As Kashmir burns

The most worrying aspect of the fecklessness is the consistent mishandling of Kashmir

No government since independence, with the exception of Indira Gandhi’s, has been as irresponsible about maintaining the integrity and institutions of India as the one we have at present. The evidence for this is considerable: The introduction of party-linked time-servers into cultural institutions, the undermining of the judiciary, the ramp-up of communal tensions, the war against college campuses, the marginalisation of the south and the east, the intimidation of the media. Yet perhaps the most worrying aspect of this fecklessness is the consistent mishandling of Kashmir. 

Nobody has bothered to even try to make the argument that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) withdrawal from the governing coalition in Srinagar is a product of anything but cold-blooded calculation about how to win elections elsewhere. That the BJP went into a coalition with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was puzzling enough; there was little that you could imagine the parties would agree on. The only consequence was that mainstream politics was further discredited in the Kashmir Valley. The precipitous fall in voting turnout in the Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency between 2014 and a by-election last year — from 25 per cent to seven per cent — is a good indication of this fallout. 

But the BJP’s behaviour since its departure from the government is even worse. Not content with having its tame television anchors declaim for hours weekly demanding an inhuman approach to Kashmiri agitators, the party has within a few days of its about-turn in Kashmir begun deeply polarising and dangerous messaging. 

Consider this: The BJP IT cell has sought to trend on Twitter, this Friday, a hashtag #CongLeTGathbandan — a claim that the Congress and Pakistani-backed terrorists are in coalition. This is not just straightforward politics, even given the current BJP’s coarsening of campaign rhetoric. It is particularly dangerous because of the specific examples that the BJP has trotted out. What are they? Ghulam Nabi Azad warning that operations in the Valley should be against militants, and not bystanders. Saifuddin Soz warning that azadi has become a preferred alternative for many in the Valley. And Rahul Gandhi tweeting that ‘many innocent people’ had been killed in Kashmir, ‘including our brave soldiers’. The BJP wishes to explicitly make the argument, in other words, that all Kashmiris are by definition guilty; that anyone calling for a conciliatory or careful approach is in cahoots with terrorists. This is not a few keyboard warriors raging on their Chinese-made smartphones. This was the subject of a tweet from the interim finance minister. The law and telecom minister held a press conference on the subject. A senior BJP spokesman tweeted “Rahul Gandhi’s sympathies for the LeT are well known”. 

Anyone is entitled to mock their political opponents. After all, the Prime Minister himself has claimed that his predecessor conspired with Pakistan to undermine the electoral process in Gujarat. This reveals much about today’s BJP, but at any rate we need to waste no sympathy on the Congress. The party will either learn to live by and counter the new rules of Indian politics, or it will die unmourned. 

No, the trouble is that this narrative seeks to individually and collectively demonise Kashmiris to win votes in the Hindi heartland. Party leaders call for counter-productive state repression of the Valley’s entire population; lowly and self-serving fellow-travellers ignominiously condemn individual Kashmiri journalists and activists, smearing them all as violent Islamists. Fear that its disappointing performance will cause it to lose vast swathes of the north and west in 2019 has unhinged an already ruthless BJP, and caused it to use Kashmir as an instrument for electoral machinations. This is profoundly irresponsible and deeply dangerous. We saw some signs of this when the so-called “surgical strikes” were sold as unique toughness prior to the UP elections. The apparent success of that narrative has clearly emboldened the BJP to try an intensified version of it in the run-up to 2019. 

In the process, Kashmir has been left to burn. We should all be worried about this. I make this argument not just as someone who believes that Kashmiris, whatever their opinions, are entitled to the basic human rights the Constitution gives all our felllow-citizens. No, this is an argument grounded in the most realistic view of where the Indian state’s national interest lies. We must accept that irresponsibility and impunity have alienated a large part of the state’s population. We need to, in the medium-term, manage this anger; and, in the long-term, win them back. There is no other alternative if we wish to preserve the integrity of India. This is the approach that Atal Bihari Vajpayee repeatedly argued for; the approach Manmohan Singh wished; and even the one Modi himself has gestured to on some occasions. To abandon this common-sensical, pragmatic and humane vision of India’s role in its northernmost state, to risk the unity of India merely to win an election — well, if anyone else had done it, the BJP would no doubt have called it “anti-national”. 

Email: m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma