ARE democracies in South Asia subject to the law of primogeniture? Does a scion of a well-established political dynasty stand a better chance with the electorate than a candidate with a substantive ideology but without a family connection? How capable are political dynasties of not simply inheriting the ‘regal’ mantle of Head of State or Head of Government, but also of bringing about much needed systemic and structural changes in conflict ridden, politically and socio-economically decrepit polities in South Asia, like Jammu and Kashmir (J&K)?

My maternal grandfather, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, popularly known as the Lion of Kashmir, reigned as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) from 1948 to 1953. When the pledge to hold a referendum in J&K was not honoured by the Indian government, and the Pakistani government did not fulfil the stipulations mandated by the United Nations (UN) to hold a referendum, Abdullah’s advocacy of independence for Kashmir led to his imprisonment by the Government of India. He was shuttled from one jail to another from 1953 until 1972, and remained out of power until 1975. Sensing Abdullah’s disregard of the emasculating conditions of the Delhi Accord of 1975, forged with the then Indian premier Indira Gandhi, which amounted to compromising the autonomy of the state, the Congress withdrew its support to him in 1977, resulting in fresh elections.

Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference (NC) won an overwhelming victory in the elections of 1977, which most political analysts celebrate as the freest and fairest elections held in the Indian subcontinent. After this victory, Abdullah remained in office until he died on 8 September 1982. In 1981, however, shortly before his death, Abdullah, contrary to his socialist politics and in a moment of poignant resignation, presided over the ‘coronation’ of his oldest son and my oldest maternal uncle, Farooq Abdullah, as president of the NC. This act perpetuated the subcontinental tradition of dynastic politics. Farooq Abdullah led the National Conference until 2002, when he chose to step down as president of the party. In a curious turn of events since then, however, the NC nominated Farooq Abdullah as its chief ministerial candidate for the 2008 assembly elections. However, subsequent to the decision to form a National Conference-Congress coalition government, Farooq’s nomination was inexplicably shelved and his son, Omar Abdullah, whose temperament and working methods were more acceptable to the Congress ‘High Command’ was made chief minister.

Following Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s death, Farooq Abdullah took over as Head of Government and led the NC to a resounding victory in the assembly elections in 1983. Despite the popular mandate given to him by the electorate, Farooq’s terse dismissal of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s former cabinet of ministers created antagonism between the old guard and Farooq’s then young turks, which could have been avoided. One of the old guard whom he was unable to accommodate was his older brother-in-law, my aunt Khalida’s husband, Ghulam Mohammad Shah, resulting in an acerbic rupture in the family.

 

At that stage in India’s political history, Indira Gandhi was attempting to bolster her political platform by making overt and covert appeals to Hindu majoritarianism against grossly exaggerated secessionist threats from Muslim and Sikh minorities.¹ As Farooq’s government approached the end of its first year in 1984, the Congress government in New Delhi orchestrated the formation of a new political party, the Awami National Conference (ANC), comprising twelve NC legislators who unconstitutionally quit their party and formed a new government with the support of the Congress legislators in the J&K assembly. The leader of this breakaway faction was none other than Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s older son-in-law, Ghulam Mohammad Shah, who had cast his lot with his father-in-law in the heyday of the movement for self-determination.

The dismissal of the Farooq government was perceived as a blow to the morale of the Kashmiri people who had placed him on a political pedestal previously occupied by his father, because they believed that his succession had been legitimized by Abdullah. I recall that divisive period as being a particularly difficult one for my maternal grandmother, Begum Akbar Jehan, and also for my mother, Suraiya Abdullah Ali. They were devastated by the rift in the family and painfully torn apart.

In a society in which relationships are hierarchically structured and kinship ties determine loyalties, my maternal grandmother felt obligated to be loyal to her older son, the purportedly ‘legitimate’ heir apparent despite his inefficacious administration. The beginning of representative government in J&K (in 1977) was thus summarily destroyed in 1984. The shoddy dismissal of Farooq’s government engineered by New Delhi’s political bigwigs showed a callous disregard for the wishes and aspirations of the Kashmiri people, and brought political apathy in its wake.

 

In late 1986, Farooq Abdullah conceded defeat by forging an alliance with the Congress party, which had formed the central government. The creation of this alliance spelt a death knell for regional political aspirations and cultural pride. Farooq’s attempt to establish harmonious relationships with the Congress regime was met with contempt and derision by NC’s popular base, even as it enabled his installation as head of government pending fresh assembly elections in March 1987. Though assembly elections were held in J&K on schedule in order to constitute a legislative assembly and a state government, by then the NC had managed to alienate its popular base and only represented the interests of a powerful political elite.

