Akeel Bilgrami is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University in New York. His research interests include political philosophy and moral psychology. He has written on secularism, identity and how Mohandas Gandhi integrated politics with philosophy. He has a forthcoming book titled, “What is a Muslim?” Bilgrami’s teaching includes courses on politics and rationality, and the effects of globalisation on political thought.
Over an email interview in October, Suhail Bhat, a data-journalism student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, spoke to Bilgrami on the contemporary political situation in India. They discussed the reading down of Article 370, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the fundamental differences between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Referring to Kashmir, Bilgrami said, “It is crucial for the rest of us in India to think not from the point of view of the interests of the sarkar but from the point of view of the desires of the region’s population. We owe it to the Kashmiri people.”
Suhail Bhat: Does the Bharatiya Janata Party’s abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status by reading down Article 370 endanger the democratic foundations of India?
Akeel Bilgrami: It is an entirely illegal and unconstitutional step, as many jurist scholars have pointed out, not least [the lawyer and political commentator Abdul] Gafoor Noorani. The elementary and well-known facts about the abrogation’s unconstitutionalism, are roughly as follows: These articles formulated the provisions of autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir. Though there was some mention of the temporary nature of these provisions in the understanding of those who crafted the Indian constitution in 1949–50, it was also explicit that they could only be overturned with the endorsement of the regional constituent assembly.
Now, of course, it is in the nature of constituent assemblies that they are dissolved by their own will once their work is done. And when in December 1956 and early 1957, the Kashmir constituent assembly was dissolved, it was on an understanding on the part of the Jammu and Kashmir politicians that the constitution adopted had been made into a stable and abiding arrangement between the centre and the state, with these features of autonomy in place. There was a general and an explicitly stated understanding that this stable and abiding arrangement could in the future only be reconsidered and amended by the regional legislators. And it was this understanding that was preempted by the BJP government’s sleight of hand of first declaring President’s rule in Kashmir, and making the matter of reconsideration (and abrogation) turn on the legislators at the centre, where the BJP has a sufficient majority. [The centre imposed president’s rule in the erstwhile state in December 2018, following six months of governor’s rule.] And, in the short term, if not the long, control of the region via President’s rule is crucial too, so that the normalisation of this cancellation of autonomy proceeds apace without the noise of democracy.
SB: Why is the ruling government feeling this need to take aggressive actions such as the effective revocation of Article 370?
AB: That is a particularly good question because the fact is that autonomy, in most respects, was in any case a merely formal provision once the military occupation got consolidated. De facto, there was not much autonomy. So the question arises, what was the point now behind removing it formally, removing its de jure status?
I don’t think we can understand the long-term point of this move in Kashmir, without relating it with other aspects of BJP government policy, such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and the infamous National Register of Citizens. The former is intended to permit residency for non-Muslims who are said to be seeking refuge from oppression in neighbouring Muslim-majority nations. The latter, focused at the moment in [Assam], deregisters those—and their descendants—in the population of Assam who lack legal documents and electoral roll status going back to [before March 1971]. In the end, the ones affected by all this are going to be Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh because the Hindu and other refugees will be accommodated by the CAB.
So the NRC and CAB together basically amount to a pincer movement to change the demography of the northeast region, one arm of the pincer deregistering Muslims and Hindu immigrants to the region, the other arm restoring the Hindu immigrants to citizenship, leaving the Muslims alone reduced to second-class status. It is a formal version of ethnic cleansing. It is not killing people of a certain community, but declaring them to be second class, freezing them out of citizen’s rights and benefits. Leave the killing to lynch mobs and others who feel sanctioned by this BJP government to do violence on the ground.
The point is that the Kashmir move is similarly part of this transformative demographic plan. The abrogation of the formal aspects of autonomy now allows Hindus to purchase land—shades of the Israeli precedent can be easily detected here—in Kashmir and it also will change the electoral complexion of the Valley in favour of the BJP, which has an increasingly strong presence there in recent years. This will not happen, of course, if Hindus from outside Kashmir feel it is not a safe place to move to. So military occupation must be further and completely normalised to make it safe for them to do so—again the Israeli antecedent is obvious here too.
Going back to your question about how democracy is being subverted by this violation of the constitution, democracy in another sense will be completely demolished if the knowledge of these things—that are known to people who bother to learn the facts and analyse them—remains esoteric knowledge. It must be brought to public light and kept constantly in the public awareness and attention. The task of journalists and a wide range of human-rights and other activist organisations today is to keep hammering away at that, informing the public, including the international public, to mobilise opinion and eventually to seek redress by all means possible, including appeals to international law as well as to human-rights provisions in the United Nations declaration [referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a historic UN resolution adopted in December 1948].
