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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Modi’s single and consistent response to any political setback throughout these years has been rage. But the fact is that, the excise policy ‘case’ does not hold up to basic questioning.
Manish Sisodia, Arvind Kejriwal, Sanjay Singh and Satyendar Jain. The latter, arrested by the ED like the others, is jailed in a different case. In the foreground is Narendra Modi.
Prime Minister Modi’s empty boast “abki baar 400 paar (this time, beyond 400 seats)” is now one that the Bharatiya Janata Party would dearly like to forget, for the party’s strength has been reduced from 303 seats in 2019 to 240 this year, making it wholly dependent now upon the continued support of two major regional parties that neither share his totalitarian goals, nor his Messianic image of himself.
This is the first time in 22 years as chief minister of Gujarat and then as prime minister of India, that Modi has found himself not in a position of untrammelled power. The question that lurks in every mind today is, will he be able to adjust his so far tyrannical style of governance to a situation he has never been in before?
Nothing he has ever said or done, either as the chief minister of Gujarat or prime minister of India, suggests that he will be able to do so.
This is because his single, consistent response to any political setback throughout these years has been rage.
Over the past 22 years he has turned this rage upon all those who have tried to thwart his ambitions. Beginning with former Gujarat home minister Haren Pandya in 2001, and ending most recently with Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, human rights lawyer Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat Intelligence chief R.B. Sreekumar, Modi has used one or other of the government’s law enforcement agencies to terrorise his political opponents. Today, Modi is venting his rage upon the Aam Aadmi party, and most viciously upon its founder, Arvind Kejriwal.
Modi’s rage against Kejriwal in particular, arises from the BJP’s rout in the 2015 Delhi state elections, barely a year after it had won all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, in 2014. Despite the BJP’s having repeated this success both in 2019 and 2024, Modi’s rage against AAP, and against Kejriwal in particular, remains unabated. In the nine years that have elapsed since then, Modi has stopped at nothing in his bid to discredit the Delhi state government and force it out of power in the national capital. When the Kejriwal government changed the state’s liquor licensing policy in 2021, he got the opportunity that he had been looking for.
The birth of a case
Taxes on liquor contribute between 15% and 30% of the annual revenues of state governments and are the second largest source of revenue (after the Goods and Services Tax) for all of them. But the consumption of liquor is frowned upon by the vast majority of poorer families in the country. In Delhi state, where the sale of liquor had remained a monopoly of the state since the late 1970s, it was also one of the principal sources of bribes and kickbacks to the lawmakers and administrators in the concerned departments. Therefore, when the AAP government decided to end the state’s monopoly and conduct the entire liquor trade via public auction it kicked over a hornet’s nest that the Modi government lost no time in taking advantage of to discredit the party in the eyes of the people of the city.
The first salvo on Modi’s behalf was fired by the chief secretary of Delhi, Naresh Kumar, who wrote, in a letter addressed to V.K. Saxena the then (and now) Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, at some point in the earlier half of 2022. In it he stated that “arbitrary and unilateral decisions” taken by Sisodia in his capacity as excise minister had resulted in “financial losses to the exchequer” estimated at more than Rs 580 crore… and “kickbacks…received by the AAP Delhi government and AAP leaders” from owners and operators of alcohol businesses for preferential treatment such as discounts and extensions in licence fee, waiver on penalties and relief due to disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, etc. were used to “influence” the assembly elections held in Punjab and Goain early 2022.
During this period, the Enforcement Directorate has turned the homes, offices and other premises controlled by the indicted persons upside down, but has failed to find, as the Supreme Court said while summing up the bail hearing of Sanjay Singh, “even a shred of evidence” against any of them.
In normal times any government agency would have closed the cases against the AAP leaders long ago. But Modi had taught the Enforcement Directorate the consequences of failure to do his bidding as far back as in 2016, in the NationalHerald case. On that occasio , when Rajan Katoch, the then director of the ED closed the case lodged against the Congress party by Subramaniam Swamy for lack of evidence, after investigating it for a full year, Modi removed him from his post immediately.
Since then, every head of the ED has been aware of the cost of failing to do Modi’s bidding. But others too have learned the lesson. That is the only explanation for the Delhi high court’s hasty overturning of the Rouse Avenue court’s decision to grant bail to Kejriwal. As has been pointed out in the media, the ED rushed to the Delhi high court, and the judge, Sudhir Kumar Jain, purportedly complied, even before he had received, let alone read, the Rouse Avenue court’s judgement.
Not surprisingly, therefore, when the ED could find no material evidence of the barrel loads of cash that the AAP had reportedly accepted from the liquor wholesalers, it resorted to presenting statements by various people who claimed that they had been the intermediaries between a ‘South Group’ of liquor manufacturers and bottlers and the Kejriwal government, and had arranged the vast transfers of cash that the Group made to the party.
Fearful of the Supreme Court granting Kejriwal bail, the government has now got the Central Bureau of Investigation to arrest the Delhi chief minister for essentially the same ‘crime’ that the ED has failed to make any headway proving.
So overwhelming has been the BJP’s propaganda blitz against the AAP, that no one bothered to remember that by 2022, the electoral bonds scheme had been in operation for more than four years and that AAP had received somewhere between Rs 52 and 65 crores by way of donations. This was far more than the Rs 22 crores it was accused of having transferred to Goa to fight the 2022 elections there.
Finally, the ED’s two principal “informers” are Raghav Magunta Reddy, son of one Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy, a YSR Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh, and a Delhi businessman Dinesh Arora – who was himself under arrest at the time when Sisodia was arrested, and had turned an ‘approver’ for the ED, after being guaranteed a pardon for the transgressions he was accused of having committed. Readers of this article can decide for themselves how reliable, let alone truthful, their depositions were, from the fact that both the Reddys, father and son, had initially been indicted by the ED, and that while Raghav Reddy, along with Dinesh Arora were pardoned at the Rouse Avenue court in Delhi on October 4, 2023, Magunta Srinivasulu Reddy is now a Telugu Desam Party MP from Andhra, and was photographed recently with Modi, during the announcement of the TDP’s continuing partnership with the BJP.
A 2021 image uploaded by Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy to Facebook, on his official account, showing him with Modi.
However the strangest feature of the ED’s case against Kejriwal and other AAP leaders is that at every hearing before – no matter which court – the ED has strenuously opposed bail for the four leaders of the AAP, on the grounds that it is still gathering evidence against them, and releasing them will make this exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. But if that is truly the case, then how was chief secretary Naresh Kumar able to write a letter to Lt Governor Saxena giving precise details of the amount of excise revenues lost by the government from the new liquor policy, the kickbacks obtained by AAP from liquor vendors, and the amounts of money that it had transferred to Goa to fight the assembly elections in 2022?
A plausible explanation
There are only two possible answers – either Naresh Kumar’s letter was a fabrication dictated by the Modi government, or the ED felt that the information it contained was insufficient and imprecise, and needed to be reinforced with more direct evidence.
Of these, the first is by far the more plausible explanation. This is for the simple reason that the new liquor policy not only did not cause a loss of excise duty revenues, but actually doubled them.
Under the earlier policy, the Delhi government was both the wholesaler and the retailer of alcohol in the city. The government paid the manufacturer their ex-factory price plus 5%, took control of the liquor and bore the cost of transportation and storage till it was supplied to the retail outlets. The retail outlets were also all controlled by the government, but licensed from the premise owners.
This bureaucratic monopoly had a number of shortcomings: first, the number of brands of any particular spirit stocked by the government liquor shops was limited and not responsive to changes in public tastes and incomes; and second, the retail liquor shops were concentrated mainly in the high income neighbourhoods of Delhi. There were very few in the poorer areas of the city.
Over the years this policy had led to a serious loss of revenue to the government. High income earners began buying their liquor in Haryana. Because of the lack of shops near them, the poor were buying country liquor. AAP’s new policy corrected these distortions while simultaneously taking the government out of the liquor business altogether. The wholesalers paid a one-time tax of 14% on their sales in Delhi. The retail outlets were reorganised to ensure that there was an even distribution of these throughout the city. The government had divided the city into 32 zones, of which 20 were classified as affluent, and the remaining 12 as relatively poor. Each zone was divided into a number of principalities, each to be served by up to three retail locations. The retail locations were evenly spaced to ensure that every mohalla, and every section of the population, had equal access to a liquor shop. It then auctioned the liquor shop locations. These were then put up for auction.
In the first auction, the government garnered Rs 5,300 crore from the auction of locations in the more affluent 20 zones, and Rs 3,180 crore from the auctions in the remaining 12 zones. The lower paying capacity of the poorer areas was automatically reflected in the lower bids for these locations. An important side benefit of the new policy was that by giving easier access to licensed liquor in poor areas, it reduced the sale of illicit liquor within those areas.
Two months after the new policy came into operation, a civil servant, who withheld his name while sharing the above figures to Hindustan Times, told its correspondent that along with new brand licensing and some other minor taxes, the government expected to garner over Rs 10,000 crore a year from the sale of liquor in the capital. This was almost double the average of Rs 5,500-crore recorded in the previous three years, and the Rs 5,272 crore (excluding VAT) that was garnered between September 1, 2022 and August 31, 2023 after the return to the old policy.
Finally, in all the time that the ED has spent gathering evidence against AAP no one in the media has asked the most important question of all: if both the choice of wholesalers and retailers is made through public auctions, then where is there any space left for graft and favouritism? To the eternal shame of the Indian media, in the months since AAP leaders were imprisoned, no newspaper or television commentator has asked this question.
The answer almost certainly lies buried in the ongoing rapid privatisation of port and LNG terminal development that has taken place during Modi’s prime ministership.
