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.
I have not a shadow of a doubt that the EC will be true to Kumar’s word, and that Delhi will do everything in its power to vindicate his promise. But for Kashmir, and India’s, future it is not just a fair conduct of the elections by the EC that matters but the way in which the concerned political parties decide to fight it.
The fact that Rahul Gandhi and Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge have both gone to Kashmir to discuss election strategy for the J&K assembly election with the National Congress and the People’s Democratic Party, shows that the INDIA alliance, and the Congress in particular, is aware this election will not only decide the future of Kashmir, but also quite possibly, of India’s ethno-federal democracy as well.
To say that these elections are as important for both Kashmir and India as were the Jammu and Kashmir elections of 1987, would be an understatement.
1987 was a turning point for both Kashmir and India because while it created the first-ever opportunity for a democratic opposition to the National Conference and the Congress to emerge in Kashmir, the way in which the Muslim United Front (MUF) was suppressed by the NC-Congress coalition immediately after the election triggered the first armed insurgency in Kashmir.
This year’s elections are equally important because they are giving the same parties, the Congress and the National Conference, a chance to repair the damage they did in 1987. The threat this time is not external but internal – it comes not from Pakistan but from the BJP.
Put briefly, the danger that Kashmir now faces is that if Kashmir’s major parties continue with their present no-holds-barred competition with each other, and divide the Kashmiri vote, they will allow the BJP, which is certain to sweep Jammu, to emerge as the largest single party in the new state assembly. This will give it the right to form the next government.
The rise of the BJP in Jammu has been dramatic. In 2002 its vote share in the state elections was only 8.6% and it won only one seat in the J&K assembly. By 2008 its vote had risen to 11.28% and it won 11 seats. Six years later, in the next state assembly election in 2014, it won 25 seats and garnered 23.2% of the vote. Its share of the J&K vote in the parliamentary elections also doubled further from 23% in 2014 to 46% in 2019 in the wake of the Pulwama tragedy, but fell back to 24% in 2024.
This 24% was won almost entirely in the Jammu region, as was the 23% in 2014, and most of the 46% in 2019. These figures show that the political split between Jammu and Kashmir is now complete. With Ghulam Nabi Azad having left the Congress and formed his own party, the Democratic Progressive Azad Party, the BJP will face even less of a challenge in Jammu than it had in 2014 and 2019. It can therefore be confident of again winning the majority of the 43 seats allocated to Jammu after the recent delimitation of constituencies. In the recent general election, two of J&K’s five Lok Sabha seats went to the BJP, two to the National Conference, and one to an independent, Abdul Rashid Shaikh, a.k.a. ‘Engineer’ Rashid, a charismatic figure who fought as an independent from jail where he has been held for the last five years on allegations of ‘terror financing’ without being brought to trial.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the BJP won both of its seats in Jammu. The National Conference won its two seats in central and southern Kashmir. The PDP won no seats, but Engineer Rashid swept Northern Kashmir, winning from Baramula by defeating not only former chief minister Omar Abdullah, but also Mir Mohammed Fayyaz of the PDP and Sajjad Ghani Lone, the leader of the J&K Peoples’ Conference. Rashid’s victory was so enormous that he garnered more votes than all the other three combined.
If the BJP repeats its Lok Sabha performance in the coming assembly elections, it will find little difficulty in creating a majority coalition not only because it already has some allies in Kashmir like Sajjad Lone’s PC and Altaf Bukhari’s Apni Party, but because, thanks to its harvest from the now banned electoral bonds, it has both the money and the coercive power to secure some defections from the other major parties, and to entice other small parties and independents to join its coalition.
Since the election will be held when Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, and the Supreme Court has set no deadline for J&K’s conversion into a full state, there will be no one to oppose the ratification of the laws that this first-ever BJP-led government could enact. It will, therefore, hasten the end of Kashmiriyat in the state.
But Kashmiriyat could well be only the first victim of Modi’s relentless drive to create a unitary Hindu Rashtra under his supremacy. There are nine other states that have benefited from special safeguards for their ethnic identity under Article 371 of the constitution, eight of which are in the Northeast. What happens next in Kashmir is therefore likely to be seen as a precedent for his handling of ethno-national discontent in these states as well.
Therefore, when Gandhi and Kharge speak to the Kashmiri leaders they will do well to remember that they are speaking not just for the Kashmiris, but for all the smaller ethno-regions of India. For should they fail to protect Kashmir’s ethnic identity, it will be seen by them as an unravelling not only of Kashmiriyat but a warning of what their fate could be if they dare to oppose Modi’s diktats in the future.
If there is a lesson the opposition needs to learn from Modi’s endorsement of a film that he has almost certainly not even seen the trailer of, it is that he will stop at absolutely nothing to come back to power in 2024.
PM Modi. In the background are posters of ‘The Kerala Story’. Photos: Twitter/@BJP4Karnataka and IMDb.
Barely a year after the release of The Kashmir Files, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is again using another grossly incendiary film, The Kerala Story, to fan hatred of Indian Muslims in order to consolidate the “Hindu” vote and stay in power next year.
The Kashmir Files was a hugely distorted and highly inflammatory depiction of the planned murders of prominent Kashmiri Pandits in the early months of 1990, which was designed to ethnically cleanse the valley of its Pandit community. TheKerala Story accuses Muslim organisations in Kerala of supplying 32,000 recruits to ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State terror group which briefly established control of territory in Syria and Iraq. Many of these, it claims, were women recruited to serve as the wives of IS fighters.
The brazen disregard for the truth displayed by both films reflects how completely the Bharatiya Janata Party, under Modi, has become a conduit for lies. For, one brief look at the actual Kashmir files – not the screen version but the Union home ministry’s papers – would reveal that the killing of selected Pandits in 1990 was planned and paid for, in weapons and cash, by the Pakistan army’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and carried out by a handful of self-styled mujahideen recruited by it from among the many thousand young Kashmiris who had joined the rebellion against India after the Gaukadal police firing upon civilians in Srinagar in January 1990 that took between 24 and 55 lives.
