Hartosh Singh Bal: After Terror, Polarizing Politics in India
Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and his party seem to be exploiting the deaths of paramilitary
soldiers in a terrorist attack for political gains ahead of national elections.
On Feb. 14, a
19-year-old drove a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of Indian
paramilitary forces in Indian-administered Kashmir and killed 49 soldiers.
Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the Army of Muhammad, a Pakistan-based terrorist group,
claimed responsibility for the attack. Over the past five
years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has governed India
and been part of the local government in Kashmir as well, thus controlling
India’s policy approaches to the disputed, conflict-torn region.
Mr. Modi embraced a
militaristic approach and shunned a political process involving dialogue with
the separatists in Kashmir. Consequently, the number of civilian and security
personnel killed in the region have increased, and a growing number of young
Kashmiris, like Adil Dar, the 19-year-old suicide bomber, joined militant
groups. These are inconvenient
facts for Mr. Modi, who has continually attacked India’s opposition parties for
being soft on terror and compromising national security. As the deaths of
the soldiers come three months before a general election, an honest evaluation
of Mr. Modi’s failed policy should have led to him to being held accountable.
Such questions,
naturally, receded into the background in the immediate aftermath of the
Kashmir bombing, in a national outpouring of grief. Before those pertinent
questions would return to the national conversation, Mr. Modi spun the bad news
to his advantage by turning the grief into an emotive and prolonged
commemoration of the deaths of the soldiers.
As Indian television
networks followed the coffins of the slain troops draped in the Indian flag on
their final journey home, Mr. Modi’s party directed its senior leaders to attend the
cremations, which were telecast live. The funerals became occasions for
patriotic avowals, some genuine, some orchestrated, as politicians sought to
ensure they were part of the frame. Mr. Modi ratcheted up
the rhetoric against Pakistan and suggested that India would retaliate
militarily. “Security forces have been given complete freedom, the blood of the people is
boiling,” he said. On social media and
television networks, retired military generals, such as G.D. Bakshi, echoed Mr. Modi’s words and
described the bombing in Kashmir as an act of war. “They started it but we will
finish it,” he said.
The venerable Cricket Club of India, a colonial
institution founded in 1933, decided to do its part by draping a portrait of
Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, which had been put up to honor his
cricketing feats in the last century. The mourning took on a
more sinister note as gangs of young menstarted parading the streets of
many Indian cities, including New Delhi, shouting slogans directed at Pakistan
and “anti-nationals” — the preferred term of the Hindu nationalists for
perceived foes and undesirables ranging from liberals to Muslims.
Several Hindu nationalist affiliates of Mr. Modi’s
party led a campaign that targeted students from Kashmir studying in educational
institutions across India. They managed to extract promises from a few colleges
that they would not admit Kashmiri students. The tone and tenor of
the marches and the threats to Kashmiri students were not lost even on Mr.
Modi’s own allies. In an editorial in its party newspaper, Shiv Sena, the
Mumbai-based Hindu nationalist party, cautioned the prime minister that “there were
political allegations that Prime Minister Narendra Modi could wage a
small-scale war to win elections …. The rulers should not behave in a manner
that these allegations gain credence.”
Mr. Modi’s political
use of the deaths of “martyrs” is not new to India, but we haven’t seen it at
such a scale since India and Pakistan fought alimited war over Kashmir in 1999. In the past
two decades, Indian security forces have periodically been targets of violent
insurgent attacks, some causing even larger numbers of casualties, but the
grief has run its normal course. Mr. Modi and his party
seem to be working on a template of exploiting calamitous deaths that they have used before. In February 2002, soon
after he took over as chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, a
train carrying Hindu religious volunteers was allegedly set on fire in the town
of Godhra by a group of Muslims. Fifty-nine people died.
Mr. Modi ensured the
bodies of the dead were taken to the Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state,
and paraded through the city. Violence broke out soon after. Hindu mobs fueled
by incendiary rhetoric from leaders of organizations affiliated with the
Bharatiya Janata Party, targeted homes and businesses owned by Muslims. Over a
thousand people were killed, over 700 of them Muslims.
In his campaign for
the state elections held a few months after the violence, Mr. Modi barely
disguised his hatred and contempt for the Muslim minority, describing them as a
demographic threat to India and seeking to connect them with Pakistan. The
insurgency in Kashmir, which is the only Muslim majority state in the country,
is often invoked in the same fashion by Mr. Modi's Hindu nationalist party.
Mr. Modi is at his
political best with an electoral campaign run on sectarian and polarizing
themes. Before the attack in Kashmir, he was facing an opposition campaign
dominated by questions about unemployment being the highest in 45 years and
distress in Indian villages. His party had already lost state elections in
Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, partly as a result of an acute farm crisis in India.
This was the campaign
that the Congress Party and other opposition parties were looking to fight;
this is the campaign that Mr. Modi is seeking to avoid with the emotive call of
martyrdom. Ironically, a vast majority of the soldiers who died were drawn
from India’s lower and middle castes with largely rural
backgrounds, a far cry from the upper-caste, urban Hindu voters who are Mr.
Modi’s most ardent and hawkish supporters.
What has largely gone
unspoken in the aftermath of the Kashmir attack is that the C.R.P.F., the
paramilitary force these young men joined, is heavily understaffed and underequipped, a
stark contrast to Mr. Modi’s bluster on national security. In 1999, I was working
as a reporter in the northern state of Punjab. I covered the cremations of
soldiers who had died in Kargil in the war between India and Pakistan. Each
body draped in the Indian flag was accompanied by a soldier from the fallen
man’s unit.
Those men were angry
with the government and willing to speak on record with their names and ranks about
being been sent to battle in the icy Himalayan mountains without proper
equipment to shield them from the cold and the snow. When I wrote their
stories, my editors refused to publish them and argued that it was not the time
to report such things because they were damaging to the “national interest.” In the rhetoric of
martyrdom that prevails in Mr. Modi’s India, editors across the country are
making similar calls and leaving out inconvenient facts and questions. It may
or may not be in the national interest, but it certainly is in Mr. Modi’s
interest.
