In the eight months that have elapsed since the NDA coalition was voted back to power, Atal Behari Vajpayee and his colleagues have demonstrated more than once that they lack the strategic vision necessary to safeguard India's unity and resolve its ever-mounting domestic and international problems. Beginning with its surrender to five hijackers in Kandahar, its inability to help Sri Lanka, its failure to make a dent in the fiscal deficit, its increasingly costly paralysis over nuclear non-proliferation issues like the CTBT and its lack of direction in Kashmir, this government has shown over and over again that what it does best is to sit utterly still, like a toad, and pray that its camouflage will make the threat go away.
It is doing that once again. This time it is on the crisis that a visibly weakening Farooq Abdullah government has provoked over the issue of autonomy to, and autonomy within, Kashmir. Anyone who has followed the debate over the past two years could have predicted that the contents of the bill would arouse a storm in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly. This has played straight into Abdullah's hands, for it has drawn the Indian government and public's attention away from a far more important issue-his lack of moral authority for introducing any bill that will alter Kashmir's relations with India and Kashmiris' relations with each other.
There is nothing particularly wrong with the autonomy bill, at least nothing that extended discussions between leaders of Kashmir's various regions cannot set right. All it does is concede Kashmir's ethnic diversity and recognise that this should be reflected in constitutional arrangements within the state, in the way that ethnicity has become the cornerstone of the entire Indian union. But after four years of sliding popularity, the National Conference can no longer claim that it has a sufficiently strong mandate to push such an important change through entirely by virtue of a resolution in the Kashmir assembly.
The National Conference's mandate to rule was always a little shaky. The Hurriyat leaders boycotted the election that brought it to power in 1996. This brought the voter turnout in the Valley down from the 73 and 74 per cent recorded in 1977 and 1983 to a little under 50 per cent. Despite that, Abdullah's government enjoyed undoubted popularity for the first two years and the Hurriyat was marginalised. But by 1998, Abdullah's popularity had begun to slip. While the BJP government at the Centre starved Kashmir even of money that was owed to it and prevented the developmental work that would have created jobs, Abdullah's whimsical ways, the mounting corruption of his MLAs and petty bureaucrats and the brutality of the Kashmir police's Special Operations Group in its dealings, above all, with former militants who had not formally surrendered, rapidly alienated the Kashmiri middle class once more. The loss of support was strikingly demonstrated by the decline in support for the National Conference in the voting for the parliamentary elections of 1999. It was only then that Abdullah brought out his ace in the hole once again-autonomy.
By saying his party could have pushed the bill through but wants a national debate first, Abdullah has implicitly conceded that he might lack the moral authority to make such a radical change. It is even possible that his purpose in introducing it was only to get his party identified once more with Kashmiriyat. His father, the Sheikh, had followed a very similar strategy in 1945 when he found that after three years of ruling the state under Maharaja Hari Singh, the National Conference had lost a fair bit of its support in the Valley. But by politicising the issue of autonomy, he has already let a particularly nasty cat out of the bag.
As the debate in the assembly has already shown, political competition is pushing MLAs into making more and more ill-considered statements and extravagant demands. To cite just one, the information minister, Ajatashatru Singh, claimed on Wednesday that his grandfather, Maharaja Hari Singh, had always wanted Kashmir to be independent and had joined India only because the raiders invaded his state. Had he known his family's history better, he would have known that his grandfather had decided to accede to India if Kashmir could not remain directly under the British crown (if one can call that independence) as early as the end of March 1947 and had sent his grandmother (accompanied by his father) to meet Justice Meher Chand Mahajan secretly at Flatti's Hotel in Lahore on April 1, 1945, to recruit him as an intermediary.
The more that competition between political parties within the state assembly builds up the demand for autonomy, the less room will the government have left to manoeuvre with the Hurriyat, who are no longer marginal but have returned to the centre of the political stage in the Valley. Yet peace will never return to the Valley and to the state if at least the major components of the Hurriyat do not come to an agreed solution with the Centre. Today, they are under tremendous pressure from the terrorised people of the Valley to do so and bring peace back. But they will find it impossible if the so-called recognised political parties bid up their autonomy demands so high that the Hurriyat is left with no option but to demand complete independence.
Abdullah's autonomy bill is, therefore, a red herring of the worst sort. The fact that, as I write, Vajpayee has asked him to come to Delhi for talks suggests that the Centre is at last alive to the danger. But what was it doing for so long? Why did it let the cat get out of the bag in the first place? Is it trying to push it back in because its camouflage has failed?
