Prem Shankar Jha

Why Narendra Modi Fears the AAP’s Delhi Model

With a focus on grassroots empowerment, transparency, and prioritising the needs of the poor, the AAP challenges the entrenched top-down system that has long dominated Indian politics.

Manish Sisodia at a Delhi government school. Photo: Facebook

In an unprecedented move on December 26, two departments of the government of Delhi – the women and child development, and health departments – sent out notices warning the public not to register for the “Mahila Samman” and “Sanjeevani” schemes, two schemes announced by Delhi’s elected Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government. The first promised a monthly cash transfer of Rs 1,000 to the accounts of allowances for women, and the second free health care for seniors.

In their public notices, these departments called the two schemes “non-existent” because no such schemes had been notified by the Delhi government. Notification of a scheme announced by an elected government is normally a routine matter. In this case, the subjects fell far outside the limitations prescribed in Article 239A of the Constitution, which reserves only three subjects under the jurisdiction of the central government in the union territories of Pondicherry and Delhi – police, law and order, and land.

Why, then, did the two departments insist on a public notification first? The answer is to be found in the unrelenting, no-holds-barred war that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have been waging against the AAP ever since its inception and capture of the national capital territory.

Why is Modi targeting the AAP?

These notices have, however, served a useful purpose, for they have highlighted the fear that the AAP is inspiring in the greatest tyrant that has governed India since the death of Aurangzeb. That V.C. Saxena, the lieutenant governor of Delhi who is perfectly aware of his duties under the Constitution, is willing to violate Article 239A at Modi’s behest, is a measure of the fear that this prime minister inspired in the officials who have the misfortune to serve the Delhi administration.

Why is Modi going to such extreme lengths – willing even to insult the Constitution – to crush one of the smallest national parties in the country?

The answer is an almost feline awareness of what this tiny party stands for; it is the very opposite of what the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is striving to create – an authoritarian government that rules its subjects from the top.

AAP’s vision: Trickle-up, not trickle-down

Modi’s government did not create ruling from the top. This was enshrined in the Government of India Act of 1935. Regrettably, the Constituent Assembly chose to use this Act as the base upon which to create the Constitution. As a result, nearly all the immunities from prosecution enjoyed by civil servants and the police under the British were kept intact.

When the Constitution did not create a legal and justiciable system for financing central and state elections, the criminalisation of politics became complete. Since government sanctions were necessary to implement the decisions of these criminalised legislatures, the corruption of the bureaucracy and police followed closely on the heels of the criminalisation of the legislature.

Over the past 75 years, these initial mistakes have created an inegalitarian, top-down, corrupt and criminalised political system, masquerading as a democracy. That is the political system that Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP is fighting to not merely defeat but eradicate.

It is the AAP’s commitment to create a clean political and administrative system that prioritises the needs of the poor that people have been welcoming in ever larger numbers. This has been demonstrated by the rapid rise of the party in Delhi, Punjab and Surat, in the heart of Modi’s citadel in Gujarat, within 12 years of the party’s inception.

What is Kejriwal trying to do that is evoking such an electrifying response from the people? It is his party’s unswerving belief that good governance must begin with meeting the needs of the poor. Prosperity needs not to trickle down from above, but to seep up from the poor till it palpably improves the lives of the rich.

It is the AAP’s unswerving adherence to this conviction in the face of every conceivable obstacle thrown in its way that explains the party’s meteoric rise from an idea to a ruling party in two states in a mere 12 years. The party’s rapid rise shows how desperately the poor of India have been yearning for this.

The AAP owes its rise to a guiding philosophy that Jasmine Shah, a senior member of the party, has described in a book titled The Delhi Model: A Bold New Road Map to Building a Developed India.

Kejriwal’s first act upon coming to power in 2013 was to set up a helpline for complaints on corruption that the public could convey to the government. That had to be suspended within days because 90% of the complaints it was receiving were against the Delhi police, over whom the state government had no control. When he set it up again upon his return to power in 2015, it took the Modi government only three months to send in the Delhi police, seize the building of Delhi’s anti-corruption bureau and confiscate all its files.

Transforming education in Delhi

But as Modi was soon to find out, Kejriwal had far more ambitious plans for Delhi. Within days, the new government increased the state’s education budget by 45% – taking it to a quarter of the government’s entire spending – and began a teacher training programme, selecting bright teachers from all the government schools, bringing in specialists from abroad to train them and sending the best of them for further educational qualifications to universities abroad.

Kejriwal’s reason for giving education the highest priority was that “if good education is provided to every child in the country, they can eradicate poverty in their families within one generation.” This is the very essence of the difference between the Delhi model of governance, as it has come to be called, and the traditional model of school and college education. The latter is designed for recruiters and managers to serve    a “trickle down” model of economic growth. In this model – a quintessential product of private enterprise-led economic development – the rich get the cream while the poor get only the dregs.

In his book, Shah gives a riveting description of the impact that Delhi’s “trickle up” model of governance has made. In the last decade, it has built 22,700 classrooms in government schools. For comparison, 24,700 classrooms had been built in the previous 70 years. The impact of its relentless emphasis on education for the poor has not taken long to become visible. Since 2016, more than 200,000 students have left Delhi’s private schools to join government schools. And since 2016, class 12 students from these schools have performed better than those from private schools.

Addressing basic needs

There have been similar dramatic improvements in health care. The Mohalla clinic initiative has been written about extensively but the number treated is still mind-boggling – over 9 years from 2016 till end of 2024, 540 Mohalla clinics have treated 70 million patients, an average of 60,000 persons per day.

In the provision of water, sanitation and electricity, the AAP has followed a recommendation made decades ago by the World Bank, to provide a “lifeline” amount free of cost. One of its least noticed but most humane enactments has been to allow free travel to women in city buses. One of them who lives outside the city limits told this writer that it had freed 30% of her income – Rs. 3,000 a month earned from cleaning homes in the city – to pay for her children’s school fees.

Shelter is a basic right of human beings but in large cities, it is one that is obtained only by default by the poor. The AAP’s greatest achievement has been to make shelter a central feature of its policies. It has therefore laid 2,100 kms of water pipelines and allowed 20,000 litres of water per month to be provided to each family free of cost. To ensure that the water reaches its consumers, the AAP government has laid over 5,200 kms of water pipelines in unauthorised colonies, giving 99.96% of them access to it.

There are other achievements of this kind listed in the book that will take too long to describe. Among these is making 1,627 industrial units which were using coal and diesel switch to natural gas and plant almost 30,000,000 trees of which a quarter were planted in a single year, 2021.

In March 2017, the Delhi cabinet approved a 36% increase in the minimum wages of Delhi’s five million workers. The legal minimum wage in Delhi now is therefore Rs 17,494 compared to the national minimum wage of Rs 5,340 per month. To sum up the Kejriwal government’s work, it has concentrated upon building human, as against physical, capital to improve the quality of life of its people.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the AAP has become the nemesis of the BJP, the largest national political party. It is also not surprising that Kejriwal has become Modi’s personal nemesis, and that he and his closest advisors have been charged with crimes, repeatedly denied bail and kept in jail for periods of more than two years, without having found a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.

The Modi government’s animosity is, at least, understandable. But what explains the sustained hostility to the AAP in the Congress party, particularly its Delhi wing? So deep does this run that despite being in some sort of an alliance with the AAP, not one party member has felt it necessary to raise even a murmur of protest against the victimisation of its leaders. If the INDIA bloc loses a general election that it should have won, it has only itself to blame for it. For however small the AAP may be, it offers a future to which the people are able to relate. Since the days of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, no party has been able to do anything of this kind so far.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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The One Mistake Manmohan Singh Made on the Economic Front Cost Him — and the Congress — Dearly

I have often wondered why Singh went back on his initial decision to fight the 2008-9 recession in the orthodox way by lowering the interest rate. By succumbing to the RBI’s demand for higher interest rates, he allowed industrial growth rates to crash. The rest is history.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a book release event in 2018. Photo: Press Information Bureau.

In the midst of the paeans showered on Manmohan Singh after his death there has been one dissenting note. This has been struck by the Radical Socialists , a small group that is a remnant of the grand socialist movement that had dominated public discourse in large parts of the world, including India, for four decades after the Second World War.

Today, half a century after the advent of economic globalisation, its destruction of state-directed socialism in economic policies, and the near-total eclipse of the communist parties in India, this movement stands politically depleted. But their moral voice remains strong, for these are now almost the only elements of the urban intelligentsia that still care, actively, for the fate of the poor in the new, somewhat heartless, world that globalisation has created . 

In a detailed critique of Singh’s contribution to the Indian economy shared on e-mail, the Radical Socialists have said that a proper evaluation of his record can only come from the poorest of the poor of this nation (where an) overwhelmingly large majority of people are struggling with poverty, hunger and unemployment. No one, not even Narendra Modi, can disagree with this, but it is their choice of yardstick, for measuring this, that is highly questionable, for it is not the work of even the most socially conscious of Indian economists but that of the French economist Thomas Pikety, best known for his seminal book Capital in the 21st Century

Citing UN data that had been analysed by Pikety and a colleague, L. Chancel, Piketty had found that :

This is a classic example of the selective use of data to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion. Pikety and Chancel’s data tell us nothing about why this happened. 

The answer lies in the wrenching changes that the Indian economy went through in this period. India’s private industry, which had flourished during the Second World War and the first decade after independence, was severely stifled. This was due to a combination of two factors: the strangling controls imposed by the 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution, and a crippling shortage of foreign exchange. The latter was caused by the exhaustion of India’s sterling reserves, which had been built up during the second world war.

 The shift in investment from the private to the public sector, and from consumer to capital goods, that these two simultaneous developments caused not only strangled industrial growth but made industry more capital intensive. Hard on the heels of this shift came rising urban unemployment and under-employment, and consequently a drastic slowdown of improvements in the standard of living. 

Not surprisingly therefore, for more than two decades India had one of the six slowest growth rates in the world, of 3.6%. Employment growth was miserable, at less than 2% a year, and half or more of it was taking place through huge overstaffing in central, state and local government service, industry was not absorbing more than a fraction of the burgeoning youth population of the towns, let alone the villages. 

The developments in agriculture were the mirror opposite of those in industry. While employment growth in industry was being stifled by controls, agriculture was thriving. This growth was driven by – a rapid increase in cultivated land area in the 1950s, resulting from forest clearance in the Terai and other regions, and the subsequent onset of the Green Revolution in cereals, which began with wheat in the mid-1960s and rice in the mid-1970s.

The trends in real income growth identified by Piketty and Chancel were reversed only after India began to relax its regime of industrial controls in the late 1970s and 1980s. GDP growth rose to 4.5, then 5 and finally 6% in 1990, as controls on trade and manufacturing were relaxed. But since India’s strictly controlled exchange rate was too high, exports lagged further and further behind imports.

