Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why is no one boycotting India?

Try as I might, I just can’t seem to get anyone interested in discriminating against Indians. No one is tearing open packets of imported turmeric and cardamom and dumping their contents on supermarket floors. British academics aren’t severing ties with professors from Delhi University. If pension funds are divesting from Tata Motors and ICICI Bank, the FT is still to pick up on it. 

This is strange because on Monday Narendra Modi’s right-wing government revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, site of a long-running territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. Both sides claim the entirety of the state, which has been under Indian administration since Partition, and which until now has enjoyed significant political autonomy. Modi’s decision to bin almost all of Article 370 and reorganise the area into two centrally-governed ‘union territories’, comes amid increased military presence in the region and a crackdown on leaders of Kashmiri regionalist parties. 

Modi’s nationalist BJP was recently re-elected with an increased majority on a platform that included stripping Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority region of the Hindu-majority country, of its special status and its power to ban non-Kashmiris from settling and buying property there. The decision to follow through with the pledge has brought censure from across the Muslim world. The Pakistani government denounced the ‘brutal Indian racist regime’ and downgraded diplomatic and economic links to New Delhi. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Contact Group on Kashmir released a statement condemning ‘illegal Indian actions’ and characterising the move as an ‘Indian attempt to strengthen its illegitimate occupation’. 

Reaction from the international community has been somewhat more muted. China, which itself claims an eastern chunk of the territory in question, could only muster an ‘unacceptable’. While the White House merely noted that Modi failed to ‘consult or inform’ the US ahead of the move.

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