SRINAGAR, Jammu and Kashmir
Many in Indian-administered Kashmir were angered when the New Delhi announced a law defining criteria for residency and employment , with suspicions mounting that this is the first step in undermining the disputed region's Muslim-majority status.
An "extraordinary" notification in Tuesday's Official Gazette said any Indian who has lived for 15 years in Jammu and Kashmir qualified to be its "domicile," entailing the right to hold land and work in the region. Also eligible are Indian nationals who have passed their 10th or 12th-grade examinations after at least a seven-year stay in the territory.
People registered as government-sponsored migrants and children of Indian nationals who have served under this status in the region's government offices for at least a decade were also included. Even those children who have studied or worked outside the region could claim domicile if their parents met the criteria.
Before Aug. 5 last year, only a person born in undivided Jammu and Kashmir before 1954 could qualify for citizenship, apply for jobs and own property. The state had its own constitution and flag, while its assembly could make laws. Several provisions of the Indian Constitution provided or safeguarded this special political status.
However, the current government scrapped this autonomous character, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers, arresting nearly the entire political leadership in the region, as well as about 8,000 supporters of independence, and placing the state under a communications lockdown.
Noted lawyer Zafar Shah, who has mounted a legal battle against the abolition of the region's autonomy in the Indian Supreme Court, told Anadolu Agency that the domicile rules "paved way for a gradual takeover of political, administrative and economic institutions of Jammu and Kashmir."
"What I fear is that these changes appear to be irreversible. This fresh machination of the people in power is one more challenge to the people wedded to the idea of the state's autonomy," said Shah, the former head of Kashmir's largest lawyers organization, the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Association.
If the latest criteria are applied retrospectively, which former law professor Sheikh Showkat believes will be the case, tens of thousands of Indian nationals have already become eligible to apply for public jobs.
"And if the same parameters are applied for buying properties," Showkat said, "demographic invasion has been unleashed and that too when a global pandemic has left people helpless in their homes."
On Aug. 5, Kashmir was divided and downgraded from a full-fledged state into two federally ruled union territories. Sheikh Showkat believes that even if statehood is restored, the new legislature would be powerless to reverse the laws.
"Effectively, the Indian state is taking over the state apparatus. To begin with, this is being done through government employees," said a minister in the previous Jammu and Kashmir government. He requested anonymity as he feared he would be detained again for his comments as he was let off after months of detention only on the condition that he would not speak against the abrogation of the special status.
Hameeda Nayeem, an outspoken pro-freedom activist and English professor at Kashmir University, told Anadolu Agency that announcing domicile rules at the time of a pandemic lockdown "smacked of sadism."
"This is the Armageddon, final battle for our survival as a distinct Muslim ethnicity. History will not forgive the world if they don't step in at this juncture," she said, adding that the lockdown "necessitated by the corona scare should have sensitized the world about the even worse lockdown Kashmiris have been enduring for the past eight months."
The timing of the decision surprised even Altaf Bukhari, the leader of the region's new Apni political party, which has made restoring the region's statehood and reserving its livelihood and land its main agenda.
"It reflects a casual exercise carried out at the bureaucratic level without taking the aspirations and expectations of the people into consideration," Bukhari told the media.
Several petitions filed in the Supreme Court of India have challenged the abrogation of Kashmir's special status and are being heard by a five-judge bench. Lawyer Shah, whose defense of the special status during one of the hearings was widely hailed by Kashmiris, said the Indian government should not have made the domicile changes until the courts legally closed the matter.
"These have far-reaching consequences," he said.
The National Conference party, which has also been advocating the restoration of the state's autonomy as it was in 1953 -- when Jammu and Kashmir had its own prime minister -- called the domicile laws a "cruel joke."
"These raise concerns about demographic changes which might be effected," a statement issued by the party said.
The People's Conference, once an ally of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said the domicile laws "add insult to injury."
"The government has embarked on an erroneous path and seems to be in no mood to rectify wrongs and instead is content to be deluded in thinking 'we know the best for J&K and its people,'" reads a statement of the party.