India met the deficit by borrowing abroad, increasingly relying on short-term money markets as long-term lenders became increasingly reluctant to provide further loans. The inevitable happened when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Oil prices went through the roof and India ran out of both foreign exchange and international lenders willing to bet on its future.

That was when Singh, as finance minister, managed the crisis in a way that landed him in the prime minister’s chair a decade later. His carefully phased economic liberalisation saved India from the shocks that other countries had had to endure. Growth accelerated to 7% in 1993-94, the second year of liberalisation, and remained at that level for four years. It then entered a mild five-year recession, from which India emerged in 2003-04, on the eve of Singh’s prime ministership.

Between 2004-05 and 2009-10, the economy grew at close to 8% a year, and industry and the services sector created 7 to 7.5 million jobs a year, drawing an average of 4 million workers, mostly youth, from the villages into the cities. But the honeymoon ended with the global financial crash of 2008 followed by the onset of global recession in 2009. 

Singh first fought the recession the orthodox way by forcing the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to drastically lower its prime interest rates which had been rising steadily since 2007, back down to their pre-2007 level. The result was a greater than 10% growth in industry and a continuation of close to 8% growth of GDP for two additional years. However, in March 2010, he succumbed to the RBI’s pressure. The central bank had pointed to a small increase in the inflation rate as a harbinger of things to come, and ultimately got its way.

The impact this had upon the economy was immediate and catastrophic. Industrial growth crashed from 8.2% in 2010-11 to 2.8% in 2011-12. In the next year, it rose marginally to around 4% and remained there till well after the Covid lockdown. And, if one believes the calculations of  Arvind Subramanian, once the chief economic adviser to the Modi government, real GDP growth fell to 5% or less, and stayed there throughout the Modi years till the post-Covid rebound. 

Industry was hit hardest of all. By December 2015, sky-high interest rates of 12% or more, even for blue-chip companies, had forced the abandonment of nearly all infrastructure and heavy industrial projects due to their long gestation periods. As a result the country was saddled with Rs 880,000 crore worth of “stalled” i.e abandoned projects, and 415 out of 2300 operating companies that were heavily invested in infrastructure, were not making enough profit to pay the interest on their debt. 

Nine out of India’s dozen steel plants were insolvent and some of the biggest infrastructure companies, like Jaypee and Gammon India, that had piled up debts in excess of Rs 33,000 and Rs 15,000 crore respectively, were unable to service them. As a result, Public Sector Banks (PSBs) were saddled with Rs 400,000 crore of bad debt.. 

Not surprisingly the growth of non-agricultural employment shrank to 2 million a year, forcing millions of recently employed youth back to their homes in small towns and villages. 

Being the superb politician that he is, Modi sensed that this, and not the slew of corruption scandals that had surfaced in 2012, was the Achilles’ heel of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. He, therefore, promised to create 20 million jobs a year; 42% of the voters under 30, who make up almost a third of the electorate, believed him and voted for him. This, without a doubt, was the cause of the 12% jump in the BJP’s vote, from 19% in 2009 to 31% in 2014, that brought the Modi government to power, and has now endangered the future of Indian democracy. 

In the years that have gone by since then, I have often wondered why Singh went back on his initial decision to fight the recession in the orthodox way by lowering the interest rate. The only explanation I have been able to come up with is that after allowing the private sector to borrow money from international banks in 2008, India had by then accumulated $1200 billion in external debt and was relying upon short term capital inflows into the Indian money market to meet the interest payments and repayments that came due. Even the whisper that a devaluation of the rupee was possible, let alone imminent, would cause this highly volatile capital to disappear in a matter of minutes. 

Furthermore, in sharp contrast to the debt that had accumulated till 1990, a quarter of this was private debt, taken by around two dozen large companies with immense influence in the market and the RBI. Having lived through the trauma of one near-bankruptcy in 1991, Singh did not feel that India could weather another. 

In 2012 and 2013, I wrote repeatedly in one or another of my weekly and fortnightly columns that raising interest rates was a mistake. I argued that continued high industrial growth would restore the confidence of foreign investors in the Indian economy after the initial shock and bring back foreign investors. Furthermore, I stated that failure to restore employment growth would bring down his government. However, Singh had been through one foreign exchange crisis and can’t be blamed for being cautious about triggering another one. He ultimately succumbed to the RBI’s pressure, and the rest is history.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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The Victimisation of Yasin Malik: The Role of Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, aka Latram

The government is keen to hang Malik over the Rawalpora killings but there is a strong possibility that it was Latram who planned them.

File image of Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar. Photo: Website of Jammu and Kashmir CID.

This article is the second in a two-part series on the Union government’s pursuit for the death penalty for Yasin Malik. Read the first here.

In the preceding part of this article, I had described why the “new” evidence the government claims to have obtained, that pins Yasin Malik to the killing of four airmen at Rawalpora on the outskirts of Srinagar on January 25, 1990, will not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny in any self-respecting court of law.

But if Malik and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) did not kill the airmen at Rawalpora twenty-five years ago, then who did?

Despite a decade of digging around for witnesses and sweating the accused in jails, the Central Bureau of Investigation failed to get an answer. But today, the benefit of hindsight allows us to identify one terrorist, little known by the public and the media in Kashmir at the height of the insurgency, as the mastermind, if not the actual killer of the airmen. 

This is Mushtaq Ali Zargar, better known in Kashmir as Mushtaq Latram.

Latram is almost completely unknown outside the circle of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The public got an inkling of his importance in Pakistan’s long-term plans for snatching Kashmir away from India only in 2000, more than two decades after the start of the insurgency, when the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) insisted that he had to be one of three terrorists in Indian jails who must be released if Indian Airlines’ flight IC 814 was to be allowed to return to Delhi from Kandahar.

The other two were Masood Azhar, who went on to head the Jaish-e Mohammad, and the British-born extremist, Ahmed Omer Sheikh. 

In the decade of peace that had followed the Vajpayee-Musharraf meeting in Rawalpindi in 2004, and the Musharraf-Manmohan joint statement of April 2005, Azhar had created a training centre for terrorists in the Pir Panjal region of South Kashmir. He was also the mastermind behind the Pulwama slaughter of Indian jawans in 2019.

Sheikh was a Britain-born terrorist who became a member of the extreme Islamist jihadist group Harkat-ul-Ansar, also known as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, in the 1990s.  He was arrested-in India for the part he played during the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists and jailed in 1994, where he stayed till he was exchanged for IC 814 in 2000.

After his release, he joined the Jaish-e-Mohammed and used his British education and upper-class accent to lure the Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Pearl to his kidnapping and execution in Karachi.

Latram was in the exalted company of the Jaish-e Mohammed’s top killers because, till his arrest in 1992, he had been the single-most important recruiter of killers for the ISI in Kashmir.

Pakistan’s hand in stoking the violence in Kashmir

Pakistan’s complete failure to garner any support from locals in Kashmir in the 1965 war had shown Islamabad that Kashmiris had no desire to become Pakistanis.

But Pakistan never lost its appetite for Kashmir. So when General Zia-ul-Haq, who was an ardent Islamist, came to power via a military coup in 1978, he immediately revived the attempt to seize Kashmir, but this time through “other means”.

Relying upon the religion card, Pakistan’s ISI first approached leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Kashmir, invited them to Muzaffarabad, and even introduced its leaders to Zia.

The Jamaat was willing to work towards the annexation of Kashmir by Pakistan, but the ISI soon realised that its following in Jammu and Kashmir was much too small, as it is even today. So it was left with no option but to approach the leaders of the then-nascent JKLF.

By 1983, only months after Sheikh Abdullah’s death, Kashmir had been thrown into turmoil by New Delhi’s undermining and displacement of Farooq Abdullah, and its imposition of his uncle, Gul Shah, in the chief minister’s seat. When the Gul Shah gambit came unstuck, it declared governor’s rule and sent in Jagmohan as the governor.

So disenchantment with New Delhi was running high when the ISI took some of the senior leaders of the JKLF to Muzaffarabad and Islamabad, to persuade them to revolt. But they soon found that while these were willing to accept Pakistan’s assistance, their goal was to win independence from New Delhi, and not to join Pakistan.

By the late eighties, therefore, Pakistan had been forced back on to the only remaining alternative.

This was to find impressionable young men in Jammu and Kashmir, bring them to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), give them intense indoctrination and military training, supply them with arms (sent separately), get them to launch attacks on Indian soldiers, policemen, Kashmiri Pandits and pro-India leaders of opinion in Kashmir, and allow the inevitable police response, which would involve mass arrests, crackdowns on entire villages and the use of varying degrees of coercion, to create the discontent in spreading ripples that would pave the way to a wider insurgency.

The rigged elections of 1987, and the Gawkadal massacre in 1990 came to it as Manna from Heaven.

Latram was an even earlier convert to separatism than Malik. Belonging to a middle-class family from Srinagar’s old town, he had been arrested on a petty charge and mistreated by the police in 1983 and had never gotten over it. Among the thousands who crossed over into POK to seek revenge for the betrayal of their rights in the 1987 elections, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar was one of the earliest and, as it turned out, most lethal.

In August 1988, after a falling out with Malik over the use of violence, Zargar crossed over to Pakistan through Trehgam in southern Kashmir and received training at a camp that had been organised by the Pakistan army for the JKLF1.

He came back, formed the Al Umar Mujahideen (AUM), went back to PoK for a second round of training in May 1989 and came back to form an even more violent assassins’ group within the AUM. He named it the Al Umar Commando Force and put it under a close confidant and possibly also a relative, named Shabbir Ahmed Zargar.

Together with the much more publicised (and dispensable) Hizbul Mujahideen, the AUM and the Al Umar Commando Force became Pakistan’s most valued weapons for unleashing targeted violence aimed at triggering an Indian over-reaction that would alienate Kashmiris, and to assassinate prominent Kashmiris who were prepared to discuss paths to peace with New Delhi.

Spate of kidnapping-murders, not yearning for release, made Malik order JKLF to lay down arms

Latram was one of the four men who kidnapped Rubaiya Sayeed on December 9, 1989. One of the prisoners whose release the kidnappers demanded in exchange for her release was Javed Ahmad Zargar. Zargar is a common surname in Kashmir, but he too may have been a relative of Latram or of Shabbir Ahmad Zargar. Latram was therefore almost certainly responsible for getting Javed Ahmad Zargar on the list of prisoners to be released.

Six weeks after his release, Javed Ahmad Zargar was accused by the CBI of being one of the planners, if not assassins, of the Rawalpora murders. Given the strained relations between Latram and Malik, there is a strong possibility that it was Latram, not Malik, who planned the Rawalpora killing.

Latram’s presence among the terrorists who kidnapped Sayeed could also be the reason why Malik not only accompanied the kidnappers but was willing to let her see his face. He may have joined the plot to ensure that Sayeed would not be killed even if the government did not accept the kidnappers’ demands, and shown her his face to reassure her that she would be safe. That would explain why he was the only person whom Sayeed was able to identify.

