Thanks to the creatively unstable government that has formed in New Delhi, surely good things will materialise:
We can now trust Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar to ensure that schemes like a Uniform Civil Code, Agnipath and ‘one nation one election’ will be pushed to the backburner; perhaps also the plan to create a National Register of Citizens, and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which introduces religion as a criterion for the grant of citizenship.
On a more positive note, how nice that the people of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh will finally be accorded “special status” such as was taken away from the less fortunate Kashmiris.
Additionally, we can look forward to a national caste census – an article of faith with Nitish – and see reservations allocated to Muslims in Andhra Pradesh – again an article of faith with Naidu.
Given that both Naidu and Nitish are gentlemen of the highest integrity and political principle, it is hardly to be thought that they will resile from any of these long-held commitments to their respective peoples, or that Narendra Modi will risk losing state power by giving in to some uncharacteristically lofty scruple in denying Naidu and Nitish.
This happy confluence then encourages a poor Kashmiri activist like me to turn to Naidu and Nitish for following up on the federal principle they rightly hold so dear, and spare a thought for the beleaguered and humiliated region, undemocratically and unconstitutionally robbed of its negotiated special status, and diminished into a mere Union territory – the only time a state has been so reduced in independent India.
The nationalists want us to believe that after the abrogation of Article 370, it is cakes, ale and lots of tulips in Kashmir.
We are also to believe that all the mischief in Kashmir had been the doing of the decrepit old National Conference, and that the results of the parliamentary elections would show how this naughty nuisance of an anti-national political legacy fanned by the wicked Congress would receive a mortal blow, come the results.
The National Conference might have been expected to lose dutifully in order that events beginning August 5, 2019 could have found nationalist justification among Hindutva warriors.
But, alas, what do you know: not only has the diehard National Conference won two seats in the valley, the crooked gerrymandering of constituencies notwithstanding, it let the third be won by a man in jail for radical federal activity.
Not to speak of the unkindest cut – that all the King’s parties came such a cropper, perhaps losing their deposits to boot.
Clearly, then, the cussed people of the valley know something that neither the grand lieutenant governor nor his supervisors in New Delhi know about the shape of things in Kashmir.
But if anybody can be trusted to know, it has to be Naidu and Nitish.
May we Kashmiris then hope that even as they foreground the urgencies of their own states and peoples, they will spare a thought for us?
May we hope that the days of sabre-rattling about Kashmir and our “enemy” neighbour will find a quietus and yield space to a just political renewal without which no nationalist, not even Modi, can either win over Kashmiris and assure them that the historic choice they made in 1947 to spurn a pernicious sectarian thesis and throw their lot with a secular and democratic India was quite the right one still.
On a mundane level, we hear that the honourable Election Commission is stirring to organise assembly elections in Jammu & Kashmir, following the directive of the Supreme Court that they do so before September.
But, here is the hidden trick – one this writer drew attention to many months ago.
If the restoration of full statehood does not precede assembly elections, Kashmiris may wake up to an unlovely reality, namely, that the form of statehood they get may match the results they produce in the assembly elections.
Should parties like the intractable National Conference once again play foul and emerge victorious, J&K may get only a truncated and powerless state such as people suffer in Delhi.
Surely, Naidu and Nitish, given their commitment to states’ rights, will understand this, and find it in themselves to come to the rescue of the long-suffering peoples of the region.
Nothing would seal their place in history more than if they accomplished justice for Kashmir.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
