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New research offers an alternative to the war on terror as the Biden administration rethinks its counterterrorism playbook.
Over the next 20-plus years, the tab on that conflict, which began in Afghanistan but spread across the globe to Burkina Faso, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, has ballooned to more than $6 trillion. The payoff has been dismal: To date, the war has killed around 900,000 people, including more than 350,000 civilians; displaced as many as 60 million; and led to humanitarian catastrophes and the worst U.S. military defeat since the Vietnam War. American cash has built armies that have collapsed or evaporated when challenged; meanwhile, the number of foreign terrorist groups around the world has more than doubled from 32 to 69.
It didn’t have to be this way, according to a new study of counterterrorism approaches from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “Terrorism is a political phenomenon,” writes researcher Jennifer Walkup Jayes in “Beyond the War Paradigm: What History Tells Us About How Terror Campaigns End,” which was shared exclusively with The Intercept ahead of its release on Tuesday. “Counterterrorism strategies which address the root causes of terrorism, rather than the organizations and people that commit it, might end the waves of terrorist violence.”
Sophisticated statistical analyses have demonstrated that there are proven, effective methods to hasten the demise of terrorist organizations, according to Walkup Jayes’s report. But the “war paradigm,” which was a departure from America’s previous law enforcement approach to counterterrorism, is not one of them.
One innovative study of 648 militant groups cited by Walkup Jayes notes that only 7 percent of terrorist groups were defeated through military efforts. What bleeding-heart, leftist, ivory tower eggheads came to this conclusion? The 2008 study was conducted by the RAND Corporation, the military’s go-to think tank, when the cost of the war on terror was still a paltry $752 billion.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan,” Bush said that same year, “we set a clear definition of success: Success will come when Al Qaeda has no safe haven in those countries and the people can protect themselves from terror. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are economically viable. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are democracies that govern themselves effectively and respond to the will of their people. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are strong and capable allies on the war on terror.”
Today, Al Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan. Its successor, the Islamic State, is active in Afghanistan and Iraq. And neither of those nations is a democracy or economically viable, as Afghanistan now teeters on the brink of economic collapse and is ruled by the very regime that Bush deposed in 2001.
Experts say this cascade of failures could have been largely avoided. “You can envision a scenario, after 9/11, in which the terrorist attacks were treated primarily as a criminal justice problem,” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, noting that the FBI and the CIA could have led the effort with a goal of arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Osama bin Laden and others who planned the attacks.
While noting that the Costs of War report highlights drawbacks to this approach, Savell told The Intercept that it would have been transformational. “You wouldn’t have seen 20 years of conflict and this incredible waste of resources,” she said. “The U.S. response wouldn’t have led to this spiral of escalation, of war and violence begetting more war and violence.”
The money spent on the war paradigm could instead have been allocated to more serious national security concerns. Walkup Jayes draws attention to the perils of the global climate crisis, the fact that a lack of health insurance kills more than 45,000 people a year, and the Covid-19 pandemic which has not only led to the deaths of close to 1 million Americans but also laid bare the sorry state of U.S. health care. “The reality is that poverty, racism, and other structural inequalities pose far greater threats to human lives than do terror attacks,” she observes. “These threats are far more dangerous to far more people than are militant groups who use terror tactics, and there are feasible policies to address them.”
It all raises the question of what might have been if the budget for the war on terror had been repurposed. “If the U.S. government had used even a portion of the $8 trillion spent and obligated on the post-9/11 wars on other domestic policies to promote societal health and well-being or mitigate the effects of climate change, that would have resulted in far more meaningful human security in this country,” Savell told The Intercept.
“Beyond the War Paradigm” lays out 10 distinct, though sometimes overlapping, counterterrorism alternatives to America’s militarized approach. These include the law enforcement model, which relies on policing and the judicial system; using public messaging and media campaigns to blunt radical ideologies; addressing the root causes of terrorism by funding development projects and aid groups; and an even more holistic “human security” model, which “aims to empower disenfranchised groups politically and economically … making terrorism a less compelling tactic for changemaking.”
Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for militarism and human rights for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group, says “Beyond the War Paradigm” is crucial to educating members of Congress, many of whom entered government after 9/11, about the alternatives to America’s ineffective but long-standing strategy. “We’ve had 20 years of counterterrorism being seen through the lens of war,” she told The Intercept. “This new report presents different options and demonstrates that long-term, non-military solutions are the most effective. To have the research and evidence laid out in such a clear way is extremely important. It provides the information necessary to have the conversation with Congress and the Biden administration about how to properly resource these non-military tools, which are critical to successful counterterrorism.”
One year ago, the White House imposed temporary limits on drone strikes and commando raids outside of conventional war zones. The administration launched a review of such missions and began writing a new “playbook” to govern counterterrorism operations. That policy, which was reportedly slated to be released around the 20th anniversary of 9/11, has been delayed as the White House has dealt with the fallout of the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and a final “righteous” drone strike in the country that the Pentagon was forced to admit killed only civilians, most of them children.
The White House would not provide even basic information about the state of the counterterrorism review and when — or whether — the administration might reveal its new policies. “We continuously assess our counterterrorism posture around the world and make adjustments as needed,” a senior administration official told The Intercept.
Recently, Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Barbara Lee, D-Calif., called for far more than “adjustments.” “The greatest threats to America’s security — pandemics, climate change, economic inequality, authoritarianism — cannot be defeated at the barrel of a gun. It’s time to stop relying on the same old playbook and instead forge a foreign policy that works for everyday people,” they wrote in an article announcing a Congressional resolution they introduced. “Today’s greatest security challenges cannot be solved through military adventurism. International cooperation, diplomacy, development, and peacebuilding — not bombs — must be the foreign-policy tools the country reaches for first.”
Other experts have called for a hybrid policy that maintains existing military capabilities but puts greater emphasis on alternative methods. Luke Hartig, a senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the Obama White House and now a fellow in New America’s International Security program, called for an “all tools approach to counterterrorism” that combines law enforcement, border security, intelligence, the targeting of terrorist financing, foreign partnerships, and countering extremist ideologies, as well as military operations.
“We have over-resourced our military responses and under-resourced our civilian programs,” he told The Intercept. “I don’t think ending the forever war means ending all military operations against terrorist groups, but it does mean shifting to a civilian-led paradigm. That means investing more in things like countering violent extremism and institution building. It means deploying savvy diplomacy to advance counterterrorism objectives. And it means being willing to rely on our defenses to protect the country rather than lethally targeting every threat we see in the world.”
“Beyond the War Paradigm” is packed with intriguing findings from studies of militancy, such as the link between an imbalanced sex ratio among young adults and terrorism and the fact that education in the humanities “may offer inoculation against violent ideologies, particularly those which target others on the grounds of ethnicity or religion,” as well as suggestions about how such research might be employed to achieve real-world counterterrorism results. Altogether, it reinforces a seemingly self-evident finding from the World Bank’s 2011 World Development report, highlighted by Walkup Jayes, that nonetheless appears to have escaped four presidential administrations and hundreds of lawmakers over more than 20 years: State violence in the form of invasion, occupation, and repression is central to the rationale of terrorist groups.
“We would be in a very different place if we had prosecuted the 9/11 attacks as criminal acts and called it a day,” Walkup Jayes told The Intercept. “The war paradigm has caused more people to take up arms against the United States and broadened support for the terrorist groups that the war aimed to eliminate. So if your goal is to truly prevent terrorism, your best bet is to help foster security and human rights, and guarantee people have access to the resources that they need.”
