Where Is The ‘indian Hand’?

The remarkable thing about our home minister is that as far as he is concerned, just about everyone in the world is responsible for the mess the Government finds itself in on the Kashmir front. The sole exception, of course, is the Government of India itself. Our politicians do not waste time in honest introspection or critical self-appraisals. There is no political capital to be made out of such exercises.

Ever since the home minister’s outburst against Uncle Sam (or is it Aunt Raphael now?), senior officials in North Block, the imposing building which houses the Home Ministry, have been at pains to explain that Chavan’s statement was not an off-the-cuff remark, and that it was indeed made with "full responsibility". Perhaps the Government does have very valid reasons to be suspicious of the US designs on Kashmir. But when the home minister of cthe country cites no more than the instances of American officials iterating the disputed status of Kashmir "every time we see a change in the attitude of Kashmiri people," as the basis of the charge against the Clinton administration of being opposed to elections in the state, one cannot but wonder. For even to the simplest of minds, it has been more than obvious that what led to abandoning the latest effort to hold elections in Jammu and Kashmir was not Pakistan, nor any statement by the American State Department, but the refusal of former state Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and his party, the National Conference, to play ball with the Centre.

In the same statement in Parliament, Chavan also spoke of the Government’s disappointment with the Election Commission for declining to recommend the notification of Assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir. The Government was consulting legal experts on the matter and was planning to go to the Supreme Court, the home minister indicated. Once again, one cannot but reach for the proverbial pinch of salt. Firstly, the very fact that the three-member Election Commission postponed its meeting on Kashmir by a day (the proffered reason was the sudden illness of Election Commissioner G.V.G. Krishnamurthy) and took the decision only after the Prime Minister’s return from Burkina Faso had given enough ground to suspect that due consultations had been held with him before the decision was announced. And secondly, if we are to assume that the Election Commission’s decision was truly an independent one, does the Government of India, with all its might, need more than a month to get legal opinion on the matter? Chavan may well claim that it is the Law Ministry which has let him down on this score, but then whatever happened to the concept of collective responsibility? What the home minister does not realise, perhaps, is that by seeking to point an accusing finger at the Clinton Administration for India’s woes in Kashmir, he has ended up pointing three fin-gers back at his own Government.

It is high time now that the home minister and his colleagues in the Cabinet accept the fact that the root of India’s problems in Kashmir lies in the extremely low credibility the Government of India has with the people of the strife-torn Valley. One is not denying that Pakistan, and perhaps even the United States, is not fishing in troubled waters. But the fact remains that they would not have been able to fish if we had not created a mess in the state through sheer bad governance and opportunistic petty politics played by the Congress Party.

It would be pertinent to point out here that the genesis of the current phase of Kashmir’s militancy lies in the unfortunate political accord between Rajiv Gandhi and Abdullah prior to the 1987 Assembly elections in the state. The accord had, for all practical purposes, squashed the first real opportunity for the people of Kashmir to integrate themselves into the Indian political mainstream. It may be remembered that ever since his ouster from power in 1984, Abdullah had been drawing considerable support from the Indian mainstream opposition, the leaders of which had rallied with him in the mammoth public meeting held at Hazratbal in 1985. Simultaneously, Abdullah had also begun to emerge as the hero of moderate middle class Muslims in the rest of India, providing the first occasion since the state’s accession of a Kashmiri leader becoming acceptable to the rest of the country. But petty political considerations struck again, and Abdullah was pushed into the ill-advised accord with the Congress.

The subsequent rigging of the Assembly polls by the Congress-National Conference combine which decimated the Muslim United Front coalition for all practical purposes, snuffed out the opposition voice in the state and militancy raised its head to fill in the resultant political vacuum. The election also destroyed whatever little faith the Kashmiris had in Indian democracy and intelligence records confirm that it was only after the March 1987 elections that disillusioned youths started crossing the border in substantial numbers to receive arms training in Pakistan as well as in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.

If the Government wants to persist with a realistic battle to restore a semblance of normalcy in Kashmir, the fight has to be to win over the alienated minds of the people of the Valley. And for that, the first requisite is the need to re-establish the credibility of the Government. That, unfortunately, cannot be done only by blaming the foreign hand in the Valley, without first acknowledging the causes for the people’s disenchantment. The home minister would be well advised to candidly admit past mistakes he and his predecessors have made and follow it up by an acceptable autonomy package to bolster the few pro-India politicians still left in the troubled state.