Balance needed

Balance needed

New Delhi’s narrative on Kashmir runs into some ambushes.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s risky move of plumping wholesale for President Donald Trump at the Houston ‘Howdy Modi’ event may have backfired, as Democrat lawmakers at a US Congressional hearing on “human rights in South Asia” focussed mostly on the situation in the Kashmir Valley. Apart from antipathy for Trump in a polarised polity, they may have been influenced by a certain easily available narrative in left-liberal sections of the Western press, which looks only at government restrictions and not atrocities committed by militants in a onesided portrayal of events in Kashmir.

Such preachiness was in full flight when Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar – she of the “some people did something” remark on 9/11 fame – hectored a Kashmiri journalist working for this newspaper for not reporting the “objective truth” in her home state (which no doubt is easily available to Omar who gets teleported there by the ‘clairvoyant’ sections of the Western press). Nevertheless, even as the US polity is intensely polarised at this point, for that very reason it makes sense for New Delhi to place fewer eggs in Trump’s basket and more in the Democratic one – Trump being impeached even before his popularity is tested in elections next year has emerged as a distinct possibility.

Moreover, there is a strong case for relaxing Kashmir restrictions and releasing political detainees – those restrictions are now well past their expiry date. It must also be recognised that part of the PR problem New Delhi has run into in presenting its case on Kashmir is because of events elsewhere in the country – the spate of lynchings, the unwarranted Muslim bashing and Hindutva triumphalism, the NRC fiasco, the Citizenship Bill that is destructive of the values of the Indian Constitution. These steps must be reversed not just for the sake of external soft power but internal cohesion too.