How opposed the average Kashmiri Muslim was to becoming a part of Pakistan, even after the 14 years insurgency of insurgency and draconian repression that followed, was revealed by two international opinion polls carried out in 2004 and 2009 . The first was conducted by MORI, Europe’s premier sampling survey organisation, and the second jointly by MORI with GALLUP. The 2004 poll showed that 61% of the population of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh wanted to remain a part of India and only 6% preferred Pakistan.
Similarly, the 2009 poll, which was initiated by Chatham House, Britain’s premier foreign policy think tank, and confined to the Kashmir valley, showed that even in the four worst-affected districts of the valley, only 2.5 to 7.5% of those surveyed preferred Pakistan to India.
That was the strength of the bond between Kashmiri Muslims and secular India that Modi fatally weakened within weeks of coming to power by breaking off all talks with the Hurriyat Conference, unleashing a reign of terror in the valley, gutting Article 370 of the constitution, and turning Jammu and Kashmir into a Union territory, thereby disempowering Kashmiris within their own state. That is the bond that The Kashmir Files has weakened further by creating alienation not in Kashmir but in the Hindu population of the rest of India.
TheKerala Story is intended to do the same to the 1200 year-old bond between the Hindus, Christians and Muslims of Kerala. It is a measure of Prime Minister Modi’s insecurity about his party’s – and his own – future that he is now openly endorsing the grotesque lie cooked up by his bhakts and his propaganda machine that there was an exodus of Muslims from Kerala to join Daesh, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Here is what Modi said in a pre-poll speech at Ballari in Karnataka, on May 5:
“ In these changing times, the nature of terrorism is also changing …Bombs, rifles and pistols… (have been replaced by) a new type which undermines society from within, makes no sound. TheKerala Story is a film based on one such conspiracy in Kerala”.
What is the theme of The Kerala Story that Modi is asking the people of Karnataka and the rest of India to treat as gospel? It is that Muslim organisations in Kerala supplied 32,000 recruits to ISIS when it established its brief, blood -soaked control of territory around Raqqa, Deir-ez-Zor and Mosul in Syria and Iraq. Many of these, it claims, were sent to serve as wives for the IS fighters.
What is far more incendiary, the film depicts in graphic detail how many of them were Hindu girls who had been converted to Islam before being inveigled into going.
Several reviewers, who did not bother to do the 30 minutes of research on the internet that has gone into the writing of this article, have stated that this is “a serious issue lost to bad direction, and worse writing” (India Today). The Organiser, the de facto mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, has described the film as “a dangerous truth told with a calculated balance”.
But the entire film is such a bald-faced lie that to find the prime minister of India mouthing its praise and endorsing its contents in a public speech brings shame upon the entire country. Study after study, both in India and abroad, has noted the almost complete absence of Indian Muslims in the ranks of the IS. On December 20, 2017, Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, Modi’s minister of state for home affairs in his first stint as PM, reported to the Rajya Sabha that only 103 people who “sympathised” with ISIS had been arrested across 14 states by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), according to the data available with the government. The minister added: “Very few individuals [from India] have come to the notice of the central and state security agencies who (sic) have joined ISIS.”
Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous state – reported a paltry 17 sympathisers, followed by Maharashtra (16), and Telangana (16). Kerala had reported only 14 and Karnataka a mere 8. What is more, these were individuals accused of being ’sympathisers’ – and who had not left India to join ISIS in the desert.
Two years later, at the start of Modi’s second term in June 2019, minister of state for home Affairs G. Kishan Reddy stated in a written reply to Lok Sabha that the NIA and state police forces had registered cases against ISIS operatives as sympathisers, and have arrested 155 accused from across the country.
Three years later, in a detailed study published by the Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis at New Delhi, Adil Rasheed reported that until 2019 less than 100 migrants working in the Gulf were thought to have been lured into ISIS while 155 had been arrested in India for having ISIS links.
“The mystery behind the very few Indian names appearing in the long list of foreign fighters in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),” he wrote, “has puzzled strategic thinkers for some time now. This pleasant yet inexplicable surprise finds a historical precedent in the conspicuous absence of Indians from the legions of foreign ‘mujahideen’ fighting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s and from the Taliban and al Qaeda’s ‘Islamic Emirate’ of the 1990s”.
The figure of 32,000 recruits from India, and the assertion that a large number of them were women, is therefore absurd – all the more so because estimates by the European Union and the Central Intelligence Agency in the US have put the maximum strength of the IS at its height at around 30,000.
What is more, 5,000 of them had been recruited in Europe and most of the remainder had come from Arab countries devastated by civil war after the so-called Arab Spring. The largest number had come from Libya, whose economy had been totally destroyed by the concerted Euro-American attack upon it in 2011. The idea that 32,000 Indian Muslims had also joined IS, whether as fighters or sex slaves, is therefore ludicrous.
That Modi, speaking in Hindi, should have gone to the length of endorsing such a dangerously incendiary film at Ballari in Karnataka before a large crowd whose grasp of the language is poor to non-existent, reveals that his intended audience was not Kannadigas, but the vastly larger masses of unemployed and desperate youth in the Hindi-speaking belt. These are the young Indians to whom he has so far been unable to provide jobs and a secure future, and who are now being primed to attack Muslims in order to retain their support for the BJP in the 2024 general election.
If there is a lesson the opposition needs to learn from Modi’s endorsement of a film that he has almost certainly not even seen the trailer of, it is that he will stop at absolutely nothing to come back to power in 2024 and is willing to plunge the country into communal violence, not to mention war with a nuclear armed neighbour, if that is what it will take. This is what has transformed the role of the opposition in the next general election from one of winning the maximum number of seats to saving India from disintegrating in a sea of blood.
