Mukul Kesavan on Article 370

Mukul Kesavan has an article in Scroll.in which attempts to refute 'Liberal arguments' in favor of the Union Government's recent actions in J&K

The obvious problem with these arguments is that they were not concerned with the means by which these ends were to be achieved.

This is not true. Liberals uphold the Rule of Law. If there has been any illegality in what the Government has done, then Liberals would question it and the Courts would take remedial action.

The telecommunications blackout, the continuous curfew, the lack of consultation, the pre-emptive arrests of political leaders, the shotgun pellet injuries reported, were ignored, regretted in passing or justified as the necessary cost of moving quickly to maintain the advantage of surprise.

Each of these measures has been used in the past. Failure to take such measures could have resulted in a bloodbath. It may be that there are some actions being taken which are unnecessary or unfair. Those actions should be investigated and over zealous officials should be punished.

Such concern as these commentators did express was raised perfunctorily and in passing: the hope that this state of collective, muted house arrest would not last longer than was necessary.

This was perfectly reasonable. Commentators are not important because, like Kesavan himself, they are as stupid as shit and nobody cares about their opinions or feelings. Kesavan may feel that the concerns he himself is expressing represent anything more than a perfunctory reflex of virtue signalling. Nobody else does. Rather they find his article useful only for the purpose of understanding why Indian 'public intellectuals' are so utterly useless. The reason is that they are unable to reason.

The airlifting of troops and the incarceration of an entire population in peace-time,

Kashmir is a border state which has faced repeated aggression. There is nothing objectionable to air-lifting troops there. The entire population has not been incarcerated. Some politicians have been put under house arrest or preventive detention.
Kesavan is telling stupid obvious lies.

glossed over by raison d’etat realists in the name of the nation, ironically made the operation seem more like an imperial annexation than an assertion of national sovereignty.

How things seem to Kesavan has no significance whatsoever because he is a cretin. The wonder is that he isn't babbling about Nazi storm-troopers or screaming and shitting himself about the the Spanish Inquisition.

The Government of India has a duty to defend the territorial integrity of the country and to keep its citizens safe- regardless of their religion. This is what Amit Shah has done and he has received great praise for it.

The second elision was the willingness of these commentators to accept the legitimacy of the government’s legal manoeuvre without considering its political and constitutional implications.

The Supreme Court does not seem to think there are any constitutional implications. That is why they have not listed the matter for urgent consideration. The political implications are good for Jammu and Ladakh. It remains to be seen whether it will be good for the Valley. However, internal and external security are likely to improve. 

Any precedent that allows a central government to abolish a state under President’s rule and reincarnate it as a Union Territory via presidential proclamation and simple majorities in the upper and lower house of Parliament, needs more scrutiny than a thumbs-up for ingenuity. The likelihood that this move will be tested in the Supreme Court should not be an alibi for kicking the issue down the road.

Yet there is no other constitutional remedy. Kesavan may believe that 'liberals' should spend prolonged periods of time screaming and shitting themselves but even if they did so only a nuisance would be created.

If the state of Jammu and Kashmir, hedged about as it was with special constitutional protections, can be reduced to a Union Territory through a constitutional sleight of hand, what prevents a central government from imposing President’s rule in West Bengal and then, with a pliant governor’s assent, bifurcating the state into the Union Territories of Gorkhaland and Dakkhin Bengal? Or Kerala into the Union Territories of Malabar and Travancore?

Nothing. The Government did bifurcate Andhra Pradesh though its Legislature was against it. Kesavan may not like it but the Indian Constitution does not permit the majority in a State from ethnically cleansing a minority. Even purely economic grievances have to be resolved such that minorities are not exploited or ignored.

Even if – in fact especially if – the Supreme Court were to sign off on the constitutionality of the government’s legal manouevre, a raison d’etat realist concerned about the national interest would assess the trade-off between re-making Kashmir and de-stabilising the Centre-state balance that underwrites this union of states.

Sadly, Dr. Ambedkar and the other framers of the Constitution chose to make India a unitary, not a federal, structure. A State is whatever the Union Government chooses, for reasons of administrative convenience, to be a state. There has been a continuous process of State reorganization based on linguistic and other considerations.

Thus, no 'trade off' exists.

For a liberal supporter, the most embarrassing thing about the reasons for reading down 370 was that they were pro-consular arguments.

Liberals should scream and shit themselves constantly. That wouldn't be embarrassing for them at all.

Kesavan may not like it, but the President of India has a duty to defend minorities and maintain the integrity of the Republic. This is not a 'pro-consular' argument because it does not involve the conquest and subjugation of foreign territory.

They accepted that the people of Jammu and Kashmir had to be coercively excluded from a decision that transformed their lives.

If the majority of the people in a State want to kill or chase away the minority, they must be coercively excluded from doing so. India is a Democracy under the Rule of Law. 

The average Sangh supporter might embrace this position since it is consistent with his view of restive frontier populations as subjects to be disciplined, not citizens to be consulted, but it isn’t a comfortable stance for a commentator whose public persona is neither authoritarian nor majoritarian.

