Did India’s demonetization policy curb stone-pelting in Indian-administered Kashmir

ABSTRACT

On 9 November 2016, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his ‘demonetization’ policy which rendered all Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes null and void. His government claimed that this policy, among other things, would curb stone-pelting in India’s restive Jammu and Kashmir by rendering valueless the copious illegal currency that, according to India, Pakistan pumped into the state to pay protestors to throw stones. Subsequently, New Delhi claimed success despite countervailing evidence for this claim. Here, we assemble a novel dataset to evaluate these assertions. After controlling for other factors that may explain variation in stone-pelting, we find that demonetization corresponded to increased stone-pelting. This finding is important for at least two reasons. First, Indian efforts to depict all protests in Jammu and Kashmir as the result of Pakistani payments both delegitimize Kashmiris’ grievances by reducing them to anti-state behaviors and diminish public appetite for addressing those grievances. Second, the current populist Indian government, which caters to Hindu nationalists, selectively curates facts to justify its actions, big and small, to the detriment of democratic accountability and governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Kashmir
• demonetization
• Pakistan
• proxy war
• stone-pelting/stone-throwing

Acknowledgments

We thank the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service for generously supporting the labor of Mr. Digvijay. In addition, we thank Sameer Lalwani, Paul Staniland, and Asfandyar Mir for their inputs on an earlier draft of this analysis as well as the reviewers and the editor of Small Wars and Insurgencies. We alone are responsible for errors of fact and/or interpretation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Dr. C. Fair, upon request.

Notes

1. Parthasarathy, “Understanding Kashmir’s Stone-pelters.”

2. Pressman, “Throwing stones in social science.”

3. There are no comprehensive and/or reliable estimates available. In 2018, the Union Minister of State for Home Hansraj Ahir informed the upper house (Rajya Sabha) that between 2015–2017, there were 4,799 stone-pelting incidents in which 17 protestors and two security personnel were killed. However, this report doesn’t indicate whether the protestors were killed by the stone-pelting or by the security forces themselves (Rajya Sabha, “Unstarred Question No-556;” “4,799 stone- pelting incidents.”).

4. Ray, “The Case for Revising.”

5. Bhalla, “Pakistan funded terrorism.”

6. Pathak and Khan, “Stone-pelters on Hire in Kashmir.”

7. “Stone-pelters today.”

8. Doshi, Vidhi, “Cash for queues.”

9. Slater and Naseem, “2018 is the deadliest year.”

10. Das, “De-mon-niversary.”

11. Devadas, The Generation of Rage; Wani and Desai, “The Road to Peace;” and Human Rights Watch, “India.”

12. Sharma, “Forces deploy 1 million.”

13. Ganie, “All I got is stones.”

14. See inter alia Mohanty, “The New Wave;” Khandy, “No place for “Kashmiri;” and Ganie, “All I got is stones.”

15. Ranganathan, “Re-Scripting the Nation.”

16. Note that while Pakistan has vocally impugned India for what it deemed a ‘unilateral and illegal’ move, Pakistan revoked the ‘state subject’ status (comparable to 35-A) for Gilgit-Baltistan in 1974 and has engineered demographic change by encouraging Pakistanis from other provinces to move into the area. Shahid, “Pakistan Is Doing Its Own Political Reengineering in Kashmir.”

17. For a range of accounts, with different sympathies, empirical and ontological commitments see, inter alia, Behera, Demystifying Kashmir; Devadas, The Generation of Rage; Duschinski et al., Resisting Occupation in Kashmir; de Bergh Robinson, Body of Victim; and Schofield, Kashmir in the Crossfire.

18. Inter alia, “Pakistan Resolution Day”; and “Pakistan is incomplete without Kashmir, says Bilawal.”

19. Tinker, “Pressure, Persuasion, Decision.”

20. Khan, Raiders in Kashmir; Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir; and Nawaz, “The First Kashmir War.”

