The year 2023 for Jammu and Kashmir was a year full of ironies, paradoxes and blatant double standards — all packaged and sold under the name of economic progress, democracy and normalcy.
Take for example the issue of elections, which the people of J&K last saw nine years ago in 2014. The Union government is perhaps acutely aware of what conducting a free and fair election in a Muslim-majority region would mean – a complete ouster from being able to direct the state of affairs (assuming that statehood will be restored). So it has devised a new stratagem. It has put out ceremonial statements from time to time, emphasising the indispensability of holding elections to the legislature, but without actually proceeding to hold them.
More talk and less action
In January, the election commissioner pledged that polls in J&K are due and would be held after taking the weather and security concerns into account. The following month, Union home minister Amit Shah said that “the voter list is about to be finalised. After that the Election Commission of India (ECI) will take a call on holding polls.”
In March, chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar acknowledged that “there is a vacuum in the Union Territory which needs to be filled”, and said that the qualifying date for the revision of electoral rolls for the UT was to precede the national-level special summary revision (SSR) – as if to convey the seriousness on the government’s part to restore democracy in J&K.
In April, the Commission extended the date for filing claims and objections on SSR, and a month later, the Divisional Commissioner of Kashmir was holding meetings to “review the progress achieved”. In July, Lt Governor of J&K Manoj Sinha appointed Braj Raj Sharma, retired IAS officer, as the state election commissioner. Yet another intent of good faith, perhaps? In September, Sinha went on to claim that if elections were held now, “Eighty percent of the people will vote and favour the prevailing system here.”
And yet despite the Union government in its submission in the Supreme Court in August, which was hearing the Article 370 case, saying that polls can be held ‘any time now’, it refused to set a time frame.
Ultimately, it took the Supreme Court to finalise September 2024 as the deadline for holding the assembly polls. So one might genuinely ask, what role was the government playing all along, except for prevaricating over the issue of holding elections?
Mother of ironies
Another bitter irony of 2023 was the J&K Raj Bhawan commemorating West Bengal Statehood Day in June even as J&K’s own statehood remains forfeited.
This was also the year when people started to realise the adverse ways in which the legal changes to J&K’s status enacted pursuant to the loss of Article 370 in August 2019 were going to affect them. In January this year, the government sent bulldozers fanning out across many parts of the UT to raze the properties it claimed have been built on the “encroached” State land. In one case, a petitioner had moved the JK and Ladakh high court arguing that he could get his 2,000 square feet of proprietary land exchanged in lieu of the kahcharai (grazing) land that he was accused of holding “illegally”.
Technically, he was right because the laws that existed in J&K before 2019 permitted for such an exchange. But judges had to set his petition aside as Section 133(2) of the Jammu and Kashmir Land Revenue Act, 1996 which legitimised such allowances no longer existed in its previous form, thereby making the petitioner as well as thousands of other “encroachers” vulnerable to expulsion, with their properties liable to be bulldozed.
Much ado about nothing
While the government was showcasing the mounting tourist numbers as evidence of normalcy and economic growth, it simultaneously slashed the duties on apple imports from the US and Iran. With the apple yield of 17 lakhs metric tonnes, J&K accounts for 75% of India’s total apple production. And for all the talk of it being a boon for J&K’s economy, tourism contributes only 6% to the UT’s GDP.
By contrast, it is the agriculture, trade and allied sectors that are the major drivers of growth in Kashmir. But with the government’s decision to waive surcharges of imported apples, it is likely to impact the Kashmiri growers adversely.
Dispensing justice selectively
Such ironies have abounded in 2023. Take for example the decision of the State Investigation Agency (SIA), a nodal unit for the National Investigation Agency in J&K, to trace out the perpetrators involved in the militancy incidents taking place during the 1990s. As part of the whole campaign, the SIA also reopened the case of Retired Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo, who was among the first to be killed at the onset of insurgency in 1989. The SIA also arrested two absconding militants 33 years later who were involved in the assassination of Kashmiri religious leader Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq.
