The EconomistAugust 10th 2019 Asia 432 allowed parliament to abolish the state,
and split it into two new “union territories”
under the centre’s direct rule: one called
Jammu & Kashmir and the other, Ladakh.
The ease with which the state was dis-
solved will spook some of India’s other re-
gional governments. A challenge has al-
ready been filed with the Supreme Court.
But there is considerable popular support
for Mr Modi’s sleight of hand. Even some
parties that are normally fiercely opposed
to the bjphave backed him.
Mr Modi’s ministers have justified the
move partly on security grounds. Since
1989 insurgents, some of them backed by
Pakistan, and campaigns against them
have killed at least 45,000 people in Jammu
& Kashmir. The Hindu minority in the val-
ley around Srinagar has been driven out. By
the time Mr Modi became India’s prime
minister in 2014, the conflict had become
less intense. Since then it has steadily esca-
lated. Mr Modi believed that the state’s au-
tonomous status was fuelling anti-India
violence. Scrapping it, however, is hardly
likely to prove an effective cure.
Kashmir’s more moderate politicians
feel most badly betrayed. On the campaign
trail earlier this year, Mr Modi had sworn
that he would not “allow Muftis and Abdul-
lahs to divide India”. He was referring to the
state’s two most famous political families.
Generations of Indian bureaucrats had par-
leyed with them to try winning over Kash-
miris, greasing the wheels with subsidies.
The Muftis and Abdullahs often frustrated
their handlers in Delhi, but they are not
separatists—unlike many more popular
leaders. “Our darkest apprehensions have
unfortunately come true,” said Omar Abd-
ullah, a former chief minister of the state
who was among those placed under house
arrest on August 4th.
Actions that anger Kashmiris can some-
times benefit Mr Modi politically. He has
been widely praised in India for his mili-
tary operations in the region. In September
2016 a day of “surgical strikes” against near-
by Pakistani positions achieved little stra-
tegically but helped him in elections. It re-
sulted in a patriotic Bollywood movie
which was topping the box office when
campaigning began for this year’s polls.
But the long-term consequences of Mr
Modi’s action may well be ones he regrets.
The animosity he has doubtless intensified
among Kashmiris will make the area even
more fertile territory for recruitment to
Pakistan-backed insurgency. By allowing
non-Kashmiris to buy land, he has in effect
given a green light to Hindus wanting to
move into the Muslim-dominated Kash-
mir valley. That risks stoking ethnic ten-
sions in the area. The country has a long
history of bloody confrontation between
adherents of the two religions. The just-
abolished state has suffered much of it. Its
residents are bracing for more. 7
U
zbekistan’s “youth”camp, Jaslyk in
the vernacular, sounds like a children’s
holiday camp, but it is a prison where ene-
mies of what was until recently one of the
world’s most repressive regimes were iso-
lated and tortured. Now Shavkat Mirzi-
yoyev, Uzbekistan’s reforming president, is
shutting it down.
Jaslyk became synonymous with medi-
eval-style barbarism when two inmates
died after immersion in boiling water in
2002—in effect boiled alive. Other political
and religious dissidents held there were
beaten with iron rods, had their fingernails
pulled out and were given electric shocks.
Situated in a desert in the Karakalpakstan
region, where the temperature ranges from
45°C to -35°C, some 1,400km from the capi-
tal, Tashkent, and 180km from the nearest
town, Jaslyk—like the Soviet Siberian pri-
son camps on which it was modelled—was
impossible to escape from. The local rail-
way station is Barsa Kelmes, which loosely
translates as “place of no return”.
Jaslyk was opened in 1999 by the tyran-
nical Islam Karimov, who ruled the post-
Soviet Central Asian country for a quarter
of a century until his death in 2016, after
bombings in Tashkent sparked a hunt for
dissidents. His successor, Mr Mirziyoyev,
has surprised the world by liberalising po-
litically as well as economically: he has
freed 50 political prisoners and removed20,000 citizens from blacklists of people
suspected of extremist tendencies, often
simply because they were Muslims.
Mr Mirziyoyev has prohibited the use in
court of evidence obtained through tor-
ture, in tacit acknowledgment that abuse is
rife throughout the penitentiary system,
not just at Jaslyk. But the government is shy
about facing up to its history: even as it ad-
vertises the camp’s closure as a step to-
wards improving the country’s human-
rights record, it denies that people were
tortured there.
There is some way to go before the
country’s criminal-justice system becomes
a beacon for the region. Shadowy espio-
nage cases are still being pursued behind a
veil of secrecy in closed courts. Andrey Ku-
batin, an academic, is serving a prison sen-
tence for passing secrets he insists were in
the public domain. Kadyr Yusupov, a for-
mer diplomat, is on trial for spying for a
foreign power, although he left the foreign
service years before the alleged espionage
began. Mr Yusupov, who has schizophre-
nia, was arrested following a failed suicide
attempt in the Tashkent metro, raising
questions about whether he is psycholog-
ically fit to go on trial.
And then there is Gulnara Karimova, the
late president’s daughter, serving a jail sen-
tence on corruption charges as the govern-
ment seeks to recover her assets from
abroad. She has been confined since 2014,
before her father died, but has never faced
open judicial proceedings. One trial report-
edly took place in the kitchen of a house in
which she was being held. If Uzbekistan
wants to show that it believes in the rule of
law, which is so important to investors, it
will need to show that even a “robber bar-
on”—as a WikiLeaks cable once dubbed Ms
Karimova—gets a fair trial. 7ALMATY
Another good move from Uzbekistan’s
new presidentUzbekistanDismantling the
gulag
Jaslyk, as it once was