The kidnapping of Sayeed almost certainly completed the split between the JKLF and the AUM. That would explain why Malik played no part in the kidnapping of Mushir-ul-Haq, the vice chancellor of Kashmir University, his secretary Abdul Ghani Zargar, and H.L. Khera, the general manager of the Hindustan Machine Tools plant in Kashmir, all of whom were killed when the kidnappers’ ransom demand was not met.

Those murders set the mould in which violent militancy flourished for the next four years. These years saw a spate of kidnappings of children of politicians and senior civil servants. There were 169 in 1990, 290 in 1991, 281 in 1992 and 349 in 1993. All these occurred while Malik was languishing in jail.

No one has kept count of how much money the militants collected from the parents, but it undoubtedly became the bait that lured more and more disaffected and poor Kashmiri youth into the insurgency.

Malik was in jail when all this was happening. So all Kashmiris know that the JKLF played no part in these kidnappings.

The HAJY  [i.e. Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Wani, Javed Ahmad Mir, Jasin Malik] group’s initial outburst of rage had been at the rigging of the 1987 elections, and the reversal of the election victory of their candidate, Mohammad Yusuf Shah (now Salaheddin). But Malik was appalled by the spate of murders and kidnappings that followed. That, more than the yearning to be released from jail, was what made him order the JKLF to lay down its arms in 1994. He had understood within months of taking up arms in 1987 that acts of violence alone would not secure ‘Azadi’.

What is certain is that with Malik in jail and the JKLF in disarray, Latram’s AUM and Commando Force became the main killing instruments of the ISI in Kashmir. Unlike the dozen or so other militant groups that were spawned by the uprising, these did not advertise themselves. In the almost daily news reports carried by the print and television media in the 1990s, there are only occasional references to the AUM, and none to the Al Umar Commando force.

Kashmir’s police and intelligence services credited them with at least 40 murders, but apparently had no idea of Latram’s pivotal role in Pakistan’s game plan. This only became apparent to Delhi and Srinagar when the terrorists who hijacked IC 814 to Kandahar included him in the three terrorists whose release they demanded in exchange for allowing the plane to fly back to Delhi.

What is more, it had become clear even before 1990 that Pakistan was prepared to arm and train only those who espoused the goal of making Kashmir a part of Pakistan.

Hashim Qureshi, the second hijacker with Maqbool Butt of an Indian Airlines plane to Pakistan in 1971, had absolutely refused to fight for Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan and had to flee to Holland to save his life. In an article in Chattan, a celebrated Urdu magazine published from Srinagar, he had warned Kashmiris to beware of Pakistan’s enticements.

This became glaringly apparent when by mid-1990 itself, the ISI had withdrawn arms and training from around 5,000 JKLF youth who had crossed over into PoK in the wake of the Gawkadal massacre of January 21, 1990, and had created a rival tanzeem, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, out of those who were willing to make this commitment. By October, the Hizb numbered close to 1,5002.

Malik’s first act upon coming out of jail in 1994 therefore, was to order the JKLF to lay down its arms and adopt non-violent methods of agitating for independence. The JKLF paid a heavy price for following his instructions, because it became an easy prey for both the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and security forces personnel hungry for the prize money that the government was offering for the head of every slain militant.

In the next two years it lost somewhere between 100 and 300 of its cadres in the internecine three-sided war that erupted in the valley.

Despite this heavy toll, Malik stuck to his resolve. In the golden period of Vajpayee followed by Manmohan Singh in Delhi, Musharraf in Pakistan and Mufti Sayeed in Kashmir, Malik and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq became intermediaries in ironing out details of the Delhi agreement of 2005. Both made it clear to Musharraf that Kashmir wanted to retain its own identity and not become a part of Pakistan.

At a conference held at the Islamabad campus of the National University of Science and Technology, they both told an audience of Pakistan army officers bluntly that Kashmir did not wish to become a part of their country. This took place in this writer’s presence.

In 2007, Malik launched a Safar-e-Azadi – a ‘journey to freedom’ – in which he covered virtually every village in the valley, urging the people to shun violence and fight for self-determination peacefully. This was two years after Manmohan Singh and Musharraf had agreed to a four-point programme for bringing peace to Kashmir and ending the hostility between Pakistan and India, but were dilly-dallying over its details.

Malik did this to speed up the process. India and Pakistan came within an inch of success then, and again between 2012 and 2014. But Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on December 27, 2007, by terrorists widely suspected to have been employed by the ISI, and the UPA’s defeat in the 2014 election, killed both initiatives. The rest is history.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

Footnotes

1. Manoj Joshi: The Lost Rebellion, 1998.
2. Indian intelligence reports seen by the author in October 1990.

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The Controversial Pursuit of a Death Sentence for Yasin Malik

In the shadow of Kashmir’s decades-long turmoil, the case against Yasin Malik – a prominent separatist leader accused of a 1990 attack on Indian Air Force personnel – has resurfaced, raising critical questions about justice, political motives, and the rule of law.

Yasin Malik. Photo: File/Shome Basu

The high voter turnout in the September and October legislative assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir demonstrated that, despite five years of near-total political disempowerment and strict military rule, Kashmiris have not lost their faith in democracy.

However, this fragile trust could be irrevocably shattered if the Narendra Modi government follows through on its determination to execute Yasin Malik, the chief of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), for a crime that occurred 34 years ago. While few Kashmiris may actually like Malik, he commands widespread respect. Among the separatist leaders who emerged from the unrest triggered by the rigged elections of 1987, Malik has been the most steadfast advocate of self-determination through peaceful means—a stance that sets him apart in the region’s turbulent history.

The Rawalpora incident and its alleged perpetrators

The crime for which the Modi government is demanding his death is the killing of four Indian Air Force (IAF) men, and the injuring of 22 others, in an early morning assassination bid by three scooter-borne terrorists at Rawalpora, on the outskirts of Srinagar, on January 25, 1990.

At 7.30 a.m., when some 30 to 40 IAF men were waiting for the bus that would take them to work that morning, three persons on a motorcycle approached them and opened fire with Kalashnikovs, killing four and injuring 22 others.

The CBI filed a report within days of the shooting, claiming that the assassins were Malik, the chief of the JKLF, and Javed Ahmed Mir, also known as Nalka, who were armed with Kalashnikovs; and Mushtaq Ahmed Lone, who was the driver of the motorcycle, armed with a .30-bore pistol. It also identified five other members of the JKLF who had helped to hatch the conspiracy – Ali Mohammad Mir, Manzoor Ahmed Sofi alias Mustafa, Nanaji alias Saleem, Javed Ahmed Zargar and Showkat Ahmed Bakshi.

But although all of these eight have been arrested and imprisoned multiple times in the past 34 years, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) court has been forced to release them because of the lack of evidence against them. The Rawalpora case has therefore lain dormant for 34 years for want of evidence. This is the case that the Modi government is now determined to revive.

In March 2020, only months after the Modi government read down Article 370 of the Constitution and turned the entire state into a de facto occupation run directly from New Delhi, it charged Malik and six others with a string of crimes that fell under the headings of criminal conspiracy to commit murder, committing terrorist acts, raising funds for terrorist acts, conspiring to commit such acts, being members of a terrorist organisation, hatching criminal conspiracies, and advocating sedition.

Malik refused to contest the charges levelled against him, so the trial court awarded him life imprisonment and two consecutive 10-year sentences that would ensure that he remained in jail for the rest of his life. But it concluded that the crimes of which he was being convicted did not fit into the category of “the rarest of rare cases” and rejected the government’s demand for a death sentence.

Dubious accusations by Tushar Mehta

This verdict did not satisfy the Modi government because Malik’s refusal to contest the charges had robbed it of the publicity that his trial, in the full glare of the media, would have given it. So a year later, solicitor-general Tushar Mehta came back to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) trial court with the assertion that Malik had to be given the death sentence on two additional grounds. The first was his “attempt to separate one part of the country from the rest of it.” The second was his having personally participated in the attack on the IAF men at Rawalpora on January 25, 1990.

Both these actions, Mehta told the court, fell within the “rarest of rare” cases in which capital punishment was merited. Mehta also accused Malik of pleading guilty to the lesser charges levelled against him only to avoid the death penalty. He argued that allowing Malik to escape the death penalty would set a dangerous precedent, paving the way for other criminals who deserved capital punishment to avoid it and continue living.

To bolster his plea for the death sentence still further, Mehta claimed that Malik had not only committed the “sensational killing of the four IAF officers” in 1990, but “even kidnapped the daughter of then Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed” a month earlier in Srinagar. This, he castigated the court, had led to the release of four dreaded criminals “who masterminded the 26/11 attack in Mumbai in 2008.”

This was an outright lie that banked upon the ignorance of the judges hearing the case to further reinforce his case, for Mehta would have to be both deaf and blind not to know that David Headley in the USA and Tahawwur Rana in Canada, had confessed more than a dozen years earlier that they had been the mastermind and financier respectively, of the 2008 attack on Mumbai by the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, working hand in hand with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Kashmiris cannot have failed to perceive this blatant contempt both for human life and the truth. So a sentence of death upon Malik, coming on top of the sentences passed upon Maqbool Butt (1984) and Afzal Guru (2013)  will complete their alienation from India, and give Pakistan the success it has been working towards ever since the Kashmiri insurgency first broke out. If the Modi government succeeds in adding Malik to that list, it will hand Pakistan the victory it has been hankering for since 1947. So the case being built against Malik needs to be examined in the minutest possible detail to ensure that Modi does not score a self-goal for India and help Pakistan’s ISI.

Questionable testimonies and missing links

To target Malik, the Modi government has revived the almost 35-year old case against him by suddenly finding not one, but two, alleged “eyewitnesses” who are prepared to swear that they recognised Malik as one of the assassins at Rawalpora. These are Rajwar Rajeshwar Singh, who sustained four bullet injuries but survived, and Nirmal Khanna, the wife of Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna, who was killed in the attack.

Neither witness is even remotely credible. Firstly, neither of them claim that he or she actually saw Malik at the time of the shooting. Rajeshwar Singh, a corporal in the IAF in 1990, has stated that he was amongst the group of IAF personnel waiting for the staff pickup bus at Rawalpora on the outskirts of Srinagar on January 25, 1990, when he saw a man pull out a gun from under his “pheran” and open fire at them, killing four men. He was questioned by the CBI shortly afterwards but said that he had been in too much pain himself to be able to notice anything else.

In 2020, however, 34 years later, his memory had cleared. Deposing before a special TADA court in Jammu, the former IAF corporal said, “I was among the IAF personnel waiting for their bus to get to office.” Pointing to Malik, who appeared in court via video link from Tihar Jail in Delhi, he said, “He had pulled out his gun after lifting the ‘pheran’ and opened fire on us.”

