It’s not win-win, but lose-lose in Jammu and Kashmir

Is it the Bharatiya Janata Party or the People’s Democratic Party that’s more blatantly opportunistic and unprincipled in forming the alliance just installed in power in Jammu and Kashmir? In their common minimum programme (CMP), both parties retreated from their “principled” stands or core-agendas. 

The fashionable reading is that the BJP climbed down on Article 370, which gives J&K a special Constitutional status; and the PDP on the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives the military/paramilitary impunity to use force in areas notified as “disturbed”; the parties thus reached a fair “give-and-take” compromise, which is the best way of healing J&K’s “fractured” election verdict.

Nothing could be more untrue. The BJP conceded nothing on Art 370. The CMP doesn’t even refer to it; it only says “the present position will be maintained”. But 370’s abrogation hasn’t been on the agenda — not since 1999 when the BJP palpably opportunistically put aside the “controversial” demand, along with the Ram temple and Uniform Civil Code. The real issue is the restoration of the original Article which limited the Centre’s jurisdiction in J&K to defence, foreign relations and communications. Restoring it entails rescinding more than 90 Union list entries unconstitutionally extended to J&K without the concurrence of its constituent assembly which ceased to exist in 1956. 

The PDP didn’t even demand this. But it caved in on AFSPA. It dropped the demand for its withdrawal within a year, and agreed that the state government would “examine the need for de-notifying ‘disturbed areas’”, thus enabling “the Union government to take a final view” on AFSPA’s continuation in them. This clinches the issue in the Centre’s favour. The rest of the CMP is a string of platitudes.

The PDP-BJP deal is loathed in the Kashmir Valley. It’s seen as the minority Jammu region’s veto against the popular will, and a “capitulation” more humiliating than Sheikh Abdullah’s 1974 “surrender” to Indira Gandhi, engineered by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, seen as close to National Security Adviser AK Doval. The fact that the deal is so unequal and concedes little to the predominant sentiment in the Valley for the withdrawal of the army and for genuine autonomy will cause serious discontent. Whether or not this revives militant separatism, it will certainly increase popular alienation from the Indian state. 

The BJP too will draw flak from India’s mainstream parties keen to display their nationalist credentials, as it did thanks to Sayeed’s remarks thanking Pakistan and the “Hurriyat and militant outfits” for the recent elections’ conduct. The BJP has repudiated these remarks. At the same time, Mufti’s wantonly boastful claim that India is resuming foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan at his “behest” won’t be seen as fulfilling the promise to resume the peace process and dialogue with the Hurriyat. Some Hurriyat leaders have scornfully rejected it.

Mufti won 28 Valley seats primarily because he seemed best-placed to keep out the BJP, which fought the election on a brazenly communal platform by appealing to anti-Muslim, anti-Valley sentiments. To ally with that very party can bring him neither credibility nor stability. It certainly won’t lead to “healing” between the Jammu and Kashmir regions. 

The PDP-BJP coalition’s survival will depend on the state of popular alienation in the Valley, the two parties’ relations, and the outcome of the attempted dialogue with Pakistan, a tokenist, poorly-thought-out gesture without assured success. But so long as the coalition exists, it will serve more to legitimise Narendra Modi’s unique Hindutva-sectarian Right-wing politics than to do any good to J&K’s people or help its integration with India.

The author is a writer, columnist and social science researcher based in Delhi