State within a state

Old Brit wit captured it perfectly in the quip, “The Americans, like us in England, have a two-party system. They have the Republican party, which is like our Conservative party, and they have the Democratic party, which is like our Conservative party.” Nothing demonstrates how true it remains for South-Asian polity more than the role Congress (I) has played in successive J&K governments and the smoothness with which the BJP is now replacing it in both the Lok Sabha and the state assembly. It is not even the Good Hindu/Bad Hindu false binary of which Ambedkar warned the sub-continent’s marginalised communities long back. It is a more upfront display of Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan. In J&K, the politics of India has always stood for the politics of Hindutva.

This politics manifests itself in a thousand ways. It is obvious in the insistence of “secular” India that Muslim Kashmir love it so that it can prove its secularism to the world; a demand not different from the patriotism the Hindu right keeps asking for from India’s Muslims. It was apparent in the strong communal posture among sections of Kashmiri Pandits, drawing a power tree right to the tip of the roots of the Nehru-Gandhi family, in the first decades after the end of the British rule (Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Blood Clots provides rich anecdotal evidence of this). It is exhibited in the long-term effort of redescribing the topography of Kashmir into a Hindu geography. The figure of Bharat Mata, with J&K being its head, is a case in point; so is the astronomic rise in the number of pilgrims visiting destinations deep and high within the fragile mountain ecology, like the Amarnath cave and Vaishno Devi and the many new sites which have been identified for yatras recently. It is unmistakable in the manner India’s institutions operate in Kashmir. Indian military and paramilitary forces are known to enter battles with Kashmiri militants and stone pelters with war cries of “Har Har Mahadev!” and “Jai Ma Kali!” It is patent in the protracted course of action of dividing the “Muslim vote” in the state while consolidating the “Hindu vote”. Check how, for example, the state machinery has been used to amplify and scramble gujjar, bakarwal, shia, pahari, peer, grees, rural, urban Muslim assertions on the one hand, while, on the other hand, attempts have been made to consolidate Dogra, Dalit, Buddhist and Kashmiri Pandit affirmations into one steady whole. That the former has succeeded and the latter failed contains a great lesson about the finer nuts and bolts of the state’s society. Of course, pro-independence and pro-Pakistan constituencies have also played a part in this division and revision, but their ideological motives are transparent. Why would a “secular” state be interested in creating a communal political arrangement; especially when a “secular” party has been at the helm of affairs for fourth-fifths of the time? In Kashmir, the BJP is the new Congress, or Congress was the old BJP. 

But is it true only of Kashmir?As Hindutva is also a certain paradigm of centralisation, its imprint is also palpable in the way Kashmiris have been dispossessed piecemeal since 1947. The original contract between Kashmir and India was of a conditional accession, subject to a plebiscite. This was diminished into Article 370, which has since been systematically undermined and used as what Gulzari Lal Nanda described as a tunnel to mine and take away the rights of Kashmiris. The autonomy of the state has been a farce for so long that people are even tired of laughing at the joke.

But this decentralisation too holds more lessons for centrifugal India than it does for marginalised Kashmir. It underlines how India does not have the unity in diversity of a garden; but what it has is a black hole madly rushing to reach singularity. The case of Kashmir offered a great possibility to the Indian State to experiment with substantial devolvement of power, but instead it has been used as a laboratory to test new methods of disempowerment. Once tested, these techniques are then used in dealing with India’s marginalised populations, Dalits, Muslims, the poor, people in the tribal heartland, industrial hubs, abounding agricultural lands etc.

PDPThe greatest power is the power to define things, to label them with this noun or that adjective, this epithet or that elegy. The concerted effort of the Indian media to classify PDP as a soft-separatist party betrays the desire of the state to define “separatism” on its own terms. PDP was poured out of Congress’s cauldron to step into the political space two decades of militant political activism had created in Kashmir. Its very existence, therefore, represents a loss of almost twenty years of labour for both the pro-independence as well as the pro-Pakistan constituencies of Kashmir. In his first tenure as Chief Minister, Mufti Sayeed, a veteran of symbolism, put up a “green” façade — quite literally — behind which his administration let loose targeted killings, torture, arrests and blackmail to wipe out the state’s political opponents. His allopathic “healing touch policy” masked the symptoms, but was incapable of providing a cure, and left the Kashmir body politic reeling from the side and after-effects.

Marriage of inconvenience Sometimes the only way to end a relationship thoroughly is through a marriage. Within the narrow bandwidth of electoral politics in J&K, BJP and PDP appeal to two opposing constituencies. A successful alliance is, therefore, a loss for both parties. Once the PDP warmed up to the BJP immediately after the elections, it was left with no choice but to form a government with the BJP and then wait for an opportune time to break the alliance and return to its voters on a moral high ground. Such a dramatic end will also help BJP consolidate its core vote bank. Until that happens, PDP will play out a new stack of symbolic cards — talks with Pakistan, return of Afzal Guru’s mortal remains, an abstract programme of restoration of the “dignity” of Kashmiris, and suchlike. The BJP will do what the Congress has been doing in the last six decades — ensure subtle but important legislative changes about land, industry, trade, tourism etc.;   changes that will put new chains around the wrists and ankles of Kashmiris. On their part, the Kashmiri people will have to do better than fulfil their God-ordained role of revealing new ways of dispossession to the world.

The author is a Kashmiri writer