President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, listens to Detroit poll worker Jessi Jacobs during an appearance before the Michigan House Oversight Committee on Dec. 2, 2020, in Lansing, Mich. (photo: Rey Del Rio/Getty)
President’s legal advisers helped twist clerical error by rural county into key tenet of false election-fraud claim
Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter said in an interview that Giuliani and several colleagues made the request during a telephone call after the county initially misreported its election results. The inaccurate tallies meant that Joe Biden appeared to have beaten Trump by 3,000 votes in a Republican stronghold, an error that soon placed Antrim at the center of false claims by Trump that the election had been stolen.
Rossiter said he declined. “I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.” Even if he had had sufficient grounds to take the machines as evidence, Rossiter said, he could not have released them to outsiders or a party with an interest in the matter.
Legal scholars said it was unusual and inappropriate for a president’s representatives to make such a request of a local prosecutor. “I never expected in my life I’d get a call like this,” Rossiter said.
Giuliani declined to comment in response to questions from The Post, his attorney said.
Giuliani’s team called Rossiter around Nov. 20, 2020, Rossiter said, as it worked to overturn Trump’s defeat to Biden. The direct appeal to a local law enforcement official was part of a broader effort by Trump’s allies to access voting machines in an attempt to prove that the election had been stolen. That effort extended to a recently disclosed draft executive order for Trump’s signature to have National Guard troops seize machines across the nation.
A Post examination found that the call to Rossiter was also part of a behind-the-scenes intervention by Trump’s legal team in Antrim that seized on the county’s election night blunder and helped twist the mistake into supposed proof of a vast conspiracy to rig the election.
Antrim is dominated by elected Republicans, and the small rural county last backed a Democrat for president in 1964. A review commissioned by state officials later found that the election night error was largely the result of officials’ failure to properly update machines that scan and count paper ballots following a last-minute change to ballots in several precincts. This led to inaccurate vote tallies in the county’s initial results.
After addressing the mistakes in the days that followed, officials announced that Trump had in fact beaten Biden by more than 3,000 votes, a result that was confirmed by a hand recount of the paper ballots marked by voters. The county clerk, Sheryl Guy, later said in a report that the error was an honest mistake that she “owned, acknowledged and accepted.”
But as Trump’s advisers searched for evidence to support his false claims that the election had been stolen, they focused on Antrim. Having unsuccessfully pressed Rossiter and another county official for access to the voting machines, they supported an election lawsuit brought by local Realtor William Bailey, who won a court order granting him access to the machines from a judge who had recently donated to Trump’s campaign.
A purported “forensic report” produced for Bailey’s lawsuit, created by a team that his attorney later described in a podcast interview as “forensic scientists and data collection scientists,” claimed that data gathered from Antrim’s machines provided evidence of sweeping fraud. The machines — made by Dominion Voting Systems, which had become a focus of election conspiracy theories — were “intentionally and purposefully designed” to manipulate votes, the report said. Experts have called that conclusion false and the report critically flawed.
The 23-page report was produced by a team that included Phil Waldron, the pro-Trump retired army colonel now best known for circulating a PowerPoint presentation before Jan. 6 that said troops could seize ballots. The report was signed by Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a conservative activist who has claimed since 2018 that elections were compromised and leads the Texas-based company Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG).
Neither Ramsland nor Waldron responded to requests for comment.
The analysts who examined Antrim’s machines for ASOG were accompanied by Katherine Friess, a former Republican Senate counsel who was working with Giuliani on Trump’s legal effort, the Traverse City Record-Eagle first reported. They made two visits to municipal offices in Antrim to inspect voting machine data, arriving on private planes provided by Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock chief executive, Byrne told The Post. Byrne, who was deeply involved in efforts to prove the election was stolen, described himself as part of an independent team that gave assistance to Giuliani and others.
The ASOG report was released to the public via a Dec. 14 court order, as electoral college members met to cast their presidential votes in state capitols. Alongside the report, Bailey’s attorney submitted an affidavit to court from a former engineering professor who raised additional concerns about voting machines. The metadata of a version of the affidavit posted to the attorney’s website lists Friess as the creator of the document the previous month. Friess did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
When the ASOG report was made public, Giuliani issued a news release calling it “nothing short of mind-blowing.” The evidence of fraud it presented, he claimed, was “undisputable” and reason for state lawmakers to “halt any further approval of presidential electors until all of these machines have been seized for auditing and analysis.” The news release was authored by Friess, according to the metadata of a copy posted online that day by a TV news station in Michigan.
The president’s legal team cited alleged findings from Antrim to pressure battleground state lawmakers to reject Biden’s victory. The claims about Antrim were eventually presented as a key justification for the draft executive order for troops to seize machines. Trump cited the case of Antrim in his speech on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham University Law School and former chair of the American Bar Association’s criminal justice standards committee, said Giuliani and his team were wrong to ask Rossiter to seize the county’s voting machines.
“One might understand someone who’s not a lawyer asking, not knowing it wouldn’t be lawful. It’s another thing for a lawyer who used to be a U.S. attorney,” Green said. “If anyone knew the prosecutor couldn’t comply, it should be Rudy Giuliani.”
Rossiter, a Marine Corps veteran, became Antrim’s prosecuting attorney — Michigan’s equivalent of a district attorney — in 2013 after more than a decade as a prosecutor in the county office. While he was reelected as a GOP candidate in 2020, Rossiter said, he stressed to Giuliani’s team that “politics play no part” in his official duties.
“It’s no secret I run on the Republican ticket. But I told them, ‘It’s not about who wins or loses. It needs to be fair,’ ” Rossiter said. The prosecutor said Friess called him and placed him on speakerphone, where she was joined by Giuliani, Byrne and former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik.
Kerik told The Post he did not remember the call. Byrne said he did not have firm memories of the call.
Told of Rossiter’s account, Byrne said the official explanation for Antrim’s election night error had not allayed local suspicions. “Six thousand votes being shifted is all the probable cause that guy needed to demand that someone independent inspect those machines,” he said.
Rossiter and James Janisse, who was the top detective in the Antrim County Sheriff’s Office until he retired last summer, told The Post that they did investigate an allegation of fraud filed by Bailey. The detective and prosecutor said they interviewed Bailey and county officials and reviewed ASOG’s report, but their inquiries concluded with no charges.
Guy, the county clerk, told The Post that Antrim was being exploited to “terrorize the country with doubt” over the electoral process. “Nobody cares about what really happened. They are simply using us for their agenda,” said Guy, a Republican.
Michigan’s Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson (D), last month urged the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack to examine whether Trump or his campaign directed the creation of the Antrim report to justify seizing voting machines.
The false allegations about Antrim have endured since the Capitol riot, helping to power an ongoing movement to rehash the 2020 election with partisan ballot reviews, most notably in Maricopa County, Ariz. The claims have also infected debates about election integrity in communities far from Michigan, records from other states show, making “Antrim” a byword for election fraud among many Republicans.
Bailey’s attorney, Matthew DePerno, is now a Republican candidate for Michigan attorney general. Trump has endorsed DePerno and is scheduled to host a fundraiser for him next month at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla. DePerno did not respond to detailed questions from The Post but sent the questions to supporters in a fundraising appeal.
“They know most of the questions they are asking involve attorney-client privilege or have nothing to do with the issues I raised about election integrity in Antrim County,” DePerno wrote. Bailey declined to be interviewed.
The report ASOG produced for DePerno’s lawsuit made its way to the highest levels of government. On the day of its public release, Trump’s assistant emailed a copy of it to Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy to Attorney General William P. Barr, with the subject line: “From POTUS,” records released by the Senate show. Also attached to the email were talking points calling the report “evidence of intentional fraud” and claiming “Michigan cannot certify for Biden.”
