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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/opinion/sunday/kashmir-siege-modi.html?fbclid=IwAR0uK36dBOZ78mZCcSJ-SB5tLN65TRYj5ElETz-gp3Bnnaqcgbo0PgLF4yM">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/opinion/sunday/kashmir-siege-modi.html?fbclid=IwAR0uK36dBOZ78mZCcSJ-SB5tLN65TRYj5ElETz-gp3Bnnaqcgbo0PgLF4yM</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Silence Is the Loudest Sound</h1>
<p><font size="+1"><b>The Indian government has confined about
seven million Kashmiris to their homes and imposed a
complete communications blackout</b></font></p>
<div class="meta-data">
<div class="reader-estimated-time">Arundhati Roy - August 15,
2019<br>
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<p>NEW DELHI — As India celebrates her 73rd year of
independence from British rule, ragged children
thread their way through traffic in Delhi, selling
outsized national flags and souvenirs that say,
“Mera Bharat Mahan.” My India is Great. Quite
honestly, it’s hard to feel that way right now,
because it looks very much as though our
government has gone rogue.</p>
<p>Last week it <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/opinion/modis-majoritarian-march-to-kashmir.html?module=inline"
title="">unilaterally breached </a>the
fundamental conditions of the Instrument of
Accession, by which the former Princely State of
Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in 1947. In
preparation for this, at midnight on Aug. 4, it
turned all of <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/asia/kashmir-india-pakistan.html?module=inline"
title="">Kashmir into a giant prison camp</a>.
Seven million Kashmiris were barricaded in their
homes, internet connections were cut and their
phones went dead.</p>
<p>On Aug. 5, India’s home minister proposed in
Parliament that <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/world/asia/india-pakistan-crisis.html?module=inline"
title="">Article 370 of the Indian Constitution</a>
(the article that <a
href="https://thewire.in/law/murder-of-insaniyat-and-of-indias-solemn-commitment-to-kashmir"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">outlines the legal obligations </a>that
arise from the Instrument of Accession) be
overturned. The opposition parties rolled over. By
the next evening the Jammu and Kashmir
Reorganization Act, 2019 had been passed by the
upper as well as the lower house.</p>
</div>
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<div>
<p>The act strips the State of Jammu and Kashmir of
its special status — which includes its right to
have its own constitution and its own flag. It also
strips it of statehood and partitions it into two
Union territories. The first, Jammu and Kashmir,
will be administered directly by the central
government in New Delhi, although it will continue
to have a locally elected legislative assembly but
one with drastically reduced powers. The second,
Ladakh, will be <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/opinion/modis-majoritarian-march-to-kashmir.html?module=inline"
title="">administered directly from New Delhi</a>
and will not have a legislative assembly. </p>
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<div>
<p>The passing of the act was welcomed in Parliament
by the very British tradition of desk-thumping.
There was a distinct whiff of colonialism in the
air. The masters were pleased that a recalcitrant
colony had finally, formally, been brought under
the crown. For its own good. Of course.</p>
<p>Indian citizens can now buy land and settle in
their new domain. The new territories are open for
business. Already India’s richest industrialist,
Mukesh Ambani, of Reliance Industries, has
promised several “announcements.” What this might
mean to <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/opinion/himalayas-mountains-dams.html?module=inline"
title="">the fragile Himalayan ecology</a> of
Ladakh and Kashmir, the land of vast glaciers,
high-altitude lakes and five major rivers, barely
bears consideration.</p>
<p>The dissolution of the legal entity of the state
also means the dissolution of Article 35A, which
granted residents <a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/kashmir-special-status-explained-articles-370-35a-190805054643431.html"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">rights and privileges</a> that
made them stewards of their own territory. So,
“being open for business,” it must be clarified,
can also include Israeli-style settlements and
Tibet-style population transfers.</p>
<p>For Kashmiris, in particular, this has been an
old, primal fear. Their recurring nightmare (an
inversion of the one being peddled by Donald
Trump) of being swept away by a tidal wave of
triumphant Indians wanting a little home in their
sylvan valley could easily come true.</p>
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<p>As news of the new act spread, Indian
nationalists of all stripes cheered. The
mainstream media, for the most part, made a low,
sweeping bow. There was dancing in the streets and
horrifying misogyny on the internet. Manohar Lal
Khattar, chief minister of the state of Haryana,
bordering Delhi, while speaking about the
improvement he had brought about in the skewed
gender ratio in his state<a
