Kashmir: Condemned by consensus that we need to hold it by force

India has done little to rebut the global accusation inherent in describing the border state as 'Indian-administered' Kashmir

Kashmir has gone back to Governor’s rule again, with the strange experiment between the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ending. “Strange” because it was not clear why they were partners and what they intended to achieve. The coalition was essentially communal or communitarian in nature. It was a joining of some of the Muslim members of legislative Assembly (MLAs) of the Kashmir valley with almost all of the Hindu MLAs from Jammu (which the BJP swept). The partnership intended to reflect the anxieties of these two regions and assuage them. In this, it failed Kashmir’s Muslims.

Their issues are many — the use of 12-gauge shotguns for crowd control, a weapon not used anywhere else in India, nor anywhere else so far as I know in the world; the use of preventive detention (meaning jailing people before a crime has been committed) against individuals including, illegally, minors; the total and absolute impunity with which our nation’s armed forces are allowed to kill, murder and rape Kashmiris.

This last line will draw attention so it is important to look at the official data. Parliament was told on January 1, 2018, that not a single one of the first information reports (FIRs) filed by J&K police against the armed forces for murder, rape, torture and kidnap had been allowed to reach the courts by the Union Government, this one and the ones before. This is impunity by definition.

This, then, is what we are doing to them. What are they doing to us? Two things: Demanding Azadi and pelting stones at the security forces. The question is why they are doing that. Our usual answer is that they are anti-nationals and jihadis and so on. But, of course, the issue is that and it goes back to Partition and our promise to Kashmiris that we would give them autonomy if they acceded to India. In an excellent interview with the news portal Rediff, former Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief A S Dulat was asked if there was an ideal solution to the Kashmir problem. He replied: “Let us at least manage it properly even if we cannot solve it. Solving, I think, is a very big ask. But it is not even being managed properly.”

Illustration: Binay Sinha

Is solving really a big ask? I don’t think so. Kashmir is one of those strange problems that we resolved at inception but then we complicated it with time. The solution was Article 370 of India’s Constitution. It gives Jammu and Kashmir “autonomy” (word used in quotes because the state actually enjoys no such thing). The details are unimportant but suffice it to say that if applied in full, they will satisfy many Kashmiris — in other words, go some way in producing a solution to the problem— but they are also likely to make India anxious. By India, I mean the entire polity because there has been a consensus since Jawaharlal Nehru that the constitutional freedoms given to Kashmiris must be violated. The truth is that though Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel reached an agreement with Sheikh Abdullah, we had second thoughts and backed out of our agreement with him. This we did by hollowing out Article 370. Forget the nonsense about “special status”. Today Kashmiris have fewer democratic rights than the rest of us. Example: It is the one state where the Centre can indefinitely continue ruling directly, as we are seeing now under Governor N N Vohra. And this abuse of democratic rights has never been different. B K Nehru in his memoirs, Nice Guys Finish Last, wrote: “From 1953 to 1975, chief ministers of that state (J&K) had been nominees of Delhi. That appointment to that post was legitimised by the holding of farcical and totally rigged elections in which the Congress party led by Delhi’s nominee won huge majorities.” Enough said.

Unfortunately for those of us who want to see Kashmiris humiliated further, at least some of their rights are set in stone. The BJP casually campaigns against Article 370 but strangely it has made no move to overturn it in Parliament. Former chief minister Omar Abdullah told us why this was. He broadcast this on his Twitter account a few days after this government took over: “Mark my words & save this tweet — long after Modi Govt is a distant memory either J&K won't be part of India or Art 370 will still exist... Art 370 is the ONLY constitutional link between J&K & rest of India. Talk of revocation of not just ill informed it's irresponsible.”

The fact of the matter is that we will not get any of the nuances on the issue from our journalism, which is part of the consensus that Kashmir needs to be held on to by force, but the Kashmiris can go to hell. To understand Kashmir really we need to go to the work of people like A G Noorani, of whom we have too few, alas. We do not have and have never had many Indians who will speak the truth to us.

 

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report a few days ago (much of its material being taken from the organisation that I work for). It is an excellent chronicle of what we are doing wrong. The government predictably took offence at the marginalia. The world was accusing it of misbehaving with its own citizens and violating their rights, but the problem that the government had was with the phrase “Indian-administered Kashmir”. 

The Indian government also insisted that the other side is referred to as “Pakistan-occupied Kashmir”. That is fine, but what exactly are we doing to ensure that we are not seen by the world in the same light? As events show, very little indeed.