During the 1987 elections, the NC was opposed by an unwieldy coalition of non-mainstream, anti-establishment groups calling itself the Muslim United Front (MUF). It was a conglomerate that lacked structure and a unifying political ideology. However, as the newsmagazine India Today observed during the campaign, the emergence of the MUF indicated that ‘the valley is sharply divided between the party machine that brings out the traditional vote for the NC, and hundreds of thousands who have entered politics as participants for the first time under the umbrella provided by the MUF.’²

The emphasis laid by the MUF on Kashmiri nationalism and cultural pride enabled it to woo a large number of Kashmiri youth. The MUF underlined its ultimate objective of working toward Islamic unity and disallowing political interference from the Indian government in New Delhi.³ But New Delhi was not willing to let anti-establishment organizations rule the roost in a state in which it could exercise power only through proxy.

 

It is widely agreed that the 1987 elections were characterized by heavy rigging and booth capturing.⁴ Although the outcome was a predictable landslide victory of this alliance, the 1987 elections tarnished the reputation of the Farooq-led NC and showcased it as a marionette that could be manipulated by New Delhi’s seasoned puppeteers. Farooq Abdullah’s regional credibility was further jeopardized by his willingness to kowtow to political strategists and gurus in New Delhi. Once the populace was disabused of the notion of achieving regional integrity and autonomy it had once held by peaceful means, armed struggle gained impetus in the Kashmir Valley.

Starting with the decade of the 1990s, the Kashmir Valley became a playground for Indian military and paramilitary forces, as well as for innumerable resistance factions that toed different ideological lines. The hitherto torpid valley began to shake with a thunderous energy that would shatter the complacency of the governments of India and Pakistan, as also expose their complicity in the neglect of the peoples of the former princely state of J&K. The disillusionment and sense of disenfranchisement created by New Delhi’s machinations and the collusion of Farooq’s regime with it generated a new phenomenon. A large number of young men from various parts of the Kashmir Valley crossed the Line of Control (LoC) in search of ammunition and combat training.

 

Unfortunately, Farooq Abdullah’s response to this new development and its ramifications was singularly impolitic. He resorted to belligerent tactics, invoking the political and economic support of New Delhi, in the process antagonizing the Kashmiri people, who saw no hope in New Delhi.⁵ As the insurgency spread, the authority of the Farooq-led government began to slacken and it experienced a progressive political decline.

The hallmark of Farooq Abdullah’s second term in office, which lasted until January 1990, was a sense of unaccountability.⁶ Farooq gained the reputation of a sybarite and a connoisseur of luxury. His cabinet acquired a reputation for unaccountability. The sense of disenfranchisement in Kashmir was aggravated by New Delhi’s rule, which lasted until 1996 when the Farooq Abdullah-led NC came back to power. But Farooq’s collaboration with the ultra right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) further eroded the mass base of the NC.

Rekha Chowdhary, Professor of Political Science at the University of Jammu, in an e-mail pointed out that, ‘The effort of the NC to reclaim its political space in 1996 via the slogan of autonomy had a very limited success since Farooq Abdullah could not deliver on his promise of restoration of autonomy and had to cut a sorry figure as the Autonomy Resolution duly passed by the state legislature was dismissed by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in the Centre’ (13 March 2011). Farooq, to the dismay of many ideologically staunch Sheikh Abdullahites, proved himself a wheeler-dealer by getting his son Omar, then a Member of Parliament representing Srinagar constituency in the Parliament, installed as Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry in 1999 and Union Minister of State for External Affairs in 2001 in the Vajpayee-led and BJP controlled NDA central government.

 

Despite the brutality and ruthlessness of the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat and the post-pogrom large-scale socio-economic marginalization of Muslims in that state, Farooq and Omar, representatives of predominantly Muslim constituencies, made the unconscionable decision of remaining in alliance with the BJP and its cohorts, which monstrously dispelled the delusion of a politics driven by principles, ideals, and convictions that a lot of young people were labouring under at the time. Many a politician has had to pay a heavy price for the heartless dismissal of the sensibilities of his/her constituents!

In a replay of history, the Congress with a total of 17 assembly seats and the NC with a total of 28 assembly seats, the same number it had in 2002 when it shunned the possibility of power-sharing and chose to sit in the opposition, formed a coalition government headed by Farooq Abdullah’s son, Omar Abdullah in 2008. Though the NC managed to regain its lost dominance in the urban areas of the Kashmir Valley, the authority of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) remained unchallenged in the rural areas. As the results of the 2008 J&K assembly elections showed, none of the mainstream political parties elicited a particularly ecstatic or loyal response from the electorate.

