Abrogating Article 370 and Kashmir’s exceptionalism: a critical analysis of India’s bodies politic

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2019, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, took the historic decision of abrogating Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, revoking Kashmir’s special status. The contentious move resulted in the emergence of multiple narratives from competing discourse clans, with supporters hailing it as liberation from terrorism to opponents labeling it an assault on democracy. This paper analyzes the discursive construction of the abrogation as a key moment, that recontextualizes a region strife with violence and political instability into ‘bodies politic’ (Graham & Luke [2003]. Militarizing the body politic: New mediations as weapons of mass instruction. Body & Society, 9(4), 149–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/13570340377368470), legitimizing the decision as a historical event that imbues Kashmir, and thus India, with ‘a self-conscious political force … and a new militaristic bodily habitus’ (Graham & Luke [2003]. Militarizing the body politic: New mediations as weapons of mass instruction. Body & Society, 9(4), 149–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/13570340377368470, p. 163). To conduct the analysis, I draw on Bhatia’s ([2015]. Discursive illusions in public discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge) Discourse of Illusion (DoI) theoretical framework, which reinforces Phil Graham’s mission to illuminate the remnants of militarism in modern societies. Treating nation-states as living organisms with a collective memory, analysis occurs from three aspects: historicity (drawing on the past to make sense of the present or predict the future); linguistic and semiotic action (subjective conceptualizations made apparent through significant metaphorical rhetoric); and degree of social impact (the rise of delineating social categorizations).