Mahua Moitra. Photo: X/@MahuaMoitra
In the ten years since Narendra Modi came to power in Delhi, his political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has dragged India down from a pinnacle of moral esteem in the world, into the gutter of hate, murder and state planned assassination. The US Department of State’s country report on human rights violations in India summarises India’s descent into the lower circles of Hell as follows:
“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful and arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by the government or its agents; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by police and prison officials; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or detainees; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; restrictions on freedom of expression and media, including violence or threats of violence, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and enforcement of or threat to enforce criminal libel laws to limit expression; restrictions on internet freedom; interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; restrictions on freedom of movement and on the right to leave the country; refoulement of refugees; serious government corruption; harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations”; (and) “crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting members of national/racial/ethnic and minority groups based on religious affiliation, social status or sexual orientation…A lack of accountability for official misconduct persisted at all levels of government, contributing to widespread impunity. …Lax enforcement, a shortage of trained police officers, and an overburdened and under resourced court system contributed to a low number of convictions.”
This was where the BJP had already taken India in the esteem of the world, before the government’s alleged plans to assassinate prominent Khalistanis in the US and Canada were exposed by the West’s ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence consortium. But the expulsion of Mahua Moitra from Parliament, on the basis of a report by an Ethics Committee from which the entire opposition had walked out in protest against the demeaning, sexual innuendo-loaded questions that its chairman, Vinod Kumar Sonkar ,was asking, reeks of a sexual misogyny that has brought shame upon our parliament and country across the entire world.
The BJP has accused Moitra of almost everything it could think of. Chief among the grounds given for her expulsion is her alleged “highly objectionable, unethical, heinous and criminal conduct” before the committee. But even a cursory examination of the record of its meetings shows that Moitra treated the committee with respect, and answered every question relating to the allegations made by her detractors fully. In her replies, which occupy 16 long paragraphs spread over pages 32 till 40, she remained deferential and gave detailed explanations of her actions throughout.
The kernel of the charge Moitra faced was that she had given her login and password to an unauthorised person, Darshan Hiranandani, and allowed him to send in questions in her name that were designed to damage the reputation of Narendra Modi and his government. By doing this she had breached confidentiality and endangered national security. What the committee did not explain was how anyone could have uploaded a question in her name without sending an OTP, as is required in India by all online business transactions, and is mandatory for MPs filing questions in Parliament.
That OTP had to come from Moitra’s phone, and so any verification would necessitate Moitra’s involement. So no matter who had given Moitra the information upon which she based a question in parliament, and who typed and mailed it for her, once she had sent the OTP, it became her question. If she sent the question to Hiranandani, which the records show she undoubtedly did, it would not only have been to get it typed, which is admittedly a not very credible reason, but for verification of the facts that she was citing. That is something every responsible journalist does, so why should a member of parliament not do so in matters of infinitely greater importance?
In fact even her explanation that she had sent her parliamentary questions to Hiranandani’s office only for typing and uploading on the net because these can no longer be submitted in handwritten form, was not a subterfuge. For the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had confirmed to the committee that all of her 61 questions, of which 90% had little or nothing to do with the Hiranandani enterprises, had also been posted from his Dubai IP address.
It was only when the committee chairman, Sonkar asked her five questions that, taken together, insinuated that she was loose woman having an affair with Hiranandani, and was giving him sexual favours for information with which to attack the Modi government, that she stormed out. The questions were: i) What is your relationship with Darshan Hiranandani? ii) How many times did you visit Dubai? (iii) Where did you stay iv) in which hotel; v) Did you meet Darshan Hiranandani there? It was the fifth question that made her lose her temper and storm out. Every self-respecting woman, whether an MP or not, would have done the same.
When Sonkar asked these questions, the committee had already been informed that Moitra had visited Dubai only four times in nearly five years – hardly often enough to sustain a clandestine affair – and that the timing of her visits was not even remotely connected with the timing of the questions she had posed to the petroleum and natural gas ministry. Moitra did not know this, so she had responded to the accusation, indirectly supported by Hiranandani’s affidavit, that the idea of her being able to force a dollar trillionaire with a vast international construction company – a Unicorn – to do anything illegal was ludicrous.
But Sonkar ignored all this and deliberately asked her questions that invaded her privacy, and would have been resented by any self-respecting woman, and drove her into losing her temper and storming out. Sonkar succeeded, knowing that this would make any further inquiry into her actions before recommending her expulsion superfluous. He will no doubt be rewarded in due course as Anurag Thakur and Kapil Mishra were rewarded after the police firing upon Shaheen Bagh protestors and the North-East Delhi communal violence in 2020.
The question no one has asked
The question no one has asked is, what was the Modi government’s tearing need for hurry that made the government target and destroy Mahua Moitra now? So great was the BJP’s hurry that it could not give the members of the Ethics Committee even a day to read its 495 page report, took less than 30 minutes after Moitra stormed out of the final hearing to recommend her expulsion from the Lok Sabha, and carried this out the very next day?
The answer almost certainly lies buried in the ongoing rapid privatisation of port and LNG terminal development that has taken place during Modi’s prime ministership. This began in 2018, and has gathered momentum rapidly since then. The principal, but not only, beneficiary of this shift from reliance on the public sector has been the Adani group of enterprises. A second major player has been H-Energy, an increasingly important part of the Hiranandani group. In Bengal, the competition between these groups was won by the Hiranandani group. In Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere, it is being won mostly by the Adani group.
On January 9, 2019, H-Energy, the energy arm of the Hiranandani group, entered into negotiations with the Calcutta Port Trust to set up an initially three, and eventually five, million tonnes a year Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at Kukrahati, near Haldia port. These negotiations were completed in February 2021, when the Kolkata Port Trust signed an agreement with it for a project involving an investment of Rs 3,900 core, which would yield gross revenues of around Rs 6,000 crore. The construction of the terminal has been delayed because the group proposes to use Kukrahati for supplying LNG to Bangladesh as well, and is building a 150 km pipeline for this. It is now expected to be completed by the middle of this year.
This is only one of several port and gas terminal projects being planned and executed along the east and west coasts. H-Energy, for example, is partnering with Jindal Steel Works to build an LNG terminal at Jaygarh, in Maharashtra. Essar has won a contract to build a one million tonnes per year LNG facility at Haldia port. But the biggest player in this is the Adani Group, which is building a giant facility at Dhamra port in Odisha, and actively bidding for more contracts in Andhra Pradesh, Bengal and on the west coast.
Absent from this hectic activity is Petronet, the public sector consortium consisting of the Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL), Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) and Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), that set up the country’s giant LNG receiving and regasification terminal at Dahej, Gujarat, with a nominal capacity of 17.5 MMTPA (million metric tonnes per annum), and another terminal at Kochi, Kerala with a capacity of five MMTPA. Petronet’s terminals account for around 40% gas supplies in the country and handle around two-thirds of its LNG imports. But today it is nowhere in the scene, and is at most a minor shareholder in a few of the projects that are coming up.
This shift of emphasis has taken pace entirely during the Modi era. So it is not surprising that five out of Moitra’s 91 questions have asked for details concerning the way it has been made. In these she has questioned, among other things, how the Dhamra port LNG terminal project, which began as a proposal by GAIL and ONGC, became a wholly owned Adani enterprise. These questions were posed on July 8, 2019, November 18, 2019 and December 9, 2019. Then, after a 3.5 year gap on March 16, 2023, and then only a week later on March 23, 2023. All of them centred around the way in which the public sector oil and gas companies were being pushed, or shut, out of existing and proposed projects for the construction of LNG terminals and other facilities at the ports being developed on the east and west coasts.
Most of these contracts were ending up with the Adani group. Moitra wanted to know why. To get an answer from the government, she focused on the route by which the group gained full ownership of the LNG terminal planned for Dhamra port in Odisha. Her interest had been sparked by the fact that in 2013, i.e. during the UPA’s rule, GAIL had entered into a contract with the government of Odisha to build a floating LNG terminal at the port of Paradip at a cost of Rs 2,485 crore. But in 2015, a year after the BJP came to power, it withdrew from the Paradip project and took an 11% share in a similar project at Dhamra port, also in Odisha. IOCL, another member of Petronet, took 38%. The other 51% was to be taken by ‘an unspecified partner’. That partner turned out to be the Adani group.
That was only the beginning of the shift. Another two years later, GAIL and IOCL both withdrew from the project, leaving the Adani group the sole owner. This company then signed a 20-year contract to supply three million tonnes a year of LNG to GAIL and IOCL at Rs 60.18 per MMBtu, with an escalation clause of 5% a year. This was a ‘use or pay’ contract, in which the buyers had to pay for all of the contracted amount even if they did not lift it. Moitra claimed that with this assured return, Adani had no difficulty in roping in the French oil and gas giant, Total, as a partner. From the country’s point of view, it was a good deal. But the way in which it was engineered was all wrong.
This was admitted, perhaps unwittingly, by advocate Jai Dehadrai (Moitra’s former lover) himself in the ‘Remarks’ column that he had added to the list that he submitted to the Ethics Committee of the questions that Moitra had posed in Parliament. In these he accused Moitra of targeting the prime minister by asking questions that were designed to show how his government was helping the Adani group to evade the tendering process and violate the guidelines set by the Central Vigilance Commission to acquire the Dhamra LNG project. This was being done by first getting state-owned oil and gas companies to tender for a project, and then making them withdraw in favour of Adani. This, she claimed, was a more sophisticated way of doing what his government had done earlier, to eject GVK from the Mumbai Airport modernisation project and hand it over to the Adani group.
In his determination to punish his ex, Dehedrai went a step further and accused Moitra of repeating these allegations in her March 16 unstarred question this year in the Lok Sabha, solely in order to add to the discomfiture caused to the government by the Adani-Hindenburg exposures. In doing this he unwittingly gave the game away.
On March 16 this year, Moitra had posed the following seven-part question:
“Will the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas be pleased to state (a) the details of Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (IOCL) Memorandum of Undcrstanding (MoU) signed with Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited at Gangavaram Port , duration of contract, take or pay commitments along with price and volume per annum and escalations in the contract;
(b) whether this MoU bas been approved by the Board of IOCL and if so. the details there of (c) whether there is any Government nominee on the Board of IOCL and if so, the details thereof,
(d)whether there is any transaction and if so, the Government’s approval has been taken for such transaction;
(e)whether it is true that IOCL would move its business from Vizag Port to Gangavaram Port and if so, the reasons thereof along with the charges paid to Vizag Port;
(f) whether there are any payment-related commitments at Vizag Port and if so, the details thereof; and
(g) the details of the annual payments and quantities imported by IOCL to Vizag.”
