Prof Hari Om
The Home Minister Amit Shah’s 2-day visited to Jammu on March 18 and 19, the report that PM Narendra Modi would visit Jammu on April 24, ‘Panchayati Raj Day’, during which he will interact with members of the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), launch industrial investments and inaugurate or lay foundation stones of various development projects and the sudden spurt in the local BJP’s political activities could be construed as a definite signal that the first-ever assembly elections in J&K UT are round the corner. Almost all the Kashmir-based outfits have also intensified their activities, including no-holds-barred campaign for restoration of the pre-August 5, 2019 position. This also suggests that elections could be held sooner than later. All the Kashmir-based outfits are demanding separate status, statehood for the UT and an elected government. India is a democratic country where people elect government at the centre and in the states of their own choice every five year. Some of the major issues which dominate poll campaigns include nature of polity and governance, state of economy and society, centre-state relations, “secularism Vs rightwing politics”, price situation, inflation, unemployment and educational and healthcare facilities. The last few years have been witnessing highly bitter poll campaigns across the country with all or nearly all the opposition parties accusing the ruling BJP of “subverting and misusing institutions to weaken the Opposition and convert India into a Hindu Rashtra”.
However, J&K perhaps is the only region in India where elections are fought on planks which have all the potential of unsettling the settled or holding J&K aloof from the mainstream politics or driving it out of the political and constitutional organisation of India and hurting the minorities. It’s not that the entire leadership in the erstwhile J&K State believed in, propagated and promoted sub-nationalism and hatred between J&K and New Delhi. Bulk of the leadership in Jammu and Ladakh and the people these two regions housed, and house, barring a few disgruntled elements here and there, were, and are, religiously committed to India. They have been fighting relentlessly against fissiparous tendencies and pervert ideologies and making supreme sacrifices for the unity, integrity and sovereignty of India since ages. It’s the leadership in Kashmir, which has been doing exactly the opposite in the name of religion not since 1947, when J&K lawfully acceded to India, but since centuries leading to serious conflicts, bloodshed, exodus, internal displacement and miseries at regular intervals and causing threat to national unity and integrity. The wholesale expulsion of the miniscule minority of peace-loving Hindus, Jammu Dogras and Punjabis from Kashmir in 1990, tensions of serious nature between Jammu and the Valley and between the latter and Ladakh and demographic changes in the strategic Jammu province and the trans-Himalayan Ladakh on a massive scale were some of the immediate results of the policies the New Delhi-backed rulers in Kashmir devised and implemented ruthlessly in the state after 1947. Genuine students of J&K history and objective researchers, academics and opinion leaders with secular outlook all appreciate these hard realities. They all bemoan without mincing words the weak-kneed policies the successive governments at the centre adopted towards the subversive, divisive, fundamentally communal, intolerant, backward-looking, greedy, self-centred and ungrateful Kashmiri ruling elite. It would be only appropriate to point out that what the just-released Vivek Agnihotri’s “The Kashmir Files” presents is just a tip of the iceberg. Indeed, the history of Kashmir post-1339 and Jammu post-1947 is a history of heart-wrenching stories.
The Narendra Modi Government was the first-ever government at the centre which created a history of sorts in August 2019 by correcting some of the past grave wrongs and integrating J&K and Ladakh fully into India. It lawfully snatched from the irresponsible, undependable, intolerant, exclusivist, blackmailing and threatening Kashmiri rulers pernicious, divisive and discriminatory Articles 35A and 370, under which they enjoyed veto power and exercised unbridled and extraordinary legislative, executive, judicial and financial powers till August 2019. But the Modi Government didn’t stop just here. It took cognisance of the sufferings the Buddhists in Ladakh faced at the hands of the Kashmiri rulers and separated Ladakh from J&K and made it Union Territory (UT). Not only this, it also converted the remaining J&K into a UT and brought both the UTs under the ambit of all the central laws – 890 in number — and institutions. All this suggested that New Delhi had diagnosed what ailed J&K and that it will continue to tread the path it charted in August 2019.
One may call it silly or preposterous but it’s a fact that New Delhi is undoing (wittingly or unwittingly) what it courageously did much to the happiness of the nation in August 2019 to undo the past’s grave wrongs.
For example, it appointed a delimitation commission to delimit the proposed 90 assembly and the five already existing Lok Sabha constituencies in J&K. Since the delimitation commission was mandated to delimit the constituencies based on what all in Jammu contemptuously reject as the “fudged 2011 census”, the commission divided Kashmir into 47 territorial constituencies (all Muslim) and Jammu into 43 (30-32 Hindu and 11-13 Muslim). In other words, it gave more than 50% seats to Kashmir as it happened in 1950s, 1970s and 1990s. Not content with all this, the delimitation commission eroded and undermined the very unity and integrity of Jammu province. In effect, it delinked the whole border district of Poonch and parts of Rajouri district from Jammu province (seven assembly segments and all predominantly Muslim) and linked them with parts of the erstwhile Kashmir’s Anantnag Loka Sabha constituency (eleven assembly segments and all 100% Muslim) and named it as Anantnag-Poonch Lok Sabha Constituency.
What the delimitation commission did was not what the people of Jammu province had been demanding since decades. They had been demanding three out of five Lok Sabha seats and over 50% representation in the asserting again and again that the population of their province was equal to Kashmir, if not more, and their region was two-time that of Kashmir in terms of geographical area.
The Union Government has not only repeatedly said that elections will be held in J&K after the completion of the delimitation exercise but it will also grant full state status after elections and installation of an elected government. Clearly, the Union Government is playing with dangerous tools. What will be the result if elections are held to install an elected government and UT of J&K granted statehood thereafter? Some of the results will be the retransfer of the state power to those who (a) muddied the Indian waters in Kashmir, (b) widened the gulf between Kashmir and New Delhi, (c) promoted, shielded and aided separatists and terrorists, (d) questioned the very accession of J&K with India, (e) defended and promoted further the Pakistani cause in J&K, (f) wrecked the state from within and outside, (g) misused and exploited the state apparatus to promote their own vested interests and interests of the enemy nations, (h) created a narrative that Kashmiri Muslims were a race apart, (h) propagated that the non-Kashmiris were aliens, usurpers and oppressors and a threat to Kashmiri sub-nationalism and (i) destroyed Jammu and Ladakh socially, culturally, economically, politically, and even religiously. It will also help them create Pakistan/Afghanistan/Bangladesh/ Kashmir-like situation in Jammu province, which would mean further destruction of the nationalist constituency in this region. To be more precise, the elections, the reinstallation of an elected government and grant of state status to UT of J&K will mean a total negation of what the Union Government did in August 2019 to defeat the evil designs of the Valley-based ruling elite. Can the nation afford such a dangerous negation? It just can’t.
What, then, is the way out? Making Kashmir a Chandigarh-type UT and grant of full state status to Jammu province is the only way out. The whole point is that the extraordinary situation in J&K needs an extraordinary solution. Let’s hope and pray that the South and North Blocks in New Delhi will finish the unfinished agenda of August 2019 to break the backbone of secessionists of all varieties in this highly strategic region.