir.

to understand what was going on in Kashmir? So over the weekend, I had been talking closely with a local journalist who works for us named Samir Yasser. I've worked with him a lot. I've traveled across Kashmir with him. He had told me that thousands of Indian army troops had flooded into the valley in the last few days. And there were barriers being erected. People were being called up for extra duty who worked for the government.

Satellite phones were being passed out to police officers. And Samir was just describing this anxiety and confusion and sense of doom hanging over the valley. He gave me the impression that there was a big preparation for some type of clampdown. And he and I had a plan that we were going to talk on Monday. We were going to put together a story on Monday. that we were going to talk on Monday. We were going to put together a story on Monday. And he said, you know what? Let me send it to you Sunday just in case something happens.

And he sent over a story about all these tensions and worries on Sunday afternoon. And that was the last I heard from him. You couldn't reach him after that? No. I tried calling him many times. I sent him messages. I sent him emails. And what we learned was that the Indian government had shut down all communication from the valley on Sunday night, shortly after I had last communicated with our colleague. So what did you do?

So we had no way of communicating with people in the entire Kashmir region. So we waited, knowing that something big was going to happen. And on Monday morning, there was an announcement that a speech was going to be made by India's home minister in the parliament, and that this would likely explain what was happening in Kashmir. So I came into the office early, along with some other colleagues. We turned on the TV. Hello and welcome to Rajya Sobha television. You're watching The Big Picture with me, Frank Rausen-Pereira. An announcement with massive repercussions for Jammu and Kashmir.

And we waited to hear what was afoot. Jammu and Kashmir, a historic day, a massive day. And pretty quickly it was clear that the government had a very ambitious plan to change the status of Kashmir and erase its autonomy that has existed for decades. And the Home Minister took the floor of the Upper House of Parliament and began making this presentation about what the government was going to do, how it was going to change these constitutional provisions, and what this means for India. And it immediately provoked an outroar on the floor of the parliament with opposition politicians heckling him and booing and screaming. But he just kept going.

And the news landed like a bombshell in India because this is one of the biggest decisions the country has made about ruling Kashmir or any other state since India was formed in 1947. From what I can tell out of my window, because our house is a little fortified and we have a lot of security, like I said, there's a deathly calm. The weather is actually beautiful. It's a nice sunny, balming morning here. It's about 12 in the afternoon.

So I wasn't able to reach Samir, but I was able to find an activist, the daughter of a prominent Kashmiri politician who somehow was able to make a voice recording and send it to me to give me an update of what was happening. And there's absolutely no movement, no honks, no sounds of cars, nothing at all. Her name is Iltaja and I did some checking to see who she was. And her mother is a prominent Kashmiri politician who had been put on house arrest.

So from yesterday, there have been a couple of developments. My mother was previously under house arrest, but she's been detained now. I don't know if she was detained when I spoke to your correspondent yesterday, but they've taken her away. And Iltajah was really concerned and frightened about what was happening all around her. At the moment, none of us are allowed to even step out of the house. The confusion, the anxiety, the fear. I don't know how much longer are they going to snap internet services

and not allow us to make calls or have any sort of access to communication. She felt like this was an assault on the dignity of Kashmiris. There's an absolute curtailment of civil liberties. We have no rights. And it feels like Kashmir has been reduced to an open-air prison. That's the main feeling that people are having, is just this sense of powerlessness, that they don't like at all what the government has done,

but they can't do anything about it. Jeffrey, orient me a little bit here. What is the story of Kashmir? The story is long and complicated. August the 15th, 1947, Independence Day for India. And it goes back to when India was granted independence from Great Britain in 1947. A subcontinent larger than the whole of Europe becomes two self-governing dominions within the British Commonwealth of Nations.

There was a division in the Indian subcontinent between India and Pakistan. India was established as a secular country in this part of the world with the Hindu majority population, and Pakistan as a Muslim country. There, beyond the snow-capped Himalayas, forming a barrier to all invaders, lies Kashmir. Kashmir is this absolutely exquisitely beautiful mountain valley between India and Pakistan, and it has been contested bitterly between those two countries. And Kashmir at the time was a princely state run by a Hindu Maharaja. And to make things even more complicated, it was majority Muslim.

