- Across the aisle: The remains of the day
P Chidambaram says in his column for The Indian Express today that he has no hesitation in blaming the BJP-led Central government’s policy for the rapidly deteriorating situation in Jammu and Kashmir, especially in the Kashmir valley.
I take no satisfaction that numerous persons have affirmed what I had said three years ago: that the PDP-BJP coalition was an unnatural and opportunistic alliance. It was rejected on Day One by the people of the Valley. The PDP was viewed as the betrayer and the BJP as the usurper. When a by-election was held in Srinagar constituency, the turnout was 7 per cent. The coalition was the main provocation for the increase in violence.
Several fundamental principles have suffered major damage. Contrary to the written and unwritten rules, Army generals made political statements, the J&K Council of Ministers broke the principle of collective responsibility, the integrity of the state (consisting of three regions) was severely impaired, and the state unleashed violence against its own people, including its young citizens. I cling to the hope that Kashmir is not lost forever, but the situation is pretty close to that catastrophe.
- Is the mood changing?
In her column for The Indian Express today, Tavleen Singh asks if not Modi then who will be the next prime minister of India? Is it time to start asking this question? I think it could be because Indian voters are today more impatient than they were 10 years ago, and they are much more aspirational.
At the beginning of this year, if you said that it was not certain that Narendra Modi would become prime minister again next year, you risked being charged with wishful thinking or lunacy. But, as that old cliché goes, a week is a long time in politics. The political mood has changed even if the message has not yet reached the big man himself. High officials in Delhi scoffed when I told them last week that during recent travels in northern India I had seen a disturbing degree of despair setting in.
So will they vote for Rahul Gandhi instead? This is not certain because he is so good at ruining his own chances. Rahul’s confused political thinking is not the only reason why his chances of becoming India’s next prime minister continue to look bleak. The more important reason is that the Congress has shown no signs of revival in Uttar Pradesh.
For the first time since he became Prime Minister, there are signs that Modi is losing his personal popularity.
- E for Emergency: Is Narendra Modi in the same place as Indira Gandhi was in 1974?
KN Hari Kumar, in his column for Scroll.in said that the growing disillusionment with the Narendra Modi government has led recently to a few electoral setbacks for the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance at the Centre. In different states Dalits, farmers and some upper-caste groups have been agitating to draw attention to their demands. The BJP, through chicanery and worse, has installed governments of its choice in some states without having won a majority.
Rural distress shows no signs of abating despite Modi’s promise to double farmers’ incomes over the next few years. Farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra – all BJP-ruled states – have been at the forefront of protests. The powerful landed upper castes, again more so in BJP-ruled states – like Jats in Haryana, Patels in Gujarat and Marathas in Maharashtra – are mobilising and demanding reservations and other benefits and protection against the lower castes and classes. Dalits too are unhappy.
The use of the Central Bureau of Investigation and other anti-corruption agencies to target Opposition politicians at the Centre and the states is another area of concern. Similar transgressions of democratic and Constitutional norms – and probably worse – were also seen during Indira Gandhi’s rule, even setting aside the Emergency period. All this taken together has aroused suspicions in some commentators whether the Modi government, faced with the prospect of electoral defeat, will stop at nothing to cling to power, even without formally declaring an Emergency.
- The ‘Unholy’ Alliance May Be Over, But There Are Still Dark Days Ahead for Kashmir
Anand K. Sahay writes in his column for The Wire that the BJP’s project to impress communal Hindus in order to win them over electorally began long before the rug was pulled under the feet of Mehbooba. Uncertainty and foreboding mark the foreseeable future. This is because the BJP still rules at the Centre, and under governor’s rule, it will be calling the shots with renewed communalist and militarist fervour, if that is the trajectory it reckons will suit its interests.
With Mehbooba Mufti’s virtual sack and the perfectly planned introduction of direct rule from the prime minister’s office, with national security advisor Ajit Doval playing Modi’s jack, the saffron party will not have to contend with the paradoxical situation of an acquiescing state-level partner in the PDP that also raised uncomfortable questions from time to time.
This means the BJP may now run the show any way it likes and allow its “muscular” but mindless, and dangerous and morally hollow, policies unhindered play at the expense of the peace-craving population of Kashmir. The Modi regime has scrupulously avoided the politics of engagement in Kashmir, but it has without inhibition played politics of another kind – a politics to be the vehicle for its ideology which it thinks will brighten his party’s electoral prospects as well.
- The features of a nationalist
Analysing what nationalism and a nationalist really means, Tabish Khair in his column for The Hindu says that nationalism, as we know it today, is the late 19th and early 20th century belief that if you are a nation, you need a state, and if you are a state, you have to be (or become) a nation. When we apply the term ‘nationalism’ to any state or movement before the 19th century, we are basically (and erroneously) talking of patriotism — a very different concept from nationalism — and other forms of hegemony or identity.
As has been noted by historians, the concept of nations and various kinds of patriotism had existed before the 19th century all over the world. For instance, gypsies and Jews were considered ‘nations’ in Europe in and before the 19th century. Hence, both Savarkar and Jinnah, following a common colonial discourse, saw ‘Muslims’ and ‘Hindus’ as ‘nations’ in pre-Independent India.
However, by the early 20th century, matters — and the meaning of ‘nation’ — had changed. From the 19th century onwards, an equation had started being made between the nation and the state. Not just Hindu and Muslim nationalists in pre-independent India, but almost all other peoples — Turks, Irish, English, Germans, Nazis, Zionists, etc. — had been swept along with this new equation of nation with state, erroneously considering it an age-old inheritance simply because both the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ could be traced into the far past.