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J&K:
The politics of illusion
Praveen
Swami
"When
you see Tom Sawyer immediately after Mozart or you enter the case of
The Planet of the Apes after having witnessed the Sermon on the
Mount with Jesus and the Apostles", wrote Umberto Eco after a
visit to a waxworks museum in the United States of America,
"the logical distinction between the Real World and Possible
Worlds is definitely undermined."
The Real began intruding on the Possible in the hours before Mufti
Mohammad Sayeed became Jammu and Kashmir's (J&K) new Chief
Minister. A day earlier, his daughter Rubaiya Sayeed had returned to
Srinagar to witness the swearing-in. Shaukat Bakshi, the terrorist
who had kidnapped her in 1989, also returned to his home, after
being released on bail after twelve years. Three hours before the
swearing in, members of one of the same terrorist groups with whom
he has promised negotiations fired rifle grenades at his home. The
attack came after Al Umar chief Mushtaq Zargar, released from jail
in December 1999 in return for the safety of the hostages on board
Indian Airlines flight IC814, warned the People's Democratic Party (PDP)
against entering into an alliance with the Congress (I). A little
later, Sikandar Khan, a Congress candidate who narrowly lost the
Karnah Assembly seat, was shot dead along with his security guards
while shopping in a Srinagar market. The new Jammu and Kashmir seems
as depressingly surreal as the old.
All this did little to puncture the curious political reverie in
Srinagar, perhaps because the circumstances of the new government's
birth have done not a little to affirm faith that the impossible can
be willed into existence. Until October 21, the Congress' mediator
with the PDP, former Union Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, had
failed to arrive at even a minimum understanding with Sayeed. Singh
even offered Sayeed a rotating Chief Minister deal, which, sources
say, was rejected out of hand. On his return to New Delhi, the
Congress began to consider staking a claim to power on its own.
Senior Congress leaders in Srinagar believed they would be able to
manage a majority with the aid of PDP rebels. As the prospect of a
split in the PDP accelerated, Sayeed backed down from his hardline
stand, and flew to New Delhi for talks with Congress President Sonia
Gandhi on October 25.
Sayeed was now willing to accept Manmohan Singh's rotating Chief
Minister plan, but with key caveats. First, the PDP would have the
first shot at the top job. Second, it would hold it for all of three
years, half the length of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly's tenure.
Congress Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) found both proposals
unacceptable, but Gandhi thought it best to override the state
party. Senior Congress leaders, particularly Arjun Singh, persuaded
her that a Congress-led government would end in disaster. A
fractious alliance, with only tenuous support from maverick figures
like Panther's Party leader Bhim Singh, would be too busy fighting
internal fires to actually get on with governance. Gandhi also held
broad consultations with several intellectuals, who insisted that
blocking Sayeed's rise to power would fuel popular alienation in
Kashmir. Speaking to journalists after the deal with the PDP was
inked on October 26, Gandhi made this concern explicit: the
decision, she said, was made "in the larger interests of the
people of the Valley".
Outraged Congress and Independent MLAs responded with unprecedented
public protests, and threatened to boycott the swearing-in. The
Congress MLA from Uri, Taj Mohiuddin, described Gandhi's decision as
"a betrayal". A group of fourteen MLAs held a series of
meetings through October 27, to consider their course of action. The
three-year term given to Sayeed was unacceptable, they argued, since
there were no guarantees he would not bring the government down
after that time. In any case, the Valley-based MLAs in the group of
fourteen said, the decision to accept Sayeed's claims to represent
the Valley was political suicide.
Sonia Gandhi's notion of the 'larger interest of the Valley' needs
examination, since it is widely shared by much of New Delhi's
intelligentsia. Effusive editorial writers who have greeted the rise
of the PDP as something of a latter-day resurrection might have done
well to spend a little time with a calculator and a piece of paper.
The PDP share of the 2002 vote does nothing to affirm the
proposition that it is the principal voice of the Kashmir region .
Indeed, the combined vote share of the PDP and the Congress in
Kashmir only narrowly exceeds that of the defeated National
Conference. In the north Kashmir district of Baramulla, over half of
the PDP's votes were cast in a single constituency, Gulmarg. The PDP
exceeded the vote share of the National Conference in only three of
the Valley's six districts, all in central and southern Kashmir. Two
of those districts registered below average voter turnout, and five
of the PDP's sixteen MLAs were elected in constituencies where
terrorist violence led to exceptionally poor turnout. Indeed, three
of them by less than 1,000 votes. And while the PDP's claims of
'representation' in the Valley itself are at least dubious, without
a single seat outside the Valley, it cannot even pretend to advance
any such claim in the Jammu or Ladakh regions of the State. This
cannot, of course, undermine the decisive rejection of the National
Conference in the elections. But it does show that the battle for
oppositional space has had a multi-dimensional outcome.
While the PDP's Kashmiri-chauvinist position has allowed it to gain
the office of the Chief Minister, the victory is not cost-free. It
has, most important, given a new lease of life to the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) backed Jammu State Morcha, which has been
demanding the creation of a separate state for the southern region.
The Morcha succeeded in winning just one seat - which went, not to
an RSS activist but a long-time Congress dissident who jumped ship
after being denied a ticket. But on October 28, RSS activists were
able to shut down much of Jammu in a protest strike. The Bharatiya
Janata Party, which won only a single seat in the elections, has now
started demanding that local body elections be held in the State,
hoping to cash in on regional anger. Similar regional aggression is
also evident in Kashmir. On November 1, for example, the Kashmir Bar
Association threatened to boycott court, claiming that Muslims from
the Valley were under-represented in the High Court, and demanding
that Kashmiri Muslim judges posted outside the State be brought
back.
