But I stayed quiet – consumed by a deep, viscous silence – as I tried to understand this political whiplash.
I did not want to give a quick, adolescent reaction. I wanted to assess the government’s invoking of Article 370 to kill Article 370 on the three touchstones of Mandate, Method and Morality.
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[00:00:00] 11.15 am 5th of August 2019 I stood stunned, immersed almost in a time-lapse video as Home Minister Amit Shah read out the resolution abolishing Article 370 and the State of Jammu and Kashmir in Rajasabha. Now if you were a liberal, you were beginning to castigate
[00:00:39] and you were doing this almost by rote. The Kashmir Valley has become India's Gaza. And if you were a conservative, you almost celebrated and this was almost crude. We will make the Kashmir Valley into another Switzerland.
[00:00:52] But I stayed very quiet. I was consumed by a deep and viscous silence as I tried to understand this political whiplash. I did not want to give a quick or an adolescent reaction. I wanted to assess the government's invoking of Article 370 to kill Article 370
[00:01:15] and I wanted to do this on the three touchstones of mandate, method and morality. Now I totally disagree with people who censure Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah for what they call political treachery. It should be said loud and clear.
[00:01:33] The BJP has consistently asserted in one manifesto after another over decades that they would abolish Article 370 whenever they had the mandate and since their overwhelming majority in May 2019 was democratically won, they had the mandate to create this new law. Period.
[00:01:54] But yes we can and we should argue with the method employed by them. On the face of it there maneuver seems quasi-constitutional and since I am not a learned judge, I would hesitate to call it outright unconstitutional.
[00:02:12] To first dissolve the Jammu and Kashmir assembly, vest all powers in an appointed governor and then use that manufactured almost arrogated authority to justify the legality of your own action. Now Prima FSI, the Modi Shah government has acted as the judge, the jury
[00:02:31] and the executioner all by itself. Finally we come to the morality of their actions, the political morality. Here the Modi Shah government is on truly slippery terrain. An entire population is locked up at home, leaders are arrested, communications and mobility are jammed,
[00:02:50] the whole state is put under the jackpot and then in the silence of this graveyard the government passes a law which requires under the constitution to be sanctioned by the will of the people. To even think that what has happened is therefore politically moral
[00:03:08] is frankly to become complicit and live in a very dangerous and a malicious kind of denial. Now on an aside just imagine if Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah had pulled this off
[00:03:22] after getting a majority vote in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly to endorse the new law. They would have then attained immortal statesmanship. Therefore to summarize they had the mandate but their method was highly suspect and their actions clearly lacked political morality.
[00:03:44] Now through the really critical question, how will it now play out once the Kashmiri people are freed? Now this is impossible to predict. It depends on several questions whose answers cannot even be guessed at this stage. How hopeless and disenfranchised do people feel?
[00:04:03] Remember a hopeless person is the world's most dangerous species. How vulnerable and susceptible will people be to invocations of violence and revenge? How lethal can Pakistan be or want to be in brainwashing young recruits and stoking terror?
[00:04:21] Will China for instance play a stabilizing or a trouble making role? How honestly and fairly will the left-in-governors administration work in alleviating people's distress? Can Modi and Shah deliver on their promise of converting a wretched valley into a development paradise?
[00:04:40] Or will people feel sort of shortchanged by what are now called jumlas or empty slogans? What if the general economic funk all over in the country that continues or gets worse? In that case frankly God help the Emperor.
[00:05:00] Since the answers are unknown and more importantly unknowable at this stage we should stay away from either triumphalism or cynicism and pray that sabko sanmati de Bhagawan, that God grant good sense to all because we simply don't know.