SOUTH ASIA INTELLIGENCE REVIEW
Weekly Assessments & Briefings
Volume 1, No. 16, November 4, 2002

J&K Elections 2002: Voting Percentages in Kashmir Valley

INDIA

J&K: The Politics of Illusion
Guest Writer: Praveen Swami in Kashmir
Chief of Bureau, Mumbai, Frontline

"When you see Tom Sawyer immediately after Mozart or you enter the case of The Planet of the Apes after having witnessed the Sermon on the Mount with Jesus and the Apostles", wrote Umberto Eco after a visit to a waxworks museum in the United States of America, "the logical distinction between the Real World and Possible Worlds is definitely undermined."

The Real began intruding on the Possible in the hours before Mufti Mohammad Sayeed became Jammu and Kashmir's (J&K) new Chief Minister. A day earlier, his daughter Rubaiya Sayeed had returned to Srinagar to witness the swearing-in. Shaukat Bakshi, the terrorist who had kidnapped her in 1989, also returned to his home, after being released on bail after twelve years. Three hours before the swearing in, members of one of the same terrorist groups with whom he has promised negotiations fired rifle grenades at his home. The attack came after Al Umar chief Mushtaq Zargar, released from jail in December 1999 in return for the safety of the hostages on board Indian Airlines flight IC814, warned the People's Democratic Party (PDP) against entering into an alliance with the Congress (I). A little later, Sikandar Khan, a Congress candidate who narrowly lost the Karnah Assembly seat, was shot dead along with his security guards while shopping in a Srinagar market. The new Jammu and Kashmir seems as depressingly surreal as the old.

All this did little to puncture the curious political reverie in Srinagar, perhaps because the circumstances of the new government's birth have done not a little to affirm faith that the impossible can be willed into existence. Until October 21, the Congress' mediator with the PDP, former Union Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, had failed to arrive at even a minimum understanding with Sayeed. Singh even offered Sayeed a rotating Chief Minister deal, which, sources say, was rejected out of hand. On his return to New Delhi, the Congress began to consider staking a claim to power on its own. Senior Congress leaders in Srinagar believed they would be able to manage a majority with the aid of PDP rebels. As the prospect of a split in the PDP accelerated, Sayeed backed down from his hardline stand, and flew to New Delhi for talks with Congress President Sonia Gandhi on October 25.

Sayeed was now willing to accept Manmohan Singh's rotating Chief Minister plan, but with key caveats. First, the PDP would have the first shot at the top job. Second, it would hold it for all of three years, half the length of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly's tenure. Congress Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) found both proposals unacceptable, but Gandhi thought it best to override the state party. Senior Congress leaders, particularly Arjun Singh, persuaded her that a Congress-led government would end in disaster. A fractious alliance, with only tenuous support from maverick figures like Panther's Party leader Bhim Singh, would be too busy fighting internal fires to actually get on with governance. Gandhi also held broad consultations with several intellectuals, who insisted that blocking Sayeed's rise to power would fuel popular alienation in Kashmir. Speaking to journalists after the deal with the PDP was inked on October 26, Gandhi made this concern explicit: the decision, she said, was made "in the larger interests of the people of the Valley".

Outraged Congress and Independent MLAs responded with unprecedented public protests, and threatened to boycott the swearing-in. The Congress MLA from Uri, Taj Mohiuddin, described Gandhi's decision as "a betrayal". A group of fourteen MLAs held a series of meetings through October 27, to consider their course of action. The three-year term given to Sayeed was unacceptable, they argued, since there were no guarantees he would not bring the government down after that time. In any case, the Valley-based MLAs in the group of fourteen said, the decision to accept Sayeed's claims to represent the Valley was political suicide.

Sonia Gandhi's notion of the 'larger interest of the Valley' needs examination, since it is widely shared by much of New Delhi's intelligentsia. Effusive editorial writers who have greeted the rise of the PDP as something of a latter-day resurrection might have done well to spend a little time with a calculator and a piece of paper. The PDP share of the 2002 vote does nothing to affirm the proposition that it is the principal voice of the Kashmir region [Table]. Indeed, the combined vote share of the PDP and the Congress in Kashmir only narrowly exceeds that of the defeated National Conference. In the north Kashmir district of Baramulla, over half of the PDP's votes were cast in a single constituency, Gulmarg. The PDP exceeded the vote share of the National Conference in only three of the Valley's six districts, all in central and southern Kashmir. Two of those districts registered below average voter turnout, and five of the PDP's sixteen MLAs were elected in constituencies where terrorist violence led to exceptionally poor turnout. Indeed, three of them by less than 1,000 votes. And while the PDP's claims of 'representation' in the Valley itself are at least dubious, without a single seat outside the Valley, it cannot even pretend to advance any such claim in the Jammu or Ladakh regions of the State. This cannot, of course, undermine the decisive rejection of the National Conference in the elections. But it does show that the battle for oppositional space has had a multi-dimensional outcome.

While the PDP's Kashmiri-chauvinist position has allowed it to gain the office of the Chief Minister, the victory is not cost-free. It has, most important, given a new lease of life to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) backed Jammu State Morcha, which has been demanding the creation of a separate state for the southern region. The Morcha succeeded in winning just one seat - which went, not to an RSS activist but a long-time Congress dissident who jumped ship after being denied a ticket. But on October 28, RSS activists were able to shut down much of Jammu in a protest strike. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which won only a single seat in the elections, has now started demanding that local body elections be held in the State, hoping to cash in on regional anger. Similar regional aggression is also evident in Kashmir. On November 1, for example, the Kashmir Bar Association threatened to boycott court, claiming that Muslims from the Valley were under-represented in the High Court, and demanding that Kashmiri Muslim judges posted outside the State be brought back.

