Waiting Game: Who’ll put jannat back in Kashmir?

In recent days, the People’s Democratic Party, led by Mufti Muhammad Sayeed and seen as sympathetic to hardliners in the Kashmir Valley, has publicly proclaimed the National Democratic Alliance government had a better sense of the Kashmir issue. It has criticised the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government. Its leaders, such as Mehbooba Mufti, have expressed the hope that a potential Narendra Modi-led government would go further in addressing the various aspects of the Jammu and Kashmir phenomenon.

Is the PDP simply attacking its immediate political opponents — since the Congress and National Conference are in power in Srinagar? Is it being politically expedient and winning points with a likely future government in Delhi? Is it making advance plans for the November 2014 Jammu and Kashmir Assembly election? All of these factors are weighing on the minds of the PDP as well as of individuals in the All-Party Hurriyat Conference — such as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq — who have of late recalled and praised the Atal Behari Vajpayee years.

Nevertheless, if the Kashmiri Muslim leadership does feel let down by the Congress and entertains hopes of a better deal under the Bharatiya Janata Party, there is a history to it. There are two dimensions to the Kashmir problem, or to the complex legacy of that complicated geog-raphy that used to be the Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.

The external dimension, involving the dispute with Pakistan, makes global headlines, but there is an internal dimension as well. It requires a structured conversation between a variety of stakeholders in the Valley, including the exiled Kashmiri Pandits, and delineating the gamut of relations between Delhi and Srinagar as well as between Srinagar and Jammu and Ladakh.

It is not as if these two dimensions — the external and the internal — are entirely removed from each other. Yet, to see them as totally overlapping and identical would be equally irresponsible. It is to Mr Vajpayee’s credit that he realised this, that he put his political capital behind that realisation, and that he focused on the domestic aspect of India’s Kashmir challenge. Broadly, this involved working towards an expansion of the ambit of formal, participatory politics in the Valley. From 2000 to 2004, every move Mr Vajpayee made was an element of this long-term strategy. In contrast, the Congress has thought tactically, rather than strategically.

To understand what the UPA did not do, it is important to go over what the NDA did do. In 2000, the Vajpayee government called a unilateral ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir.

In 2002, the state saw what was till then its freest election. By January 2004, India’s then deputy Prime Minister was in talks with the Hurriyat.

These were not independent events; they formed a deliberate pattern. In the 2002 election, the BJP was willing to live with a defeat for itself and its alliance partner, the National Conference, but was not ready to tamper with the franchise, as previous governments in Delhi had done.

The election of 2002 brought the PDP to power, supported by the Congress. It was a breakthrough moment in Jammu and Kashmir. An honest verdict, accepted with honesty, made it difficult for the Hurriyat to justify its boycott of the election. The emphasis now was on widening the limits of formal politics and persuading at least sections of the Hurriyat to enter the electoral fray. That is why the negotiations between L.K. Advani and the Hurriyat leadership in 2004 were seminal.

This was a serious legacy for the UPA to build on. Instead, it dropped the ball. True, the 2008 state Assembly election too was free and fair, but there was no push for tangible agreements or credible political interlocution.

True to form, the Congress was content with leaving Kashmir to proxies, agents and propped-up local elites. When the government appointed a committee to talk to various shades of Jammu and Kashmir opinion, it ensured the committee had no political weight.

The Prime Minister’s stress was almost solely on doing a deal with Pakistan, and for various reasons that was not possible.

In the process, the UPA in effect conceded that it could not think of any movement ahead in the Valley in the absence of an agreement with Pakistan. In a sense, it merged the external and internal dimensions. In doing so, it reduced its autonomy for decisive and defining political settlement in an entirely domestic setting, one that involved Delhi and Srinagar, or Delhi, Jammu and the Valley. This was a blunder.
In 2002, in recognition of popular sentiment in the Valley, Mr Sayeed became Chief Minister. In 2005, the Congress forced the Mufti to step down and installed Ghulam Nabi Azad as Chief Minister. It had a point here. First, there was a pre-existing agreement to split the chief ministry. Second, as Congress spokespersons explained in the national capital, it was unfair to surrender the chief ministry permanently to the Valley. The aspirations of other regions, Mr Azad is from Doda, in Jammu, could not be neglected by adopting a Valley-centric approach.

This seemed a valid argument then; it appears hypocritical in 2014. For the past six years, the state government has been headed by a person from the Valley, Omar Abdullah. The Congress has backed him and given him a free run, despite protests within its own state unit and despite troubled relations between him and a significant slice of the populace in Jammu. Suddenly, all talk of aspirations of other regions has disappeared. This has led the PDP to ask the perfectly reasonable question: Does the Congress have a policy for the Valley or a policy for whoever is the chief minister/leader from the Valley?

Where does Mr Modi come into all this? Political actors in the Valley began to watch him closely after his December 1, 2013, public meeting in Jammu. In his speech he referred to Mr Vajpayee and spoke of resolving the state’s problems using the principles of “Insaniyat, Jammuriyat, Kashmiriyat” — humanitarianism, democracy, Kashmiri identity. It was astute political messaging on Mr Modi’s part. Could this man cut the Gordian knot? The Valley — and the rest of Jammu and Kashmir — must wonder.