To Eliminate Muslims, This Is How Modi Changes the Demographic Composition of Kashmir

In a way similar to the Israeli Occupation authorities in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Indian authorities in Kashmir have carried out a series of surprise bulldozer demolitions of Muslim homes, claiming to “reclaim” state land.

British and Indian newspapers have revealed that the extremist Hindu Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has accelerated its policy of using bulldozers to uproot and displace Muslims in the Kashmir region by demolishing their homes as part of a plan to change the demographic composition and bring in Hindus.

On August 5, 2019, the Indian government revoked Article 370 of the constitution, which guaranteed self-rule in the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir region, and divided it into two regions under federal government control.

Jammu and Kashmir refers to the part of the Kashmir region under Indian control, and it includes groups that have been fighting against what they consider to be the Indian occupation of their areas since 1989.

Its residents are demanding independence from India and joining Pakistan since the independence of both countries from Britain in 1947 and the partition of Islamabad and New Delhi in the region.

 

Bulldozer Policy

On March 19, 2023, The Guardian confirmed that the bulldozer-policy, which has spread in several Indian states such as Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh, has also been implemented in Kashmir.

Muslim homes were demolished on the pretext that they were built on state land, even though India occupied their land. Other homes were demolished on charges of participating in protests or resisting Indian forces there.

On August 5, 2019, Modi’s government revoked Article 370 of the constitution, which granted autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, the only state in the country with a Muslim majority.

After revoking the state’s autonomy, it was divided into two regions under the central government’s control, dissolved its government, imprisoned local politicians, and imposed the longest internet ban lasting 18 months, to prevent Muslims from sharing their grievances with the outside world.

Since 1954, the Jammu and Kashmir region has had a special status under the Indian Constitution, allowing the state to enact its own laws, as well as protecting its citizenship law, which prevented outsiders from settling and owning land.

However, Modi’s government passed legislation that gives its Hindu citizens, who have lived in Jammu and Kashmir for more than 15 years, the status of local citizens to enable them to own land, reside, work, and hold public office.

Since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, he has escalated the policy of turning India into a Hindu state, persecuting and oppressing Muslims and attacking them through Hindu militias.

As part of this plan, members of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s extremist wing, along with their families, were transferred to Kashmir, including members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh extremist Hindu movement, known as RSS.

These groups adhere to an extremist Hindu law called “Hindutva,” which promotes the killing of Muslims, the destruction of their property, and the boycott and closure of their businesses.

The Guardian reported that the people of Kashmir are living in a state of terror after the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) implemented what is called the “bulldozer policy” against Muslims there as part of the Hindus’ goals to displace Muslims.

The British newspaper confirmed that what the Indian government is doing in Kashmir is nothing more than attempts to change the demographic composition through widespread demolition operations without prior notice of the homes of Muslims and handing over their land to Hindus.

According to Muslims there, Indian occupation authorities’ bulldozers suddenly arrived at many homes, shops, and workshops and demolished them over their owners’ heads without even warning them, then flattened the place with the ground.

“Suhail Ahmad Shah stood despairingly before the wreckage that for two decades had been his livelihood. Just hours before, he had been busy at the workshop when he heard an ominous crunch above him, and the tin roof began to cave in. He barely made his escape before a bulldozer flattened the entire place,” according to The Guardian.

“No notice was served to us,” said Shah. “The officials came suddenly and demolished our workshop. No one is listening to us. We’ve been paying rent. Isn’t this an atrocity? They have snatched our livelihood.”

As part of the demographic change operations, the BJP party has allowed foreigners who are not residents of Kashmir, mostly Hindus from India, to buy properties and own land, and granted them the right to vote in elections.

The voter lists have registered more than two million new voters, with the aim of increasing the Hindu vote in any elections in Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Residents of Kashmir tell foreign and Indian newspapers stories of their oppression and intimidation by Modi’s extremist government, up to the arrest of those who complain of oppression and persecution on social media.

Journalists have been subjected to open harassment by the police, including the inclusion of some names on the lists of those banned from traveling for defending Muslims, and the newspapers, which were independent at times, have turned into outlets for publishing government press releases.

Thousands of families who were granted land ownership under the 2007 Jammu and Kashmir State Lands (Vesting of Ownership to the Occupants) Act, which granted ownership to residents, are now being deemed “occupying families” of the land illegally by the Hindu government.

After the Hindu central government imposed its rule on Kashmir in 2018 and revoked its autonomy, the decision regarding property rights to state land made in 2007 by the then-governor Satya Pal Malik was reversed.

Later in October 2020, the Supreme Court of Jammu and Kashmir declared the law invalid and null and began evicting Muslims from their land.

The situation not only involves demolishing homes and properties of ordinary Muslims with bulldozers, but it has also extended to seizing properties belonging to political opponents and organizations fighting against Indian occupation of Kashmir in recent years.

The Hindu government has taken over the headquarters and lands of all political and religious groups, such as the now-banned Jamaat-e-Islami and its affiliated individuals, claiming it is in the name of “counter-terrorism.”

The sale of agricultural land owned by those they call “missing persons” has also been banned, deeming them deceased, even though they were originally subjected to enforced disappearances by Indian authorities.

Now these individuals disappear in prisons and torture centers, and their families fail to find any trace, while Indian occupation authorities prevent them from selling their families’ land.

Documents related to the properties of the missing persons are being obstructed, and documents for these lands are being refused, according to the Middle East Eye, on March 12, 2023.