It is, therefore, imperative that they put aside their political rivalries with each other and unite to meet the threat to India’s very existence that the BJP under Modi and Shah now poses to India’s very existence. The leaders of all the major opposition parties, including the Congress, are now fully aware of this. But, as the no-holds-barred struggle between Sachin Pilot and Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan, and AICC general secretary and former Delhi Congress party chief Ajay Maken’s incessant diatribes against the Aam Admi Party have shown, this realisation has yet to trickle down into the second rung of the Congress party’s leadership.
The resistance at this level is understandable, for these are the leaders who manage party cadres at the ground level, and the surrender of some seats to other parties inevitably leads to demoralisation and defections of cadres in those constituencies. All opposition parties, and particularly the Congress, face this problem, but there is a solution to it.
This is for the opposition to agree to confine coalition building to the Lok Sabha elections and continue to fight each other in the Vidhan Sabha elections. This would not have been possible earlier, when Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections were held more or less simultaneously – as used to happen till the 1960s – but today presents no major problem.
By concentrating entirely upon national and international issues in his relentless campaigning during the past nine years, Modi has made it possible for the opposition to do the same. If it comes to an agreement over this, its victory in 2024 will be assured.
Kiren Rijiju on Nehru’s ‘Blunders’ in Kashmir: The Dubious Benefit of Hindsight
Jawaharlal Nehru in Kashmir in May 1948. Photo: Photo Division, MIB, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
On October 26, the anniversary of Kashmir’s accession to India 75 years ago, Union law minister Kiren Rijiju highlighted five blunders made by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to explain why Kashmir remains a breeding ground for terrorism, and a bone of contention between India and its largest neighbours that, to use his words, is bleeding India till this day. His precise allegations were the following:
“July 1947: Maharaja Hari Singh approaches Congress to accede to India like other princely states. Nehru refuses, saying “he wants more”, a requirement which did not exist in any instrument.
October 20, 1947: Pakistani raiders invaded the Kashmir region. Nehru still waffles and does not accept Kashmir’s request to accede to India.
October 21: Nehru officially writes to PM of Maharaja Hari Singh, saying it is not desirable for Kashmir to accede to India at that time. This despite Pakistani forces rapidly advancing in Kashmir.
October 26: Pakistani forces surround Srinagar. Maharaja Hari Singh again makes desperate appeal to join India. Nehru still negotiating and waffling with inordinate delay in responding.
October 27: Kashmir finally accepted into Indian union when Nehru’s demand met on Sheikh Abdullah.
Rijiju used October 26, the 75th anniversary of Kashmir’s accession to India to launch his diatribe against Nehru’s dilatoriness in accepting its accession to India. But his main purpose seems to have been to shift the blame for the increasing alienation of Kashmiris, and the renewed attacks on the few remaining Kashmiri Pandits in the valley, upon Nehru’s shoulders from those of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where it rightly belongs.
There is one flaw in his attack on Nehru: it is seriously inaccurate. I am able to assert this with some authority because in 1995 I wrote a book titled Kashmir 1947 – Rival Versions of History, a book BJP spokespersons have often quoted (and sometimes misquoted) to substantiate their statements on Kashmir. So, using Rijiju’s five blunders as a frame, let me set the record straight.
First, Maharaja Hari Singh did not exactly offer to accede to India in July 1947. He asked Rai Bahadur Gopal Das, a prominent Hindu gentleman from Lahore to intercede with Sardar Patel to break the ice that had formed between him and Nehru, in order to commence negotiations on accession to India. This was because he had decided six months earlier in December 1946, that if the British denied the princes the option of remaining under their suzerainty, he would accede to India.
The last Maharaja of Kashmir, Hari Singh. Photo: Unknow author/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
The deciding event for him had been the arrival in Muzaffarabad on December 23, of 2,360 penniless and traumatised refugees, fleeing from the Muslim League’s first instigated pogrom against Hindus in Rawalpindi and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and been received with open arms by the almost entirely Muslim local population. The Maharani had rushed to Muzaffarabad to supervise their relief and rehabilitation. Her account of what the refugees had suffered made up the Maharaja’s mind: If a 6% minority of Hindus and Sikhs in the NWFP, who had lived in harmony with their Muslim neighbours for centuries, could suffer this terrible betrayal what, he wondered, would the fate of Kashmir’s 23% Kashmiri Hindus left helpless in Pakistan be?
Nor, he believed would Kashmiri Muslims be spared. This fear was founded on his knowledge of the umbilical cord that joined the Reshi Islam of Kashmir to Hinduism. Reshi is a corruption of Rishi. Their most revered saint, Sheikh Nooruddin, is known in the valley, and invoked by Kashmiri Hindus, as Nand Rishi. His most famous disciple, after whom the main Srinagar hospital is named, was Lal Ded. Her full name was Laleshwari Devi.
Kashmiri Muslims did not change their surnames, and have not even thought of doing so even today. Their diet is still almost entirely Shaivite Hindu: there is no beef in Kashmiri cuisine; most Kashmiris still shun chicken and eggs; Reshi Islam has a dawn prayer, the Aurad-e Fitrat, that has no counterpart in Sunni Islam but is the incorporation of Surya Namaskar into Islam. And finally, all prayers in Reshi Islam start with an invocation of their ancestors by name, just as I have done in every formal prayer I have ever uttered from my Upanayana, till the deaths of my wife and parents. In Sunni Islam this is haraam.
These differences had not gone unnoticed by the Muslim League. In 1943, when the J&K Muslim Conference asked for incorporation into the Muslim League, Jinnah sent a close advisor, possibly his private secretary Khurshid Hussain, to Srinagar to feel them out. Here are a few excerpts from Hussain’s assessment:
“The Muslims of Kashmir do not appear to have ever had the advantage of true Muslim religious leadership…. Islam in Kashmir has therefore throughout remained at the mercy of counterfeit spiritual leaders …..who appear to have legalised for them everything that drives a coach and four through Islam and the way of life it has laid down….It would require considerable effort, spread over a long period of time, to reform them and convert them into true Muslims.”