The second witness was Nirmal Khanna who has, for some reason, changed her first name to Shalini. She described what happened thus: “I lived in Rawalpora and our house was just 50 yards away from the crime scene. Amid curfew, I heard sound of crackers that morning. At wit’s end, I went to the roof top and saw some army vehicles and men in uniform. I went there to see what actually had happened and spotted my husband’s briefcase with a bullet mark on it. I realised that something wrong has happened.”

“At a distance, I saw my husband lying in a pool of blood. I saw a bullet injury in his abdomen. Initially, I felt embarrassed thinking that if my husband could not endure a single bullet, then how could our borders be secured,” she added. But she claimed that Flight Lieutenant B.R. Sharma, who was with her husband at the time, told her that Malik was behind the attack. “Malik was leading the attackers and had sought directions for Natipora from my husband,” she told newspersons. “Ravi was giving him directions in a friendly manner when Malik fired the first bullet in his abdomen. Following a scuffle, Malik emptied an entire magazine on my husband’s back.”

Incongruities in witnesses’ accounts

There are profound incongruities in both these accounts that need to be explained. The CBI report stated that there were three shooters who had come on a motorcycle, but Rajeshwar Singh’s account mentioned only one assassin who was on foot when he opened fire. This may be because the shooter had first dismounted and approached the airmen with an incongruous question before pulling out his Kalashnikov from underneath his “pheran.” It could also be that, having been severely wounded himself, he was in no position to know what else was happening.

Nirmal (Shalini), on the other hand never actually saw Malik and relied entirely upon what Flight Lieutenant Sharma, who she claimed had been standing close to her husband, told her. Her account is entirely second-hand. The witness who needs to be found is, therefore, Flight Lieutenant Sharma.

Given the fervour with which the government is pursuing this case, it is surprising that the CBI has been unable to find, and get a deposition, from him. One possible reason is that he does not exist, for there is no mention of him anywhere, by anyone, in the CBI’s files or in subsequent news reports. When I tried to find him through a search of the Bharat Rakshak database of IAF officers, I got the following information: “Flight Lieutenant Baldev Raj Sharma: Service No & Branch 10852 AE(M) (Orig: ARMT); Commissioned: 03 Jun 1967;Died in Service 29 Apr 1973.” Another Baldev Raj Sharma retired as a Squadron Leader in 2002 and died in 2016 but if he was already a Flight Lieutenant in 1990, he ordinarily ought to have made the rank of Wing Commander by 2002.

Despite dying a hero’s death, Ravi Khanna’s name was somehow not included in the National War Memorial for Indian soldiers killed in combat. Shalini (aka Nirmal) Khanna spoke in detail to Open magazine in two stories about this exclusion, and about what she saw in the immediate aftermath of the January 25, 1990 incident. Her accounts were carried on September 12, 2019 and October 23, 2019. The first story appears to have been based on the reporter’s earlier conversations with her, before the trial began that day, where she mentioned her husband’s exclusion from the War Memorial but did not say anything about Flt Lt B.R. Sharma identifying her husband’s killer as Malik. The second story, by the same reporter, drew on her testimony at the trial. On October 6, the government rectified its “mistake” in omitting Squadron Leader Khanna from the war memorial and had his name duly engraved.

Either way, the identity of Flight Lieutenant B.R. Sharma, present or retired, circa 1990, is not clear, nor is it apparent why he ever came forward with his testimony to the authorities at the time or subsequently.

There are two other purely situational reasons for regarding the identification of Malik at Rawalpora by anyone as worthless. The first is that, on January 25, the shooting took place at 7.30 am. But the sun rose in Srinagar at 7.32 am on January 25 so it took place in the pre-dawn twilight, when the landscape is still fairly dark. To get a good look at any person in that pre-dawn light, one would have to be only a few metres away. But Rajeshwar Singh was not close enough to do so, and B.R. Sharma’s very existence is in doubt.

The second is that the minimum temperature anywhere in the world is reached at dawn just before the sun rises. In Srinagar, this minimum is between minus 3 and minus 5 degrees Celsius throughout January. In such bitterly cold weather, is it conceivable that anyone would not have his or her face covered by a heavy muffler while riding on a motorcycle? So for his face to have been seen, Malik would have had to remove his muffler for some reason, and risk being seen.

The inescapable truth is that, for the assassins, it would have been essential to keep their faces covered by thick mufflers not only to avoid recognition and identification but simply to stay warm. So there is no way in which either Rajeshwar Singh or B.R. Sharma, if he exists, could have seen the face of the person who killed Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna.

The final flaw in the case Mehta is trying to build is the way Malik has been “recognised.” Every police force in the world knows that visual recognition is a highly subjective act. The human eye is not a camera. In virtually every situation, people see what they are prepared, or want, to see. That is why police procedures for ensuring that a visual recognition will stand the test of cross examination are elaborate and rigidly specified.

The most frequently used way is to line up a group of persons with similar characteristics, make them turn, bend or speak as required by the witness, and ask them to identify the culprit. A second-best procedure is to show the witness a set of photographs of persons and do the same. But it is apparent from all that has been reported or presented in court that the prosecution has used neither of these methods to recognise Malik. Instead, it seems that the NIA has not required a visual recognition at all, and has relied solely upon “confessions” extracted from other prisoners by the police, or on photographs of Malik that it has shown to witnesses, and asked them whether this is the man they saw.

Neither of these procedures can stand a moment’s examination in a court of law. This is especially true of Malik, whose face has appeared a hundred or more times in newspapers, TV news channels and the internet, so he would be instantly recognisable to the witnesses, but for the wrong reason.

Note: This article was edited at 1625 IST to add references to Nirmal Khanna’s comments in OPEN magazine in September and October 2019.

This is the first of a two-part series on the trial of Yasin Malik.

Prem Shankar Jha is the author of Kashmir 1947–The Origins of a Dispute and a former media adviser to former Prime Minister V.P Singh.

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Those Speaking of Kashmir as an Independent State Err in Conflating Freedom With Independence

Freedom is a birthright of individuals, and families. It has no territorial connotation and presupposes democracy. Independence, on the other hand, relates not to control over our lives, but to control over territory. 

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Sometime in October, I became aware that the Oxford Union was holding a debate on the motion ‘This House Believes That Kashmir Should Be An Independent State’. What had brought it to my attention was a refusal by Vivek Agnihotri, the maker of the film Kashmir Filesthat he had put up on the internet. Agnihotri was within his rights to refuse, but the tone of his reply, which was belligerent and defensive, was an implicit admission of defeat. The Union had then asked a second speaker from India, a member of the pro-BJP ‘Chanakya Forum’, who had apparently first accepted and then withdrawn from the debate. 

Knowing that refusal to engage in a debate is an implicit acceptance of defeat, I volunteered to join the debate to oppose the motion. My offer was immediately accepted. The Oxford Union paid neither my air fare to England, nor my hotel bill at Oxford. Both were paid by me, because I felt that my country needed to be defended against allegations made by organisations sponsored by the very country that had turned Kashmir from a little bit of heaven on earth into the first circle of hell. 

The following is the full text of my speech, slightly edited for style and clarity, given at the Oxford Union on November 14, 2024 on the motion, ‘This house believes that Kashmir should be an independent state.’

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Those who have spoken in favour of the motion have talked about independence for only the Indian part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. I am sure this house will agree that whatever we decide, whatever solution we recommend, should apply to the whole of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, because it was the whole of this state that had acceded to India. I see that none of them have proposed independence for their part of the Kashmir state. My response will therefore be confined to the Indian part of Jammu and Kashmir. I will leave it to the House, to judge its relevance for ‘Azad’ [i.e. Pakistan-occupied] Kashmir.

It is my belief that the people of Kashmir are entitled to freedom. But Independence, more specifically the creation of an independent state, will not give them the freedom they desire and is their right. On the contrary it could lead to a different, and worse, form of servitude. 

Let me illustrate this by highlighting the difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘independence.’

The demand for freedom is a demand for control over our lives – over how we wish to live, the freedoms we wish to enjoy, and whom we wish to worship. It is a personal demand and the desire for it is as old as time. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt in the 13th century BC to make them free to live as they wanted to. Slaves in America pined for freedom not to return to Africa but to acquire the rights that free American men and women enjoyed. 

Freedom is a birthright of individuals, and families. It has no territorial connotation. Independence, on the other hand, relates not to control over our lives, but to control over territory. 

The motion we are debating implicitly assumes that independent statehood is a necessary requirement for freedom. This idea is not only simplistic but, in the chaotic world that is being created by the convergence of decolonisation with economic globalisation, it is rapidly becoming the opposite of the truth. 

The proof is all around us. For the people of most of the new nations of the world, independent statehood has led not to freedom, but to one or other form of servitude. When I speak of servitude I am referring not only to their country’s economic servitude to other larger nations, which is pervasive but does not impinge directly upon their everyday lives. I am speaking of the servitude that dominant economic, linguistic, religious, or tribal majorities in these countries have imposed upon their people, and especially minorities. 

To understand the profound misgivings that the proposal for creating an independent state of Kashmir arouses in me you only need to remember the tribal war, stoked by copper mining conglomerates using hired European mercenaries, that broke out after independence was achieved by the former Belgian Congo; or the civil war that broke out in Angola immediately after it gained its independence from Portugal, or the Hutu massacre of the Watutsis in Rwanda. In none of these countries did independence bring freedom to their people. Instead, it brought poverty, and death. 

The only true guarantee of freedom within a nation is a vigorous democracy. 

All the members of the United Nations are independent countries. But how many are democracies, even in name? Here are a few observations:

The UN began with 51 charter members. By 1958, the number had risen to 82. By 2011 its membership had risen to the present 193 countries. Nearly all the post-colonial members started out as democracies. But how many were able to sustain it? The answer is that in 2010, only five of the 61 states that joined the UN between 1958 and 1975 had been able to do so. 

Very few in the following wave of decolonised countries have succeeded in staying democratic. When I asked on Google how many of the present members of the UN are democracies the answer I got was: “There isn’t much information about how many UN member states are democracies, but here’s some related information…”

The United Nations requires only sovereignty, not democracy as a precondition for membership. How low democracy stands in its concerns can be judged by a finding published by Ideas International, an intergovernmental organisation that supports democracy worldwide, on September 26 this year. It estimated that democracy had ranked 27th in the issues discussed that the UN between 2015 and 2023! 

So let me repeat once again: Independence is not a prerequisite even for peace, let alone freedom. On the contrary, far too often in the past three-quarters of a century, it has become a prelude to tyranny and genocide. There is one going on even as I speak. 

Then why do we keep conflating freedom with independence? 

The answer is that our minds have been moulded into this belief by the era of the nation state in which we were born, and are still living. Nation states require clearly defined territories over which their governments have total control. They are not natural entities, but have been created by a ruthless suppression of feudal forms of rule, through war.

