“The BJP’s strategy is to consolidate Hindu votes and fragment Kashmiri homogeneity. Kashmir-based parties are helping them do that by staying divided.”
Prem Shankar Jha*
Kashmir has one chance to win back the autonomy that it enjoyed under Article 370 of the constitution. As the first phase of voting for the assembly polls ends, it is apparent that its main political parties are throwing it away.
The BJP’s strategists have known from the very beginning, that they will not get a single seat in Kashmir, and that their solid support exists only in part of Jammu. As a result, it does not have the faintest chance of winning an absolute majority of the state’s 90 assembly seats.
Kashmiris therefore have a real chance – possibly their last – of winning back the autonomy they lost after Modi abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution.
The Modi government is fully aware of this, so from the very beginning, its purpose has been to break the Kashmiri vote into pieces, use its almost guaranteed 25-seat block of seats in Jammu to emerge as the largest single party and claim the right to form the government of Jammu and Kashmir.
Once the BJP has secured that right, it will seduce, buy, or coerce, a sufficient number of independents and smaller parties in Kashmir, using the Public Safety Act, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and a host of ancillary laws, to seduce or compel a sufficient number successful individuals and small parties to join it, till it has a majority in the J&K Vidhan Sabha.
If it succeeds, it will have five full years to destroy Kashmiriyat, that unique, syncretic blend of Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism, that Sheikh Abdullah and the Maharaja had been determined to protect when they refused to accede to Pakistan but asked for the safeguards provided by Article 370 of the Constitution, prior to signing the Instrument of Accession to India, in 1947.
When realising their folly, Kashmiris begin to rebel against their subjugation once more, Delhi’s crushing response will reignite armed militancy in the valley and bring Lashkars sponsored by Pakistan back into the valley.
Kashmir will then sink back once more into the Hell in which it had existed from 1990 till Prime Minister Vajpayee went to Srinagar in 2003, and held out a hand of reconciliation towards Pakistan, from that city.
The Kashmiri intelligentsia is fully aware of this but has been made powerless to prevent it, by the illiterate and irresponsible behaviour of Kashmir’s main parties, the Congress, and the National Conference. It should have been apparent to them from the moment the Supreme Court mandated a return to full statehood for Kashmir, that if they wanted to protect J&K’s autonomy, they would have to fight the elections as a single coalition, with a single common platform – the release of all Kashmiris held without trial in jails all over India, and restoration of Kashmir’s cultural autonomy, i.e. Kashmiriyat.
This required the NC and Congress to join hands with the PDP. Mehbooba Mufti, who co-founded the PDP with her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in 1999, understood this from the very beginning. But the Congress and the National Conference did not, and still have not understood the need for doing so and have continued to make her their main target of attack in Kashmir.
The reason is that like Mehbooba, while Omar Abdullah too was initially arrested and spent months in ‘house arrest’ after Modi ‘abrogated’ article 370, unlike him she refused to leave Kashmir when she was released.
In sharp contrast, if several reports by India Today TV and other channels are to be believed, both Farooq and Omar Abdullah, who had moved to Delhi after their release, made attempts to ally themselves with the BJP even after Kashmir was brought under central rule.
As for the Congress, Rahul Gandhi’s preference for being in the USA lecturing the Indian diaspora for ten crucial days from the 7th till the 16th of September, after paying a single visit to a single constituency to campaign for a single candidate, in Kashmir, and his refusal to go back there while the BJP ensures, step by step, the fragmentation of the Kashmiri vote speaks volumes for his political naivete and lack of awareness of the role he needs to play.
Neither of the Abdullahs has spoken out against the reign of terror that the BJP unleashed on the Kashmir valley for four long months before it ‘abrogated’ Article 370. Neither of them has protested against the prolonged imprisonment of every Kashmiri who has dared to speak out against the actions of the Delhi-imposed administration, during the President’s rule that followed.
The Supreme Court gave a specious meaning to the word ‘Temporary’ to justify removing Article 370. Neither of the Abdullahs objected to this interpretation. The judges should have known that ‘Temporary’ actually referred to Article 370 only applying to the part of Kashmir that had joined India, while the rest was still under Pakistan’s control.
It should have been apparent, even to these dynastic Kashmiri leaders, that the BJP, knowing that it could not win a single seat in Kashmir, would do its level best to split the Kashmiri vote into as many fragments as possible. It had already split the Peoples’ Conference, by tempting, or coercing, assassinated leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s son Sajjad into joining them. It had also done this with businessman and former friend of Mufti Sayeed, Altaf Bukhari by forcing him to choose between defection and jail.
The pathetic performance of both Omar and Sajjad, whose combined vote did not even come close to that of Engineer Rashid, seems to have convinced the BJP’s strategists that releasing other Kashmiri radical leaders and allowing them to stand for election would split the Kashmiri vote into many more irreconcilable pieces, and severely dent the NC-Congress combine’s share of the vote.
The BJP coined this strategy only after witnessing the doubling of the number of votes cast in Baramulla, in comparison to 2014, and the fact that virtually all of the increase went to Engineer Rashid. But even there it hedged its bets by releasing Rashid only after the first round of nominations had been completed.
By the time he came out of jail, Rashid was able to nominate only 12 candidates to fight the assembly elections, against the 18 assembly segments of the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency where he had gained the largest number of votes.
This was a product of careful calculation. For if the AIP won all the 12 seats neither the Congress nor the NC would be able to form a government without its support. But, recognising that incarceration has endowed political activists with the halo of martyrdom, the BJP’s strategists have decided to release more political dissidents from jail, in ones and twos from other parties and religious affiliations to scatter the Kashmiri votes more widely and prevent them from going to the Congress-NC alliance.
The only way for the NC-Congress alliance to ensure that the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them, that no matter who wins the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government of the state.
This will not be as hard as it looks, for far more difficult reconciliations have taken place in other countries. The most striking was the Lebanese Peace Agreement signed in Doha in 2008. On that occasion, the Christian leader Michel Aoun, parted company with his more die-hard co-religionists and the American-backed Lebanese Sunnis, and agreed to Hezbollah’s demand to make it a part of the Lebanese cabinet, in proportion to its vote.
A similar pre-election agreement between the three major parties Rashid’s AIP and the Jamaat-i-Islami would enable a similar stable government to be formed in Jammu and Kashmir.
*The author is a senior journalist based in Delhi.
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