Hari Singh, therefore, knew, viscerally, what would happen not only to Kashmiri Pandits and Jammu Hindus, but to Kashmiri Muslims if he acceded to Pakistan. But in December 1946, he had lost access to Nehru because, six months earlier, when he jailed Sheikh Abdullah for raising the twin cries of ‘Land to the Tiller’ and ‘Down with Dogra rule’, Nehru had tried to force his way to Srinagar to see Abdullah, been stopped at the border in Kohala on the Srinagar-Rawalpindi road, and virtually held captive in the state guest house for three days till he turned back.
In 1947, Hari Singh made not one but three unsuccessful attempts to break the resulting ice but failed. For the first, he sent his Maharani, accompanied by the 16-year-old Karan Singh, to Lahore for a secret meeting with a judge of the Lahore high court, Mehr Chand Mahajan. At the meeting, which occurred in Faletti’s Hotel, Mahajan asked for time to consider but before he could decide, the British, who had their spies, took the option away from him by appointing him within days to the Radcliffe Boundaries Commission. This was the first indication that the British were determined, to ensure that Kashmir should become a part of Pakistan. The Congress never got to know of this secret power play.
Hari Singh made his second attempt to break the ice in July by asking Rai Bahadur Gopal Das, a prominent Hindu gentleman living in Lahore, to meet Sardar Patel when he visited Delhi, inform Patel of his desire to accede to India, and ask Patel for his help in ending his estrangement with Nehru. Patel’s reply to him, dated July 3, was the first formal communication between the future government of India and the state of Kashmir. There was no communication between the Maharaja and Nehru either in the rest of that month, or in August.
Hari Singh made a third and final attempt on September 19, and this was directly with Nehru, via Mehr Chand Mahajan, who had taken over as prime minister of Kashmir after the dissolution of the Radcliffe Commission.
A postage stamp issued in honour of Mehr Chand Mahajan. Photo: Post of India, GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons
Mahajan’s memoirs give us the first explicit clue to Nehru’s reasons for not responding earlier. At his meeting with Nehru, when he reiterated that the maharaja was prepared to make the internal administrative changes that Nehru desired only after his accession had been accepted on the same terms as all the others, Nehru apparently lost his temper and virtually threw him out. As a highly insulted Mahajan was leaving the room, he said “Release Sheikh Abdullah from prison, then we can talk”.
That single, throwaway, sentence holds the key to understanding the dilemma of the new government and therefore to Nehru’s strategy for resolving it. The dilemma was, “If we accept Kashmir’s accession now, what will we do if Hyderabad opts for Pakistan?”
For the architects of the future Indian Union, Hyderabad was the Mr Hyde (in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel) to Kashmir’s Dr Jekyll. Hyderabad was the second largest of the princely states, only marginally smaller than Kashmir but with three times the population and four times the wealth. It too was one of the only four princely states that had enjoyed full internal autonomy, including the right to have their own armed forces, and be given a 21-gun salute by the British. It had an 81% Hindu population ruled by a Muslim elite, against Kashmir’s 77% Muslims ruled by a Hindu elite.
Finally, Hyderabad had a far better claim to independence than Jammu and Kashmir because while the latter was a creation of the British and had existed for a mere 98 years, Hyderabad had never been annexed, either by the East India Company or the British Raj. In 1947, therefore, it was the last, still-autonomous, part of the Mughal empire. So, not surprisingly, the Nizam too was determined to remain independent no matter what it cost him. And unlike Kashmir, he had made this plain on June 11, 1947 by announcing that Hyderabad would not participate in the constituent assemblies of either India or Pakistan.
Contemporary Indian assessments of Nizam Asaf Jah VI have painted him as a miser, as somewhat unbalanced and harbouring delusions of grandeur, and if not as a Muslim fanatic himself, then as a willingtool of Qasim Razvi, who had emerged as the head of the Razakars by 1947. What else could make him believe, for even a moment, that Hyderabad could exist as an independent state when it was plumb in the centre of the Decan almost 200 miles from the nearest sea?
But later assessments provide an explanation that is far better grounded in realpolitik. The Nizam had the sovereign right to accede to either India or Pakistan. He was therefore using the leverage that gave him to bargain for the greatest possible autonomy from India. What was worse, with communal clashes increasing and the Razakars steadily gaining the support within the Muslim elite, and Jinnah offering every kind of inducement to him, to the point of pressing the Maharaja of Jodhpur to accede to Pakistan, the Nizam’s bargaining strength was getting stronger by the day.
The only way to take the initiative away from the Nizam was to accept Kashmir’s accession to India not from the Maharaja but from the people of Kashmir. For this, Nehru had to show that not only the Maharaja but also the majority community wanted to be a part of India. And for that, he needed the explicit endorsement of Sheikh Abdullah. This made it absolutely impossible for India to accept Hari Singh’s accession while he was keeping Sheikh Abdullah in jail.
Mahajan took Nehru’s message to the maharaja and Hari Singh lost no time in putting Abdullah’s release in motion by sending his former prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, to mend his bridges with Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah met him more than halfway. In his reply to the Maharaja, he wrote:
“In spite of what has happened in the past , I assure your highness that myself and my party have never harboured any sentiments of disloyalty to your highness’s person, throne or dynasty….I assure your highness the fullest and loyal support of myself and my organisation.”
The Maharaja released Sheikh Abdullah three days later (September 29) and the road to Kashmir’s accession to India was finally open.
But why, one may still ask, did Nehru not act with greater celerity after that? Why did he allow 23 days to pass, giving Pakistan all the time it needed to organise the ‘spontaneous’ tribal raid into Kashmir that began on October 22? The question is legitimate, but it too is a product of selective hindsight. There were three reasons for the delay: first, the infant government’s preoccupation with the overwhelming disruption and slaughter unleashed by partition; second, the maharaja’s reluctance to make an explicit commitment on the role of Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference even after he had tacitly accepted Nehru’s pre-condition and released him; and third the lack of any information about what was brewing in Pakistan. For this, the British government was directly responsible.
