Deepening Tragedy

Deepening tragedy SHOWKAT A. MOTTA Print edition : Mehbooba Mufti at the press conference in Srinagar on June 19 where she announced her government’s resignation afte Bharatiya Janata Party pulled out of the ruling coalition. The BJP pulls out of the ruling alliance and brings down the government in Jammu and Kashmir in a move made with the Lok Sabha elections in mind even as the State sinks into greater depths of violence and militancy. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah has demonstrated a ruthless streak ever since he arrived in New Delhi. He has broken political alliances in States from outside (Bihar), staked a claim to government without a legislative majority (Goa, Meghalaya), and won in some States by poaching other parties’ leaders (Nagaland). He played the “Hindu card” to achieve a last-minute win in his home State (Gujarat), and has taken on established parties through the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) by portraying RSS workers killed by activists of the opposition as “martyrs” (Kerala), and encouraged inghting in two other State parties (West Bengal). Jammu and Kashmir remained relatively distant from Shah’s Machiavellianism until June 19, when he pulled the rug from under the feet of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and brought down the three-and-half- year-old coalition government in the most volatile State of India. Long before the BJP’s sudden announcement of withdrawal from the alliance, however, the daggers were drawn within the forced political marriage between the BJP and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The two parties, which had overzealously campaigned against each other right until the end of the 2014 Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, were bound to cut loose, sooner or later. Remaining in the alliance was costing the BJP support in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region that gave it 25 members in the Assembly. The saron party was essentially behaving more like a disgruntled opposition than a partner in government. Much to the PDP’s chagrin, the BJP, while still in power, oversaw RSS activists marching through Muslim areas of Jammu brandishing rearms and making violent attacks on Muslim nomads. Some senior Ministers from the BJP even had the audacity to organise rallies in support of the accused in the infamous rape and murder of a minor Muslim girl in Jammu’s Kathua district. There was also a relentless campaign for the scrapping of Article 35 A of the Indian Constitution that gives the Jammu and Kashmir legislature a carte blanche to decide who are “permanent residents” of the State. Clearly, there is a sense of euphoria in the BJP’s ranks, as the party believes it will be able to exploit its dumping of the PDP to peddle its “Hindutva” politics in the run-up to 2019 Lok Sabha election. Amit Shah has, in fact, already dropped hints about that. On June 23, four days after the BJP-PDP alliance ended, Shah landed in Jammu to join a function to mark the death anniversary of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, founder of the Jana Sangh, the precursor of the BJP. Shah accused the PDP of “discriminating against Jammu”. It prompted Mehbooba Mufti to take to Twitter to remind him, and rightly so, that his party was an equal partner in the fallen government. Diatribes and point-scoring apart, the BJP, whose raison d etre is abolition of Article 370, which accords special status to Jammu and Kashmir under the Constitution, is preparing to pull up its socks to see its dream come true before heading for the 2019 election. “There was political suocation for us in that alliance,” says Ravinder Raina, the State BJP president. “It was very hard for us to separate ourselves from our core political issues revolving around Article 370 and two separate Constitutions for the state.” Earlier, after the BJP came to power at the Centre, the contentious issue made it to the Supreme Court through a litigation campaign sponsored by the RSS. Sense of foreboding In Srinagar’s civil society and media circles, there is already a sense of foreboding that the BJP is deliberately pushing the verdict on Article 35A closer to the 2019 election to score electoral points. Amid all this, the BJP is throwing its weight behind the hard power—the new “muscular policy”—against Kashmiris, according to the PDP. While the coalition lasted, party members say, the PDP’s “soft” approach vexed them and escalated the “alienation on the ground”. But after the Narendra Modi government’s deputation of some hardened counter-insurgency experts from the Maoist heartland to Kashmir as advisers of Governor N.N. Vohra, the party wants action not only against insurgents but also their sympathisers and supporters. The PDP, on the other hand, appears, although belatedly, to be lled with remorse and shame. Almost all of its leaders, barring the likes of Naeem Akhtar and Haseeb Drabu, the architect of the Agenda of Alliance (AoA) with the BJP, are conscious of the fact that Kashmiris nurse a visceral hatred for them, which stems from the PDP’s role in virtually inviting the RSS to Kashmir. This was evident when celebrations erupted in many parts of south Kashmir, the erstwhile bastion of the Muftis, when the government fell. Now, the PDP, which was founded by the only Muslim Home Minister of India, the late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, for providing a “middle ground” in Kashmir’s politics, is staring at an existential crisis. A senior party leader and former Minister, currently cooling his heels behind the tight security at his Srinagar residence, sees in the government’s collapse a “divinely preordained plan”. He says the PDP contested the 2014 election on the promise of keeping the “Gosanis” (a dysphemism in Kashmir for the RSS) away from Lakhanpur (the entry point to Jammu and Kashmir). “But we later not only embraced them, we entered into a political wedlock with them,” he told Frontline. “It was an unnatural alliance formed against the wishes of Kashmiris. It was supposed to be a coalition based on the common minimum programme for development and peace, but it ultimately proved a Frankenstein’s monster for us.” The PDP, in the manner of all pro-India parties eager to please the Centre, had dened its alliance with the BJP in grandiose terms, something like a marriage between “north pole and south pole”. The late Mufti began to envision this alliance, seen as unnatural by everyone except him, as harmonising relations between Hindu-dominated Jammu and Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley. This was delusional, as Hilal Mir, a senior editor with the daily Greater Kashmir, put it. “The PDP shut its eyes to the fact that the BJP never gave up on its anti-Muslim and anti-Kashmir agenda. Just go through the statements of BJP leaders during these three years. You will nd nothing but malice for Kashmiris there.” The coalition was deemed unnatural from the word go. It was bound to collapse under the weight of its inherent contradictions, and both the alliance partners knew it very well. Mehbooba Mufti today stands reduced to a failed, humiliated politician. She betrayed her exasperation at her farewell press conference where she made a show of taking the fall of her government in her stride. So disconnected was she not only from the ground but from the developments taking place in her courtyard that on the day when the BJP called it quits, she and her party’s Ministers were sitting comfortably in their oces in the civil secretariat in Srinagar. This was despite the fact that all 25 MLAs of the BJP had been camping in New Delhi for two days on Amit Shah’s call, fuelling speculation in Srinagar and New Delhi that the BJP had decided to pull out of the coalition. “Mehbooba was either caught o guard or was hoping against hope that all was well,” said Tariq Ali Mir, editor of Belaag, a Srinagar-based Urdu magazine. “Either way, she displayed her political immaturity,” he said. Her two decades of experience in guileful politics notwithstanding, the BJP outwitted Mehbooba on most occasions. So meekly did her party surrender to the BJP that in its three-year rule it never spoke of its political bible, self-rule, and seldom insisted on the implementation of the AoA, a document it had attempted, in vain, to sell to the people of Kashmir as sacred. Nothing agreed upon in the AoA, such as talks with the Hurriyat Conference and Pakistan, was pursued with conviction with the BJP. “It was, therefore, politically naive for the PDP leadership,” said Sheikh Qayoom, a senior journalist and well- known political commentator, “to expect that the terms of the AoA would be fullled in the remaining period of the coalition’s term of oce.” He said if past governments in New Delhi could eortlessly back out of the Delhi Agreement (1952) without any remorse, what would have stopped the Modi government from backing out of the AoA, which could not be even remotely compared to the Delhi Agreement which had constitutional legitimacy? Certainly, Mehbooba Mufti cannot blame anyone but herself for not running away from the “unholy” alliance when she twice got an opportunity to do so. First, it was after the death of her father in January 2016, a year after the coalition regime assumed oce. The writing on the wall was already unmistakable: a storm was brewing against the PDP in Kashmir. The public anger at Mufti’s joining hands with the BJP came to the fore at his funeral in Bijbehara, his home town, which attracted fewer than 1,500 people.

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