This mammoth query sealed her fate. For if the government answered it, the entire country would see that it was a repeat of what had happened at Dhamra. This would give the still-to-be-born INDIA alliance a golden opportunity to show the country how the Modi government was quietly breaking every rule and convention in order to find ways of handing over their future to a single, highly favoured industrial group, and to start asking what was the quid pro quo.
Moitra had therefore to be to be stopped from demanding an answer in parliament, which is now a televised forum that the whole country watches. The one way to do this was to find a way to expel her from the Lok Sabha. It did this by exploiting a path that she herself had opened, by her behaviour as a single, highly educated and self-confident woman who could choose her friends and lovers – everything that “traditional” Indian women have been trained, or forced, to suppress.
The violence in Nuh, Palwal and Gurgaon makes it clear Narendra Modi has fallen back on the one antidote with which he is familiar, which worked unfailingly in Gujarat and in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. This is the stirring up hatred of Muslims and other minorities in the Hindu majority.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: pmindia.gov.in
Nine years into Narendra Modi’s reign as prime minister, one cannot but admire the consummate skill with which he has turned silence and enigma into his most effective political weapon. INDIA, the newly formed opposition coalition, has roundly condemned the BJP’s failure to prevent the civil war that is now raging in Manipur. It has also condemned the sudden and unexpected outbreak of communal rioting in Nuh, Palwal and Gurugram – a bare 40-60 km from Delhi. But Prime Minister Modi’s only response to them has been his now familiar, enigmatic, silence. His response to the no confidence motion didn’t even scratch the surface of the problems there.
Why is Modi silent? What can he possibly gain from silence? Only in the past week has the opposition become aware of the link that binds the two. This is his utter inability to empathise with victims of tragedy, and his dazzling capacity to turn that psychological failing to his political advantage.
Civil war has been raging in Manipur for more than three months. The entire state is split into warring camps. By the first week of July, nine weeks after the civil war started, 142 persons had been killed, dozens raped and several thousand injured or had their homes burned or razed to the ground – in a total of almost 6,000 atrocities reported to the police. Today, the death toll is closing on 200, but Modi not only continues to maintain his silence but, more significantly, has not levelled a word of criticism against Manipur chief minister Biren Singh in all of the three months that Singh has taken to destroy his state and endanger the unity of India.
This is the stubborn silence that drove the opposition into demanding a vote of confidence against his government. Its goal was not to oust him, which it knows is impossible, but just to force him to account for his government’s misrule to the people of India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Lok Sabha on August 10, 2023.
What can possibly have made the prime minister court this indignity? Surely, he knows that showing empathy with the poor is the best way to win their hearts? He has only to remember how Mrs Indira Gandhi’s instant concern for the plight of the poor made her spectacular political comeback in 1980 possible. The pivotal event then was the massacre of Dalits that took place in 1977 in Belchi, a village in Bihar, at the hands of upper caste landowners. Despite being on trial before the Shah Commission for the excesses committed during the Emergency, she flew to Bihar and rode on an elephant to reach the village.
That was the quality of spontaneous sympathy that gave her a near-divine status among the poor. Modi is too good a politician not to know the value of such gestures, so his profound silence has to be traced to other, more pressing concerns. The only one that springs to mind is his growing fear that, with opposition unity solidifying from month to month, the BJP is in danger of losing the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. So he has gone back to the one antidote with which he is familiar, and which worked unfailingly in Gujarat, and in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. This is stirring up hatred of Muslims and other minorities in the Hindu majority. He did not plan the Manipur violence, but these played into his hands just as the Pulwama attack had done four years ago. It is against this background that one needs to examine the riots that broke out in Nuh.
How dangerously irresponsible Prime Minister Modi’s behaviour is can be judged by comparing it with that of his predecessor Atal Behari Vajpayee. When, within months of the NDA coming to power in 1998, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal raised a hue and cry against conversions to Islam and Christianity, began to attack Christian priests and nuns and vandalise churches, Vajpayee sharply criticised their lawlessness and undertook a fast to force BJP-ruled state governments to take stern action. When cadres of the Bajrang Dal set fire to the car in which Graham Staines, an Australian Christian missionary, and his two sons were sleeping outside a church in Odisha, and burned them alive, he took immediate action. Mass arrests followed, and in less than four years, Dara Singh, the main culprit was in prison, sentenced to death, while his accomplices received lesser sentences.
When the VHP began another campaign against the conversion of tribals to Christianity in the Dang district of Gujarat, Vajpayee pushed the state government to end it forthwith. He also called a conclave of the BJP’s coalition partners and set up a National Coordination Committee headed by George Fernandes as a counterweight to the RSS within his government. That balancing act gave India one of the best governments it has had since Independence.
When the Gujarat riots began on February 28, 2002, after repeatedly failing to contact Modi on the phone, Vajpayee sent defence minister Fernandes to Ahmedabad to call in the army to end the violence. When he visited Ahmedabad a month later, he openly criticised Modi at the Shahpur refugee camp stating, “Main yahan lashe ginane nahi aaya hoon. Aman kayam rakhna rajneetik neta aur adhikariyon ka zimmedari hai. (I have not come here to count the corpses. It is the responsibility of the political leaders and officials to maintain peace.)”
Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Photo: KUNALJ73/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Compare this with Modi’s steadfast refusal to condemn, and his tacit legitimisation through silence, of the lynching of more than 50 Muslims and Dalits by self-appointed gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes), his three-month long silence as Manipur has burned, and now his calculated silence over the outbreak of communal violence in Nuh, Gurgaon and Palwal. This makes the difference between a Hindu who understood, and wanted to foster, the essential tolerance of Hinduism, and a fake devotee who is abusing it to perpetuate his personal power at the expense of his country becomes starkly apparent.
As I write, Prime Minister Modi has maintained his now-familiar enigmatic silence on the eruption of communal violence in Nuh, Gurgaon and Palwal for nine days. Through his silence, he has endorsed the Haryana home minister’s placing of the blame squarely upon Muslim youth in Nuh who allegedly attacked devotees who came to offer prayers at the Nalhar temple. This allegation has been so readily accepted that even The Hindu reported that “soon after they (the yatris) started the second leg of their journey from the Nalhar temple to a Radhakrishna temple 60 kms away, they were attacked by a mob . As stones were thrown at them and vehicles and shops set ablaze the devotees ran back to the temple in terror. They sat huddled inside for five hours as the mob surrounded the temple”.
This description left out several key facts. The most important of these is that it was preceded by a full year of carefully planned provocation of an entirely peaceful Muslim population by the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, to which the Haryana government consistently turned a blind eye. The first was that while the Nalhar temple was ancient, the pilgrimage to it, titled a Jalabhishekh Yatra (offering of holy water from the Ganges to Lord Shiva) was only three years old, and had been launched by the VHP, with the express purpose of reclaiming Mahabharat-age temples from the Muslims. The article also did not mention that most of the pilgrims in the Jalabhishekh Yatra were not ordinary men and women of all ages but almost exclusively young men.
The second was that the fracas in Nuh town was caused by a string of provocations that had begun a year or more before the violence occurred. The first provocation took place in 2022 when a mazaar (a sufi shrine) was vandalised, but the elders of both communities contained the reaction. This year, however, saw a rapid fire string of further provocations.
First, a self styled gau rakshak named Monu Manesar, who is a Bajrang Dal activist on the run from the Rajasthan police for killing two Muslims, Nasir and Junaid, earlier this year, posted a succession of inflammatory videos and promised that he would attend the Shobha Yatra at the Nalhar temple on Monday personally, to bathe the Shivling in Ganges water.
Monu Manesar. Photo: Twitter/@MonuManesar. January 21, 2023.
Second, another notorious Muslim baiter and self-advertised member of the Bajrang Dal, Bittu Bajrangi, uploaded a series of venomous anti-Muslim videos on various channels, in one of which he claimed derisively that ‘Nuh was the Hindu community’s sasural (in-laws’ house)’. No one failed to understand the insult.
A third agent provocateur who had also announced his intention to join the Yatra this year was yet another Bajrang Dal member who is known by his nom de guerre, ‘Rambhakt Gopal’. He gained notoriety in 2020 by firing a revolver at protestors demonstrating against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in Shaheen Bagh, shouting “Yeh lo azaadi (Here’s your freedom)” as he retreated, still holding his revolver up, into the protective ranks of a hundred Delhi policemen who did nothing to deter him.
In the run up to the Nuh march, Gopal had uploaded two videos, the first of armed persons in a jeep terrorising women and children in a Muslim village, and the second, captioned “Taking away the cow smuggler” was of young men dragging a Muslim into an SUV.
Neither Monu Manesar nor Gopal turned up at Nuh, but the damage had been done and the town was seething with young men who were determined to take revenge. It was in these conditions that, after visiting the Nalhar temple, the Jalabhishekh Yatris decided to go through the centre of Nuh town to their second shrine, the Radhakrishna temple at Singar village, 60 km away. This made the resulting violence unavoidable.
Then followed the now familiar BJP routine of blaming the victims for the atrocities they had suffered. By Friday, just four days after the riot in Nuh, the Haryana police force that had done absolutely nothing to prevent a well publicised riot, had arrested as many as 141 persons and registered 55 FIRs in connection with the violence. It has not given any data as to who, precisely, they have arrested. But it is safe to assume that just as happened after the East Delhi riots three years ago – where despite 40 out of 53 persons killed being Muslims and most of the property destroyed being Muslim-owned, all but a handful of those arrested were also Muslims – most of those who have been arrested in Nuh will also turn out to be Muslims.
