ANY analysis about the politics of Jammu and Kashmir has necessarily to factor in the conflict situation that has engulfed the state for the past two decades, a conflict that has both initiated a new understanding of the way political responses are organized as also introduced a new political vocabulary. Thus politics in J&K is manifested not only in the ‘mainstream’ sphere of elections and governance but also in the ‘separatist’ sphere with ‘militancy’ and violence as added factors. The existence of these two parallel and, at many points, overlapping spheres of politics creates many grey areas that are unique to this state.

What does the politics of this state entail? A glimpse of it could be ascertained during the past few months. A state gearing itself up for elections was suddenly inflamed by the political unrest, first in Kashmir, and then in Jammu over the issue of diversion of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board. The electoral spirit in the valley, reflected in huge political rallies being organized by different political parties across the length and breadth of this region, was soon substituted by a rising separatist sentiment. The political response in Kashmir was matched by political mobilization in Jammu, bringing to the surface the subdued political divergence that exists within the state at the regional and sub-regional levels.

To get a fair idea about the contours of the politics of the state as well as to make an assessment about the political situation at this present moment, it may be pertinent to refer to the nature of politics as it evolved during last two decades of conflict and identify the form that it has been taking over the period.

 

Militancy as it erupted in the late eighties was matched by a rise of separatist sentiment in the Kashmir Valley. The spontaneous outburst of people chanting azadi slogans in the streets of Srinagar and elsewhere throughout the 1990s, reflected not only a crisis of legitimacy for mainstream politics but also a collapse of the political order. For a prolonged period of six years when the state was placed under President’s rule, the political parties and leaders went into hibernation and the gun became the dominant logic, at least in Kashmir.

It was only during the 1996 assembly elections that some effort was made to restore mainstream politics, albeit only under the supervision of the security forces and with the active support of counter-insurgents (the surrendered militants). The crisis of legitimacy for the ‘elected’ government as well as for mainstream politics, therefore, continued throughout the period 1996-2002. Nevertheless, this period provided some space for regeneration of mainstream politics despite the ascendancy of the separatist sentiment. This was mainly due to the popular disillusionment with militancy and violence on the one hand and a heightened urge for normalcy on the other.

What brought vibrancy to the mainstream politics during the end of the decade of nineties, however, was the emergence of another Kashmir based political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which introduced the factor of competition in mainstream politics of the valley so far hegemonized by the National Conference. The PDP was formed by a splinter group of the Kashmir based Congress party led by Mufti Mohd. Sayeed and his daughter Mehbooba Mufti. In order to compete with the ruling National Conference, the PDP introduced an agenda which was not only ‘people friendly’, but also accommodated many of the demands which so far had been raised only within the separatist camp. It thus talked about violation of human rights of Kashmiris, raised the slogan of providing a ‘healing touch’, and called for ‘dialogue’ with the separatists and militants.

 

Mainstream politics gained further momentum in Kashmir after the 2002 assembly elections. Offering a ‘free and fair election’ was a part of the confidence building measures which the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had initiated to assuage the feelings of Kashmiris. Held under international glare and generally conceded to be much fairer than earlier elections, the 2002 elections went a long way in expanding the mainstream political space. However, what provided credibility to the elections was its outcome. For the first time in the electoral history of Kashmir, an incumbent government had been changed, not through central intervention but due to participation of the people. The participation of the people though was quite uneven in Kashmir, affected as it was by the separatist call for the boycott of elections on the one hand and militant violence on the other. (It ranged from as high as 53% in Kupwara district in North Kashmir to as low as 11% in Srinagar district). Nevertheless, despite such unevenness, the 2002 election attained greater credibility.

The post-2002 mainstream politics of Kashmir was fairly vibrant due to a number of reasons. First, the fragmented verdict within the valley ended the era of dominant party politics and initiated a phase of more competitive politics. The coalition government which was formed after the elections with the Congress and the PDP as major partners, itself provided space for internal competitiveness. However, the biggest gain of the 2002 elections was a genuinely interactive politics with a large and effective opposition party in place. The National Conference, which emerged as the leading opposition party, was also the largest party in the legislative assembly.

