Omar Abdullah Is in a Bind
Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, finds himself in a bind. The battered and diminished state he was elected to lead is turning into a cauldron of crises, pushing the politics of the region toward an inevitable inflection point.
Recently, the beleaguered chief minister found himself blasted by an unlikely critic: a Shia cleric from the central Kashmir district of Budgam who, amid the symbolical black-and-red drapery around his religious pulpit, reminded Abdullah that he was not voted to power for the supplication to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he has been doing – but to fight all the way till the end, till J&K was returned its “lost identity.”
After the reading down of Article 370, and the follow-up crackdown that drowned out nearly all voices of dissent, Aga Syed Hadi, the cleric, has of late emerged as an articulate defender of the political interests and ambitions of the people.
He has been remarkably more demurring than his political peers, raining fire and brimstone from his pulpit, and speaking directly to the anxieties and aspirations that the public continue to nurse secretly, behind the smokescreen of elaborate hyper-nationalist pageantry choreographed every once in a while around Lal Chowk.
In his speech, he employed the Urdu word 'tashakhus', which implies 'self-hood' – a new addition to the language register that the perennially dissenting culture of Kashmir harnesses its political idioms from.
This acquires even more perfect salience given the increasing emphasis on Hindi in the Valley of late.
A new sign board guiding people towards the Income Tax office in Srinagar now comes entirely in Hindi and English, and has already provoked furious online reactions, for it reveals that even the ceremonial nod to Urdu’s prevalence was being done away with – something that re-inscribes the sense of an identity being dismantled, part by part.
Union government versus Omar Abdullah
Urdu’s marginalisation is not the only issue people are angry over. The Union government has been ruthlessly able to prevail over Omar’s administration with aplomb, running roughshod over the voter’s expectations that the assembly elections held last year would slowly change things for good.
The way the Union went about demolishing homes of the alleged suspects of the Pahalgam attack, expelling Pakistani nationals residing in Kashmir – one of whom was an 80-year old Srinagar-born man who eventually died an abject death near Wagah crossing and, in a shocking case last month, literally manhandling Omar Abdullah to prevent him for remembering the killings of 22 protesters in 1931 (that marks a seminal moment in the long arc of Kashmir’s regional politics) – all demonstrate that the BJP is least bothered about local political sensibilities in ways the NC cannot afford.
This hostile posture notwithstanding, Abdullah continued to flatter Modi such as during the inauguration of the Z-Morh tunnel in Sonmarg earlier this year, where the CM invoked the metaphor of “warm hearts” while beseeching the PM for statehood.
Even his father, Farooq, defended the newly formed government’s conciliatory approach to the Union government, arguing that, “We don’t have to take cudgels against Delhi. We don’t have to fight with the Centre. Those who want to pick a fight against Delhi can gladly do so.”
‘A cold realisation’
Meanwhile, as Hadi’s speeches spread across social media platforms, people watched them earnestly. In a wider political milieu – where the state is largely conspicuous through its coercive arm determined to erase “separatism”, leading other dissenting voices to swing out of view too, Hadi’s speeches have come as a pleasant surprise.
And perhaps numbed into reconciling with their current travails out of the belief that they are too intractable, Hadi has been able to force upon the minds of the people a cold realisation – that by appearing too deferential to the Union government, Omar’s administration is short-changing them, and that such a deference is going to be dangerous.
The backdrop of Hadi’s outrage was the Independence Day speech by Omar Abdullah. He accused the chief minister of having been reduced to a “defeated man,” who was not able to keep his campaign promises, chief of which include getting statehood back.
Instead, he said, Abdullah had now embarked upon a toothless signature campaign to rally the public in J&K and remind the Supreme Court – which has given eight weeks to the Union government to respond on the issue – of the pervasive and urgent demand for statehood across the whole of union territory.
In his August 15 speech, Abdullah's demeanour and carriage was doing more conversation than his actual utterances. With his brows knitted together tensely, Abdullah spoke with noticeable anguish, alluding to “several reports” he had come across which had led him to anticipate that PM Modi might announce statehood for J&K on Independence Day. “We were told the papers are ready and it’s only a matter of time. But nothing happened,” he said.
It is clear that the NC has got no benefit from the accommodative vein it tried to show to the BJP-led Union government.
A disappointment from the top court
Another ominous development during the same period were CJI B.R. Gavai’s observations, when an SC bench was hearing a petition for restoration of statehood. Justice Gavai said that the courts cannot ignore “what happened in Pahalagam”, which is supposed to reflect the grim “ground realities” of Kashmir.
