Who knows best?
Who can give a verdict on what is best for Kashmiris? Not, surely, the Kashmiris, who should not be asked the question. They are too personally involved, unable to think objectively, when it comes to minor matters like taking a child to hospital during a curfew, or wanting to know when a father, husband or son arrested without warning or a trial may be released.
Those who can think more coolly about life in Kashmir are, for example, voters in Maharashtra’s imminent elections, who answered with a full-throated ‘yes’ when Amit Shah, the BJP chief, asked them if they were pleased that Kashmir, freed from its special status, was now a part of India like any other state.
Even more objective, in Narendra Modi’s apparent view, were the thousands of NRIs who had assembled in Houston, Texas, to cheer the Modi-Trump duo. Evidently distance enhances clarity and detachment. Although many if not most of the NRIs held US passports, Modi felt no hesitation in asking them to rise and give a standing ovation to Indian MPs who with a large majority had voted to end Kashmir’s special status.
Rise they did, and with enthusiasm. India’s MPs were duly thanked. But the crowd of thousands had duties in the US as well, and Modi did not hesitate to indicate to them how those duties should be performed.
Of course they should vote for Trump, especially in large-and-critical Texas, where the Democratic Party has shown dangerous signs of resurgence.
Modi did not pronounce the preceding sentence in direct or precise words, or in English. He spoke in Hindi, but the words were unmistakable. Abki Bar Trump Sarkar, or ‘This coming time, a Trump regime,’ he said. As Mihir Sharma put it in a Bloomberg column reproduced in The Print, this was ‘as close to an endorsement as it is possible to go’.
https://theprint.in/opinion/howdy-modi-risks-dividing-the-us-on-relations-with-india/295652/
That nationals of India should not seek to influence voters in an American election has been a well-understood position, even something like a principle, an irremovable other side of the rule that Americans should not try to influence voters in Indian elections.
But principles change with time, and the Democratic Party has had a battle convincing all of America that hacking organized by Russia to influence US voters was a serious matter.
Raising before the large Houston assembly the question of how life was like in today’s India, Modi answered it by saying -- in Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Bangla and Odiya -- that everything was just fine. He received thunderous applauses.
The linguistic performance was certainly impressive. However, as Mihir Sharma has noted in another piece by him, the NRIs who gathered in Houston ‘are not the ones suffering through demonetization, a government-induced economic slowdown, lynching, and the slow debasement of every Indian institution’.
https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/howdy-modi-what-it-means-for-pm-and-his-bond-with-nris-2105650
Modi and Trump possess fervent bases of support but each of them also has firm opponents. Unlike many Modi critics in India, Trump’s foes in the US are vocal too.
Was it wise for Modi to provoke disappointment, disapproval and perhaps hostility from large and powerful sections of Americans towards their Indian-origin neighbours? And similar reactions from people living not far south of Texas in Latin America?
Meanwhile Trump has told the world, Imran Khan sitting beside him, that he is willing and able to arbitrate between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, if both sides ask him, adding that he trusts Khan. And Modi, of course, is a great friend of his.
Modi says he wants to learn from Trump ‘the art of the deal’. Trump, on his part, may have felt in Houston that Modi can teach him some marketing skills.
Can high-table deal-making and clever marketing rescue the peoples of South Asia? Or of North America? Admittedly, Trump and Modi have more than that to offer, including assertions of military strength against terrorism, with Trump using the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ in Houston.
In our complex world of hunger, hates, suspicions, bombs, and threats to our planet, even those assertions might not only not suffice; they could make the world’s divides even more dangerous than they are.
Summing up the world’s dilemmas as a clash between Muslims and the rest may appeal to victims of cruelty perpetrated in the name of Islam, but the explanation is not only oversimplified; it is inhuman and false.
All of us know that cruelty can come from anywhere, from any individual and from any racial, religious, tribal or national group.
