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Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are now halfway through their five-year term. The BJP belongs to a vast family of organizations and associations known as the Sangh Parivar, all controlled by the cadre-based Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Its goal to establish Hindu dominance across India enjoys stronger backing than ever now that the BJP controls the government without coalition support. For years, the Left has debated whether the RSS’s declared project of securing a Hindu state amounts to fascism. No matter what we call it, everyone agrees that it wants to found an authoritarian and belligerent nationalist order. This would transform India: Hindus would enjoy differential rights, and religious minorities, namely, Muslims and Christians, would face permanent marginalization. To accomplish this, RSS would have to institutionalize this stratification: legal and extra-legal mechanisms to monitor, subordinate, contain, defuse, and even eliminate actual or potential resistance, no matter its direction or source. Already, the BJP and the RSS have made some domestic headway. This distinguishes it from most mainstream Indian parties, like the Indian National Congress (INC) and the horde of regional political formations. Of course, that hasn’t stopped most of them from allying with the BJP. In fact, at the economic level, the Modi government has simply advanced the neoliberal policy started by previous governments, whether led by the INC (1991–96, 2004–2014), by a coalition of non-INC and non-BJP parties (1996–98), or by BJP-led coalition governments (1998–2004). Similarly, the BJP not only agrees with the INC’s strategy of building deeper ties with Israel, but, motivated by its anti-Islamic fervor, seeks to further extend this relationship. The Modi administration has also worked to consolidate its relationship with the United States against China. This August, it signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum Agreement, which approved much closer military interactions between the two countries. While domestic developments certainly deserve attention, over the last three months, the public has understandably been more focused on the unrest in the Kashmir Valley. On September 18, an Indian army camp at Uri — not far from the Line of Control (LOC) in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) that separates the Indian and Pakistani sides — was attacked, resulting in eighteen deaths. A massive outcry and media-fueled calls for military revenge followed. The RSS will now control India’s relationship with Pakistan, which may prove disastrous.

Kashmir and Uri The story starts in the Kashmir Valley, where over six hundred thousand armed personnel— police, paramilitary, and army regulars — are stationed, making it the most concentrated militarized zone, in relation to population, anywhere in the world. BJP has called for the formal repeal of Article 370 of the Constitution, which promises considerable autonomy to J&K province not satisfied by the fact that in practice and by dubious legal rulings this autonomy has already been greatly eroded. It has always viewed Muslims in general — and Kashmiri Muslims in particular — as a suspect population that needs to prove its loyalty to Hindu India. Their brutality here shouldn’t surprise anyone. On July 8, Burhan Wani — a young man known to be a commander of the Hizbul Mujahidin, a Kashmiri separatist group — was placed under house arrest, then tortured and murdered. Massive demonstrations erupted and have continued ever since. The government repression that followed has left more than eighty civilians dead and many times more injured. These protests have cross-class and cross-generational support. The Kashmiri people feel so alienated from New Delhi that the demands for azaadi (independence) have become more popular than ever. The Modi administration has justified its hard-line response by claiming that Pakistani forces are provoking Kashmiri youth. Blaming Pakistan allows the BJP government to win support by appealing to aggrieved nationalism. It has pressured its coalition partner in the J&K state government — the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) — to toe the line. And it has: Mehbooba Mufti, the party’s head, has expressed only the mildest criticisms of the state-sponsored repression. The media has echoed these government claims. But the depth of public anger in the Kashmir Valley has led many Indians to question the government: such large and sustained protests cannot be easily dismissed as the work of an outside hand. Ultimately, however, the assault on Uri — timed to raise international concern about India’s human rights abuses in Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly meeting — has backfired and played into the RSS’s hands. The pushover media has for the most part gone completely overboard, calling the attack an outrageous act of terrorism and an assault on Indian nationhood. They demand that Pakistan incur appropriate military and diplomatic responses. (Of course, this same media has not portrayed the recent spate of Indian armed forces killing unarmed civilians as acts of terrorism.) The outrage expressed by the government and the media has created a public mood that benefits the Modi government considerably. First, it has shifted attention away from Kashmir. The military can simply wait the protesters out: exhaustion will eventually set in, and calm will return, even if it leaves a more embittered public behind. Further, the RSS’s desire to present itself as the true defenders of Indian nationalism against an external enemy — Pakistan — and an internal foe — the Muslim — will become more appealing. The party sees the nationalist plank as a potentially winning card in the next general elections. It will also help in the 2017 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh (population-wise, a state that would be the fifth biggest country in the world) as well as in Punjab, Goa, Uttrakhand, and Manipur. But on the other hand, the government’s extremely aggressive rhetoric might put it in a bind. A military response would be incredibly dangerous. And New Delhi’s stated policy aim — to declare Pakistan the epicenter of terrorism, exported and otherwise — is not only morally hypocritical and politically dishonest, but also has no chance of being endorsed. Of course, no liberal intellectuals will recognize that Indian allies like Israel and the United States have a far worse record of state-sponsored, state-directed, and state-executed terrorism outside their borders. Nor do they object when the RSS says that the Pakistani establishment is paying the price for nurturing Islamist groups when they turn against it and carry out domestic terror attacks. India doesn’t have a better record: Hindu communal-terrorist attacks have been a regular event for the last twenty-five years. RSS-controlled authorities at various governmental levels have silently acquiesced to or actively participated in this violence. Modi’s own ascent testifies to this. Setting aside committed Islamophobes, a far larger section of the population is essentially indifferent to the fact that he oversaw one of the worst pogroms — in February 2002 in Gujarat — in Indian history.