The main driver of this change has been the inexorable expansion of markets which has been driven by advances in technology. These have steadily increased the minimum size of the market needed for their efficient use, from the city states of the 15th century, to the nation states of the 18th to 20th centuries, to the global market of today.

Nation states have required protected markets, in which infant industries can develop free from the threat of competition. That has required them to create sharply defined frontiers, to restrict, if not ban the import of foreign products, and create barriers to the entry of foreign labour. The capacity to create and maintain these protective walls, has therefore become the yardstick of freedom. 

Today, despite the fact that globalisation has begun to destroy these protective walls, the identification of freedom with territorial sovereignty continues to dominate our minds. We have therefore forgotten how violent the creation of nation states has actually been. In country after country throughout Europe, it has subordinated regional languages, dialects and customs to a single “national” language. 

Age-old cultural practices, and even religions, have been forcibly homogenised and those who have resisted this, have been identified as irredeemably alien and been ‘ethnically cleansed’. I would therefore like to ask the house about the kind of independent state they would like Kashmir to become.

What do Kashmiris really want even after 14 years of police rule?

Despite 34 years of interaction with Kashmiris from every walk of life, I do not feel qualified to give any definitive answer to this question. As I have pointed out earlier, it certainly isn’t the kind of independence Kashmiris in Indian Kashmir want. 

This was made abundantly clear by two opinion polls carried out in Jammu and Kashmir, by MORI [editor’s note: now known as Ipsos] and Gallup, Europe and the US’s most respected polling agencies. 

The MORI poll of 2004 was commissioned by a British organisation headed by Lord Avebury, called the Friends of Kashmir. I think to their surprise it showed that almost no one in any part of Indian Kashmir wanted the state, or any part of it, to merge with Pakistan. 61% of those polled said they felt they would be better off politically and economically as Indian citizens. Only 6% said the same about Pakistani citizenship. 33% said they “did not know”. 

Its other, more significant, finding was that 81% the respondents in Jammu and Kashmir wanted ‘the unique cultural identity of Kashmir,’ i.e its Kashmiriyat, to be preserved in any long-term solution’. Even In Srinagar, the epicentre of the Kashmiri uprising, 76% were of this view. 

The core of Kashmiriyat is its form of Sufi Islam. There are five variants of this in Kashmir: the Naqshbandi, the Qadri, the Suhrawardi, the Kubrawi and the Rishi. None of these come even close to the brand of Sunni-ism advocated by the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is now the form of Islam encouraged in Pakistan. 

Sufism is derived from Sunni Islam, but it came to India from Iran and not Arabia. It is therefore not only different in important respects but is intermixed with practices adopted from Hinduism, to make the conversion of Hindus easier. 

Since its first abortive attempt to annex Kashmir through an invasion in 1965, Pakistan has spared no effort to annex Indian Kashmir by other means. These have been the source of the misunderstanding and distrust of Kashmiriyat in India, especially but not only, by the present government.

 In the 2004 MORI poll the respondents cited their goals as follows 

  • 86% wanted free and fair elections to elect the people’s representatives; 
  • 87% wanted direct consultation between the Indian government and the people of Kashmir; 
  • 86% wanted an end to militant violence in the region ;
  • 88 % wanted the government to stop the infiltration of militants from Pakistan, across the Line of Control. 
  • Finally, and not at all surprisingly, 93% of those polled wanted economic development of the region to provide more job opportunities and reduce poverty. 

The MORI poll’s results came as a shock to its promoters, so a second poll, with a larger sample size was organised in 2009-10 under the auspices of Chatham House, Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. Its results were very similar to those of the MORI poll of 2004. But for Indians its most welcome finding was that in the four most militancy affected districts of Kashmir valley in India only 2.5 to 7.5% said they preferred becoming citizens of Pakistan. 

According to the poll, the vast majority of those polled wanted ‘Independence’. But the polling was not done in English. The respondents would have used the word ‘azadi’. But azadi and its companion demands, “khud mukhtari“ and “nizam-e Mustafa,” do not have the connotations that the English word ‘independence’ has. Azaadi and khud mukhtari are demands for the right to make one’s own decisions and choose one’s way of life. These could be for oneself, one’s family, tribe, religious group or nation. Nizam-e Mustafa is the right to live by “the order of the Chosen One” – in the case of Muslims, by the dictates of the Prophet. 

All three are expressions of the way people wish to live. They are what the late professor Isaiah Berlin of Oxford University defined in his celebrated essay on Two Concepts of Liberty, as Positive freedoms, i.e the freedom to control oneself, to act rationally and choose responsibly. As the 2004 MORI poll showed, none of these were demands for the separation of Kashmir from the rest of India.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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The Modi-Shah Game in Kashmir Is to Split Opposition Vote and Pave Way for BJP to Form Government

The only way for the NC-Congress alliance to ensure the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them that, no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government.

File image of Modi and Shah. In the background is an image uploaded by the EC on X, of voters in Anantnag.

Kashmir has one chance to win back the autonomy that it had enjoyed under Article 370 of the constitution. With the first phase of voting for the assembly polls over, it is apparent that its main political parties are throwing this chance away. The Bharatiya Janata Party strategists have known from the very beginning, that they will not get a single seat in Kashmir, and that solid support for the party exists only in a part of Jammu. As a result, it does not have the faintest chance of winning an absolute majority of the Union Territory’s 90 assembly seats. Kashmiris therefore have a real chance – possibly their last – of winning back the autonomy they lost after Modi read down Article 370.

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are fully aware of this. That is why, from the very beginning, their aim has been to break the Kashmiri vote into pieces, use the BJP’s almost guaranteed 25-seat block of seats in Jammu to emerge as the largest single party, and claim the right to form the government of Jammu and Kashmir. Once the BJP has secured that right, it will seduce, buy, or coerce a sufficient number of independents and smaller parties in Kashmir, using the Public Safety Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, and a host of ancillary laws, to seduce or compel a sufficient number successful individuals and small parties to join it, till it has a majority in the J&K assembly. 

If the BJP succeeds, it will have five full years to destroy Kashmiriyat – that unique, syncretic blend of Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism, that Sheikh Abdullah and the Maharaja had been determined to protect when they refused to accede to Pakistan but asked for the safeguards (eventually provided by Article 370 of the constitution) prior to signing the Instrument of Accession to India in 1947. 

When, realising their folly, Kashmiris begin to rebel against their subjugation once more, Delhi’s crushing response will reignite armed militancy in the valley and bring various ‘Lashkars’ sponsored by Pakistan back into J&K. Kashmir will then sink back once more into the hell in which it had existed from 1990 till former prime minister, the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee went to Srinagar in 2003, and held out a hand of reconciliation towards Pakistan, from that city.

The Kashmiri intelligentsia is fully aware of this, but has been made powerless to prevent it by the illiterate and irresponsible behaviour of Kashmir’s main parties, the Congress, and the National Conference. It should have been apparent to them from the moment the Supreme Court mandated a return to full statehood for Kashmir that if they wanted to protect J&K’s autonomy, they would have to fight the elections as a single coalition, with a single common platform – the release of all Kashmiris held without trial in jails all over India, and restoration of Kashmir’s cultural autonomy, i.e Kashmiriyat.

This required the NC and Congress to join hands with the People’s Democratic Party. Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the PDP, understood this from the very beginning but the Congress and the NC did not, and still have not understood the need for doing so. Indeed, the NC has continued to make her a major target of attack in Kashmir. 

As for the Congress, Rahul Gandhi’s preference for being in the United States to lecture the Indian diaspora for 10 crucial days from the September 7-16 – after paying a single visit to a single constituency to campaign for a single candidate in Kashmir – and his refusal to go back there while the BJP ensures, step by step, the fragmentation of the Kashmiri vote, speaks volumes for his political naiveté and lack of awareness of the role he needs to play. 

Neither of the Abdullahs has spoken out against the reign of terror that the BJP unleashed on the Kashmir valley for four long months before it read down Article 370. Neither of them has protested against the prolonged imprisonment of every Kashmiri who has dared to speak out against the actions of the Delhi-imposed administration, during the president’s rule that followed.

Neither protested against the specious meaning that the Supreme Court attached to the word ‘temporary’ to vindicate the reading down of Article 370, when it had to have been was obvious to the judges that this referred only to the fact that it applied only to a part of the princely state of Kashmir that had acceded to India, and that the rest had still to be liberated from Pakistan’s illegal occupation.

It should have been apparent to them that the BJP, knowing that it could not win a single seat in Kashmir, would do its level best to split the Kashmiri vote into as many fragments as possible. It had already split the Peoples’ Conference by tempting, or coercing, assassinated leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s son Sajjad into joining them. It had also done this with businessman and former friend of Mufti Sayeed, Altaf Bukhari, by forcing him to choose between defection and jail.

The pathetic performance of both Omar and Sajjad in the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency – their combined vote did not even come close to that of Engineer Rashid – seems to have convinced the BJP’s strategists that releasing other Kashmiri radical leaders and allowing them to stand for election would split the Kashmiri vote into many more irreconcilable pieces, and severely dent the NC-Congress combines share of the vote.

The BJP coined this strategy only after witnessing the doubling of the number of votes cast in Baramulla, in comparison to 2014,  and the fact that virtually all of the increase went to Engineer Rashid. But even there, it hedged its bets by releasing Rashid only after the first round of nominations had been completed. By the time he came out of jail, Rashid was able to nominate only 12 candidates to fight the assembly elections, against the 18 assembly segments of the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency where he had gained the largest number of votes.

This was a product of careful calculation. For if Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party won all the 12, seats neither the Congress, nor the NC would be able to form a government without its support. But, recognising that incarceration has endowed political activists with the halo of martyrdom, the BJP’s strategists have decided to release more political dissidents from jail, in ones and twos from other parties and religious affiliations to scatter the Kashmiri votes more widely and prevent them from going to the Congress-NC alliance.

The only way for the Congress-NC alliance to ensure that the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them, that no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government of the state.

This will not be as hard as it looks, for far more difficult reconciliations have taken place in other countries. The most striking was the Lebanese peace agreement signed in Doha in 2008. On that occasion, the Christian leader, Michel Aoun, parted company with his more die-hard co-religionists and the American-backed Lebanese Sunnis, and agreed to Hezbollah’s demand to make it a part of the Lebanese cabinet, in proportion to its vote. 

A similar, pre-election agreement between the three major parties, Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party and the Jamaat-i-Islami would enable a stable government to be formed in Jammu and Kashmir once the results are in.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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The NC and the Congress’s Hubris Has Put Them – and All of Kashmir – in a Risky Place

The prospect of a return to popular rule has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, but the decision by the Congress and the NC to leave out the PDP and the AIP could lead to the BJP emerging the largest party in J&K.

NC and Congress leaders on August 26. Photo: X/@JKNC_/Basit Zargar.

This is the second of a two-part series by the author on Kashmir. Read the first here.

Srinagar: If the Congress had returned to power in 2014 under Manmohan Singh, then long before the present day, there would have been no Kashmir problem left to resolve.

