The Perils Of Myopia

To those untutored in Kashmiri politics, the week-long fight between the Congress party chief, Ghulam Nabi Azad, and the PDP chief, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, looks like another ugly squabble between greedy politicians over the loaves and fishes of office. But Kashmir today is not the rest of India. For once, the struggle over office is taking place mainly (if not wholly) over issues and not over spoils. The Congress and the PDP already had an informal understanding and a limited seat-sharing agreement before the election. Had the PDP won more seats than the Congress, the chief ministership would have gone to it as a matter of course. But the Congress ended by winning 20 seats against the PDP's 16. With the National Conference opting out of the power stakes, its members felt, understandably, that the chief minister should be chosen from the senior party in the coalition. This sentiment was greatly strengthened by an all-pervasive feeling of neglect in Jammu. Although Jammu accounts for almost half of the population of the state, the chief minister of J&K has always been someone from the Valley. With the Congress winning 15 out of its 20 seats in Jammu, the people of that part of the state felt that their day had at last come. This accounts for the unqualified support that Bhim Singh's Panthers Party, which won four seats, extended to the Congress the day the results came out.

In an ordinary Indian election, where power is the end and not a means to an end, the PDP would almost certainly have accepted the Congress' seniority and allowed it to take the chief ministership. It could, after all, have asked that its leader be designated the deputy chief minister and bargained for a disproportionate number of ministerial berths. But the PDP fought the elections to secure a very specific mandate. This is to open a dialogue with Kashmiri nationalists, militants and former militants in order to bring lasting peace and find a durable solution to the Kashmir problem. Only a Kashmiri party can do this.

Contrary to some newspaper reports, there is no difference of opinion between the Congress and the PDP on the need to hold a dialogue with the disaffected elements in Kashmir. But as a long-time former Congressman, and Union home minister at the time when the Kashmiri insurgency began, Mufti Sayeed knows that a national party will always be shackled in its discussions with the militants by the need to keep its constituencies in the rest of India intact. Were Ghulam Nabi Azad to become the chief minister, he would lack the necessary flexibility to find common ground with some or all of the parties belonging to Hurriyat as well as other Kashmiri formations like the Hizbul Mujahideen. In the final analysis, if any Kashmiri government is to succeed, it must be in a position to speak for Kashmir as a whole and against the Centre when necessary. Only then can it become a credible representative of Kashmiri ethno-nationalism within the Indian Union.

The person who could, and should, have done this was Farooq Abdullah. In 1996, he went to the people with a promise to take back the autonomy that Kashmir had enjoyed under the Delhi Agreement in 1952. The Kashmiri people gave the National Conference a massive mandate, albeit on a modest votebase. But within days of coming to power, instead of bargaining with New Delhi to reassert the rights of the Kashmiri people, Abdullah joined the United Front coalition at the Centre. And instead of drawing the former Kashmiri militants into the mainstream of Kashmiri politics through a dialogue, he tried to marginalise them completely and turned the Special Operations Group of the Kashmir Police onto them. This turned the next six years into a nightmare for the Kashmiris and security forces alike.

Mufti Sayeed is adamant that the chief minister must be from his party because he is determined not to go down the same path. His courage and sagacity must be respected. But the Congress too should secretly heave a sigh of relief if the Mufti succeeds, because were Azad to become the chief minister, the party would very soon find itself in an even worse situation than the National Conference found itself in after it joined the United Front. For, in a year at most, it will have to start preparing for the 2004 parliamentary elections. In these it stands a good chance of heading the winning coalition. It is therefore in no position to allow the nda to accuse it of being soft on militants or Pakistan.

If peace is ever to return to Kashmir, it is imperative that its politics should be insulated from those of the rest of India. As a purely local party, the PDP can do this to a large extent. The Congress simply cannot. The fact that on Wednesday last week Ghulam Nabi Azad called on the Mufti at his home before going to meet the J&K governor, and that he did not stake a claim to forming the government when he met him, shows that Azad has begun to appreciate the constraints outlined above. If this is so, then he deserves eternal credit. So do all the other actors in the game. And so does Indian democracy, which is always messy but often effective.