What there is data for already is the revenge that the police has taken upon the Muslims of Nuh. Almost all of the more than 750 homes, huts, shops, restaurants and cinema halls demolished by the Haryana government in the immediate aftermath of the riot, allegedly for suddenly discovered illegal construction, belong to Muslims.
Throughout this tragedy, Modi has maintained his sphinx-like silence while his advisers worked out how to convert the resulting increase in Hindu-Muslim animosity into votes for the BJP in 2024. The first fruit of their cogitations has not taken long to ripen. On Wednesday August 9, a bare 48 hours after the Muslim property destruction drive began, the Haryana BJP chief, Om Prakash Dhankar, had the brazen-faced gall to accuse the Congress and the Aam Admi Party of having instigated the riots. He and his five-member delegation did this without even having visited Nuh, but after the police had prevented a Congress delegation from going to the town on Tuesday and an AAP delegation from doing so on Wednesday.
The causes of the communal conflagration in Manipur may have been local, and the violence unplanned, but the same cannot be said of the tragedy that has befallen the Meos of Nuh. Judging from Modi’s past actions, Nuh is likely to be followed by more communal violence triggered by the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, but blamed upon local Muslims. As the BJP feels more threatened by the INDIA alliance, such provocations are set to multiply. India is therefore likely to go through the fires of hell before the next election. And if the BJP somehow comes out as the victor, it will almost certainly be the last proper general election this country will see.
“Kashmir came to India because we felt our ambitions and hopes would be fulfilled by allying ourselves with the great country which was India, which believed in democracy, in the rule of law… Now look at the treatment Kashmir has received… Let every Indian search his own heart.”
Sheikh Abdullah. Photo: File
This interview with Sheikh Abdullah was first published in the February 1968 edition of The Weekend Review, a supplement published by the Hindustan Times. The Wire is republishing it now because of the bearing it has on the ongoing debates in the Supreme Court and elsewhere over Kashmir’s constitutional status.
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It is February, 1968. In a bungalow in New Delhi, the Lion of Kashmir Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah waits for the weather to moderate and the road to open so that he may return to his homeland. He waits also, with dwindling hope and increasing despondency, for some sign from the Union government that it is willing to give up its ostrich attitude on Kashmir. Today history is threatening to repeat itself. A carefully planned campaign seems to have been launched to rouse communal violence and then point to him as its cause. He has been falsely accused of having met the Chinese Charge d’ Affaires in the Pakistan High Commission. The ground is thus being prepared to force the government to put him away again as it did in 1963, in 1958, and in 1965. The Sheikh’s “sin” is that he is an uncompromising idealist in an era of political disillusionment. In this interview with Prem Shankar Jha of the Weekend Review, he sets out the political convictions that have sustained him in his long travail.
How were you first attracted to politics?
It was what I saw around me in Kashmir, I think, that first attracted me to politics – the distress, and the poverty which I saw as I grew up. As I have been telling my friends here (in Delhi), Kashmir, because of its natural beauty, has always attracted conquerors who have treated it as a prize a luxury item made simply for their enjoyment. They never thought of the Kashmiri people. This has been true of all conquerors including the Moghuls and most recently the Dogras. During all this time, the needs of the people were seldom looked after, and as I grew I found that poverty and illiteracy prevailed everywhere.
What led you to convert the Kashmir Muslim Conference into the National Conference in 1938?
You see, I was brought up in a place where I had the people of one community all around me, that is Muslims. Generally the Muslims are very much downtrodden in Kashmir. They are a huge majority – 95%. So naturally my first contact was with them and I was influenced by their distress and the injustices they suffered at the hands of officialdom. So I had the idea that they were suffering on account of their religion.
But later when I had had an opportunity to travel around and tour the whole state, I came across other people belonging to other religious communities – Hindus and Sikhs – receiving the same, and in places even worse, treatment than Muslims. So I came to the conclusion that the real fight was not between two religions, or two religious groups, but between “haves” and “have nots”, oppressed and oppressor. I found there were Muslims, there were Sikhs – people of all communities. So I began to feel that if one’s real purpose was to relieve oppression or distress, the best course was to serve not one group but all the people irrespective of caste, creed or colour. That was my reason for broad-basing the old Muslim Conference.
Was it when you found that the condition of oppression was not merely confined to Kashmir that you decided to join the States’ People’s Conference?
Yes, initially of course my views were formed by touring Kashmir state, but later when I went to Hyderabad, for example, I found the overwhelmingly Hindu population of that state in the same condition as the population of Kashmir.
When did you meet Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, and what impression or impact did they create on you?
I met Panditji first when he visited Lahore and he was staying with Mian Iftikhar-ud-din Khan. I met him not at his house but at the railway station when he was proceeding to the (North West) frontier. It was 1938 or 1939. We had a talk at the railway station… I sat in his compartment…and accompanied him on his tour. Just like that. Just like that we had a long exchange of ideas. That was my first contact with him. At that time we discussed how to open the gates of the Muslim Conference to the other minorities in the state in Kashmir. We did not have to do (much) because the basic principles of the Muslim Conference were already universal and non-communal. So we had only to discuss the technical part of how to do it. We exchanged our ideas. I told him of my difficulties and he discussed the advantages of broad-basing the movement. So that was my first contact.
Gandhi’s impact on me was that he was a man of high principles and of noble, political ideals. He had a religious bent of mind. This attracted me to him ideologically. Another thing which impressed me was that he was a lover of truth. He would always stand by the truth. Once he was convinced that a certain thing was wrong it would not take him a minute to admit it. In his whole life he would not ask others to do anything which he himself would not practice first.
In 1945-46 Mr Jinnah came to Kashmir. What he was seeking at that time was to reconvert the National Conference into the Muslim Conference. Therein we naturally did not agree. But in Delhi when I met him I told him it was not my view only which matters, and that I would ask the advice of my colleagues. [I explained to him that] in 1931-32, we had gone through this debate and come to the conclusion that it was not merely a question of communities, and that it was the duty of every Muslim to fight to relieve the distress of everyone. We believed that this was the true Islam, so the Muslim Conference was opened to minorities. Unless I was convinced that this was wrong, I could not go back on this decision. I said that if my other colleagues decided unanimously to back to the original position, then I would not stand in the way. But in that case I would not be able to lead the Conference because personally I would still not be convinced. But I would accept the decision of my party because as a democratic principal if the majority decides, naturally I would then have to either follow or quit.
But finally no decision was needed. Mr Jinnah had come to Kashmir. He had accepted my decision. But there probably, he was advised not to accept my proposal to put his suggestion to the Conference because it was felt that I had so much influence with the working of the National Conference that they would always go by my advice. So he avoided referring the matter to the Conference. Naturally there was a conflict apparently after that his position was changed and he supported the Maharaja. His position as far as the princes were concerned was that the right to ‘decide the future’ affiliation was given to the princes and not the people. Therefore he stuck to that position, whilst the Indian Congress and the State Peoples Conference opposed his view point. They said that it was the right of the people to decide, and not of one man.
Sheikh Abdullah addressing a gathering at Lal Chowk in Srinagar in 1975. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
What was the situation in Kashmir in 1947?
Just before the emergency in 1947, I found anxiety all round, because of what was happening on both sides of Punjab. Thousands of refugees, both Hindus and Muslims, had poured into the state. They had suffered a lot and there was tension between the Hindus and Muslim of Kashmir. There was anxiety about what was going to happen. Then the Maharaja had not taken any decision about the accession. This was the main question that faced me on my release from jail on the 28th of September, 1947.
At my first public meeting which I addressed in Srinagar, I made my position on the accession clear. I felt that the people of Jammu and Kashmir were not in a position to take a decision at that moment because they did not know what shape, ultimately, the two dominions would take. There was so much trouble and nobody even knew whether the two dominions would exist. I suppose nobody knew whether the secular principle would survive at that time. Nobody knew what was going to happen. So we thought that this was not the time to take a decision which would influence not only us but also future generations. So we needed time.
That was one consideration. The second consideration was that we had been fighting since 1931 for a responsible government in Kashmir. We had not achieved that objective and the Maharaja was still an autocrat. We had to first gain our freedom before deciding about accession and we requested the heads of both the dominions, both Congress and the Muslim League, not to force us to take a decision at that moment, but to leave us alone.
I sent one of my colleagues Mr G.M. Sadiq, who is the present chief minister, to Lahore to meet the prime minister of Pakistan, Mr Liaquat Ali Khan and to put this question before him, but unfortunately they took the position that as the subcontinent was divided on the basis of Muslims and Hindus, and as Kashmir was a Muslim-majority area, it must ipso facto come to Pakistan. That position was not acceptable to us. Mr Sadiq told Pakistan that the decision must not be imposed on the people of Jammu and Kashmir but they should be given a chance to decide their own fate. Both India and Pakistan must accept (their) decision, whatever it may be. There was no agreement on that, so Sadiq returned and, soon after, the raids began and the picture changed.
When the raids began the Maharaja could not stop them because his forces were spread out throughout the state in small, batches. The raiders therefore nearly reached Srinagar, so he was advised (I don’t know by whom) and left in the dead of the night with his personal staff and belongings for Jammu; meanwhile he requested India for military support. India could not give this military support unless some legal basis was established. Lord Mountbatten advised his colleagues, Pandit Nehru and others that it would be wrong for India to send troops into a technically independent state. If India did so, Pakistan would do the same and there would be a clash between the two dominions, and since the army was still controlled by British personnel on both sides, it would be difficult for them to fight. So he suggested that some legal formula should be established.
The Maharaja was told that military help would come (legally) only if he signed the Instrument of Accession. Thus the Maharaja signed under duress, and in his letter whilst forwarding the document to Lord Mountbatten he stated clearly the circumstances under which he had signed the accession. Realising this position and the desire of the people of Kashmir for self-determination and their refusal to give up that position vis-à-vis Pakistan, the leaders of India accepted the accession provisionally subject to ratification by the people of Jammu and Kashmir at a later stage on the basis of a plebiscite. The condition of a plebiscite was laid [down] at that very hour.