The success of that, of course, depends on the willingness of states to listen to and be open to pressure from these international bodies. Many states unblushingly refuse to do that. India, on Kashmir, is one such state. Israel is another—it listens to no one, except the United States on which it heavily depends financially and militarily, and the United States almost never puts any pressure on Israel anyway. Sri Lanka, on the Tamil question, is yet another. But still, one cannot ignore the importance of keeping the issues alive. The fate of Palestinians, Kashmiris, Tamils in these nations depends on the issues being kept alive despite the states in question working assiduously to make the issues go away, to normalise occupations, curfews, illegal arrests and detentions, round-the-clock surveillance, et cetera.
It’s not just to keep the issues alive that the public has to be kept informed, it is also to counter the brazenly false claims and fallacious arguments that are in the air thanks to the Hindutva propaganda on Kashmir. For instance, many people I know, who have no Hindutva commitments, repeatedly say that Kashmiri autonomy, as articulated in [Articles] 370 and 35A, is an anomaly, and it is about time it is brought to an end. This is something they would not say if they knew the history. So it is important to give accurate accounts of the history in public forums, not just in scholarly locations. Why was, and is, Kashmiri autonomy important? What are the sentiments of the Kashmiri people today and in the past? What ways were, and are, these sentiments ignored? For a democracy to work and to make the proper decisions at the ballot box, you have to be informed about all these things, and the role of the press and other public fora is indispensable in making that happen.
It is crucial for the rest of us in India to think not from the point of view of the interests of the sarkar, but from the point of view of the desires of the region’s population. We owe it to the Kashmiri people. Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. I was once seated next to PN Dhar, a former high-level adviser to prime minister Indira Gandhi, at a dinner because his wife was a good friend of my sister. This was in the early 1990s when all sorts of abominations by the Indian military presence were being perpetrated and there was tremendous resistance. We got to talking of Kashmir. I pointed out that the militant Islamic element in Kashmiri resistance was a creation of the Indian government in order to undermine the secular JKLF, [the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front,] which was so influential then. He did not deny it and said, in fact, that things were so bad right now that “the Valley is gone.” I distinctly remember those words. What do you mean, I said, quite surprised. “We should just hand it over to Pakistan,” he said. My surprise turned to shock. “Why?” I asked, “What sort of solution is that?” His answer was memorable: “Because if we don’t give it to Pakistan and give it to the Kashmiri people, we will set a precedent for the northeast to make similar demands.”
That’s how the sarkar thinks. A situation may incline your hand to concede something, (though, of course, no such concession was actually made or ever will be), but even if you do concede it, pay no attention to what the people want. The sarkari point of view alone should determine your decisions, even your concessive decisions.
SB: How do you see the cultural project of Hindutva shaping up in India since 2014? Do you see Hindu nationalism excluding and silencing minorities, especially Muslims?
AB: It is very interesting to compare the Muslims in a slightly earlier period, when Hindutva forces were also very active, and the present, when they are actually in power. For some years following the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, the Muslims showed some real agency. Some of it was even violent. We can oppose that violence but still you have to observe that the agency was there. Moreover, in that period, figures like [the former Indian politician Syed] Shahabuddin, the Delhi Imam Abdullah Bukhari, and others had a voice and prominence, whatever you think of how they used it and what they said. But now Muslims have gone completely into their shells—[Akbaruddin] Owaisi, a member of the Telangana legislative assembly, today has some voice but it is pretty much restricted to his locality and city.
With the BJP in power, there is real fear among Muslims and the fear is widespread, chronic and deep because the menace they face is widespread, chronic and deep. The Muslims have a clear sense that the lumpen Hindu mobs know with confidence that their violence against Muslims can be carried out with impunity. It is informally sanctioned by the very fact that BJP occupies the state and does so with hegemonic support not only from a majority of the electorate, but a large enough section of the population that has accepted ideas of a Hindu nation. Apart from lynchings and violence, arrests of ordinary helpless Muslims with no access to lawyers are now done daily without any due process and—unlike the illegal arrests of celebrated activists in the recent ‘Urban Naxal’ farce—these don’t even get reported in the newspapers. It’s just quotidian menace, part of their daily life.
Now, it is interesting to make a further comparison between Muslims in these years of BJP in power, and the Dalits. In recent years, Dalits, in contrast to the Muslims, have shown real agency, even the willingness to resist violence—sometimes with violence. But what is odd and needs further study is that this agency they show is primarily in the long- and mid-term moment, not the electoral moment. What I don’t properly understand is why the kind of agency and resistance that Dalits show in the period in between elections changes when it comes to the electoral clock.