The implications of competitiveness were reflected in the changed nature of politics of Kashmir which became more grounded and based upon local sensibilities. In a competitive spirit, the political parties, especially the PDP, brought almost all the issues of separatist politics into the mainstream political space, including the disputed nature of Kashmir and the need for its long term resolution.

 

The expansion of mainstream politics in the Kashmir Valley, however, did not take place at the cost of separatist politics. On the contrary, there developed an overlap between the two kinds of politics. Interestingly, not only did the mainstream parties recognize the relevance of the separatist politics and thus sought to attain legitimacy by borrowing heavily from it, the separatists too recognized the relevance of mainstream politics and acknowledged it as a politics of ‘governance’. As a result, a distinction started being made in Kashmir between the ‘politics for governance’ pursued by mainstream parties as different from the ‘politics for the ultimate resolution of Kashmir conflict’ pursued by the separatists.

The separatists meanwhile were engaged by the central government. As a part of the comprehensive peace process which sought to resolve both Pakistan related as well as Kashmir related matters, the All Party Hurriyat Conference (Mirwaiz group) was invited for a dialogue with the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Two rounds of talks with the Vajpayee government followed by another round of talks with the Manmohan Singh government boosted the confidence of Kashmiris in the peace process who for the first time felt that the Kashmir issue was being addressed seriously.

 

Their confidence was further bolstered with the opening of the Uri-Muzzafarabad road. This was the first tangible result of the peace process which, though ostensibly meant to facilitate the free mobility of people across the Line of Control, had deeper implications. Other than opening the road for trade, it held out the possibility of resolving the Kashmir tangle through introducing a fresh perspective on the ‘irrelevance of borders’. The momentum of the peace process, reflected not only in such confidence building measures but also the progress in India-Pakistan relations, provided further stimulus to the politics of Kashmir. Musharraf’s emphasis on ‘out of box solutions’ and subsequently the four point formula enunciated by him, engaged Kashmiris in an intense manner. All this led to debating issues like ‘self-rule’, ‘demilitarization’ and so on, not only by separatists but also mainstream politicians.

But as the peace process lost its momentum, so did the vibrancy in the politics of Kashmir. With internal problems in Pakistan becoming more intense after March 2007, the forward movement in the India-Pakistan related peace process started stalling. Internal dialogue with the separatists had already faced a setback as the Manmohan Singh government substituted the policy of direct dialogue with the separatists with round table conferences involving mainly the mainstream political parties and organizations of Jammu and Kashmir. This only reinforced the feeling of alienation, best reflected in the frequent protests that Kashmir started witnessing around various issues. Throughout 2007, Kashmir resonated with protest demonstrations involving a large mass of people, at times around administrative matters but mostly focusing on human rights violations. Most of these protests reflected the growing anger of the people against the state.

It was this simmering resentment that came out in the open in June 2008 over the land issue. The spontaneous and popular response reflected a deep-rooted sense of scepticism towards the local administration on the one hand and the Indian state on the other. The government order to divert 800 canals of land to the SASB (Shri Amarnath Shrine Board) was not only seen as a government plan to permanently hand over forest land to ‘outsiders’, but also as a conspiracy to change the religious demography of the only Muslim majority state.

 

Interestingly, the land related agitation took place at a time when normalcy seemed to prevail in Kashmir. For over a year, political parties had been preparing for elections, holding huge rallies in different parts of the valley. Mainstream politics, one could say, seemed to be ascendant with sufficient enthusiasm of the people towards the forthcoming assembly election in September 2008. This was also a time when separatist politics seemed to be facing a crisis of relevance. In a mere three months time, however, the political scenario has changed in Kashmir. With massive demonstrations resounding with the slogans of azadi, it is the separatist sentiment and separatist politics that is now in ascendance once more in Kashmir.

 

Political discontent within Jammu and Kashmir, however, is all pervasive and extends beyond the Valley of Kashmir. In the Jammu region, a feeling of political neglect has persisted since the early fifties. This feeling emanates from the context of power politics which has remained Kashmir-centric, allowing only token involvement of the political elite of Jammu. It also has much to do with the specificity of the conflict situation of Kashmir and the political responses of the Centre vis-a-vis the state. There is a feeling that in all political negotiations undertaken to address the Kashmir problem, Jammu is taken for granted and that the political arrangements are imposed on Jammu.

