There was, given the prime minister’s unsettling past, a tragic inevitability to all this. What looked like the beginning of an outright revolt momentarily startled him and stirred an inert opposition into action. But rescuing institutions from authoritarian assaults in a democracy is like administering heavy doses of radiation to a cancer patient: it seeds fresh risks. Smelling blood, the opposition mobilised to impeach the chief justice in parliament. But by seeking to activate a process that had never before been put to use—and that too not so much to preserve the court’s independence as to magnify Modi’s perceived influence on it—the democratic arrangement was being reconfigured drastically. Impeachment proceedings, put on to generate a public spectacle to embarrass the government, would have ripened the procedure for future abuse. What averted the trial, ironically, was the decay of parliament itself. India’s Modi-worshipping vice-president, who chairs the upper house of parliament, refused to authorise the impeachment in spite of the fact that all the procedural conditions for it had been satisfied.61 The Supreme Court, split within, found itself in an embarrassingly difficult position: to be seen to be going against the prime minister would open it up to accusations that it was seeking to allay the perception that its chief justice was biased. Having admitted a petition by activists demanding an independent inquest into Loya’s death, a bench of the Supreme Court headed by the chief justice threw it out and upbraided the petitioners—none of whom could reasonably be called a busybody—for wasting the court’s time. This was a baffling denouement. In the background, Loya’s son held his own press conference to announce that he no longer had any ‘suspicions’ about how his father died. After a brief tremor, Shah and Modi won decisively.
In a country with thousands of newspapers and hundreds of television channels dedicated exclusively to news, there is, with some notable exceptions, a strange absence of dissenting voices. Instead, primetime shows on the most-watched television networks—almost all of them pro-Modi—are packed with panellists who trip over one another to praise the prime minister. ‘Influential owners, anchors, editors across the nation’, as the dauntless journalist Krishna Prasad has observed, serve as an ‘advance party to quell dissent, manufacture consent, set the agenda, drum up support, and spread fear, venom, hatred and bigotry—sometimes through sheer silence’.62 Prasad, eased out of his job editing one of India’s finest English-language newsmagazines for the offence of scrutinising Hindu nationalists too vigorously, was not exaggerating when he wrote that the Indian media today is ‘gasping under pressure not felt even during Emergency’s darkest nights’. Indira Gandhi shackled the press. Modi co-opted it.
Outliers have found themselves relentlessly harried and harassed. In 2017, officers from the CBI raided the residence of Prannoy Roy, the founder of NDTV, one of India’s last remaining bulwarks of independent broadcast journalism, and the offices of his television channel. The reason for the swoop was an alleged ‘loss’ to a private bank arising from a loan of Rs 3.5 billion taken, almost a decade before, by Roy and wife. The investigative agency’s energetic effort to recoup such a tiny sum apparently due to a private lender in a country whose state banks are owed more than ten trillion rupees by the country’s oligarchs was mystifying on the face of it.63 What made it all the more bizarre was the fact that the Roys had repaid the debt in full in 2009, and produced a letter from the bank attesting to this fact. A former head of the CBI questioned the agency’s motive. But Modi’s fixation with NDTV—and prominent journalists in the English-language media who covered the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 when he was chief minister of Gujarat, or questioned him about it—is all-consuming. A year before the raid on the Roys, NDTV’s Hindi station was accused of imperilling India’s national security for having reported on a terrorist attack, something virtually every other station did, and forced off the air for a day.
2017 was the year in which Modi consolidated his hold over the media. Karan Thapar was perhaps the only journalist who unnerved Modi with his direct questioning in a television interview after the violence in Gujarat. Modi walked out of the show within minutes of sitting down. But the payback came in 2017 when Thapar, among the best in his trade anywhere in the world, found himself out of a job after his employer, India Today TV, refused to renew his contract.64 A few months later, Bobby Ghosh, the editor of Hindustan Times who distinguished his publication with an online ‘Hate Tracker’ to keep tabs on sectarian violence in the era of Modi, was shown the door the day after the broadsheet’s owner had a meeting with Modi.65 In between, a newly launched Marathi-language show hosted by Nikhil Wagle, another fiercely independent-minded broadcast journalist, was cancelled by TV9 despite its soaring ratings.66 A year later, the recently empowered tax authorities raided the properties of Raghav Bahl, a media proprietor whose publications are not worshipful of Modi.67
The harassment and ostracisation of Modi’s critics have been complemented by the introduction into the media landscape of a new television news channel, Republic, backed by an investor from southern India whom the BJP nominated to the upper house of parliament.68 The star of Republic, Arnab Goswami, is an unabashed pro-government bully with an outsize pulpit. Times Now, the channel Goswami vacated to seek his own fortune, chases ratings by out-shouting and out-doing the polarising theatrics of its erstwhile leader. Careers of Modi’s critics have tapered away. The prime minister’s champions have prospered.
