Every day, Chaudhary Mohammad Hanief, 70, leaves his house, located up in the hills of Dadkai village, at 9 am sharp. He walks down 2 km to reach the road and then walks another 5 km to reach Gandoh sub-district of Chenab valley. Throughout the day, he visits different offices with applications, complaints and demands of local villagers.
Hanief has been with the National Conference (NC) since his childhood. His father Mir Ali was with the NC when the party had launched the All Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front, after Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s arrest on August 9, 1953, in the Kashmir conspiracy case.
Sitting in his house, Hanief talks about his long association with the NC. “We’ve been with NC all our lives. My father didn’t leave the party. I believe the vision of the party is supreme, irrespective of the actions of its party leaders,” he adds.
He says during Sheikh’s time, the party was immensely popular in his area due to its “land to the tiller” reforms, and for decades its influence remained strong in the Chenab valley, as in other districts of Jammu and Kashmir. However, he is also a witness to the waning influence of the NC in the region and holds the party responsible for it.
Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad has a deep influence in the area covering Dadkai, Gandoh and Soti in district Doda. Azad is revered here for his developmental work, carried out after he became CM of the state in 2005. Over the years, most political leaders and workers of different parties have switched loyalties to join the Congress, but Hanief has continued with the NC.
But Hanief says these days, youngsters refuse to join the NC, as the party appears to have adopted a top-down approach to leadership. Today, party workers constitute mostly those people who had some residual affiliation with the party from Sheikh Abdullah’s time. “The youngsters see better prospects in other parties. One of the reasons for this is that my party gives more weightage to former bureaucrats who join the party, than grassroots workers,” he adds. “I don’t feel the NC would win any seat in the Chenab valley, if this trend continues,” he adds.
Hanief has never been to the party headquarters at Nawai Subh in Srinagar, where many young NC leaders seem to share his view. Most of these young leaders also happen to be related to senior NC leaders who had once risen up the ranks within the party.
While Hanief is in favour of reforms within the party—calling for propping up of grassroots leaders—the young NC leaders at the party headquarters appear stuck in a time warp of the Sheikh’s “land to the tiller” reforms. On October 17, 1950, the then PM of J&K, Sheikh Abdullah, had declared a policy of liquidating big landed estates and transferring land to the tiller by enacting the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act. A century of Dogra rule had seen usurpation of nearly all land in the Valley by the ruling class, as most of the 22 lakh acres of cultivable land in Kashmir legally belonged to either the Maharaja, his jagirdars or a small coterie of landlords called chakdars.
According to Sheikh’s biographer Muhammad Yousuf Taing, till the “land to the tiller” law of 1950 came into force, even daughters of poor peasants were treated as part of the estate on which the landlords enjoyed absolute rights. The sweeping land reforms of 1950 changed the complexion of Kashmiri society, releasing around 160,000 acres of land from landlords in Kashmir and 310,000 acres in Jammu, empowering 87 per cent of people of the state.
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While the reforms brought die-hard cadres like Hanief’s father into the party, the new generation has different aspirations, and the party’s current leaders are aware of that. They say after abrogation of Article 370, many political leaders kept jumping from one party to another, but this did not happen in the NC as it is cadre-driven.
For Salman Sagar, the party’s youth president, NC was running on the sentiment of people throughout Jammu and Kashmir up until the 1990s, when militancy erupted in the region. According to him, in the past few decades, the sentiment—especially in the Valley—switched toward separatist politics, as a large section of youths started identifying with it. In Jammu too, he says, there has been a drift toward other parties.
He adds though that after the abrogation of Article 370, there is a sea change in people’s behaviour, with expectations from the party again rising across Jammu and Kashmir. “Many youngsters are joining the party. We don’t say the coming elections are about development, or that we’ll provide drainage and other facilities once in power. These are duties of any government, and we’ll do that. But we will fight elections on an ideological plank. We’ll say loudly that we’ll strive for the restoration of Article 370 and preservation of Jammu and Kashmir’s unique identity, which resonates with what people here aspire for.”
“You don’t give up your ideological goals so easily. It took BJP 70 years to abrogate Article 370. It might take us seven years to see its restoration. That doesn’t mean we should give up,” he adds.
Dr Sajad Uri, whose father Mohammad Shafi Uri was a minister in Farooq Abdullah’s cabinet, is one of the party’s young leaders from Uri tehsil of Baramulla, around 100 km from Srinagar. The party, he says, is like any other cadre-based party like CPI(M) and CPI. “Since its foundation, when the party changed its name from Muslim Conference to National Conference and fought against Maharaja Hari Singh’s autocratic rule, the party has played a major role in changing the lives of people”. “I have seen workers who haven’t got anything from the party. But they realise that the party’s existence is vital for Kashmir,” he adds. He says when militancy erupted in the Valley, a large number of NC workers were killed to destroy the party, but when elections were held in 1996, it was the dedicated party cadre who came out to vote risking their lives. “And in 2000, the party respected their sentiment and passed a resolution in the assembly for the restoration of autonomy,” he adds.
“Despite difficulties, we’re working hard to increase our membership beyond the traditional cadre,” says NC's state spokesman Imran Nabi Dar. His father Ghulam Nabi Dar was a party MLA in 1983, who was assassinated in a militant attack in 2006.
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“I think one of the biggest contributions of the NC is the “land to the tiller”. The older cadre understand its importance,” he says, adding they have seen the benefits of these reforms directly. He says the younger generation is starting to realise this too.
Abid Wani, 29, a software engineer who joined the party in 2019 from the Khanyar constituency of Srinagar at Sagar’s behest, says that before the abrogation of Article 370, Kashmiri nationalism co-existed in the minds of Kashmiris alongside Indian nationalism. “The abrogation was an attempt to destroy the idea of Kashmiri nationalism, but the NC will continue to fight for it,” he adds.
While “ideological reasons” dominate conversations among the party’s young leaders, for Hanief, being an NC cadre is a way to reach out to the people. “Land reforms are fine, but we have different challenges today. I cannot afford to sit at home. I have to reach out to the people,” the dedicated NC cadre concludes.
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