For good and ill, India’s prime minister is hard at work

LAST YEAR Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the most Olympian of India’s public intellectuals, infuriated many of his compatriots. Instead of lauding the audacity of a government that had just imposed direct rule on Jammu and Kashmir, India’s most troubled state and its sole Muslim-majority one, Mr Mehta issued a warning. We should not cheer the “Indianisation” of Kashmir, he said, but rather fear a creeping “Kashmirisation” of India. The focus should not be on what Narendra Modi, the prime minister, wanted Indians to see: an assertion of national (read Hindu majoritarian) will and an end to decades of flaccid ambiguity over the territory, which is claimed by Pakistan. Rather, argued Mr Mehta, it should be on what was meant to remain unseen in Kashmir: the failure of the world’s biggest democracy to respect its most basic constitutional responsibility, to seek the consent of the governed.