The Electorate Restores Kashmiri Identity But Will the ‘Nationalists’ Take Heed?

In 1947, the moot question was whether the Muslim-majority Jammu & Kashmir, then a princely state, would follow the stipulations of the Partition agreement — namely, demography and contiguity — and join with the new dominion of Pakistan, or whether it would strike a blow for the idealisms that underpinned India (with its vastly Hindu-majority India) in defiance of what might have been more natural for it to do.

We know what historic decision they made.

But for that enlightened decision, the Hindu-majority region of Jammu may have had to either capitulate to the Partition agreement or support Independence (as the Hindu Maharaja wished to do).

Incontrovertibly, if Jammu & Kashmir has since been a uniquely prized part of republican India, the credit accrues to Kashmiri Muslims.

It is precisely for that reason that Kashmir’s political identity has been inseparable from the career of the National Conference (NC).

That fact also explains why Hindutva forces have strenuously sought to erase this formation of Kashmiri secular idealism from the political map of the region.

For five years now, we have been carpet-bombed with the calumny that it is the NC which has been at the root of the problems in Kashmir, even as historical facts suggest precisely the opposite.

And, over five autocratic years Narendra Modi has sought to persuade everyone that the people of Kashmir have seen that point and relegated the Abdullah legacy and its political-cultural role and content to the dustbin, along with the allegedly complicit shenanigans of the Congress party.

The Hindu-nationalist media has played this establishment tune relentlessly since the abrogation of Article 370 — the special status for J&K which had been collectively conceived as the bridge facilitating the state’s accession to the dominion of India.

It may be noted in passing that after five months of negotiations with the NC from May to November 1949, it was Sardar Patel who obtained concurrence to the special status provision both within the Congress party and the Constituent Assembly (see his letter to Nehru dated November 3, 1949).

Also read: The NC-Congress Alliance in J&K Has a (Very Few) Hindu MLAs Problem

Well now, after five long years of slander and suppression, what a tight slap this party of the Kashmiris has struck across the falsifying, undemocratic, authoritarian cheek.

In giving the party 42 seats from a total of 90 — 35 in the valley and 7 in the Jammu region — the J&K voter has sought to leave no one, especially Modi and Amit Shah, in any doubt that they fully endorse the pre-eminence and the manifesto of the NC, making sure that the NC/Congress combine had an unquestionable majority in the new assembly.

It is being propagated that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has done better than in 2014. Actually, it has not. When it got 25 seats in the Jammu region then, the total number of seats in that region was 37; now it is 43. That makes the party’s 2024 tally of 29 seats the same as before.

To the extent that the NC manifesto spoke plainly of their resolve to bring back the lost special status, above and beyond restoring full statehood to the humiliated Kashmiris, the vote and seats they have achieved cannot but be interpreted as a popular endorsement of that agenda.

And may we ask why such an agenda is seen as an anathema when the demand and grant of special status to many a state in the republic has been routinely negotiated by the central authorities when both the Congress and the BJP have been in charge?

The lack of a reasoned answer to the above poser leads one inevitably to the unlovely conclusion that the character of the demography of Kashmir — i.e. its Muslim majority — seems to make democratic demands of this nature seem toxic while not being so regarded when raised in other regions of the republic.

Let us recall that the one time a demand for the secession of a state from the Union was raised in Independent India by a major political force was in 1962 by no less than the late Annadurai in his maiden speech in parliament.

Heavens did not fall; always understanding that such sentiments from the south had to do with the fear of the imposition of Hindi, the Nehru regime found the right democratic answers to the problem.

Never once since its inception has the NC raised a demand for the secession of the state from the Union, in contrast to the many times such demands have been raised in states like Nagaland.

If anything, it was a BJP prime minister who thought it safe and fit to send Farooq Abdullah to the Security Council to argue India’s case on Kashmir.

The worst thing that the Modi regime can do now is to procrastinate on the just demand for the restoration of full statehood – and not the neutered Delhi or Puducherry like statehood – to Jammu & Kashmir.

If it fails to do so, the BJP will only be inviting fresh trouble in that most sensitive region. Modi and Shah must play straight if they indeed believe Jammu & Kashmir to be an integral part of India.

Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.