India’s international woes spring from its failure to address the disquiet in Kashmir and attempts at establishing Hindutva’s supremacy at home and abroad
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on February 13, before Indo-US relations took a nosedive. Pic/X/@narendramodi
The law of causality says every event has a cause, and the event, or the effect, in turn becomes the trigger for yet another happening, creating a chain of episodes that stretches from the present to the past. Unless humans work backward in time to fathom the cause-and-effect linkages and consciously break them, they are doomed to forever remain shackled by the mistakes of history.
Apply the law of causality to American President Donald Trump’s imposition of a 50 per cent tariff on India and you will realise that behind it is the festering problem of Kashmir. Surprised? Here’s how they are linked.
It’s now widely accepted that Trump is waging a tariff war against India in pique, because of Delhi repeatedly rejecting his claims of having worked out a ceasefire between India and Pakistan in May. Whether or not Trump’s claims have substance, he wouldn’t have made them had there been no India-Pakistan armed conflict. Then again, India’s attack was a punishment visited on Pakistan for allegedly sponsoring the terrorists who mowed down 26 people at Pahalgam in April. The reason behind Pakistan interminably bloodying Kashmir is that a segment of its people endorses violence as a solution for their alienation from India.
Kashmir has been the cause of several India-Pakistan conflicts, sparking America’s attempts at interventions. The United States brought an end to the 1999 Kargil conflict, for instance. In 2019, on his trip to North Korea, Trump said the world would soon hear “good news” amidst India-Pakistan armed hostilities following the Pulwama bombing. The good news turned out to be the release of Abhinandan Varthaman, an Indian Air Force pilot, from Pakistan’s custody, although Trump’s precise role in it had been ambiguous even then.
India’s disregard of the law of causality has turned Kashmir into a gargantuan problem that foreign powers exploit for their own interests. We compounded the unfulfilled promise of self-determination made to Kashmiris by betraying democracy. In the 1951 Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections, the National Conference (NC) of Sheikh Abdullah, then Nehru’s favourite, swept all 75 seats. The NC won 73 of these seats uncontested, for the nomination papers of Opposition candidates were rejected. This dubious method of winning elections continued until the 1970s.
Thereafter, in 1987, the NC-Congress alliance deployed State power to brutalise the Muslim United Front cadres, the only credible Opposition then, for winning the Assembly elections. Many of those who experienced State violence crossed into Pakistan to pick up the gun, inaugurating an armed secessionist movement from which India has had no respite since then.
The law of causality is indeed inexorable.
We must dread this law because the Modi government, in demonstrating its fidelity to Hindutva, read down Article 370, split Jammu and Kashmir and demoted it from a state to a Union Territory. Its elected government has been deprived of vital powers. These measures have deepened the alienation of Kashmiris, a dangerous situation for India as Trump, unlike the past few American presidents, can’t be relied upon to stand firmly in its corner.
India’s hope of escaping the law of causality lies in addressing its vulnerabilities at home. It has, instead, chosen to initiate a new chain of cause and effect by exporting Hindutva to Nepal. In 2015, it was claimed India wanted Nepal to remove the word secular from its newly adopted Constitution, and revert to retaining its Hindu identity explicitly spelt out in the 1990 Constitution. India has consistently denied this allegation.
Yet, in 2015, Adityanath, only an MP then, wrote a letter to Nepali Prime Minister Sushil Koirala, asking him to declare his country a Hindu rashtra. Such gratuitous steps have fuelled speculation in Nepal that India is orchestrating the periodic display of public support for Gyanendra Shah, the deposed king. About this, academic SD Muni, widely respected for his insights into Nepal, told The Diplomat, a digital foreign policy magazine, “Many of my Nepali friends even suggest that financial support has been coming from India for the massive demonstrations and mobilisation in Nepal in support of a Hindu and a monarchical state.”
In a country where India’s interference is always suspected, often with rage, the BJP’s ideological experiment in Nepal could have the law of causality unfold with serious consequences for Delhi. This is already happening in Bangladesh, whose people have turned hostile to India because of the BJP’s furious campaign against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, infamously described as termites by Home Minister Amit Shah. Opinion pieces in Bangladesh’s English newspapers constantly fret over India straying away from constitutional secularism and spawning a communal divide reminiscent of the 1947 Partition.
These sentiments burst out during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Bangladesh in 2021, when protests against him, involving both Muslim rightwing and leftwing groups, were fired upon, killing 12. A BBC article had then warned, “India may end up being friends only with the government in Dhaka and not with the people of Bangladesh.”
With Sheikh Hasina Wajed compelled to flee the country, India has been rendered friendless in Bangladesh, testifying to how divisive domestic policies impinge upon foreign affairs. The law of causality doesn’t recognise borders.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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