Why Kashmir’s Leadership has Abdicated at a Critical Time
ON May 25, senior National Conference (NC) leader Aga Ruhullah publicly expressed his resentment over his party’s continued silence over the revocation of Article 370 of India’s Constitution, which granted autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir.
Ruhullah was angry over an article his colleague, Tanvir Sadiq, wrote in a local daily, urging New Delhi to let the local parties hold political activities. The article sought reconsideration of new domicile rules that for the first time have thrown open the citizenship of Jammu and Kashmir to outsiders, and restoration of high-speed mobile internet – the demands that represented a drastic climbdown from the party’s opposition to the revocation of the autonomy.
“Revisit domicile law? Lift curbs on Internet? ‘LET’ political process … run? Is that all what you are looking for in this reconciliation? If I am not reading (it) wrong, you are basically asking for 4G (internet) and THEIR ‘PERMISSION’ to let us start the political process? & then all is well?” Mehdi wrote on Twitter criticising Sadiq.
Establishment politics in Kashmir is no site for principles and ideology. It is no place for struggle and sacrifice. People don’t join it for conviction or a cause”
Though the NC vice president Omar Abdullah later termed Sadiq’s piece as his personal opinion, and reiterated his party’s stand on Article 370, he stayed well short of spelling out a political course of action to resist the move, something a majority of people in the region want.
Omar was released from nearly eight months of detention on March 24, and that of his father, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, on March 13, the duo has been confronted with a mounting public pressure – mostly expressed through social media – to speak their minds about the withdrawal of the region’s autonomy and lead a public resistance to it. But, in response, the father and son have been meaningfully silent.
They have so far fended off the pressure by citing the urgent need to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. This excuse did work, but only until the Centre slipped in the domicile law opening the door to citizenship for outsiders in Jammu and Kashmir. This is when people began expecting them to respond. Though Omar and his party did slam the move, the phrasing of the response was seen as mild compared to the far-reaching implications of the domicile order.
Similarly, the rival Peoples Democratic Party, led by Mehbooba Mufti, and the other parties have come out with stock criticism of the move. To understand the muted response of the establishment parties to New Delhi’s withdrawal of the region’s autonomy, one needs to be aware of the contours of socio-political space in which they operate. Ever since the outbreak of the armed separatist movement in the region in 1989, the pro-establishment politics has been precariously caught between nodding to an endemic anti-India public sentiment and the need to owe allegiance to New Delhi.
This has created its own dilemmas for the politicians in the region – comic, if their fallout was not so messy. The more a political party tries to play to the sentiment in Kashmir, the more it is read as an unwelcome drift towards separatism in New Delhi. And as a corollary, the more a party plays to New Delhi’s expectations, the more it is inferred as a political compromise in Kashmir. So, it should be no surprise if some Kashmiri mainstream politicians talk autonomy and self-rule in Kashmir, governance in Jammu and rail against Pakistan in New Delhi.