This was because, as Thomas Friedman, the veteran columnist of the New York Times, pointed out in an article comparing Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attack and Singh’s response to the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba attack on Mumbai that killed 175 persons and injured scores more in 2008, the Indian prime minister had done with restraint what Netanyahu has been unable to do with blind reprisal.

The Indian prime minister, he pointed out, had brought remorseless international pressure to bear on Pakistan till it was left with no option but to arrest, try, and reluctantly punish the masterminds behind the attack, and to provide the US and Canadian governments with the information they needed to arrest and punish David Headley, the mastermind and Tahawwur Rana, the financier behind the plot.

This restrained response kept Pakistan in the dock for the next decade and was largely responsible for its being put on the watch list of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.

Singh’s restraint in 2008 was also the reason why Pakistan turned to India for help in weathering the foreign exchange crisis that the US plunged it into, four years later, when it abruptly cut off all foreign aid and payments after Islamabad reacted angrily to a bungled US helicopter attack on the Taliban in November 2011 that hit two Pakistani military border posts and killed 28 of its soldiers.

India came to its rescue then and used that as a lever for reopening talks to end the Kashmir dispute on the basis of Musharraf’s four-point plan. These had almost come to fruition when the UPA government fell, and Modi came to power in 2014.

Modi’s government lost no time in turning the clock of Indo-Pakistani relations back to where they had been in the early nineties. He did this in August 2014 by abruptly ending all communication with the Hurriyat, banning its members from even meeting the Pakistan high commissioner, and resuming heavy firing across the Line of Control on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Five years later he used his brute majority in parliament to end Kashmir’s special status and turn it into a Union territory.

From then till now, Kashmir has been a police state. Police states do have some advantages, for in the short run they are capable of imposing peace upon a turbulent society. This has been so in the valley, especially in Srinagar, which was the cockpit of militancy in the early nineties.

The city has grown rapidly in size. Business seems to be booming and, in the more affluent parts of the city that most tourists visit, there is an absence of the fear that was ever-present in the nineties, of not knowing where and when the next confrontation between militants and the police would take place.

But these benefits are limited to Srinagar and a few other tourist destinations, and even in Srinagar to its more modern and affluent parts. In these areas, armed police or Border Security Force (BSF) personnel are no longer stationed out in the open at key points and intersections. Instead, they patrol the city discreetly from armoured cars that move slowly and unthreateningly through the streets. This change has virtually eliminated the sudden “crossfires” that killed or injured hundreds of civilians over two decades from the nineties till 2010.

In most of Srinagar, therefore, life is almost normal. But in the rural areas, a different kind of peace is maintained through constant patrolling by the Rashtriya Rifles and the BSF, and frequent arbitrary arrests and incarceration of suspected militants, almost always in jails far from home. Experience has taught them to concentrate on the youth, of whom as in the rest of India, up to four-fifths are unemployed.

During a visit to Pulwama, this writer saw a rounding-up operation in progress. Half a dozen or more young men were being led away in shackles. The villagers were standing around, angry but helpless. Their fear and anger was palpable, but so was their helplessness.

The one bright spot in this sorry tale is that the army and the BSF have become more discriminating in their exercise of force. The data that the army command regularly releases show that the spontaneous mass militancy of earlier years has been replaced by an organised, low-level infiltration of terrorists from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, who use caches of arms, much of it flown in by drones, from Pakistan and logistical support from disaffected youth.

An idea of the scale on which this is happening, and the degree of Kashmiri involvement, can be had from the annual and monthly statements released by the army command in Jammu and Kashmir. Its release on January 13 this year revealed that of 76 terrorists killed in encounters in 2023, only 21 had been locally recruited.

The decline in local participation is welcome but the numbers of local youth being killed is still sufficiently high to maintain tension and alienation in the rural population.

It is in these conditions – of an uneasy peace bought by force – that Kashmir is holding its first election after ten years. The prospect of a return to popular rule, even though Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, for it offers a chance to end the enslavement that has followed the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.

Kashmir’s political parties are therefore conscious of the need to avoid splitting the vote in Kashmir because of the BJP’s formidable hold on Jammu, where it was the leading party in 29 out of 36 assembly segments in the Lok Sabha elections.

They are also aware that the Modi government is deliberately holding this election at a time when J&K is still a Union territory and the lieutenant governor has an unchallengeable right to decide which party he will call upon first to form the next government.

If the seats in Kashmir are divided between two or more recognised parties in such a way that the BJP wins more seats in Jammu than either the National Conference (NC) or the Congress win individually in the state as a whole, then the governor will be well within his rights to call upon it to make the first attempt to form the next government. After that, Modi’s ‘friendly persuasion’ machine will go into top gear.

All Kashmiri parties are acutely aware of this, so the Congress and the NC have immediately formed a seat-sharing alliance, with the former putting up 32 candidates, and the latter 51. They are fighting each other in only five constituencies where their local leaders could not be persuaded to agree to a seat-sharing arrangement. They have called this a friendly contest because no matter who wins they will still be a part of the same coalition.

The two parties of consequence that they have left out of their calculations, and therefore of their alliance, are Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and Engineer Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party (AIP).

Boycotting the PDP at such a pivotal moment in Kashmir’s history simply did not make sense. It is true that Mufti Sayeed lost most of the following his party had gained between 2002 and 2014 by trying to make a coalition government with the BJP in 2014, when he had no real need to. But voters do not hold grudges forever, and this year’s Lok Sabha elections had shown that the PDP had remained the largest party in five assembly segments in South Kashmir.

What is more, Mehbooba Mufti had offered not to put up any PDP candidates if the Congress and the NC adopted her seven-point agenda. Since these were very similar to their own agendas, all that these parties had to do was formally accept her offer and offer the PDP the five seats in South Kashmir where it is strongest. But by treating her and her party as pariahs, they have forced her to nominate candidates for 30 seats.

Another formidable contender whom the Congress and the NC have both underestimated and spurned is Rashid’s AIP. Every psephological indicator shows that Rashid owed his colossal victory in the Baramulla parliamentary constituency to the emergence of a huge protest vote that had been absent in earlier elections, for want of a candidate in whom it could place its trust.

The first is the voter turnout in the constituency. At 1.033 million, it was more than double of the 458,000 who voted in 2019. Second, Rashid’s own vote more than quadrupled, from 102,168 in 2019 to 472,481 this year. Third, his vote was greater than that of Omar Abdullah, Sajjad Lone, and the PDP candidate Mir Mohammad Fayyaz put together. Fourth, the AIP was the largest party in 18 out of Baramulla’s 21 assembly segments.

With Rashid still in jail despite being a member of parliament, would anyone like to bet against the AIP winning three quarters, if not more of these 21 assembly seats?

So if the PDP wins five seats in the south, the AIP 15 or thereabouts in the north, and two seats go to other parties or independents, it is perfectly possible that the NC and the Congress may be left with as few as 25 seats in the valley. Whether they are able to form a government or not will then depend on how they do in Jammu.

To sum up, the hubris that has made the Congress and the NC ignore both the PDP and the AIP could easily lead to the BJP emerging as the largest single party in Jammu and Kashmir and claiming the right to form the government.

Were that to happen, it would open the gates in Kashmir for the kind of bargaining that has corrupted democracy in the rest of India. It will also increase substantially the possibility of another intifada in Kashmir at some time in the future.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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Kashmir is on the Eve of an Election That Can Decide Its Future

Political dissent in Kashmir has been crushed with a ruthlessness that the rest of India is only now beginning to experience as Prime Minister Narendra Modi feels his power weakening. Today, Kashmir is under the Centre’s rule, untrammelled by anything except the will of Modi.

Congress workers in Jammu and Kashmir stage protests in Srinagar demanding statehood on October 31, 2023. Photo: X (Twitter)/@vikar_rasool

Srinagar: Kashmir is on the eve of the most fateful election in its history. For this election will decide whether it will be able to retain its Kashmiriyat, its unique syncretic identity articulated by Sheikh Abdullah almost nine decades ago – or will see it drowned in the communal and totalitarian tide that is gathering force in the rest of the country.

The threat of the latter comes from the growing authoritarianism of the BJP under Prime minister Narendra Modi.

Today, not only is Kashmir under the rule of a Lieutenant Governor; not only has it lost the protection of its cultural identity that was guaranteed by Articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution, but virtually every senior post in the administration and the police is manned by officers of non-Kashmiri cadres, and the whole of rural Kashmir is under an informal version of army rule.

Political dissent in Kashmir has been crushed with a ruthlessness that the rest of India is only now beginning to experience as Modi feels his power weakening. Today, Kashmir is under the Centre’s rule, untrammelled by anything except the will of Modi.

Crushing political dissent

Political dissent, except of the watery Farooq Abdullah variety has been crushed. A bare two weeks after the Modi government read down Articles 370 and 35A, it had arrested more than 4,000 Kashmiris under the Public Safety Act, and sent at least 1,122 of them to prisons outside Kashmir as those in Kashmir had run out of space.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of Hurriyat, and all its council members were among the first to be arrested under the Public Safety Act. They were kept incarcerated for more than a year and released only after they agreed not to make any public statements, thereby not only ending their political careers but also destroying the only organisation in Kashmir that the people of that state trusted.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq being ushered into Jamia Masjid on Friday, September 22, 2023, by his aides. Photo: Jehangir Ali.

All this was done on the basis of PM Modi’s unique combination of ignorance, arrogance and prejudice. To execute its plan the Modi government chose not to remember that with the exception of the late Syed Ali Shah Gilani and a handful of his acolytes, Kashmiris had never expressed any desire to be a part of Pakistan.

As far back as October 1947, the British High Commissioner to Pakistan Sir Lawrence Grafftey-Smith had reported to London with palpable regret that if there was a plebiscite the people of then undivided Kashmir would ‘most likely opt to join India’. The only thing that might change their minds, he had concluded in his dispatch, was a huge massacre of Muslims by Sikhs in the border areas between Kashmir and Pakistan.

What had been true of undivided Kashmir became doubly true after the separation of POK, with its mostly non-Reshi Islamic population. The rigged election of 1987, and the subsequent outbreak of armed insurgency fuelled at least in part by mistaken perceptions and unfounded distrust in Delhi, were capitalised upon by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to train insurgents and trigger an insurgency that caused thousands of needless deaths in Kashmir.

The sense of disempowerment in Kashmir

But even those nightmare years did not change the Kashmiris’ preference for autonomy within the Indian constitution. This was shown conclusively (much to even Delhi’s surprise) by two independent opinion polls, the first carried out in secret by MORI, Europe’s premier opinion polling agency, in 2003-4 and the second openly by MORI and GALLUP on behalf of Chatham House – The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London – six years later.

These showed that in no portion of Kashmir valley did more than 7.5 per cent of the population say that it would prefer to be a part of Pakistan. A far higher proportion said they wished to remain a part of India, but the highest proportion opted for some form of independence. That was 14 and 19 years after the armed insurgency had torn their lives apart!