href="https://twitter.com/manakgupta/status/1160083098253455360"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">, joked</a>: “Our Dhakarji used
to say we will bring in girls from Bihar. Now they
say Kashmir is open, we can bring girls from
there.”</p>
<p>Amid these vulgar celebrations the loudest sound,
however, is <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/asia/kashmir-india-pakistan.html?module=inline"
title="">the deathly silence from Kashmir’s
patrolled, barricaded streets</a> and its
approximately seven million caged, humiliated
people, stitched down by razor wire, spied on by
drones, living under a complete communications
blackout. That in this age of information, a
government can so easily cut off a whole
population from the rest of the world for days at
a time, says something serious about the times we
are heading toward.</p>
<p>Kashmir, they often say, is the unfinished
business of the “Partition.” That word suggests
that in 1947, when the <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/india-pakistan-partition-imperial-britain.html?module=inline"
title="">British drew their famously careless
border </a>through the subcontinent, there was
a “whole” that was then partitioned. In truth,
there was no “whole.” Apart from the territory of
British India, there were hundreds of sovereign
principalities, each of which individually
negotiated the terms on which it would merge with
either India or Pakistan. Many that<a
href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24159594"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank"> did not wish to merge</a> were
forced to.</p>
<p>While Partition and the horrifying violence that
it caused is a deep, unhealed wound in the memory
of the subcontinent, the violence of those times,
as well as in the years since, in India and
Pakistan, has as much to do with assimilation as
it does with partition. In India the project of
assimilation, which goes under the banner of
nation-building, has meant that there has not been
a single year since 1947 when the Indian Army has
not been deployed within India’s borders against
its “own people.” The list is long — Kashmir,
Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, Hyderabad, Assam.</p>
<p>The business of assimilation has been complicated
and painful and has cost tens of thousands of
lives. What is unfolding today on both sides of
the border of the erstwhile state of Jammu and
Kashmir is the unfinished business of
assimilation.</p>
<p>What happened in the Indian Parliament last week
was tantamount to cremating the <a
href="https://thewire.in/history/public-first-time-jammu-kashmirs-instrument-accession-india"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Instrument of Accession</a>. It
was a document with a complicated provenance that
had been signed by a discredited king, the Dogra
Hindu King, Maharaja Hari Singh. His unstable,
tattered kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir lay on the
fault lines of the new border between India and
Pakistan.</p>
</div>
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<div>
<div>
<p>The rebellions that had broken out against him in
1945 had been aggravated and subsumed by the
spreading bush fires of Partition. In the western
mountain district of Poonch, Muslims, who were the
majority, turned on the Maharaja’s forces and on
Hindu civilians. In Jammu, to the south, the
Maharaja’s forces assisted by troops borrowed from
other princely states, massacred Muslims.
Historians and news reports of the time estimated
that somewhere between <a
href="https://kashmirlife.net/circa-1947-a-long-story-67652/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">70,000 and 200,000 were murdered</a>
in the streets of the city, and in its neighboring
districts.</p>
<p>Inflamed by the news of the Jammu massacre,
Pakistani “irregulars” swooped down from the
mountains of the North Western Frontier Province,
burning and pillaging their way across the Kashmir
Valley. Hari Singh fled from Kashmir to Jammu from
where he appealed to Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian
prime minister, for help. The document that
provided legal cover for the Indian Army to enter
Kashmir was the <a
href="https://thewire.in/history/public-first-time-jammu-kashmirs-instrument-accession-india"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Instrument of Accession</a>. </p>
</div>
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<div>
<div>
<p>The Indian Army, with some help from local
people, pushed back the Pakistani “irregulars,”
but only as far as the ring of mountains on the
edge of the valley. The former Dogra kingdom now
lay divided between India and Pakistan. The
Instrument of Accession was meant to be <a
href="https://undocs.org/S/RES/47(1948)"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">ratified by a referendum</a> to
ascertain the will of the people of Jammu and
Kashmir. That promised referendum never took
place. So was born the subcontinent’s most
intractable and dangerous political problem. </p>
<p>In the 72 years since then, successive Indian
governments have undermined terms of the
Instrument of Accession until all that was left of
it was the skeletal structure. Now even that has
been shot to hell.</p>
<p>It would be foolhardy to try to summarize the
twists and turns of how things have come to this.