21. The issue of the plebiscite is complex but important, particularly given Pakistan’s incessant yet disingenuous demands for its conduct. In 1948, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, first insisted that a plebiscite be held under UN auspices at the urging of the last Viceroy Louis Mountbatten. At that time Jinnah demurred, fearing that the plebiscite would not favor Pakistan given Kashmiris’ anger at the Pakistani marauders and their rapine violence. While Pakistan never fulfilled the necessary but insufficient conditions to hold the plebiscite, other factors also undermined its prospects. First, over successive decades, J&K has undergone considerable ethno-religious cleansing through violence and migration to other parts of India and Pakistan. While that part of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control is nearly all Muslim, many are Shia (e.g. as in Baltistan). In India, Kashmir (especially the Valley) is overwhelmingly Muslim (97%, most of whom are Sunnis, except for the Kargil district which is overwhelmingly Shia). Jammu has a Hindu Majority (65%) and in Ladakh, 52% espouse Buddhism, Hinduism or other non-Muslim faith. The vast majority (95%) of the state’s Hindu pandit population (150,000–160,000) were ethnically cleansed by Muslims when militancy seized the state in 1990. See Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India; and Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir; Evans, “The Kashmir Insurgency.” The afore-noted UNSC resolution called for the situation ex-ante to be restored, which has long been superseded by these voluntary and forced migratory events. Second, per the 1972 Shimla Agreement which ended the 1971 war, India and Pakistan ‘are resolved to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them.’ See “Shimla Agreement” Text. India interprets this to mean that the United Nations is no longer relevant. Pakistan rejects this and routinely and duplicitously calls for the plebiscite to be held.

22. Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad.

23. Raghavan, “Civil–Military Relations.”

24. Tellis et al., Limited Conflicts.

25. Evans, “The Kashmir Insurgency”; and Varshney, “India, Pakistan, and Kashmir.”

26. Fair, “Insights from a database;” Fair, Fighting to the End; and Kapur, Jihad as Grand Strategy.

27. Also see Human Rights Watch, “With Friends Like These”; and Human Rights Watch, “Everyone Lives in Fear.”

28. Rajagopalan, Fighting Like a Guerrilla; and Ray, “The Case for Revising”; and Human Rights Watch, “India: Abuses Persist.”

29. Mohanty, “The New Wave of Mobilisation.”

30. Inter alia Staniland, “Kashmir since 2003”; and Nabi and Ye, “Of Militarisation, Counter-insurgency.”

31. Aaron, “The Modi government.”

32. Pressman, “Throwing stones in social science;” Ganie, “All I got is stones in my hand.” For example, a reviewer of a previous draft of this essay wrote, without interrogating his or her own ethical commitments that: ‘I found it troubling that the authors have no qualms, reservations, or caveats about the ethical implications of their argument. They state numerous times that stone-pelting is a violent act, one that should be grouped alongside acts of political violence rather than nonviolent protest. This is a fair enough claim and I have no issue with it. But in their zeal to show the physical costs attendant with pelting stones, the authors may pause to consider the militarized, trained, and ruthless states that these stone-pelters are facing. From Israel to India, these are big economies with big defense budgets, allied to the strongest country in the world, acting essentially with impunity and zero legal accountability, either domestic or international. Can the authors at least signal attentiveness to the ethical issues in criticizing stone- pelting as they do … ?’ (Anonymous Reviewer Report 15 August 2020).

33. “4,799 stone- pelting incidents.”

34. Singh, “2019 Recorded Most Number.”

35. Ganie, “All I got is stones in my hand,” 117; and Devadas, The Generation of Rage in Kashmir.

36. Ganie, “All I got is stones in my hand,” 117.

37. Pressman, “Throwing stones in social science,” 520.

38. Ganie, “All I got is stones in my hand.”

39. “Stone pelting reduced.”

40. “58% back Modi.”

41. Lokniti, “All India Postpoll.”

42. Peerzada, “The Kashmir journalists.”

43. Allsop, “In Kashmir”; and John and Grewal, “How foreign media.”

44. Singh, “How foreign media.”

45. Mehta, “How I was Deported from India;” Ellis-Petersen, “India strips overseas citizenship from journalist who criticised Modi regime”; and Committee to Protect Journalists, “Indian government expels two foreign journalists for visa violations.”

46. “Full text: PM Modi”s.”

