How Narendra Modi And Amit Shah Pulled Off The Audacious Strike?

With Article 370 gone, Kashmir is at par with any other part of india. There will be resistance, and voices of protest from around the world, but there will be more voices of support from a world that agrees with the idea of a new India

- R. Prasannan

It needed only one stroke of a presidential pen, the boldest stroke ever executed in the Great Game over Kashmir. With that one stroke, India that is Bharat declared to the world that the territory of Kashmir is as sovereign Indian territory as Kamrup, Kathiawar or Kanyakumari. Article 370, by which a corner of its vast territory had been claiming special treatment, simply vanished. No constitution amendment, no long-winded debates, no marshalling of majorities, not even a simple raising of hands.

Not that there was any doubt in the minds of most Indians about India’s sovereignty over Kashmir, but there was always that provision of ambivalence lodged in the Constitution in the form of Article 370. An ambivalence that was legated from an era when such federal ambivalence suited the idea of India that prevailed in the minds of the founding fathers of the republic—the idea of an amorphous, liberal, plural and heterogenous India.

Today, many may carp at that ambivalence, scoff at it as Nehruvian liberal weakness, but the fact is that it had saved Kashmir and India at that time. In fact, there were several such instances of ambivalence—when concessions beyond the call of federal responsibility were extended to peripheral regions—that had helped the young republic recover from post-colonial penury and pangs of partition.

Today, having consolidated into a modern nation-state with rockets, bombs and a billion bellies being fed, the Indian state believes that it does not need such elements of ambivalence in the new idea of India—an assertive, self-willed, determined and homogenous India.