Of course, nothing happens in Kashmir without it being part of the overall optics. The government has been asserting time and again that it wants to put the history of insurgency behind and start a new chapter. But the reality is perhaps that it can only go so far in this attempt. As 66-year-old Abdul Rashid Baba, brother of one of the 67 persons who died in the massacre following Mirwaiz’s killing, told one journalist,”What about justice for us?”
Or think about the case of Army Major Bhoopendera Singh of 62 Rashtriya Rifles (RR) whose sentence was suspended by the Armed Forces Tribunal that also granted him bail. Singh was involved in extra-judicial killings (locally called fake encounters) in Ashimpora Shopian.
With incidents like these occurring every now and then, the government exposes itself to the allegations of being insincere and duplicitous, especially when it’s making vaunted claims of being committed towards justice.
Media and civil freedoms
In terms of civil freedoms, the year 2023 was hardly dissimilar to previous years. The arrest of journalist and editor Irfan Mehraj brought into sharp focus what critics have called the appalling press freedom conditions in J&K.
This year, the J&K administration also stepped up the passport policing of journalists and politicians who tend to be critical of its policies.
In August, Middle East Eye reported that at least seven Kashmiris living overseas have had their passports suspended on the grounds that they are a threat to national security.
Separately, a special NIA court in Srinagar denied permission to Waheed ur Rehman Para, a political leader from South Kashmir’s Pulwama region, from travelling to the United States to attend the Yale Peace Fellowship.
But when some of these decisions reached the JK&L high court, the State’s grounds for withholding or suspending passports were set aside as in the case of Mehbooba Mufti’s octogenarian mother, Gulshan Nazir where the judges promptly ordered that her passport be released while criticising the authorities for acting as a “mouthpiece of CID”.
In July, the authorities at Kashmir University removed works of authors such as Agha Shahid Ali and Basharat Peer from the curriculum, in yet another attempt to suppress dissenting views inside institutions of learning.
In August, the Kashmir Walla website and its social media handles were blocked on the instructions of the government. Separately, the editors of the publication were served eviction notices, forcing them to relinquish the office.
If there was any good news pertaining to press freedom in 2023, it was the bail order served to three incarcerated Kashmiri journalists. But that intervention came from the judiciary.
Militancy on decline but dangers remain
As far as the militancy is concerned, it has been a pretty peaceful year in the Kashmir Valley. The hit-and-run killings that had spiked over the last few years came down, if not getting completely eradicated. The J&K Police data shared with The Wire indicates a precipitous decline of local recruitment which stands out as one of the most significant developments of 2023. The local recruitment has come down from 122 in 2020, 155 in 2021, 119 in 2022 and 22 in 2023. 172 militants were killed in J&K last year, while this year the number stands at 113.
But this aspect has gone hand-in-hand with increasing foreign participation. As General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) Northern Command Lieutenant General Upendra Dwivedi said in September, for the first time since the insurgency began, the “number of foreign terrorists killed is four-times higher than local terrorists”.
It is this shifting dynamic which is resulting in the Jammu region becoming the new epicentre of violence in J&K. This year, at least 34 soldiers have died in various militant attacks in J&K of which 20 alone were killed in the two districts of Rajouri and Poonch, accounting for more than 50% of casualties among the armed forces in J&K.
It was perhaps for this reason why General Officer Commanding of Chinar Corps (GOC) Lieutenant General A.D.S. Aujla remarked that the time was not yet ripe for the Army to move to barracks in J&K, in a sharp contrast to the BJP government’s discourse around normalcy.
In October, the Indian Express reported that the “new spurt in terror incidents in J&K, where infiltration peaks before the onset of winter, has prompted security forces to reassess their counter-terror strategy in the Union Territory, and plans to redistribute Rashtriya Rifles (RR) units might not be implemented immediately”.
The year 2023 thus offers a subtle reminder that the BJP continues to uphold its most cherished mantra when it comes to governing J&K – running with the hares and hunting with the hounds.
Shakir Mir is a Srinagar-based journalist. He tweets at @shakirmir.