Four-fifths of Kashmir's population is Muslim, but the ruling class is Hindu. And the decision that he made was to not join either India or Pakistan and to remain independent. Well, that didn't last very long because just within a couple months of independence in 1947, militants from Pakistan invaded Kashmir and the Maharaja went running to India for help. And India said, basically, okay, we will help you drive these invaders out. But part of the deal is you have to agree to join the state of India. When the Maharaja greeted the Indian premier, it became clear to all observers that the proposed plebiscite was as good as settled, and that Kashmir would vote to remain within the Indian dominion. So the Maharaja made a decision to do that.

The Indian army would clear all invaders from their soil. In the western part of the province, tribesmen are now in full retreat. But he put special conditions on his joining India, and some of those conditions were granting Kashmir a special degree of autonomy. The area would still have its own constitution, its own prime minister, rights to pass its own laws. And that was the compromise between the two sides. So Kashmir would have its own separate identity. But in the late 80s, early 90s, a huge conflict erupted. And many people in Kashmir wanted independence from India. They didn't want to be part of India anymore.

Some of it had to do with religion, because India is majority Hindu, Kashmir is majority Muslim. Some wanted to join Pakistan. And Pakistan took advantage of this. They sent thousands of militants across the border from Pakistan into Kashmir to fight against the Indian army. And it turned the place into a bloodbath. Thousands of civilians were killed. Militants were fighting soldiers. Bombs were going off all over the place. Civilians were being dragged into the battle against their will to

fight for either the government or for the militancy. And the place was just cast into chaos and bloodshed and turmoil, grinding the economy to a halt, taking thousands of lives, and changing the character of it. So it sounds like by not choosing to fully be a part of India or Pakistan, Kashmir becomes a kind of tortured place in between the two that's tugged at by both. Yeah, and Kashmiris really express that frustration that they feel like they've been used by both. Yeah. And Kashmiris really express that frustration that they feel like they've been used by both. That Pakistan was using the Kashmiri youth to fight against India,

and India has turned Kashmir into a buffer zone against Pakistan. And the result is this stagnation and depression. The villages are really run down. You don't see many stores. You see a lot of old cars. I've been in places where the moment you drive in, you're just kind of swarmed by a bunch of curious young men who aren't working. You don't hear explosions or gunfire, but you see just tons of soldiers and paramilitary officers. You see lots of sandbags and barbed wire and checkpoints. It feels like an occupied territory. And that's another piece of it are these protests. There's often protests against the Indian rule in the towns, in the villages.

There's just a lot of anger there. And part of that anger is people feel like they're marginalized, that they're not taken seriously in India. They don't have any of their own rights. They don't enjoy their own freedoms. And that spread this small but stubborn militancy that the Indian military is able to kind of take out these militants one by one. But then there's more young guys that want to join. And it just goes on and on and on. So young men in Kashmir have become radicalized and militant because of their frustration with being in this position.

And that fuels the narrative that Kashmir is a place that needs to be clamped down on. Exactly. And it's been stuck in that cycle for, you know, almost 30 years now. We'll be right back. Jeffrey, the situation in Kashmir has been deeply unstable now for decades. So what changed? What finally tipped that brought us to this point? A big piece of this is the rise of Narendra Modi, India's prime minister. He is a Hindu nationalist and is pushing a strong nationalist agenda that prioritizes the Hindu religion. nationalist agenda that prioritizes the Hindu religion. And Modi has been talking for years about reorganizing Kashmir and ending this problem once and for all of the militancy and the troubles inside Kashmir. We are trying to bring the majority of such youngsters into

the mainstream who have been inspired by foreign propaganda and are attacking their own nation. And he was just reelected a few months ago by an enormous margin. And that gave him a lot of momentum. There's no alternative to peace and cooperation. My advice to such youngsters who have chosen a different path is to rejoin the mainstream as typified by their own family and parents. Their participation is required in the development of Jammu and Kashmir. So Modi's government came up with this plan, dividing Kashmir into two federal territories,

make it a part of India much more than it's ever been. And it would make it easier for Indians outside of Kashmir to move into the area and change the demography. And that's the big fear. This is the first step. It's a legal administrative step. And the next will be an influx of Indians that will come cruising into Kashmir, buying land, setting up businesses.

And soon Kashmiris will be minorities in their own homeland. The fear and the reality, it seems, is that India is deliberately swallowing up Kashmir, not so that it can maintain what it is, but so that it can completely turn it into the rest of India. That's right. And the worry is by swallowing up Kashmir, that's going to raise tensions with Pakistan.

