How ‘Special’ Did 370 Make Kashmir and Its People, After All?

Deceit meted out to Kashmiris is mixed up with them being viewed from the start through a communal lens.

Article 370: The special status was given to Kashmir because it has always been a conflict zone.

Photo: Revati Laul

Let me start with the deeply personal. I love my four- year old nephew more than anything or anyone on earth. When my day has been rotten, my ego crushed, this bright eyed four- year old looks me in the face and thinks the world of me. It restores me. It makes me want to live again.

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If to such a child you make a promise and you say – ‘If you don’t cry on your way to school today, I will get you some chocolate in the afternoon,’ but then in the afternoon you don’t deliver on your promise? And then for the next ten years you don’t deliver on it? Will you see the light go out of this child’s face? Will you see their utter destruction of faith in you, perhaps their trust in all adults will be broken forever.

Promising Chocolate to Kashmir

In October 1947, the Partition had happened, with it accompanying communal bloodbath. Before the Kashmiri people could make the decision of choosing between Pakistan or India, Pakistani tribals infiltrated the border and attacked them. So they were left with little choice. At this time, the Hindu ruler of this Muslim majority state, Hari Singh, was forced to ask India for military support and this meant signing up to be part of India. But everyone concerned recognized that this was a decision taken under duress. Special circumstances called for special provisions for Kashmir. So article 370 was the promise made and the legal document drawn up that made Kashmir part of India.

But the promise of this special status was never fully upheld. In fact, the constitutional lawyer A G Noorani explains this best. He writes that from 1954 to 1994, ninety-four entries were made to the list of subjects where the centre would have jurisdiction over the state and many of these additions altered the essential nature of article 370 – the promise made to the Kashmiris for signing on to India.

We Have Made It Seem that Kashmiris Have Been Spoiled Children

370 is not and was not the means to elevate Kashmir over the other states in India. As Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda explained on the floor of the Lok Sabha on 4th December 1964: ‘the only way of taking the Constitution (of India) into Jammu and Kashmir is through the application of Article 370…It is a tunnel.’ While the promise wasn’t kept and the equivalent of the child who never got his chocolate played out for seventy years, notionally. However, the promise of delivery of the said chocolate remained.

The deceit meted out to Kashmiris is also mixed up with them being viewed from the start through a communal lens as people who cannot be trusted because they are mainly Muslim and therefore inherently allied with Pakistan.Photo: Revati Laul

Until August 5th 2019, when Home Minister Amit Shah pushed a presidential order saying that now no chocolate would even be promised. And simultaneously, there was the awareness of the deep distress this may cause the people of Kashmir, so a huge number of security personnel was sent into the state in advance, elected leaders placed under house arrest. So Shah was effectively saying, ‘Sorry, I don’t even believe in the original promise made and I know you will not like it.’

The present siege in Kashmir is the skin that wraps itself around the violence and trauma Kashmiris have been subject to at the hands of the State on one hand and Pakistani infiltrators on the other.

Is this a recipe for peace? For integration? For inclusion?

But this is not the story being told by many of us whose business it is to tell stories. We have made it seem that Kashmiris have been spoiled children with special privileges – chocolates from abroad. They don’t want peace. Their aspirations at birth are to be jehadis, take up arms and kill people on mainland India so that they can…errr…go to Pakistan. So, let’s take away their special status and force them to concur. And that, it is believed; will bring peace!

Kashmiris Viewed Through a Communal Lens

When in fact, the special status was given to Kashmir because it has always been a conflict zone. And the trauma and deceit meted out to Kashmiris is also mixed up with them being viewed from the start through a communal lens as people who cannot be trusted because they are mainly Muslim and therefore inherently allied with Pakistan.

A few years ago, I made a film on The Half Widows of Kashmir – women whose husbands have disappeared into the conflict but who are not officially declared dead. Photo: Revati Laul

A former Kashmiri bureaucrat I met recently explained that there is a neat cleave between Kashmiri bureaucrats in the state and non-Kashmiris. The Kashmiris are referred to as `370 waley,’ – people who want to stick to the special status and the rest are referred to as `non-370 waley.’

A Kashmiri student explained to me how driving around in Delhi with a J&K car number plate was no longer possible after the Pulwama attack because Hindu mobs in the street were targeting Kashmiris everywhere.

A few years ago, I made a film on The Half Widows of Kashmir – women whose husbands have disappeared into the conflict but who are not officially declared dead. So they cannot be declared full widows and get a pension or compensation from the state.

Kashmir Is Indeed Special; No Other State Has So Many Half-Widows

She would call me and never ask for help directly but it was the unsaid expectation hanging over our conversations. And I had none to offer.

One woman I filmed was full of anger at being forced to remarry her husband’s brother by her in-laws. She was made to work as domestic help and then use that money to build a separate floor for herself and her children with no help from the in-laws and then find that they treated the children from her first husband as pariahs.

Another half widow lived in a house with very thin walls in Srinagar. She had no money to plaster the walls or insulate it from the cold, so she covered it with newspaper. And froze in the winter. Soon after I made the film, her landlord threw her out and she had to re-locate outside Srinagar and build a new house from scratch.

She would call me and never ask for help directly but it was the unsaid expectation hanging over our conversations. And I had none to offer. Then one afternoon she broke down on the phone, saying it was cold and she had no money to build the roof of the house. I had no money to give either and I couldn’t bear to speak with her any more. So I did the irresponsible, journalistic thing and stopped taking her calls.

‘Autonomy’ Taken Away Without Asking for Their Opinion

This is the Kashmir whose promises have now been taken away. Whose people have now been triply humiliated. First, they have been told that their long tryst with destiny – the autonomy promised in the constitution is taken away and it’s been done without asking for their opinion. It’s been done by force. And then, they have been downgraded from a state to two union territories under the central rule. So they are subject to the Home Minister Amit Shah’s direct rule with no state leaders as buffer. And no state at all.

I leave you with one thought. Is this a recipe for peace? For integration? For inclusion?

And to this I add a second thought. In taking away the basic freedom of 1.25 crore people isn’t the Indian state diminishing the freedom of the rest of us? People have been speaking of this with some foreboding to say – what has happened in Kashmir could happen to your state next. As if in the present, what has happened to Kashmiris isn’t already a loud and clear statement of the disregard for the spirit of the constitution and therefore immediately disenfranchising all of us.

It’s like the 13th century Turkish poet Jalaluddin Rumi said, “You want proof that the Sun exists, so you stay up/All night talking about it. Finally you sleep/As the Sun comes up.”

Revati Laul is an independent journalist and film-maker and the author of `The Anatomy of Hate,’ published by Westland/Context in December 2018. She tweets @revatilaul. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own.The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)