 

The Occupying Government

On February 9, 2023, the Indian news website, Outlook India, reported that former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti, accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of acting like the East India Company in Kashmir. In other words, as an occupying government.

It stated that the BJP party had turned Kashmir into Afghanistan by demolishing people’s homes with bulldozers under the pretext of encroachment, even though the residents of these homes have ownership papers.

Mehbooba accused the Modi government of political oppression, stating that she and several members of her party had been subjected to endless harassment, and that the Indian authorities put her under house arrest and did not allow her to engage in any political activity.

The Indian democratic administration in Kashmir has been thwarted, as it has refused to hold elections for more than 5 years and has refused to appoint a new government there after dissolving the previous one in 2019, leaving the Kashmiris without parliamentary representation that represents them.

The Frontline magazine, which calls itself the “National Magazine of India,” stated on February 23, 2023, that the Hindu administration in Kashmir, under the rule of Deputy Governor Manoj Sinha, is carrying out a random campaign against Muslims under the pretext of encroachment on state lands.

It stated that the Indian military governor receives information from false incitement lists prepared by Hindus on social media, without evidence, about “land encroached upon,” showing clear bias against Muslims in order to demolish their homes and properties.

It confirmed that buildings have already been demolished despite the valid ownership documents and that bulldozers create an atmosphere of panic and anger among Muslims there.

Former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, was quoted as doubting the transparency of the Hindu administration in demolishing the homes of Muslims based on these lists, which he described as forged.

Kashmiri activists stated that the bulldozer-policy is a wicked plan that represents part of a broader agenda of the Hindu nationalist BJP party government to displace and expel the Kashmiris from their lands and to change the demographic composition of the only state with a Muslim majority in India.

Amidst the ongoing oppression and persecution of Muslims, the Indian government completely closed the Grand Mosque of Srinagar, Jamia Masjid, with iron chains on December 17, 2021, in the Jammu and Kashmir region under its control.

The police said the closure was “a punishment for their rioting against the occupation authority,” as the mosque had become a “center of disturbances, protests, and clashes that challenge the Indian administration of the disputed Kashmir region.”

Since the Indian government revoked the special status of the autonomous Kashmir region in 2019 and began annexing its entire occupied territories, Modi’s party has referred to this as the “final solution,” borrowing words from the Nazis’ language about the presence of Jews in Europe.

After that decision, protests erupted throughout the entire region because the new situation allowed Indian Hindu citizens to move to Kashmir, own land, and build temples.

India turned the region into a military barracks and deployed around a million soldiers and officers from military and quasi-military forces. The region was completely closed off; even phone, internet, and television communications were cut off.

The entire Kashmiri political leadership was imprisoned. At least 13,000 young Kashmiri men were arrested, many of whom were subjected to torture. India’s forces also killed hundreds of protesters and injured thousands of Kashmiris. The soldiers used rape as a weapon of war, similar to what the Serbs did, and demolished and burned entire neighborhoods and villages, and restricted freedom of religion, expression, and assembly.

The most dangerous weapon was working to change the demographic fabric of the region, as “Israel” does in Jerusalem and the West Bank, after a new law was passed allowing Indians from outside Kashmir to build and own property there.

In October 2020, the Indian Ministry of the Interior issued a set of new laws for land under the Indian administration in Kashmir, allowing any Indian citizen to buy land in the region.

As part of the process of ethnic cleansing and transforming the Muslim majority in Kashmir into a weak, fragmented, and oppressed minority, India has issued 4.2 million residence certificates in the past two years to change the demographic structure of the region.

On August 11, 2021, Foreign Policy released a report detailing India’s ethnic cleansing operations to change the people’s composition and erase the Islamic identity by bringing in Hindus to the region of Kashmir and expelling, suppressing, and killing Muslims.

The report stated that India is working on demographic engineering of Kashmiri populations through a program to demarcate borders and another to divide its electoral districts into several new electoral units in a way that gives numerical importance to the southern region of Jammu, where the Hindus who were brought in by the Indian government and given the right to reside there are concentrated.

It confirmed that these demographic changes, coupled with the reshaping of electoral districts, will allow Hindu nationalist politicians to achieve their old goal of installing a Hindu prime minister in Kashmir.

Prime Minister Modi is held responsible by Kashmiris for the outbreak of religious violence due to his efforts to forcibly change Kashmir’s situation and alter its demographic composition to eliminate its Muslim majority, according to the New York Times on October 7, 2021.

The danger of what Modi’s extremist Hindu government is doing is that it is destroying coexistence between Muslims and Hindus throughout India and Kashmir through Hindutva.

It is an extremist nationalist religious doctrine that combines Hindu religious extremism and Indian national chauvinism, so its supporters carry out bloody racist acts that, according to researchers, rank as terrorism.

Prime Minister Modi encourages the extremist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement to practice brutal religious violence against Muslims and to make the Hindutva doctrine dominate political and media discourse in the country.

Hindutva doctrine was adopted as the official ideology of the ruling party in 1989, and extremist groups have also embraced it.

According to Western reports, there are now six million members, and most of the leaders and members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, including Modi, are part of the movement that was a major factor in his overwhelming victory in the 2014 elections.

Experts describe the Hindutva movement as “fascist,” as it embraces the principle of a homogeneous majority of Hindu-only and cultural domination.

The youth of this extremist movement wear black hats reminiscent of the Mussolini soldiers’ style, the founder of fascism and leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943, the first fascist dictator in Europe in the 20th century.

They also wear pants in the colors of the Nazi forces; they are armed with sticks, knives, and guns and perform military parades to suppress Muslims.