The synonyms for Independence in Urdu and Hindi – Azadi, Khud Mukhtari, Swatantrata and Swadheenta – do not have quite the same meaning as ‘Independence’ has in English. The meaning of ‘Independence’ has been shaped by the era of industrialisation and the Nation-State, to mean a complete separation of one territory from another through the creation of clearly defined ‘hard’ frontiers, and controls over trade, travel and immigration.

The Hindi and Urdu equivalents have a far older provenance, that relates not to territory but to the status of the individual – more specifically his or her freedom to make their own decisions.

Innumerable conversations I had with Kashmiris during the height of the insurgency in the ‘nineties, and the years that followed, led back invariably to their sense of disempowerment.

Protests demanding the release of moderate Hurriyat chairman and chief cleric of Kashmir, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid on June 23, 2023. Photo: Special arrangement.

Naeem Akhtar, an associate of Mufti Sayeed and adviser to Mehbooba Mufti after his death, gave me the most precise explanation of what Azadi meant to him and most Kashmiri Muslims: “ Partition broke our link with our religious and cultural origins. We trace our Islam back to Sufis who came from Iran via the Jhelum valley. Our trade, and our cultural links with the rest of the sub-continent and west Asia, had always been via the Jhelum valley, through Rawalpindi with the south and the passes in the Hindu Kush with the west. To us Azadi means the repair of this break. It is more a psychological than a material need”.

Assassination of leaders to scuttle peace deal 

That is the break that Prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Nawaz Sharif had come within an inch of repairing, when the defeat of the Congress and the rise of Modi in 2014 scuttled any possible deal between the two countries.

When insurgency raised its head in 1987 Pakistan thought its opportunity had finally come. But when the ISI realised that merger with Pakistan was not what the Kashmiris wanted, it began to assassinate all those in leadership positions within the insurgency who did not want to secede to Pakistan.

Umar’s father, Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq was the first to be assassinated in May 1990, on the orders of Pakistan’s ISI, barely three weeks after he had given an interview to BBC in which he had outlined the steps India needed to take if it wished to restore peace in Kashmir.

In 1996, when Abdul Ghani Butt, who was then the deputy Chairman of Hurriyat, expressed a desire for the organisation to contest that assembly election announced by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, his brother was killed by agents of the ISI a few weeks later.

Pak-sponsored and financed gunmen assassinated Abdul Ghani Lone, the seniormost and most respected leader in Hurriyat on May 21, 2002, barely two months after he had decided that his ‘Peoples Conference’ would contest the state assembly elections that year even if the rest of Hurriyat did not. The list of eminent Kashmiris who have paid the ultimate price for merely suggesting that there is a road to peace with honour within India, is too long to reproduce.

One of the most heinous killings was that of H.N. Wanchoo, on December 5, 1992. Wanchoo was a Kashmiri Pandit who had become the lawyer for a large number of members of the JKLF who had been jailed by the police, and become known as Kashmir’s most respected defender of human rights.

Wanchoo was shot dead in an auto-rickshaw by three men who had come to him asking for help in getting one of their colleagues released from police custody. His murder attracted worldwide attention and triggered investigations by intelligence agencies of several countries in addition to R&AW and the IB. These concluded that Wanchoo had been murdered on the instructions of the ISI because he had become the single greatest obstacle to it’s campaign of communal polarisation in Kashmir.

This was followed only months later by the killing of yet another hugely respected religious leader of Kashmir’s Reshi Islam, Qazi Nissar, the Mirwaiz of North Kashmir whom Pakistan’s ISI got assassinated in 1993.

Most journalists and intellectuals in Kashmir concluded later that it was these murders that turned Kashmiri Muslims against Pakistan.

Modi destroying every atom of autonomy 

By the time Modi came to power, the Hurriyat, under the chairmanship of Mirwaiz Umar, had formally announced its decision to accept the Manmohan-Musharraf four-point plan that was then in the last stages of being hammered out by Tariq Aziz(Pakistan) and Sati Lamba (India).

It had done this through Fazal Qureshi, a senior leader of Hurriyat and friend of Kashmiri martyr Maqbool Butt, at a conference in Srinagar in October 2009. This was not to Pakistan’s liking so, six weeks later, another Pak-hired assassin shot this fine old man in the head, and turned him into a vegetable.

Former JKLF leader Yasin Malik had made it known as early as 1994, that the JKLF did not want to separate from India but wanted a different relationship with it, to be framed after consultations with like-minded people in Jammu and Ladakh. He is now in prison for life.

Shabir Shah, who founded the JK Democratic Freedom Party, and invested his entire political future in trying, and almost succeeding, in brokering a lasting settlement in Kashmir with home minister L.K, Advani, was released from jail only days ago, presumably also on the condition that he, like the Mirwaiz, refrains from politics in the future.

The Modi government has not spared even second and third-rung members of Hurriyat. Shahid-ul Islam, the Mirwaiz’s liaison officer with the media, was arrested in 2017 and has been in Tihar jail without being charged, and without bail, for seven years.

PM Narendra Modi and Lieutenant Governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Manoj Sinha. Photo: X/@manojsinha_

The Modi government imprisoned Shahid despite the fact that, knowing his closeness to Mirwaiz Umar, two assassins had come to his home in the mid-nineties to kill him, and hastily fired five bullets at him when he guessed their intent and rushed out of the room to save his life. Three of those bullets were still embedded in the walls of his parents’ home years later.

The common strand that bound all of these attacks on Kashmiri political and religious leaders was the anger of Pakistan and its ruthless Inter-Services Intelligence at Kashmiris’ refusal to make a union with Pakistan their goal in their struggle against New Delhi.

All this information, and much, much more, has been available in the files of the Home Ministry and the Prime Minister’s office, but Modi was not interested in peace with Pakistan. For him Kashmir and Pakistan are convenient whips with which to lash latent Hindu fury into a frenzy. To do this he has been bent upon destroying every atom of the autonomy given to Kashmir by the Indian constitution through articles 370 and 35A.

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This election will not only decide the future of Kashmir, but also quite possibly, of India’s ethno-federal democracy as well.

From left, Mehbooba Mufti, Mallikarjun Kharge, Omar Abdullah and Sajjad Lone. In the background are voters in J&K. Photo: X/@ECISVEEP

When announcing the dates for Jammu and Kashmir’s assembly elections, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar told The Indian Express,  “We would (sic) assure all the required security to candidates, and facilities to the electors”.

I have not a shadow of a doubt that the EC will be true to Kumar’s word, and that Delhi will do everything in its power to vindicate his promise. But for Kashmir, and  India’s, future it is not just a fair conduct of the elections by the EC that matters but the way in which the concerned political parties decide to fight it. 

The fact that Rahul Gandhi and Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge have both gone to Kashmir to discuss election strategy for the J&K assembly election with the National Congress and the People’s Democratic Party, shows that the INDIA alliance, and the Congress in particular, is aware this election will not only decide the future of Kashmir, but also quite possibly, of India’s ethno-federal democracy as well.

To say that these elections are as important for both Kashmir and India as were the Jammu and Kashmir elections of 1987, would be an understatement.

1987 was a turning point for both Kashmir and India because while it created the first-ever opportunity for a democratic opposition to the National Conference and the Congress to emerge in Kashmir, the way in which the Muslim United Front (MUF) was suppressed by the NC-Congress coalition immediately after the election triggered the first armed insurgency in Kashmir. 

This year’s elections are equally important because they are giving the same parties, the Congress and the National Conference, a chance to repair the damage they did in 1987. The threat this time is not external but internal – it comes not from Pakistan but from the BJP.

Put briefly, the danger that Kashmir now faces is that if Kashmir’s major parties continue with their present no-holds-barred competition with each other, and divide the Kashmiri vote, they will allow the BJP, which is certain to sweep Jammu, to emerge as the largest single party in the new state assembly. This will give it the right to form the next government. 

The rise of the BJP in Jammu has been dramatic. In 2002 its vote share in the state elections was only 8.6% and it won only one seat in the J&K assembly. By 2008 its vote had risen to 11.28% and it won 11 seats. Six years later, in the next state assembly election in 2014, it won 25 seats and garnered 23.2% of the vote. Its share of the J&K vote in the parliamentary elections also doubled further from 23% in 2014 to 46% in 2019 in the wake of the Pulwama tragedy, but fell back to 24% in 2024. 

This 24% was won almost entirely in the Jammu region, as was the 23% in 2014, and most of the 46% in 2019. These figures show that the political split between Jammu and Kashmir is now complete. With Ghulam Nabi Azad having left the Congress and formed his own party, the Democratic Progressive Azad Party, the BJP will face even less of a challenge in Jammu than it had in 2014 and 2019. It can therefore be confident of again winning the majority of the 43 seats allocated to Jammu after the recent delimitation of constituencies. In the recent general election, two of J&K’s five Lok Sabha seats went to the BJP, two to the National Conference, and one to an independent, Abdul Rashid Shaikh, a.k.a. ‘Engineer’ Rashid, a charismatic figure who fought as an independent from jail where he has been held for the last five years on allegations of ‘terror financing’ without being brought to trial.  

Not surprisingly, therefore, the BJP won both of its seats in Jammu. The National Conference won its two seats in central and southern Kashmir. The PDP won no seats, but Engineer Rashid swept Northern Kashmir, winning from Baramula by defeating not only former chief minister Omar Abdullah, but also Mir Mohammed Fayyaz of the PDP and Sajjad Ghani Lone, the leader of the J&K Peoples’ Conference. Rashid’s victory was so enormous that he garnered more votes than all the other three combined.  

If the BJP repeats its Lok Sabha performance in the coming assembly elections, it will find little difficulty in creating a majority coalition not only because it already has some allies in Kashmir like Sajjad Lone’s PC and Altaf Bukhari’s Apni Party, but because, thanks to its harvest from the now banned electoral bonds, it has both the money and the coercive power to secure some defections from the other major parties, and to entice other small parties and independents to join its coalition.  

Since the election will be held when Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, and the Supreme Court has set no deadline for J&K’s conversion into a full state, there will be no one to oppose the ratification of the laws that this first-ever BJP-led government could enact. It will, therefore, hasten the end of Kashmiriyat in the state. 

But Kashmiriyat could well be only the first victim of Modi’s relentless drive to create a unitary Hindu Rashtra under his supremacy.  There are nine other states that have benefited from special safeguards for their ethnic identity under Article 371 of the constitution, eight of which are in the Northeast. What happens next in Kashmir is therefore likely to be seen as a precedent for his handling of ethno-national discontent in these states as well. 

Therefore, when Gandhi and Kharge speak to the Kashmiri leaders they will do well to remember that they are speaking not just for the Kashmiris, but for all the smaller ethno-regions of India. For should they fail to protect Kashmir’s ethnic identity, it will be seen by them as an unravelling not only of Kashmiriyat but a warning of what their fate could be if they dare to oppose Modi’s diktats in the future.  