On that same day, Trump tweeted that Barr, who had publicly challenged Trump’s claims about election fraud, would resign.
The next day, Dec. 15, Trump called a meeting with Rosen, soon to replace Barr at the helm of the Department of Justice, and Richard Donoghue, who would become Rosen’s deputy. The president brought up ASOG’s report, Donoghue later said in a deposition with Senate investigators. “He said something to the effect of, you know, ‘Have you guys seen this report? This is unbelievable. This is a disaster.’ ” Donoghue said he and Rosen mollified Trump by explaining that a hand recount was planned and would shed light on whether the alleged problem in Antrim was real.
On Dec. 16, an as-yet-unidentified person drafted the executive order that would have authorized U.S. troops to seize voting machines and appointed a special counsel to oversee the effort. The draft order’s second paragraph said ASOG’s Antrim report, “prepared by experts,” helped provide “evidence of international and foreign interference” that justified drastic action. The never-issued executive order, first reported by Politico, was among documents the National Archives gave to the House Jan. 6 committee.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security officials studied the Antrim claims at Barr’s request, preparing a “white paper” that said its key claims lacked merit and briefing Barr and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, the Senate records show. On Dec. 20, Barr announced there was no basis for seizing voting machines or appointing a special counsel.
By then, Giuliani’s team had established a “command center” at the Willard hotel in Washington for overturning the election. The rooms were reserved through Friess’s cybersecurity firm, Seven Good Stones, The Post previously reported.
John C. Eastman, another personal lawyer to Trump, authored two memos that laid out options for Vice President Mike Pence to delay certifying Biden’s win or ensure Trump’s inauguration instead. At the Willard on the evening of Jan. 5, Eastman watched the returns from two U.S. Senate elections in Georgia with Waldron and Ramsland, he told The Post in an interview.
The next day, shortly before the Capitol attack, the president invoked Antrim in his speech to thousands gathered in Washington.
“In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden,” said Trump, “and the same systems are used in the majority of states in our country.”
Members of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, marching through Center City in Philadelphia, US, on July 4, 2021. (photo: Philadelphia Inquirer)
Leaked documents show that about 18 out of 87 applicants, or 21%, to Patriot Front were currently or formerly affiliated with military
Some 18 out of the 87 applicants, or 21%, said they were currently or previously affiliated with the military. One applicant, who claimed to be a former Marine, also said he currently worked for the Department of Homeland Security, according to the SPLC’s Hatewatch, a blog that tracks and exposes activities of American rightwing extremists.
A white supremacist and neo-fascist hate group, Patriot Front emerged as a rebrand of the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America in the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
According to the SPLC, the Patriot Front “represents one of the most prominent white supremacist groups in the country” and is led by Thomas Rousseau, a 23-year old man based in Dallas, Texas. “A nation within a nation is our goal. Our people face complete annihilation as our culture and heritage are attacked from all sides,” Rousseau once said.
In January, Unicorn Riot published over 400 gigabytes of data that included “ostensibly private, unedited videos and direct messages [that] reveal a campaign to organize acts of hatred while indoctrinating teenagers into national socialism (Nazism),” the journalist collective said.
Group members and applicants expressed an open admiration for Nazi ideologies, with the latter expressing various motivations for joining the group.
One applicant, who said he lived in San Diego, claimed to be a current DHS employee and told Patriot Front he was inspired to join after he “found out about the Jews while in the marines”.
Another applicant used derogatory language about LGBTQ+ people and said he “first saw” them during his time in the military.
Someone else from Salt Lake City said he “shifted focus and questioned things” after his second deployment and went from being a Republican to joining the far right.
Applicants also touted their various skill sets, including “great land-navigation, great physical fitness, able to clear rooms” and “basic medical training”. Others said they had been “trained in firearms”. One claimed to train people in “marine corps martial arts” and said he was the leader of the Kansas Active Club, an affiliate of the Rise Above Movement, a Southern California-based SPLC-designated hate group.
In addition to alleged military affiliations, the leak also revealed that the group targets minors. According to Unicorn Riot, Patriot Front recruits “members through the internet who are still legally minors, indoctrinating them with white supremacist ideology and even encouraging them to lie to their parents so the group can transport them across state lines for fascist events”.
Patriot Front’s official policies require members to be at least 17 and a half years old, but it “goes by a case by case basis” with certain members being below that age.
In the past year, there has been growing concern surrounding the far-right radicalization of current and former military members. More than 80 defendants charged for their affiliation with the deadly January 6 riots have been found to have ties to the military, with most being veterans.
Last March, the Pentagon released a report that cited domestic extremist groups posing an increasing threat to the military by attempting to recruit service members and in certain situations join the military to gain combat experience.
“Military members are highly prized by these groups as they bring legitimacy to their causes and enhance their ability to carry out attacks,” the report said. “In addition to potential violence, white supremacy and white nationalism pose a threat to the good order and discipline within the military,” it added.
In October, a House panel convened to discuss ways to address veterans being increasingly targeted for recruitment by extremist groups.
“They provide them with a tribe, a simplistic view of the world and its problems, actionable solutions and a sense of purpose, and then they feed these vulnerable individuals a concoction of lies and an unrelenting narrative of political and social grievance,” retired Marine Lt Col Joe Plenzler said at the panel.
A study last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that in 2020, 6.4% of all domestic terror attacks and plots were committed by active-duty or reserve personnel, up from 1.5% in 2019 and none in 2018.
ACLU calls on President Biden to make good on his promise and end immigrant detention in private facilities. (photo: USA Today)
Maribel Hernández Rivera, ACLU deputy national political director, issued the following statement:
“President Biden pledged to end all private detention last year while speaking in Georgia. Yet under his administration, private companies have continued to profit off of our country’s reliance on mass incarceration by expanding contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The news that the GEO Group has reached an agreement with Charlton County officials to create what will be one of the largest immigration detention facilities in the nation is highly disappointing and deeply concerning.
“Private prison corporations like the GEO Group operate with little public oversight and accountability and have abysmal human rights records. The ACLU and government investigators have documented incidents of medical neglect, sexual abuse, suicide attempts, and uses of solitary confinement as retaliation in facilities run by the GEO group. To make matters worse, COVID-19 is surging inside facilities across the country as a result of inadequate protections, putting people who are detained at a high risk of illness and death if infected.
“We expect better from the Biden administration. President Biden should make good on his promise to end all private detention and immediately cease partnerships with for-profit corporations to detain immigrants.”
Law enforcement officers clear an area of demonstrators during a protest over Sunday's fatal shooting of Daunte Wright during a traffic stop, outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department on Wednesday, April 14, 2021, in Brooklyn Center, Minn. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota and the state’s Department of Public Safety announced the settlement Tuesday. It prohibits the Minnesota State Patrol from attacking journalists, arresting or threatening to arrest them, ordering them to disperse, seizing their equipment and more.
It also calls for an independent review of all complaints alleging mistreatment of the media covering those protests, and issuing body-worn cameras to all troopers by June.
Several journalists reported being struck by less-lethal munitions, herded and detained while covering protests. After Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by an officer in Brooklyn Center in April, the city’s police station was surrounded for several nights by protesters.
Tim Evans, a freelance photographer, described to The Associated Press how officers surrounded protesters after a 10 p.m. curfew passed, then charged into the crowd and began pepper-spraying and tackling people.
Evans said he was punched in the face, his credentials were torn off and an officer believed to be a Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy forced him to his stomach and knelt on his back.
