NEW YORK – A respected American weekly magazine has carried a damningarticle in its latest issue about Indian Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’svirulent push to promote Hindu nationalism in India that targets Muslimsand other religious minorities, his illegal annexation of Jammu and Kashmirand the repressive lockdown of the disputed state.
“The change in Kashmir upended more than half a century of carefulpolitics, but the Indian press reacted with nearly uniform approval,”wroteDexter Filkins, a staff writer of The New Yorker who recently sneaked intothe curfew-bound Kashmir along with an Indian journalist Rana Ayyub, whosebook, “Gujarat Files,” about a massacre of Muslims in the Indian state ofGujarat, has made her a target of Hindu nationalists.
“Ever since Modi was first elected Prime Minister, in 2014, he has beenrecasting the story of India, from that of a secular democracyaccommodating a uniquely diverse population to that of a Hindu nation thatdominates its minorities, especially the country’s two hundred millionMuslims,” Filkins said in an in-depth article in which he also highlightedthe courageous struggle of Ms. Ayyub in getting the truth out about Modiand his associates decisive move to subdue minorities and to turn Indiainto a Hindu country.
“Modi and his allies have squeezed, bullied, and smothered the press intoendorsing what they call the ‘New India’,” he wrote, citing a number ofinstances about how much of the Indian media now supports the primeminister’s oppressive policies, ignoring his failures and covering up hislies, especially about the Balakot operation.
“Kashmiris greeted Modi’s decision with protests, claiming that his realgoal was to inundate the state with Hindu settlers. After the initialtumult subsided, though, the Times of India and other major newspapersbegan claiming that a majority of Kashmiris quietly supported Modi—theywere just too frightened of militants to say so aloud. Televisionreporters, newly arrived from Delhi, set up cameras on the picturesqueshoreline of Dal Lake and dutifully repeated the government’s line,” saidThe New Yorker article, entitled:Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India.
Although foreign journalists are banned for entering occupied Kashmir,Filkins clad himself in Indian dress and took the Srinagar-bound flightfrom India along with journalist Rana Ayyub. They dodged past the heavyIndian security at the airport and got into a taxi to the city two weeksafter the August 5 crackdown.
“Even from a moving car, it was clear that the reality in Kashmir veeredstarkly from the picture in the mainstream Indian press,” he wrote.“Soldiers stood on every street corner. Machine-gun nests guardedintersections, and shops were shuttered on each block.“Apart from the military presence, the streets were lifeless. AtKhanqah-e-Moula, the city’s magnificent eighteenth-century Mosque, Fridayprayers were banned. Schools were closed. Cell-phone and Internet servicewas cut off.
“Indian intelligence agents are widely understood to monitor the rosters oflocal hotels, so Ayyub and I, along with an Indian photographer named AvaniRai, had arranged to stay with a friend.
“When we got there, a Kashmiri doctor who was visiting the house told us tocheck the main hospital, where young men were being treated after securityforces fired on them. The police and soldiers were using small-gaugeshotguns—called pellet guns by the locals—and some of the victims had beenblinded. ‘Go to the ophthalmology ward,’ the doctor said.“At the hospital, we found a scene of barely restrained chaos, withsecurity officers standing guard and families mixing with the sick incorridors. While I stood in a corner, trying to make myself inconspicuous,(Ms) Ayyub ran to the fourth floor to speak to an eye doctor. After a fewminutes, she returned and motioned for me and Rai to follow. ‘Ward eight,’she said. Thirty gunshot victims were inside.
“As the three of us approached, a smartly dressed man with a close-croppedbeard stepped into our path and placed his hand on (Ms.) Ayyub’s shoulder.‘What are you doing here?’ he said. Rai looked at me and quietly said,‘Run.’ I turned and dashed into the crowd. The bearded man took (Ms.) Ayyuband Rai by the arm and led them away.
“When (Ms.) Ayyub and the photographer were detained at the hospital inSrinagar, I found a hiding place across the street, screened by a wall anda fruit vender; (Ms.) Ayyub would have faced serious repercussions if shewas found to have snuck in a foreigner. After about an hour, they emerged.(Ms.) Ayyub said that an intelligence officer had questioned them intently,then released them with an admonition: ‘Don’t come back.’
“The next morning, we drove to the village of Parigam, near the site of thesuicide attack that prompted Modi’s air strikes against Pakistan. We’dheard that Indian security forces had swept through the town and detainedseveral men. The insurgency has broad support in the villages outside thecapital, and the road to Parigam was marked by the sandbags and razor wireof Indian Army checkpoints. For most of the way, the roads were otherwisedeserted.
