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 âJubilant Indians celebrate Modiâs Kashmir masterstroke.â A week earlier, Modiâs government had announced that it was suspending Article 370 of the constitution, which grants autonomy to Kashmir, Indiaâs only Muslim-majority state. The provision, written to help preserve the stateâs religious and ethnic identity, largely prohibits members of Indiaâs 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 Muslimsâa move that Republic TV described by saying that âthe leaders who would have created troubleâ had been placed in âgovernment guesthouses.â
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.