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If the Congress, which is, and will remain, the senior party in the alliance, continues to let its local minions make decisions that will become, by default, the national policy of the party, then Modi and his BJP will be the only gainers.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s failure to win an absolute majority of the seats in the Lok Sabha, and Narendra Modi’s refusal, so far, to descend from the high pedestal on which he had seated himself before the elections raises a crucial question: how stable will the present National Democratic Alliance government be?

Our experience of previous coalition governments – the Janata government from 1977 to 1979, the United Front government from 1996 till 1998, and the United Progressive Alliance from 2004 till 2014 – suggests that it will depend upon the major party’s, in this case Modi’s, willingness to compromise with his partners and make their concerns his own. 

Nothing that Modi has done in the 22 years that he has been the chief minister of Gujarat and Prime Minister of India, suggests that he will be able to do so. On the contrary Modi’s reaction to his sudden return to political vulnerability has been a combination of disbelief and rage. The disbelief is writ large in the composition of his new council of ministers, for its composition has shown no sign that he intends to change either his goals, or his methods of achieving them. Despite having secured only 240 seats and therefore being dependent for his government’s survival upon N. Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), Modi has not given even one of the four most important portfolios in the Union government – home, defence, finance and external affairs – to either of them. 

Few observers had expected him to go so far, but many had expected him to offer the speakership of the Lok Sabha to one or the other of them. Modi has done no such thing either. The TDP ended with just two ministers. JD(U) also got the same number. By contrast Modi appointed 51 of the 78 ministers and deputy ministers in his government from within his own party. 

Modi’s Embrace Leaves Allies Weak and Voiceless

Modi’s reluctance to change his strategy almost certainly stems from the continuing strength of the BJP’s vote share. The BJP lost 60 seats, but its share of the vote fell by a bare 0.8%, from 37.36% in 2019 to 36.58% in 2024. On the other hand, although the Congress almost doubled the number of seats it won from 52 to 99, its share of the vote rose by a bare 1.7% from 19.49% in 2019 to 21.19% in 2024. Modi therefore probably believes that it is only a matter of time before the INDIA alliance disintegrates and leaves him free to continue ruling the country as he has so far. 

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah with invited NDA leaders. Photo: X/@amitshah

The other evidence of his refusal, or inability, to face an unpalatable reality has been his undiminished rage. As has happened over and over again in the past several years, whenever he has faced a threat , or a situation that he is not able to control, Modi has hidden his anger in silence. But the anger has been mirrored by the way that he has stepped up his vendetta against those who have dared, or continue to dare, to challenge his absolute power over the nation. The primary target of his vengefulness today remains the Aam Aadmi Party and its chief, Arvind Kejriwal

Kejriwal was the very first leader whom Modi had tried to destroy as far back as in 2015. His primary reason was that AAP had virtually destroyed the BJP in the 2016 legislative assembly elections in Delhi, winning 67 of its 70 seats, barely six months after the latter had won all the seven Lok Sabha seats from Delhi. Modi took this as a personal affront, for in addition to launching a relentless attack on Central and All-India service officers in Delhi who were carrying out the instructions of the new government, he lost no time in getting a complaisant judge of the Delhi high court to virtually overturn Article 239 AA of the Constitution and declare Delhi to be nothing more than another Union territory in which final executive power rested – as it did in all other union territories except Puducherry – with the Lieutenant Governor appointed by the Union government. 

It took Kejriwal almost three years to get this decision reversed by the Supreme Court, but what was even more galling for Modi was that barely a year after that AAP trounced the BJP again in the 2020 Vidhana Sabha elections, winning almost the same share of the votes and seats. 

No aspiring dictator would have taken such a double defeat lying down, but Modi’s grudge against Kejriwal runs far deeper and is more personal. It arises from the fact that while other political parties have taught their followers to fear Modi, Kejriwal has been inviting them to laugh at him. He did this 15 months ago through a 20-minute fairy tale recounted to the Delhi Vidhan Sabha, about the fumbling antics of a Chauthi-pass Raja. He did this with such good humour that even some of the BJP MLAs present in the hall were unable to conceal their amusement. 

In the year that followed, the YouTube video of Chauthi-pass Raja went viral. All, or parts of it, were replayed by a score of video channels, and collectively registered several million hits on the net. Not only did Modi find this intolerable, but he realised that Kejriwal was doing what the great comedian Charlie Chaplin had done to Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator, 80 years earlier. When Chaplin was asked why he had lampooned Hitler so, he had replied that the only way to defeat a dictator was to make people laugh at him. Given Modi’s exalted opinion of himself, it is hard not to conclude that this video turned political animosity into virulent, personal hatred. 

The yardstick of Modi’s hatred of Kejriwal is the extent to which the executive branch of the Central government is prepared to bend, or break, the law in order to carry out his diktats. The Enforcement Directorate and the CBI have dropped even the pretence of impartiality in their hounding of Kejriwal. The way in which the ED rushed to the Delhi high court to stay the bail granted to Kejriwal by the Rouse Avenue trial court shows that for it there is now no law but The Law as decreed by Modi. 

Nor, apparently, is there any other ‘law’ for the Delhi high court either, for it allegedly complied with the ED’s wishes even before reading the Rouse Avenue court’s decision. This illustrates the shameful extent to which both the executive and the judiciary have been turned into tools of fascist control by the BJP during the past decade. Both the ED and the CBI have ignored the fact that when the Supreme Court had granted Kejriwal bail from May 10 till June 2 to enable him to fight the election, it had directed him to go to the trial court, (i.e. the Rouse Avenue court) for further relief. So when the Delhi high court stayed the Rouse Avenue court’s decision, it tacitly overturned a sanction by the highest court of the land. More than any other single action of the executive under Modi, this is what shows how far, and how willingly, he, his ministers, and his bureaucrats and his judges, have turned India’s democracy into a shadow without substance. 

The Modi government’s move to charge writer Arundhati Roy now for a statement she allegedly made in a public forum in Kashmir 14 years ago, shows that Modi has also not lost his taste for persecuting members of civil society who have fearlessly opposed his government’s creeping advance towards tyranny during the past 10 years. Even if what Roy said in 2010 was accurately reported by the Hindu zealot who filed a case against her a decade ago, the fact remains that through decision after decision the Supreme Court had by then established that mere verbal statements or exhortations criticising the State do not constitute sedition. All previous Supreme Court judgements have been unanimous that only actions designed to destabilise or overthrow the state can be considered seditious. 

The Modi government only changed this through a spate of amendments in 2019. So it is now considering prosecuting her under a law that did not exist when she allegedly made her supposedly ‘anti-national’ statement. This is a huge perversion of the very concept of law. But that seems to matter little to Modi and his home minister Amit Shah. 

Unlike his vendetta against Kejriwal, Modi’s intention to punish Roy through a retroactive application of law is not personal. It is a message to the country that as far as he is concerned nothing has changed and he will continue to harass and imprison all those who oppose him at will, as he has done so far. 

Arvind Kejriwal during a roadshow in Delhi ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. Photo: X/@ArvindKejriwal

His continuing assault on civil society, is also a veiled warning to Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu that despite their 28 seats they too do not matter because, should either of them decide to oppose his policies and actions, he will do to them what he has done to the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra, and earlier to the Congress in Bengal and Assam. 

That is to get the CBI or ED to fabricate cases against them or their MPs and give them the option of going to jail like Kejriwal and Hemant Soren, or joining the BJP as Suvendu Adhikari, Eknath Shinde, Ajit Pawar and others have done in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Assam and elsewhere in the past 10 years. 

His party’s task, of terrorising its opponents into submission has been made hugely easier by the ban Indira Gandhi imposed on company donations to political parties in 1970. Since her government created no alternative legal way of financing elections, it went a long way towards criminalising political financing in the ensuing decades. That has made it easy for Modi to justify whip-up cases against political leaders. Nitish Kumar got this message seven years ago. If Naidu has not, he soon will. 

The INDIA alliance. therefore, needs to learn that the task of saving India’s multi-ethnic democracy has only just begun. To complete it, the alliance needs to acknowledge, and learn from, the mistakes its members made during the formation of their coalition. Their very first was not to agree upon a basis for choosing candidates for the Lok Sabha elections at their Varanasi meeting itself. The obvious way was to offer the seats won by the BJP in 2019 to the party that had been the first runner up in those constituencies. This would have limited the number of seats in which disagreements could still have arisen because of changed circumstances, to a handful in each state. Their settlement could then have been left to the state party leaders. 

Doing that would have given the national leaders the time and leisure they needed to frame a common set of policies on critical national issues like inflation, rapidly rising unemployment and growing rural distress that Modi, despite all his grandiose promises, has not been able to resolve. 

With the elections behind us and Modi once more in power, the alliance needs to reflect on the tactical mistakes that made it miss seizing power by a hair this year. The one that jumps immediately to mind is the Congress party’s decision to launch Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra from Bengal, and take it through Bihar despite the entreaties of its powerful alliance partners, chief ministers Mamata Banerjee and Nitish Kumar, not to do so.

Rahul Gandhi of Congress holds up a poster calling for justice for RO and ARO position examinees during the party’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. Photo: X/@INCUttarPradesh

The Congress ignored these requests, most probably because of the impact that Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra had had on the state assembly elections in Karnataka. But its planners chose to forget that in Karnataka it had happened in the legislative assembly elections, while this was an election for the Lok Sabha. As happened in Karnataka, any gain in Congress votes in these states would only take place at the expense of an alliance partner, and therefore benefit the BJP. 

Despite being ignored, Mamta Bannerjee did not leave the broad alliance, because she relied on Bengali sub-nationalism to win the elections in Bengal and the Congress had long ago been reduced to insignificance. But Nitish Kumar faced a far more difficult challenge in Bihar, so decided to play it safe and go back to the BJP. 

How expensive this decision has been for the INDIA alliance, and may prove to be for Indian democracy in the future, can be judged from the fact that had the alliance stayed intact in Bihar, the BJP would not have been even asked, let alone been able, to form the next government. 

Regrettably, the Congress seems to have neither learned anything nor forgotten anything from its mistake, for today its party leaders in Delhi have joined the BJP’s chorus of accusations against the AAP on the alleged Delhi liquor scam, with gusto. They seem unable to realise that doing so will not only weaken, but eventually destroy the INDIA alliance, for other parties will learn not to trust the Congress and to look for safer havens. 

The only way to stabilise the INDIA alliance is to accept the dominance of each of its members in its own territory. Only thus will it be able to create a stable, secular and democratic all-India alternative to the BJP. If the Congress, which is, and will remain, the senior party in the alliance, continues to let its local minions make decisions that will become, by default, the national policy of the party, then Modi and his BJP will be the only gainers and, sooner rather than later, democracy will become a fading memory. 

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