It is nearly two months since the Indian government suspended civil liberties of over eight million Kashmiris — putting the region under a security lockdown and communications blackout; jailing several thousand people, including political and business leaders — to preempt mass protests against the abrogation of Article 370.

The severity of the lockdown has invited greater global attention to the Kashmir dispute. Several countries have urged New Delhi to lift the blackout and free political prisoners, but it hasn’t budged. 

India’s move has also ratcheted up tensions with Pakistan, drawing New Delhi into a war of narratives in which the Indian media has largely arrayed itself against the international press. While much of India’s national media, particularly TV news channels, has been trying — increasingly in vain — to show that Kashmir is “normal”, the foreign press has brought out tales of suffering, mass arrests, torture, and killings.

Of late, though, the key battle in this information war has moved beyond the coverage of the situation in Kashmir to Indian and Pakistani leaders and diplomats pushing their respective country’s viewpoints through various international platforms — Islamabad highlighting the clampdown in the Valley and New Delhi firefighting by blaming terrorism emanating from Pakistan.

The Indian embassy in Washington DC has uploaded on its website a compilation of the media coverage of Kashmir, until August 23, highlighting articles and points that the Indian state agrees with.

Enter the diplomats

In recent weeks, representatives of the two countries have sparred at several international forums, most prominently during the United Nations Human Rights Council session that ended on September 27. This round of sparring was likely prompted by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan writing an article in The New York Times denouncing the crackdown in Kashmir.

Although Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not written on Kashmir, his diplomats have been countering Pakistan in the foreign press and presenting New Delhi’s viewpoint, the gist of which is that Article 370 was an “anachronistic provision” of the country’s constitution that was scrapped to promote peace and progress. Of course, the blueprint of the plan for peace and progress is missing from their discourse.

Writing in the Financial Times on September 24, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar argued that the “anachronistic provision” had created a “cosy arrangement of local ownerships that served the state’s political elite well”, but denied economic opportunities to the masses, resulting in separatist sentiments that were “then exploited by neighbouring Pakistan to conduct cross-border terrorism”.

And because the provision had “encouraged links between separatist politicians and terrorist groups sponsored by Pakistan”, the Modi government had no choice but to remove it. For this reason, he added, the move “should be applauded, not criticised”.

Pakistan’s argument is that India is forcibly annexing the land of a people who are hostile to its rule but unable to express their anger due to the lockdown.

War of words

Responding to Khan’s article in The New York Times, India’s ambassador to the US, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, wrote a rejoinder on September 20, claiming the Pakistani prime minister “finds it difficult to accept” that the state was “now back on the road to progress and prosperity”.

Shringla argued that Article 370 “prevented the Indian government from having any say in the affairs of Jammu and Kashmir except in matters of defense, finance, foreign affairs and communications. This contributed to the province’s struggles.”

Shringla conveniently didn’t mention that New Delhi had already hollowed out Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomous status, going to the extent of deposing and imprisoning elected leaders to achieve its goal. Sheikh Abdullah, the Kashmiri leader who was instrumental in the state’s accession to India over Pakistan, was imprisoned several times, the longest for 11 years, to force him into accepting New Delhi’s diktats.

Shringla nevertheless argued that Pakistan was disgruntled as India had “cut the feet from under it”. “Prime Minister Khan needs to wake up and smell the tea,” Shringla concluded. “India will hope that Pakistan renounces hostility, violence and terrorism to become the normal neighbor that all of South Asia desires.”

Abid Saeed, the press minister at Pakistan’s Washington embassy, promptly responded with a letter to the editor arguing that Shringla had “failed to answer the fundamental question that is bothering all right-thinking people across the globe: why has India laid siege to Kashmir and cut off eight million Kashmiris from the rest of the world for the last seven weeks?”

“Rather than attacking Pakistan and Prime Minister Imran Khan,” Saeed said, Shringla “should have explained what this ‘prosperity’ is that India feels that it can deliver to the Kashmiris only at the pointed end of bayonets.”

Round Two

This war of words extended to other publications that the Hindutva discourse in India views as biased against the country. In an article in TRT World, which is owned by the Turkish government, the Indian envoy in Istanbul, Sanjay Bhattacharyya, addressed its audience claiming the “widely reported” Kashmir issue in the Turkish media had missed the basic facts and conveyed a misleading and incorrect narrative.

A significant part of the Turkish outlet’s Kashmir coverage has come from Kashmiri journalists working under testing circumstances. “Unfortunately, Turkish media has been a victim of propaganda and motivated narrative,” the ambassador declared as he delivered ripostes to a few broad themes that have been the focus of the international coverage.

Bhattacharyya justified the lockdown in the valley presenting it as a matter of “Siege vs saving lives”. In a paragraph on “Terrorism vs Human Rights”, he stated that Pakistan’s “gift” to Kashmir was “terrorism” to protect against which India had deployed its forces.

On the subject of international support, the envoy said several countries had recognised India’s “positive initiatives on J&K as our internal affair” and that “Pakistan’s misguided policy was unable to get even 16 countries to support a resolution in UNHRC although it claimed 58 (yet unnamed) members had supported its country statement!”

Bhattacharyya concluded: “With normalcy returning, a new era of peace and prosperity dawns.”

The Pakistani ambassador in Turkey, Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi, responded in a rather acerbic article, published two days later on the same platform. “It is better to remain silent and let the world think you are stupid rather than open your mouth and confirm it,” Qazi wrote.

He called India “the world’s first post-colonial colonial power” and likened New Delhi’s move to federally govern the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir to an “anaconda-like stranglehold”. Responding to the argument that Pakistan had failed to garner global support for its position on Kashmir, Qazi mentioned UN officials, other international bodies, and human rights organisations as having taken note of the Kashmir situation, but “India would like us to believe that all these personalities and institutions are either misinformed or being manipulated by Pakistan”.

Qazi concluded by imploring India to honour its pledge to the Kashmiris by allowing “a free and fair UN-administered plebiscite”.

All hands on deck

Sometime in August, the Indian embassy in Washington sent out a mail to Indians and Indian-Americans in the United States – described, in a second mail in early September, as “community leaders” — requesting them “to share and explain the real picture to all community members so that they are aware of the factual situation”.

The September email was sent by Anurag Kumar, the Indian minister for community affairs in Washington, regarding information “being shared/available in open domain which is giving a distorted and misleading picture about J&K”. It contained a 17-point “latest update” on Kashmir, much of it a compilation of the already stated “facts and figures” — from the quantity of apples exported to the number of candidates applying for jobs in the Army. The essential message of the mail was encapsulated in the penultimate point: “Full focus is on returning the situation to normalcy.”

Lastly, it provided a list of Twitter handles to follow for “accurate updates on the situation”. The handles belonged to Shahid Choudhary, district commissioner in Srinagar; Imtiyaz Hussain, superintendent of police, security, in Srinagar; the state’s public relation’s department; the Jammu and Kashmir police; and the spokesperson, Ministry of Home Affairs in New Delhi.

In Kashmir, public officials are the subject of ridicule for presenting a lopsided view of the ground situation even as residents still complain of the denial of civil liberties and fear reprisals from the government for any expression of dissent.

For now, Kashmiris are waiting to see what impact, if any, the final showdown, at the ongoing UN General Assembly session, where Khan and Modi spoke on Friday, has on their situation.