Are the non-saffron parties in Jammu and Kashmir missing the true significance of the assembly election commencing on September 18? Their actions so far seem to suggest they have missed the point that after Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has had the erstwhile state firmly in its sights and that the ambition of ‘ruling over it’ seems closer to realisation today than at any other time.
The Hindu-wadi would rather that the Hindu raja (king), whose kingdom sat on India’s northern border with Pakistan, was still on his throne, presiding over the fate of his Muslim ‘praja’ (subjects). But that’s another story.
As part of their strategic vision, first the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and then its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), floated under RSS’s auspices and guidance to take forward the Hindutva agenda. They have longed to have their own chief minister in the Muslim-majority Kashmir which shares its border with Pakistan as well as Chinese territories across Ladakh.
They are lured by the idea of controlling such a strategic space, even if the local populace, be it Kashmir’s Muslim community or the Hindu of the Jammu region, is isolated on account of thoroughly alienating policies of the current regime which, five years ago, took away its special status that came with Articles 370 and 35-A.
Until recently, the electoral capture of Jammu and Kashmir seemed like a pipe dream. But after Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, the ruling party, while sitting for nearly 10 years with an absolute majority, plotted its moves assiduously. The first deliberate step to set up the final approach was to dispatch its own coalition government headed by the People’s Democratic Party’s (PDP’s) Mehbooba Mufti in the summer of 2018. This was followed by bringing J&K under the Union government’s direct and intrusive control in August 2019 by altering and reducing the former state’s constitutional status, without reference to the state legislature, juridically an extraordinary and unprecedented decision.
The smallest shadow of subtlety in governance was gone, leave alone the notion of winning hearts and minds in a conflict-prone zone where terrorism has been a recurring motif for three decades. In Modi’s Delhi, it seems to have occurred to no one that getting the people over to your side — as former Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and A.B. Vajpayee sought to do — was good policy, solid strategy, and indeed the only way to isolate extremist forces in J&K which look across the border for succour and nurture.
Using extreme state violence to stop stone-pelting protesters, deploying the tool of indiscriminate human rights abuse, the unchecked use of mass arrests (even of children) and ‘unlawful’ laws such as Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), can only bring superficial peace. The recent resurgence of terrorism in J&K testifies to this.
Make-believe peace impresses the parliament and shapes public opinion on false grounds through an obliging media. The Indian public has largely been kept in the dark and prevented from acquiring even a rudimentary awareness of the complexities of the situation in J&K. This directly impacts national integration.
The media in J&K itself has been bludgeoned into quiet acquiescence through the spread of fear. Owners, editors, and journalists of well-known publications have been slammed into jail, roughed up, or subjected to harsh questioning. Only government propaganda is permitted. Editorial pages have turned into garden notebooks or spiritual manuals.
Everything possible is being done to cover the truth or facts on the ground. It is no wonder, then, that the country had no idea that for the past year or so, the forests and hills of the Jammu region have become a redoubt of terrorists, thought to be Pakistanis, and who knows some locals too. The scourge of terrorism is blowing up in our faces all over again after a lapse of a few decades.
Also read: How Newspaper Op-Ed Pages in Kashmir Are Engineering Pro-BJP Narratives
Effectively, there is a news blackout in J&K but the sheer magnitude of the situation, with several soldiers and police officers getting killed on a steady basis, has obliged the government to give out controlled information. There can be no doubt that serious efforts will be made to diddle public opinion with the aid of communal twists as voting day approaches.
But the recent visits of the Army chief and other top security officials to the troubled area blows the lid off the story. The moral is clear: repression and extreme military measures — the both eyes for an eye approach — are not the answer. Better sense has to prevail in Delhi. You need to have the people on your side if the Kashmir policy is to make any sense.
The state, especially under the authoritarians now, takes no pains to give the public any understanding of what’s at stake, or it wouldn’t be doing what it is doing. An egregious example is the exemption from entertainment tax of a communal film on Kashmir, made by the regime’s fellow-traveller, whose purpose is to spread social poison across India. The idea is to disseminate the falsehood that the Kashmiri Muslims helped inflict violence to drive out Kashmiri Pandits.