Early in October, a British officer serving with the Pakistan army had reported to General Frank Messervy, the transitional commander in chief of the Pakistan army, that he had chanced upon a meeting at the home of the deputy commissioner of Rawalpindi, where seven or eight tribal leaders, including one Badshah Gul, leader of the Afridis, were planning the details of an invasion of Kashmir. Messervy must have reported it in turn to Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, the supreme commander of both the Indian and Pakistani armies, who was based in Delhi. But Auchinleck did not consider it necessary to inform the prime minister of India, and may not even have informed Lord Mountbatten, the governor-general. That led to his rapid, and unceremonious, exit from his position and replacement by General K.M. Cariappa.
General Cariappa, C-in-C, Indian Army, greets Jawaharlal Nehru at Plaam Aerodrome on the Prime Minister’s return from his foreign tour on November 15, 1949. Credit: Photo Division
The maharaja’s reluctance to make a commitment to the role of Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference remained a stumbling block even after the raiders had entered Kashmir, sacked Muzaffarabad, killing and injuring more than 3,000 civilians, and sweeping up into the Jhelum valley. It was only after they cut the power at Mahura power station 40 miles from Srinagar on October 23, plunging the maharaja’s Diwali dinner into darkness, that reality finally dawned on him. He sent deputy prime minister Ram Lal Batra with what the latter described as a ‘Letter of Accession’ to India, to Delhi the next morning.
Nehru immediately sent V.P. Menon, accompanied by then Lt Col Sam Manekshaw and Wing Commander Dewan of the Royal Indian Air force to get the maharaja’s signature, assess the military requirements, and gauge Srinagar airport’s capacity to sustain a military airlift. As Menon reported to the defence committee of the cabinet the next day (they were able to fly back only because National Conference cadres lit up the runway in the dead of night with flaming torches), even as late as the evening of October 25, Hari Singh had still been reluctant to make a firm commitment on democratisation that Nehru required to legitimise India’s acceptance of Kashmir’s accession.
This was not simply a battle of wills. Nehru knew that once the accession was complete, India could force the maharaja to do anything Delhi wanted. But democratisation after accession, even with Sheikh Abdullah’s consent, would not have made it an accession by the people of Kashmir. Nehru, and no doubt Patel, needed that because even at that crisis moment they had not forgotten Hyderabad. Every risk Nehru took during those fateful days was intended to ensure that an invasion of Hyderabad, were it to become necessary, would be considered legitimate in the eyes of the world. For there, whatever the Nizam may have desired, there was never any doubt that his people wanted to be a part of India.
Kiren Rijiju’s third, fourth and fifth ‘blunders’ are therefore nothing more than the querulous complaints of a government that knows that it has caused irrevocable damage not only to Kashmiris, but to India in Kashmir, and is now looking for ways in which to shift the blame onto the shoulders of a long-dead prime minister who can no longer defend himself, and whom the party that he helped to create is too lazy, complacent, or ignorant to know how to protect. He also seems to have forgotten that nine other states, listed in Article 371 of the constitution, have been formed on the basis of the explicit guarantee of Kashmir’s ethnonational identity provided by Article 370. Except for Arunachal Pradesh, to which he belongs, all the other states of the region have been its beneficiaries.
Last month’s election in Jammu and Kashmir gave a ‘hung verdict’ of a new kind: most of the seats in Jammu ( 25 ) went to the BJP, But most of the seats in Kashmir (28)went to Mufti Sayeed’s mildly nationalist Peoples’ Democratic party. Thus neither party could form a government on its own in the 87 member state assembly. This verdict brought to a head a struggle for power between the two main parts of this heterogeneous state whose roots go back 500 years. The split verdict has created both a crisis and an opportunity. The article reproduced below, which appeared in the Indian Express on December 31, 2014 examines its roots and what is at stake in the State.
The election results in Jammu and Kashmir have brought to the forefront an issue that has dogged Kashmir’s relations with the rest of India ever since Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession. It is, ‘which part of the state will dominate policy-making —Jammu or Kashmir?
In the hundred years before Independence , it was the Dogras from Jammu. Prior to that , while Jammu was squarely a part of the Mughal and later Sikh empires, Kashmir had been ruled for more than five hundred years by a succession of invaders, ranging from Afghans to Sikhs.
In 1947, therefore, the feeling of disempowerment was far more acute in Kashmir than in Jammu. It was assuaged only when Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference came to power in 1947. Sheikh Abdullah’s 1945 war cry of ‘Down with Dogra rule’ was not a repudiation of ‘Hindu’ rule, but of domination by rulers from Jammu. The National conference, and indeed the Sheikh’s, endorsement of the Maharaja’s accession to India was wildly popular in the valley because it shifted the base of power in the state from Jammu to Kashmir. To the educated , politically sensitive sections of the Kashmir’s population, this was ‘independence’ after more than 500 years of enslavement.
The need to empower Kashmiris explains Sheikh Abdullah’s lack of interest in recovering Gilgit, Skardu and “Azad’ Kashmir from Pakistan. He knew only too well that this would make Kashmir’s pre-eminance harder to sustain.
The roots of Abdullah’s growing disenchantment with India in the six years that followed Accession and his eventual, disastrous imprisonment, lay in Nehru’s failure to understand that waiting for Pakistan to vacate POK before holding a plebiscite was endangering not only its outcome but also Kasmir valley ( and the NC’s) control over the state. He was privy to the fact that Pathans made up only a fifth of the ‘Raiders’ from Pakistan and that more than two-fifths had come from POK. So had Nehru gone ahead with a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference would have been happy as clams because it would not only have fully legitimized the Accession in the part India controlled, but also Kashmir’s domination of Jammu in Indian Kashmir.
The reason why the Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s government rigged every election in the valley from 1957 till 1972 was its need to maintain its dominance of the state in the face of declining popularity. The suppression of dissent in the valley that this entailed led to the uprising of 1990.
