Badri Raina 
I may be excused to say with Hamlet, “bless my prophetic soul”.
In more than one article, I have sought to caution Kashmiris and those who care about democracy in Kashmir that the idea of granting full statehood back to Kashmiris is not uppermost in the ruling mind.
The latest caution I sounded was in my column of June 17, 2024.
On the question of holding elections to a prospective assembly, the Modi government may have little option but to obey the Supreme Court injunction that the exercise be concluded by September 30.
However, do not be surprised if an argument is again in preparation to tell the top court that the “situation is not conducive” for elections. The sudden uptick in militant attacks that have taken the lives of nearly 10 Indian soldiers in the past month or s may come in handy for such a claim.
But what was clear to many from the start, namely, August 5, 2019, was that the Modi regime had not disbanded the erstwhile state only to hand it back to Kashmiri leaders at some future date.
Voting for parliamentary seats, like it or not, could not have been set aside; and, secondly, those elections were clearly allowed as a testing ground to evaluate what hold the king’s parties had developed among Kashmiris.
The Lok Sabha results from Jammu and Kashmir have been distressing to the ruling BJP.
Not only did it not muster the courage to float its candidates in the valley seats, its proxies who had occupied so much media space through the last five years came a cropper, losing their deposits.
The wretchedly persistent National Conference ran away with two of the three seats in the valley, deleterious delimitation exercises notwithstanding, while the third went to a regularly radical gentleman who languishes in jail.
Thus, left to its own devices, the Modi regime would rather not hold elections to the prospective assembly, but may have to, given its comeuppance in the Lok Sabha elections, and the difficulty it will face in warding off the top court injunctions in the new weakened scenario.
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Knowing that such elections may have become a necessity, however distasteful and unwanted, the all pervasive Union Home Ministry has preempted the prerogatives of a prospective Assembly by amending the Jammu & Kashmir Reorganisation Act of 2019, inscribing further powers to its nominee, the Lieutenant Governor, bearing on control over police services, transfer/posting of bureaucrats, including revenue officers down to the tehsildar level etc.
Thus, as predicted by this writer, it is only, at best, a Delhi model of a state that the Modi dispensation has in mind for Jammu and Kashmir.
No nightmare is more scary for the BJP than the prospect of an electoral majority for the INDIA alliance, chiefly the National Conference, and then the allocation of all constitutionally mandated powers of federal governance to such a dispensation.
All other things having failed – demographic change, delimitation gimmickry, electoral muscle etc. The last thing left to the Modi government is to ride executively rough-shod over Kashmiris, and keep them safe from governing themselves. And, the red-cross knight to make that possible can now only be a lieutenant governor who makes sure that the will of the people as represented in a new Assembly is at every point made subservient to the fiat of the unelected point man at the top of the executive.
What is to be done?
Through the entire period spanning from the abrogation of the erstwhile “special status”, Kashmiris have sought to follow the legal route to seek reversal of things done to them.
To their admirable credit, they have desisted from either taking to violence or instigating violent resistance.
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But, surely, with the prospects that loom large before them, perhaps it is time for Kashmiris in both provinces to exercise their constitutional right to peaceful mass protest.
Did not some stalwarts of our freedom movement, and heroes of people’s struggles against authoritarian lurches of the state say that when parliament and government betray the just constitutional prerogatives of “we the people”, the street must speak?
Once a Delhi-style statehood is planted on Jammu and Kashmir, it may never come to be lifted.
In that context, it has been encouraging to hear erstwhile king’s party spokespersons, now disenchanted by the elections and new governmental moves, say that the Union government is betraying Kashmiri democratic and constitutional rights, and that this must be resisted by all and sundry.
Also, can those who are busy lambasting the Emergency of the mid-seventies justly fail to understand how Kashmiris of all hues see the developing situation?
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.