Was it specifically plebiscite, or a ‘reference to the people’?
For that I would like you to see V.P. Menon’s book The Integration of the Indian States. He has devoted a chapter to each state and there is one on Kashmir too. He clearly says that because of these considerations the accession was ‘accepted subject to a plebiscite’. He has clearly used the word plebiscite in his book. Actually it was Lord Mountbatten in his letter to the Maharaja in which he accepted the deed of accession, who said this would become final after a “reference to the people” .
What were the problems you faced during the emergency government when you became prime minster?
My problems were multifold. Firstly there was a fear complex: Muslims were afraid of Hindus and Hindus were afraid of Muslims. In the Jammu and Kashmir state, Hindus would not think of going to Pakistan because of what had happened on that side. They thought they would be completely finished if the state acceded to Pakistan. The Muslims were afraid that if the state joined India then their fate would be the same as of Muslims in Kapurthala and other Punjab states. In India too, at that time, there were definitely two trends. One was the secular concept and the other trend was towards a theocratic concept. The Hindu Mahasabha and parts of the Congress and the general mass of the people also thought that if “they” have a Muslim state we must have a Hindu state. So (in Kashmir) we had to fight these trends. It was a tough fight and an uphill task for those who believed in humanity and not in Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs.
This was the problem facing us: how to create confidence in the two sectors in Kashmir. I thought that remaining in India on the basis of the Instrument of Accession was enough guarantee for the non-Muslims that their lives would be safeguarded and that their rights would be safeguarded. But how to create confidence amongst the Muslims. I thought that by guaranteeing an autonomous position (for) the state, they would have an assurance that there would be no interference with their internal affairs. As a majority, it would be up to them to provide safeguards for the minority and not vice versa.
Besides this, they would have the tremendous advantage of being a part of a country which claimed to be democratic and progressive, and in which the rule of law prevailed. By remaining a part of such a state, the condition and aspiration for which they had been fighting since 1931 would be fulfilled. So I thought that this would be a good compromise and I could retain the confidence of the people. Unfortunately communal forces and the trend in India which believed in a theocratic Hindu state proved to be too strong. And there was a break.
Sheikh Abdullah with other leaders of the 1931 agitation. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
You are referring to 1953? But you were very successful in doing so during the emergency (raiders’ invasion).
At that time there was imminent danger. In Kashmir, in spite of everything, people do not believe in violence and communal hatred. They belong to the same ethnic group. There are people, both Hindus and Muslims, who belong to the same caste and have the same surname – for example Bakshis are both Hindus and Muslim. Wattals are both Hindus and Muslims, and so on. So there was nothing that could separate them, and this helped us a lot.
What was the result you would have wanted to see emerge from a plebiscite?
At that time we thought that they could fulfil their ambitions by remaining a part of a democratic country in India because of Pandit Nehru and Gandhi and other Congressmen with whom we had close associations. We thought we too could remain a part of that country The sympathy of the Congress leaders for the people of Kashmir was fresh in the minds of the Kashmiris – how Nehru had suffered for them and Gandhi had sympathised with them. Though the ruler was a Hindu and a majority of the population was Muslim, this had not prevented the Congress leadership from identifying itself with the political movement in Kashmir led mainly by the Muslims. This had a tremendous impact on (Kashmiri) Muslims at that time. If a plebiscite had been conducted at that time, I am sure that it would have gone in favour of India. Later, of course, the situation changed, unfortunately.
Did the presence of the army create tensions?
From the very beginning we had to go through a lot of stress and strain even in 1947. When the first Indian Army troops came there, some of the battalions had completely lost their perspective. They thought that the fight was between Hindus and Muslims, no matter where the Muslim belonged to. We had to face this trouble [from the start]. A Sikh regiment from Patiala was stationed near the airport and wanted some volunteers. But the next morning when the camp moved out, we found the four volunteers dead in their bunkers. We had to face a terrible row in the city at that time. Then I called a conference and said that [the soldiers had perhaps] seen their nearest and dearest being killed in the riots. They were not in their normal mood as they thought that every Muslim was an enemy. They did not know that we were fighting for a certain cause. So we decided that the army heads and leaders must be told to inform the soldiers that they were fighting for an ideal. We did this and it had a very good effect.
During the period after the [Kashmir] war, how did reactionary forces, which you said earlier proved to be too strong, manifest themselves?
When we took over the administration, we had naturally to fulfil the promises we had made to the people for a long time about land reforms, the reduction and cancellation of debts, and other such reforms.
Landholdings were distributed among the tillers of the soil. Among the landlords there were Hindus, Muslims and others. But the Hindu landlords had a say in Delhi. They came here [to Delhi] and spread poison against us, trying to give the land reforms a communal colour. There were people here who readily believed these people. This vitiated the atmosphere of relations between Kashmir and the Centre, giving them a communal cast when the object of our reforms was purely economic.
Similarly with regard to debt cancellation. We passed a law according to which any debt in which the sum of interest payments had equalled or exceeded one and half times the value of the principal was considered automatically cancelled. Now, among the sahukars (moneylenders) also, there were both Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu sahukars were able, and did, complain to people here in Delhi, thus further vitiating the atmosphere. And then the Maharaja…we could not keep on the dynasty… When the dynasty was abolished, all those people who used to surround the Maharaja took advantage of this position, did not like the changes my government was making and combined to wage a campaign on communal lines in Delhi, in spite of the fact that none of the measures we had passed were communally motivated.
Was there any kind of discrimination in the allocation of jobs in Kashmir?
During my time there was none, but one thing was clear: with the spread of education, groups which were not previously represented began to claim jobs. So we had to satisfy their urges. Muslims, who were as you know a majority, had suffered for a long time and were nowhere represented in the administration. So naturally when they came up, they expected that they would also get their due. This is what happened in Hyderabad, where the Hindus came up in a similar manner. The position in Kashmir was exactly the reverse of Hyderabad.
My difficulty, however, was that I could not clean up the administration all at once. I could not remove people who had been working for years without providing them alternative employment. So, I was trying, little by little, to redress the balance of the various communities in government. The process was slow, but I can say with certainty that there was no discrimination.
One often hears in Delhi that you were arrested on the 8th of August, 1953 because you were on the verge of giving a unilateral call for independence. It is also said that you would have done so in your in speech on 1 August. I have read the text of the speech which you were to give and have not found anything to support this thesis. Was there anything else which could have led to this conclusion? Did you at any point even consider such a unilateral declaration could not happen? What was the dialogue you were engaged in with Panditji at the time of your arrest?
Panditji wanted the ratification of the accession by the Kashmir Constituent Assembly. I advised him that the world would not accept this situation, nor the people whom we had been assuring that theirs would be the final say. Actually I had suggested this course [ratification by the Assembly at an early stage] in 1950. At that time it was Panditji who had firmly refused to follow this course, saying that India was committed not only to the people but to the entire world to hold the plebiscite. This ratification was one of the purposes for which the Constituent Assembly had been called in 1950. But Pakistan and protested strongly to the Security Council, and India had assured the council twice through Sir Benegal Rao, who was the permanent representative to the UN, that India would abide by her commitments.
May I now come to the present day [1968], and ask you a few questions on which there has been some controversy recently: Firstly, quite a lot has been made in the press of your hesitation to declare your nationality as Indian. You subsequently clarified your position by saying that you were “provisionally” an Indian citizen, which did not really help very much. Would you care to tell me what made you hesitate to commit yourself?
The difficulty with me is that circumstances have drawn me into politics. Otherwise, I don’t feel myself good enough for this job. Because nowadays I feel a politician must know how to stab his friends. A politician must know all these dirty tricks. I find myself incapable of conspiracy, incapable of speaking untruths, and incapable of what we call diplomacy. I have suffered because of this.
With regard to this nationality question, in my press conference my main objection was to the attitude of the questioner. I felt that he was not asking this question with a good intention, Otherwise I would have explained the whole position then and there. And what I thought turned out to be true; this question was loaded, and was meant to spoil the atmosphere of the conference.
With regard to my nationality, I feel that this is the whole question under dispute since 1947. If the nationality of the people of Jammu and Kashmir is considered fixed once and for all, then there is no dispute left, and nothing to be settled.
But no one today seriously believes that there is no dispute. Even in 1965 when the war was going on, Vinobaji [Vinoba Bhave] is on record as having said that the Jammu and Kashmir dispute can only be considered truly settled when the people of India, the people of Kashmir, the people of Pakistan and the whole world agree that it is settled. So at the most, as far as I am concerned…you see, I have been a party to the provisional accession, so if you take it from a purely legalistic point of view then I consider myself as having accepted a provisional citizenship of Indian.
Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru.
The second point is that we the people of Kashmir, of all shades, believe that so long as the uncertainty of the external situation continues, we can never have internal peace and stability. That has been our experience – not only mine but also of all my colleagues, including those who succeeded me. I have not been on the scene for the last 14 years, but all the material and moral help which the Government of India has given to Kashmir has not succeeded in bringing peace or stability. So we feel that peace and stability will only come when India and Pakistan come together, become friends. So the people of Kashmir have a self interest in seeing that India and Pakistan come together. I am working therefore for this purpose. So if you “fix” me, then where is the basis on which I can work for better relations? I must have a little freedom to negotiate.
‘The third point which I keep trying to explain to my friends in India is that in 1947, Kashmir did not come to India because of any pressure or persuasion, but of its own free will. It was because we felt that our ambitions and our hopes, for which we had made huge sacrifices since 1931, would be fulfilled by allying ourselves with the great country which was India, which believed in democracy, in the rule of law, which believed in equality of man. We believe in the high ideals which Mahatma Gandhi preached. Now look at the treatment Kashmir has received. That is an open book, and I don’t want to go into it. Let every Indian search his own heart.
But most people in Indian seem to think that the Kashmiris enjoy the same degree of democracy which Indians elsewhere do.
