The drastic recent steps taken by the Indian government in Kashmir, depriving it not only of its constitutional autonomy but also its status as a state, can best be understood in the context of a worrisome phenomenon afflicting the world’s largest democracies.

In the wake of the global financial meltdown a decade ago and the ensuing crisis of free-market capitalism, voters in countries as different as India and the United States have gone in for similar remedies. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trump are both rightwing populists who have successfully mobilized Hindus and whites in their respective countries as voting blocs.

The Modi-led ruling coalition’s repeat triumph in India’s parliamentary elections a few months ago with an even bigger majority has led to an intensification of its project to remake the officially secular country into a Hindu polity. India “in all probability and unless checked is headed toward a Hindu nationalist, majoritarian state,” Brown University Professor Ashutosh Varshney tells The New York Times.

This is where the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir (India’s only Muslim-majority province) fits in. The Modi government’s stripping away of its autonomy and its statehood only makes sense in light of the region’s place in the Indian Right’s pantheon of obsessions.

One of the Hindu nationalist movement’s first political agitations occurred in the early 1950s against the special status (enshrined in Article 370 of the Indian Constitution) accorded to Kashmir when it acceded to independent India. Indeed, a Hindu Right stalwart, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, died in a Kashmir jail during the protests.

The votaries of Hindu nationalism see the Modi government’s moves as the fulfillment of a demand they’ve been making for more than half a century—and the ultimate tribute to Mookerjee, who founded the current ruling party’s ideological progenitor.

“The move in Kashmir is expressive of the core ideology of the Hindu nationalist movement that has organized and mobilized since the 1920s to make India a Hindu nation,” University of Pretoria Professor Alf Gunvald Nilsen, the author and editor of a number of books on India, tells me in an email interview. “Indeed, what could possibly be more true to the spirit of Hindu nationalism than the erasure—for that is what the revocation of Article 370 is—of India’s only Muslim-majority state?”

And even if U.S.-related factors played a relatively minor role in precipitating his decision, Modi knew that he could count on his American ideological counterpart in one respect.