At least one potential flashpoint is already visible in the horizon.
Jammu has for long been under-represented in the Assembly, because
of constitutional provisions that had suspended the delimitation of
constituencies until after the completion of the 2001 census. In the
last Assembly elections, approximately 78,000 registered voters in
Jammu and Ladakh were represented by each of 37 MLAs; in Kashmir,
each block of approximately 55,000 voters was represented by each of
46 MLAs. Now that a Commission has been charged with redrawing
constituency boundaries to ensure equitable representation, struggle
seems inevitable. Sayeed's demands for a Kashmiri Chief Minister,
said Bhim Singh a day before he accepted his leadership,
"substantiated the claim of the people of Jammu that the future
growth of their identity, culture and language is possible only when
they are accorded statehood." Unless the new government handles
Jammu's legitimate concerns with care, its historic contribution
might just be the tearing apart of Jammu and Kashmir along
ethnic-communal lines.
Few in the new government, sadly, are likely to have time to address
long-term problems. With the caucus of twelve independent MLAs on
whose support the government depends having decided to offer only
'issue-based' support, survival itself will be time-consuming
business. Then, the alliance will have to find acceptable ways of
implementing its 31-point Common Minimum Programme (CMP). The CMP
rests on three major pillars, all intended to bring what Mehbooba
Mufti tirelessly refers to as a "healing touch". First,
the CMP mandates the assimilation of the Special Operations Group (SOG),
alleged to be responsible for a welter of human rights abuses, into
the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Second, the alliance has said it will
terminate the use of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA),
and release alleged terrorists held for long period of time facing
trial for minor offences. Along with this, compensation to the
families of victims of terrorism is to be doubled, while the
children of terrorists who have been killed will receive State
support for their education. Finally, the CMP calls for
unconditional dialogue with terrorist groups.
At least some of these promises mean very little. The SOG is and
always has been part of the 60,000-strong Jammu and Kashmir Police,
and constitutes less than five percent of its overall strength. Its
troops and officers are drawn from the same ranks, wear the same
uniforms, earn the same pay, and report to the same superiors. As
such, its 'assimilation' seems little other than a re-branding of
the product. The end to the use of POTA and the release of prisoners
will also have marginal impact. Only an estimated 190 people are
currently charged under the Act, eight of them of Pakistani origin,
including those released on bail. Hard figures on the precise
numbers of people held on terrorism-related charges are unavailable,
but data published in October 2001 suggested the number who had not
by then secured bail was just 366. Interestingly, all of thirteen
individuals have actually been convicted of terrorist crimes since
1989 - an index both of the efficiency of the criminal justice
system, and of the kinds of redress available to victims of
terrorism in a State where 33,288 people have lost their life to
terrorism over 13 years.
The PDP-led coalition's promise to initiate dialogue with terrorist
groups is another case in point. Each Indian Prime Minister since
P.V. Narasimha Rao has offered to initiate such a dialogue; Prime
Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee actually began negotiations with the
Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM)
faction of Abdul Majid Dar during the Ramzan Ceasefire of 2000-2001.
The reason such dialogue went nowhere is a matter of record: groups
ranging from the mainstream Hizb-ul-Mujahideen to the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT)
and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)
have made it clear they will not engage in a dialogue until India
commits itself to final status negotiations with Pakistan.
Pakistan's military establishment sees continued violence as an
instrument to secure concessions from India - concessions of a scale
no government in India can make. Sayeed may succeed, as others have
done in the past, in beginning a dialogue with secondary terrorist
groups, but such initiatives have had little concrete impact before.
Nor has the PDP made clear just what it intends to negotiate, since
India-Pakistan issues are well outside its remit.
What is perhaps most disturbing about the CMP is that it appears to
have no real vision of what political perspective its authors have
for J&K. As the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M)
recently pointed out, the document contains not a single reference
to greater federal autonomy for the State. Nor is there evidence
that the new government has any real conceptual framework for
addressing violence. Speaking in New Delhi after the PDP-Congress
alliance was formalised, Arjun Singh said the alliance drew on his
experience in Punjab, where terrorism was solved by dealing with
"each and every small thing". He perhaps forgets the
record. Singh's own signal contribution to Punjab was installing the
S.S. Barnala-led ministry, whose indiscriminate release of jailed
terrorists and winding-down of police operations laid the
foundations for five more years of bloodshed. Six months on,
Governor Siddharth Shankar Ray and Director-General of Police Julio
Ribeiro were brought in and assigned the impossible task of fighting
terrorism without the cooperation of the State government. When
terrorism was finally stamped out, not one of the issues Singh had
privileged, from the status of Chandigarh to the sharing of river
waters, had been resolved.
Back in J&K, in May 1990, three young men walked into the home
of Srinagar religious leader Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq, and shot him
dead in his study. The leader of the hit squad, Mohammad Abdullah
Bangroo, was shot dead in an encounter less than a month later. Both
their bodies rest today in a graveyard near the Idgah in downtown
Srinagar, separated by just a few dozen metres. Both victim and
assassin are revered as martyrs; martyrs, moreover, for the very
same cause. The People's Democratic Party is now in power having
marketed itself as a representative of the same cause. Now, it needs
to work out just what the cause might be.
By
arrangement with Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi
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