BJP turns further right, signals India’s hard power

Having won a bhaari bahumat, the BJP government now assumes sovereign authority to reshape India to its will. The fundamentals are now in question, including ideas of citizenship and federalism. Old rules no longer apply.

Removing Article 370 was a longtime BJP manifesto promise, deemed too drastic to ever be formally implemented. Now, the Modi government has moved to make it real, ending Kashmir’s special status in the Indian Union. The Jana Sangh held Article 370 and 35-A to be unwarranted special favours to J&K, and wanted “one country, one emblem, one Constitution”. In their view, any separateness creates separatism.

The Modi government has made headway on two big Hindutva grouses — the right of Muslims to keep their customary family law, and the special status of J&K. By criminalising triple talaq, it has shown it can venture into Muslim personal law. And now, with Article 370, it speaks of integration and uniform citizenship.


Put that way, most people have no objection — after all, we are one nation, should we not be governed by the same consistent laws? But look closer, and this is a tussle over what it means to be one nation at all.

In the Constitution’s model of plural citizenship, we are united as Indians across all our valid differences. Given that India was a compact between many states and social groups, each with their own circumstances, they tried to do justice to each. Minority communities who worried about being swamped by the numerical advantage of the majority, were given some cultural safeguards — though less than what they had during British rule.

The Modi government is not merely different in its method or aggression — its intent is wholly different from previous governments. While they used force as one tool among many for specific political ends, this government is ideologically invested in showing strength. It seeks a hostile acquisition of Kashmir to prove its point about the Union of India subordinating all other allegiances, especially those of a Muslim-majority state. It calculates the costs and benefits differently.

Given the acquiescence of other parties (except the few Kashmiri parties, the Congress, DMK, CPM, TMC etc), perhaps the government was right to bargain on the rest of India’s indifference, or even willingness to go for broke in Kashmir.

For now, the Centre can exert the full force of the military, administratively and economically integrate Kashmir and ignore its people’s various wills, make a desolation and call it peace. And perhaps win polls in the rest of India.