Let’s just say that it’s as complicated and as
dangerous as the games the United States played
with its puppet regimes in South Vietnam all
through the 50s and 60s.</p>
<p>After a long history of electoral manipulation,
the watershed moment came in 1987 when New Delhi
flagrantly rigged the state elections. By 1989,
the thus far mostly nonviolent demand for
self-determination grew into a <a
href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/09/21/death-in-kashmir/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">full-throated freedom struggle</a>.
Hundreds of thousands of people poured onto the
streets only to be cut down in massacre after
massacre. </p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<p>The Kashmir valley soon thronged with militants,
Kashmiri men from both sides of the border, as well
as foreign fighters, trained and armed by Pakistan
and embraced, for the most part, by the Kashmiri
people. Once again, Kashmir was caught up in the
political winds that were blowing across the
subcontinent — an increasingly radicalized Islam
from Pakistan and Afghanistan, quite foreign to
Kashmiri culture, and the fanatical Hindu
nationalism that was on the rise in India.</p>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The first casualty of the uprising was the
age-old bond between Kashmir’s Muslims and its
tiny minority of Hindus, known locally as Pandits.
When the violence began, according to the Kashmiri
Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, or the K.P.S.S., an
organization run by Kashmiri Pandits, about 400
Pandits were targeted and murdered by militants.
By the <a
href="https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/why-kashmiris-want-a-fair-probe-into-the-killings-of-pandits-prosecution-of-guilty-4786855/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">end of 1990</a>, according to a
government estimate, 25,000 Pandit families had
left the valley.</p>
<p>They lost their homes, their homeland and
everything they had. Over the years thousands more
left — <a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/kashmirtheforgottenconflict/2011/07/2011724204546645823.html"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">almost the entire population</a>.
As the conflict continued, in addition to tens of
thousands of Muslims, the K.P.S.S. says 650<a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/kashmirtheforgottenconflict/2011/07/201176134818984961.html"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank"> Pandits have been killed </a>in
the conflict.</p>
<p>Since then, great numbers of Pandits have lived
in miserable refugee camps in Jammu city. Thirty
years have gone by, yet successive governments in
New Delhi have not tried to help them return home.
They have preferred instead to keep them in limbo,
and stir their anger and understandable bitterness
into a mephitic brew with which to fuel India’s
dangerous and extremely effective nationalistic
narrative about Kashmir. In this version, a single
aspect of an epic tragedy is cannily and noisily
used to draw a curtain across the rest of the
horror. </p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<p>Today Kashmir is one of the most or perhaps <em>the</em>
most densely militarized zone in the world. More
than a half-million soldiers have been deployed to
counter what the army itself admits is now just a
handful of “terrorists.” If there were any doubt
earlier it should be abundantly clear by now that
their real enemy is the Kashmiri people. What India
has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years is
unforgivable. An estimated 70,000 people, civilians,
militants and security forces have been killed in
the conflict. <a
href="https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2008/0201/p07s03-wosc.html"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Thousands
have been “disappeared,”</a> and tens of thousands
have passed through torture chambers that dot the
valley like <a
href="http://jkccs.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/TORTURE-Indian-State%E2%80%99s-Instrument-of-Control-in-Indian-administered-Jammu-and-Kashmir.pdf"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a
network of small-scale Abu Ghraibs</a>. </p>
</div>
<div>
<p>Over the last few years, hundreds of <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/asia/pellet-guns-used-in-kashmir-protests-cause-dead-eyes-epidemic.html?module=inline"
title="">teenagers have been blinded</a> by the
use of pellet-firing shotguns, the security
establishment’s new weapon of choice for crowd
control. Most militants operating in the valley
today are young Kashmiris, armed and trained
locally. They do what they do knowing full well that
the minute they pick up a gun, their “shelf life” is
unlikely to be more than six months. Each time a
“terrorist” is killed, Kashmiris turn up in their
tens of thousands to bury a young man whom they
revere as a <em>shaheed</em>, a martyr.</p>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>These are only the rough coordinates of a
30-year-old military occupation. The most cruel
effects of an occupation that has lasted decades
are impossible to describe in an account as short
as this.</p>
<p>In Narendra Modi’s first term as India’s prime
minister, his hard-line approach exacerbated the
violence in Kashmir. In February, after a <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/kashmir-india-pakistan.html?module=inline"
title="">Kashmiri suicide bomber</a> killed 40
Indian security personnel, India launched an
airstrike against Pakistan. Pakistan retaliated.