To get comfortable, such commentators should scream and shit themselves incessantly.

Kesavan thinks these commentators are important. Their every pronouncement is dissected and analysed. Then 'charges' are framed against them. Thus to show they are neither 'authoritarian' nor 'majoritarian' it is vital that they scream and shit themselves. Failure to do so will lead them to falling into the hands of some Liberal version of the Spanish Inquisition.

For these liberals a useful way of deflecting the charge that they were advocating a colonial re-making of Kashmir was to argue that it was a mistake to conflate the districts of the Kashmir valley with the districts that made up the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Building on this point these commentators cited the populations of Jammu and Ladakh as equal stake-holders in J&K’s future and argued that they were enthusiastic supporters of the abolition of 370 and the re-ordering of the state’s political geography.

They may be even more enthusiastic supporters of becoming the 51st state of the United States of America. But, that option is not on offer. Being a State in the Union of India is a privilege not a right. A badly run State can be degraded to a Union Territory so that the police become independent of corrupt or criminialised politicians.

Implicitly (and often explicitly), Jammu and Ladakh were used as placeholders for “Hindu” and “Buddhist”. The bifurcation of the state is celebrated as the liberation of a Buddhist region from the overbearing Muslim politics of Kashmir’s valley. It’s worth pointing out here – if only because this fact has been glossed over so often in political commentary in recent days – that Buddhists are not the largest religious community in Ladakh. That would be Muslims who account for 46% of Ladakh’s population. Buddhists make up 40% of Ladakh’s population. 

But Hindus comprise the rest and Hindus revere Buddhism. It has never been the case that Hindu temples exclude Buddhists or vice versa.

Ladakh is made up of two districts, Kargil and Leh, which are predominantly Muslim and Buddhist respectively. The majority alluded to in recent commentary is, in fact, not a Buddhist majority but a Buddhist-Hindu majority, a civilisational coalition harnessed in recent times to do in South Asia the ideological work that Judeo-Christian has done for decades elsewhere.

Bullshit! It is a fact that many of the great Buddhist savant-Saints were of Brahman origin. Buddhist Kings- like the present monarch of Thailand- employ Brahman purohits.

What 'ideological work' has the term 'Judeo-Christian' done? Christians massacred and ethnically cleansed Jews. It is a separate matter that ever since the 6 day War, many Evangelical Christians in America have become strong supporters of Israel. This does not mean they have any great liking for Jews- whom they consider to be Liberals.

In a democracy, political opinions shouldn’t be read off a region’s religious demography; they should be expressed in a legislative assembly.

This has been done. However, if the legislature in a State or Union Territory is dysfunctional, President's rule can be imposed. No State has any vestige of sovereignty in itself- as the Supreme Court has clarified with respect to J&K.

Since Jammu and Kashmir’s assembly stands dissolved and replaced by President’s rule, these commentators must necessarily endorse the government’s ingenious thesis that the governor of the state can be a proxy for its legislative assembly and, by extension, its people.

It is the Supreme Court which has clarified this. Commentators don't matter. They can say anything that comes into their heads. The Supreme Court is the only authority which can interpret the Constitution in a manner that has the force of Law.

Commentary of this sort can be plausibly produced and consumed only by green-screening the political context in which 370 was gutted.

God alone knows what Kesavan is getting at. The plain fact is that commentators are shit. Every asshole can produce commentary. Kesavan is welcome to consume this shit. Nobody else will.

The political context for this abolition is the BJP’s concerted attempt to discipline and diminish Indian Muslims.

This is Kesavan's view- but he is too stupid and ignorant to be able to come up with a plausible narrative for other people to consider.

I may believe that Kesavan spends his time screaming and shitting himself and this is the reason that he writes like shit. However, my belief is not plausible because if Kesavan really were incessantly screaming and shitting himself he would have achieved far greater fame. There would be documentaries about him. Doctors would speak of a 'Kesavan syndrome' and speculate as to its aetiology. Ramachandra Guha would get jealous and shit himself to death in a vain attempt to outdo our hero. 

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Should the Citizenship Amendment Bill be passed by Parliament (as it likely will), and should the National Register become an all India Inquisition with a cell in every state (as Amit Shah has promised), all citizens will be required to document their claim to citizenship, but only Muslims will be proceeded against should they fail to satisfy the National Register of Citizens because non-Muslims will have been amnestied by the provisions of the Citizenship Amendment Bill.

This is perfectly reasonable. Non-Muslims were ethnically cleansed and thus are refugees or the descendants of refugees. Muslims were not ethnically cleansed. They are not refugees or the descendants of refugees. 

The nonchalance that marked the lynching of Muslim men in the name of cow protection was matched by the lewd enthusiasm with which a BJP chief minister and BJP legislators read the abolition of 370 as a sign that Kashmiri women were now available to North Indian men.

What the Harayana CM said was in the context of restoring the states sex-ratio by pro-women schemes.

