South Asia Terrorism Portal

Jammu & Kashmir 
Tragedy begins as Farce

Among a vast array of possible policy approaches in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), the Centre has chosen the one course of action likely to be most damaging to stability and the future of the State, at a stroke arraying all political parties in the region - with the exception of the Centre's own ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (and there are indications of some dissatisfaction even within this faction) - against New Delhi.

The BJP's gameplan has been fairly transparent since it abruptly pulled down its coalition government with the People's Democratic Party (PDP), plunging the State into Governor's rule in June this year. Equally transparent have been its desperate efforts to buy off a sufficient number of Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in the Valley to form a patchwork Government dominated by the BJP; as well as the error of its premature calculations.

Further exposure came with the graceless removal of N.N. Vohra as Governor, widely believed to have been provoked by panicked assessments by the BJP's J&K managers, that he was about to call for early elections in the State, precluding the possibility of the horse trading the BJP was engaging in. The hasty appointment of a dubious outsider like Satyapal Malik, from the murky political culture of Uttar Pradesh, in his place reinforced suspicions that political mischief was afoot. This now stands beyond doubt with the Governor's dissolution of the Assembly immediately after the decision of the PDP, Congress and National Conference to come together to form a Government in the State.

The index of a complete collapse of standards is visible in the infantile excuses put forth by the Governor to mask his manifest bad faith: a gubernatorial staff that doesn't work on holidays; a FAX machine that does not receive a crucial message announcing the tripartite agreement to form a Government; but efficiently sends out messages minutes later, announcing the abrupt dissolution of the Assembly; and a State in long-term crisis with an information system that appears to depend on a single FAX machine as its sole mode of communication.

What has also been exposed is a thuggish pattern of politics, and a continuous flood of fabrication and falsehoods, including baseless allegations by the BJP's J&K managers that the tripartite agreement to form the Government in J&K was on 'instructions from across the border' - i.e., from Pakistan.

This unfortunate decision will enormously augment the power of grievance peddlers in the Valley, feeding the forces of the separatists, the terrorists and their state sponsors in Pakistan; it will, at least temporarily, silence or marginalize the voices of the constitutional political parties in the Valley; and it will escalate pressures on the Security Forces at a time when they had come to substantially dominate the theatre, at great cost in their own blood. The utter incompetence and intentional destabilization of J&K has been the cause of an escalation of violence over the past five years - commencing well before the 2014 elections. The present and farcical theatre can only worsen the situation.

Ajai Sahni
Publisher and Editor, Second Sight