Jeffrey, if you are India, why not just let Kashmir go instead of absorbing it? If this is a majority Muslim territory that is constantly creating conflict with India, why not just kind of cut it loose? That's a great question. One reason why India doesn't want to do that is they're afraid that Pakistan would move into Kashmir and be even closer to New Delhi, the capital, and they'd be able to strike the heartland of India more easily. That's one. Another reason is that India is a federation of many different diverse territories. And if you let one spin off, others might soon follow suit.

And there are independence movements and rebel movements in other parts of India. And India is worried that if Kashmir breaks off, other parts of the country would break off. And any tensions between India and Pakistan kind of hold this whole region in tension because they're the two biggest players. They fought wars against each other before. They have nuclear weapons. And they have this religious divide between them that's very easy to stir up people on either side.

And so a messy Kashmir is just a problem for a lot of people far away from Kashmir. So bring us back to Monday and the way that things played out. India had cut the phones in Kashmir. It sounds like that was a way to suppress this militancy and keep people from connecting with each other and organizing against India. What do we know about what's happened in Kashmir in the time since?

So once the announcement was made on the floor of the parliament that this dramatic change was being done to Kashmir, we realized why all the troops had been bussed into the valley in the weeks before and why the authorities had cut the internet and severed landline connections. They were worried that once the announcement was made, there would be an outburst of violence, of protests, of rioting, maybe militant attacks. And the Indian government was trying to get ahead of that and just put everything in place to clamp down really hard on Kashmir so there could be no unrest. Since then, the clampdown has remained really tight. I still can't get in touch with our journalist. I haven't spoken to him since Sunday. The information we have is that Kashmir is pretty quiet. Most people are staying indoors, inside. There's a curfew in place. Soldiers are everywhere. place. Soldiers are everywhere. And the people there are just kind of stunned that this has happened, but they're not able to do much because it's basically illegal to move around outside.

And another thing that was surprising was how much support Modi's decision has received across the political spectrum. Opposition parties that oppose Modi's government on many fronts have backed him on this because Kashmir is seen as a nationalistic issue, one that stirs up feelings of patriotism. There's fears about Pakistan. So his decision has been incredibly popular. Just about all of India has been behind it except Kashmir. I'm struck that this is popular in so much of India, even though India is a democracy. And what was done in Kashmir could not possibly be less democratic. Turning off people's phones, literally depriving them of the ability to communicate.

Yeah, it's suppressing dissent. It's not allowing any channel of criticism. It is eliminating the voice of Kashmir when it's their fate that is being changed. So they have no say in what's happened or even allowed to react to it. That bothers some people in India. There's been intellectuals that have been very disturbed and say this is a threat to democracy. It's a threat to India's secular identity. There's been a legal challenge already filed, and there will probably be others saying that the Modi government did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally change Kashmir's status. But the majority of Indians see Kashmir as a trouble zone, as a place for Pakistan to meddle.

And they are happy that the government has taken a strong stand on what they think could be a solution to the conflict. Jeffrey, as we've been talking, so many global conflicts have come to mind. China and Hong Kong, China and the Uyghurs, Israel and the Palestinians, Russia and Crimea. It could kind of go on. I wonder where you think Kashmir fits. Maybe it sounds like just another intractable conflict that people outside of the area just don't really need to care about. I think it's different in a couple ways.

I think it's an especially difficult conflict to solve because of the issues of religion and history and identity and just the years of bad blood. But I also think that unlike these other ones you've mentioned, not a lot of people are watching Kashmir. It's kind of like the forgotten conflict. And I think that's one reason why this has happened, that India has taken this drastic step, because nobody was really paying attention. And they just kind of left this to fester. If the world had been so focused on Kashmir and its status, you're saying it would have been harder

and perhaps less likely for India to have done what it did. I think there would have been more consultation and pressure on India to have done what it did. I think there would have been more consultation and pressure on India to respect the rights of the people in Kashmir, to speak to them, to see what they want, and try to come up with a solution that was more consistent with India's democratic values. Instead, this was like a military takeover.

And those usually don't win hearts and minds. Jeffrey, thank you very much. Of course. My pleasure. In a speech on Thursday, India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, declared that ending Kashmir's autonomy was a, quote, historic decision that would benefit India, Kashmir, and the entire region by eliminating the Islamic insurgency there. But the decision was met with fury in Pakistan,

which retaliated by halting trade with India and expelling India's top diplomat. In a statement, Pakistan's prime minister accused India of promoting, quote, an ideology that puts Hindus above all other religions and seeks to establish a state that represses all other religious groups. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick,

Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, Julia Simon, Samin Amin, and Colin Archdeacon. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you on Monday.