The insurgency, however, broke Kashmir’s hold over Jammu. In the ensuing decade Jammu’s politics became detached from those of Kashmir and became those of the mainland. This parting of the ways, first vividly demonstrated by Jammu’s blockade of Kashmir in July 2008, reached its consummation this week.
Today the polarization between Jammu and Kashmir is almost complete. This has confronted the PDP and BJP with an extraordinary challenge, but also a unique opportunity. To its credit the PDP has been the first to realize that running a stable, functionally efficient and politically equitable government will not be possible if the polarization is not reversed. This requires cooperation – preferably a coalition – between the PDP and the BJP. But a coalition can only take shape if there is a broad agreement on the principles and goals of governance.
To the PDP the irreducible minimum is for the BJP to respect Jammu and Kashmir’s ethnic and religious diversity, explicitly distance itself from communal polarization in Kashmir and other parts of India, and avoid any attempt to change Kashmir’s special position within the Indian constitution.
Since the BJP’s main concern at the moment is to capture the chief ministership, and since Mufti Sayeed had shown in 2002 that he is not averse to sharing the chief ministership of the state, a deal is possible. But for this the BJP must agree to the basic principles of governance that Mufti has outlined.
This would have posed no problem for Mr Vajpayee, but today’s BJP is a different party in all but name. For Mr. Modi, therefore , stepping back from the programmes of communal polarization that the Sangh Parivar’s hardliners have let loose on the country, and resuming a constructive dialogue with Pakistan will be a supreme test of leadership.
It will also be a test of his sagacity. For Pakistan’s encounter with the most bestial face of has become a defining moment for its government and army. The Nawaz Sharif government has shed the last vestiges of its ambivalence towards Islamist terrorism, and declared an all-out war on it within Pakistan. It has lifted a six-year moratorium on the death sentence with the specific purpose of putting terrorists it held in its jails to death.
Around 500 terrorists are likely to be executed in the next few weeks. It is also revising its criminal code to award harsh punishment to terrorists, and is setting up special military courts for their speedy trial.
This is part of a comprehensive strategy that is designed to cut off all the insurgents’ sources of income including donations to charities under whose rubric they received their funds. The government also intends to enact a ban on religious persecution and punish the abuse of the internet for the glorification of terrorism and organizations sponsoring it.
The trigger was undoubtedly the killing of 133 children in a Peshawar school, but the demand to lift the moratorium had in fact been made by the army chief Gen Raheel Sharif, before this barbaric attack. Thus although it has done so for its own reasons, Pakistan is on the point of meeting Mr Modi’s demand that it should stamp out terrorism within its own country in order to build lasting good relations with India.
In the coming two years Pakistan will need all the help—military and economic– it can get. India could provide some of it indirectly by enabling it to move its troops from the Indian to the Afghan border. This would go a long way towards healing the scars of Partition. But even if does not, India will still be much better off with a stable Pakistan that is no longer hosting terrorists, than it is today.
From the moment news broke that the Modi government had cancelled the foreign secretaries’ talks scheduled for August 25, the Indian media have been accusing Pakistan of sabotaging the talks by scheduling meetings between the Hurriyat and its high commissioner in Delhi and refusing to heed a plea from the Indian foreign secretary to postpone these till after the talks.
The truth is a little more complicated. Delhi has known that Basit telephoned the Hurriyat leaders to come to Delhi not at the last minute but on August 10. According to Greater Kashmir (August 13) Islamabad wanted was an update from them on developments in the valley for the meeting in Islamabad. Such consultations had become routine after India and Pakistan began to talk peace bilaterally, in earnest. The Pakistan High Commissioner himself spoke openly about it at a social gathering just two days earlier.
The volte face on Monday August 18 therefore came not from Pakistan but India. Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh made her request only hours before Basit’s first scheduled meeting, when the Hurriyat leaders were already in Delhi. This made it impossible for Islamabad to accede to it. Nawaz Sharif had already been roundly criticized at home for not meeting the Hurriyat when he came to Delhi for Modi’s inauguration. Acceding to such a peremptory last minute demand when he was besieged at home by Imran Khan and the Canada–based Barelvi preacher, Tahir-ul Qadri, would have been political suicide.
Mr. Modi now has two options: to reject everything that the Vajpayee and Singh governments achieved in the past eleven years and go back to square one, or gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of Indo-Pak relations, and make a fresh start with Kashmir and Pakistan in the near future. The first step on the latter road is to acknowledge that he is not the sole patriot, or indeed the sole custodian of India’s national interest. In January 2005, when Musharraf sent his prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, to New Delhi and Hurriyat flocked to the capital to meet him Dr. Manmohan Singh faced the same dilemma but adopted a very different course of action.
Through an intermediary, he tried to persuade them to observe diplomatic protocol by asking to meet him first, before they met Aziz. Since Dr. Singh had met the Hurriyat leaders through me three years earlier, he asked me to be the intermediary. I spent the entire day urging, cajoling and eventually warning the Mirwaiz, Butt and Bilal Lone that they would irretrievably turn the PMO against them if they insulted not only Dr. Singh but the Indian State. But they refused to budge. Only in the late afternoon did Hurriyat chairman Abdul Ghani Butt explain why: “If we do this”, he told me bluntly, “we will be killed”.
To anyone not familiar with Kashmir’s tragic history this would have sounded like self-expiating melodrama. But Butt’s confession took the wind out of my sails. For beginning with the assassination of Mirwaiz Umar Farouq’s father Maulvi Farouq on May 21, 1990 (three weeks after he gave an interview to BBC outlining requirements for a return to peace) and ending with the assassination of Abdul Ghani Lone exactly 12 years later, each and every Kashmiri nationalist leader who dared to discuss, or even consider, a solution within the Indian union, had been assassinated by agents of the ISI. The ISI had, in fact administered its most recent punishment for disobedience only eight months earlier when it arranged the assassination of Maulvi Mushtaq Ahmad, the Mirwaiz’s uncle, and torched his family’s 100 year old school in Srinagar, when he did not succumb to its threats and met deputy Prime Minister Advani on February 2, 2004, for a second round of talks on Kashmir.
