Opinion | Hong Kong is in India, Kashmir is in China. Right?

Returning to Hong Kong this time held a special attraction. It may sound like an odd thing to say now, what with the eventual flight cancellations and the disruption, but before it all escalated, there was no denying the mild thrill of anticipation of being greeted by a swarm of protesters at the airport. That doesn’t happen every day, and who doesn’t like a spirited protest?

So, it was slightly disappointing to be deprived of this novelty on landing in Hong Kong last week. It was early morning, and the handful of black shirts present had chosen to use their limited manpower then to work on passengers of another flight, one coming from Beijing. They waved posters on police atrocities, tried to engage individual passengers to explain their position, and shouted slogans about the virtues of democracy.

The unfolding events in Kashmir and Hong Kong these days sometimes make it difficult to make out which of the two is administered by the world’s biggest democracy and which one is the democracy-craving outlier of an authoritarian state.

Like Hong Kong, the province of Jammu and Kashmir – till recently – was an autonomous region with special privileges defining its relationship to the republic holding its sovereignty. The princely state acceded to a newly independent India in 1947 in return for guarantees of its autonomy, including having its own constitution.