Voices from within denounce ‘dark day for Indian democracy'

Move to snatch IOK special status condemned by prominent Indian opinion makers

KARACHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rushed move on Monday to snatch Occupied Kashmir’s special status has even drawn the ire of sane voices within India.

Prominent Indian opinion makers, ranging from politicians and journalists to legal experts to academics, joined the chorus of condemnation of what they unanimously agreed was an unconstitutional step.

“This is not the Indian democracy we have cherished for more than seven decades,” tweeted Congress leader and former Indian foreign minister Shashi Tharoor.

What is going on in J&K? Why would leaders be arrested overnight while having done no wrong? If Kashmiris are our citizens &their leaders our partners, surely the mainstream ones must be kept on board while we act against terrorists & separatists? If we alienate them, who’s left?

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) August 4, 2019

“The assurances that successive rulers of India, including those of BJP, have given the people and leaders of Kashmir and the international community now stand torn into shreds.”

India abolishes occupied Kashmir special status with rushed decree

“What you are doing today sends a very very wrong signal to all the states of this country,” wrote his Congress compatriot P Chidambaram on Twitter.

I had warned of a misadventure in J&K. It seems the government is determined to embark upon one.

— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) August 5, 2019

“You think you have scored a victory,” he said. “You are wrong and history will prove you to be wrong,” he warned earlier in a speech in the Indian parliament.

“Shameful that you have turned Jammu and Kashmir into a non-entity by making a lieutenant governor there, so that you can appoint even a peon or a clerk, sitting here [in New Delhi],” said Rajya Sabha opposition leader Ghulam Nabi Azad.



“Doing it unilaterally like this, without consultation with Kashmiri people, political parties or without taking it through parliament, this is against the very essence of the [Indian] constitution,” the Economic Times quoted Indian Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh as saying.



“It’s a dark day for Indian democracy,” he added. Renowned Indian lawyer and constitutional expert A G Noorani was more blunt in his condemnation. “It is utterly and palpably unconstitutional. An unconstitutional deed has been accomplished by deceitful means,” he said in an interview with Huffington Post.



Noorani pointed out that after the dissolution of the IOK constituent assembly in 1956, the Indian president’s power to abrogate Article 370, which granted the disputed region its special status, had vanished. He hoped that India’s Supreme Court would strike Modi’s decree as void.

“For a fortnight, the governor and other people told a whole load of lies. And I am sorry that the [Indian] army chief was also enlisted to spread this false thing of inputs from Pakistan. It was all a falsehood.

They have undermined the army’s non-political character,” the legal expert lamented.

Writing for The Wire, Indian journalist and author Manoj Joshi termed Modi’s move a “deeply undemocratic action … that it has been done without the consent of the governed.”



“It is possible to suppress popular opinion for a while using the police and the army, but whether it will bring long-term peace to the state is a matter of speculation. It is disturbing because the argument used by the government to suppress Kashmiri opinion can be used for any other part of the country,” he warned.

Another senior journalist called it “a mockery of democracy”. “Today they introduce a bill on Article 370 and give parliament just over one hour to deliberate. Tomorrow they could do this to any other piece of legislation that changes your life. This is outrageous. A mockery of democracy,” tweeted Supriya Sharma, the Executive Editor of Scroll.in.

Indian historian Ramachandra Guha denounced the “handiwork of paranoid rulers”.  “This is not democracy, this is authoritarianism, the handiwork of paranoid, insecure rulers who daren't even have a proper debate inside or outside parliament,” wrote Guha, who is also the biographer of Gandhi.