The simple explanation was not forthcoming from the state that in the years when terrorists were ascendant (the period the film deals with), it was only a section of communally-consumed Muslims who took to violence and forced Hindus out in droves. The terrorists, in that era of upheaval when the Indian state seemed to totter, killed thousands of Muslims who tried to resist or did not assist the communal-terrorist venture.
At the civilian level, Muslims died in thousands, the Hindus in dozens. The Jamaatis in that period, whose star rose, strung up National Conference (NC) supporters from the nearest tree. The inside story of Kashmir politics of the time has not been written.
From the beginning, the Hindutva forces have spread propaganda that Muslim-majority Kashmir valley has been ‘given’ more seats in the J&K assembly than Hindu-majority Jammu, conveniently disregarding the fact that the Valley has a larger population.
As a result, the gerrymandering of constituencies has followed with the idea of increasing seats in Hindu majority areas. The hill tracts of Jammu have been artificially joined with southern Kashmir to alter constituency boundaries and profiles as part of the overall Hindutva design for eventual domination.
In post-Article 370 Kashmir, when Hindu Jammu, Muslim Kashmir and Buddhist Ladakh, are all disgruntled, and protest regularly, the BJP may have been expected to be on the back foot, but it is clearly not. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, it did well to win both seats in the Jammu division. To what degree the ruling party’s reduced showing in the national election, and Modi’s compulsion to form a coalition government, will impact the J&K assembly poll, if at all, is to be seen.
Also read: Five Years After Article 370 Move, the Simmering Cauldron of J&K Remains Highly Flammable
Nevertheless, it’s clear the BJP has enormous fire power. It sits on unmatchable financial resources and is adept at buying legislators and toppling governments when it loses. It can push large sums to win votes, setting up dummy candidates to act as vote sinks against competing parties, and spread money around to attract legislators in the post-election scenario, if required.
By now it’s also a well-merited principle that the saffron party in Modi’s India will stop at nothing to win even a village panchayat election. That’s the only way to have legitimate constitutional power to dictate new laws, rules and policy, have the executive authority do as it pleases in violation of laws and traditions.
Given this backdrop, the NC and the Congress have conducted themselves as babes in the woods. They have wholly disregarded the notion of the INDIA bloc, which Congress leader Rahul Gandhi worked so hard to establish. There are three INDIA parties in J&K, but for narrow partisan reasons, Gandhi and NC leader Omar Abdullah have behaved as though the third did not exist.
The younger Abdullah lost sight of the fact that he was defeated in the recently concluded Lok Sabha election because a separatist politician was sprung from jail and facilitated in filing his nomination papers in time to be a candidate from prison. He trounced Abdullah and the other contenders. A by-product, intended or otherwise, has been the emergence of a large battalion of youngsters rooting and mobilising votes for the separatist candidate. This helped bring alive the Jamaat-e-Islami (J-e-I) cadre which had been lying low for five years. Some of them plan to fight the assembly election as independents, although the J-e-I is evidently divided on such a course.
It is plain that J&K is no longer just a NC, Congress state. The PDP emerged as a regional force about two decades ago, though it is enfeebled today. Moreover, the electoral arena is now chock-a-block with the BJP proxies created to cut the main regional parties, NC and PDP, to size — a strategic move by the BJP to establish its long-term political dominance in J&K. In this game, the doors have been opened even for the Jamaat to emerge to take in some fresh air.
The exclusion of the PDP from the alliance created by the Congress and the NC throws the party to the wolves, but more pertinently places it among those whose electoral effort will take away alliance votes and help boost the BJP in the post-poll scenario.
In the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress practised self-abnegation for once, supported regional allies and reaped great dividends. For the upcoming J&K poll, it has lost the lesson learned only three months ago. The NC for its part saw just the small picture.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.