There is a pervasive atmosphere of self-censorship in newsrooms. Four hundred pairs of eyes and ears monitor every news channel in India from the offices of the government’s Information and Broadcasting ministry.69 What they see and hear, for the most part, are shrill theatrics camouflaging the ethical and intellectual destitution of India’s news media in the age of Modi. In America, legacy publications such as the Washington Post and the Atlantic have been able to rediscover and pursue vigorously and fearlessly a lofty purpose—the defence of democracy from the assaults of Trump—with the resources placed at their disposal by their billionaire proprietors. In India, with some exceptions, the proprietors of most of the once great and trusted brands in journalism have degenerated into hustlers. An extensive undercover operation in 2018 by the website CobraPost exposed the depths of the rot: a reporter posing as a deep-pocketed Hindu nationalist was able to obtain enthusiastic assent from virtually every major print and electronic news entity for his proposal to air anti-opposition, pro-Hindutva propaganda in return for cash.70 They are all on tape—owners and top executives of the Times of India, India Today, the New Indian Express, Radio One—discussing the details of this cancerous idea. Vineet Jain, the owner of the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language newspaper that was also one of the principal cheerleaders of Modi’s demonetisation, even gave advice to the fake reporter on ways to launder hundreds of millions of rupees into legal cheques.71
There are still exceptionally talented journalists at these titles. But their skill is fated to become insupportable just when it is most needed as what remains of India’s fourth estate is repurposed into a PR service by the knaves, scoundrels and bootlickers who own it. Practitioners of adversarial, public-interest journalism in India are to be found in greater numbers in the ‘regions’—in small towns, villages, non-English languages—men and women such as Gauri Lankesh, Sandeep Sharma, Vijay Singh. Their circumstances aren’t glamorous, but the impact of their work can be judged from the gruesomeness of their killings. The linguistic diversity of India, sadly, means that countrywide outrage against the localised murders of journalism can only be produced by extensive coverage in the ‘national’—that is, English-language—media. And this is the segment that is also the most compromised and craven.
Many well-heeled ‘national’ media personalities in Delhi and Mumbai, incapable of extending their gaze beyond their own navels, were appalled when India was ranked 138 in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.72 The fact that the ‘world’s largest democracy’ was placed at such an insultingly low ra
nk was proof to them of an international conspiracy to discredit Modi. What their fulminations did not take into account was all that was happening around them: the sacking of critics, the hacking apart of intrepid reporters in the regions, the deep corruption at media houses in the metropolises. The democratic content of the republic was being gutted in the age of Modi, but the people believing themselves to be the guardians of democracy were concerned most of all with image. India, you see, had become Modified.
10
Disunion
Unity in diversity is India’s strength …
—Narendra Modi
India is an improbable nation. Inheriting the continental diversity consolidated into an elaborate colonial holding by the British and their native collaborators, it constructed its sovereignty by bypassing all the traditional determinants of nationhood—language, ethnicity, religion—long adduced to sift human beings into exclusionary silos. The polyglot, poly-ethnic, poly-religious political union envisaged by the founders of India was ratified in a free vote, held in 1951, in which every adult from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Kutch to Kibithu, regardless of his or her origins, was for the first time enfranchised. But the democratic republic consecrated by that astounding pageant of political participation could only be sustained by a creed that honoured the heterogeneity of India’s human cast. Secularism, it turns out, was a great deal more than the private fetish of a deracinated post-colonial elite. It was, with all its defects, the condition of India’s unity.
