Peace in Kashmir – Chasing a Mirage

In the ongoing Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the Valley’s political environment appears to be hijacked by the separatist elements. In such a situation even ‘moderate’ Kashmiri leaders and political parties are finding it electorally more profitable to add their voice to the separatists’ call for reinstating Article 370 and ‘greater autonomy’ for the State. In such a situation it is hard to believe that the ongoing elections to the J&K Assembly will create a conducive environment for promoting peace and stability in the State and in India at large.

A common hope and expectation from the ongoing election process is that the new Assembly will open doors for a new peaceful era where violence, separatism, and terrorism will be things of the past. In December 2023 the honorable judges of the Supreme Court delivered their judgment upholding the constitutional validity of the abrogation of the special status of J&K through the removal of Articles 35A and 370 from the Constitution of India. Yet, in the same judgment, they asked the Central Government to hold Assembly elections by the end of September. To most people it looked like the panacea for this ever problematic State. While every Indian would wish that such hopes for the return of peace to Jammu and Kashmir come true, a lucid review of the ground reality shows that such hopes are nothing but a mirage.

A simple litmus test consists in an honest assessment of the quality and quantity of the candidates in the fray and their declared agendas. The tone and content of announcements, election promises, and narratives being openly voiced in the public rallies by a large section of candidates and even in the printed manifestos of some leading parties, almost all of them belonging to Kashmir Valley, establish beyond doubt what is the final agenda of most Kashmiri contenders for legislative seats. 

For example, in the first phase of election for 24 seats 90 candidates were independents, out of which a majority are known to be old separatists. The most talked about coordinator of independent candidates is Farooq Sheikh Abdul Rasheed, popularly known as ‘Engineer Rasheed’, who won the recent Loksabha election despite being imprisoned in Tihar Jail on charges of money laundering, and is believed to be a staunch supporter of separatists and terrorists in Kashmir. His popularity can be judged by the fact that he defeated Omar Abdullah, a former Chief Minister, Vice President of National Conference (NC) and son of Farooq Abdullah, in the latter’s constituency of Baramulla with a massive margin. If some news reports from Kashmir are to be believed, Rasheed has surreptitiously joined hands with the Jamaat-e-Islami Party of Kashmir which is banned for its terror and separatist activities.  A large number of former separatists, who went into hibernation following the abrogation of Article-370 and increased security action in the Valley, have become active again, supporting candidates and, in some cases, contesting in the current elections.

Even many mainstream parties and their senior political leaders including two former Chief Ministers, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, the President of NC, and Begum Mehbooba Mufti of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) have publicly vowed to reinstate the special status of J&K under Article-370. While campaigning for his son Omar in the Ganderbal constituency Dr. Abdullah announced that he would go to the Supreme Court to press for the reinstatement of Article 370. The manifesto of NC promises to reintroduce the 2000 Resolution which was passed by using the absolute majority of Kashmir valley seats in the Assembly to give greater autonomy to J&K. If really put into practice, this step will push the clock back to 1951 which provided the basis for ‘Do Nishan’ (Two Flags) and ‘Do Vidhan’ (two constitutions) for J&K within the Indian system. It is the same dreaded anomaly corrected by the Modi government through the Indian Parliament in August 2019. While both Abdullah and Mehbooba are considered to be ‘moderate’ as compared to the separatists and pro-Pakistani groups in Kashmir, their calls for the restoration of Article-370 and of the ‘special status’ for J&K reflect the prevailing separatist and anti-Centre mood among the current political leaders in the Valley and also the narrative they plan to revive in Kashmir. All this proves beyond doubt that the next J&K Assembly has the potential of undoing all the gains made as a result of restored peace and normalcy in the past five years.

The most unfortunate aspect of the directive part of the December judgment of the Supreme Court was that, while it recognized the importance of a functional Assembly for J&K and proactively directed the Centre to hold the Assembly elections within a specified period, it completely failed to take note of and address the real issues causing the absence of democracy in the former State, that is temporarily a Union territory. Unfortunately, this oversight is not unique to the Supreme Court. Many political parties, policymakers, media, members of civil society, and opinion makers have failed to understand the real nature of the Kashmir imbroglio right from the day J&K joined the Republic of India in 1947.

To correct this mistake, the first fact to be realized about the J&K problem is that it has been purely a ‘Kashmir’ problem from day one. At no stage in the past 77 years have the other two regions of J&K, namely Jammu and Ladakh which together amount to more than  90 percent of the total area of the State, ever showed any signs of alienation from the rest of India or shouted for ‘Azadi’ or secession. It is not a coincidence that the entire separatist movement has been nurtured and promoted solely in the Kashmir Valley and that too only in the Sunni Muslim section of the Kashmiri society. The first known seeds of this separatism and sectarian violence were sown by the late Sheikh Abdullah in 1931 when, following Maharaja Hari Singh’s refusal to lift the ban on cow slaughter the Sheikh ran a violent movement for cleansing the rural parts of the ‘Riyasat’ (princely state) of all ‘Kafirs’. Thousands of Hindus and Sikhs of Jammu and Kashmir were massacred and many more were exiled from their ancestral homes by the Sheikh’s supporters. This massacre is still remembered among the victim families as ‘Athasee Na Shorash’ (the pogrom of the Hindu Samwat year 1988). Since 1931 the Valley has been the theatre of  periodic violence aimed at pushing out Hindus and Sikhs from Kashmir. The last act of that tragedy was witnessed in 1990.

