Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week,...
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The Big Story: Guess who’s back
Through much of 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government claimed the actions it took in the aftermath of its controversially, legally questionable effort to strip Jammu and Kashmir of autonomy were motivated by security concerns.
Yet anyone observing could tell that the suspension of civil liberties and jailing of mainstream political leaders – including the former chief minister who had been in an alliance with Modi’s own Bharatiya Janata Party just months before – was part of a political project. The Indian government did not want to permit the Kashmiri public to express opinions about the reading down of Article 370 and it hoped, by suppressing the political class, that it could create a ‘King’s Party’ in the vacuum.
As we wrote in December 2020, part of that project clearly failed. The BJP had sought to label the two major Kashmiri parties – the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party – as corrupt dynasties and the government insisted that the people of the Valley...
