Modi govt’s Kashmir crackdown is damaging India’s image abroad: Indian novelist

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By Pankaj Mishra

As each week goes by, India’s crackdown on Kashmir deepens. Not content with cutting phone lines and the internet, detaining top political leaders and imposing a curfew which has now lasted three weeks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has reportedly imprisoned thousands of Kashmiris, including businessmen and students as well as human-rights activists.

This suppression of an ethnic-religious minority has met with mass acclaim in India. One has to go as far back as Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic to recall a similarly ecstatic upsurge of vengeful nationalism.

As the Economist puts it, “India’s press and television channels are jumping up and down and cheering.” Many Indian journalists have joined social media trolls in assaulting Western outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times for reporting Kashmiris’ anger and disaffection.

Near-unanimous backing from India’s media seems to have emboldened Modi’s government. Last weekend, it prevented a delegation of opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, from visiting Kashmir.

Such impunity reveals just how extraordinarily complete Modi’s success as India’s pied-piper is, how irresistible his tunes. He and his followers draw additional encouragement from the fact that most foreign governments are too distracted by domestic challenges to pay attention to events in Kashmir, and that Pakistan’s strident campaign to isolate India diplomatically has failed.

Still, as the situation of Kashmiris deteriorates, India’s well-wishers should ask: Has Modi, while accumulating untrammelled power for himself and fellow Hindu nationalists, irreparably damaged India’s claims to be a rational and stable democracy?

Coverage of Kashmir in the international media has been uniformly critical of the Indian government, partly provoked by its demonstrably false assertions, echoed by India’s media, that things are “normal” in Kashmir. Front-page pictures of heavily armed soldiers on empty Kashmiri streets make clear the region is effectively under military occupation.

Modi’s version — that he is advancing economic development in Kashmir — is either not in sight or looks patently deceptive as writers, academics and journalists, often from the Kashmiri diaspora, educate global audiences about their history and fate.

It might be easy to mock these critics as irrelevant and powerless. But they emerge at a crucial time, when even many hardened observers of Indian politics and economy are questioning what kind of leader Modi is.

Outside of India, neither the prime minister’s economic data nor his boasts about destroying terrorist camps deep inside Pakistan has survived close scrutiny. Indeed, the mob lynchings of Muslims under his watch have directed fresh attention to the origins of Modi’s Hindu nationalist organization in the European fascist movements of the 1920s.

In news reports and analyses, India’s prime minister is not uncommonly grouped with such demagogic politicians as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte. Even Pakistan, long identified internationally as a rogue nation, has felt emboldened enough to denounce Modi’s government as “racist” and “fascist.”

Modi himself has suffered new damage to a reputation that he had diligently washed free of the taint of suspected complicity in a 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom. Ascending to power in 2014, he managed to persuade many in the West that he was focused on making India’s economy grow and creating jobs rather than stoking Hindu majoritarianism. Modi’s image as an economic modernizer suffered greatly from his decision to withdraw most currency notes from circulation in 2016. Post-Kashmir, it has become even harder to maintain.

Amid bleak news about the economy, overseas investors were pulling funds out of India before Modi launched his crackdown in Kashmir. The bigotry on display in India’s public sphere might lead more of them to wonder if they should still take for granted the country’s social cohesion, and the political and economic rationality of its leaders.

In the West, India long ago lost the prestige it had enjoyed through its association with world-historical figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, and its moral leadership of the non-western world in the decades following independence in 1947. The more recent narrative about India — that it is a distinguished multicultural democracy and economic powerhouse — is now also up for debate. This squandering of soft power cannot but have deep consequences for an aspiring global force that is very far from matching China’s hard power.

In many ways, the repression of Kashmiris is a more egregious act of self-harm than demonetization. The longer it goes on, the greater the suspicion will grow that, having failed in his central tasks, India’s pied-piper is running blind, in danger of leading his nation to a dead-end. -Bloomberg

https://theprint.in/opinion/modi-govts-kashmir-crackdown-is-damaging-indias-image-abroad/283082/
 
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That is the last thing India should be bothered about.