They became the first two nuclear powers in
history to actually launch airstrikes against each
other. Now two months into Narendra Modi’s second
term, his government has played its most dangerous
card of all. It has tossed a lit match into a
powder keg.</p>
<p>If that were not bad enough, the cheap, deceitful
way in which it did it is disgraceful. In the last
week of July, 45,000 extra troops were <a
href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/before-abolishing-article-370-indian-army-identified-possible-trouble-spots-in-kashmir/articleshow/70583869.cms"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">rushed into Kashmir </a>on
various pretexts. The one that got the most
traction was that there was a Pakistani “terror”
threat to the <a
href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-india-kashmir-pilgrimage/india-boosts-hindu-pilgrimage-to-holy-cave-in-conflict-torn-kashmir-idUKKCN1UN04Q"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Amarnath Yatra</a> — the annual
pilgrimage in which hundreds of thousands of Hindu
devotees trek (or are carried by Kashmiri porters)
through high mountains to visit the Amarnath cave
and pay their respects to a natural ice formation
that they believe is an avatar of Shiva.</p>
<p>On Aug. 1, some Indian <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ta1Dj9LHgM"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">television networks announced</a>
that a land mine with Pakistani Army markings on
it had been found on the pilgrimage route. On Aug.
2, the government published a notice asking all
pilgrims (and even tourists who were miles from
the pilgrimage route) to <a
href="https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/leave-kashmir-j-k-administration-issues-security-advisory-for-amarnath-pilgrims-1576494-2019-08-02"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">leave the valley immediately</a>.
That set off a panicky exodus. The approximately
200,000 Indian migrant day laborers in Kashmir
were clearly not a concern to those supervising
the evacuation. Too poor to matter, I’m guessing.
By Saturday, Aug. 3, tourists and pilgrims had
left and the security forces had taken up position
across the valley.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>By midnight Sunday, Kashmiris were barricaded in
their homes, and all communication networks went
down. The next morning, we learned that, along
with several hundred others, three former chief
ministers, Farooq Abdullah, his son, Omar Abdullah
of the National Conference and <a
href="https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/mehbooba-mufti-omar-abdullah-arrested-after-scrapping-of-article-370-1565015217174.html"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Mehbooba Mufti of the People’s
Democratic Party</a>, had been arrested. Those
are the mainstream pro-India politicians who have
carried India’s water through the years of
insurrection.</p>
<p>Newspapers report that the Jammu & Kashmir
police force <a
href="https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/disarmed-fall-guys-of-article-370/cid/1696748"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">has been disarmed</a>. More than
anybody else, these local police men have put
their bodies on the front line, have done the
groundwork, provided the apparatus of the
occupation with the intelligence that it needs,
done the brutal bidding of their masters and, for
their pains, earned the contempt of their own
people. All to keep the Indian flag flying in
Kashmir. And now, when the situation is nothing
short of explosive, they are going to be fed to
the furious mob like so much cannon fodder.</p>
<p>The betrayal and public humiliation of India’s
allies by Narendra Modi’s government comes from a
kind of hubris and ignorance that has gutted the
sly, elaborate structures painstakingly cultivated
over decades by cunning, but consummate, Indian
statecraft. Now that that’s done — it is down to
the Street vs. the Soldier. Apart from what it
does to the young Kashmiris on the street, it is
also a preposterous thing to do to soldiers.</p>
<p>The more militant sections of the Kashmiri
population, who have been demanding the right to
self-determination or merger with Pakistan, have
little regard for India’s laws or constitution.