 

The NC had won the same number of seats in 2002 when it shunned the possibility of power-sharing and chose to sit in the opposition, in all probability because neither Farooq nor his son, Omar, had a chance of heading the government as the former had not contested the election and the latter lost by a big margin to an obscure greenhorn. It could have been politically fatal for Omar to allow anybody else in the NC to assume leadership. The same holds true for the PDP where the father-daughter duo do not want anyone else in their party to taste blood either, both parties thus contributing to the installation of democratic monarchy. This brings to mind a couplet of the celebrated poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal: Hum ney khud-shahi ko pehnaya hey jumhoori libas, jab zara adam hua hay khud shinas-o khud nigar (We have adorned our royal selves with a democratic attire, the moment man gained self-confidence and political sagacity).

The outcome of the election has further reinforced the religious, regional, and provincial ruptures in the political fabric of the state. The dominance of the Congress has been buttressed by the fractured verdict and the zealous overtures made to it by the two mainstream regional parties, the NC and the PDP. Subsequent to the declaration of the election results, it was interesting to watch Omar and Mehbooba rush to New Delhi in order to humbly submit their petitions to the Congress ‘High Command’, which observed the political developments in J&K from its minaret in the citadel of quasi-secular politics.

 

Although Sheikh Abdullah’s son and grandson were able to inherit leadership of the organization, they did not inherit his equation with the people of Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah’s NC evolved the notion of Kashmiriyat in the 1940s and 1950s to defeat the centralizing strategies of the successive regimes of independent India. The basic ideology of Kashmiriyat was not handed down to me as an unachievable and abstract construct; on the contrary, it was crystallized as the eradication of a feudal structure and its insidious ramifications; the right of the tiller to the land he worked on; the unacceptability of any political solution that did not take the aspirations and demands of the Kashmiri people into consideration; the right of Kashmiris to high offices in education, the bureaucracy, and government; the availability of medical and educational facilities in Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh; the preservation of local literatures, shrines, and historical artifacts; the formation of the Constituent Assembly of J&K to institutionalize the constitution of the state in 1951, which was an enormous leap towards the process of democratization; the fundamental right of both women and men to free education up to the university level; equal opportunities afforded to both sexes in the workplace; the nurturing of a contact zone in social, political, and intellectual ideologies and institutions; and pride in a cultural identity that was generated in a space created by multiple perspectives: this theorization of Kashmiriyat was enshrined in a manifesto entitled ‘Naya Kashmir,’ formulated and adopted by representatives of the NC in September 1944.⁷ This manifesto propounded a programme of democratization and progressive social change under the new regime.

This concept was deployed by Sheikh Abdullah’s NC in order to forge a strategic essentialism that would enable the creation of a sovereign Kashmiri identity. Maharaja Hari Singh ruled the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir with an iron fist and employed forceful means to extinguish the flames of an anti-feudal nationalism. Because of their military and political supremacy, the Dogra Rajputs of Jammu were rewarded with high-ranking and lucrative positions in the military as well as the civil services, in addition to their enormous landholdings. Muslims were denied the right to acquire an education, excluded from the civil services, and disenfranchised and prevented from participating in political activities without governmental permission. Such unapologetically discriminatory practices created an endemic ignorance and conscripted existence for the Muslim inhabitants of the princely state.⁸

 

When the first few Kashmiri Muslims to have obtained degrees at institutions of higher education, such as the Aligarh Muslim University in British India, returned to the state in the 1920s, they were imbued with ‘newfangled’ ideas of nationalism, liberty, and democracy. A group of these young graduates, who were well educated but denied opportunities that would have enabled them to climb the socio-economic ladder, started convening regular meetings at a house in Fateh Kadal, Srinagar, and from these seemingly innocuous gatherings evolved the Fateh Kadal Reading Room Party. Members of the Reading Room Party wrote articles for various publications in which their subversive voices expressed resentment against the arbitrary and discriminatory practices of the Dogra regime.

 

The torch of cultural pride and political awakening in the princely state of J&K was lit by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, a prominent member of the Fateh Kadal Reading Room Party, in 1931: ‘Sheikh Abdullah was an imposing figure. His six feet four inches of height towered over his countrymen, and his intellect attracted the attention and respect of those who were associated with him in his revolutionary efforts’.⁹ For the first time in decades, the Kashmiri people, particularly the Muslim population, acknowledged the leadership of a middle class political greenhorn who overtly challenged the hitherto impregnable authority of the Maharaja. They responded to his revolutionary politics with a zeal that was previously unknown.

Abdullah’s inspirational speeches, concern for the well-being of the masses, commitment to the cause of freedom, as well as his charisma, motivated the Kashmiri people to throw off the yoke of oppression and docility. Despite persecution, he continued to vociferously fight for the political, economic, and religious rights of the Kashmiri people.