More important is why is the Govn digging into RBI reserves and economic slow down being experienced?

Also what image really, till 80s people in west used to combine Africa and India and how people are dying of hunger.
 
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That is the last thing India should be bothered about.

More important is why is the Govn digging into RBI reserves and economic slow down being experienced?

Also what image really, till 80s people in west used to combine Africa and India and how people are dying of hunger.

Dying of hunger due to economy vs killing and suppressing people's voice because they are fighting against occupation.
 
Dying of hunger due to economy vs killing and suppressing people's voice because they are fighting against occupation.

So you are saying we should choose which is better outta the two?
 
So you are saying we should choose which is better outta the two?

you attempted to discredit the current tarnish image of India with the past.

Also what image really, till 80s people in west used to combine Africa and India and how people are dying of hunger.

All I am saying, people notice more when people are being oppressed by majority than inability of the government to provide adequate nutrition to citizens of the nation.
 
The issue is people are expecting 0 to 100 in a very short span of time. Coming from similar separatist movement, from my experience, I can say that it will take at least 20 or more years to bring significant changes. But once it is done, the future generations does tend to stay in the main stream.
 
The issue is people are expecting 0 to 100 in a very short span of time. Coming from similar separatist movement, from my experience, I can say that it will take at least 20 or more years to bring significant changes. But once it is done, the future generations does tend to stay in the main stream.

its been 70 years, how many generations is that, kashmiris will never accept india what will you do, punish them forever.
 
its been 70 years, how many generations is that, kashmiris will never accept india what will you do, punish them forever.

Economic scenario matters. Once a place is developed from infrastructures perspective, agitation will automatically fade.

Case in point, Assam.
 
you attempted to discredit the current tarnish image of India with the past.



All I am saying, people notice more when people are being oppressed by majority than inability of the government to provide adequate nutrition to citizens of the nation.

Notice? May I know what you mean by notice? China is able to feed its citizens, give em wealth and feed em and is an oppressor.. are you telling me it should bother about its image over having a dragon economy?

So the image matters more?To who though..
 
Angry Pakistanis have become angrier.

If anything else has changed, I'll bake a cake for you.
 
Economic scenario matters. Once a place is developed from infrastructures perspective, agitation will automatically fade.

Case in point, Assam.

have you heard of the deal of the century? they were going to throw billions at the Palestinians yet they are not interested.

There was a poll to see which countries were the happiest, Pakistan was way ahead of India, now what does that mean?

Money cant buy you happiness.
 
One should expect such things from an illiterate PM. Modi is now stuck not knowing what to do. The curfew can not be implemented forever. He has bitten of more then he can chew just like his mentor Hitler did. We know how that ended up.
 
have you heard of the deal of the century? they were going to throw billions at the Palestinians yet they are not interested.

There was a poll to see which countries were the happiest, Pakistan was way ahead of India, now what does that mean?

Money cant buy you happiness.

1. There's a difference. I am not talking about money. I am talking about infrastructure. Current generation will find the concept a bit hard to swallow but future generations will be free from outside influence due to the culture that will build through more exchange with rest of the India.

2. That poll was very subjective which many Pakistani posters themselves find it hard to agree. Read my post there. One can be delusioned yet he can be happy.
 
1. There's a difference. I am not talking about money. I am talking about infrastructure. Current generation will find the concept a bit hard to swallow but future generations will be free from outside influence due to the culture that will build through more exchange with rest of the India.

2. That poll was very subjective which many Pakistani posters themselves find it hard to agree. Read my post there. One can be delusioned yet he can be happy.

I think you live in cloud cuckoo land. They want freedom they dont want to live with hindutvas.
 
I think you live in cloud cuckoo land. They want freedom they dont want to live with hindutvas.

No. I lived in a state where similar conflicts were regular occurrence. And unlike others, I actually can use the term of, "from my experience" that is unlike you who is sitting behind a computer, having a privilege life.
 
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