This statement foreshadows a fate similar to that of Article 370, where the top court controversially validated its annulment. It also appears to legitimise the grotesque logic that it is reasonable to deny statehood to J&K in the wake of terrorist attacks, not least when the BJP itself champions the notion that terrorist numbers in J&K are declining, and local recruitment has all but dried out.
A more sober reality, however, is that Kashmir continues to be an ideological project for the BJP, and the allure of the idea of having brought a Muslim majority province under heel remains too potent a political calling card to be jettisoned.
Recall how just one big gunfight – Operation Mahadev on July 28 – in Srinagar’s Dachigam area became a cudgel with which the Union home minister felt he could silence the opposition. The gun-battle – where the government announced that it had killed the terrorists responsible for the April 22 carnage – was ‘coincidentally’ timed with the scheduled debate on the Pahalgam attack in Lok Sabha, where Parliamentarians were expected to grill Modi over why the terrorists had not been nabbed yet.
A reversion to statehood, where J&K regains significant powers over key departments such as police, law and revenue will take the sting out of BJP’s Kashmir project.
The Bonsai-politics of J&K
Those observing J&K for six years now can clearly see the meticulous political engineering that the Modi government has unleashed in the region – from selectively erasing and retaining laws (it removed J&K’s own RTI Act, a relatively progressive version of its national counterpart, but kept the stringent PSA); to gerrymandering voter constituencies; plucking new political parties out of thin air; and even selectively unveiling benefits under affirmative action programs, which has disturbed the older reservation calculus in the region, and angered the local youth.
Ahead of assembly elections last year, another baleful aspect of this highly stage-managed politics was visible when 365 out of 908 total candidates in the fray ran as independents, suggesting how fragmentation of votes was being envisioned as a key strategy to prevent Kashmiris from rallying around one single political umbrella.
If and when statehood comes back, it will naturally allow an organic version of the political realities to resurface. Then, the Bonsai-politics that the Modi government is desperately trying to preserve will outgrow itself, and manifest into its natural form, which will always remain fundamentally in a dialectical opposition with the BJP’s professed ideals.
In this scenario, it is not the people of Kashmir who will have to reconcile themselves to the BJP’s vision of India, but rather the BJP-led Union government which will have to find ways to accommodate Kashmir’s political peculiarities.
That will include substantial policy revisions which, assured of its hold over power levers in India, BJP will yet not countenance.
But we also understand that the history of Kashmir’s politics is such that it will never stay constantly pivoted on the same locus, and as a political conflict with external dimensions, any major geopolitical reconfiguration may have significant regional implications, which will automatically force a major rethink, the present self-conceitedness notwithstanding.
A lesson for National Conference
As for the NC, it must stop playing second-fiddle to the BJP. It has already become a scapegoat for the BJP’s faulty policy decisions such as the new reservation arrangement.
The NC has even allowed itself to become complicit in the recent decision to take control of the management of Jamaat-backed Falah-e-Aam Trust schools – a brainwave most likely to have originated out of the power corridors of New Delhi, rather than in Srinagar.
Realistically speaking, in its capacity as a union territory, J&K cannot afford to cross swords with a powerful Centre. But the local leadership can instead broaden its engagement with the public that voted it to power.
It should be forthright with the people and confess to them it cannot, for example, reverse the controversial reservation rules because they stem from the three laws passed in the Lok Sabha two years ago, and the powers that would have enabled the CM to undo the changes are being denied to him.
By going out of his way to propitiate the Union government, Omar is becoming the buffer for all the political disgruntlement that would otherwise be reserved for the Centre.
And what has the Centre done for him in return? Last week, the MHA introduced an amendment in Lok Sabha that will allow it to hoover up more powers vis-a-vis chief ministers, with an identical but separate amendment effected to the J&K Reorganisation Act, 2019 also.
So as opposed to giving J&K more powers, the Union government is determined as ever to strip the region of whatever little constitutional authority it has – to the point that no matter whichever party the Kashmiris vote for, it effectively changes nothing – except for when the party elected to power is BJP.
This – for all practical purposes – is rigging by other means. In fact, not just election fixing of a standalone character such as the one that provoked militancy in 1989, but one which is permanently built into the system.
Omar has the choice of either continuing to perpetuate Bonsai-politics in J&K, or stop being a cog-in-the-wheel for its mechanisation.
Shakir Mir is an independent journalist and a book critic based in Srinagar. His work delves at the intersection of conflict, politics, history and memory. He can be reached at shakir.imtiyaz.mir@gmail.
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