Skip to main content

Beyond Article 370




Article 370 had to go long ago. Most of the special statuses given to various states at the time of India’s Independence became redundant as time passed. They should have, at least. If they persisted for decades, it means they were not effective and not serving their purpose. So better alternatives were required.

Kashmir was a mistake right from the beginning. Just because the king there happened to be a Hindu, the state became a part of India. Of course, Nehru had a role in that too. It was not, however, “rank hypocrisy” that prompted Nehru to accede Kashmir to India, as suggested by eminent columnist Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar in today’s [11 Aug 2019] Times of India [in his column pertinently titled Next Step: A West Bank in Kashmir?]. Nehru was essentially romantic, and the roots of his romanticism lay in the miscegenated culture of Kashmir. Who but a romantic would describe a place as “supremely beautiful woman whose beauty is almost impersonal and above desire”? Nehru loved Kashmir’s “feminine beauty of river and valley and lake and graceful trees.” Who can blame such a romantic for longing to keep Kashmir with his country?

Aiyar’s argument is that Kashmir didn’t really belong to a communally divided India. It was better to let it go to Pakistan where the Muslims really belonged at that time. When thousands of Hindus and Muslims had killed each other already, when India had witnessed “the greatest migration in history” [the title of a chapter in the classical Freedom at Midnight], there was no logic in assuming that the Nehruvian version of secularism would eventually embrace the Muslims of Kashmir. India never, never possessed even a fraction of Nehru’s romanticism. India was, if anything, downright pragmatic; it was cutthroat pragmatism too.

The Congress should have abolished article 370 long ago and done a lot of things to solve the problems in Kashmir. But the Congress lacked the imagination to do anything more than appease sections of people with sops of various kinds. The majority community of the country hit back with its quintessential pragmatism by electing as their leader a man who has the butcher’s heart and a surgeon’s pretences. So article 370 went. Many other things will follow. Kashmir won’t ever be Nehru’s “supremely beautiful woman”.

As Aiyar fears it may become India’s West Bank. The typical BJP leaders are already gloating about the possibility of “marrying” [raping?] the fair-skinned women of Kashmir. The slightly less typical ones are looking forward to owning the soil of Kashmir. No one talks about the people of Kashmir.

Has Mr Modi done a great service to the people of Kashmir as he claimed in a rhetorical speech that followed the abrogation of the article 370? Given that man’s credentials, it is impossible to believe that. He is more likely to create India’s own West Bank in Kashmir. India can look forward to a lot of violence and massacre in the near future.

Mohandas Gandhi’s mystic inclusiveness and Nehru’s poetic romanticism were very minor errors in politics in comparison with mass murders.



PS. Written for Indispire Edition 286: #article370


Comments

  1. Loved the phrase 'butcher's heart and surgeon's pretences'... :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm a romantic too but living in harder times than Nehru!

      Delete
  2. Your thoughts are agreeable. Nobody is talking about the people and what they have gone as well as going through. It's more a politically expedient move because a UT is ultimately controlled by the Lieutenant Governor who is nothing more than the Union Govt.'s man in the region. That's why the statehood of J&K has been snatched. Now the Centre will rule it by the proxy of the LG.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let there be peace and prosperity in Kashmir. But is that what BJP really wants?

      Delete
  3. I don't know about who made an error, but the thing is we have seen Kashmir since 1990...stone pelting, killings and terrorist attacks. The special privileges that were given to it have not been judiciously used. So, it was a good thing in that sense that 370 was done with.

    What will be the repercussions? If Kashmir will become the next West Bank - it remains to be seen? As you said, when Nehru took the decision to merging Kashmir with India, he didn't know what he was taking on, the same way Modi's decision to remove 370 was also taken in good faith, as a means to remove the status quo in the state for the last 30 years.

    Let's be positive and hope for the best. Nobody is thinking about the people of Kashmir - I guess you may be wrong here. People have been thinking about them for the last 30 years, and it didn't do them any good. Let's take the limelight off them and see.

    We do the same thing in parenting. When a child starts putting forward unreasonable demands, the parents do a time out or ignore the child for a while. Maybe it's time we did that with Kashmir too. Give it less importance and engage our minds to other places too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would love to share your optimism. But I'm not naive.

      We know what Modi-Shah think of Muslims. We know too much to be naively optimistic.

      Delete
  4. Replies
    1. I hope I'll be disproved by good tidings from Kashmir. But the state is still under curfew and leaders under house arrest.

      Delete
  5. I would like to my optimism alive that people wil be able to lead better life above stone pelting and terrorist attacks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All sane people would like to share your optimism. The ground reality doesn't endorse it, however.

      Delete
  6. I don't know what is right- Kashmir shouldn't have come to india in the first place or Nehru stopping the indian army at LOC to leave POK to Pakistan!! It's too easy to criticise someone's decision and harder to live with it. Time will tell us who made the right decision.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maybe its me but I didnt understand whose side you are on.Your first paragraph says 370 had to go and later on you say that it wasnt right. I lived in Kashmir in 2015 when my daughter was living there. It was the best time of my life.Simple peple simple lives simple needs.All the violence is organised politics. I have no news of a friend there since August 5th.I fear for his life :( #wordsmithkaurreads #MyFriendAlexa #BlogChatter

      Delete
  7. Its a hard post and its even harder to comment on it. i don''t know about anything inside i just hope that people their will get everything what every indian is getting.

    even in a war their are some consequences and this time consequences over this hopefully works for its betterment and their people.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This insightful piece offers a profound critique of Article 370's abrogation, highlighting the complex political dynamics surrounding Kashmir. The author challenges the romanticism of past leaders and raises valid concerns about the future of the region, urging a more thoughtful approach to the welfare of Kashmiris. It’s an eye-opening read that encourages reflection on both historical decisions and their contemporary impacts. Highly thought-provoking!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

Our gods must have died laughing

A friend forwarded a video clip this morning. It is an extract from a speech that celebrated Malayalam movie actor Sreenivasan delivered years ago. In the year 1984, Sreenivasan decided to marry the woman he was in love with. But his career in movies had just started and so he hadn’t made much money. Knowing his financial condition, another actor, Innocent, gave him Rs 400. Innocent wasn’t doing well either in the profession. “Alice’s bangle,” Innocent said. He had pawned or sold his wife’s bangle to get that amount for his friend. Then Sreenivasan went to Mammootty, who eventually became Malayalam’s superstar, to request for help. Mammootty gave him Rs 2000. Citing the goodness of the two men, Sreenivasan said that the wedding necklace ( mangalsutra ) he put ceremoniously around the neck of his Hindu wife was funded by a Christian (Innocent) and a Muslim (Mammootty). “What does religion matter?” Sreenivasan asks in the video. “You either refuse to believe in any or believe in a...