Bulletin

Articles

• Changing the Domicile in Jammu and Kashmir: BJP’s Long Term Plan to Colonise Kashmir
  1 September, by Tapan Bose

  That the Modi Government will bring in a law altering the definition of resident or domicile in Jammu and Kashmir was a foregone conclusion. The RSS could not live with the fact that Jammu and Kashmir is a Muslim majority region and that its Muslim majority status was protected by law, i.e. Article 370 and its section 35 A. During his election campaign in 2019, Modi had promised to abrogate Article 370. After being re-elected he fulfilled his promise to his constituency. The fact that he (...)

• The Geopolitics of the Oppressed
  1 September, by Mohamad Junaid

  Mapping the occupation in Kashmir.
  1.
  Sitting far away in Massachusetts, I spend hours on Google Earth zooming in and out of Kashmir. I type names of Kashmiri places in the search box and watch the globe roll and the pin drop. I zoom in to locate villages and neighborhoods with recently bombed houses, or Kashmiri settlements along the border destroyed in artillery shelling. Google Earth satellite images aren’t recent—why else would Kashmir look sunny and green even during snowy winter (...)

• A Nation Rendered Numb
  1 September, by Parvaiz Bukhari

  Amid multiple lockdowns, Kashmiris confront and contest an escalating campaign to dismantle their sovereignty.
  Close to midnight on August 4, 2019, police vehicles fitted with megaphones pierced a deathly silence in Srinagar, the capital city of Indian-controlled Kashmir. Officers tersely ordered residents to stay indoors or face “strict action.” This was not unusual for people subjected to frequent and punishing curfews and lockdowns every time they have seen reason to protest. But this (...)

• Two International Webinars on Kashmir
  1 September, by Editorial

  Kashmir is under siege. Seven million people are under virtual lockdown for nine months since the BJP government abrogated Articles 370 and 35 reducing the former Princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in to two ‘Union Territories’ of Indian state.
  The Indian Constituent Assembly had adopted Article 370 as a part of Indian Constitution to give a certain degree of autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir the only Muslim-majority state — integration of which into Indian Union was to be done either through a (...)

• The Menace Brought By August 5, 2019 Still Hangs Heavy a Year Later
  1 September, by Siddiq Wahid

  The past year under the BJP has helped us in Kashmir to grasp, up close, what an attempt at total political domination looks like.
  On August 5, 2019, the Narendra Modi government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and statehood, dividing it into two union territories.
  It is vital to remember the moment that gave birth to the past twelve months in Jammu and Kashmir if we are to understand how it has redefined India, yet again, for itself and the world. The effect on the erstwhile (...)

• Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India
  1 September

  Edited by Angana P. Chatterji and Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot
  A trenchant assessment of Narendra Modi’s BJP government and its impact on India.
  Description
  Majoritarian State traces the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP administration has established an ethno-religious and populist style of rule since 2014. Its agenda is also pursued beyond the formal branches of government, as the new dispensation portrays (...)

• Authoritarianism & Lockdown Time in Occupied Kashmir and India
  1 September, by Mona Bhan & Purnima Bose

  Pandemics generate their own vocabularies, and the “novel coronavirus” is no exception. In the United States the vocabulary of COVID-19 of “sheltering-in-place” and “lockdowns” resonates with Cold War era anxieties about nuclear war and more recent fears about gun violence.
  In India the context involves growing Hindu majoritarianism materialized in a national-security state intent on demonizing Muslims and stripping them of citizenship. It is also a state determined to crush Kashmiri aspirations (...)