I have little value to add on the many comments around “Modi is bad to the bone” piece in The New Yorker, except that this passage jumped out at me:
Other coverage on Republic TV showed people dancing ecstatically, along with the words āJubilant Indians celebrate Modiās Kashmir masterstroke.ā A week earlier, Modiās government had announced that it was suspending Article 370 of the constitution, which grants autonomy to Kashmir, Indiaās only Muslim-majority state. The provision, written to help preserve the stateās religious and ethnic identity, largely prohibits members of Indiaās Hindu majority from settling there. Modi, who rose to power trailed by allegations of encouraging anti-Muslim bigotry, said that the decision would help Kashmiris, by spurring development and discouraging a long-standing guerrilla insurgency. To insure a smooth reception, Modi had flooded Kashmir with troops and detained hundreds of prominent Muslimsāa move that Republic TV described by saying that āthe leaders who would have created troubleā had been placed in āgovernment guesthouses.ā
From the broadly Left/liberal internationalist perspective, Hindu nationalists express a majoritarian and ethnoreligious self-consciousness. They don’t want what in India is termed “secularism” to be ascendant. I believe that some Hindu nationalists do want for India what was the original vision of Pakistan, a nation-state that has at its core a particular ethnoreligious identity (I believe this is distinct from a “Islamic fundamentalist” vision properly understood in the modern context).
And yet this passage simply glosses over the fact that legal fiat was preserving a particular sub-national identity, that of Kashmiris, the vast majority of whom are Muslims.