The five-stage election in Jammu and Kashmir will commence next week and the entire process will last nearly a month.
This time it would seem that the party most nervous would be the ruling National Conference which, by all accounts is floundering, on lack lustre performance.
Its ally, the Congress, has already lost the race. The PDP might have felt it had its best chance this time but an aggressive Bharatiya Janata Party threatens to upset many calculations.
Fresh from victories in the Lok Sabha and other state elections, and riding on the popularity and personality of Narendra Modi, the BJP assesses that this is its best chance to make inroads into the valley as well.
Its Mission 44+ in an 87-member state assembly is serious and the BJP is fielding 32 Muslim candidates out of the 70 seats it is contesting. Six of these candidates are from the Jammu region, 25 from the Valley, while four Kashmiri Pandits and a Sikh are also contesting from the Valley. There are three Buddhist candidates from the Ladakh region.
Riding on a wave of popularity, the BJP will not make discussions on Article 370 an election issue but AFSPA is likely to be raised by Kashmiris. Instead, the party will concentrate on development and peace. The NC will talk, most probably about the killings of youth, especially the latest incident; Afzal Guru could be another rallying point for the NC against New Delhi. PDP perhaps would concentrate on establishing how they would be far better than the Omar Abdullah government and try to capitalise on people's resentment. As it is the NC had only 28 seats in the outgoing assembly and is not expected to do much better than this.
The Hurriyat has a problem now. If it boycotts the election then it leaves the field open to the others, including BJP, to contest from its proclaimed areas of influence and enabling other parties to win from "their constituencies." If they contest then this amounts to accepting the Indian electoral process. If they contest and lose, then that is their end. Most probably they will try to disrupt the process.
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As is to be expected the Hurriyat leaders and their masters from Pakistan have opposed the elections.There have been threats from internationally outlawed terrorist outfits like the Lashkar -e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to disrupt the elections, which are being held despite the prolonged and heavy trans-LOC and trans-IB exchange of heavy fire between Indian and Pakistani forces in the summer. Probably firing at this scale was to test reactions of the Modi government. The reaction to Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit's refusal to avoid meeting a Hurriyat leader was swift when the Foreign Secretary level talks were cancelled. The Pakistanis had assumed that theyhad every right to interact with those India considered secessionists and that too on Indian soil.
Indians have continued to hold elections ever since 1952 and all transfers of power have been constitutional.However, elections are at times less than completely fair. After all, Al Gore won in 2000 but George Bush became president. Indian democracy has its flaws but the process of elections is now generally acknowledged to be free and fair and is the largest known exercise of democratic rights anywhere in the world. Anyone who is not participating in the elections and yet claims to represent the people is lying.
We must realise that in the present day world, changes through the barrel of a gun are not acceptable especially in a country where elections are regularly held. And in India, if the so called foreign agent of change says that he wants to overrun the entire country through jihad and that Kashmir is not the only cause, then this is just not going to work.
We Kashmiris have had two major misfortunes. We have been saddled with successive governments that have believed in feathering their own nests and the people never mattered. They repeatedly manipulated elections. And the large scale rigging in 1987 led to massive disillusionment among the youth. They took to the gun. Added to that, the Kashmiris had to rely on a self-appointed incompetent saviour who still does not have the ability, the wherewithal or the will to deliver. Pakistan has merely used innocent Kashmiris in an effort to settle scores with India.
Pakistan is a country that hardly practices democracy itself and ill treats its own minorities - be they religious like the Christians or the Hindus or other Muslims like the Shias or ethnically different like the Baloch. It is hardly likely to treat Kashmiris differently. Pakistan has changed the demography in Gilgit and Baltistan and reduced the Shia and Ismailis to second rate status.Pakistanis have been sending Punjabi members of the Jamat-ut-Dawa to settle in Pak Occupied Kashmir and marry locally to change the demographic pattern of the region and to use these settlers as the vanguard for their unending jihad against India. All these persons will ever do is to ill-treat the local Kashmiris on their side of the LOC and kill more Kashmiris on our side. This should give enough cause for worry to us Kashmiris.
All that the Hurriyat can do is to organize hartals and shut downs thus depriving the people even of daily earnings but no fulfillment of any of their dreams. Like their masters they can obstruct and destroy the present and the future but cannot create. As a result, the Kashmiri youth has achieved nothing and generations have missed out on the kind of benefits the rest of India has been getting.
The best choice for us today, if we are unhappy with the present government, is to go out and vote positively in large numbers, for whoever we feel will fulfill our aspirations in a world that is changing fast. There are far greater chances for the Kashmiris to preserve their Kashmiriyat through the ballot than the gun.
The views expressed in the above article are that of Mr. Ghulam Rasool.