It is not surprising that since the nearly total ‘cleansing’ of Kashmir from its Sikh and Hindu (‘Kashmiri Pandit’) populations, all attempts of the government of India to rehabilitate the displaced Kashmiris back are now locally interpreted as an ‘anti-Muslim’ act and an attempt at ‘destabilizing the demography’ of Kashmir. Similarly, the Central government’s efforts to maintain peace in the Valley are seen through the tainted glasses of ‘human rights protection’. It is sad to note that all such forces, active inside the Kashmir Valley and at the national and international levels, have been able to block the plans of the Central government to create suitable conditions for the return and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits in their homeland. This has perpetuated the demographic injustice inflicted on these exiled communities and also encouraged the Islamist forces and Muslim political leadership to consolidate their Islamic agenda in Kashmir. Some social psychologists have pointed out that since the expulsion of the entire non-Muslim population from the Kashmir Valley the past two generations of Kashmiri Muslims have lost the habit of co-existing with non-Muslim neighbours and seeing non-Muslim children in schools or colleges. The growing parochialism has only helped the Islamic narrative-building machine and the anti-India lobbies, at the national and international levels, to describe the actions of the Indian military against the local and Pakistani terrorists in the Valley as an ‘onslaught on Islam’.

 Sadly, the Honourable Supreme Court, which has a commendable record of taking up the causes of oppressed people on the basis of an ordinary post card in its mailbox or even taking up a suo-moto case on the strength of a news clipping, failed to take up the long-standing issue of ethnoreligious cleansing in Kashmir and chose instead to mandate the prompt holding of Assembly elections. 

A major source of unbridled political and executive powers to the Kashmiri political class was the manipulated majority of the Kashmir Valley in the State Assembly. In 1951 when the rest of nation was busy defining the composition of its national Parliament and the State assemblies through the national Delimitation Commission, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, gave special rights to Sheikh Abdullah to decide the composition of his State Assembly. The Sheikh, who was made the unelected ‘Prime Minister’ of the State following the exile of the Maharaja on Nehru’s order, used this opportunity to impose the permanent dominance of the Kashmir Valley over the State by creating a hundred-member strong assembly house. To give the appearance of fairness, he assigned 43 seats to the Kashmir Valley, 37 to Jammu, 2 to Ladakh, and kept the remaining 25 seats vacant on the premise that these seats would be filled by the people of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) whenever that region would return to India. In the second delimitation of the State Assembly in 1995 the number of seats was  increased to 111 by keeping 46 seats for Kashmir, 37 for Jammu, 4 for Ladakh and 24 seats reserved for POK which is now referred to as POJK because the areas occupied by Pakistan in its 1947 military-tribal attack were in Jammu. In 2002 the National Conference refused to implement India’s 4^th National Delimitation Commission. Rather, it used its majority in the State Assembly to maintain the number of seats until 2026 with the rider that further revision would be done on the basis of the next national census. Since the next census was scheduled to happen in 2031 that resolution ensured that Kashmir Valley’s dominance over the Assembly would continue at least till the 2031 census. All through these years the demand of displaced persons from POJK to fill up the vacant 24 seats with their representatives was systematically frustrated by the State and the Central governments. The reason behind this denial was simple: assigning these 24 seats to people of POJK would have wiped out the Kashmir valley majority in the house because all members of the exiled community were Hindus and Sikhs. The nation missed the opportunity of ending the Kashmir Valley’s ‘gerrymandered’ Muslim dominance over the State Assembly in the latest exercise of delimitation, held in 2022, which has once again kept the 24 POJK seats vacant. 

Another major factor responsible for keeping the pot of separatism and violence boiling in the Kashmir Valley has been the inability of all subsequent governments in New Delhi to counter and neutralise the false narrative-building machinery in the Kashmir Valley. The news media there have gone through ethnic cleansing over the past many decades. One is surprised, or rather shocked, to note that not  a single national or international level media house in India or abroad has dared to dispatch a news-gathering team there for the past 30 years.  Unlike all other state capitals like Lucknow, Chennai, Patna, Ahmedabad, Guwahati or Kolkata where the news bureaus of national and international media  present a colourful bouquet of journalists from all over India, the last list of accredited correspondents of the Kashmir administration contains the names of 172 correspondents and media representatives of almost all major national and international news media.  It is strange that 169 of these journalists are local Kashmiri Muslims. Surprisingly this list also includes names of two local Kashmiri Muslim correspondents who report for the Chinese news agency Xinhua, although the government of China never allowed India media representatives in Beijing to travel to Tibet or Xinjiang. 

Being a journalist with a career of more than fifty years behind me, I would never believe that all Kashmiri Muslim journalists in Kashmir are unprofessional or dishonest. Still, knowing the real ground situation of Kashmir Valley where many local journalists have been gunned down by terrorists belonging to various anti-India groups, no one can claim that the working environment for media in Kashmir is conducive to free and fair news reporting. There have been instances when the security agencies found some Kashmiri journalists to have links with separatist groups or even Pakistani agencies. In this climate of fear, no journalist in Kashmir can survive long if he or she annoys terrorists or influential separatist leaders by writing unbiased news and analysis. The net result of this situation is that the national and international media have been consistently fed heavily filtered or doctored news and analysis from Kashmir. That in turn helped create and perpetuate an anti-India narrative and explains why almost all news reports from Kashmir in the past many decades have been more favourable to the separatists and other anti-India forces than to Indian interests. 

Today, during the current electoral campaign in J&K, the separatist elements have succeeded in hijacking the political discourse. As a consequence even ‘moderate’ Kashmiri leaders and political parties find it safe and profitable to add support the separatist calls for reinstating Article-370 and securing ‘greater autonomy’. Therefore, it is hard to believe that the upcoming J&K Assembly will contribute to peace and stability in the State and in the rest of India.