The many partitions of India and the unity of its historical character is the core plot of its travelogue through history. Persians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, Europeans and the British have played snakes and ladders with the myriad borders of pre-Independence India. Now a new border wants a change. The residents of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) are clamouring to join its estranged parent. Massive anti-Pakistan protests are raging across PoK, asking India’s Narendra Modi to free them from Islamabad’s illegal occupation. Ironically, this is happening when their Indian brethren are protesting the removal of Article 370.
At the peneytralia of both Kashmiri movements is freedom, one genuine and the other indoctrinated perversion. Kashmiris across the LoC seem to be betraying the ‘united’ Azadi concept of Kashmir as an independent Islamic nation living under Pakistan’s tyrannical thumb. One set of Kashmiris, funded and led by characters financed by ISI, are inflaming youth in the Valley to demand azadi from India, while another set of Kashmiris living under Pakistani occupation are demanding azadi because they are starving and being brutalised by the Pakistani Army. It is the end of irony.
The Partition of India was managed by the cynical British who feared the rise of this newly unchained beast, and mismanaged by the addictive pacifist Jawaharlal Nehru and his fanatic mentor Mahatma Gandhi. The Partition of Kashmir would not have happened had the Indian Army marched into now-PoK to eject Pak-backed Pashtoon invaders in 1947. On the advice of Sheikh Abdullah, Nehru ordered a ceasefire and Pakistan got PoK. In 2011, Duane R Clarridge, a former CIA agent, revealed that Sheikh knew of Pakistan’s 1965 war plans months in advance. For the Abdullahs and Pakistan, Kashmir is not a territory but an Islamic paradise once governed by sultans and Mughals as a symbol of religious imperialism. This legacy is what the Abdullahs have appropriated, exploited and defined as Kashmiriyat. But it’s the economy, stupid.
The Abdullahs, Yasin Maliks, Andrabis and Geelanis lived at both Indian and Pakistani expense while the prosperity of PoK steadily declined. Government stats say per person allocation for J&K has always been higher than the rest of India—in 2017-18, it was Rs 28,000 for J&K and Rs 8,000 for other states. It also gets 90 per cent of Central assistance as a grant and 10 per cent as a loan. For the rest of India, the loan part is 70 per cent. Government data shows that J&K’s revenue generation, post abrogation of Article 370, has started recovering; it crossed Rs 25,000 crore in 2022-23. PoK’s poverty rate in 2021 was 61 per cent, and 48 per cent of its population is jobless; J&K’s poverty and unemployment rates are 10.35 per cent and 5.2 per cent, respectively. The GSDP rate of J&K was 8.2 per cent compared to 1.3 per cent in PoK.
The Opposition may deride Modi as the Great Divider, who stokes religious dissensions and irrigates the embedded roots of Hinduism to create divisions. He became a uniting factor after the abrogation of Article 370. Paradoxically, he is the uniting factor of the Opposition; there would be no I.N.D.I.A without him. In the likelihood of Pok breaking away for a homecoming—a tough proposition since it is Pakistan’s main motivation for jihad against India—Modi would be, by default, hailed as the Great Unifier. There is a tide in the affairs of nations, too, which, taken at the flood, leads to fortune. India’s strategic moves in Balochistan and PoK are turning the tide of native freedom movements. Modi is freedom’s salesman in PoK. Hardsell has never been a problem for him.