 He said- 
Earlier Haryana was infamous for female infanticide, but after the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Abhiyan, the sex ratio has gone up from 850 to 933 girls per 1,000 boys. Our minister O.P. Dhankad had said that we’ll need to bring daughters-in-law from Bihar. Now some people are saying Kashmir has been opened, we can bring girls from Kashmir also. Jokes apart, if [sex] ratio is fine, then there will be balance in society.”

He has clarified that he was saying it was the State's responsibility to fix the underlying problem by pursuing pro-women policies. It was absurd to think girls could be brought from elsewhere.

Given this context it shouldn’t be hard for a dispassionate observer to see that the dissolution of India’s single Muslim-majority state is a majoritarian government’s way of bringing a recalcitrant Muslim population to heel.

A dispassionate observer would note that Muslim majorities have ethnically cleansed non-Muslims in the region. They would see that only the Valley is Muslim majority. However, for economic reasons, it is still yoked to Hindu majority Jammu. Thus the Union Territory of J&K will still be Muslim majority. However, local politicians won't be able to use the police to terrorize Hindus.

Kashmir Valley, in the Nineties, witnessed ethnic cleansing of Hindu Pandits.  Clearly, steps have to be taken to protect minorities in that region. India is democratic, it is true, but it is a Democracy under the Rule of Law. If the local politicians subvert the police force, then that function should be taken away from them.

That so many of these commentators manage to unsee the elephant in the room should worry their readers.

Why? Commentators are worthless fools. We read them to make fun of them.

Commentators supportive of the government’s evisceration of 370 but keen to establish their secular credentials danced a three-step minuet: they started by calling out the BJP’s motives in dissolving the one Muslim majority state in the Union as communal; they then laid out the benefits that the dissolution would, nevertheless, bring, and concluded by urging the BJP to manage the transition wisely by setting aside its communal agenda.

It doesn't matter if they danced a minuet or performed bharat natyam. Nobody gives a shit about these shitheads.

This is disingenuous. If you endorse a majoritarian government’s stealthy sleight of hand in gutting Section 370, you endorse the means that it will use because everything in its history and the history of Kashmir tells you that collective brutality will follow. You can’t let a wolf into a pen and then urge it to act like a collie.

If you don't endorse a legal move by a democratic government you are saying that there is a defect in the Constitution. You would then need to make a proper legal argument. Screaming and shitting yourself won't cut it.

Nirupama Menon Rao, formerly foreign secretary and now a passionate advocate of Amit Shah’s initiative, wrote a column justifying it that ended with these lines: “Kashmir must be drawn away from the precipice, with humane and judicious calibration, bringing the prodigal back into the family fold. We must borrow from both Kautilya and post-Kalinga Ashoka.” This mess of mangled metaphors, cliché and pedantry, written up in High Babu, is the strain of having it both ways starting to show.

In the opinion of another Babu who babbles about minuets.

Christine Fair, a South Asian strategic studies specialist, was an early supporter of the government’s move on social media and more recently wrote an essay setting out her understanding of the issue. Her conclusion is similar to Rao’s, only more exhortatory:
  “If India genuinely wants to mainstream Kashmiris, this effort cannot begin and end with this legal sleight of hand. India must follow through with the various commitments to develop the state and to extend all of the rights of privileges of Indian citizenship to the residents. Should it fail to do so, Pakistan will be loitering like a hyena waiting to pounce upon the injured carcass of Kashmir.” 
Fair’s itemisation of the government of India’s responsibilities towards Kashmiris is unreal. A government that is about to amend a law to smuggle in a religious test for citizenship that targets Muslims across India isn’t likely to commit itself to vesting Kashmiri Muslims with the “…rights of privileges [sic] of Indian citizenship…” Besides, Kashmir-as-carcass makes Pakistan’s intentions moot: a carcass, injured or otherwise, is dead.

So Kesavan wants India to give up Kashmir. Why does he not say so? Is he afraid that someone might bring a petition to a Magistrate asking for Kesavan to be tried for sedition?

It is a fact that Hindus and Buddhists have been ethnically cleansed from Muslim majority areas. They are refugees or descendants of refugees and should be granted citizenship because they can't safely return to their place of origin. This is not the case with Muslim economic migrants.

No Muslim from Kerala or Kashmir faces any similar bar to citizenship. Why? Their place of origin is within the Union of India. 

Scholars, intellectuals and public figures intervening in policy controversies deserve our attention. Kuldeep Nayar is remembered for his opposition to the Emergency. Nikhil Wagle’s consistent critique of the criminalisation of Maharashtra’s politics has a place of honour in the history of Indian journalism. Gauri Lankesh is a larger than life figure today because she was murdered for her commitment to free speech and a secular politics. The dark side has its own heroes. There’s no shortage of Indians queueing up for a star in Hindutva’s Hall of Fame. The ranks of Modi’s willing enablers are massively oversubscribed. As the old classified ads might have put it, “Liberals need not apply.”

What about M.J Akbar? He was a more important figure than Wagle or Lankesh. Furthemore, he was elected to Parliament on a Congress ticket. He doesn't seem to be doing too badly in Modi's Government. If he falls it will not be because of his Religion.