30 Asia The EconomistAugust 24th 2019
2Banyan Fawning frenzy
I
t is nearlythree weeks since the
government of Narendra Modi, in one
swoop, scrapped Jammu & Kashmir’s
constitutional autonomy, ended its
status as a state and divided it into two
parts, both to be ruled from Delhi. It
carried this out not by consulting the
region’s 12m-odd inhabitants on whose
behalf it claims to be acting, nor after a
national discussion or even the sem-
blance of a proper parliamentary debate.
Rather, it achieved its ends by cutting
phone lines and access to the internet,
arresting nearly the whole political
leadership and imposing, in effect, a
curfew. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a public
intellectual, puts it, the act of supposedly
integrating the former state more fully
into India has begun by casting the most-
ly Muslim inhabitants of the Kashmir
valley “under a pall of suspicion”. Kash-
miris’ first experience of Indian law as a
union territory, he notes, is of untram-
melled executive power.
The best that can be said is that it is
not a constitutional putsch on the scale
of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency” of 1975,
when democracy was suspended across
the country. Soon after it was restored,
Lal Krishna Advani—a co-founder of Mr
Modi’s very own Bharatiya Janata Party,
who had been at the sharp end of the
Emergency, having been imprisoned for
19 months—castigated India’s press. “You
were asked only to bend,” he told journal-
ists, “yet you crawled.”
Today, far from crawling, India’s press
and television channels are jumping up
and down and cheering. Talking heads
vie to outdo one another in celebration.
Few match the bombast of Arnab Gos-
wami, whose brand of shriek show has
launched a new network, Republic tv. He
labelled the bbc’s reporting of both a
huge protest in Kashmir and shots firedby Indian security forces to disperse it “a
dirty and a motivated lie”. He seemed little
bothered that video footage confirmed the
bbc’s account.
Ending Kashmir’s special status, and
(as a subtext) humiliating its Muslim
population, has long been a goal of India’s
Hindu nationalists, whom Mr Modi leads.
Yet when, on August 8th, the prime min-
ister appeared on television to explain why
India should celebrate while Kashmir lay
incarcerated, gone was the jaw-jutting
nationalist. Instead, as Arundhati Roy put
it in the New York Times, he spoke with “the
tenderness of a young mother...his most
chilling avatar to date”. Even former critics
of Mr Modi filled the next day’s column-
inches with gushing praise.
Kashmiris are demonised, the Indian
authorities praised. This week cnnNews18
polled viewers on whether Shehla Rashid
Shora, the co-founder of a recently
launched mainstream party in Jammu &
Kashmir and a leader of the main student
union at Jawaharlal Nehru University
(boo!), should be arrested. Her crime? She
claimed that the army had tortured detain-ees in Kashmir, relaying the screams by
loudspeaker to intimidate locals.
Reporting on what is really going on
in Kashmir is hard. Foreign journalists
are hindered from going there. The Kash-
miri press is stymied from getting its
story out. This month Delhi’s Press Club
of India succumbed to pressure not to
show a documentary, “Kashmir Caged”,
that carried testimony of Kashmiris’
treatment at the hands of the security
forces. It is only thanks to brave Kashmiri
and other Indian journalists filing for
foreign news outlets that any picture at
all of the benighted region is possible.
In truth, the press’s current syco-
phancy rises from a hinterland of intimi-
dation, trimming and currying favour
dating back to Mr Modi’s rise to national
power in 2014. Government ads are
pulled in retaliation against newspapers
that have been critical of the bjp, such as
the Hinduand the Telegraph. Meanwhile,
businessmen are shyer of voicing criti-
cism in public. Ramachandra Guha, a
historian, talks of the “silence of the
successful”. Back in 1992 several industri-
alists put their name to a full-page ad
decrying the destruction by a Hindu mob
of the Babri Masjid mosque. Today’s
generation of businessmen, Mr Guha
says, would be too scared to sign a simi-
lar ad over Kashmir. Meanwhile, lack of
scruple rules: Mr Goswami’s original
backer, one of a new breed of Modi-
supporting industrialists and a member
of the upper house of parliament, profits
through arms sales from the militarism
Mr Goswami extols on air.
Back in 2015 Mr Advani, no fan of Mr
Modi, said that he wouldn’t be surprised
if, sooner rather than later, another
emergency was declared. That remains
wild conjecture. But one thing is for sure:
the press will be ready.When India’s government abuses power, the media don’t roll over. They cheerand for cases involving politicians just 6%.
In December the Supreme Court was
moved by the plight of witnesses for the
prosecution of a cult leader accused of rape
and murder, who were dropping like flies.
It found “the conditions of witnesses in the
Indian legal system can be termed ‘pathet-
ic’.” As a stopgap, the court ordered that a
witness-protection scheme devised by the
home ministry be put into effect in all In-
dia’s states within a year.
Shiv Singh, a lawyer in Delhi, says the
main principle of the scheme, that “protec-
tion measures shall be proportionate to thethreat” against the witness, is correct. But
few states will meet the deadline. More-
over, money for witness-protection can be
sent to a place like Unnao, but the chances
that local officials will put together a water-
tight system are very small indeed. Anoth-
er advocate practising in Delhi, Abhinav
Sekhri, recommends normalising an exist-
ing procedure whereby magistrates some-
times record witnesses’ initial statements,
although this would not necessarily stop
them from abjuring these accounts later
on. In small towns, time is not on the side
of justice.Public outrage also helps. The details of
the Unnao case grew so grotesque and the
uproar in the media so loud that this
month the bjpat last distanced itself from
Mr Sengar, saying that he had been ex-
pelled from the party. He has been charged
not only with rape, but also with orches-
trating the arrest of the victim’s father. He
and his brother have been charged with the
murder of the victim’s father, too. The
greater the public indignation and scruti-
ny, the unlikelier it is that all the witnesses
to these alleged crimes will suddenly
change their tune or fall under a bus. 7