As India moves to strip Muslim-majority Kashmir of its special status and the region is effectively shut down, tensions boil between New Delhi and Islamabad. David Pratt examines the timing and potential fallout.

It’s a region that’s always been on a short fuse. As of yesterday however that fuse appears to have been lit and the resultant explosion could well prove catastrophic. 

The decision by India’s Hindu nationalist-led government to revoke the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is easily the most far-reaching move on the disputed Himalayan area in nearly seventy years. 

To say that citizens and watchers of the region are worried, would be a considerable understatement. Already India has flooded Kashmir with thousands of extra troops in anticipation of unrest and rioting. 

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Kashmiri leaders meanwhile have been placed under house arrest, while Internet service and nearly all telephone communication have been cut off, schools closed and measures readied to evacuate foreign tourists from this stunningly beautiful mountainous area. 

So just what exactly has happened, why now and what might the implications be for the already strained relations between arch-rivals India and neighbouring Pakistan? 

For years the entire Jammu and Kashmir region has been disputed between these two giant nations. Each claims it in full, but control only parts of it.

But it was amid an angry session in India’s parliament yesterday that the country’s interior minister, Amit Shah, proposed the abolition of article 370, which grants Kashmir its own constitution and autonomy over all matters except for areas such as foreign affairs and defence.
Allied to this is article 35A that also gave the Kashmir government the right to decide who qualifies as a ‘permanent resident.’

Mr Shah claims the move was made in view of constant threats of cross border terrorism from an insurgency underway in Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Critics of India’s efforts to revoke such status however say that in doing away with Article 370, the government hopes to change Kashmir's Muslim-majority demographics by allowing in a flood of new Hindu residents. 

The enormous sensitivity surrounding this issue and such moves is obvious. This was summed up yesterday by Ms Mehbooba Mufti, former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir who insisted the revocation of Article 370 would have serious implications not just for the state, but also for India as a country and the whole subcontinent.

“They just want to occupy our land and want to make this Muslim-majority state like any other state and reduce us to a minority and disempower us totally,” Ms Mufti warned. 

Worrying as the moves are, many say the timing should come as no surprise. India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, (BJP) has deep roots in a Hindu nationalist ideology and one of its campaign promises during the election earlier this year had been removing the special status of Kashmir.

Indeed the far-right BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi who won re-election stand accused of campaigning on a secular agenda that strives to make India a Hindu state. 

Over the past five years, Mr Modi’s BJP bloc has been spreading an us-versus-them philosophy in a country already riven by dangerous divisions. As a result, the Hindu right has perhaps never been more enfranchised at every level of government.

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While many of Mr Modi’s more moderate supporters hoped he might set the sectarianism aside in the wake of his landslide election victory this year, the latest moves over Kashmir now suggest otherwise.

To date, Mr Modi’s tough-guy approach has largely been a disaster in the disputed region. His heavy-handedness there appears only to have inflamed rather than quell the separatist insurgency in Kashmir. The latest moves too will only further alienate even moderate Kashmiris who already live under a heavy Indian military presence.

This very muscular approach has been typical of Modi’s approach to India’s foreign policy as a whole, especially in relation to Pakistan, which lies on the other side of the rivalry over Kashmir. 

Both nuclear-armed countries have already fought three wars over the region, which both claimed as their own. The Pakistani-backed separatist insurgency in Kashmir meanwhile has claimed the lives of at least 45,000 security forces, insurgents and civilians. 

The capacity for tensions to boil over quickly was again exposed in February when a Kashmiri militant rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of Indian paramilitary forces travelling on a highway, killing at least 40 soldiers. 

A banned terrorist group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, which is based in Pakistan, claimed responsibility.

In the tense military standoff between India and Pakistan that ensued, warplanes from both countries engaged in aerial dogfights.

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Against this backdrop, India’s proposal yesterday is the most radical change any government has suggested for Kashmir’s status since the region was granted autonomy in exchange for joining the Indian union after independence in 1947. 

By any standards, it’s a highly contentious and potentially dangerous move, leading one senior leader of the opposition party the Indian National Congress, yesterday to say; “today the BJP has murdered the Constitution of India.” 

For the moment though all eyes will be focused on what happens on the ground in Kashmir. Back in 2000 the then US president Bill Clinton described it as arguably “the most dangerous place in the world today.”

As of yesterday, Kashmir could once again be heading for that ominous distinction.