For the layperson, Sheikh Abdullah embodied the ‘new Kashmir’ in which the hitherto peripheralized Muslim population of the valley and marginalized women would reinsert themselves into the language of belonging. Although the radical ‘Naya Kashmir’ Manifesto launched by the Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah-led NC and the radical land reforms initiated by the Sheikh consolidated the NC and gave it an unshakeable foundation, the Kashmir of the 2000s requires a much greater and autonomous ‘healing touch’. The politically savvy citizens of Kashmir are no longer willing to accept a ‘healing touch’ that stops short of the restoration of the autonomous status of J&K. The radical social and political transformations mobilized by the Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah led-NC have much less significance for the current generation.

 

The generation that Omar is attempting to govern is technology-savvy, radicalized, and has witnessed the agonies and upheavals of armed insurgency. It is not easily seduced by the much publicized image of Omar as a ‘youth icon’. This generation is swayed by the strength of mass mobilizations in the Arab world to dislodge monarchies and dictatorships, which had successfully crushed forces of dissent for decades. It is a generation that although disconnected from the grassroots movements of the thirties and forties, is learning to get political mileage out of the symbolism of the subversive power of a mere stone pelter, whose only weapon of war in the age of nuclear warfare is a rock.

The innocence of this generation was cruelly ripped apart by the forces of armed insurgency and counter insurgency; the romanticized image of Kashmir fails to hold a lasting appeal for these children of an internecine war; the sense of peace and security historically provided by a democratically elected government has eluded these denizens of a paranoid state; the machinations of electoral politics have vitiated the sociopolitical fabric; this post-lapsarian generation has never known the allure of a political edifice built on a well-defined ideology; it has been bereft of a nationalist and political discourse within which it could blossom; its scarred psyche is yet to be healed. In a democratic set-up, however flawed it might be, the will and aspirations of the electorate are ignored by politicians at their own peril. The youth in J&K clamours for democratic rights, efficient governance, a stable infrastructure and a much less fractious polity.

 

For the masses of J&K, not the handful of missionary-school educated, English speaking professionals, Omar lacks a representative character and richness of appeal. In an interesting conversation that I had via e-mail, 17 February 2011, with Gull Mohammad Wani, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kashmir, he pointed out that although the dynastic factor in South Asian politics has the potential of providing an element of stability to political organizations, the gulf between the expectations of the electorate and the ability of the dynasty to deliver is growing wider.

‘The third generation Abdullah, Farooq’s son, Omar Abdullah, has, so far, been unable to strike an equation with the plebeian masses. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, unlike his son, had risen from the ranks and was a man of the people. There is a governance deficit, on the one hand, and challenges of restoring peace and stability, on the other. All this will have an impact on the National Conference as a party. The PDP, led by Mufti Mohammad Syed and his daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, as a dynastic party was fortunate in having only three years in power with a better record. This party, too, will have very little to bank upon in terms of dynasty.’

 

Once the successors of popular leaders, who established their credibility through ideology, conviction, perseverance, and working for the well-being of their electorate, become complacent and rule with carte blanche, electoral politics can only suffer. It is indeed ironic that both the older son and grandson of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the founder of a non-statist and non-centrist Kashmiri identity, have become alienated from the ground realities of Kashmir and the non-elite activist cadre of the NC. The current regime has not been able to create an environment in which the young people of today would be energized and persuaded to actively participate or to revive civil society institutions that could initiate uncoerced collective action around shared interests, values, and purposes.

For those of us who have learned to respect the strident potency of the voice of the people, the unequivocal and pitiful assumption of mainstream politicians in J&K that power unilaterally flows from New Delhi, reeks of a reprehensibly unrepresentative character. Kashmir today is split into two nations, the plutocracy and the plebeians, with a lackadaisical middle class between the two, which lacks ideological unifiers across class and other social divides, and icons of national unity in the face of political and military oppression.

 

* Nyla Ali Khan is the author of The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Routledge, New York, 2005, and Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010. Currently, she is working on an edited collection: Parchment of Kashmir: History, Society, and Polity.

Footnotes:

1. Sumantra Bose, ‘Hindu Nationalism and the Crisis of the Indian State: A Theoretical Perspective’, in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997, pp. 104-64.

2. India Today, 31 March 1987, p. 26.

3. P.S. Verma, Jammu and Kashmir at the Crossroads. Viking, New Delhi, 1994, p. 159.

4. India Today, 15 April 1987, pp. 40-43.

5. Balraj Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency. Orient Longman, New Delhi,1995.

6. India Today, 30 April 1990, p. 10.

7. Imraan Mir, A New Kashmir: Religion, Education and the Roots of Social Disintegration. Valley House Books, Napa Valley, 2003.

8. M. Zafarullah Khan, The Kashmir Dispute. Institute of International Affairs, Karachi, 1958.

9. Josef Korbel, Danger in Kashmir. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1954. Reprint, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002. (Page reference is to the 2002 edition.)