I wish Kashmir had that democratic constitution and that democratic way of life, but the fact remains that Indian democracy stops short at Pathankot. Between Pathankot and Banihal you may have some measure of democracy, but after Banihal there is none. What we have in Kashmir bears some of the worst characteristics of colonial rule. We are at the mercy of an ordinary police officer. Nobody can express his opinion freely. Let any Indian go there and honestly assess the entire situation. Can you blame Kashmiris for saying that when the Indian government has kept their leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, in jail for 14 years without a charge, what can they expect from it in the future in the way of fair play?
We did not come [accede] to Indian because of its vastness, or because it is a moneyed country. We were enamoured of the high principles for which you stood. But today, let alone what is happening in Kashmir, even here I have been released but I am discouraged from speaking of my cause. What happened in Meerut? The chief minister of UP directed all his district magistrates to prevent me from speaking if he felt this would lead to disturbances. The chief minister did not bother to find out who were the troublemakers in Meerut. What did I say at that public meeting? I delivered an address of nearly two and a half hours. The speech is there. I could be taken to task on the basis of that speech, but even there in Meerut when the atmosphere was so tense, I preached communal harmony. Does it become a minister in a democratic country to take such an attitude? Now I am warned not to go here, not to go there, not to go there…this how Indian democracy functions. How do you expect the people of Kashmir today to come rushing to you?
Of course India can keep Kashmir by force. But this way it will have the bodies of the Kashmiris but not their souls. That would not be a true accession. Accession should be of minds and hearts, and love and justice are the only two weapons which come with you for that accession.
In your public meetings and your talks, have you found the people more responsive to your suggestions than before?
As far as the common people are concerned, I have found them very responsive. They understand things, they are themselves tired of these people who exploit them, who try to exploit their emotions. There is a good response from the people. It is only gangs of assassins, who have learnt the art of murder, who have been taught how to stab people. These people hide in a bush and when a person is walking unawares, come up behind him, stab him, and run away. But not a single man has been caught, although in Meerut nearly 30 people have been stabbed.
There have been disturbances in many places – Rourkela, Ranchi, even Srinagar. Hundreds of people have been involved, but no one has been hanged for murder committed during communal disturbances. I know very well that this is not representative of what is happening in the whole of India, and that India is a vast country, but these things are happening, and they have a terrible effect on the people of Kashmir.
We had some Kashmiri students studying in Ranchi in the medical college there. They returned home almost naked. When they reached their home, they narrated their tale of misery and woe to the people. How could these things not effect the listeners, and how could you expect them to look to India for protection? These things have got to stop, but they will never stop until the tension between India and Pakistan is resolved. There is only one answer to this problem and that is to end the strife on the subcontinent. How long can this be avoided?
This interview was originally published on February 17, 1968 in the Weekend Review and is republished here courtesy the Hindustan Times.
Congress party workers and supporters hold national flags during a Freedom March to celebrate the 75 years of India’s Independence in Bengaluru, Monday, Aug. 15, 2022. Photo: PTI
The fact that ten more ‘like-minded’ parties have joined the meeting of the opposition at Bengaluru, that the Congress has graciously met the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s demand that it commits itself to voting against the Bill that seeks to deprive the Delhi government of control over its own civil servants, in the Rajya Sabha, and that the opposition has now given itself a single name – INDIA – reflects the near-complete consensus within the opposition on the need to set differences aside in order to save democracy. This has greatly increased the likelihood of a defeat for the BJP in the 2024 Lok sabha election, by shifting the ‘multiplier effect’ of the simple majority voting system, which invariably magnifies the seat-to-vote ratio of the largest party or coalition at the expense of the smaller ones, in the opposition’s favour.
In the past two Lok Sabha elections, this effect worked strongly in favour of the BJP. In 2014, its 31% vote share made it the largest single party in the elections. That, and the fact that all but a fraction of this vote was concentrated in seven states of northern and western India enabled it to win 282 seats, comprising 52% of the total membership of the Lok Sabha. In 2019, its vote share increased to 37%, close to double that of the next largest party, the Congress. That enabled it to win 303 seats. Opposition unity next year will take the multiplier effect away from the BJP and confer it upon itself.
Joint opposition parties meeting in Bengaluru. Photo: Twitter/@AAP
How dramatic this shift can be was vividly demonstrated by the Karnataka Vidhan Sabha elections in May. Although the BJP’s share of the vote remained unchanged at 36%, a 5.4% shift of the vote from the JDS to the Congress – which increased its share to 43% – increased the number of seats it won from 80 to 135, and brought down the BJP’s tally from 104 to 66. Opposition unity, even if not complete, will almost certainly do the same thing at the national level next year.
This possibility has already driven Modi into a frenetic election mode, in which he has left governance to his lieutenants, and has been tailoring his every statement and action to creating a God-like image of himself for the ordinary Indian, and pandering to the hyper-nationalism that is latent in most Hindus in the country. He is not doing this solely out of a desire to remain in power. He is also aware that should the BJP lose, the ghosts of those who were killed in the Gujarat riots, and the faked encounters and the unexplained deaths that followed, will rise to torment him, possibly till the end of his life.
This fusion of political with personal motives will make the 2024 elections the most fateful that India has ever faced. For, democracies can only survive if their leaders are willing to accept defeat and fight for power through the ballot, instead of the bullet. Modi has shown a reluctance to do this throughout the 22 years he has enjoyed power at Gandhinagar and Delhi. He is, therefore, certain to seize any opportunity that arises in the next nine months to pose again as the guardian of India’s security and honour, as he was able to do after the Pulwama suicide bombing in February 2019.
Modi may sense an opportunity in Kashmir
One such opportunity is certain to arise in Kashmir – if the Supreme Court rules against the government’s 2019 abolition of the state’s special status under Article 370, and rules that it must be re-instated. The court’s brusque dismissal earlier this month, of the government’s attempt to justify that action by claiming, ex-post, that it has brought peace and economic development to the state, has aroused this hope in Kashmir’s political parties, and public, throughout the Valley. Should it do so, they believe that Delhi will have no option but to restore the status quo ante and thereby restore their right to preserve their ethnic identity within the Indian union.
But they could be catastrophically wrong. In his 22 years of leadership, Modi has never, ever, admitted that he has made a mistake that needs correction. Nor has he ever reversed any decision he has taken. So, how is he likely to react to such a direct challenge to his authority by the Supreme Court?
Had the petitions against the dilution of Article 370 been filed in a lower court – such as the Jammu and Kashmir high court, Modi would have been able to buy time till after the Lok Sabha elections by appealing against an adverse order to the Supreme Court. But all of them were lodged in the Supreme Court, which is the court of final appeal, so the only alternative that will be available to Modi is to assert parliament’s supremacy over every other democratic institution in the country, as his government has done more than once in recent months, ignore the court’s ruling and continue to rule Jammu and Kashmir directly from Delhi. This will almost certainly make the simmering discontent in the Valley explode into violence, and in doing so, give Modi the excuse for stoking Hindu hyper-nationalism again, to win yet another general election.
Will the Union government be able to control the reaction in Kashmir? Modi would like us to believe that it will, because the majority of the people of the Valley will oppose the return of violence, and the loss of business and livelihoods that it will entail. That was what his government’s affidavit to the Supreme Court had been intended to impress upon it. But even a cursory look at the reality behind the virtual blackout of political news from the Valley shows that the government’s affidavit is a tissue of falsehoods.
In it, the government has claimed that ‘the entire region of Jammu and Kashmir has witnessed an “unprecedented” era of peace, progress, and prosperity, with street violence orchestrated by terrorists and secessionist networks becoming a thing of the past’. Modi may even have persuaded himself that this is actually true but data collected painstakingly by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) show that it is the opposite of the truth.
According to the SATP, in the four years from 2019 to 2022, there were 729 incidents involving the killing of civilians, militants and security forces – an average of one incident every two days! In these, the security forces killed 781 militants and suffered 209 deaths. Kashmir had therefore seen 990 deaths in 1,460 days, i.e. one death caused by militancy-related violence, every 36 hours! Unless it is SATP that has been lying, these figures show that the Government of India has told a blatant lie in a sworn affidavit to the highest court of the land.
Having done so, it will have no option but to live out that lie. Since it can only do this by crushing the popular discontent in Kashmir as rapidly and completely as possible, this could lead to a level of repression that Kashmir has never experienced before. Furthermore, given the way in which Modi turned the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the Pulwama suicide bombing of 2019 to the BJP’s political advantage, it is a safe bet that he will try to do the same with the pogrom that will follow in Kashmir. And, given the BJP’s spectacular rise after both those tragic events, there is every likelihood that he will succeed yet again.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi paying tribute to the CRPF soldiers killed in the Pulwama attack. Photo: PTI
Averting this design
So one of the first questions the opposition will need to discuss, when formulating a common programme of action to present to the people before the next election, is how to forestall an attempt by Modi to repeat his earlier successes by unleashing another reign of terror in Kashmir, and using the reaction that will evoke from the youth to inflame the dormant distrust of Muslims in Hindu hearts in the rest of India.
The starting point for frustrating this design is to understand, and accept, that Partition, and the slaughter of innocents that followed, severely damaged the syncretic Ganga-Yamuni culture built over the previous 600 years all over north India. In Pakistan, it led to a ‘purification’ of Sunni Islam, exemplified by the teachings of Maulana Maududi, that led to the official excommunication of various Shia factions, most notably the Ahmadiyyas, and fostered the rise of violent extremist organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Taliban – who offered to further ‘purify’ Islam in Pakistan, in exchange for being allowed to ‘liberate’ Kashmir.
In India, Partition, and the subsequent conflict with Pakistan, hardened Hindu distrust of Muslims and discredited the syncretic Islam that had emerged out of centuries of peaceful co-existence and been codified by Akbar in the Din-e-Elahi. That is the syncretism that Mahatma Gandhi gave his life in an attempt to preserve. How deeply embedded it remains in the Indian Muslim psyche, even 75 years and three Indo-Pak wars after Partition, can be judged from the fact that there has not been a single Sunni-Shia communal riot of significance in India after independence, when this was an annual event in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By contrast, in Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was given a relatively free reign to kill Shias in some parts of Pakistan such as Sindh and Baltistan.