No doubt, it is due to the fact that the BJP—this is Amit Shah’s manipulative genius, I suppose—is able to exploit the resentment among some Dalits against other Dalits who have gained from other parties in power—Mayawati, for instance— by promising them similar gains if they voted for the BJP instead. But I think it is a rather fascinating fact that the long-term issues of oppression of Dalits surfaces in their resistance and mobilisations in a period when elections are not on the horizon, and then subsides, and different, more manipulable hopes for gains surface during elections. These are differentials well worth studying carefully.
SB: What is the fundamental or philosophical difference between the politics of the BJP and the Congress?
AB: The Congress, unlike the BJP, is not a quasi-fascist party. It has become an ineffectual party because ever since the Emergency and its aftermath, it slowly began to lose its grassroots. It increasingly, from that time on, became a party that focused on a centralised, more technocratic ideal of governance. After the neo-liberal period that began to get seriously consolidated from 1990, this became fortified in its economic outlook too. In 2004, to a considerable extent because of Sonia Gandhi’s quite remarkable campaign in that election, it came back to power and, partly because it was dependent on Left support, even put in place policies to uplift the poor—however fitfully implemented. To some extent, she and her supporters were a buffer against the nakedly corporate-influenced tendencies—worsened by the pressures placed by international credit agencies—of the then prime minister [Manmohan Singh] and his neo-liberal economic advisers.
A fascinating question arises, however, regarding the failure and fall of UPA 2 [referring to the second term of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government]. In my view, the deeper source of its failure owed to the predictable effects of neo-liberal economic policies, though, of course, the analysis by which this is made evident is never presented to the electorate by any dominant party in the electoral field. So, the BJP, which promises to adopt those policies with even less constraint, can then get elected.
As I said, those are the deeper underlying causes. The more immediate cause—apart from the BJP’s Hindutva-based mobilisation and the Modi personality cult that was pursued by an obscenely expensive public-relations campaign—was that Congress corruption was called and it tainted the party sufficiently to measurably undermine its image.
Here is the question that fascinates me. The fascist ideologue, Carl Schmitt, said that sovereignty lies with those who can “call the exception.” This was essential to his critique of liberalism. He shrewdly pointed out that liberal representative democracy can make all its impeccable claims about the rule of law, claim the high ground for its constitutional codifications, but it always has to have space for the exception to the law and the constitution—the emergency move, the abrogation, et cetera. That is the moment of exception. And he said whoever gets to call the exception, that is where sovereignty really lies. Or I suppose it is better to say, that is where it really underlies.
By analogy, what I think we should be asking about the Indian society and polity and economy today is a related question: who gets to call corruption? In the current relation of capital to politics and government, pretty much every party is corrupt. This is widely believed by all. The electorate is not naïve about it either. But who gets called corrupt and who gets to do the calling is the deep question. Since governments can be toppled by the effective and persuasive call of corruption, there is a kind of middle-level sovereignty that lies in whoever gets to call it. Where does this peculiar form of sovereignty lie in Indian society? This is a question worth exploring.
Is it big business, which decides and gets everyone—media, especially, but the courts as well— to taint someone with the call of corruption? If so, which part of big business? Surely not all of big business. Is it the crony capitalists around the prime minister, the Gujarat capitalist mafia? But then why isn’t the rest of the corporate sector—surely a measurably larger fragment of the corporate sector—resisting the domination of these very few corporate houses? Do they not have a concern that other political parties, like the Congress, must not be allowed to disappear from the scene, since one cannot be wholly dependent on one party that favours only a small segment of the corporate sector? These are some of the aspects of current capitalism that are shrouded in obscurity.
SB: Could you say something about the BJP, then?
AB: A good question to ask is why the BJP seems so compulsively authoritarian when it has fairly widespread support in the electorate in so many regions of the country. Since you asked about the difference between the Congress and the BJP, one way to pursue your question is to explore how BJP’s current authoritarianism is different from and more willful than past authoritarianism—the state authoritarianism against radical peasant agitations of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Emergency, et cetera. I think the answer lies in the fact that far more political will and muscle is needed now than it was in the past to have the one-party domination of the form that BJP seeks. The Congress’s one-party domination came initially from its pedigree as the dominant party in the freedom struggle and such grassroots that it laid during that long period. When that began to wane, it sought it by more authoritarian means such as the Emergency. But in the 1980s, politics, both at the federal and the regional level, became far more democratic and demanding. That is, the demos was more demanding. All sorts of diverse interests emerged, identity politics became a defining force.
One-party domination requires a far greater assertiveness, therefore, both via sheer authoritarian force and via manipulation of the electoral forces. In short, as the noise of democracy increases, the more authoritarian and manipulative the requirements of one-party domination have to be. That is one source of the difference between the BJP today and the Congress in its heyday.
This interview has been edited and condensed.