Other journalists posted photos and videos online showing police detaining them while checking their credentials, and in at least one case spraying chemical irritants.
The ACLU said other portions of the settlement require that the State Patrol be trained on treatment of the media and First Amendment rights.
Litigation continues against other defendants, including the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County.
Jammu and Kashmir Special Operation Group (SOG) personnel frisks civilians after a grenade attack by militants on January 25, 2022 in Srinagar, India. (photo: Waseem Andrabio/Getty)
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s violent clampdown is the latest episode in a long saga of repression and resistance in Kashmir. The people of Kashmir deserve the chance to determine their own future, free of repression or outside interference.
The sharpest forms of repression under Modi’s government have taken place in Kashmir, where the Indian state has always displayed its most authoritarian characteristics. From its incorporation into the Indian Union after independence to today’s repressive climate, the people of Kashmir have never been granted the free choice about their political status that they were promised back in the 1940s.
Vanessa Chishti teaches history at the O. P. Jindal Global University in Delhi, India. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.
DF: What was the status of Kashmir under British colonial rule?
VC: Before I answer that question, I should begin by saying that the word “Kashmir” has been used over time to describe many different territorial and geographical entities. For the purposes of our conversation, whenever I say Kashmir, I mean the valley of Kashmir, which is currently under Indian control, and is home to the movement for self-determination.
In the era of British colonial rule from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the Kashmir valley was part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. The princely state was created in the year 1846 when the British conquered Kashmir and handed it over to their ally — Gulab Singh, who was then the ruler of Jammu. At this time, Kashmir assumed great significance for the British, in the context of a very intense imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia. The significance of Kashmir lay in its being strategically located between British and Russian spheres of influence in Central Asia and South Asia.
In contrast with areas that were governed directly by the British in the Indian subcontinent, which were called the British provinces, the princely states had Indian rulers and were subject to considerable indirect control by the colonial government. Through the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, the British were able to influence politics on the frontier without the risk or expense of governing the place directly. Because this arrangement was so beneficial to them, the British were always keen to underwrite the power of the Jammu and Kashmir state. This allowed the new rulers of the state an unusual degree of latitude in relation to their subjects.
They imposed a predatory tax burden on agriculture and manufacturing, institutionalized various forms of discrimination against the Muslim-majority population, and favored Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri Hindus for public office, land grants, and other forms of state patronage. By the late nineteenth century, the regime, which was headed by a Hindu prince, was anchored in Kashmir by a class of largely Hindu landlords, state officials, and money lenders, while the artisans and peasants were overwhelmingly Muslim. This had very significant implications for the lines along which politics cleaved in the twentieth century.
This overlap between class and religion was not unique to Kashmir. In the princely state of Hyderabad, which I will mention again later, a Muslim prince and a coterie of Muslim officials and landlords ruled over a predominantly Hindu peasantry.
DF: What political forces were active in Kashmir at the moment of decolonization in the twentieth century?
VC: In the decisive years — that is, between the 1930s and 1947–48 — the most significant political organizations that were active in Kashmir were the National Conference, which was a populist, cadre-based party with some socialist inflections in its rhetoric, and the Muslim Conference, which was a conservative Muslim party. Opposition to the maharaja’s regime had been evident in episodes of sporadic political militancy from at least the 1860s onward. This opposition was contained by the regime through a stringently enforced ban on political activity and newspaper publishing, and of course the use of brute force.
In 1931, this long simmering discontent was catalyzed into open revolt by the crushing impact of the Great Depression. Two very significant things happened that year. One was an uprising of the urban poor in Kashmir, so forceful that one Kashmiri socialist described it as an “elemental upsurge.” The second was an armed anti-tax campaign by Muslim smallholders in one of the Muslim-dominated districts in the Jammu province. The combined impact of these two events was immense. The power of the maharaja’s regime would never recover.
Among other things, the maharaja was forced to lift the ban on political activity and substantially relax the curbs on newspaper publishing. He was also forced to constitute a token representative body: it had virtually no powers and was to be elected on a very narrow property-based franchise, which would have allowed an estimated 3 to 5 percent of the population to vote.
The first political party that was formally announced after this was the All-Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, which after a few years was renamed the National Conference. This party campaigned quite vigorously against the maharaja, the big landlords, money lenders, and state officials. It won a small but committed following among the incipient urban working class, small peasants, and landless agricultural laborers. It even had a handful of communist radicals working within the party, inspired by the Popular Front strategy. Sadly, the undemocratic political culture of the party ensured that this base had little say in the direction that its leadership took.
In any case, the radicalism of the National Conference was very short-lived. By the late 1930s, sections of the National Conference leadership, with an eye on the elections, were attempting to win support among the propertied classes, who were the only people who could vote, and most of whom were not Muslim. As a result of this and a few other things, the party began to lose support among its core base, which was among poor and middling Muslims, without gaining much support among the propertied classes, most of whom unsurprisingly saw their interests as being tied to the maharaja’s regime.
Faced with this quite steady decline in popularity, Sheikh Abdullah, who was by then the most prominent leader of the National Conference and who would become a pivotal figure in later years, aligned the party with the Indian National Congress, which was the largest party in the Indian subcontinent at the time. The Congress favored a very limited program of political reform in the princely states, which was well to the right of the professed anti-feudal socialist radicalism of the National Conference. This alliance with the Indian National Congress marked a decisive rightward shift for the National Conference under Abdullah’s leadership. Its decline in popularity continued unabated from there.
Another significant thing that happened was that in 1938, the Muslim League, which claimed to be the party representing the interests of all Muslims in the subcontinent, issued its first explicit call for a separate Muslim homeland. Not long after a large section of the National Conference broke away and formed the pro-Pakistan Muslim Conference. The newly created Muslim Conference aligned itself with the Muslim League: much like the League, its core base consisted of Muslim landlords, traders, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and some students.
Following the split, the National Conference led by Abdullah was wiped out completely among Muslims in the Jammu province. The hemorrhaging of support in the Kashmir valley continued. In these decisive years, then, between the 1930s and 1947–48, the pro-India National Conference was rapidly losing support, but it was better organized and therefore able to act decisively, while the pro-Pakistan Muslim Conference was poorly organized, riven by factional struggles, and unable to capitalize on growing support in the Valley.
Neither party was very large however: between the two of them, they had an estimated twenty thousand members. This was certainly not insignificant, but they were definitely not mass parties either. This is important to emphasize.
As we know, the promised plebiscite on the status of Kashmir was never conducted. In debates today, the supposed strength of the Muslim Conference or the National Conference in the 1940s is often cited as a proxy for popular aspirations. This is entirely unjustified: as I said, these formations were not insignificant, but neither of them was very large, and neither could truly be seen as an index of popular sentiment.
DF: How was it determined that Kashmir would become part of the postcolonial Indian state in the late 1940s? Was there any process of consultation, either at the time or afterward?
VC: There was no process of consultation at the time, nor has there been one since, even though it was promised. I want to say a couple of things by way of context: in 1947, areas that were directly ruled by the British, the provinces as they were called, were divided along religious lines between Pakistan, which was explicitly styled as a Muslim homeland, and India, which was formally secular but implicitly majoritarian. The princely states were expected to join either India or Pakistan, depending on the religious affiliations of the majority of their subjects.
Under that logic, Kashmir, with its Muslim-majority population, was a state with what historians have called “Pakistan potential.” However, even after the India–Pakistan border was announced on August 17, 1947, the maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir had not announced a decision about which dominion he would join. He was testing the waters with both Pakistan and India. He also had the right-wing Hindu fundamentalists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whispering in his ear about establishing an independent Hindu kingdom.