Thanks to Mahatma Gandhi’s sacrifice, and the relentless efforts of Nehru, Maulana Azad and others, syncretism has remained strong in India. Out of more than 200 million Indian Muslims, only 18 joined al Qaeda, and less than 100 joined ISIS. Nearly all of these, moreover, were migrants working in the Gulf, who were lured into joining ISIS in part at least by the prospect of escaping from their miserable conditions of work in there. By contrast, more than 5,000 Europeans joined it, among whom only a minority were children of immigrants from the middle east.
What the post-partition conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir has erased from the Hindu mind is that this syncretism is not only strongest in Kashmir but has survived despite the outbreak of insurgency in 1989 only because Article 370 prevented a large number of people from other parts of India from settling in Kashmir. Since the outbreak, first army and then police repression has driven more and more of the youth into the arms of the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Ahl-e-Hadis. But syncretic Reshi (a corruption of Rishi) Islam has survived in spite of this and remains the dominant form of Islam in Kashmir even today.
Reshi Islam is full of practices incorporated into it from Hinduism. Among these is Auradh-e-Fidrat, a morning prayer to the rising sun that has no equivalent in any branch of Islam outside Kashmir, because it is an incorporation of Surya Namaskar. Another is the practice of invoking one’s ancestors at the beginning of every major prayer or religious function – again normal in Hinduism but haraam in Sunni Islam.
But perhaps most telling is the nature of Kashmiri cuisine. Till today, there is not only no beef in it but also no chicken and no eggs. There is also, in my experience, no garlic. In short, Kashmiri cuisine is, till today, indistinguishable from the cuisine of Shaivite Brahmins – which, of course, was what Kashmiris were till the arrival of Sufi Islam from Iran.
These are only some of the more superficial differences between Reshi and Sunni Islam. Other, more profound, differences are the worship of relics of saints, and of the shrines where they are buried, that one finds in Reshi, and some other variants of Shia Islam, but is forbidden in Sunni Islam. These differences were noted by no less eminent a person than Mohammed Ali Jinnah in 1946, and led him to reject a request by the Jammu-based J&K Muslim Conference to allow it to join the Muslim League.
These differences also explain why, despite almost a quarter of a million traumatised refugees from both sides of the Radcliffe line passing through Jammu in 1947, the entire princely state of Kashmir, and the Valley in particular, remained free from communal violence till almost the end of October 1947, while the rest of India burned.
That is the communal harmony that both Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah cherished and were determined to protect. Even the rigging of elections, that began in a small way as early as 1952, was not designed to prevent Kashmiri Muslims from expressing a desire to join Pakistan but to prevent Hindu zealots, concentrated in Jammu, from being able to drag Kashmir into the mire of Indian communal politics. This threat had arisen in November 1947, when the J&K Praja Parishad was created in Jammu by Balraj Madhok, a key member of the RSS, with the express purpose of opposing the special status granted to the state under Article 370 of the constitution. This brought the communal politics of the rest of India into the state and threatened to undo precisely what Nehru, Sheikh Abdullah and Maharaja Hari Singh had been trying their level best, in their own ways, to prevent.
Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah. Photo: Oxford University Press
The rigging that began then was designed to insulate Kashmiriyat not from the pull of Pakistan’s Sunni Islam in Kashmir, but against the push of Hindu intolerance, later dignified as Hindutva, in Jammu. This made it necessary for the National Conference to ensure that it always won a sufficient number of seats to obtain a majority in the state legislature. Rigging up to half of the constituencies in Kashmir became the surest way to ensure that the National Conference stayed in power at least until India won its case in the UN Security Council and Pakistan withdrew from PoK. That, of course, never happened. So, particularly after the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah, what had begun as a temporary expedient became a routine feature of all elections in Kashmir.
The casualty in this power game was democracy. For the continuous rigging of the elections in Kashmir to checkmate the rise of Hindutva in Jammu frustrated every attempt to create a democratic opposition in the Valley. That is what finally triggered the insurgency that began after the rigged elections of 1987 and burst into flames in December 1989.
So the first challenge that a combined opposition will have to face is to find a way to prevent Modi from turning a defeat in the Supreme Court into a victory in the 2024 elections. The way to do this is not by condemning the military crackdown that Modi is sure to impose on the state the moment he receives an adverse verdict from the Supreme Court, but to demand an immediate election in the whole of the pre-2019 state to elect the members of a Constituent Assembly, that will be empowered to ratify the original or a modified Article 370. This will be necessary because it was a Kashmiri Constituent Assembly that ratified Article 370 in November 1956. Since this assembly then dissolved itself, a new one will have to be created through an election, to ratify its reinstatement.
A formal commitment by the opposition to leave the choice of Jammu and Kashmir’s future to the Kashmiris, made immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision if it rules against the withdrawal of special status, will prevent the resurgence of armed insurrection because the youth who favour this will receive no support from their elders. That was what had made the insurgency of the 90s peter out. The prospect of being able to decide their own future democratically will have the same effect once more.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist and author of Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History published by OUP in 1996.
The party’s future lies in defending federalism from Modi’s assaults and building regional coalitions around a programme of development and reform.
Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. Photo: PTI/Atul Yadav
Ramachandra Guha’s description of the Gandhi family’s leadership of the Congress as a ‘gift to Hindutva authoritarianism’ is a cry born out of despair. Tragically, the description is accurate. The last eight years have seen a planned, creeping destruction of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy that the founders of our republic created. The road the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is taking the country down can easily end in civil war and even disintegration of the Indian Union. But to warn the people of this danger and seek their vote to avert it, a political party needs to identify the early signs of danger, and flag them convincingly for the voters to see. But the Congress’s leadership has not raised its voice to warn the people about the peril they are facing.
As a result, today, the Congress is a party without a programme. Its appeal to voters is based solely on the dynastic connection of Rahul and Sonia Gandhi to Jawaharlal Nehru, his closeness to Mahatma Gandhi and his seminal contribution to the making of modern India. Implicit in this is a sense of entitlement and a demand for trust based on lineage alone. As the Congress’s rebound after the Emergency showed, this was a powerful appeal till 40 years ago.
Dynasty is the past
But the generation that responded to it has passed away and for today’s youth, both Nehru and Gandhi are just a part of history. With innumerable existential problems to face, the current generation has neither the time nor the desire to dwell on the past, let alone pay homage to it. So the appeal of dynastic rule has faded, and will keep fading.
In 2014, the youth of northern India voted overwhelmingly for the BJP because they believed Narendra Modi offered them hope of a better, more secure future. He failed to deliver it, but in 2019 they still voted for him because the opposition had offered no alternative vision of the future either. Three years have passed since then and there is still no consolidation within the opposition, still no clear perception of the threat that a continuation of BJP rule poses to India’s future – and still no offer of an alternative, better future. So, it is looking more and more as if the BJP will win the 2024 general elections too.
If that happens, there is an even chance that by 2029 the Indian Union will cease to exist. This is not an alarmist prediction. It arises out of the pattern that the BJP’s actions have been weaving since it came to power, and especially since its second electoral victory in 2019. For virtually from day one, Modi, Amit Shah and their advisers have spared no effort to dismantle the multi-ethnic, federal India that Mahatma Gandhi gave his life to create, and replace it with an intolerant, lawless, Hindu-dominated unitary nation-state.
Home minister Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: PTI
Assault on the federal state
Had Modi and Shah been students of Indian history, they would have known that any such effort is doomed to fail. Even the Mauryan empire, which is the model that advocates of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ wish to emulate, was more an empire than a nation-state – a collection of socially and culturally independent principalities held together by the promise of peace and help in hard times, backed by the threat of retribution if they rebelled against central authority. When the central authority became intolerable, the empire came to an end.
The first explicit warning that this could happen again was given by DMK member of parliament S. Kanimozhi on March 16 when, during the Lok Sabha debate on the railway budget, she asked why the Union government had allotted Rs 59 crore for development to Southern Railways, and Rs 13, 200 crore to Northern Railways. “You keep talking about India being one nation,” she said. “The railways also has to understand that it is one nation”.
The depth of anxiety this has aroused in the South can be judged from the way her statement has gone viral. The railways may have a legitimate explanation for this enormous gap but, in a manner that has become this government’s trademark, no one thought it necessary to prepare southern governments for the shock they were about to receive.
This high-handedness is only the latest of a succession of decisions that reflect the Modi government’s contempt for federalism. One of his first decisions in 2014 was to dissolve the Planning Commission and replace it with the NITI Aayog. The change looked cosmetic but was anything but that. Outwardly, Yojana Bhawan remained entirely unchanged. Not a soul working there lost his or her job. The only change was that the NITI Aayog no longer had the responsibility exercised for 65 years by the Planning Commission – of disbursing the annual plan grants to the states upon a consensually agreed basis.
Till 2014, the devolutions had been based upon the famous Gadgil Formula which was a function of a state’s population, GDP, per capita income and level of industrialisation.
The Planning Commission’s abolition opened the way to making plan grants discretionary. The government sought to give it a veneer of justification through a report published under the auspices of NITI Aayog, ‘Central Transfers To States In India Rewarding Performance While Ensuring Equity’. But this year’s railways budget has shown how easily, and even unintentionally, the discretionary power arrogated to the centre can be abused.
Modi’s second essay in centralising power at the expense of the states was his virtual abolition of the National Development Council – the forum of chief ministers that every prime minister since V.P. Singh had used to coordinate social and economic policies after the era of Congress party dominance came to an end in 1989. In January 2015, Modi observed that with the formation of the NITI Aayog, there was no need for the NDC and that it should be dissolved. Since the state governments demurred, he did the next best thing: in eight years he has not called a single NDC meeting.
