Is India’s Kashmir move an attempt to shift its Muslim demographic?

The fear Muslim numbers will overtake Hindus in certain parts of the country is an old clarion call of Narendra Modi’s BJP and its base

Critics fear Kashmiris are being reduced to a minority in their own state as the BJP tries to ramp up numbers and support there

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Indian security forces personnel patrol the streets in Srinagar after the government scrapped Kashmir’s special status. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:00am, 9 Aug 2019Updated: 8:36pm, 9 Aug 2019

Since New Delhi’s announcement that Kashmir’s autonomy would be revoked, critics have suggested the region’s original Muslim-majority residents could be reduced to a minority, invoking comparisons to the West Bank or the Chinese model in Xinjiang that pushed Han Chinese into the region.

By scrapping Articles 370 and 35A of the constitution, the complex state will become two centrally administered Union Territories in India’s northernmost region – Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh. Among other changes, Indians from outside the region will be able to buy land or permanently settle in the Kashmir Valley.

India’s Home Minister Amit Shah said the decision to scrap the state’s special privileges was aimed solely at the national integration of the region, which would further develop the restive state of 12.5 million people. Kashmir, at the centre of a long-running territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, has been trapped in a decades-long insurgency that has killed at least 40,000 people.

New Delhi’s move was celebrated by not just the rank and file of the ruling party, but by a few major opposition parties in India as well. These included some prominent members of the Indian National Congress, creating a rift within the chief opposition party.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said New Delhi’s decision to revoke the article was an attempt to change the demography of Muslim-majority Kashmir, which was a “war crime” under the Geneva Conventions. He has downgraded diplomatic ties with India and is rallying for support from countries like Malaysia and Turkey to take the matter to the United Nations Security Council. Kashmir has been under lockdown by Indian military forces to prevent protests.

In response to Khan, Communist Party of India (Marxist) Politburo member Brinda Karat said at a New Delhi protest that was jointly organised by five parties from the Left, all of them critics of the current government, that it was Khan and the Pakistani military who had also been “gravely responsible” for the “very serious situation” in Kashmir, aiding numerous militant strikes from across the border that had disrupted the lives of Kashmiris.

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