Only a citizenship premised on the repudiation of the procrustean presumptions of the phrase ‘national identity’ could fuse the bewilderingly variegated peoples of India into a nation. Indianness was a catholic category: you could speak any language, practise any faith, belong to any ethnicity—and still be able to call yourself Indian. Distinctions of language were overcome with relative ease; ethno-religious insularity was the fount of ungiving intransigence. The business of squashing it was phenomenally ugly. But force and chicanery alone could never have worked against the variety of resistance ranged against Indian integration. In the end, India could generate support for the union among Christians in Nagaland, Muslims in Kashmir, Sikhs in Punjab and Buddhists in Sikkim because their faith was immaterial to full membership of it. But as India moves under Modi from defective secularism to de facto Hindu supremacism, it can no longer invoke the foundational arguments of the state to retain non-Hindus within its fold. Delhi can hold on to them only by force—as second-tier subjects of a Hindu imperium, not equal citizens of an inclusive non-confessional state.
Nowhere is the hazard of disunion more apparent than in Jammu and Kashmir. India’s sole Muslim-majority state was a moral blot and a criminal enterprise long before Modi appeared on the scene. But his Hindu nationalism is not even theoretically equipped to defuse the crisis of legitimacy that stalks the state in Kashmir. Modi’s presence in the prime minister’s office is, if anything, a dream-come-true for Kashmir’s radical Muslim separatists—and their sponsors in Pakistan—who have long preached to the province’s brutalised majority that India is a Hindu state and they its subjects. The fillip Modi has given their cause has an inescapable ring of finality to it. Two segregationist forms of nationalism are clashing, complementing and fortifying each other in Kashmir. On the quartering block is a brittle unity forged in the dream of emancipating Indians from the malign thrall of small identities.
The crisis of modern Kashmir began at the birth of India. When the British partitioned and quit the subcontinent in 1947, Jammu and Kashmir was one of hundreds of ‘princely states’—tributaries of the crown of various sizes—faced with the choice of accession to either India or Pakistan, or independence from both. Most of these states, lorded over by unconscionably opulent maharajas and nawabs, transferred their loyalties to India to avert rebellions by their haggard subjects. Kashmir was Hyderabad in reverse: a Muslim-majority kingdom under the thumb of a Hindu king, Hari Singh, a dissolute despot. His forbears had received the territory in the nineteenth century as a token of gratitude for betraying Kashmir’s Sikh rulers to Britain’s advantage.1 Now the dynasty faced an impossible choice. An Islamic Pakistan from which non-Muslims were fleeing en masse was as unthinkable for Singh as a secular state was for his counterpart in Hyderabad. Joining India, embarked on Nehruvian socialism, would mean relinquishing his privileges. So Singh temporised. Jinnah nonetheless felt confident in the beginning that, given its location and demography, Kashmir would end up in Pakistan. And it might have done had it not been for a major complicating factor in the form of Sheikh Abdullah. The wildly popular leader of Kashmir’s largest political party, the secular National Conference, Abdullah was a close comrade of Nehru’s. A socialist and secularist, he charged Jinnah with ‘breath[ing] poison into the atmosphere’ with his ‘formula that Muslims and Hindus form separate nations’.2
Pakistan branded him a ‘quisling and paid agent’ out to ‘disrupt the Mussalmans’,3 but it could not take chances: Kashmir’s accession to India would instantly debunk the argument for Pakistan’s invention—that Muslims and Hindus could not coexist in one state—and obliterate Pakistan’s claim to be the authentic homeland of the subcontinent’s Muslims that gave a gloss of purpose to its puzzling existence. Rattled, Jinnah authorised a war to seize Kashmir by force in October 1947. The American journalist Margaret Bourke-White interviewed the ‘irregulars’ setting out from Pakistan to ‘liberate’ Kashmir, which at that stage was an independent and sovereign state. ‘We are going to help our Muslim brothers in Kashmir,’ they told her.4 There was barely any resistance as they crossed into Kashmir, and Srinagar, the capital, was theirs for the taking. But then the men mobilised in the name of Islamic solidarity by the father of Pakistan distracted themselves for days by butchering the locals, razing a church, and raping and mutilating the nuns at a mission hospital.5
Belatedly taking notice of what was coming to him, Hari Singh appealed to India for help. But Kashmir was a foreign state. Nehru set conditions: Kashmir must accede to the Indian union and the accession must be approved by Sheikh Abdullah. Hari Singh, anxious to keep the Muslim socialist out of power, insisted on retaining some of his royal prerogatives. This was very far from ideal. But since the proposal had the assent of Kashmir’s most popular politician, and since Kashmir was on the threshold of surrender to Pakistan, Indian troops were airlifted to Srinagar on 27 October 1947.6 The Instrument of Accession that gave Delhi juridical authority over the state, dated 26 October 1947, may have been an antedated document signed by Hari Singh on the day India initiated action. Whatever the case, Kashmir had acceded to the Indian union by the legal mechanism instituted under the terms of the subcontinent’s partition. The matter was settled in law.
