“As if a communications blackout and restrictions on movements were not enough, news reports indicate there have been hundreds of political arrests, and that at least one journalist -- Qazi Shibli, editor of news website The Kashmiriyat -- has been detained… Who else is imprisoned in Kashmir right now? What other tactics are security forces using to suppress information? How else has this blackout impacted the region's population? How do Kashmiris feel about recent developments? Or about the future of their region? We really don't know.”
Michael De Dora and Aliya Iftikhar, CNN

“This is the kind of crackdown on free speech and assembly one expects from authoritarian China, which has set up concentration camps for ethnic Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. But India, which just this week celebrated 72 years of independence as a boisterous, multiethnic and multiconfessional democracy? Mr. Modi might have fulfilled a dream of Hindu nationalists going back to the 1950s, but he also stained that democracy and most likely stoked anger in Kashmir that will fester long into the future.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post

“India is in danger of becoming what I have called an ‘election-only democracy.’ Once a party has won an election, it is unaccountable for its acts. Parliament barely functions. Large sections of the media are scared or co-opted. The judiciary is overburdened and dysfunctional. The civil service and the police are in the pocket of the [ruling party]. President Trump cannot set the tax authorities and intelligence agencies on his critics, but Modi can, and might. Independent news websites and television channels… have [already] faced intimidation through libel cases, tax raids, etc.”
Ramachandra Guha, Washington Post

Kashmir “had long been exempted from parts of the Indian Constitution and set its own laws, even as it remained under Indian control, an anomalous status that a government under the sway of Hindu nationalism will no longer tolerate. Meanwhile, protesters in the streets of Hong Kong are pushing back against efforts by the Chinese government to chip away at the semi-independent status it has enjoyed—known as ‘one country, two systems’—since the former British colony came under Chinese control in 1997…

“These stories are all signs that national governments are waging a war against ambiguity—of citizenship, of territorial status—to enforce a rigid and uniform vision of statehood… Liberal commentators often fret about the threat that Trump and other right-wing populist leaders pose to the postwar ‘rules-based international order.’ But Trump and his cohort are obsessed with rules and order when it comes to national sovereignty, borders, and who gets to live within those borders. Trump has often argued that ‘If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country!’... This philosophy fails to recognize that a certain amount of ambiguity can be stabilizing in the absence of a political consensus.”
Joshua Keating, Slate