It is around this feeling, deep-rooted in the political consciousness of the people of this region, that Jammu has erupted from time to time. However, in the absence of a regional party (comparable to the National Conference as a regional party of Kashmir) the politics of regional neglect has often been appropriated by the Hindu Right organizations and thus communalized in the process – this despite the fact that the politics of regional divide is as widespread in Muslim-majority sub-regions of Jammu like Doda, Poonch and Rajouri, as in the Hindu majority areas.

The political divergence between Jammu and Kashmir has become more perceptible during the last two decades of conflict. The separatist politics that emerged as a dominant response of the valley had little impact in Jammu, though militancy did take roots in certain parts of the region. However, the conflict impacted the Jammu region in a number of ways. Apart from the militant violence, there were situations of selective killings of minorities aimed at provoking a communal backlash.

 

Political divergence fortunately did not lead to antagonism between the two regions. Despite the dissimilar, and at times even contradictory, responses to the political issues raised during the two decades of conflict, the inter-regional relationship was rarely affected beyond a point. An accentuation of Kashmiri identity politics, however, led to a sharpening of Jammu’s identity politics and the demand for reorganizing Jammu’s relationship with Kashmir became the dominant discourse during the decade of the nineties. Just how prominent this discourse was at that time can be seen from the fact that even the Kashmir based National Conference was forced to incorporate the issue of regional autonomy in its manifesto, alongside its primary demand of state autonomy during the 1996 assembly elections.

Taking advantage of an assertive regional politics, the RSS and other Hindu Right organizations had sought to introduce an agenda for the division of the state in a serious manner. During the late nineties, there was intense speculation in Jammu about the ‘trifurcation of the state’ and a separate state for Jammu. The trifurcation politics received a boost from the reactive politics of the Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) and the Panun Kashmir. While the LBA raised the demand of Union Territory status for Ladakh, the Panun Kashmir went further in demanding a separate ‘homeland’ in the valley for the Kashmiri Pandits who had migrated en masse from Kashmir in 1990.

The trifurcation politics receded into the background after the 2002 assembly elections, not only because the Jammu State Morcha, the RSS backed organization failed to get a response from the electorate, but also because of the changed power equations in which Jammu emerged as a dominant partner for the first time. The fractured mandate in the 2002 election brought in a coalition government in which the Jammu-based Congress party was the leading partner along with the Kashmir-based People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Although the PDP, despite being a junior partner, could bargain for the position of chief minister during the first three years of the coalition, Jammu had enough visibility in the government with a deputy chief minister from this area and, after three years, it could also boast about the first chief minister from the region.

Throughout the coalition period there was no visibility of the politics of regional discontent in Jammu – at least till the time the issue of revocation of the order of allotment of land to SASB came to the surface and a massive agitation around regional discrimination took place.

 

The land row that overtook the state in the month of June 2008 was like a tremor which not only knocked over everything political but also left a huge impact on society. Many facets of politics in the state have changed since then.

The entire issue initially revolved around a government order diverting forest land to the SASB, and subsequently around the revocation of the order. The order gave the SASB the right to erect pre-fabricated temporary structures for housing the yatris during the period of the Amarnath yatra. However, more than the order, it was the assertion of the CEO of the SASB representing the ex-officio chairman, the Governor, General S.K. Sinha, that the land had been given permanently to the Board to build permanent structures that generated a massive response in Kashmir.

General Sinha had earlier incensed many Kashmiris through a pro-active politics that reflected his saffron bent of mind. He had a self-proclaimed agenda of changing the ‘mindset’ in Kashmir which he set about doing by redefining ‘Kashmiri-yat’ based essentially on its Hindu past. It was against this background that the separatists used the issue of diversion of land to SASB to invoke suspicion among many Kashmiris that there was a grand design behind the order aimed at altering the Muslim-majority character of the state. The fear of ‘demographic change’, therefore, became the basis of mass mobilization in Kashmir.

 

To quell the agitation which had assumed dangerous proportions in Kashmir, the order was revoked but this only generated another kind of politics in Jammu. The BJP and like-minded organizations termed the revocation of the order as an assault on ‘Hindu sentiments’ and demanded that the original order be restored. These organizations succeeded in mobilizing enormous support from the Hindu-dominated areas of Jammu region, not only on the ground of religious sentiment but also by invoking regional and national sentiments. The revocation of the order was portrayed as an anti-national and anti-Jammu decision taken under the pressure of separatists to appease the ‘Muslims of Kashmir’ without taking into consideration the sentiments of the ‘Hindus of Jammu’.