Inciting religious passions had yielded tremendous dividends for Jinnah in India. But the technique did not work in Kashmir. The misadventures of his men deepened Abdullah’s revulsion for Pakistan’s founder and horrified ordinary Kashmiris. When Bourke-White made her way into Kashmir—‘heaped with rubble and blackened with fire’—she found that Kashmiri Muslims, far from yearning for the Islamic state of Jinnah, were mourning the martyrdom of Mir Maqbool Sherwani, a local leader of Abdullah’s National Conference, in the act of defending interfaith unity. Mir, who led a heroic resistance against the invaders, was captured, tortured and ordered to recite support for Pakistan. When he refused, he was crucified in the shade of a ransacked church and then riddled with bullets. Mir’s last words, relayed to Bourke-White by the locals who now regarded him as a ‘saint’, were: ‘Victory to Hindu–Muslim unity’.7 That phrase, discredited in Kashmir since the late 1980s and even more thoroughly in India since 2014, was a poignant tribute to Kashmiri syncretism and a haunting indictment of Jinnah and his ideological kin in Hindu garb.
In the days leading up to the Pakistani invasion, Hari Singh’s administration decommissioned and disarmed Muslim soldiers and abetted a massacre of their co-religionists in Jammu. Some 200,000 Muslims were killed and another 300,000 driven from
their homes by Hindu nationalists embarked on a homicidal project to create a Hindu majority in the region. This crime, far exceeding anything perpetrated by the Nizam of Hyderabad, invited criminal prosecution.8 Gandhi himself held Hari Singh culpable for the atrocities by Sikhs and Hindus who travelled to the kingdom to wipe out Muslims.9 But having shrewdly shielded himself with the wording of the Instrument of Accession, Singh not only was not prosecuted but his criminality was airbrushed from history. Religion was a secondary concern for the Muslim Kashmiris who sought union with India. It was Singh and his Hindu-nationalist brethren—and their Muslim-nationalist counterparts in Pakistan—who injected the poison of religion into Kashmir.
A third of Kashmir had fallen to Pakistan by the time hostilities subsided. It should have been left to Indian forces to recover it. But Nehru, acting on British advice, referred Kashmir to the United Nations. It was a grievous mistake: it insulted the ordinary Kashmiris who had rallied behind India, created a costly diversion from the urgent task of rebuilding Kashmir and made Pakistan a party to what now became a legal dispute. The UN devised a sequential prescription in 1948 for the resolution of the conflict: first, Pakistan would have to retreat from the Kashmiri territory it occupied; second, India would have to pare its troop levels down to numbers essential only for the maintenance of security; third, Kashmiris would have to be given a referendum to decide their future.10 It is possible that Kashmiris may have voted for independence. But given that it was Kashmir’s status as a sovereign independent state in 1947 that invited Pakistan’s war of annexation, it is far more probable that they would have voted to ratify the Instrument of Accession backed by Abdullah and remain part of India. But the plebiscite never took place because the UN formula was sequent: the first condition had to be satisfied before the parties could move to meet the second, and the second before the third. Pakistan, rather than vacate the portion of Kashmir it took, continued a low-intensity fight to upend the status quo. And with Pakistani troops massed across the persistently violated ceasefire line, India maintained a strong military presence in Kashmir to deter a second invasion. A vote looked doomed from the beginning. The UN’s plan, built on the preposterous presumption that a state that had just waged an illegal war would act in the interests of the victims of that war, effectively embalmed Kashmiris—divided between two powerful adversaries—in an intractable limbo.
Malevolent Republic Page 19