The maharaja’s hand was forced in October 1947 by a series of armed revolts in the Muslim-majority western provinces of Jammu. The maharaja’s garrisons fell rapidly, one after the other. District after district merged with Pakistan. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands of Hindus and Sikhs were massacred in these areas, and many more were forced to flee.
About two weeks after these revolts began, the Pakistani military sent in several thousand irregulars commanded by Pakistani military officers to the Kashmir valley, hoping to push further into the Jammu and Kashmir state. Between the revolts on the one hand and this incursion, the maharaja’s army was completely outnumbered and, before long, routed.
The Indian establishment offered military assistance but made it conditional on accession to the Indian Union. The maharaja therefore acceded to India, and Indian troops arrived to beat back the Pakistani advance. Where the fighting stopped then is where the de facto border stands today.
In Kashmir, meanwhile, well before these events, virtually the entire leadership of the pro-Pakistan Muslim Conference was imprisoned by the maharaja’s government. The Congress leadership had persuaded the maharaja and Sheikh Abdullah to work together to secure accession to India. At this crucial moment, Abdullah’s support for the accession granted it a veneer of popular legitimacy in the eyes of the Indian political class and the international community, while the National Conference cadre were instrumental in securing the accession on the ground.
Hoping to make the visibly unpopular accession more palatable to Kashmiris, the Indian establishment dismissed the maharaja and appointed Sheikh Abdullah as head of state. It’s important to stress that he was appointed as head of state by the Indian establishment without any semblance of popular procedure — a rather handsome reward for his troubles in bringing Kashmir to India!
Abdullah’s government immediately came down very heavily on pro-Pakistan and pro-independence voices. In addition to the continued presence of Indian troops, the state’s own greatly enlarged police and surveillance apparatus was deployed to this end of political repression. This was a painfully ironic culmination to a cycle of political activity that had begun in Kashmir in 1931 with a demand for accountable and responsible government.
Now, as I said earlier, the maharaja acceded to India in return for military assistance. At the time Jawaharlal Nehru made an emphatic promise, heard at the United Nations (UN) and around the world: that Kashmir’s accession would be conditional and temporary, and that a plebiscite would be held to ratify or reject Kashmir’s merger with India. This promise was based on Nehru’s confidence that the National Conference, with Indian support, would be able to secure a pro-India majority. As soon as it became clear that this would not happen, Nehru backpedaled on the plebiscite.
Two very significant things happened around this time. First, the division of the state precipitated an economic crisis. The valley lost its most crucial trade links, and the government lost its most important sources of revenue. This caused widespread and quite serious economic distress.
Secondly, soon after the maharaja was forced to leave the valley, the wholesale massacre and expulsion of Muslims began in the eastern district of Jammu, which remained in India. This massacre was perpetrated by the maharaja’s troops and activists of the RSS and other right-wing Hindu forces. The legitimacy of the accession was already barely hanging by a thread in Kashmir, and after these two episodes, it was really shot to pieces.
India’s own intelligence reports from the time confirm this. One notable figure even said that it was “midsummer madness to believe that we” — that is India — “can win the plebiscite.”
DF: What formal political status was Kashmir granted by the Indian Constitution?
VC: Before I answer that question, let me quickly mention Junagadh and Hyderabad, two princely states with Muslim rulers and Hindu-majority populations, so they were really the opposite situation as Kashmir. In Junagadh, a plebiscite was actually carried out, which India won. In Hyderabad, the attempt of the Muslim ruler to resist the merger with India was crushed militarily. These military operations were accompanied by widespread atrocities.
Now, as for the political status that Kashmir was granted by the Indian Constitution, the first thing we have to talk about is Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. Although this was presented at the time as a transitional or temporary measure, its text simply laid out that the state was a constituent unit of the Indian Union and stipulated that only Article 370 of the constitution would apply to the state.
Nehru’s public posturing about a plebiscite aside, the Indian establishment saw this as a step toward the unconditional and complete integration of Kashmir into India. There were, however, a few complications. There was massive popular opposition, and because India had taken the matter to the UN, there was a great deal of international attention, so the appearance of propriety was crucial. Because of that and for other reasons, the full integration of the Jammu and Kashmir state into the Indian Union took time.
In 1952, an agreement was signed between Abdullah and Nehru which was called the Delhi Agreement. Under this agreement, the state ceded control over foreign affairs, defense, and communications to the Union government and nothing else. However, these limits have since been far exceeded in one way or the other.
Article 370 also included a statement that Indian constitutional provisions could temporarily be applied to Jammu and Kashmir through presidential orders. A series of presidential orders have since been issued since which actually rendered the state far less autonomous than other Indian states. For instance, even before article 370 was revoked and the state was broken up into two separate units, the power to declare emergencies and suspend civilian governments was freely and frequently used.
DF: How did political life in Kashmir develop in the period between the 1950s and the 1980s?
VC: From 1948 onward, the story of Kashmir is one of rigged elections, client regimes, and the complete exclusion of the majority of Kashmiris from political decision-making. The accession was very unpopular at the time and was becoming more and more unpopular by the day. There was also growing impatience within the Indian establishment to speed up the full integration of the state into the Indian Union.
In 1950, Abdullah’s government undertook a program of redistribution and debt cancellation, hoping to win over the politically restless peasantry by addressing their two great issues: landlessness and heavy indebtedness. Nehru and the Congress Party, who had scuttled the program of radical land reform in India, approved these measures in the hope that they would win support for India.
Too much is made of these reforms by pro-India writers who are always keen to burnish Abdullah’s radical and representative credentials. While the reforms were not by any means insignificant, they were granted under immense popular pressure, and their radical potential was largely blunted by the desire of the National Conference to consolidate a class of loyal beneficiaries designed to stabilize the regime politically. For instance, a lot of the land seized from big landlords was dispersed as patronage through the National Conference hierarchy.
These reforms did provoke a reaction from the Praja Parishad, which was a reactionary party formed in 1947 by Hindu landlords, moneylenders, traders, and former officials of the recently deposed maharaja. The Praja Parishad was guided by the RSS and the former maharaja. It campaigned for the full integration of Kashmir into India.
The big landlords in Kashmir had been dispossessed without compensation, whereas in India, under the terms of the very limited land redistribution that did take place, landlords were entitled to compensation. This is a key element in the Praja Parishad’s desire for full integration.
The Praja Parishad’s call found quite fertile ground among common Hindus in Jammu who feared — legitimately — that the Muslim majority would opt for Pakistan in a plebiscite. This was not a comforting prospect for them: given the mass slaughter that had accompanied the partition in India and Pakistan on both sides of the border, it was clear that neither country was an especially hospitable for minorities. Between 1951 and 1953, the Praja Parishad led a mass agitation demanding full integration.
In Kashmir, the events of 1951–53 further deepened suspicion toward India. Under pressure, Abdullah made public statements questioning the finality of Kashmir’s accession to India, something which he had until then insisted upon quite strenuously. This alarmed the Indian establishment, which had Abdullah imprisoned and installed Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad as head of state in Kashmir. Bakshi had acted as an enforcer for Abdullah and was notoriously unsparing in his use of state as well as personal violence.
An important shift in international politics took place that same year. In 1953, Pakistan entered the US orbit. The Soviet Union, hoping to encourage India’s policy of nonalignment, withdrew its support for self-determination in Kashmir at the United Nations. This eased international pressure on India a great deal.