They will no doubt be pleased that those they see
as collaborators have been sold down the river and
that the game of smoke and mirrors is finally
over. It might be too soon for them to rejoice.
Because as sure as eggs are eggs and fish are
fish, there will be new smoke and new mirrors. And
new political parties. And a new game in town.</p>
<p>On Aug. 8, four days into the lockdown, <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0bNYhPJnxk"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Narendra Modi appeared on
television</a> to address an ostensibly
celebrating India and an incarcerated Kashmir. He
sounded like a changed man. Gone was his customary
aggression and his jarring, accusatory tone.
Instead he spoke with the tenderness of a young
mother. It’s his most chilling avatar to date.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<p>His voice quivered and his eyes shone with
unspilled tears as he listed the slew of benefits
that would rain down on the people of the former
State of Jammu and Kashmir, now that it was rid of
its old, corrupt leaders, and was going to be ruled
directly from New Delhi. He evoked the marvels of
Indian modernity as though he were educating a bunch
of feudal peasants who had emerged from a time
capsule. He spoke of how Bollywood films would once
again be shot in their verdant valley.</p>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>He didn’t explain why Kashmiris needed to be
locked down and put under a communications
blockade while he delivered his stirring speech.
He didn’t explain why the decision that supposedly
benefited them so hugely was taken without
consulting them. He didn’t say how the great gifts
of Indian democracy could be enjoyed by a people
who live under a military occupation. He
remembered to greet them in advance for Eid, a few
days away. But he didn’t promise that the lockdown
would be lifted for the festival. It wasn’t.</p>
<p>The next morning, the Indian newspapers and
several liberal commentators, including some of
Narendra Modi’s most trenchant critics gushed over
his moving speech. Like true colonials, many in
India who are so alert to infringements of their
own rights and liberties, have a completely
different standard for Kashmiris.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Aug. 15, in his Independence Day
speech, Narendra Modi boasted from the ramparts of
Delhi’s Red Fort that his government finally had
achieved India’s dream of “<a
href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-india-independenceday-modi/indias-modi-trumpets-kashmir-muslim-marriage-moves-in-independence-day-speech-idUKKCN1V50K4"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">One Nation, One Constitution,</a>”
with his Kashmir move. But just the previous
evening, <a
href="https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kashmir-effect-rebel-groups-ban-independence-day-celebrations-in-northeast-1580947-2019-08-14"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">rebel groups in several troubled
states in the north east of India</a>, many of
which have Special Status like the erstwhile State
of Jammu and Kashmir, announced a boycott of
Independence Day. While Narendra Modi’s Red Fort
audience cheered, about seven million Kashmiris
remained locked down. The communication shutdown,
we now hear, could be extended for some time to
come.</p>
<p>When it ends, as it must, the violence that will
spiral out of Kashmir will inevitably spill into
India. It will be used to further inflame the <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/india-muslims-hindus-partition.html?module=inline"
title="">hostility against Indian Muslims</a>
who are already being demonized, ghettoized,
pushed down the economic ladder, and, with
terrifying regularity, <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFRuKs7ZfEk"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">lynched</a>. The state will use
it as an opportunity to close in on others, too —
the activists, lawyers, artists, students,
intellectuals, journalists — who have protested
courageously and openly.</p>
<p>The danger will come from many directions. The
most powerful organization in India, the far-right
Hindu nationalist <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/magazine/the-other-face-of-fanaticism.html?module=inline"
title="">Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the
R.S.S.</a>, with more than 600,000 members
including Narendra Modi and many of his ministers,
has a trained “volunteer” militia, inspired by
Mussolini’s Black Shirts. With each passing day,
the R.S.S. tightens its grip on every institution
of the Indian state. In truth, it has reached a
point when it more or less <em>is </em>the
state. </p>
<p>In the benevolent shadow of such a state,
numerous smaller <a
href="https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/the-rss-bhonsala-military-school-dhirendra-k-jha"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Hindu vigilante organizations</a>,
the storm troopers of the Hindu Nation, have
mushroomed across the country, and are
conscientiously going about their deadly business.