“In the village, (Ms.) Ayyub stopped the car to chat with locals. Within afew minutes, she’d figured out whom we should talk to first: Shabbir Ahmed,the proprietor of a local bakery.
We found him sitting cross-legged on his porch, shelling almonds into ahuge pile. In interviews, (Ms.) Ayyub slows down from her usual debate-teampace; she took a spot on the porch as if she had dropped by for a visit.Ahmed, who is fifty-five, told her that, during the sweeps, an armoredvehicle rumbled up to his home just past midnight one night. A dozensoldiers from the Rashtriya Rifles, an élite counter-insurgency unit of theIndian Army, rushed out and began smashing his windows. When Ahmed and histwo sons came outside, he said, the soldiers hauled the young men into thestreet and began beating them. ‘I was screaming for help, but nobody cameout,’ Ahmed said. ‘Everyone was too afraid.’
“Ahmed’s sons joined us on the porch. One of them, Muzaffar, said thesoldiers had been enraged by young people who throw rocks at their patrols.They dragged Muzaffar down the street toward a Mosque. “Throw stones at themosque like you throw stones at us,” one of the soldiers commanded him.
“Muzaffar said he and his brother, Ali, were taken to a local base, wherethe soldiers shackled them to chairs and beat them with bamboo rods. “Theykept asking me, ‘Do you know any stone throwers?’—and I kept saying I don’tknow any, but they kept beating me,’ he said. When Muzaffar fainted, hesaid, a soldier attached electrodes to his legs and stomach and jolted himwith an electrical current. Muzaffar rolled up his pants to reveal patchesof burned skin on the back of his leg. It went on like that for some time,he said: he would pass out, and when he regained consciousness the beatingstarted again. “My body was going into spasms,” he said, and began to cry.
After Muzaffar and Ali were released, their father took them to the localhospital. “They have broken my bones,” Muzaffar said. “I can no longerprostrate myself before God.”“It was impossible to verify the brothers’ tale, but, as with many accountsthat (Ms.) Ayyub and I heard in the valley, the anguish was persuasive. “Iam a slightly more civilized version of these people,” (Ms.) Ayyub told me.‘I see what’s happening—with the propaganda, with the lies, what thegovernment is doing to people. Their issues are way more extensive—theirlives. But I have everything in common with these people. I feel theirpain.’
‘One afternoon, Ayyub and I walked through Soura, a hardscrabbleneighborhood in Srinagar’s old city which has been the site of severalconfrontations with security forces. By the time we got there, the policeand the Army had withdrawn, evidently deciding that the narrow streets lefttheir men too vulnerable. The locals told us that they regarded Soura asliberated territory and vowed to attack anyone from the government whotried to enter. Every wall seemed plastered with graffiti. One bit ofscrawl said, “Demographic change is not acceptable!”
The Kashmiris we met felt trapped, their voices stifled. ‘The news that istrue—they never show it,’ Yunus, a shop owner, said of the Indian media.Days before, his thirteen-year-old son, Ashiq, had been arrested and beatenby security forces, just as he himself had been thirty years before.‘Nobody has ever asked the people of Kashmir what they want—whether to staywith India or join Pakistan or become independent,’ he said. ‘We have heardso many promises. We have lifted bodies with our hands, lifted heads thatare separate, lifted legs that are separate, and put them all together intograves.’
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“Many Kashmiris still refuse to accept Indian sovereignty, and some recallthe promise, made by the United Nations in 1948, that a plebiscite woulddetermine the future of the state. Kashmir was assigned specialstatus—enshrined in Article 370—and afforded significant powers ofself-rule. For the most part, those powers have never been realized.Beginning in the late eighties, an armed insurgency has turned the areainto a battleground. The conflict in Kashmir is largely a war of ambush andreprisal; the insurgents strike the Indian security forces, and thesecurity forces crack down. Groups like Human Rights Watch have detailedabuses on both sides, but especially by the Indian government.
“The R.S.S. and other Hindu nationalists have claimed that the efforts toassuage the Kashmiris created a self-defeating dynamic. The insurgency hasstifled economic development, they said; Article 370 was curtailinginvestment and migration, dooming the place to backwardness. Modi’sdecision to revoke the article seemed the logical endpoint of the R.S.S.world view: the Kashmiri deadlock would be broken by overwhelming Hindupower.
“As (Ms.) Ayyub and I drove around Kashmir, it seemed unclear how theIndian government intended to proceed. Economic activity had ground to ahalt. Schools were closed. Kashmiris were cut off from the outside worldand from one another. “We are overwhelmed by cases of depression,” aphysician in Srinagar told us. Many Kashmiris warned that an explosion waslikely the moment the security measures were lifted. ‘Modi is doing what hedid in Gujarat twenty years ago, when he ran a tractor over the Muslimsthere,’ a woman named Dushdaya said.