Under Bakshi, who was Chief Minister from 1953 to 1963, there were record levels of corruption and rent-seeking, heightened political repression, two rigged legislative assembly elections, and a spate of integrationist measures that were pushed through. For example, in 1957, a constituent assembly, which had been formed in 1951 after a thoroughly fraudulent election on Abdullah’s watch, adopted a constitution that declared Kashmir to be an “integral part of India.”
Bakshi’s rule was brought to an end in the winter of 1963, when mass outrage triggered by the theft of a holy relic from Kashmir’s most revered shine erupted into a political upsurge of the kind that had never been witnessed before in the valley. There were slogans like “this country is ours, and we will decide its future,” and others demanding self-determination, which resounded in the many mass protest meetings that took place at the time.
Interestingly, a few thousand Pakistan-backed armed irregulars that were sent into Kashmir with the hope of taking advantage of this discontent to foment a rebellion met with indifference. This was certainly not for lack of anti-India sentiment in Kashmir. In 1965, India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir for the second time.
Perhaps the most significant development in these years (mid-1950s–1960s) was the formation of the Plebiscite Front — an organization set up by Abdullah loyalists and led indirectly by Abdullah himself from prison. The Front campaigned aggressively for a plebiscite with the option of independence. It was outspoken against the excesses of Bakshi’s government, demanding the release of political prisoners, many of whom, ironically, had been imprisoned by Abdullah’s regime when he was in power.
The Plebiscite Front was the largest political organization that had ever existed in the state to that point and could actually boast of a mass appeal. From its formation in 1955 to 1970, it was the vanguard of pro-self-determination politics in Kashmir. Abdullah had never been more popular than he was in those years. For once, the claim that he represented the political aspirations of the majority of Kashmiris was actually true!
Unfortunately, he ultimately used the tremendous force of these mobilizations as leverage in his negotiations with New Delhi. In 1975, he signed an agreement with Indira Gandhi, who was then the prime minister of India. This agreement is often, and quite accurately, described as a total capitulation to the terms of New Delhi. Article 370 was disingenuously retained, even though the Indian government’s powers already far exceeded what the article permitted. In return, Abdullah was appointed as head of state once again. Today, unsurprisingly, Abdullah is remembered primarily as a man who sold his people out.
Soon after, the Plebiscite Front was merged back into the National Conference. But the question of self-determination, which the Front had raised so forcefully and persistently for a decade and a half, could not simply be wished away. Many of those who later led the struggle for self-determination in the 1980s, including those who led the armed insurgency, emerged from the Plebiscite Front milieu.
DF: Why did an armed insurgency break out in Kashmir in the 1980s, and what were its outcomes?
VC: The stolen assembly election of 1987 was the turning point. All of the elections up to this point in Kashmir had been hopelessly rigged. One client regime after another had been foisted on the valley, and maintained in power through the use of force, surveillance, and selective patronage. In the run-up to the election of 1987, a coalition of eleven political parties, ranging from secular to confessional, announced their intention to contest it as a united front. They called themselves the Muslim United Front (MUF).
The constituents of the MUF evidently believed that if an organized political formation independent of New Delhi took public office, political institutions could be used to demand accountable government, economic development, and a just settlement of the political question. The MUF call drew an enthusiastic response: that election saw a turnout of 80 percent, which is the highest that has ever been recorded in Kashmir.
Had the election been fair, the National Conference and the Congress, which were contesting it in an alliance, would have been wiped out. But unsurprisingly, the election administrators fabricated results to favor the Congress–National Conference alliance. Despite the fact that MUF candidates were leading by huge margins in several seats, even according to the official count, the National Conference and Congress candidates were declared victorious. Many MUF candidates and activists were subsequently beaten, imprisoned, and harassed.
This was something that completely enraged people. In the many mass demonstrations that followed, millions poured out onto the streets, chanting slogans such as “no election, no selection, we want freedom.” The 1987 election had conclusively demonstrated that the Indian establishment simply would not allow the formation of a government that it did not control, and that even a well-organized popular political force with mass support could not change that.
Yusuf Shah, who was one of the defrauded MUF candidates, is now known as Syed Salahuddin and heads the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), a pro-Pakistan militant group. His campaign manager, Yasin Malik, is a central figure in the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), the pro-independence militant organization that first launched the insurrection in the valley in 1989.
In addition to the 1987 election, there were some other developments that were significant. The first intifada in Palestine, the fall of Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe, and the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan had quite an electric effect in Kashmir. With the end of the war in Afghanistan, the entire infrastructure of money, weapons, fighters, and training camps, which the Pakistani Army and intelligence had assembled with US and Saudi money, was directed toward Kashmir.
Although armed groups had existed in the valley since the 1960s, they remained small and without popular support. It was only after 1987 that the armed insurgency won widespread legitimacy among Kashmiris as a credible mode of pursuing self-determination. For the thousands of young Kashmiri men who crossed the border into Pakistan seeking arms and training, an armed struggle appeared to be the only way to unsettle the firm consensus between India’s rulers in New Delhi and their clients in the valley — a consensus from which the vast majority of Kashmiris were persistently excluded.
The armed resistance began in 1988 with the JKLF, which was a pro-independence group with the stated aim of creating a secular and democratic Kashmir. Even though the JKLF had no overground political network and really no program for mass mobilization, it attracted a stunning amount of popular support. That year, in response to calls from the JKLF, two-thirds of all working days were strike days. There were massive rallies openly in support of the JKLF.
Although the JKLF was vastly outnumbered and outgunned by Indian troops, the mass support allowed them to effectively paralyze the state apparatus. Counterinsurgency operations commenced in January 1990 under the governor, Jagmohan, who was a BJP man. In the first few days of Jagmohan assuming the governorship of Kashmir, hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were killed in cold blood by Indian troops, but the massive marches demanding freedom continued.
Jagmohan then dismissed the civilian government and enacted several indemnifying laws to prepare for a more extensive use of force. This took the form of extrajudicial executions of suspected militants, but also the widest possible persecution of the civilian population: murder, detention, sexual violence, torture, beatings, invasive searches, daily harassment and humiliation, the indiscriminate destruction of property, and extended curfews. This was standard fare for the counterinsurgency in Kashmir and remains so today. Jagmohan himself described the counterinsurgency policy as one of “collective punishment of a disloyal population.”
The indiscriminate nature of the counterinsurgency fueled further support for armed militancy and drove up the recruitment of fighters to the JKLF — so much so that the training camps in Pakistan could not keep up with the numbers of young men who showed up. However, by the mid-1990s, popular support for armed militancy had waned a great deal. In addition to the punitive costs of the counterinsurgency, people were also growing increasingly tired of a murky landscape dominated by “unidentified gunmen” — this is a term that you will often see in news reports and other kinds of writing on Kashmir.
This landscape was the result of a proliferation of armed groups encouraged by the Pakistani establishment to undercut pro-independence forces plus the involvement of multiple intelligence agencies, with both India and Pakistan operating covertly. From the mid 1990s onward, this also included surrendered militants, most of who are coerced by the Indian state into being part of shadowy paramilitary forces.
By 2000, the major militant groups had announced ceasefires. In the years since, the number of active combatants in Kashmir has dropped from about ten thousand in 1990–93 to the lower hundreds. But the ruthlessly indiscriminate violence of the counterinsurgency has not only continued but has intensified, especially under the BJP government. This to my mind is a very clear admission of the fact that Indian troops are confronting and holding down today an entire people in revolt and not just a handful of armed insurgents. There are officers in the Indian army who have said as much.
