Badri Raina 
During a recent visit to Jammu and Kashmir valley, the honourable prime minister was pleased to say that statehood would be restored to the Union Territory when “the time is right”.
Through the ages, of course, one of the most intractable questions has been this: what is time?
After the invention of the clock, we know time as that which is by mutual agreement, incontrovertibly, recorded by the needles on a clock or watch.
But time is a more intriguing subject than our mechanically determined “clock time.”
In the early twentieth century, the philosopher Bergson was to initiate explorations into time as something experienced subjectively.
It came to be called psychological time, referenced to any individual’s streams of consciousness through which she may come to view the objective world.
As in most areas of human thought, the encyclopaedic Shakespeare had, more than three centuries before Bergson, thus written down this variable experience of time:
- For someone who is to be hung the next day, time gallops;
- For someone whose days are uniformly similar, time ambles
- for someone who is to be betrothed the next day, time crawls.
These speculations are germane also to the sphere of politics.
So, were we to ask the question, “when may the time be right for restoration of statehood to Jammu & Kashmir?”, we will get differing answers.
Whereas such time may have been already ripe within hours of the usurpation of the full statehood of this crown jewel among Indian states, for those that did the usurping this clearly does not seem to be the case even some six years after.
In the recent elections held to the assembly of the neutered territory, ruling expectations were dashed comprehensively.
Not only did the BJP not win, its bete noire, the cussed National Conference did so thumpingly.
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If the powers-that-be had hoped that the many quisling satraps that had been floated to break the political back of the grand old NC, massively propagandised as the source of all troubles in that state of states, such quislings not only lost their seats but also lost their petty cash.
Now what?
For years now, we have been given to understand that the reading down of Article 370 had finally put paid to all the naughty perfidies in those parts of Bharat.
This propagation was clearly a polemical preparation for advancing the fortunes of the BJP, especially in the Muslim-majority valley.
Had that happened, the honourable prime minister may have been able to say on his visit how the time was eminently right for restoration of statehood.
Alas, with the return of the National Conference, time has again come to be tainted, although arguments, if at all proffered in favour of such imagined taint are getting vaporously vacuous by the day.
After all, the establishment cannot in the same breath claim that the security situation and developmental initiatives have registered a great leap forward, but the time is not right for restoration of statehood.
Thus the issue of time has indeed come to occupy a deeply philosophical dimension vis a vis the fate of Kashmiris.
No matter how understanding and conciliatory an Omar Abdullah may sound on the prospects here, so long as such names continue to win in the state, how may a Narendra Modi consider this any dependable evidence of true “ghar vapsi“?
And time in the state may never be right till that ghar vapsi is brought about.
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.