It was for the first time in the history of this state that political turmoil brought the two regions of Jammu and Kashmir to the brink of direct confrontation. To a large extent the problem was accentuated by the government in power, especially the conflicting interests of the coalition partners, the PDP and Congress. Both parties acted more out of electoral consideration in their respective constituencies, rather than work responsibly to resolve the problem at hand. Viewing the turmoil in Kashmir both as a danger signal of losing out to the Hurriyat as well as an opportunity to gain from the radicalization of politics of Kashmiri identity, the PDP accentuated the crisis by disowning its role in passing the order and demanded its revocation. It later withdrew from the government, leading to its fall.

 

The Congress, in turn, further aggravated the situation in Jammu by failing to take a clear position on the issue and defending the revocation of the order. Paralyzed by the response generated by the BJP, VHP and other similar organizations, it withdrew from the political scene, leaving the space fully open for these organizations to not only articulate the political sentiments in a communal and regionally chauvinistic manner, but also to homogenize the responses by invoking the sentiment of ‘loyalty to Jammu’. Any dissenting voice was termed as ‘anti-Jammu’.

On the whole, it was the failure of the ruling coalition and other mainstream political parties to place the issues in perspective and provide a secular direction to the political responses at the ground level. Both in Kashmir as well as in Jammu, it was a case of the mob setting the political agenda and the political parties and organizations trying at best to meekly follow. The political space in Kashmir was captured by the separatists and in Jammu by the BJP and other Hindu fundamentalist organizations.

 

The land-related eruption in the state has far-reaching implications, changing the very nature and the course of politics. Separatist politics has once again assumed ascendancy in the Valley of Kashmir. However, it is a different kind of separatism where moderates have lost their pre-eminence and the leadership has passed on to the hardliners. It is Syed Ali Shah Geelani, known for his inflexible views both on self-determination as well on the religious nature of the movement, who is currently giving a direction to separatist politics with others falling in line.

The ascendancy of separatism has serious ramification for mainstream politics in general and the forthcoming elections in particular. Held under normal circumstances there might have been a massive voter turnout in elections. But now there is every possibility that many voters may remain away from the electoral process in Kashmir. The lack of participation of people in the elections will directly impact on the legitimacy of mainstream politics per se.

However, the most serious implication of the land row is the fractured relationship between the two major regions of the state which, despite the political divergence, had at no point of time earlier become acrimonious. The discordant politics has now gone beyond the issues of regional discrimination to incorporate issues of economy and trade. Note that while during the Jammu agitation, a call for a ‘economic blockade’ of Kashmir was raised, after the agitation, Kashmiri traders have given a call for boycotting trade through Jammu.

The antagonism between the two regions has serious implications for the unity of the state on the one hand, and its plural and secular character on the other. The communal direction that the agitation took has already put a strain on the plural and secular character of the state. The very initiation of the agitation on the issue of ‘demographic change’, and the fear of loss of ‘Muslim majority character’ of the state, has brought religion to the centre of the political agenda. The agitation in Jammu, moreover, had clear communal overtones. Significantly, this region had survived all kinds of provocations to communalize politics during the past two decades of conflict. But it now seems to have fallen prey to communal politics, even experiencing two severe cases of communal clashes in Kishtwar and Poonch.

 

Communalizing the politics of Jammu has the potential of reorganizing the politics of the state on communal rather than regional lines. Already, the Kashmiri separatists have started identifying with the Muslims of Jammu and voicing their concerns. So far the Muslims of Jammu have refused to be identified with the Muslims of Kashmir and maintained their distinct regional identity. But the possibility of carving out a ‘Muslim constituency’ across the regional divide cannot be discounted. This will have the most serious implications of communally polarizing the politics of the state and giving a boost to all those who have been clamouring for the division of the state along communal lines.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir stands at a crossroads. The direction of its politics will depend upon how responsibly the political actors within the state act and how sensitively the national leadership responds. On the whole, the situation is challenging.