“The newspaper columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote that, in Kashmir, ‘Indiandemocracy is failing.’ He suggested that the country’s Muslims, who havelargely resisted radicalization, would conclude that they had nothing elseto turn to. ‘The B.J.P. thinks it is going to Indianise Kashmir,’ he wrote.“Instead, what we will see is potentially the Kashmirisation of India: Thestory of Indian democracy written in blood and betrayal.”
Filkins, the New Yorker staff writer, then moved to Srinagar with RanaAyyub where they visited the neighborhood of Mehju Nagar, which many youngmen have left to join the militants. “The talk on the street was of acouple named Nazeer and Fehmeeda, whose son, Momin, had been taken away inthe crackdown. Armed men from the Central Reserve Police Force came to thedoor late one night. A masked civilian—evidently an informer—pointed atMomin. The soldiers took him away,” he wrote.
“We found Fehmeeda at her house, kneeling on the floor of an unadorned mainroom. The morning after the raid, she told us, she went to a C.R.P.F. base,where her son was being held. He told her that he’d been beaten. ‘I beggedthem to give him back to me, but they wouldn’t consider it,” she said. WhenFehmeeda returned the following day, the police told her that Momin hadbeen transferred to the city’s central jail. But guards there said thathe’d been transferred to a prison in Uttar Pradesh, on the other side ofthe country. ‘There’s no use crying, Auntie,’ they told her.
“Fehmeeda said she was not told what charges had been filed against Momin;Indian antiterrorism law allows the security forces to detain any Kashmirifor any reason, or no reason, for up to two years. In the three decadesthat Kashmir has been in open rebellion, tens of thousands of men havedisappeared, and many have not returned. “I must accept that I will not seehim again,” she said.
At Fehmeeda’s house, her friends had gathered around her, while men fromthe neighborhood stood outside open windows. Ayyub sat facing her, theirknees touching.
As Fehmeeda spoke, some of the men talked over her, and each time (Ms.)Ayyub told them to shut up: “Don’t scold her, Uncle, she has problems ofher own.”
“Fehmeeda had begun stoically, but gradually she lost her composure. (Ms.)Ayyub gripped her hands and said, ‘Your son will return to you. God is verybig.’ Fehmeeda was not consoled. Momin, a construction worker, had paid forthe entire family’s needs, including her medicine for a kidney ailment.Fehmeeda’s thoughts began to tumble out in fragments: ‘I told him, don’tthrow stones, somebody took him, somebody was paid—’ Then she started tosob and heave. (Ms.) Ayyub began to cry, too. ‘I can’t take any more,’ shesaid. ‘This is too much.’
“(Ms.) Ayyub said goodbye to Fehmeeda, promising to return with medicinefor her kidneys. (A few weeks later, she did.) We were both gripped by asense of foreboding, that we were witnessing the start of something thatwould last many years. ‘I feel this as a Muslim,’ Ayyub said. ‘It’shappening everywhere in India.’
“We rode in silence for a while. I suggested that maybe it was time for herto leave India—that Muslims didn’t have a future there. But Ayyub was goingthrough a notebook. ‘I’m not leaving,’ she said. ‘I have to stay. I’m goingto write all this down and tell everyone what happened’.”
A large part of the huge article was devoted to journalist Rana Ayyub’sinvestigative work had once gone undercover to expose the ruling BJP’s tiesto sectarian and extrajudicial violence against the Muslim minority. thearticle also carries details of the rise of Narendra Modi from humblebeginnings to the pinnacle of power and his ruthless machinations andintrigues to push forward his anti-Muslim agenda and turn India into aHindu state.
Filkins wrote, “A feeling of despair has settled in among many Indians whoremain committed to the secular, inclusive vision of the country’sfounders.”
“Gandhi and Nehru were great, historic figures, but I think they were anaberration,” Krishna Prasad, the former Outlook editor, told Fikins. “It’svery different now.
The institutions have crumbled—universities, investigative agencies, thecourts, the media, the administrative agencies, public services. And Ithink there is no rational answer for what has happened, except that wepretended to be what we were for fifty, sixty years.
But we are now reverting to what we always wanted to be, which is to pummelminorities, to push them into a corner, to show them their places, toconquer Kashmir, to ruin the media, and to make corporations servants ofthe state. And all of this under a heavy resurgence of Hinduism. India isbecoming the country it has always wanted to be.”
