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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

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.

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

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

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

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

Crushing political dissent

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

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

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.

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

Assassination of leaders to scuttle peace deal 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modi destroying every atom of autonomy 

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

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

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

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

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

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.