Another thing that I’d like to mention is the departure in the 1990s of a very large number of Kashmir’s Hindu minority. In the early days of the armed militancy, the strategy that the JKLF employed included a campaign of assassinations, targeting prominent figures in the establishment. Of the hundred or so people that were targeted in the first few weeks, roughly one-third were Kashmiri Hindus. The JKLF does not appear to have been motivated by overt religious sectarianism, but the combined effect of these politically motivated assassinations and other killings motivated by sectarian hatred and an atmosphere of public hostility was that Kashmiri Hindus felt unsafe. At the time, many who fled saw themselves as moving only temporarily out of harm’s way and entertained hopes of returning, but very few have actually been able to do so.
DF: You mentioned the role of Pakistani intelligence agencies in cultivating armed groups in Kashmir for their own purposes. How would you characterize the role of the Pakistani state in general in Kashmir?
VC: First of all, it needs to be said that the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination is not instigated by Pakistan. A tradition of autonomist politics existed in Kashmir for decades before the armed militancy erupted in 1988–89. Certainly, it’s well known that Pakistan has supported and continues in some ways to support armed militancy in Kashmir, just as India has supported the Pashtun, Baloch, and Bangladeshi struggles for self-determination from Pakistan. This is a way in which these two hostile neighbors seek to weaken each other.
The Pakistani establishment claim that they want only to support the Kashmir Muslims in their struggle to liberate themselves, but their record of cynical manipulation suggests otherwise. After initially supporting the pro-independence JKLF, apparently for lack of pro-Pakistan options, Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence (ISI) began to sabotage the JKLF almost immediately. After all, a resoundingly popular pro-independence group was a threat to Pakistan’s own interests.
The ISI then threw its weight behind the HM. It played an important role in decimating the pro-independence JKLF by the mid 1990s. Soon afterward, when the HM showed some inclination to act a little independently of the ISI, the latter encouraged the proliferation of radical Islamist groups, dominated by non-Kashmiris and motivated by a pan-Islamist agenda, in order to reign in the HM.
Pakistani military intelligence also engineered the murder of activists and intellectuals who were critical of Pakistan’s damaging influence on the Kashmir struggle. I spoke earlier about an uprising in 1963 triggered by the theft of a holy relic. Tensions ran high, and there was serious anti-Hindu violence in what was then East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh), as well as anti-Muslim violence in Calcutta and Jabalpur in India. But there was no violence in Kashmir.
Maulana Masoodi, a well-respected cleric and leader of the National Conference, was instrumental in preventing the emotionally charged demonstrations from turning violent — a prospect that the Pakistani establishment would have welcomed. Years later, in 1990, Masoodi was murdered in his home by pro-Pakistan militants for this very reason. Abdul Ghani Lone, another pro-independence leader who advocated talks with India and was an outspoken critic of Pakistan’s opportunism toward Kashmir, was shot dead in May 2002, very likely by pro-Pakistan militants.
DF: Overall, what has the experience been of the last thirty years for the people of Kashmir? Have Indian governments at any point made an attempt to offer reform as well as repression in response to their struggle?
VC: There’s been no effort whatsoever to offer anything other than the combination of client regimes and military repression that India uses to manage popular discontent in Kashmir. Although there is a lot of noise about dialogue between India and Pakistan, and a lot of rather insincere rhetoric about healing wounds and winning hearts, the mode of dealing with Kashmir has consistently moved between tightly controlled client regimes and outright, indiscriminate military repression.
The armed militancy has dwindled to a very meagre presence since the late 1990s, but counterinsurgency operations have only grown in size and intensity, especially under the BJP. Elections, when held, continue to be staged, and all forms of political contestation continue to be disallowed and punished with fatal force.
The early 2000s were relatively quiet in terms of political upsurges. The Indian media described this as normalcy, while Kashmiris would rather describe those years of quiet as the silence of a graveyard. Either way, the silence was broken in 2008 when, despite the overbearing military presence and the free use of fatal force, the valley was witness once again to mass protests. After 2008, there were protests again in 2009, 2010, 2013, and 2016. Every time, the immediate trigger was different, but it was followed by a cycle of unarmed mass protests, violence, and suppression, with more protests, more killing, and so on.
In 2009, it was the alleged rape and murder of two Kashmiri women by security forces. In 2010, it was the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy. In 2013, it was the hanging of Afzal Guru, an ex-militant who was convicted of involvement in an attack on the Indian parliament in a sham trial — the judgment actually said that the court had no evidence of his involvement but was going to hang him anyway to satisfy the “collective conscience of society.”
These instances came in addition to the ongoing violence, humiliation, and indignity of murder, rape, torture, enforced disappearances, and mass graves, with the complete dislocation of all aspects of everyday life. Life in Kashmir has been saturated for decades with violence that is neither accounted for nor held accountable, and there is nothing that Kashmiris can do about it. The estimates of the people who have died in this period range from eighty thousand to a hundred thousand Kashmiris, while the number of people who have been brought to justice is literally zero.
In 2016, again there was a summer of mass unarmed protest and violent repression. The trigger was the death of Burhan Wani, a young Kashmiri man who was a commander of the HM. There has since been a resurgence of support for militancy in Kashmir, with an uptick in local recruitment for the first time since 2001–2. However, the number of militants is still very, very small, and the real challenge to the occupation now is what many have called a total insurgency by the civilian population.
We have seen images in the media of stone-pelters baring their chests to loaded guns. Crowds of thousands have also engaged the army during gun battles with militants, attempting to help them escape, and demanding that the bodies of militants be handed over to them. The escalation of troop mobilization around the abrogation of Article 370 is no surprise, given that there is a total insurgency by the civilian population, with a very small, meager, almost insignificant armed component. It is the population of Kashmir that the Indian army is fighting and holding down.
DF: What has been novel about the actions taken by Narendra Modi’s government, especially in the period since the revocation of Article 370?
VC: Before I speak about some specifics, I should say that there has been a basic continuity in India’s policy on Kashmir, whether it is the Hindu far-right BJP, or the supposedly secular Indian National Congress, or the coalitions of various kinds that have taken power at brief moments in the political history of India. Much of what Modi’s government has done in the last two years is much more ruthless and repressive but still basically continuous with India’s Kashmir policy.
The BJP is part of the Sangh Parivar, which is the conglomeration of Hindu right-wing organizations. Over the past decade or so that they have been in power, they have succeeded in making India a Hindu majoritarian state in all but name. The demonization of Muslims in India and in general is the ideological linchpin of the BJP and other Hindu right-wing organizations that are part of the Sangh Parivar. During the tenure of the BJP government, we have seen, for example, an attempt to impose and implement significant changes to citizenship laws, which threaten India’s 200 million Muslims with disenfranchisement.
Jammu and Kashmir assumed a special significance for the project of creating a Hindu majoritarian state for the BJP, because it was the only Muslim-majority state in the Indian Union. The BJP presented the special status of the state, which as I have said never really amounted to much, as a case of special treatment and appeasement of Muslims and minorities. The state could therefore not be allowed to exist.
The revocation of Article 370 was really a move to humiliate and subordinate Muslims in the only Muslim-majority state. This was also very important for the optics of domestic politics in India, because Modi and the others could show their right-wing Hindu constituents that here was a man who didn’t care about political correctness. He is decisive. He has put Muslims in their place. He has unbroken India. There is a lot of rhetoric of that kind.
The move also has historic symbolic significance for the Hindu right wing because the Praja Parishad in Kashmir was led and guided by the RSS. The revocation of Article 370 was the fulfillment of a long-cherished Hindu right-wing agenda for the BJP and the Sangh Parivar more generally.
In terms of the broad policy, there is basic continuity but a much more ruthless employment of force and repression. In addition to this, the BJP is firmly anti-Pakistan, more so than previous governments, refusing any kind of negotiation with Pakistan and any kind of international attention on Kashmir. They have been very consistent and forceful in insisting that this is an internal matter and not something that others have a right to speak on.