Butt’s own brother had been killed by the same agencies in 1996, so his and Hurriyat’s fear was understandable. Despite that, by refusing to meet Dr. Manmohan Singh first, they burned their bridges with NSA Narayanan and, as subsequent events have shown, hastened their descent into irrelevance. But Dr. Singh did not prevent the meeting with Aziz. He allowed Hurriyat leaders to interact freely with Pakistani decision makers in Delhi and Islamabad, and kept his doors open for them. By doing that he kept the Kashmiris a part of the decision-making process and brought India and Pakistan within a whisker of resolving the Kashmir dispute in 2007 before the judges crisis fatally weakened Musharraf.
Monday’s action may make the BJP look tough, but it has severely hurt India’s long term interests. It has revoked the commitment previous governments, including Vajpayee’s, made to keep Kashmiris within the decision-making process. And it has sealed the doom of Hurriyat and all ‘separatists’ who had tacitly or accepted the Manmohan-Musharraf formula for peace. Modi has damaged even the so-called mainstream parties, for the anger he has provoked in the valley will make the boycott of the coming state election far more effective. The PDP, which brought Kashmir close to the end of militancy in 2008, will be the main sufferer.
In the longer run, the weakening of both the mainstream and the Hurriyat will leave the field open for the final fight – between the real separatists who are the Ahl-e Hadis and the radicalized youth of Srinagar, and the Indian State.
In a few days the 16th Lok Sabha will be prorogued and the UPA’s – basically the Congress’ – ten year reign will come to an end. With that will end the most tragic period in independent India’s history. Tragic not because any catastrophe has befallen the nation, but because during this period Indians got a brief glimpse of affluence, a brief taste of global respect, and a brief view of a more secure future, only to have all three snatched away from before it ended.
This is not India’s first lost decade. There was another between 1965 and 1974. But that was triggered by events outside the government’s control – two successive droughts in 1965 and 1966 and two wars in 1962 and 1965. The Indira Gandhi government’s response deepened the economic crisis these caused and slowed down growth even further, but it was not responsible its onset.
In sharp contrast, most of the wounds of the past decade have been self–inflicted. In 2004 Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government bequeathed to the UPA a country whose economy had just recovered from a five year recession and recorded an 8.1 percent rate of growth in 2003-4, the highest the country had known. It had demonstrated India’s nuclear weapons capability, weathered the storm of sanctions the world had unleashed upon it, forced the US into its first serious dialogue with India, and made it rethink its policies towards Pakistan and Kashmir.
It had pushed through Kashmir’s first truly free and fair election in 2003, in the teeth of universal scepticism, a Hurriyat boycott, and determined opposition by the National Conference, and shown Kashmiris that they could make Indian democracy work for them. It had decisively won the Kargil war and, two years later forced Pakistan to reconsider and all-but-abandon its proxy war, using ‘non-state actors’, against India. It had then held out a hand of friendship to Pakistan in 2003, symbolically from Srinagar.
It had signed the Islamabad agreement with President Musharraf in January 2004, brought lasting peace on the LOC in Kashmir and begun the detente that led to the almost consummated Manmohan-Musharraf Delhi Agreement on Kashmir in 2005.
In the realm of economic policy it passed the Fiscal Responsibility and Budgetary Management Act and reduced the Centre’s fiscal deficit to 2.5 percent of the GDP before handing over to the UPA. It halved interest rates between 2000 and 2003 and set off the boom in the stock market that continued, almost without interruption, till January 2008.
All that the UPA had to do, when it came to power was build upon the foundation that Vajpayee and the NDA had built. It began well, but then gradually allowed everything to fall to pieces.
In its relations with Pakistan, it dragged its heels over negotiating the details of the four point plan for settling the Kashmir dispute, ignoring warnings that Musharraf was losing power within his own country, till the Judges crisis took power out of his hands altogether. It also came close to settling decades long disputes with Bangladesh over the Ganges basin waters and the demarcation of the border, but then failed to live up to key commitments, leaving Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government vulnerable to attacks from the BNP and the Jamaat-i-Islami.
It persuaded the Maoists in Nepal to rejoin the mainstream of democratic politics but inexplicably withdrew its support from them just when their moderate, pro-India, leader Prachanda needed it most.
In 2013, when Prime minister Manmohan Singh pulled out of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Colombo, he humiliated the Sri Lankan President Rajapakse and severely damaged a relationship with Sri Lanka that had taken more than a decade to rebuild after the IPKF debacle. In order to appease Tamil nationalist sentiment in Tamil Nadu, he threw away the considerable capacity India had built for influencing Colombo’s policy towards its Tamil minority.
India’s two year tenure of a non-permanent seat in the UN Security Council was perhaps the most undistinguished of any in the post cold war period. Its hallmark was an unending search for ways to avoid taking a stand on key international issues that would offend the US, Europe, and the Islamist sheikhdoms of the Arab world. At a time when these countries were launching unprovoked wars upon sovereign members of the United Nations and thereby destroying every pillar of the UN charter upon which a multi-polar world order could be built, India never once voted against them. Instead it abstained in the Security Council as they planned their assaults upon Libya and Syria, and voted with them on non-binding general assembly resolutions to show that they did not need to take its abstentions in the Security Council seriously. It justified this to itself by claiming that it was taking a ‘balanced’ position when balance was the last thing that a world headed for chaos needed from a large, rapidly growing and uncommitted middle power.
Within the country it came within a hairsbreadth of ending the deep alienation in Kashmir, but then took a series of decisions, starting with the crackdown upon Kashmir in August 2008 and ending with the surreptitious hanging of Afzal Guru, that made it infinitely deeper. As if that was not enough, after having made a catastrophic mistake in promising separate statehood to Telengana, it did not have the courage to admit it, and rammed the division of Andhra through the Lok Sabha after throwing its opponents out of the house in the last days of its last session when it had already become a lame duck government.