At least one potential flashpoint is already visible in the horizon. Jammu has for long been under-represented in the Assembly, because of constitutional provisions that had suspended the delimitation of constituencies until after the completion of the 2001 census. In the last Assembly elections, approximately 78,000 registered voters in Jammu and Ladakh were represented by each of 37 MLAs; in Kashmir, each block of approximately 55,000 voters was represented by each of 46 MLAs. Now that a Commission has been charged with redrawing constituency boundaries to ensure equitable representation, struggle seems inevitable. Sayeed's demands for a Kashmiri Chief Minister, said Bhim Singh a day before he accepted his leadership, "substantiated the claim of the people of Jammu that the future growth of their identity, culture and language is possible only when they are accorded statehood." Unless the new government handles Jammu's legitimate concerns with care, its historic contribution might just be the tearing apart of Jammu and Kashmir along ethnic-communal lines.

Few in the new government, sadly, are likely to have time to address long-term problems. With the caucus of twelve independent MLAs on whose support the government depends having decided to offer only 'issue-based' support, survival itself will be time-consuming business. Then, the alliance will have to find acceptable ways of implementing its 31-point Common Minimum Programme (CMP). The CMP rests on three major pillars, all intended to bring what Mehbooba Mufti tirelessly refers to as a "healing touch". First, the CMP mandates the assimilation of the Special Operations Group (SOG), alleged to be responsible for a welter of human rights abuses, into the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Second, the alliance has said it will terminate the use of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), and release alleged terrorists held for long period of time facing trial for minor offences. Along with this, compensation to the families of victims of terrorism is to be doubled, while the children of terrorists who have been killed will receive State support for their education. Finally, the CMP calls for unconditional dialogue with terrorist groups.

At least some of these promises mean very little. The SOG is and always has been part of the 60,000-strong Jammu and Kashmir Police, and constitutes less than five percent of its overall strength. Its troops and officers are drawn from the same ranks, wear the same uniforms, earn the same pay, and report to the same superiors. As such, its 'assimilation' seems little other than a re-branding of the product. The end to the use of POTA and the release of prisoners will also have marginal impact. Only an estimated 190 people are currently charged under the Act, eight of them of Pakistani origin, including those released on bail. Hard figures on the precise numbers of people held on terrorism-related charges are unavailable, but data published in October 2001 suggested the number who had not by then secured bail was just 366. Interestingly, all of thirteen individuals have actually been convicted of terrorist crimes since 1989 - an index both of the efficiency of the criminal justice system, and of the kinds of redress available to victims of terrorism in a State where 33,288 people have lost their life to terrorism over 13 years.

The PDP-led coalition's promise to initiate dialogue with terrorist groups is another case in point. Each Indian Prime Minister since P.V. Narasimha Rao has offered to initiate such a dialogue; Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee actually began negotiations with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) faction of Abdul Majid Dar during the Ramzan Ceasefire of 2000-2001. The reason such dialogue went nowhere is a matter of record: groups ranging from the mainstream Hizb-ul-Mujahideen to the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) have made it clear they will not engage in a dialogue until India commits itself to final status negotiations with Pakistan. Pakistan's military establishment sees continued violence as an instrument to secure concessions from India - concessions of a scale no government in India can make. Sayeed may succeed, as others have done in the past, in beginning a dialogue with secondary terrorist groups, but such initiatives have had little concrete impact before. Nor has the PDP made clear just what it intends to negotiate, since India-Pakistan issues are well outside its remit.

What is perhaps most disturbing about the CMP is that it appears to have no real vision of what political perspective its authors have for J&K. As the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) recently pointed out, the document contains not a single reference to greater federal autonomy for the State. Nor is there evidence that the new government has any real conceptual framework for addressing violence. Speaking in New Delhi after the PDP-Congress alliance was formalised, Arjun Singh said the alliance drew on his experience in Punjab, where terrorism was solved by dealing with "each and every small thing". He perhaps forgets the record. Singh's own signal contribution to Punjab was installing the S.S. Barnala-led ministry, whose indiscriminate release of jailed terrorists and winding-down of police operations laid the foundations for five more years of bloodshed. Six months on, Governor Siddharth Shankar Ray and Director-General of Police Julio Ribeiro were brought in and assigned the impossible task of fighting terrorism without the cooperation of the State government. When terrorism was finally stamped out, not one of the issues Singh had privileged, from the status of Chandigarh to the sharing of river waters, had been resolved.

Back in J&K, in May 1990, three young men walked into the home of Srinagar religious leader Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq, and shot him dead in his study. The leader of the hit squad, Mohammad Abdullah Bangroo, was shot dead in an encounter less than a month later. Both their bodies rest today in a graveyard near the Idgah in downtown Srinagar, separated by just a few dozen metres. Both victim and assassin are revered as martyrs; martyrs, moreover, for the very same cause. The People's Democratic Party is now in power having marketed itself as a representative of the same cause. Now, it needs to work out just what the cause might be.