Although the political autonomy that Article 370 was supposed to grant had already been hollowed out decades ago, so that its abrogation is at one level just for show, there are also some pragmatic things that are involved here. There were economic protections of some kinds: for example, only people who were domiciled in the state could purchase land there. Immediately after the removal of Article 370, there was a massive round of what we can only call accumulation by dispossession.
Nomadic pastoralist communities that had been granted access and rights to use forest lands as pasture are being disposed on a very wide scale. The ownership and control of some of the lands that had been distributed under the land reforms of the 1950s and the 1970s is under question. There are proposals to build mining operations in many different parts of the state, which will not only be ecologically disastrous, but will also cause a great deal of displacement. There are proposals to build something like twenty-two dams in different parts of the state. You have a massive round of accumulation by dispossession already underway, and it’s likely to pick up pace in the years that follow.
Another thing that’s very worrying is that there is a process of delimitation that is meant to reorganize administrative and electoral units. This process is guided by a clear desire to ghettoize Muslims and increase the number of seats from Hindu-majority districts. This manipulation is clearly an attempt to ensure that a BJP government is able to come to power in the state without relying on other parties for support, which would be a first. In other words, the pretense of political space has been completely obliterated.
DF: If the people of Kashmir, now or in the foreseeable future, had the freedom to determine their own political status, what option do you think they would favor?
VC: I think I can say with absolute certainty that the overwhelming majority of people would agree on one point: “not India.” It’s hard to say whether there would be a larger number of people in support of unity with Pakistan or in support of independence, but my impression is that that a majority would be in favor of independence.
Florida's manatees are dying in record numbers. (photo: James R.D. Scott/Getty)
Florida’s beloved “sea cows” shouldn’t have to eat lettuce. Yet here we are.
In parts of eastern Florida, seagrass — the primary food source for these hulking marine mammals — is disappearing. So for the first time in history, state officials have started feeding manatees huge quantities of leafy greens. A single manatee can crunch its way through about 100 pounds of lettuce in a single day.
Last year, Florida lost a record 1,100 manatees, or more than 12 percent of its total population. And more than 130 manatees have died already in 2022, according to the nonprofit Save the Manatee Club, which is far above average for this time of year. The Florida manatee is a subspecies of the vulnerable West Indian manatee.
“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Michael Walsh, a professor of aquatic animal health at the University of Florida. Manatee rehab centers across the state are now overrun, as more and more of the animals come in with visible signs of starvation — flat undersides, a loss of neck fat, and even exposed ribs, Walsh said.
Florida is running out of physical space to house manatees in need of care, Walsh added, forcing rehabbers to triage. And the stakes are high: Manatees are beloved in Florida and a linchpin of the ecotourism industry — and of the ecosystem itself.
The mass die-off of a cherished species that’s closely watched and meticulously cared for is a symptom of bigger problems that are plaguing many ocean environments: coastal development and pollution. More than a decade of human impacts has weakened the entire ecosystem, making manatees far more vulnerable to threats — starting with a plague of algae.
The link between thriving algae and starving manatees
While manatees are famously rotund, they actually have relatively little body fat. They can only survive in water above about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why you often find them in winter around sources of warm water, such as pipes that release discharge from power plants.
One such manatee hot spot is the Indian River Lagoon, which spans 156 miles between mainland Florida and a barrier island along the eastern shore. The lagoon is home to hundreds of animal species and several kinds of seagrass. They might not look like much, but meadows of seagrass are among the most important features in any coastal ecosystem. They prevent erosion, clean the water, and provide shelter for fish that are a crucial part of the state economy. And for a wide range of animals, including manatees, they’re food.
Algae pose a problem because seagrasses need sunlight to grow. Fed by nutrients in pollution, such as septic discharge and farm runoff, algae can become so abundant that they actually block light from reaching the lagoon’s floor. When the seagrass dies, it can become yet another nutrient that fuels the algae.
Parts of the Indian River Lagoon, where hundreds of manatees congregate to ride out the winter, are now choked with pollution and algae, which means seagrass can’t grow and manatees can’t eat. “Tens of thousands of acres of normal grass are missing,” Walsh said. The animals can’t easily escape to richer, grassier pastures because it’s chilly outside the lagoon. “They are hemmed in by an invisible fence of cold.”
The state now faces a record die-off so severe that it’s been dubbed an “unusual mortality event,” a rare designation that calls for immediate attention under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act. The starvation-related deaths are on top of a smaller number of deaths attributed to a related algae problem, known as red tide, and boating accidents.
The conditions for mass starvation have been brewing for years
Ecosystems don’t usually fall apart all at once. The damage builds gradually, often without anyone noticing, and may eventually reach some kind of tipping point, said Patrick Rose, executive director of Save the Manatee Club.
There wasn’t some big chemical spill in the Indian River Lagoon, Rose said, but rather slow and steady pollution that accumulated in these waters for at least a decade, throwing the ecosystem out of whack and making it more prone to blooms of algae. In 2011, for example, a “superbloom” of algae erupted in the lagoon, covering roughly 131,000 acres and nearly wiping out its seagrass.
The grass started to recover — until the lagoon was struck by yet another bloom a few years later. By 2017, a staggering 95 percent of seagrass had disappeared in the northern and central portions of the lagoon, and it hasn’t recovered much since.
Healthy ecosystems can bounce back from occasional disturbances like an exceptionally cold winter, said Duane De Freese, executive director of the Indian River Lagoon Council. But when they’re damaged, they become volatile and less resilient, and even seemingly minor changes can cause dramatic effects. “The system today is unstable,” De Freese said. “Our oceans and our estuaries can’t take every pressure and stressor that we throw at them.”
“If you’re a coastal community anywhere in the US, you’re fighting the same battle we are,” De Freese said. Indeed, blooms of algae linked to pollution have damaged ecosystems and economies from the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland to the Gulf of Mexico. “We’re just an example of things starting to go wrong,” De Freese said.
What it would take for the lagoon — and its manatees — to heal
State officials in Florida plan to feed manatees through March, but lettuce is not exactly a long-term solution. Ultimately, experts told Vox, the state has to reduce the amount of pollution flowing into its coastal waters.
The problem is “fixable,” Walsh said. What’s so frustrating, experts say, is that many manatee deaths could have been avoided altogether
The main source of pollution is a few hundred thousand septic systems from nearby homes and businesses, which leak nutrients like nitrogen into the lagoon, according to a recent study published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin. The region urgently needs to modernize its wastewater treatment facilities, De Freese said. He added that Florida also needs a better way to treat stormwater runoff that sloshes into the lagoon along with pollution.
Planting seagrass can help, too. It’s not easy or cheap, but reintroducing native grasses in coastal waters can speed up the ecosystem’s recovery, in part by helping purify the water. Companies like Sea and Shoreline grow seagrasses in a nursery for restoration, not unlike organizations that raise seedlings to restore forests on land.
The lagoon needs about $5 billion for restoration over the next two decades, De Freese said, to make it livable again for manatees and other important species. Last fall, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis committed $53 million in grants to improve the lagoon’s water quality. “It’s a start,” De Freese said — though he warned that even with enough money, “the recovery isn’t going to happen overnight.”
Residents who want to help can also play a role, he added, such as by limiting the use of lawn fertilizers or avoiding them entirely. One thing they shouldn’t do, state officials have said, is feed the manatees themselves. They may be learning to like lettuce, but leave the sea cow salad bar to the professionals.
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