But none of these failures has come close to matching its ruin of the economy. In 2004, the Congress inherited a nation was growing at more than 8 percent. Today that growth rate has slipped well below 5 percent. Industrial output grew by 8.4 percent in 2004-5 and rose to 13 percent in 2006-7. In April to December 2013 it contracted by 0.1 percent. Non –agricultural employment has been the main casualty. According to the 66th round of the National Sample Survey, this grew by more than 37 million between 2004 and 2009. A partially overlapping set of data collected by the ministry of Industry shows that between April 2008 and March 2013 it rose by only 2.3 million. This suggests that more than 30 million job-seekers failed to find jobs. Another, more recent, survey by the NSO has shown that rural womens’ employment has also fallen by 9.1 million.
Indian industry has taken a terrible beating. Relentlessly high interest rates have ensured that there has not been one IPO (Initial Public Offer) of shares in the last four years. Instead large industrial houses have been moving their investment in what a Singapore based industrial consultant described as ‘a Lemming–like rush’ to Indonesia, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere.
India’s road, rail and power infrastructure remains as starved of investment as it was a decade ago. Today not only are its bottlenecks even more forbidding to foreign investors than they were in the 1990s, but these have become the biggest hurdle to the diversification of agriculture out of cereals into high value fruit and vegetable crops. A simultaneous liberalisation of exports of the latter, under the mistaken impression that the free market cures all evils, has fed food price inflation and kept the cost of living index rising by more than ten percent a year for the past four years. This combination of joblessness and a relentless, supply side, inflation has created the mounting sense of insecurity that has proved the Congress’ undoing.
All this has happened not because the government was corrupt, or short-sighted, or sold out to the industrialists, but because of weakness and ineptitude. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in its attempt to achieve ‘inclusive development’. In the last decade it has quadrupled the annual expenditure on rural development and social welfare. There are now more than 80 schemes under which the rural poor have a right to the largesse of the State. But India has slipped down three places in the UN’s Human Development index.
Within the nation the balance of power between centre and states has tilted so far towards the latter that India is beginning to look dangerously like it did under the later Mughals. The UPA has enacted statutes on tribal welfare and land acquisition that predators in the state governments have contemptuously ignored or circumvented. It has enacted Rights to Food, Education and Employment that have built a permanent deficit into the central budget and will bankrupt the treasury.
It has set the dangerous precedent of allowing Mamta Bannerjee, a state chief minister, not only to sack a central minister but also choose his successor. As if that were not enough it has allowed her to veto an international agreement with Bangladesh over the sharing of the waters of the Teesta river. Today, as the Coalgate scam showed, there is hardly a central subject left on which the centre feels it can act without first securing the assent of the states.
The Congress is not solely responsible for this all-round deterioration. In India’s relations with its Pakistan, for instance, the weakness of governments in Islamabad is at least as much to blame. In an era of coalition governments it is also a moot point how far any central government could have kept the states in check. But there is one common thread that runs through all the changes described above for which the Congress party is solely to blame. This is a lack of statesmanship, and of decisive leadership, at the epicentre of government. This has given India a dysfunctional government.
In the last two years it has become fashionable to say that UPA-1 ruled well and to heap all the blame for its ineptitude after 2009 upon the prime minister, but the real damage was done when Mrs Sonia Gandhi led the Congress to victory in 2004, but then created a dyarchy by refusing to become the prime minister and appointing Dr Manmohan Singh in her place. Although she did this with the best of intentions the confusion it created in decision-making sowed the seeds of the ineptitude that has virtually paralysed the government in recent years.
This has made the last decade one of good intentions betrayed by sloppy implementation and oversight; of promising starts seldom carried to fruition, of opportunities missed and challenges ignored. In 2008 the Congress party almost buckled under the pressure of its ally, the Left Front, and decided to let go of the Indo-US nuclear deal rather than risk its withdrawal of support. Only late in the year, when President George W Bush’s tenure was about to end, did it muster up the courage to call the Left Front’s bluff. By then it was almost too late to get the 44-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group to accept the deal. It was only Bush’s tireless calling in of favours that made the NSG lift its embargo on the supply of dual use technology to India.
At the BRICS’ Delhi meeting in 2012 India joined Russia and China in strongly criticising NATO’s intervention in Libya and Syria, but failed to vote with them in the Security council. In the same year Delhi could not prevent Dinesh Trivedi from resigning as railways minister when Mamta ordered him to do so, but it could have made it clear to her that it would cost the Trinamool Congress a seat in the cabinet.
In September 2012, when RBI governor Subba Rao refused to heed finance minister P Chidambaram’s agonised pleas to lower interest rates after he had effected cuts in subsidies that would reduce the central and state deficits by around Rs 100,000 crores in a full year, the prime minister should have sided with his finance minister and forced the RBI to fulfil its tacit promise of July. Instead he did nothing and succeeded only in deepening the recession in industry.
In the end the decision-making vacuum at the Centre has consumed the Congress itself. Six years of relentless belt tightening, with only a small break at the onset of global recession, has given the poor neither growth nor price stability. It is their rage at being cheated of a future that the Congress has begun to feel today.
A dozen of us — Kashmir watchers from Delhi and half a dozen journalists and social activists from Kashmir spent three days on the shore of the Nageen Lake in Srinagar and talked about Kashmir’s economic future.
Nageen Lake and Akbar’s fort
There had been too much unrest; too much disruption of normal life, and we believed that Kashmiris wanted to make up for the time they had lost. So we tried to think out of the box. One result was they we met people who were doing real things, battling he odds, to make a living, to develop an industry, and from their experiences we drew conclusions. One very important conclusion was that few in Kashmir, or for that matter India , fully realised the potential for short-circuiting the excruciating process of development and creating a new model of affordable, eco-friendly, employment intensive development.
On the way to Gogaldara
I have written up two of the ideas we came up with in the retreat. They can be found on my wiki.
Do tell me what you think of them.
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.