The BJP’s electoral success in 2019 seems to have increased the Sangh parivar’s appetite for undermining the federal state. The cavalier disregard with which Modi passed the three farm laws in 2020 by ordinance – and bulldozed their ratification through the Lok Sabha – when agriculture is the single most important subject on the state list of the constitution, reflects his growing impatience with the constraints imposed by Indian federalism.
From Article 370 to The Kashmir Files
By far Modi’s most blatant act of contempt has been the reading down of Article 370 of the constitution, the abolition of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood, and his push for fresh delimitation of constituencies so that more seats can be added to Jammu’s share.
In doing so, Modi has ignored the fact that Article 371 of the constitution gives protections of autonomy similar to those enshrined in Article 370 to seven other small states, six of which are in the northeast.
The decision to tinker with the boundaries of J&K’s Lok Sabha seats shows that the BJP has no intention of respecting the Centre-state consensus not to change the number (or composition) of seats allotted to each state in the Lok Sabha. It also demonstrates how easily this can be done without the consent of the affected state governments.
The threat that a politicised delimitation exercise poses to India’s unity must not be underestimated. The present composition of the Lok Sabha is an essential pillar of Indian democracy and federalism because, in the past 60 years, the population of the northern states has grown far more rapidly than that of the south. If a report by Congress MP Manish Tiwari is correct – that the new Lok Sabha hall in Delhi is being designed to seat 1,000 MPs – then the possibility that Modi intends to swamp the South with additional seats allocated to the North can no longer be ignored.
AAP’s approach to governance is the secular, democratic opposite to answer to the Sangh parivar’s narrowly focused Messianic approach.
Delhi Chief Minister and AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal hugs AAPs Chief Ministerial candidate Bhagwant Mann after his victory in the Punjab Assembly polls, in New Delhi. Deputy CM Manish Sisodia was also present during their meeting. Photo: PTI
The March 10 assembly election results have confirmed what eight opinion polls had predicted more than a month ago. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come roaring back in Uttar Pradesh, gained hugely and won in Goa and Manipur, and also retained its hold in Uttarakhand. Their prediction, that the Aam Aadmi Party would lead, and possibly win, in Punjab has also been vindicated. The Congress party has not only been the principal loser but has, in a word, been slaughtered. With these elections, whatever little claim it could make to being the leading alternative to the BJP has vanished.
Before we get inundated with the flood of explanations that is bound to follow, there is still time to reflect on the single greatest anomaly that the results have captured. This is the complete absence of any anti-incumbency sentiment against the BJP despite eight years of not only lawless, but also inept, government that this country has suffered.
The Narendra Modi government should have had its first encounter with anti-incumbency in 2019. By then GDP growth had been falling for six consecutive quarters and the number of new jobs being created in the non-farm sector had declined from 7.6 million a year between 2004-5 and 2011-12 to 2.9 million a year in the next 8 years, forcing 37 million recently urbanised workers back into agriculture. Six of these eight years were presided over by Modi.
The resulting pressure on rural wages and the need to feed a larger number of mouths in each family had increased the number of people below the poverty line by a staggering 76 million by March 2019, of whom 66 million live in the villages. This had reversed the trend of declining poverty rates the country had experienced for the previous six decades.
Oxfam’s latest study of poverty in India has shown that the poorest 20% have suffered a 53% fall in their incomes in 2020-21, even as the number of dollar billionaires increased from 102 to 142.
The main victims of the economic decline have been the youth of the country – precisely those who had backed Modi, personally, for prime ministership in 2014. Government data shows that while the proportion of young people with a secondary ( i.e. till class 10) education who could not find jobs jumped from 4% to 16% between 2011-12 and 2018-19 and of those with a higher secondary (till class 12) education, from 7% to 22%, it was those who had invested the most in education who were most comprehensively betrayed: unemployment among Bachelors’ degree holders jumped from 20% to 38%, among postgraduates from 19% to 43%, and among those with technical degrees (mainly in engineering) from 19% to 38%.
By 2019, the non-farm job famine had already lasted for eight years. Five of these had been presided over by Modi. So the BJP should, at the very least, have lost its absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, if not been pushed out of government. But for the first time in India’s 72 years of elections, the results defied the logic of anti-incumbency and, instead of falling even if only by a few percent, the BJP’s share of the vote rose by more than 6%.
Modi’s second term has so far been even more disappointing than the first. Not only did India’s GDP growth continue to slide, and unemployment to soar, but when COVID-19 struck the world, Modi all but left 60 million or more migrant workers, and lakhs of micro, small and medium sized enterprises, to fend for themselves.
When the first COVID-19 wave ended, Modi ignored frantic warnings that a far more dangerous delta wave was coming, did nothing even to equip hospitals with oxygen, and went on an election rampage instead. For weeks the smoke from burning ghats darkened the sky and corpses floated down the rivers, but a bare nine months later the election results show that all this might as well not have happened.
Why is there no anti-incumbency sentiment against the BJP? The standard explanation – that Modi has been able to weaponise what the French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has labelled the Hindu ‘majoritarian inferiority complex’ towards Muslims – takes us only a small part of the way towards understanding it. For the Sangh parivar has been weaponising this complex not since 2014, but ever since the Godhra train fire in February 2002.
The virtual disappearance of the anti-incumbency vote therefore requires another explanation. But we do not need to look very far for it, for that too lies hidden inside these election results. The clue to it is the dramatic success of the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab.
From its inception in 2015, the AAP has been an anomaly in Indian politics because it has not sought the people’s vote on the basis of caste, creed, loyalty to community leaders or in memory of the nation’s founding fathers. All these forms of appeal to the electorate are an extension of feudalism, for they treat the vote as a gift conferred by the ‘Lord of the Manor’, on his or her subjects, to be exercised as directed by him or her . The reward has usually been the grant of a favour – a government job, a petrol pump site, a gas agency, or a plot of land beside a highway.
An Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supporter flashes the victory sign, to celebrate the partys lead during the counting day of Punjab Assembly elections, in Amritsar, Thursday, March 10, 2022. Photo: PTI
On its part, the Sangh parivar, in philosophy, if not practice, has been against caste (as it weakens the ‘Hindu’ identity it favours), and its mode of recruitment has been through social service. Its conversion into a fascist political movement has been gradual, and not even wholly intended. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad was not created till 1964, and did not become militantly anti-Muslim till 1983. The Bajrang Dal, its ‘sword arm’, was not created till 1984.
However much one may disagree with its goal of creating a Hindu rashtra – a quasi- totalitarian nation state founded around religion and ethnicity – its preferred method of gaining mass political support is the offer of a chance to serve ‘Hindu India’.
So when Modi came to power in 2014, he did so with not a two but a three-pronged strategy. The first was economic revival, in which he failed miserably. The second was promoting Hindutva by dismantling the pluralism and multi-ethnicity sanctified by the Constitution. The third was launching programmes that aimed at reaching the poor directly and empowering them, rather than the bureaucrats who had been administering development and welfare programmes till then.
Among these last are the Jan Dhan Yojana – which has universalised bank accounts into which the direct benefits that the poor are entitled to are now being transferred electronically, thus empowering them rather than the bureaucrats who had been administering these till then. Then there is the Swachha Bharat Abhiyan, which promised toilets in every rural home, and the Gram Jyoti Yojana and Saubhagya schemes for rural electrification. To these, Yogi Adityanath added the extermination of lawless elements through police ‘encounters’ in UP.
AAP’s approach to governance is the secular, democratic opposite to answer to the Sangh parivar’s narrowly focused Messianic approach. There is no hint of caste or religion in its politics. There never has been. Kejriwal founded the party around a single burning issue – the fight against all-pervasive corruption and bureaucratic extortion in government. Its 2015 election campaign was crowd-funded and its message was spread by thousands of young volunteers, from among whom a core emerged as the party’s permanent cadre.
Its success in Delhi in 2015 was utterly unexpected, but its return to power in 2017 was not. As it grappled with Delhi’s innumerable problems, it widened its focus till it embraced most other areas of governance. In all of them, but especially in the provision of health, education, power and water supply, slum regularisation and urban transport, AAP has taken initiatives that have given the poor the security and legal standing that they had lacked before.
In 2017, Modi recognised the threat that AAP’s ideology posed not only to his government but to the Hindu rashtra project, and tried his level best to destroy it, but failed. Since then, an accommodation of sorts has been reached, which was partially reflected in AAP’s silence over the organised pogrom in north-east Delhi in January 2020. But, all in all, it is the BJP that has been forced to coexist with AAP in Delhi rather than the other way around. The BJP’s nervousness can be seen in its desire to postpone civic polls in Delhi.
In 2019, after the decline in its share of the vote in Punjab, and its failure to get anywhere in Goa, most people wrote AAP off as a party that could not extend its reach beyond Delhi. Delhi was a special case, they concluded, because it was made up almost entirely of migrants who were mostly educated, and had already left caste and creed behind when they migrated to the Capital. But its spectacular success in Punjab in these elections has shown that there a more fundamental change taking place within the electorate.
As Kejriwal emphasised in his victory speech after the results were announced, the key word in his party’s campaign, and the word that was on everyone’s lips during the campaign was ‘badlav’ (change, or transformation). The badlav that people were referring to, and which his party has promised them, is in the relationship of the state to its people. “Under the British and for 75 years after they left,” he pointed out, “the people had served the state. Now it it the turn of the state to serve the people.”
Therefore, the lesson that the opposition parties need to learn from the total absence of an anti-incumbency vote against the BJP is that the days of a caste-based entitlement to votes are rapidly drawing to a close. The lesson they need to learn from AAP’s victory in Punjab is that in the future, their victory will depend upon their ability to build alliances around programmes, and the measures they will take to implement them.
AAP’s victory shows what kind of programmes they need to espouse and the kind of alliances they need to make. They have barely two years left to learn these lessons and create the alternative to the BJP that the nation needs.
Hi, my name is Prem Shankar Jha. I am a journalist and author based in New Delhi, India.
In the last decade I have become more and more concerned about where the world is heading and I am curious to explore interactive formats with you in order to share views and concerns.
Please do not hesitate to be in touch.