</p>
<p><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/magazine/gauri-lankesh-murder-journalist.html?module=inline"
title="">Intellectuals and academics</a> are a
major preoccupation. In May, the morning after the
Bharatiya Janata Party won the general elections,
Ram Madhav, a general secretary of the party and a
former spokesman for the R.S.S., wrote that the
“remnants” of the “pseudo-secular/liberal cartels
that held a disproportionate sway and stranglehold
over the intellectual and policy establishment of
the country … <a
href="https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/lok-sabha-elections-result-narendra-modi-bjp-government-congress-5745313/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">need to be discarded </a>from
the country’s academic, cultural and intellectual
landscape.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<p>On Aug. 1, in preparation for that “discarding,”
the <a
href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/27/back-future/indias-2008-counterterrorism-laws"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">already
draconian</a> Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
was amended to expand the definition of “terrorist”
to include individuals, not just organizations. The
amendment allows the government <a
href="https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/uapa-amendment-bill-gets-rajya-sabha-approval/article28796520.ece"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">to
designate any individual as a terrorist </a>without
following the due process of a First Information
Report, charge sheet, trial and conviction. Just who
— just what kind of individuals it means — was clear
when in Parliament, Amit Shah, our chilling <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnd_ELCFhCM"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">home
minister, </a>said: “Sir, guns do not give rise
to terrorism, the <a
href="https://thewire.in/rights/uapa-bjp-terrorist-amit-shah-nia"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">root
of terrorism is the propaganda</a> that is done to
spread it … And if all such individuals are
designated terrorists, I don’t think any member of
Parliament should have any objection.”</p>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Several of us felt his cold eyes staring straight
at us. It didn’t help to know that he has done
time as the main accused in a series of murders in
his home state, Gujarat. His trial judge, Justice
<a href="https://caravanmagazine.in/tag/loya"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Brijgopal Harkishen Loya</a>,
died mysteriously during the trial and was
replaced by another who acquitted him speedily.
Emboldened by all this, far-right television
anchors on hundreds of India’s news networks, now
openly denounce dissidents, make wild allegations
about them and call for their arrest, or worse.
“Lynched by TV,” is likely to be the new political
phenomenon in India.</p>
<p>As the world looks on, the architecture of Indian
fascism is quickly being put into place.</p>
<p>I was booked to fly to Kashmir to see some
friends on July 28. The whispers about trouble,
and troops being flown in, had already begun. I
was of two minds about going. A friend of mine and
I were chatting about it at my home. He is a
senior doctor at a government hospital who has
dedicated his life to public service, and happens
to be Muslim. We started talking about the new
phenomenon of mobs surrounding people, Muslims in
particular, and forcing them to chant “<a
href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48882053"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Jai Shri Ram</a>!” (“Victory to
Lord Ram!”)</p>
<p>If Kashmir is occupied by security forces, India
is occupied by the mob.</p>
<p>He said he had been thinking about that, too,
because he often drove on the highways out of
Delhi to visit his family who live some hours
away.</p>
<p>“I could easily be stopped,” he said.</p>
<p>“You must say it then,” I said. “You must
survive.”</p>
<p>“I won’t,” he said, “because they’ll kill me
either way. That’s what they did to <a
href="https://indianexpress.com/article/india/tabrez-ansari-18th-mob-violence-victim-in-jharkhand-in-three-years-5808122/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank">Tabrez Ansari</a>.”</p>
<p>These are the conversations we are having in
India while we wait for Kashmir to speak. And
speak it surely will.</p>
<p>Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel “The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Her most recent
book is a collection of essays, “My Seditious
Heart.” </p>
<p><em>The Times is committed to publishing </em><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/opinion/letters/letters-to-editor-new-york-times-women.html"
title=""><em>a diversity of letters</em></a><em>
to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think
about this or any of our articles. Here are some
</em><a
href="https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014925288-How-to-submit-a-letter-to-the-editor"
title=""><em>tips</em></a><em>. And here’s our
email: </em><a
href="mailto:letters@nytimes.com" title=""><em>letters@nytimes.com</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p><em></em><em><br>
</em></p>
</div>
</div>
</section>
</article>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
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