47. Ibid.

48. Venugopal, “Note ban takes toll.”

49. Majid, “Kashmir sees sharp decline.”

50. “Note ban had major impact.”

51. “Omar Abdullah Takes A Dig.”

52. Naseem, “A year of demonetisation.”

53. See note 10 above.

54. Butt, “Street power.”

55. International Labour Organization, “India Wage Report.”

56. Government of India, “Annual Report”.

57. Arikan and Bloom, “Religion and Political Protest.”

58. Calhoun-Brown, “African American Churches.”

59. Campbell, “Acts of Faith.”

60. Harris, “Something within.”

61. Hoffman and Nugent, “Communal religious practice.”

62. Clingingsmith, Khwaja, and Kremer, “Estimating the Impact of the Hajj.”

63. Ginges, Hansen, and Norenzayan, “Religion and support for suicide attacks.”

64. See note 54 above.

65. Devadas, The Generation of Rage in Kashmir.

66. See Taylor, “Tell Me Why.”

67. Raleigh et al., “Introducing ACLED.”

68. We compile a dataset with district-day level data. Therefore, observations here refer to district-days.

69. Government of Jammu & Kashmir, “Area and Population.”

70. Gettleman et al., “India Isn’t Letting a Single Onion Leave the Country;” “India’s onion crisis”; and B, “Onion prices and state intervention.”

71. We had partial onion price data for the following districts: Anantnag, Badgam, Baramullah, Jammu, Kathua, Pulwama, Rajauri, Srinagar and Udhampur. For the remaining districts we did not find any data on onion prices.

72. To generate this dummy variable, we used the lubridate package (Grolemund and Wickham, “Dates and Times Made Easy.”) in R.

73. We ruled out any correlation between and among our Ramazan dummy variable, temperature and precipitation. Of all the possible combinations, the highest correlation was between temperature and Ramzan (0.23), which is still a weak correlation. The correlation between precipitation and Ramazan was also week at 0.01 as was the correlation between precipitation and temperature at 0.12.

74. Guo and Zhao, “Multilevel Modeling;” Steenbergen and Jones, “Modeling Multilevel Data Structures”; and Raudenbush and Bryk, Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods. We also conducted multiple likelihood ratio tests comparing logit models with mixed effects logit models. The results indicated in all instances the best model for this data is a mixed effects logit model (p < 0.001).

75. We did not include both demonetization and killing of Burhan Wani in the same model because these there is a high correlation between these two variables. The tetrachoric rho (which is used to measure correlation for binary variables) = 1 and Pearson’s rho = 0.87. Demonetization and Burhan Wani are level 1 variables; therefore, Full Model 1 = $equation3+{\gamma }_{50}\ast Demonetization$, and Full Model 2 =$equation3+{\gamma }_{50}\ast KillingofBurhanWani$.

76. We grand mean centered the non-dummy variables for the ease of interpreting the intercept term. With multilevel models the intercept and slopes in the Level-1 (all the $\beta s$) model become the outcome variable at Level-2 (see equations above). We chose to grand center all variables because doing so only changes the magnitude of the intercept without changing the magnitude of the coefficients. Grand mean centering in multilevel modeling permits us to interpret the intercept as the expected value of dependent variable when all the independent variables are held at the mean (Paccagnella, “Centering or Not Centering”; Luke, Multilevel Modeling; Kreft and De Leeuw, Introducing Multilevel Modeling; and Snijders and Boskers, Multilevel Analysis).

77. Paccagnella, “Centering or Not Centering in Multilevel Models?;” Luke, Multilevel Modeling; Kreft and de Leeuw, Introducing Multilevel Modeling; and Snijders and Bosker, Multilevel Analysis.

78. See Devadas, The Generation of Rage.

79. International Crisis Group, “Raising the Stakes.”

80. Sahay, “Kashmir politics.”

81. “Modi in Srinagar.”

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Notes on contributors

C. Christine Fair

C. Christine Fair is a Professor in the Security Studies Program at Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her most recent book is titled In Their Own Words: Understanding the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Digvijay Ghotane

Digvijay Ghotane is a research assistant the Security Studies Program at Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an MA-candidate in Data Science for Public Policy at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Parina Patel

Parina Patel is an Associate Teaching Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.